Last names not necessary in both cases.
I am psyched to have a piece in the Spring/Summer issue of the long-running Arty zine, run by Cathy Lomax. This issue is devoted to all things Tennessee Williams. I wrote about Elvis. Because naturally. There is a connection, which I wrote about here about a decade ago, but in lieu of Baz Luhrmann actually referencing this deep-DEEP-cut connection in the film, I thought it would be fun to re-visit. UK people can purchase online, and there’s a way to contact them for issues (or a subscription, which is worth it) on that main page there. You can also read Cathy’s intro – Seductive, Thrilling & Morally Deplorable… Why We Love Tennessee Williams – at the first link above. When I pitched my idea to them, I had no idea Cathy’s love of Elvis. So it was a good fit!
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
My copy showed up a few days ago, and I enjoyed your essay. And the entire magazine. I think I recall thinking, “I know this from somewhere,” when Elvis talked about the bird that can’t land. There’s so much of him doing in the movie that it was striking to have that moment of wistfulness. It was a beautiful fade-out for him.
Like a lot of what you write, the essay created a shatter of associations for me.
“Val is… howling like a dog. A hound dog, maybe?” Nice.
Dropping Tupelo from Orpheus Descending made me think of artistic choices and the line from Bob Seger’s Against The Wind
Deadlines and commitments,
What to leave in, what to leave out.
The art associated with your article somehow made me think of the sea (as well as birds) and Tennessee’s desire to be wrapped in white sheets and buried at sea. I wonder if that was one of Cathy Lomax’s reasons for choosing it.
I initially wished that the magazine had an online version. But I’m glad it doesn’t. I like that there seems to be a resurgence of work done only in physical media.
The musician Mary Spender had a recent YouTube video about people making music available on cassettes. I know vinyl has come back, but getting a record printed takes a lot of capital. Cassettes can be duplicated fairly cheaply, and you get the cover art with them. They are a less expensive way to have a physical object. We relate to them more than a streamed song. Mary mentioned a book called High Bias: A History of the Cassette> that I just gobbled down. I didn’t realize what a vital niche the exchange of cassettes still is.
Walter Kirn has the physical-only County Highway newspaper. So I’m glad that Arty is just physical. I plan to keep an eye out for more physical-only art, news, and media.
It makes it harder for AI to gobble up everything. Not impossible, though. I know there are inks that are meant to be human-readable but also difficult to scan. Probably too expensive for everyday things. Hmm. Now I want to investigate.
And speaking of physical media, has Paramount Global erased all of MTV News? WTF? WTFFFFFingF? Hard drive space is nearly free.
But returning to Earth…
That Elaine Dundy book sounds great.
// I like that there seems to be a resurgence of work done only in physical media. //
Me too! force people to buy stuff and value stuff. the audience will be smaller. that’s fine. most of human history involved small audiences (compared to what we have now). Plus – yeah – we cannot trust the landlords – i.e. the rich tech-bros who have made all this technology – we cannot trust them to value what they have created – what WE have made. I “got the memo” about 3 or 4 years ago and started printing out everything I wrote. which, as you can imagine, is quite an endeavor – but just go to Wikipedia and count the dead links. I don’t trust anything will be available forever – but my work happened and at this point it’s going to be my only lasting legacy.
and yes – paramount. MTV News. 30 years of work. great work. lost history. it’s a tragedy. disgusting.
these people are fucking ghouls and they run and own everything. so at least we don’t have to be surprised when they consistently – and always – make the worst most heartless choices.
Best to not rely on them. This is why I still buy DVDs of movies.I just went through a whole journey with my music collection – which I finally got back – after having lost it for 3 years – and people don’t seem to “get” what it means to OWN things anymore. like, yes, there’s spotify – but I don’t participate in spotify for my own reasons. I have been buying my own music since I was 13 years old and I like the idea of ownership. I think the tech bros and everybody else “in charge” want us to release the idea that we can own things at all. we’re now just RENTERS, all of us. anyway: I got my music back, but only because I backed up my computer.
this is still a temporary solution and I regret having handed over this important archive (to me anyway) to a LANDLORD. what was I THINKING.
very glad you bought the zine!! Cathy Lomax is really cool – and I love what she’s doing. It was so cool to be a part of this!
and yes – the Dundy book is one of the best books ever written about elvis. It’s very SOUTHERN. amazing insights. the title makes it sound gossipy – it really isn’t.
It was telling that the head of Spotify said the cost of creating content is nearly zero. The efforts and creativity of musicians are meaningless. Their time, his money.
You’re wise to print out your own stuff. There was that server issue that kept you off-line for a while, and that wasn’t even some giant company trying to slurp up content like a baleen whale.
I’m still thinking about MTV News. I can’t even imagine what Kurt Loder thinks. Or all the other folks who contributed.
