Buenos Aires es inspiradora. Nada más llegar, la energía de la gran ciudad me cautivó. Quería caminar, ver y hacer.
Han sido dos semanas reveladoras y he aprendido un poco sobre la gente de aquí. Son personas en forma, atléticas, inteligentes y cultas. Tienen expectativas. Leen y apoyan a sus escritores y artistas, por lo que cuentan con sus propios grandes autores. Esto les da derecho, como a cualquier cultura con una literatura avanzada, a esperar que se conozca su obra desde Borges, al menos que se haya intentado leer alguna traducción.
Mi desconocimiento de estos autores es una limitación importante para mi comprensión. Aparte de Borges y Cortázar, no he leído ni estudiado a los escritores de aqui. Hasta ahora, me he centrado en autores uruguayos porque no he leído a ninguno. Como introducción al pensamiento a través de la literatura, elegí Montevideanos de Mario Benedetti y Textos Políticos, Extraviados & Dispersos de Horacio Quiroga, con la intención de leerlos en español.
Fue un buen reconocimiento de dos comunas de Buenos Aires, habitadas principalmente por residentes blancos adinerados y turistas. La impresión que me da es la de una ciudad europea en América. La música dance y sinfónica tiene una fuerte influencia europea; el rock y el pop, estadounidense, y en menor medida, británica. Hubo momentos en Recoleta en los que sentí que podría haber sido Manhattan o San Francisco, y momentos en Palermo en los que sentí que podría haber sido París.
Nunca me ha parecido ningún lugar de Asia; esto es América. Impresiona, pero la energía y los flagrantes problemas de raza y clase, que existen como en cualquier otro lugar desde la época de Colón, se hacen más evidentes en una economía cada vez más difícil. Hay muchas cosas interesantes aquí, pero es mucho mejor para ti si eres de piel clara. La condescendencia es real, y no estoy en posición de enfrentarla. Debo tomarla como orgullo de una cultura que apenas comprendo.
Los horarios son una locura. Aquí no cenan hasta las 9:30 p. m., los clubes no empiezan a animarse hasta las 11:30 p. m. y están llenos hasta las 4 o 5 a. m. Que no haya sujetador es una seria distracción para cualquiera a quien le gusten los pechos. Carne. Ruido. Ambos están siempre presentes aquí. Pero puedes conseguir de todo. Es, sin duda, una ciudad cosmopolita.
Cabe preguntarse si es justo que yo juzgue o intente comprender a la gente y la cultura de aquí sin un buen dominio del español. El mío es puramente improvisado, sin formación académica. Nunca he tenido profesor ni clases de español. He aprendido español como todo el mundo en California y Texas. En cuanto a si esto es suficiente para conversar o para tener un nivel satisfactorio aquí, no lo sé, pero la cuestión es que para mí el español es igual que el inglés: una lengua europea.
Entre las lenguas que he conocido, siempre he preferido el francés. Pero soy tamil. Mi idioma tiene 4000 años de antigüedad. Podría decirse que es la lengua que se habla de forma continua desde hace más tiempo en este planeta. Aunque les escribo ahora en inglés —que luego traduciré con Google al español— mi mente es tamil. No se confundan.
Aun así, es demasiado tarde para aprender español correctamente; me da vergüenza. La gente de aquí tiene derecho a menospreciarme por eso. Creo que mis habilidades como MTK, la escritora, la aprendiz, me hacen una persona que aprende rápido. Espero que lo vean y lo aprecien. Son difíciles de descifrar. Me observan cuando creen que no los veo y apartan la mirada cuando los pillan, como cuando les mostré mis pechos.
Lo mejor es ser uno mismo en el momento. Esto es lo que intento hacer siempre y espero compartir mis observaciones desde dentro de esta coraza que es mi piel.
Buenos Aires me inspiró de inmediato tanto para escribir como para crear arte. Escribí mi primer poema en español en Recoleta, en el séptimo piso de un edificio anodino, con el chirrido de las cigarras y los plátanos meciéndose con la brisa de finales de verano.
La insinuación de un cambio de estación era solo eso: una insinuación, ya que no he visto tal cambio; el calor persiste, y aún más en Palermo que en Recoleta.
La ausencia de semáforos o señales de stop me asombra: el tráfico fluye con naturalidad. Llegan a una intersección y en microsegundos deciden cómo se desarrollará la situación, y si alguien duda, recibe una respuesta con bocinazos y provocaciones inmediatas. Me recuerda a París o Los Ángeles. Los barrios que visito son amigables con la comunidad LGBTQ+. La influencia de mi ciudad, San Francisco, se siente en todo el mundo en ese sentido, y no lo olviden.
Tras dos semanas, por fin puedo apreciar la diversidad que existe aquí y distinguir entre las personas de Paraguay y Uruguay, considerándolas distintas y separadas de los ciudadanos de esta gran ciudad. Esto pone de manifiesto lo que yo percibo como el racismo heredado de 500 años de colonialismo.
MALBA – Museo de Arte Latino Americano de Buenos Aires – intenta abordar este problema, dando visibilidad a artistas indígenas.
Reluctantly, I paid for ChatGPT for three months in order to evaluate engagement with what we call chatbots, or responsive Artificial Intelligence (AI). It was disturbing and I want to share my experience as a snapshot of the state of affairs today.
These interactive AI are based on the LLM or “large language model” – a model trained with machine learning, on an immense amount of text.
The largest and most capable models, designed for natural language processing, especially language generation, provide the core capabilities of chatbots and are called Generative Pre-trained Transformers or GPTs – hence ChatGPT.
Back in 2008, Hollywood made having a hyper-advanced AI you talk to feel sexy, through Robert Downey, Jr.’s Tony Stark, Iron Man.
First, his comprehensively integrated AI, named “Jarvis,” voiced by Paul Bettany, was the ultimate English butler. Tony Stark could make hip, insanely complex requests of his AI, and Jarvis accomplished them in real-time with dry wit intact.
By 2012 in the MCU, Jarvis was replaced with “F.R.I.D.A.Y.,” an acronym Marvel says means “Female Replacement Intelligent Digital Assistant Youth” but is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the 20th century, post-war term for a secretary or personal assistant, “Girl Friday” or “Gal Friday,” which in itself was a gender switch from the character of Friday, in the novel Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe.
In the novel, Crusoe names the islander he meets ‘Friday’ because that was the day they met. Crusoe refers to him as his “man Friday.”
By extension, the term “girl Friday” became used for a female. The OED considers “girl Friday,” dated today. Still, it defines it as: “a female assistant, especially a junior office worker or a personal assistant to a business executive.”
Kerry Condon, a talented Irish actor, with an excellent professional voice, trained at the Royal Shakespeare Academy, voiced F.R.I.D.A.Y. Yet they still effected her sound with heavy vocal fry to make it sexier.
The following year an entire feature film, Her, starring Joaquin Phoenix and directed by Spike Jonze, was dedicated to a man having an intimate relationship with his AI chatbot, voiced by Scarlett Johansson.
The robotic, unemotional tone of Siri and the Googlemaps vox was beginning to disappear. Seductive voices were marketed heavily.
By 2021 in the Marvel Universe, Spider Man required a hip, tech-savvy teenaged relationship with A.I.
High schooler Peter Parker’s AI, named Karen and voiced by Jennifer Connelly, was a chatty, personal teacher and friend, “like a big sister, but you know not your sister,” they might have pitched. Karen was designed expressly to correspond to young people nationwide being exposed to their own chatbots in real life.
