a room of one’s own

The below is a recent newsletter that I’d like to make public here.

March 10, 2025

This edition is not about politics. My thoughts on the last week are in today’s post by Paul Krugman and on my public Instagram.

Instead, I want to briefly ask a few questions about how we make meaning and, in the spirit of Edwardian literature, how we might connect.

“Exercise for their faculties”

While our oldest and his classmates celebrated his 13th birthday by turning into a giggling ball of trivia and video games, I retreated to our bedroom and jotted down this visual joke:

joke Penguin classics cover with AVP
slightly less than 500£ a year

Earlier in the evening, I’d given a friend a brief demonstration and, upon taking it off, she exclaimed: “It’s like you’re really somewhere else.”

I’d replied that it’s like having a private theater, because that’s what I’m focused on for work, but its potential is greater as a

a portable, personal space

When we read, we create a space between the writer and the reader (often, the same person!)1

Out of that metaphysical space emerged most if not all of the greatest achievements of humanity. (e.g., liberal democracy)

Without such spaces there is no reflection, and without reflection there is no accountability.

The person who does not read, and does not work to make such a space, may live in their regrets but they do not understand their responsibilities.

Reading takes us out of our natural tendency to lapse into self-absorption.2 Where there was one, there are now two: subject and reflection.

What’s true for me is not necessarily true for you. But until it is written and legible (intelligible) it is not even true for me.

It only becomes true for me when it becomes external and thus necessarily social.3

is reading a solitary or a social experience?

Yes.

What does this have to do with a machine that creates a portable, personal space?

diagram from Apple's documentation of immersive experiences
“its room, our moment of attention”

In an ideal world, we would gather and talk often. Perhaps, in drawing rooms.

“room appropriated for the reception of company,” 1640s, short for withdrawing room (16c.; see withdraw), into which ladies would retire after dinner. Earlier in the sense of “private room” as draw-chamber (mid-15c.); drawyng chaumber (early 15c.).

In the real world, we watch conversations that take place on sets made to look like living rooms.

These podcasts —so named because of the physical / virtual platform through which they became possible — now shapehow we imagine the public and private.

Yet as diverse as these exchanges may be, they are all driven by a single logic.

Rather than living in an age where there is a profusion of conversation, we are in fact in an age of exponentially increasing conformism.

There is but one constant conversation happening all around us, and one that is largely unintelligible to us despite having more impact on our lives than just about any other law or ideology:

Advertising.

Advertising logics rule everything around us and they are designed to be deaf to the content of our characters. Computers talking to computers to decide what we will see, hear, feel for the sake of advertising efficiency.

We are far beyond amusing ourselves to death. We are actively scrolling ourselves off a cliff of unmeaning.4

If the public sphere is now dominated by pseudo-social networks how to shield oneself then from surveillance capitalism?

still frame from the movie Z showing a riot outside a closed theater
Closed for business.

The day after our son’s birthday party, I watched the movie “Z” by Costa Gavras, which begins with an urgent search for a theater; a safe space to gather in community.

In an effort to shut down public debate of a future that is not organized around war, the state has closed all the city’s public forums to a group of pacifists who have invited a doctor from abroad.

Simultaneously, the state, thought a corrupted justice system, has also filled the streets with thugs who will viciously beat anyone who advocates for non-violence or against state-sponsored violence.

Well, that was then, right?

diagram of a group of users in a shared environment via Apple SharePlay
Apple’s SharePlay Protocol

What good then is a portable room in an age of civic disintegration?

The answer may depend on how we answer another question:

Do we need more opportunities for reflection?

And to that I would add a few more:

  • Is a shared space for reflection possible?
  • What are the market incentives for creating such a space?
  • If writing was born of material constraints, how does a different set of material possibilities expand what writing (and thus reading) can mean?
  • If movies (and, later, television) were shaped by material constraints (i.e., market forces), what does an entirely different set of forces mean for the future of theater-at-a-distance?
  • If our current regime is the end-state of television (cf., Rogin, Postman), what does an immersive media political reality look like?5

And with that, ”Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.”

