Al, Is That You?

 

Did you see what Merriam-Webster’s word of the year was for 2023?

“Authentic.”

They could have chosen Artificial Intelligence, “AI” (which always looks like Al to me, like the shortened version of the name Allen or Albert) or “rizz” or “deepfake” but didn’t. Authentic won out, and I think it should have.

I am sure the decision was indeed a way to call out AI and all the ramifications of it. I see AI all the time these days and I, for one, am sort of frightened of it. Others more so; artists, photographers, writers all see it as a threat to their livelihood and creativity. College professors wade through fake papers. Politicians use it to slander and defame their candidates. Phones fix bad backgrounds, eliminate people and objects, even aggregate a number of images into one, fake, image where everyone is smiling.

What frightens me more is the AI we don’t see and won’t see even more in the future as it gets better and better and more nefarious and, well, meaner. I should acknowledge that, as I understand it, AI can be an amazing tool – predicting problems and treatments in medicine, finding anomalies in weather patterns, aiding in the building of those amazing images from the Webb telescope that surprise us seemingly every day, and in so many more ways I am sure I will never know.

And, you know what? There’s another thing I think I should be thankful to AI for – it has sent me on a search for the truth, the actual, the authentic.

I ask myself, more than ever, perhaps even for the some of the first times in my life, is this real?

That’s profound and exactly what AI is designed to not have me do.

I listen to a lot of new music, mostly Americana, Folk and Bluegrass, and am finding a new voice coming through it all, a true voice, a real story, a new authenticity and, honestly, I think a lot of folks are looking for that as well.

At The Grammy Awards last Sunday there was a lot of big, big stuff – costumes and choreography and songs from artists I don’t know and never will – none of it AI (I assume) but, for me, fake, somehow digital. And then…

Enter Tracy Chapman, analog, a guitar and an iconic song, Fast Car, and then, Luke Combs joins her and I am holding back tears. The crowd roared; the show stolen.

And then, and then…

Joni Mitchell comes out with her beautiful helper and friend, Brandi Carlisle, and sings Both Sides Now in a spinning throne-like chair and her walking staff and re-steals the whole damn show. Imagine, a woman – a young woman – writes a song in 1966, records it and it becomes a huge hit. (I remember my dad loved it and the song’s been echoing about in my mind for decades.) She records it again, a lavish production, in 2000. And then, she sings it again in 2024 – a frail and beautiful woman, strong and tender and so, so lovely. I let my tears run…

…as they are now.

In an opinion piece in The Washington Post just yesterday, Kim Ruehl writes: “I felt these things again as I watched Tracy Chapman and Joni Mitchell sing their songs. At its best, a song can remind us there is light on offer every day. After the past few years of world events, it still feels as though we are emerging from our tiny cabins. We are pretty sure we know what to expect. But then the light comes — just like that. With it come the tears. We didn’t know how much we needed them.”

Ms. Ruehl wasn’t the only one to mention these two performances, out of the dozens Sunday night – journalists and artists, friends and so many others could not help but marvel, comment and revel in the confelicity that we all shared, the joy.

What we saw was authentic.

What we witnessed was the truth.

We saw unadulterated beauty.

It is not surprising that, in this world of AI and deepfakes and this maelstrom of untruths, many of us saw and savored this moment, humans are better than it all, I swear.

Originally when this all started, (when? I don’t know, it just kind of seeped in, didn’t it?) I was angry and distrustful and vowed to not fall for it and eschew it at every opportunity, and not allow it in my life.

Well, that’s not going to work out and life upsets me enough already.

But something else happened, I look harder now for the authentic.

Go on out now and look for it and yourself, you’ll see it.

A little league baseball game.

A high school musical.

The lyrics to this new song or that old one.

The poems of our tender sons.

The tears of a lover lost.

The stone truth in a memory turned to the sun.

 

Look for it.

 

AI can simply not compare to the brushstrokes in a Rothko painting, the story in a Norman Rockwell, the images of Mapplethorpe, the detail in a Vermeer. It cannot compare to “To be…” or "When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow..." and all that comes after those lines. It shall never even hum to Brahms’ German Requiem, Bohemian Rhapsody or an American in Paris. It could never conjure the folk dances of the indigenous or put on the slippers at the Bolshoi Ballet.

It can never get to the truth of it all, this Art.

Seek that truth. Seek that place. Seek that, well… Love. Like the Tinman of Oz, you can see its heartlessness and will never get one. It simply… can’t.