So for thirteen years, from 2008 to 2021, Hollywood crafted voices for artificial intelligence, until real-world AI caught up to being used widely by everyone. We were being taught how to talk to our machines.
Yeah, I’m not talking to it.
I’ve avoided using
“Siri” (Apple, 2012),
“Alexa” (Amazon, 2014) ,
or the more recent “Gemini” (Google, 2023).
These are all voice-activated chatbots responsive to their names, or a name you give them. Here was the original ad for Siri:
Ten years later, since 2021, during the high-profile commercials of the Super Bowl and Xmas, across every platform of gaming and streaming, ads like this one, featuring people using chatbots – and so explaining how to use them – have made these AI far more common.
By January of 2022, my friend Tom – a consistently early adopter for the 30 years I’ve known him – talked to Alexa through his house and car regularly. Between ’22 and today, use of interactive, voice-activated and responsive artificial intelligence, or chatbots, has increased and diversified. It’s popular now.
The ask is known as a prompt.
Because I can’t bring myself to talk to it or give it a name, the extent of my first interactions with ChatGPT were text-based even if they concerned images.
This summer, on a trip to Indonesia, I visited Bali Bird Park, where I saw many exotic birds only within their large, caged enclosures. I decided my first ask of ChatGPT would be to remove the cage bars that were in my photos.
The prompt was: “remove the bars from in front of the bird(s)”
This is the Eclectus Parrot.
or is it?
What do you see? Is the parrot behind the bars the same? Take a look at the feathers, the talons.
At the heart of the problem with the popularization of AI-generated images is a degree of approximation the machine does that goes unnoticed.
This withers the attention of the viewer and weakens their powers of observation. They think: “Sure, that’s good enough – now you can see the parrot.” But they don’t notice the photographed bird has been changed.
In the same way that compression drove us to trade high fidelity audio for the ease of owning, playing and manipulating music, these AI-generated images weaken our perception. An assault on the ears first, and now the eyes.
My second prompt was to remove the bars from a cage in which there was a more unusual bird. The Sulawesi Hornbill has a fantastic appearance. I photographed this one that was just hopping around outside the cages, so there were no bars to be removed:
Sulawesi Hornbill
Below its beak, there is an area of knobbed or wrinkled skin and feathers that gives it a larger appearance – a false mouth lower on its body. It is an unusual creature. What would AI make of it?
Sigh. If you just glanced at it, look at it again! It’s a different thing.
WRONG!
There are details that are just completely wrong. If I were to share the photo on social media without the bars and say, “hey everyone look at these Sulawesi Hornbill I photographed in Bali!” It would be a lie.
This shocked and saddened me. Because I know most people won’t look closely enough. They won’t carefully discriminate.
Already, because I quit social media in 2021, I notice the WRONG quick-takes and mistakes based on these small but not insignificant errors made by AI more than most.
We must train ourselves to be even more vigilant.
Next I decided to use AI for something based more in contemporary pop-culture. A 2025 television show called Alien: Earth, introduced a creature known as t. ocellus – a sort of octopus eyeball capable of parasitically occupying other creatures by replacing their eyeball with its own and manipulating the body it occupies. It was a fantastic addition to the science fiction world of the Alien franchise, and fictional creatures in general. I drew it freehand for fun.
In the TV show, the idea was introduced but not shown that the ocellus could occupy the body of the larger, more powerful creature from the Alien franchise known as the Xenomorph. I think everybody who saw the show wondered what that would be like. The small powerful eyeball creature inside the head of a xenomorph was an image instantly awakened in the imagination, though it was never presented.
So I set ChatGPT to the task. I asked it to make the Xenomorph from the Alien franchise as if it had been occupied by the t. ocellus. ChatGPT would be pulling its awareness of both the Xenomorph and the ocellus from general information available culturally because of the new TV show. It was fresh, and yet had an older pop cultural aspect – the Alien franchise has been around for forty years. ChatGPT started out cartoonish:
so I asked it to be more filmic:
But the single eye in the middle of the head was wrong … so I directed it to make the Xenomorph in profile. It made several as I tweaked it, and you can see below that the internal mouth was in some cases wrong because ChatGPT couldn’t distinguish two jaws. But this one is perhaps best:
It is an interesting exercise in iterations. I began to see that even if I didn’t ask ChatGPT to make certain specific changes between iterations, it would make some changes anyway – in pursuit of greater verisimilitude. Still it would equally fail in some other way. It was like, if I could just get an amalgamation of several of the images it made to come up with all the correct features in one image, we’d be okay. Troublesome.
I decided to use myself as a model for my next request:
My prompt was: “create a loteria card called “the Writist” with this image.
It caught my wonky eye! I tuned the prompt.
I said, “make the card number 47 and make the image more realistic.”
It was then I showed it to my friend Sofia, who commented, “Well it should be ‘El’ not ‘The'” – which is correct. So I asked ChatGPT to change it. I also took the time to ask ChatGPT to make the cigarette into a joint.
No. 47 El Writist
Why did it suddenly add the strip of blue color when I changed it to “El”? Was it pursuing a more “Loteria card” feel?
And why did it return to a more generic and comic book look from the more realistic?
It thinks “joint” means a conical spliff from Amsterdam.
I was ready to quit using ChatGPT. It left a terrible taste in my mouth and whatever the corresponding terms for negative feelings in my eyes are.
But the World Series was about to start and I had been telling people that the Dodgers have a Three-Headed Japanese Hydra. By this I meant they have three Japanese players: Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki, who are formidable.
Would ChatGPT know who these Japanese players were? What they look like? The World Series was as fresh as Alien: Earth in terms of current volume of discourse.
So I asked ChatGPT to make a Three-headed Hydra emerging from the sea with the heads of Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki:
Definitely NOT the three gentleman in question. Ohtani maybe. So I asked it to do the same with the singers Toni, Tony Toné:
It got crazy. And sort of racist.
Maybe it exposed something about the race of ChatGPT’s learning model and its view of the world.
Finally I asked ChatGPT to make an image using the movie poster from Miyazaki Hayao’s animated feature film, Castle in the Sky, and feature instead a picture of Spurs guard Stefon Castle, flying in the air for a dunk.
This was as close as we got:
The profile is just … wrong. The ear is wrong. The face.
There were some pretty bad ones. Unlike the random Black and Japanese faces on the Hydra it pulled from its awareness, this was ChatGPT approximating a person from a photograph I uploaded. Like the image I shot of myself for the Loteria card
It kind of looks like me. But not exactly. That kind of looks like Stefon Castle.
And this one definitely doesn’t.
Doesn’t look like him.
I bet if you asked it for DJT it would.
** UPDATE and CONCLUSION **
I ran the Chat GPT AI product into Google AI animation and this is the final piece of that project – from staged photo behind Silver Spur through ChatGPT and Google AI.
Nothing is as it appears in the media now. Public life in this country is an orchestrated presentation through multi-platform digital media that assaults the senses of the planet with staged cities, uses locations as sets, and employs repeated catch-phrases and frames of reference to define a USA – and its philosophy – independent of the actual nation. The loudest and most definitive are owned by a handful of people. Musk owns X.
We are held hostage to the extremist nonsense.
It suffocates. It numbs. It stupefies with ignorance and active disinformation.
Journaling on a blog is separate and distinct from using “social media,” in that ownership of the words is mine, not Zuckerberg’s nor Alphabet’s, and so not subject to their algorithm’s censorship.