Take care,

jose

Postscripts

  1. I’ve written here before that, by virtue of being a refugee, I come from America’s future. But this same perspective has its blinds spots. If you come from poverty, as I proudly do, there are things you don’t know because – well, how would you?So it was that Ana and I discovered on Friday what a Roth account is. IYKYK. And, in a few seconds, months were added to our clock. God Bless America. Or something to that effect.
  2. I understand that I risk undermining my own argument about the importance of being reflexive by hijacking Virginia Woolf’s feminist essay about economic parity. This is not an academic paper. If it were, I would point out that by focusing on the private sphere – that which money can acquire – my reflection is in keeping with her politics.  
  3. Speaking of which, here’s a wonderful song called “In White Rooms”. An experience with which I’m quite familiar. How about you?Footnotes follow!
  1. Media observers often point out that most YouTube videos are not watched by anyone. Yesterday, I came upon thisjoke about how most podcasts are never heard. So what? They were made. Spaces were made. That is our second greatest achievement as a species – just after loving one another and protecting the delicate embers of life, itself.And if you’ve read this far you either already know, or should know, that such spaces are what Gadamer called the bridge (that most sacred of spaces) of human understanding. Just as you’ll recognize understanding is a spatial term – verstehen, to stand before.
  2. The fantasy that we are all in our own private simulation lasts precisely as long as our food supply.
  3. The space between author and reader is also where memories are turned into history.
  4. I know I promised to stay away from politics but it doesn’t mean that politics will stay away from us. Recently, I have fallen into the trap of joking “The Internet was a mistake.” But or course it wasn’t. The problem was relying entirely on ad networks.
  5. If our answer is to draw from novels and teleplays written during the age of cinema/television, I suggest we do not understand what is possible until it is, in fact, materially possible.
art/ideas/people/play/power/technology

corrections & predictions on the fourth anniversary of Trump’s first failed insurrection

I recently alluded to a rumor that the world’s richest man uses “sock puppet” accounts to defend his honor – not unlike John Barron, publicist extraordinaire.

That rumor was incorrect.

In fact, the world’s richest man has managed to get real life people to perform that duty for him.

Which leads me to a prediction

It will be very, very difficult to counter mass “persuasion” campaigns that deploy AI’s as people.

If you think advanced militaries are having a hard time fending off drones (they are), civil society is going to have a much harder time with the equivalent of drones operating in chat rooms, on so-called social media, and, soon, via video and image content.

How can we get ready?

We’re going to have to pull out of some Internet spaces.1

They will have to be abandoned as dangerous places where you can get jumped, hoodwinked, swindled.

We’ll have to build new spaces that are free of scams.

Scams: crypto, mens rights, white pride, religious chauvinism, nationalism

You might ask:

But Jose, who cares about online when people are dying on the street?

Virtual spaces create real spaces.

They do so by both modeling what society should be and building it, one ethical interaction at a time.

There is no way out of our very real nightmare without working virtual places that humans can enter and exit freely.

The word utopia refers to a virtual place. The word heaven refers to a virtuous place.

You cannot have the virtuous without the virtual.

The good news

It’s never been easier to do build new spaces that are free. (Bluesky is case in point.)

While scrupulous operators will now have to be on guard against evermore nefarious bots, a majority of humans will continue to seek each other out as all mammals do.2

There is great interest in scam free societies. People do not want “enshitification” and vote with their feet if and when the market is free:

  1. Facebook’s AI-Generated Spam Problem Is Worse Than You Realize – Rolling Stone
  2. Amazon copied products and rigged search results to promote its own brands, documents show – Reuters
  3. Don’t trust Google for customer service numbers. It might be a scam. – Washington Post
Today in history. Would Patrick Soon-Shiong allow this headline today?
Today in history.

Now for the bad news.

We are again ruled by con men. Moral degenerates.

The rule of law is being probed, tested. The range of long-term outcomes is not good.

To defend liberty and justice for all, the first and last contest will always be fighting for the truth.

From 2022:

A legislative panel on Monday approved temporary rules that guide how Tennessee school districts investigate complaints about classroom discussions of race and gender — and the hefty financial penalties that could befall on school districts that fail to properly abide by the rules.