I know – the MTV News thing is so awful. soooo many years of incredible articles and interviews – NOT content!!
I hope you won’t mind that I’m inserting myself in the convo, my archivist self couldn’t resist.
Hard drive space isn’t really free, especially for large catalogues, and they’re also very costly environmentally. That said, it’s absolutely not an excuse to erase from existence people’s work, and sometimes people’s work that has been purchased. That’s just so unethical.
Archivists saw that coming and that’s why things like the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine exist. They can’t cover everything – and not everything deserves to be preserved either, but it’s one of the efforts to preserve things that can otherwise disappear all of a sudden.
Not everything can be printed out (I’m thinking multimedia files, coding, etc) but there’s that digital preservation acronym I really like: LOCKSS: lots of copies keep stuff safe. It’s a real thing, ha ha. Ideally, some on hard drives and other copies on the cloud, (but the terms of use…)
But yeah those fucking streaming platforms… They produce great works, and one day they remove them, and they’re lost forever. And now some of them aren’t even being featured AT ALL on the platform for tax purposes? How discouraging for everyone who worked on it to know no one will ever see it.
And the concept of “content”… Everything is CONTENT now: movies, music, porn, research, blogs, pictures of your kids…. everything a giant monetized soup of CONTENT. I can’t stand it, I feel like I’m a thousand years old but whatever.
I’ve been trying to BUY a dvd or bluray of Paterson for weeks, I can’t find a fucking copy of that movie, my only option is to buy it on one of those platforms, which I do not want to do! I might have to buy a European copy and a second dvd player? What the hell?
//WTF? WTFFFFFingF?//
Exactly.
Thank you for letting me rant.
Lyrie – hey! of course weigh in! these are complicated issues – and as you say not everything needs to be preserved. I am now trying to figure out how to handle my blog, actually – clearly not everything needs to be preserved but I’ve done a lot of pretty serious writing here, and … once I die, and I don’t pay the domain fee – it will all vanish in a month. This isn’t important to anyone but me I suppose but we all have to value whatever it is we’ve created!
My dad was an early adapter of digitization – as an archivist and also a librarian, particularly for totally obscure academic journals, or people’s dissertations – which may not be of interest to the general public but which are crucial for researchers! this was back in the late 80s, early 90s. The problem of course has ballooned.
The real issue is that the new landlords do not see the value in ANY of this stuff. They would prefer that we don’t remember. George Orwell predicted this with the “memory holes” in 1984! it may as well have never existed!
They don’t WANT us to have access to these catalogs – and they would prefer we didn’t even know they were there.
// And now some of them aren’t even being featured AT ALL on the platform for tax purposes? How discouraging for everyone who worked on it to know no one will ever see it. //
Yes – and so you can’t distinguish too what has value and what doesn’t. Hit Man – by one of our great American directors – is featured on the main page of Netflix for like a day – with a poster designed by AI – no sense of “this has value” or “this has more value than Season 16 of Married at First Sight” – like, yay internet, but I did not sign up for THIS. and this is what they had in mind all along.
that VILE ad for the new Mac tablet – it created such an uproar they pulled the ad within 24 hours … It was so upsetting I literally was in tears but I am grateful they put it out there because it really shows: This is what we think of art.
These people are not to be trusted.
My friend Matt wrote a really good piece calling on Tim Cook to pull the ad.
Paterson isn’t available on DVD?? Damn! I think I have a copy if you want to “borrow” it. I’m not home right now but I can look when I get home.
That’s another issue, btw – they aren’t even releasing movies as hard copies anymore. (or, many movies, they aren’t). so we have a boutique niche company like Criterion basically SAVING some movies from oblivion – but they are only one company and they already are a skeleton crew.
I loved Mudbound – and it was ONLY on Netflix for a couple of years. it’s a netflix movie, okay, I get it, but I already don’t trust these streaming platforms and I just want a hard copy. Finally Criterion released it. I just feel safer with a hard copy.
also I’m weird about things like – I want to see whatever it is in the way I first saw it.
Sometimes streaming platforms have actually SNIPPED parts of Supernatural. i’m like “wait where was that little scene I liked?” Like – how DARE YOU.
or music – which I know is a HUGE issue. there are great series that are not available at ALL because (I’m assuming) music rights. I’m thinking of China Beach. It was such a good show. with all the music of the late 60s early 70s. Releasing it on a box set took YEARS and even then they couldn’t use all the music.