But also not availed of their reach.
It is a separate exercise to blog as a means of reportage upon our times and for defining a reliable self within ever-shrinking freedoms of speech and of the press.
These three books – perhaps more than any others – are the beginning of practical life sciences.
These men, empowered by their societies, showed that our human brains can observe the natural world, understand it in new ways, communicate it to others and then perceive collectively of the complicated idea of natural selection over eons being responsible for the evolution of all life.
These books are the beginnings of our contemporary understanding of deep time in relation to living things, the dawn of bio-geographical studies.
Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctal Regions of the New Continent influenced the young Charles Darwin profoundly.
Alfred Russell Wallace shares more in common with von Humboldt though. His independent spirit and commitment to observation and collection of species was a titanic extension of the thinking.
Evolution is real. Natural selection is real. It’s happening constantly all around us and has been since the dawn of time.
These men were the first to describe it on a scale that makes it visible and comprehensible to all who read them.
A millennium before Christopher Columbus was born, my people – since I am descendant of the Tamil Kings – embarked to sea without knowing what they would find; explorers, with ships filled with the best spices, jewelry and manufactured goods on the planet.
They were headed toward the dawn, open ocean to the East and South, with probably very well-thought-out research, because we’re Tamil, on what they’d find.
For the next twelve hundred years they met, traded with, loved and engaged with every single culture from my birthplace to the “Wallace line” – end of the Sunda shelf.
This is why, every time I travel in what you call South East Asia, I feel intense kinship with every person I meet. They feel it instantly, and I acknowledge it openly, with deference and appreciation.
My pleasure at the exquisite variations of the cultures here that were born from those now ancient relationships THRRRUMMMMS! with a harmony of centuries.
That I know this pleases everyone – and their cultures flower before me in brilliant ways:
Here’s a current playlist on my travels:
The White Man just. doesn’t. get it. It’s a god damn distant object of exotic fascination from what they perceive of falsely as a lesser culture.
My people had libraries and Universities while the European man was still crawling in the dirt.
Then slowly, they learned everything from us. Then they ran out of room for themselves, built ships and started “colonizing”: calling all other people animals and heathens and enslaving and murdering us. For five hundred years.
It’s certainly political. People don’t like us … Hindus. Because they’re not sure what they’re gonna get when they open the pack. Surprise! Wild card! Rest assured, what you will get will be deeply civilized and intellectual.
Take me for example, I am not a practicing Hindu anymore, I have been studying Buddhism for three decades and am an atheist dedicated to a scientific interpretation of our universe for the good of all humanity.
Well look, I gotta go. But anyway, I’m in Bali and I love every single person from here to Tamil Nad. But not enough to call you back.
It has been a month and a half since last I wrote. The statistics for this site reveal that no one reads what I write. It is, and has been, a resource for documenting my view of this existence in which I was born the eleventh mouth to feed in a two-room apartment in India, moved at two to the United States of America, the youngest of a family of five that disintegrated.
And who then travelled alone for years and lived in Austin, Taiwan, Japan, India, Thailand, Washington D.C., and New Orleans before moving to San Francisco in 1993, to New York in ’97, and L.A. in 2002 – where I fathered a child and was a local radio personality – and back to Japan for all of 2005; India ’06 – ’07 and finally back to Oakland and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Ten years ago, I began to split my time between SF and San Antonio, Texas, where my father – undeniably a great American – wished to die.
Now, five years in the wake of his passing, I write to you from back home in my favorite city, San Francisco, where I am alone.
My eighth trip around the world was embarked upon from here in late 2022 when I spent significant time in Amsterdam and same in Bangkok in 2023.
It has taken me 40 years to free myself of the burdensome garbage I’ve had to participate in – just to be an American.
But now, I consider myself like Tolstoy after the wars,
or the young boys of the golden era of dutch painting, wealthy scions of colonists bringing everything from around the world back to Amsterdam. I’m financially stable, experienced, educated and have been writing and making art for 30 years.
I am widely disliked and in 55 years of being in the United States, I never made a friend. In the United States now, I am persona non grata for my beliefs first and my behavior in societal situations next. Most people who meet me have no interest in befriending me any more because I reject the society and maintain the uncompromised position that is a thread throughout my life and work. Being true to myself has “cost” me every relationship I ever made.
In a controlled way, and very aware of the audience, I still perform somewhat loudly in public space – coffeeshops, bars, alleys – as I have done for thirty years in the United States, expressing my truths … but now they tire of the “act,” that has been my existence here.
I continue to read in public as well, promoting the act of reading and general intellectual pursuits. I have been reading novels for decades and intend still to write a good one – let’s see.
To most, I am merely an immigrant they can either use or forget.
To me this separation was an inevitable eventuality to my methodology. It is not to be railed against, but to be rolled with and seized for the immense value it has. I have time, resources, abilities I need to let flower. Please support me or leave me alone, thanks.
People at the top share information and power sparingly, and only with those willing to learn the system and play along. Even at the highest levels of education, students are programmed.
You have to have more than curiosity, or a desire to know it. The deciders have more than money and power. They have a collective desire to sustain the narrative with its untruths sequestered.
And the cost is the forced agreement with the column of empty spaces between the plates – where omissions define what governance and society hide.
This is how the general notion of truth is composed. It is littered with untruths, and composed of fantastic, illogical agreements authored by untrustworthy men.
They seek to make an image of truth like a singular, linear thing that leads back to the past and on into the future, with the empty spaces between of their denials and lies making it more like a columnar, circling line than anything, a coil.
I was given more access than most because of how I chose to target my intellect. I studied history and political science at school and then the development of our information media during the past thirty years.
Before the Internet, their truth seemed far less universal or evident. It seemed suspect
But what has been hidden, the layers to which I am not read-in, are what I fear defines our society now.
The Colonial Era, which defines this world from the vantage of white people, is the author. Almost everything about our accepted history is an exaggeration told to substantiate and support a system that is corrupt and favors the white, European perspective.
The history of the winners of the last 500 years is insane.
The attempted genocide of entire Nations – begun with their navigation of the seas in massive ships designed to plunder and oppress – continues, abated only slightly by their perception of having mapped the entirety of our world’s territory.
Yet it is substantiated as legitimate by the creation of the context within which discussion occurs. “We must move past politics now and deal with the facts on the ground “
The authoritarian fascists and right-wing elements arising throughout Europe and the USA are coldly expressing their denial of the consecutive and continuous untruths and attempt to make the entire world accept their narrative.
In it, ancient peoples and billions of them throughout Asia and Africa are still considered barbaric hordes of heathens. There is a firm unwillingness to shatter the absurd fallacy.
Worse, the engine of the world is being driven, at an alarming speed, to blow past truths to accept the narrative. We must stop. We must stop now.
An honest reassessment of the Colonial Era – including a full reassessment of the validity of nations and states from Palestine to Park City, Utah – is an imperative of truth.
Reparations and reconciliation cannot begin in a climate of international denial of truths for contractual agreements between corporate entities that control the most important of our planet’s resources.
Humanity has exceeded the capacity of nature to control us and, for at least a hundred years now, at an alarming speed, become the greatest force of damage and destruction and violent rape of the natural world. We must stop.
The invention of a society willing to ignore truths to support a fantasy projection of a nation state emerged from the creation of information media that directly contradict the truth and program people to believe their narrative.
Individual free-thinkers who know better exist everywhere. Riding the information media, one can see we exist, but we are neutralized by an inability to overcome the massive noise that drowns out the truth.