The emergency rules were first proposed in July, then finalized in November, following the passage of legislation barring K-12 educators from teaching critical race theory in the classroom. Critical race theory is an academic framework for studying the persistence of race and racism in shaping the nation’s social fabric and institutions. Critical race theory is not typically taught in K-12 schools…

The controversial law lays out 14 “prohibited concepts” related to how teachers lead discussions of race and gender.

The so-called rebuttal to the 1619 project, the completely disproportionate – indeed, hysterical – response to the narrow excesses of Cancel Culture™ and kabuki corporate DEI are attempts to deny the truth.

The facticity of mass enslavement, a tiered justice system, a tiered labor force, the prevalence of gendered violence.

(Remember: the likely SecDef endeared himself to Trump by denying war crimes.)

You may protest: “No matter how many Jan 6 terrorists and/or insurrectionists are pardoned, they won’t succeed in rewriting history.”

But as the Soviets and their successors in Russia have proven: con men do not need to rewrite history, they need only make it irrelevant.

Flood the zone.3

“Both sides. Trust no one. Do your own research.”

(Indeed, as the SCOTUS Originalists™ have done.)

Of course, paranoid societies are ultimately doomed.

Low trust societies disintegrate in mass murder-suicides.4

Paranoid and aggrieved people slip and slide into genocide.

Look at what Israel has done to Gaza. To name just one of very, very many examples.

The First and Last Defense

The first and last defense against crime is the truth:

  1. valuing the truth
  2. researching and confirming the truth
  3. remembering the truth
  4. proclaiming the truth

If the truth didn’t matter, the fascists wouldn’t build things like “Truth Social” and/or buy up networks.

Without Fox News, America would be a wealthier, healthier place. (Immigrants get the job done, or something.)

Before Fox News.
Missing bodies.

Defending the truth means that we must remember that millions died from COVID.

The anti-vax movement, now being ushered into power by useful idiots, would have us pretend otherwise.

Like so many other proto-fascist social movements, “anti-vax” seeks dispensation from personal responsibility at the expense of others who are rendered less than equal and thus less than human.

Our society is rife with such selfishness, from the killer SUV movement to the “drill baby drill” movement to “the fuck your feeling but not my feelings” movement to the “build the wall” movement.5

Each and every one of these proto-fascist movements align in people wanting to be free of responsibility, of accountability.

They are represented, perfectly, by Donald J. Trump:

“They let you do it.”

He is now our elected leader. Hopefully not our last elected leader.

People who joke about suspending elections are not serious about the power they wield. They abuse it. They cheat with it. They punish their personal enemies with it.

We, good and decent people who do not cheat, lie and swindle, we must accept that we are fighting fascists.

The nomenclature debate is done.

They are here. They are clear. Let’s deal with it.

We do that by telling the truth about the crimes being committed.

We talk publicly about the racketeering, the bribes, the open corruption.

If you think that being a patriot will endanger your economic prospects, congratulations: you have now accepted corruption.

Ask the people of Mexico, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Israel, etc… what it’s like to overcome corruption.

If it sounds like the odds are stacked against you, you are wrong.

Remember: you are already on the winning side.

An anti-scamming, anti-spamming world is both possible and desirable to the vast majority of humanity. Immigrants prove it by risking their lives to live in such a utopia.

And it’s already ours to preserve and protect.

Endnotes

  1. The Democrats are going to have to create third spaces: Youth Athletic Leagues, Bowling Teams, Trivia Nights, etc. I’m not kidding. But what they really fucking have to do is become the ABUNDANT AND CHEAP HOUSING party. 
  2. Let’s not do this, shall we? 
  3. Flood the zone is precisely what our ad-supported, algorithmic “social media” excels at. The so-called AI’s are already here: they run our “attention economy”. The cats out of the bag. It’s a post-nuke world. That means that “good AI” must be used to counter “bad AI”. 
  4. On the subject of murder suicides: note the profiles of the TRUCK NUTZ who killed themselves and others this new year. 
  5. The wall around their broken hearts. 
people/power/technology

We’ve stopped knowing when to say when.

Have you ever had sushi?

A small piece of rice. A small piece of fish.

And it is perfect.

To get something – even pain – in just the right amount, is the greatest joy.