There is no Artificial Love.

 

A Number of Ones

 

I’ve been thinking of a number lately. No, it is not forty-two, but that would be an excellent answer, I’m sure. I guess it’s rational, but it feels irrational – neither known nor unknown. I’d say it’s fungible, but I am not really sure I know what that word means. Maybe it is finite, that’s a thing, right? Or infinite but infinity frightens me.

The number is definitely place and time-specific and it is certainly wide-ranging. It can seem arbitrary and perhaps is. When you bottom-line it – math reference – it is a very personal number, but I suspect we don’t all have one.

The number answers this question: how many people do you need in your audience?

Mine may or may not be thirteen.

Let me try to explain what I am getting at here. Many folks I know – you perhaps – are writers, musicians and singers, printmakers, painters, potters and poets, dancers, directors, actors and chefs. 

Artists all.

And, although some may argue against this, all require an audience.

 

When I was a waifish, hopelessly sophomoric, perpetually high college, well, sophomore, a group of us left our hip and happening, infamous partying university for a smaller and hipper and partyingly superior small college here in Southwest Ohio. I am not sure what brought us there now, other than the aforementioned partying.

The college town there was, and still is, a hippy enclave with little craft and book shops, and glassblowers and, just off the street behind the weird little bakery, was a blacksmiths workshop. Well, at eight in the morning, I was looking for coffee, and, after procuring some sort of vegan mud, I wandered down that alley and his sign said ‘open’ and I ding-a-linged in.

(Just to clear things up this is nineteen-hundred-and-eighty-one, and the town is Yellow Springs, the college Antioch.)

He was a bear, I was, frankly, bear fodder. But he looked kindly, and I asked what was going on.

Now, to make an already long story less long, he took a shine to me and me him and we hung out for a few visits. He was a welder and artist who worked with iron mostly - abstracts on a large scale - a hanger-on alum and one gruff and wise dude. He also fashioned tools for fellow artists at his forge. Tongs and holders and picker-uppers and bangers, hammerheads and auls and augers – honestly, I’ve not the vocabulary to be more accurate.

I thought it was vaguely interesting that he, an artist, made tools for other artists. When I asked him about that, my brain, although imaginative, was hardly prepared for his answer. He went on about the duty of the artist (I giggled at that) and making things for the makers and much more heady stuff – he had a master’s degree. Through it all, though, I did hear this:

“Art is for however many need it.”

He made art, the hand tools, and gave them to a single person, an audience of one.

He made grand, rusty behemoths in public squares seen by many thousands as well.

He said they were both the same audience.

 

In my fiftyish years of playing guitar and singin’ songs, I have played for numbers of crowds of varying numbers. A couple of friends in a college apartment, a kitchen full of folksingers at a summer party, a beautiful wife, two soft and tender little boys beside a campfire. I played to the endless stars, a moon, and a Milky Way, to the desert wind and the city snow, alone? Maybe, probably not.

I’ve played Christmas carols for my dying father and I’ve sung at funerals, church services, and weddings. I still feel special when I play for my mother and my brother and his lovely wife.

I played one night at an open mic, a very late slot, and the soundboard glitched and the mics were screeching and the whole thing had to be shut down. I said I could do without it all and sat at the edge of the stage and began to play and sing. A pool of light from above shone on me and into the front few rows of tables where the last of the crowd lingered. Midway through John Prine’s “Paradise” I looked out and counted thirteen faces, it was positively Rockwellian, every face different and warm and kind and patient… eager. Eager to hear me play. I played five songs that night and it remains the best set I’ve ever played.

When I think about an audience and what that all means, I often think back to Bear the Blacksmith, and I reckon I now understand what he was getting at – an audience is built a member at a time.

The answer, it seems, might simply be one.

It might be thirteen ones or seventy-thousand ones.

One.

You.

 

My sons, who I am no longer writing about around here, have inspired me to start up the old blog again. Some of you might remember them from many years of considering and watching and sharing their stories and such in the back pages here. One son took on the challenge of writing a poem a week last year and sharing them on Instagram. The other has listened to an album a day for all of that same year and shares his brief thoughts on them on Discord, is it? Both have decided to do it again this year.

So, I am going to do an essay a week and publish that on Fridays for the rest of the year… wish me luck.

 

Peace to you all in this New Year, thanks for stopping by.

 

(Nick’s poems can be seen here and, well, I dunno where Z’s stuff ends up, I think it's just for the youths...)