How can we get this whole thing to stop and look honestly at the lies? How are we to unpack the propaganda and jingo?
The USA isn’t anything it says it is anymore, in the same way the Soviet Union wasn’t when it fell apart.
Yet we are all forced to call it the greatest country in the world, obliged to praise and never criticize how it has come into being or what it engages in globally to protect the powerful corporate interests who compose the narrative.
Even to say openly that the attempted genocide of the First Nations in the Americas is a far more terrible thing than the attempted genocide of the Jews by Hitler’s Reich is considered wrong-minded.
We are forced to accept that shit just happened to the red man.
To the brown man.
To the black man.
They lost. “We” won.
The USA just exists.
And now the same narrative approach is taken with Israel.
Only it’s not a 275 year old continuous lie, it’s a hundred year old one.
The single coiled line of their historical narrative cannot stand the suggestion of the truth that these nations do not and can not legitimately exist without massive, international brain washing.
Every “citizen” of the USA – born here or not – is responsible for this giant, coiled stack of lies of omission. The only way forward is to admit it is a house of cards.
The Republicans will never do this. The spook George Herbert Walker Bush and his powerful, secret society seized control to ensure the narrative will not die
If the Democrats represented a chance for the truth after Nixon and led by Carter, Reagan covered up for Bush and his cronies to crush that and the Clinton Establishment destroyed it further through the compromises and contracts of Globalism – with alliances in Israel, Europe and around the world.
Both parties now represent the cementing of the false narrative in order for the USA to exist. They are in fact one party – much like the Soviet Union when it ended.
We must be honest. We must stop the train of this madness and reassess the entirety of the project. We must have the courage to lead the world in self-critical assessment of our society, identification of its wrong-doings, and in reparations and reconciliation for these.
We must lead other nations to this before a true globalism can exist.
I am unlike everyone else on this planet because I have done nothing but travel, read, think and party. I have avoided jobs, family and friends because they all demanded I compromise myself. but I read Emerson at 14:
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.“
So I have been myself for at least 43 years and it has cost a lot of relationships. I won’t play along with things I don’t agree with.
I don’t blame all of you for buying in. I blame some of you for selling out. But the thing I resent is that since you bought in or sold out you decided to apply condescending judgements against me as an outsider to what you chose to be a part of.
You married assholes all expect me to revere married life as some higher place. You people with families have a LOUD, UNIVERSAL CLAMOR about the virtues of family. Families are mostly fucked collections of bullshit responsibilities to people who share some DNA.
Your recriminations and requests for me to “grow up” or to join your so-called society are an offensive affront. Your societies are horseshit. You are filled with lies disguised as social truths.
You are so deluded now that you wouldn’t know a truth if it came up and bit you on the nose.
You think Oswald killed Kennedy. You think those towers fell down by themselves. You think democracy exists and capitalism hasn’t OWNED it for decades. You think you have free will.
You believe in gods out of fear of looking at the truth.
There is no God. There is no anthropomorphic he or she to praise or punish we.
You are so profoundly manipulated by your compromises that to speak to you about truths is impossible because – and this I just can’t believe – you will deny it, call me crazy and cover your ears.
You maintain the falsity out of fear of looking at the truth and being responsible for it.
The only sad thing is the lack of shame you have for all this.
I may be totally alone. But I know the truth and I fear nothing. Sucks ta be you.
It’s a narrow but quiet and well-appointed spot just off Union Square on Post. My sixth floor room has windows that open and I can see the back of the immense billboards that surround the square and the bronze woman atop the Philippines War Dewey Monument within it.
Dedicated to Admiral George Dewey, it commemorates his victory in the Battle of Manila Bay during the Spanish–American War. I want to replace it with a massive Foucault’s Pendulum.
The ‘coffee at 8am’ is in a small, cramped area and the guests all stood around trying to get what they wanted from a selection of muffins, bagels, bread-y treats, yogurt and fruit – or created plates to carry back to their rooms. I grabbed a slice of cold bread stuffed with spinach and a coffee and left.
It’s meagre and the coffee is plain, boring. They had oat milk, though – amazing how swiftly that became popular in the last few years. I came back to the room and discovered this is a hotel owned by The Oxford Collection. It is quiet, and tucked away.
It’s the weekend of Outside Lands, a music festival held in Golden Gate Park that I protested when it was proposed. It’s a terrible idea to have drunk, drug-addled youth partying to loud, crazed music sets in that idyllic microsystem.
I have never been and will never go. In any case, of the hundred or so acts appearing this weekend, I have heard of exactly two. I am old and irrelevant to pop culture. It doesn’t interest me either. I use Radio Garden to find new music or vibes. I use playlists that I mix to listen to otherwise.
Speaking of the drunk, drug-addled tech crowd that have ruined San Francisco for a decade, the company formerly known as Twitter, to which we gave the insane tax-break in 2012 that allowed them and Zynga and the rest of these assholes the ability to move here … is now leaving San Francisco. As announced by that ignorant, half-wit Elon Musk this week.
So what was the point?
This town has been made worse, less humane, less sensitive and cultured, less tolerant even, by the social media crowd who came here, used it like a snot rag, and now spit on it as they leave. Good riddance. I will always hate you. Stay away, you ruinous ignorant cunts.
I am no longer on social media. And recently I have started turning my phone off entirely. For days at a time. I’m unemployed and without any need for it.
I feel very lonesome much of the time, but I don’t think much of the artifice of friendship and camaraderie projected by text messages and social media whatnot. It’s pointless drivel.
The only thing that’s real is presence.
Nobody ever knew me in reality, so dispensing of the bogus social media artifice leaves me alone with myself, a condition to which I grow accustomed. It will be how it is until I’m dead. It’s kind of how it has always been.
The world in my time has been a decaying disappointment. No one from my family or the nation of my birth cares for me, or if I live or die, I’m an irrelevancy to them, or worse, for what I have become away from there.
The nation I was dragged to as a child, considers me an idiot immigrant. I have always felt horrifically trapped, surrounded by ignorant, deluded zombies who loyally parrot jingoistic or corporate slogans to promote to me a pseudo-nation, invented by profoundly racist and genocidal Europeans. They don’t care a thing about me.
I have no home. No family. And no real friends. I sleep mostly in hotels now. Alone
Moving now, through this world, I see things from an outsider’s perspective – slower, more deliberate. I feel it’s a more honest appraisal of these strange people all around me, who act progressively more superficial, less caring. They live in echo chambers of limited truths.
I have trained myself to think freely for decades and am proud of my independent understanding of our world.
I wish I could communicate my thoughts to … well to anyone, really.
But I am a failed writer.
I make things I feel few understand, but which to me speak loudly about my perceptions. But worse, deep within me are trapped four decades of painful and brilliant thoughts I cannot get out because of the complex social barriers the digital generation erects to being able to consider them.
It’s irrelevant because I have no audience and most people think I am crazy or ill – which I firmly deny.
I am the direct product of my circumstances which were a bullshit Truman Show of selfish, arrogant morons telling me lies about the world and my place in it
We’ve all heard of heartache. We know it’s a part of heartbreak, but that you could feel heartache either before or after heartbreak, making it an enduring pain, difficult to overcome.
After your heart breaks you feel heartache, or, you feel heartache and seek ways to prevent heartbreak – either way it lasts.
But I suffer though from something else now:
soulache.
and I dread soulbreak.