The Dose Makes the Person

diagram of portion as poison or present
for example

It is the most incredible and unexpected present of the last few years that I am now, in almost every way, full. My cup is full. It overruns, even.

I am satisfied and in love with what is around me. (Even as our material security is the most precarious it has been.)

Enough. Genug. Basta.

“Enough” comes from the proto-Germanic ganog and I have enjoyed its raw German version since I learned it in high school:

Genug.

It stops and starts. It’s complete. Genug.

Have you ever heard this song by Kraftwerk?

It’s a classical melody and a crisp, refreshing drum track.

It is also just enough. Perfect.

There are short stories that are just enough. Not more, not less. Prayers, as well.

The Spanish basta is a little bit different.

It comes from the Greek βαστάζω, to carry, bear up, carry off.

In other words, what lifts us up, what sustains us.

It is what we need. Not what we want.

That is joy.

Ruled by our wants.

Yes, the personal is political.

True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.

I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Not bad! Rest in peace!

Our system is a symptom of our society just as much as it ratchets us in the same horrible direction: bottomless appetitive, envy, resentment.

screenshot from Contrapoints video on Envy
Nailed it.

On the way down to Tijuana a few weeks, we played the excellent Contrapoints video on Envy.

And it made me realize that we’ve spent way too much time on electoral politics (push) and not enough on social trends (pull).

Here’s hoping we can find our way to being ruled by people who know the meaning of the word “enough”.

People who are not consuming – devouring, destroying – to fill a bottomless hole of insecurity.

A movie I want you to watch.

The movie is called Monkey Man and it is perfect.

It is a violent action thriller. It is also gentle and noble. A liberal fantasy. I can’t recommend it enough.

Good luck to us all, especially to those who do not have what they need. 

mental illness/people/power

inflection point

The thing about being in an inflection point is you won’t see it unless you’re truly looking ahead — or so far back that you can’t see the present any more.

Most people, most of the time, assume the future will be like the present. Until it’s not.


As I wrote here, our shift towards more and more “spectacular” computers (googles, headsets, glasses) means that we’re going to see much more stereoscopic media.

While it may seem like switching between shooting with one eye (lens) and shooting with two eyes (lenses) will be just a matter of 2x more resolution, I think we now have enough evidence to conclude that it will be something altogether different.

You can draw a sculpture but a sculpture seldom describes a drawing. It’s another thing.

Of course, it’s hard to look into the unknown.

Our brains are wired for familiar narratives – for guessing how a sentence will end based on what’s come before it. (It’s how Language Models work, right?)

We also have material incentives for assuming that new technologies will best serve existing businesses.

Movies are a well known business; they have prestige and a strong possibility of profits. So why not use stereoscopic capture and playback as part of the movie business?

But focusing on the present – or even the recent past – may miss the opportunity of what’s ahead altogether by insisting the new thing look like the old.

If anything what stereoscopic already looks like, more than anything else, is theater.

The surreal experience of people who are right in front of you pretending that they’re somewhere else, etc.

ideas/movies & television/technology/work

how to stereo

the Apple logo and its inferred depth or disparity map

Most of film culture has been built around monocular capture and reproduction. 

A single camera lens produces a flat image.

The flatness of the image has led to significant, lasting conventions in terms of blocking lighting, camera movement, etc. 

Of course, cinema borrows from painting, which in turn contains key developments in abstraction, narrative, etc.

Stereoscopic films appear to have a much narrower culture. 

Despite having the means to produce stereoscopic images for nearly 200 years, a lack of tools to reproduce or display them has severely stunted the growth of the art form. 

Assuming that 400,000 films have been released commercially in the last century, a similarly gross estimate of 1,000 3D films means they represent a quarter of one percent (0.25%) of all movies made.

While one could argue that only 0.25% of all monocular movies are masterpieces, their greatness is predicated on the sheer number of experiments made in that mode. 

The staggering paucity of stereoscopic output all but guarantees a relative lack of technical know-how, audience feedback and thus commercial success. 

And yet humans have enjoyed stereoscopic vision for some millions of years. 

If we want to advance stereoscopic art as quickly as possible we must not only absorb all stereoscopic filmmaking know-how to date but also infer stereoscopic desires implicit in monoscopic art. 