I am so glad I bought, for example., Quantum Leap in box set – because it too uses a lot of period appropriate music – and I just want it the way I remember it, the way it was meant to be seen. Supernatural box sets all the way!!
again, this might seem like a small thing but …
// I am now trying to figure out how to handle my blog, actually – clearly not everything needs to be preserved but I’ve done a lot of pretty serious writing here, //
It IS important! You might want to look into webcrawlers and such – to also save the formatting, for context. And the Very Important Comment Sections! hahaha
But in all seriousness, it’s worth preserving, and a university (maybe your alma mater) might be interested in preserving it, among other materials in your fonds. You could start donating at different moments in your life, and arrange for other things to be donated after your passing – but this way archivists processing your fonds would have access to you for context – believe me, it’s so valuable to have someone who can say “oh this picture is this convention, here’s the name of the people and how it relates to other material.” Preserving context so generations to come know who Window Boy is!
Yes, to everything you say about the people at the helm, and the loss of value. Masses are easier to manipulate when they don’t have the art and theory to THINK about what’s going on. When everything is a soup of CONTENT, and cut into 3 minute increments, and without context… nothing has meaning anymore. Ugh.
I hadn’t seen that ad for the tablet, thanks for letting me know about it. They really said the quiet part out loud: we will take away from you all means to create anything so you’re completely dependent on our subscription model. What a fucking nightmare.
What you and Mutecypher alluded to above is also something I’ve been thinking about seeing the state of Hollywood – I saw the stats about TV productions in recent years, and it has plummeted. But creative people are going to keep creating, you can’t really stop that, so in a way I’m excited about what will emerge from the very dark moment in time. When people don’t have care about pleasing funders, they make wild shit, and I’m there for it. A colleague suggested we work on giving zine making workshops, and I really want to explore that sort of things more.
Thanks for offering to lend me your DVD of Paterson, but I think it’s actually one of those movies I’d like to own a copy of. I haven’t rewatched it since I saw it in theatre, but I think I’ll want to just have it on hand – some movies or shows or books you just need to have close, you know?
I know, the first season of Supernatural on Prime has all those mediocre pop rock songs instead of AC/DC or Blue Öyster Cult and I was like “absolutely not” (Faith without Don’t Fear the Ripper is just so WRONG) and the same day I bought the DVDs off some guy in my town. Quantum Leap is another one I’ve been looking for for ages on platforms – because the boxset is a little pricey and my public library doesn’t have it – and I am PISSED not to find it anywhere! It was the first TV show I fell in love with, and I’ve never seen it in entirety.
See for instance: https://theconversation.com/an-academic-publisher-has-struck-an-ai-data-deal-with-microsoft-without-their-authors-knowledge-235203
“Academics are only the latest of several groups of what we might call content creators”
For fuck’s sake
Yes – a lot of my writer friends have published books with that publisher and have been posting about it, and sending letters to the publisher demanding transparency about this. It’s disgusting.
NOBODY wants this AI shit except rich lazy people. Nobody real wants it – and certainly not artists.
again, the controversial ad for the tablet shows what these tech lords think of art. They literally think their technology will make grand pianos irrelevant and will make us not care about statues from antiquity.
who the FUCK do you people think you are.
at least we know who the enemy is. at least it’s obvious.
There was an NYT article this week saying that many sources of data are now denying access to the large AI models, or at least denying free access. All of the current models need tons of data so they can be built into a usable shape. The data sources don’t like that the AI makers are getting paid and they aren’t.
I hope that we can develop a legal framework where writers and artists and musicians and so on can be paid for what is clearly being valued. And that they (well, we. All of us) are given the ability to opt out if they want to.
I think that dumping everything into AI models is a form of surveillance, as well as a potential form of theft. So opting out is seeking privacy as well as asking not to be robbed.
// I think that dumping everything into AI models is a form of surveillance, as well as a potential form of theft. //
Yes! totally agree.
I’ve worked at places – all these NY media places, as I’m sure you know – and a lot of them are now using AI for choosing SEO terms, and keywords, and all that backend SEO-driver stuff – which normally some human has to put in manually. (some human = Me.). I think this is a good use of AI – productive, releasing humans from having to type in 25 keywords when it can be assigned automatically using AI.
so it definitely has its uses – but … to replace creative work?
Get the hell outta here, stop clowning around. Nobody wants it.
There’s a commercial being shown during the Olympics where a young girl wants to write a fan letter to an athlete she admires. So she asks an AI to help her write the letter.
I wonder if there will be a part 2 to the commercial where the little girl learns that the athlete used the same AI to write her response to the AI-written fan letter.
Will they bond like they were sharing a Coke?
Who needs sincerity and a sense of shared humanity?
That commercial is as anti-human as Apple’s iPad commercial that you and Lyrie mentioned.
it’s all bad. it’s like that Bo Burnham song “that funny feeling.”
There it is again, that funny feeling
What a fucking nightmare. I don’t even comprehend how those things, that have to be vetted by several people, come to exist. So soulless.