The world decays because we humans suddenly increased in population over the last 150 years. We are the middle children of the human population explosion, the witnesses of the terrible burden we now place on the great organism we call our earth.
We are out of control. I witness it.
It hurts my soul.
My family was destroyed through immigration and divorce and cultural oppression. No one I ever thought loved me, does. I have lost all my friends and family. I am alone. I have no feelings of trust for any of you anymore.
These personal abandonments hurt my soul. I endure them.
My soul aches for years now.
I know there is no God to comfort me. These are the circumstances of my time on this plane.
I sense an interconnectedness, a spiritual linkage of some kind behind the math of it all. There is good. Truth exists. I keep and tend to truths myself. Others do, too. I read them as possible.
But my soulache is exacerbated by the fear there is no hope.
Meditation to empty my soul is the only respite from the ache. It works. But lasts so briefly.
I have read that if I continue this process of meditation I can overcome the misery. I hope so. Which means at least that small amount of hope exists.
I offer that to all of you. Each and every soul on this plane.
It was like walking into a university show in Soho in the ’90’s – Kusama, Warhol, Haring, Basquiat, Koons and Hirst – then suddenly it was like street stuff from the aughts: banksy, Stik, Invader.
Then Hayden Kays and KAWS and Takashi Murakami and Abloh is how it morphed into stuff I had only seen over the last five years because Google throws it up on my projector on heavy rotation ad nauseum thousands of miles from here – like Dream. (to old heads, I say big ups to Oaktown DREAM, rest in power). Then there was a Hirst and a Koons and a Warhol and a sweet roomful of Yayoi Kusama.
Moco Amsterdam is housed in the Villa Alsberg, a townhouse overlooking Museumplein in the heart of Amsterdam (between the Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum). The building was designed in 1904 by Eduard Cuypers, nephew of Pierre Cuypers, designer of Amsterdam Central Station and the Rijksmuseum.
It is a good collection of very specifically well-known contemporary art, linked only by their pop. They don’t hide it, Moco calls itself a “boutique museum.” They have a second location in Barcelona. I heard the immersive digital art installation by Studio Irma was the same there.
What is this show exactly? I found out about it from posters slapped around town:
Wait – what? I was standing there in the street thinking that looks like clickbait for a museum exhibition produced by the marketing department. Here’s 4k video of my visit to Moco Amsterdam … check it:
Moco’s building was a privately-owned residence and one of the first family homes built along Museumplein. It was inhabited until 1939. Then, the house was let to priests who taught at the Saint Nicolas School in Amsterdam. Later it was converted into an office for a law firm.
Moco took over the Villa Alsberg and opened the museum in 2016, a traditional Amsterdam townhome on the museumplein, converted into a walk-through collection. But it is densely packed with the art and difficult to navigate when crowded. I was here on a rainy Thursday and it was claustrophobic. They should show less and allow for more space before the art.
Some artists received better purchase, weirdly (read: banksy). The one Warhol inclusion was pretty cool – diamond dust. Kusama is boss. Banksy’s tenner is great. The sculptures in the garden by Marcel Wander were precious. Studio Irma’s digital immersive art was low-tech, high-concept and cool. But it’s a densely installed collection. It was difficult to appreciate a large canvas by Hayden Kays, mounted in a small room. The Harings were also installed in a small square room, jammed with people. It was awkward.
Koons and Hirst were kind of just stuck in the hallways. Rooms were grouped loosely by era, but not distinctly so. They had these vague categories – Modern Masters, Contemporary Masters. It may have been an attempt to contrast-gain through equanimity but the install just felt crammed and poorly considered.
Prints were indicated to have been authenticated by the artists. The provenance for the Invader piece was credited to Jared Leto. Things that were new to me that I enjoyed were the playful works of Marcel Wander, the digital immersive stuff by Studio Irma and the large canvases (panels?) by The Kid.
The Kid, a contemporary painter using oils to create large photocollage-style paintings, had exquisite technique, though the work was conceptually immature. I wondered if there were painters in this land that spawned Rembrandt, Hals and Hooch and Vermeer and Van Gogh – and if so, what were they into? As a young artist, The Kid is into deeply personal concerns at the moment, but he will be good to watch evolve as a painter. I admired his use of pseudonym and rejection of nation-state in the establishment of his identity. Smart kid.
Ultimately, though, the artists were equalized in the hyper-capitalized gift shop that was tragically post-ironic: Campbell Soup Can skate decks beside decks that had banksy’s girl and balloon – where’s that dough going? Basquiat crowns as lapel pins. Is the Basquiat Estate or somebody who owns some weird rights making money here? on hundreds of euros worth of cheap, chinese-made kitschy derivative chunks of plastic? Is this a non-fungible token (NFT) emerging into totally fungible bullshit (TFB) in the museum culture?
Sure enough, the exibit includes NFT: The New Future, which they claim is, “Europe’s first dedicated exhibition space to the NFT phenomenon.” Beeple. It feels half baked. Exhibition spaces for non-fungible things.
Your ticket comes with a free gift from the museum and a discount for the gift shop. The shop was cringe. There were totes and hats and pins and cards and posters, lots of pink and the generalized motto of the museum: In Art We Trust. I mean. Look, it was a decent show or a weird collection of highly successful names in art since like 1990, in a house, but … what is this?
The curatorial sense here seems to be: throw as many recognizable names up as possible to herd in the stoned masses visiting the museumplein. Oh, and cater to the ever-increasing LGBTQ+ tourism euro, by featuring gay cultural icons and the color pink. This show wasn’t so much curated as listicled. Superficial.
By my observation, the corporate partners of high-profile museums in city centers of the colonial era are amidst a reformation, post-George Floyd – a Black Lives Matter effect is international. Woke culture expects more. Millennials are uninterested in the old narratives. Moco seems to seek to fill a void in perspective over traditional museums – that of street art and free expression. But superficial listicle curation for tourist-culture, and capitalist reduction of profound cultural expression, is gauche.
Moco resides somewhere between traditional museum culture and the modern art marketplace. It’s like a brick and mortar pop magazine on the museumplein.
I covered a lot of elections during the dawn of this century. Then I stopped and unplugged from it all, and, instead of journalism, I turned to ten years of helping raise my child, making art, writing poetry and prosaic thoughts and, finally, helping my father transition from this world.
I used only WordPress blogs and Youtube channels and Twitter – but not Facebook, nor by extension Instagram, because from the beginning I despised Mark Zuckerberg and his bullshit machine and saw it for what it was – a Fuckerberg. It’s why you won’t see me in the metaverse.
For reference, back in ’20, I described myself in that context.
The machines subtly took control of time from humanity and almost no one noticed.
This base-ten cult of decades, centuries and millennia seized all of culture in the space of five score years and became the first salvo of the machines, culminating in the agreement among them known as 2000.
I was born into a continuous and ancient culture, untethered to such limitations, which soared to intellectual, philosophical, cultural and artistic heights. We invented chess and a concept of zero and many other philosophies that spread from the bosom of our land outward across the continents in your (retroactively named) first millennium.
Until we were brutally interrupted by the Europeans in their savage centuries – of using ships to travel everywhere and subjugate everyone else in the name of a ‘civilization’ we found and still find invasive, crass, physical, brutish, short-sighted, arrogant and ignorant.
They learned what they wanted to learn, what profited them, quickly though … and were great at taking credit for others’ thoughts and ideas by dehumanizing them (for, among other things, the unwillingness to debase oneself to damaging another for one’s own gain).