For example:

What we have here is a failure to communicate…

The protagonist of this monoscopic photograph has been made giant in contrast to his powerlessness. The three figures in the background, made small and flat by the lighting and lensing, are his supposed overlords. This “flat” image thus conveys two contrasting if not contradictory messages; it is thus rich with irony or paradox.

Is it easy to imagine a stereoscopic equivalent of this image precisely because it is already rich in spatial meaning.

Yet, because of the financial constraints of filmmaking, such compositions are relatively rare. 

In their stead, most performances are staged flat:

Here, irony is achieved via production design, as one of the three figures is very much not like the other. 

While delightful, this image has less to say to a stereoscopic filmmaker. 

Again, for financial or material reasons, such flat presentations are the norm in monoscopic film, which means the “knowledge set” available to would-be stereoscopic filmmakers is narrower than the 400,000 titles cited earlier.

Fortunately, the millions of years of human vision have left their mark on human culture in other forms.

Theater

The dominance of the Greek tradition in our society belies the fact that we have no record of the vast majority of “plays” performed by humanity. 

But that deficit (in possible points of view) appears dramatically different once we take a closer look at what staging means. 

Here I mean not only the performances that we in 21st century America would recognize as such, but all of the occasions when human bodies are organized in space in order to create meaning; e.g., parades, coronations, weddings, burials, battles, etc. 

The arrangement of bodies in space is a production of points of view: that of the lord, that of the subject, the insider, the outsider, etc. 

By studying the history of spaces (architecture, the meaning of places) the stereoscopic filmmaker can access a tremendous amount of spatial knowledge. 

To put this in more practical—if speculative—terms: 

What the frame was to the monoscopic camera, the building could be to the stereoscopic.

art/business/design/ideas/people/play/power/technology/work

a thousand authors

While writing about the 1979 movie Alien and what it can teach us about extractive capitalism, I noted that movies can be more nuanced, profound and comprehensive than the most philosophical texts because they have many authors – possibly even thousands.

Coincidentally, I came across this single frame of the canonical movie Fury Road:

Foreground: actor John Howard as “People Eater”.

Let’s review the painting before us. The car is missing its roof. There is a safety / roll cage in the style of an iron grate, 19th century. There are bolts holding a plate above the featured character (John).

John’s lips are cracked, he has beard stubble and his skin is shiny. His head is closely shaved with a red blotch above his forehead. He is wearing a filigree nose cover held in place with a thin chain as might have been used by a person suffering from syphilis of leprosy (i.e., his nose is gone, collapsed, the skin rotted away from a contagious disease.)

His seat belt is a wide tan leather belt. His suit jacket is covered in dust. His cufflinks are ceramic or plastic representations of nipples. (His full costume includes more such fetishes.) The sideview mirror is covered with a patina of rust or dirt. It appears to be attached with tape or another material.

The background character is wearing a leather mask that covers their entire head, depriving them of their full senses and us of their identity. Their eyes are covered with reflective lenses and what would be their ears is decorated with a circular band of apparently hand-shaped metal.

An additional ornamental reference to the human underneath is made with the large caliber bullets arranged vertically where the driver’s teeth might be. The middle bullet in this array is larger, where the character’s nose would be.

I’ve enumerated some 20 details in this frame, which is one of 172,800 frames in this movie. (We will not count the composition of the frame – the location of the viewer, floating alongside the moving vehicle –  nor the desert setting, time of day, color saturation, etc.) Not every one of the movie’s ~173k frames will have the same number of details; some scenes feature hundreds of extras (real or painted) such as this double plane composition:

An elevator from hell.

We can count at least a dozen characters in the foreground and at least a hundred bodies in the background, as well as two dozen significant mechanical pieces, from the “ribbed” tanker to the number of rocks inside the cage that serves as a counterweight to the elevator platform.

In sum, some frames will have many more details which means the total number of choices visible to the eye during the course of the movie approaches two million, at least.

We cannot doubt that bean counters will attempt to use computers (“AI”) to generate knock-off’s of scenes like the two I’ve summarized here. But it will be quite some time before Generative Antagonistic Networks can arrive at the total number of choices made by the hundreds if not thousands of humans whose labor produced such rich frames (if ever).