So yeah, suddenly, in the exact middle of their second millennium, for five centuries, they administered this vicious, dehumanizing, racist projection upon the world, culminating in continental-sized land grabs that attempted to genocide hundreds of nations of millions of people, whom they mistakenly called Indians and Blacks.
We watched all this from the other side of the world where we too were forced to absorb the Europeans’ assault, – mostly the British. We, too, then experienced the God-complex and scheming manipulations they used to elevate themselves and bend us into submission.
Thus, just as their second millennium came to a close, and a so-called Post-Colonial Era was granted by their philosophy, we are also among the hundreds of millions that shook off the yoke of their subjugation.
My existence straddles millennia.
And I don’t know when you’re living, but we now awake daily to contemplate the possibility of our complete and total eradication, not necessarily at the hands of the violent, but perhaps as a result of what the Europeans’ half-millennium has wrought, for better or worse. They build, protect and insure their clubhouse built of racist social truths for the 1%.
Their defensiveness and insecurity in the slow realization of their failings, cripples us, as we try to do the slow, age-old work … of pacifying, indeed tranquilizing the bellicose nature so quick to emerge in the grunts.
It awakens flash anger and violent explosions that have devastating effects upon hundreds of thousands of families and innocents.
It maintains white-supremacy and racial dominance. It continues and worsens insidiously by promoting loudly and at huge international volume, those who continuously relate their narrative, culminating in the ugly raw capitalist burp that is Trump – a P.T. Barnum in the White House who thinks he’s God.
(beats)
It quietly silences those telling parallel history – by eliminating them from the formal base-ten digital record in the Internet amongst the saved data. And makes them unpopular by drowning them out and by any other means necessary. Facebook is the perfect machine for this.
This means, in some cases, making the truth unpopular by any means necessary and substituting a social truth for the real truth by any means necessary.
They have not yet fully seen how what they have done was wrong nor apologized nor shown remorse nor asked genuine forgiveness nor sought to restore what was.
Instead they have created their own history that labels these millennia, establishes the calendar and when the day begins and ends and uses globalist terms for engagements that are ferociously capitalist, in which money is the almighty and war for resources is perpetual. They declare themselves the victors of these continental land grabs and centuries of slave-ownership.
On the clock we live under at the dawn of their third millennium, they drive the engine of our world madly forward at an increasingly unsustainable pace.
My name is Karthik and I am a human born in Tamil Nadu, India, and raised in the United States of America for the past 50 years. I am well-educated and read daily a large amount of contemporaneous information and data about our times. I am unemployed and divorced from all ideology.
I am not selling anything and I am not looking for a job.
I am merely trying to communicate how sickened and embarrassed I am by the USA. And to beg you to Stop. Unplug. Slow down. Get back to who you really are. You are lost and running at a breakneck pace.
When you’re lost, don’t run at a breakneck pace.
Stop.
Calm down.
Collect data and evaluate the current situation, what is actually in front of you.
Organize and Re-order your priorities to the immediate.
Immediately, a quarter of a million and rising to a third of a million Americans are dying, actively, of an unprecedented viral pandemic because we, as towns, cities, states and a nation have failed so completely to organize consistent, universal policy to control spread.
Stop.
Think about what YOU are doing. Each day. To prevent spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus and monkeypox.
In the Spring of that fateful year, 2020, my father died, at 90, of natural causes. He was a devoted American, whose contributions to the U.S. were immense, yet in some ways, immeasurable. He passed on a Monday and the global Covid-19 pandemic struck that actual week. Protocols meant I could have no public funeral service. Only five were allowed to attend: the brahmin, myself and three of dad’s former students. Six weeks later, George Floyd was choked to death, by police in Minneapolis Minnesota. Thousands marched, pandemic be damned.
George Perry Floyd Jr. was an African-American man who was openly and publicly murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during an arrest after a store clerk suspected Floyd may have used a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill.
He was lying inert and unarmed on the ground, and Derek Chauvin, one of four police officers who arrived on the scene, knelt on Floyd’s neck and back for 9 minutes and 29 seconds and choked him to death. It was filmed, and witnessed by many. The reaction to the video of George Floyd’s choking impacted the world.
Five months later Trump lost. His followers attempted a violent coup of the peaceful transfer of power to Biden. They attempted nothing short of a violent revolution against democracy in our country. Seven people died attempting to protect the Capitol and formal structures of our government from an amped-up, violent horde, whipped into a frenzy by the former President, who fomented them and the nation with utterly false accusations of election and voter fraud in the 2020 election. They continue to do this. There is a film called 2000 mules that is complete and total horseshit.
It would be like the last gasp of a terrible, ugly, racist monster swinging wildly as it goes down, except it still swings – now less publicly, without the perceived protection from a white supremacist in the White House. Ted Cruz and Ron DeSantis and Marjorie Taylor-Greene and others seek to fill the Trump-sized void, to keep the drumbeat of their racism and hate going. Their intention is nothing short of a fascist, White, Christian State.
There is significant concern that the monster has gone underground and even now plots a very real and significant coup, possibly even a civil war. Rest assured, the ugly beast – born from genocide and slavery, and cemented by white supremacy and abject racism – has dominated this nation for three hundred years. It will not go quietly.
We are and have been overdue to address it. Having calculated the impending minoritization of the so-called ‘White’ American for decades, the writing has been on the wall. The racist beast amongst them feels cornered, misunderstood and plans to retaliate against truth, justice and humanity.
These are White Americans who believe that:
This is the greatest country in the world, and became so only because whites left Europe and founded a place where they could place themselves in control; where they could create their own white-supremacist thing, murdering and enslaving those they deemed heathens without recrimination. They consider Whites to be a race that ‘authored’ the USA, with greater rights than all other Americans.
Black Americans are receiving far more protection and opportunity than they should because they make up only a small percentage of the population compared to whites. White Americans I know personally have said this to me over decades. It is a complete disconnect with the facts of Black American life.
Minorities and new immigrants do not deserve protection of any kind. Those who come here should completely embrace their lower place in a hierarchy. If they expect to climb, they have to play by rules which praise White-American culture, and that which it ordains, above all else. It doesn’t matter if the rules contradict the immigrants’ own culture and values, as they do commonly – as happened to me my whole life.
All Americans must play along, accept social truths over real truths, and be of value to the ruling class, which must remain White dominated.
I do not accept any of this. I consider it inhumane, unjust, racist and fundamentally against the founding principles of the nation’s forefathers – who, in any case, were only creating protections for themselves.
The nation has come to its inevitable crossroads once again. We reappear here at this intersection over and over through the centuries because we do not address the problem as a whole. Rather, we attempt constant fixes that pluralize over time – in the hope that we move toward a more just, fair and honest society.
We are far from it.
Truth is, we have never had one at all.
To begin, White Americans must be vetted in the context of what we consider right today. Let us root out those that harbor racist, violent thoughts against others. Let us root out the homegrown terrorists. And disarm them.
Since the coup attempt, many are hiding and plotting – by definition, treasonous acts. They don’t hide very well, since they explode with it all over social media. We should have begun there a long time ago. To those of you, particularly young people, who are into cancel culture: you don’t have to cancel them, you can identify and keep the light on them. Vet and Dox these people. Keep a record.
Whites have ‘vetted’ everyone else, brutally, for centuries. That should end now, with an appropriate vetting of them, in the context of our nation as it stands today.