At best, they will create smears; cartoons, if that’s even the right word for it.

But I did not begin to describe the tremendous labor (of love) required to make the movie Fury Road in order to argue against the reductio ad simulacrum of computerized counterfeiters. I did so to celebrate the quite literally unimaginable creativity contained in movies, the product of many people working together.

art/business/ideas/movies & television/technology

new wave 2021

now that i’m off the gram, having already gone off the book of faces, i must post saturday morning audio doodles on the main. as it was, so shall it be again.

thank you Adam for sending this VHD video to me!

thank you UDO for making a synth that sounds good when you push a single key, lol.

and thank you to Techmoan for telling the important history of grandfathered technologies.

ideas

desperately seeking sounds

After nearly two years of working on an audio drama, I’ve come to wonder if I should have spent more time thinking about the audio part and less on the drama.

a view of <20% of the details

It’s not that we haven’t sweated the details. I don’t think I’ve ever sweated the details so much in my life. It’s that the story engine might possibly be better if it were more closely tied to what we hear.

In this story, I stole (or copied) from The Conversation, a movie about sound. And so the hearing that matters is largely dialogue. Which is fine. We remember the things people tell us more than any discrete sound.

But I wonder if it wouldn’t have been a more interesting experience for the listener if the protagonist was actively seeking out sounds; if they were walking into different audio environments searching for specific sounds.

That would have been a more lean-forward experience. And I guess those are the ones that animate me the most.

postscript

I’ve been told: your audio drama has to play well when someone is doing the dishes. Why, though? Can people play video games while doing the dishes?

Are video games more or less popular today than 10, 20, 30 years ago?

The more we make video and audio work as “background”, the less engaging it becomes. The less engaging, the less popular.

art/ideas/movies & television/play/technology/work

more money in trolling

I made this video for Instagram [in 2019] just over two years ago. It should probably be hosted here as well.

Transcript: “what happens when there’s more money in trolling than in telling the truth? facts are carefully constructed, by skilled workers. facts cost money. any clown can make up fantasies, for free. distributors (gatekeepers) profit by lowering costs. distributors profit pushing fantasies over facts.”

business/ideas/journalism/movies & television/power

Queens English

From my February 7, 2021 newsletter. Reprinted in full with a few grammatical corrections.

“You don’t sound Cuban.” “Where’s your accent?” “You speak great English!”

I should be flattered. And I am. I know imitation when I do it.

For almost 40 years, I have been listening for, and speaking into, the echoes. 

What will resonate? At what pitch? In which direction of the void should I address myself? 

In high school, I learned the ropes of speaking into the void by writing for, and then editing, a public affairs journal (thank you DK and KD.)

But, also, literally, in darkened halls filled with applause, I learned to speech and debate. 

In college, I learned that this void has many names: the reader, the audience, the public, the future, the unconscious, the past.

We speak into the void because the void speaks through us.
​
This void that is in me, is in you; we are part of the same culture, the same language, the same games.  Our writing is a form of speech, our speech a form of writing.

And ever since, I have spoken well enough into the void that powerful hands still provide me with food and shelter. 

Yet I remain forever in awe of how speaking into the void works. And when.

(Is it time yet? Are we ready to have that conversation?) 

So, I was heartened to see resonance for my ongoing critique of the media modes of production that led to the star of The Apprentice almost being made king of the USA .

As someone who has to think consciously about sounding out spaces, let me tell you:

I sense profound echoes today. The contours of reality have changed.

As many pundits have joked, the Democrats appear to have learned something in the last 10 years. Inshallah. Like bats, they are echolocating their way to our freedom.

Of course, that newly “shaped” reality also includes the world’s most powerful empire turning its weapons on itself.

Holy sharp corners of Plato’s Cave, Batman!

The stakes are high. I hope we make it!

See a scary movie, make a scary movie.

I maintain that the scariest movie I have seen in my adulthood is Rich Hill.

It foretells a credible apocalypse: whiteness, stripped of money / power, destroys America.  

For almost 9 years now, I have been learning to write fiction by iterating on the following story: minority identity struggles against power structure. Reality is altered.* 

One such story is coming out in a very short amount of time.

It’s called Loops.