Let’s discern who, exactly, attempts to author the USA on racist terms, and on religious terms – when the First Amendment clearly states we shall not. Let us establish and publicly name who works for the ends of Whites above others, exclusively, and how. Who seeks to establish a religion for our nation and oppress other spiritualities? Who seeks to hold down alternative culture?
Let us vet all of those in power for racial and social inequities. Expose through vetting what their actual opinions are and make them known. Start with the Whites.
I haven’t got much to say about the twin issues that suddenly struck the Giants out of the blue – the sudden death of Brandon Crawford’s sister-in-law and the dirt bike accident that put Madison Bumgarner on the DL for the first time in his career. But I thought I’d use this space to take a second to reflect on how baseball is a family.
You all are my family.
“My Giants Family,” is what I call you when I feel I need to be specific talking to strangers. We are intensely together in spirit every year for at least eight months as our brothers play baseball and fight for another World Series championship.
The long season from April to October, the 162 – 175 games, the multiple games a week – all of this binds us. It takes place daily, weekly, all summer, yearly, as we all live our lives and go about our business, and we are intimately attached to one another through it all.
We all know when someone on the team has something as minor as a hangnail! or a busted clavicle (get better soon JP).
We know if one of the players is getting married (Congrats Hunter and Lexi) or are having a baby (Congrats Hunter and Shelley).
Heck, we know if someone farts in the clubhouse (miss you, Jean).
It’s all pretty intimate.
When Brandon and Jalynne lost her sister last week, I didn’t want anything more than to be there for them. I didn’t care about wins, losses or the standings. It is an incredibly sad stroke of ill luck for a wonderful family within our family. I just wanted to help out.
By the same token, Madison’s dirt bike accident is a family matter, too. I am not as concerned it happened as I am that he’s all right.
I was proud of him for standing erect before a phalanx of reporters and owning up to it not being the most prudent move, but honestly, I know the guy likes to ranch and ride and slay snakes to save jackrabbits. I know he’s a man’s man. I don’t begrudge him a hobby like dirt bike riding, ’cause he’s my brother and I assume it’s the kinda thing he’d do on an off day.
The beginning of this season has been filled with weird misfortunes among which the death of our sister-in-law is the most significant and important. It exceeds the petty concerns of win-loss and standings.
Of course I want to #BeatLA, but as Brandon and Jalynne grieve, and Madison mends and rehabs, I wish and pray most for the health and happiness of our entire family, irrespective of the record.
The best first half in the majors and the second-worst second half in the majors sums to the most important home stand of the year with twenty games to play.
Seven games: three against the Padres and four against the Cardinals who are outside looking in and trying, with the Mets, to pry us from atop the National League Wild Card standings.
The difference between eking out the Wild Card and seizing the division from the nemesis lies in these next seven games. We have to take five.
We were happy in June. This team looked built to make the run. The pieces all made sense and our record was the result of beautiful play. We were happy because we won without Pence, Panik, Duffy and Romo. If anything we were enthused because we knew we’d have them all back healthy for the stretch run. The pain of last year when all the injuries hit in August was fresh in our minds. (To be honest we’ve been pretty lucky in that regard).
Johnny Cueto tore it up and started the All-Star Game. We voted Belt into the summer classic with vigor. Cain and Peavy were mostly bad, but it didn’t seem to matter. Until he went down Romo was a great set-up man for Casilla who collected the majority of his 31 saves and looked like he could be the closer. (That team still exists).
Then this epic collapse of hitting and failures in the bullpen in the second half necessitated re-engineering the rotation, forced us to deal beloved Duffy.
I for one fully support what I think was swift and bold decision-making by Bobby Evans, Brian Sabean, Larry Baer, Bruce Bochy and staff. We had to do something quick and if we didn’t pick up Matt Moore, I am not sure we would even have a chance right now. Add to that the success Eduardo Núñez has had at third and at the plate, and I’m more than pleased we made the deal.
If we have to play the Mets or Nats in the play-in game I am confident we can send out MadBum and have a great chance to win. But thanks to the trade, I now also feel, with Cueto starting against the Cubs, then Samardzija/Moore and back to Bumgarner, we actually have a shot to beat the league leaders, to win the NLCS.
The Giants are due to play better. Maybe they weren’t actually the best team in baseball when they ended the first half with a better record than the Chicago Cubs, but clearly they’re not the second-worst team in baseball.
Baseball teams are streaky. While the Giants’ extreme splits are abnormal, a bad stretch doesn’t necessarily predict more losing. They’re just as likely to go on a nice winning streak now. That’s baseball.
The Dodgers play 13 of their remaining 20 games on the road, and they’re 47-27 at home and just 33-35 on the road.
The teams have six games remaining against each other, including the season-ending series in San Francisco.
Hunter Pence is hot, with eight hits in the Arizona series. Buster Posey is due to get hot as well, right?
Strickland, if he does win the closer’s role on a regular basis, will be fine. He has a 2.41 ERA in his major league career and has held opponents to a .202 average (.213 this season). He has been the Giants’ best reliever over the past two seasons. So why has Bruce Bochy been so hesitant to name him the closer? It probably goes back to the 2014 postseason, when Strickland, with just seven innings of big league time, allowed six home runs in eight appearances. It’s tough to trust a guy in close games after seeing that, but Strickland is a solid reliever and has earned the opportunity. (As a bonus, rookie Derek Law, with a 1.94 ERA and excellent peripherals, is due to come off the DL this week.)”
Which brings us to the biggest home stand of the year.
Our biggest concern is a big one: the bullpen is a mess. Our second biggest concern is an ongoing lack of timely hitting, a situational slump at the plate particularly with runners in scoring position that has made #RISPsigh a thing now.
But on the positive side we got what we asked for, all the pieces we need and we are healthy. Hunter Pence just decided to turn it up several notches. Brandon Crawford and Buster Posey know the stretch.
Panik has to follow Núñez who has also been making it happen. Span and Pagan gotta get hot at the same time and Belt … I need you Brandon, I need some power from you. More aggressiveness at the plate. I love the walks and the on-base percentage, but take a chance and rock that thing.
The sharpness is returning to the starters. I like that. And the bullpen? Well I know this, they can’t do it without our support. I can’t be there, but the yard better be rocking.
Let’s Go Giants! Take ’em one day at a time and win ’em all.
September is a funny time for baseball fans whose teams are in the running. My nails are all chewed down to the cuticle. My hair gets a little greyer each year in September. There is agony and joy wrapped up in this beautiful game that confounds and delights us.
I can remember my son’s first SF Giants game like it was yesterday. It was a September 17th game against the division-leading Rockies. This was 2009 and my kid was seven years old. It was Randy Johnson Poster night and he still has his orange My First Ballgame certificate from the Giants and his poster celebrating The Big Unit’s 300th Win, which came that year with Johnson in a Giants uniform.
The Giants trailed the Rox by just two games and Matt Cain was on the mound facing Jorge de la Rosa. We had watched and listened to the Giants all summer and I bought tickets to that game because I figured it might be the one that either got us into a playoff chase or ended our run at the Rockies.
In the ninth, down 4-3, the Giants had runners on 2nd and 3rd with two outs, and we were standing and yelling our guts out when Edgar Renteria grounded out to end the game. The Rockies took a three-game lead with them out of town and we never got closer to the playoffs that year.
The following September of course was our epic run-down of the Snakes that culminated in us stealing the division on the last day and eventually the 2010 World Series Championship And since then, like clockwork, we’ve had a good September every other year and taken it all the way to the World Series, winning twice more. Amazing.