I picked the main character in a moment of pique; on a quiet sunny morning in the Spring of 2019, I was driving through the bucolic streets of Pasadena (where Halloween was shot, for a reason) when I heard a sound that… triggered me.

A white voice on a podcast was telling me that I should be surprised that a Black kid, in juvie, was inspired by The Bonfire of the Vanities.

The gall. It rises in me still.

L.O.L.

Now, dear reader, I invite you to listen carefully to not just what I’m saying but rather how I’m saying it: if there’s one thing this Cuban-American kid knows, intimately, deeply, it’s the power of speaking with the right voice, the whitevoice. 

ESL is an everyday experience for me. 

“You don’t sound Cuban.” “Where’s your accent?” “You speak great English.”

Every time I speak, I choose to come correctly.

When I speak “perfect English”, I am making a political choice.

As when I use the language of my chosen people. The vulgar.

The words we use are how we sound out the void for invisible traps. 

What feelings do we allow, and which do we gatekeep?

Where on the line between C-suite and  the street are we standing? 

For whom do we speak the Queen’s English?

For whom do we speak the Queens English?

So many times in my life, I have heard the most damning sentiments uttered in the most vanilla phrasing. I’ve come to suspect “vanilla” serves primarily as camouflage. Decorous language: window dressing.

I’m here to tell you we don’t need no water.† 

Which brings me back to our forthcoming horror story, and that fine sunny morning in Pasadena, when I heard a perfectly “articulate” voice say something so crooked that I knew I had to set it “straight.”

Wheels went into motion. A price was set. The real work began.

Of course, as with all creative work, the real work was being done by others.

Millions, in fact.

By every one and every body that took a step forward for Black lives and Women’s lives. And yes, even some immigrant lives.  

And so, as last summer heated up, I cooled off.

I realized I didn’t have to run the same play again.

In that heated moment in 2019, I had written our flawed protagonist as a stand-in for the white voice.

By 2020, I came to understand that this voice is a meme. And it can be dislodged. Deconstructed.‡

The choice of the voice you hear in your head matters.

That’s why we ultimately cast Vivica Fox as our lead.

And, much to their credit, the team at Audible agreed to hire more writers to let us write for Vivica Fox’s voice. To “fine tune” the language. To be true. To be timely. To be free.

In Loops, as with Reversion, the protagonist is a Black woman trying to live her best life behind the gates of the empire.

But this time, there is no Daddy to be seen. Instead, Daddy is everywhere. Daddy is a speech virus. 

I’m being metaphoric! The story of Loops is quite different. But, for the sake of this conversation, let’s talk about a meme called Affluenza. 

Like a virus, affluenza hooks into whiteness and so whiteness becomes a vector. 

The virus itself, its blunt self-replicating logic, is to abuse living bodies as instruments for generating surplus wealth – wealth that then remains in the hands of the few, the well connected, the unaccountable.

This would be fun if it were a dark fantasy!  

But I’ve spent a little bit of time behind <cough> enemy </cough> lines to know it’s our incredible reality. §

The shocking reality we need horror to sound out for us – to “spell” out for us – is that we already live in a world where some bodies are worth less than others.

That’s even more obvious and quantifiable this quarantime.

We take it for granted that bodies that do less labor are worth more. That is amazing.

We assume that raising the next generation is not labor. 

Again, this is amazing – in the original sense of that word. 

In a less significant but related way: we regard some vulgarities as business friendly; others not.

For example,  it is permissible for a man like Trump to curse me over the air. Doing so will get him offers to create more TV shows. 

But for me to curse at Trump in mixed company… is still a walk over landmines.

<thinking emoji>

All of which is to say, there’s a decent amount of powerful language in Loops as well as some choice language about power.

I look forward to your hearing about it from other people. 🙂

If the echoes resound this time around.

take care, and thank you always for your time!

Jose

P.S.

Here’s the Twitter thread about reopening schools that triggered this newsletter. 

FOOTNOTES

*Some of the once-in-a-lifetime stories that Ana and I have been polishing, often with your help, include a 4-quad action adventures (Nobody Walks in LA), teen Brownsploitation (Happy Cinco de Mayo) and two are the fruits of a lifetime of returning to the same questions again and again (Cachita, Hummingbird).