Our runs and collapses in perfect order these last six years have added a powerful, albeit false, pressure to this year.
We ought to be realistic about the incredible run we have just made and see it as unprecedented in quality. We ought to acknowledge we may be fading now not because we cannot do it, not because we don’t have the talent, but rather because we may just finally be out of steam from what has been an exceptional amount of success.
Changes to the team are at the heart of this: the loss of pitchers Petit, Vogelsong and Hudson and the fading of Lincecum and Cain have weakened our formidable staff. Even Javier Lopez doesn’t look as dominant as he has these past few years (not to mention he can’t be spelled by Affeldt anymore either).
Our attempts to just plug in Cueto and Samardzija and Matt Moore and a slew of relievers cannot be expected to align with our every-other-year success. It’s a different team.
In terms of hitting, we lost Pablo and I know how much you all love Matt Duffy (I do, too), but the Panda was a special part of our Championship years. We’ve had four third basemen since Sandoval left … just two years ago. We squeezed out much of the last talent from other hitters: Pat Burrell, Aubrey Huff (THE BUNT ON NOVEMBER 1ST!), Cody Ross, Marco Scutaro, Ryan Theriot, a doping Melky Cabrera. And despite Posey, Pence, Panik, Pagan and Crawford hitting well, hitting remains a problem whether we win or not, which is why winning the World Series the way we have has been even more amazing.
Point is, I don’t want to get all wound up and agonized if we don’t manage to find success all the way to the World Series again. I think the expectation we should is inflated, unrealistic and for some solely predicated on the fact it’s an even year – which is meaningless.
This September may be the end of an amazing dream. If so, I would rather celebrate how successful these last six years have been and lose with the grace of a winner.
I am not giving up. I am in this fight daily and rooting for our boys to do it again. It would be unreal if they did it again. I mean, what a dream – a dream that just keeps not ending? Wow. I want it. I believe we can do it … because we have.
But to expect it isn’t cool.
So let’s turn that even year expectation down a bit, yeah?
I was all excited to start the 13th Reader with a link to David Laurila’s excellent interview with Dave Righetti for Fan Graphs – a rare opportunity to hear Rags speak about pitching. It’s fascinating – particularly the comments concerning speed control and its importance to command.
I read it right when it came out and it was just so cool. I learned so much from just those few questions and answers. I was going to write about it, but then found Brisbee had already gushed, and since we agree materially that you should immediately go check it out, I didn’t.
Anyway I was all excited to get up and put it into this issue of the reader … but then this morning I had to endure Ken Rosenthal on Rich Eisen’s show talking about the gritty team in Los Angeles and how tough Chase Utley and Justin Turner and – “even the young guys”- Corey Seager are … gimme a break …
Then I had to watch them score 18 runs in Cincy in the day game that puts them a full game ahead of the Giants as we head into this week’s three game series down at Chavez Ravine – and now this reader is headed toward what’s wrong with us.
I am convinced we are the better, more stable and more experienced team. We’ve been on a streaky collapse, a downtrending rollercoaster, but it isn’t from injuries or bad play as much as difficulty getting things to gel.
We’ve been inconsistent in many aspects of the game at different times and we have a hard time getting it all to come together at once. But when it does, anyone can see we’re built to win.
We’re struggling to get long missing pieces to fit back together. Panik returned and took a while to warm up, and right when Pence got back he got a black eye. Here’s Brisbee on Hunter Pence‘s struggles since returning from the DL.
We’re working to bring on new guys – Eduardo Nunez and Matty Moore and Will Smith and others – Joe Nathan, possibly. Some of these are having moments of brilliance, but it isn’t easy to make it all work together right out of the box and there has been disarray. Here’s Baggs on the Newest Giants and their struggles.
Make no mistake, we are going down there this week to Beat LA and seize back the division for good for the rest of the season. However, since we’ve fallen so mightily, there’s no shortage of “What’s Wrong With The Giants?” pieces.
John Shea did a genuine and honest inside-the-clubhouse piece about what the Giants themselves think is wrong with the energy or vibe of the team.
Around the Foghorn’s Laith Agha focuses on the hitting woes of the G-men and intends to address pitching as well, next.
Somebody called Mike Schwarz writing for something called isportsweb led with “The San Francisco Giants have been the worst team since the All-Star break.” – in this analysis of our woes.
On a lighter note, Speaking of Hunter Pence, ESPN Sr. Writer Eddie Matz did a nice little Burning Questions segment with the lanky, right fielder – such a personable and likable guy.
We have endured the East Coast and LA bias from national networks for so long they’re irrelevant to us. In fact sometimes it feels better to ride the role of underdog, knowing we have the most experienced, smartest and most tightly knit coaching staff in all the majors.
The mainstream sports media and the hulking brutes of NYC and Chicago always count us out. They have no comprehension of the nuances of the game or teamwork.
They counted us out when we were chasing the D-Backs in ’10 and again vs. the then-Champion Phillies and again in the World Series – even after seeing what MadBum, Timmy and the Beard could do. Not to mention the quietly peerless Buster Posey.
They counted us out when Melky went down for PED use, and we all agreed WE wouldn’t allow him back for the playoffs – though we could have – but rather try to soldier on. This one is always my favorite of the three, because of Pablo’s 3HR, with two off Verlander (him saying “wow,” watching the second one go out – best bad ball hitter ever: Pablo Sandoval). How Romo dismissed Cabrera is maybe my favorite SFGiants WS moment ever.
Then in 2014, they counted us out as a wild card has-been! and we just Madbummed the shit out of them. They counted us out against the Darlings of the Nation and we sent MadBum out to finish them off in their house.
So we are USED to being the ones counted OUT.
But what we know is different. We know we have Rags, Skip, Bam-Bam and Wotus in place. We know that losing Flan for the more conservative Kelly is really just an adjustment, not a loss. We have a Hall of Fame manager who has been through it all.
We know these guys know how to win with their backs against the wall. We know if we just get in to the playoffs, we have as a good a chance as any and a better chance than most because we have CHAMPIONS BLOOD.
I for one, believe that the moves we made are good moves. It hurts so much to have lost Vogey and Petit and Duffy. It hurts a LOT.
But I understand what Evans and Sabean are trying to do and I approve. These are aggressive and expensive moves – Samardzija and Cueto were $90million! We’ve never paid that kinda money for two players before. Duffy was just awesome in Panda’s place for a critical WS series year and more. But I get the trade. Getting the right puzzle pieces is hella expensive.
Here’s what I know: they can’t win if we don’t believe.
and I do.
I believe in this team of managers, coaches and players. I think the new guys need to tune in to a culture of winning and realize that petty losses should be dumped immediately. This is a tightrope walk, not whack-a-mole.
I know Posey, Pence, Bcraw, Belt, Panik, Pagan, D-Span, Nunez and our pitchers that rake can get out of this slump and start producing like the machine they were earlier in the season. It’s all about getting hot at the right time and we have the machine that can do that.
We dispensed with injuries to Pence and Panik and Pagan early so they are ready and playing well.
We dealt for better – read more experienced – pitching help for the bullpen and starters. We’re doing all the right things.
(EXCEPT I STILL REALLY THINK WE OUGHTA BAT THE SP IN THE 8 SPOT AND LET PAGAN AND D-SPAN BECOME BACK-TO-BACK LEADOFF HITTERS).
MTK The Writist 