What they all have in common is a total rejection of the status quo. We believe there is an audience of millions around the world with similar expectations. Millions who are eager to follow rebels in the struggle against empire.

† Speaking of why Queens is the best: look at what happened to Brooklyn! I mean. Come on. 🙂

Where is the roof still on fire? The Queens of AOC and the Bronx of Desus & Mero.

If The Warriors were shooting today, would they be taking a train to Brooklyn at the end of their epic journey? Of course not. They’d be on a bus going over the Bronx-Whitestone bridge. You know I’m right. 🙂

 § The benefit of the current regime goes to the graduates of schools with private dining halls and somehow even more private eating clubs. We stand atop a pyramid of Skull and Bones. 

I am not making an original observation about the spirits that possess us.

See “Get Out!” (It’s the 2001 of our generation, no? And somehow also Jaws?)

‡ What is deconstruction but when outsiders speak to one another, breaking English with one another?

If English is broken here, it’s because its bones are being reset here.

So that we may grow more limbs; a wider, stronger shelter from the burning sun.

business/ideas/language/movies & television/power/work

names

for some reason, perhaps related to the news of the world, I’ve been thinking about mortality.

i was lucky – extremely lucky – to learn a few things about storytelling while “on the job.”

i titled them as follows:

  1. Isa (Maria Isabel Reyes)
  2. Ana Maria
  3. Sophie (Sofia)
  4. Lupe

some of these have other titles, but these are their given names.

there are a few more – Cachita, for example – but increasingly the titles that I work on are more generic.

perhaps, for that reason, I wanted it to be recorded somewhere that first, they had these proper names.

ideas

shifts

It hit me first thing this morning, upon waking into our quarantine & curfew, that a character is interesting when they shift from one point of view to another at the start of their journey.

The rest of the story is whether or not they return or continue down that new path, into that newly discovered world.

ideas/movies & television

playhouse

Nearly two years ago, for the birthday of our oldest, I made a playhouse.

I designed it using Sketchup, which allowed me to adjust the sizing and layout, while helping me keep track of the materials I’d need.

Thank you to Matisse for guiding me towards notched beams. This one extra step made the finished product many times stronger.

And it’s fun to do.

During the physical build, I took screengrabs of the Sketchup views, brought them into Photoshop, and labeled them to make instructional guides:

Following instructions made the work easy to do and even relaxing.

Thank you to several good people who posted their notching how-to’s on the Internet. It was especially fun to have to make a tool. (Like programming!)

I don’t remember how I came to building the roof with plastic sheeting but it was super easy to do and it has held up nicely.

Off-the-shelf pipe technology is amazing; so many possibilities.

I used a good electric drill to bore holes and then used bolts and nuts with washers to fasten the pieces.

I used outdoor lumber and the structure has held up very well despite being in some rainfall and lots of sun.

If anything, the structure may even have improved as the wood settled into place. Only one beam has started to split a bit.

In conclusion, Libya is a land of contrasts and building a fort is alot like doing anything worthwhile: if you design, plan, and then execute, you will be blessed with a lasting reward.

Here is the final Sketchup model.

art/design/technology/work

Xpanding the diaspora

I’ve been thinking about “what we talk about when we talk about Latinx” for some years.

My main question has been: Why not Latines? why not use the vowel “e” that we already use for non-gender-specific terms like alcaldes (mayors) and doctores (doctors), etc. Why the consonant “X”?

It was a few weeks ago that I started thinking about pre-Hispanic and post-Hispanic cultures in the Americas.

It was that “post-Hispanic” naming that helped me accept the purpose of the X.

The fact that “LatinX” cannot be said easily in Spanish is a feature, not a bug.

The use of the English “ex” is meant to disrupt the flow of speech; like a branch on a tree, rather than a dam on a river.

It’s a little bit “Malcolm X” and a lot to do with the right to self-name. Specifically, I think post-Hispanic (English-native versus “Spanish dominant”) generations want to be able to indicate their specific role in, and contribution to, the diaspora.

In the end, I’ll call anyone what they want to be called. Full stop.

Likewise, I will continue to use Latines when describing everyone – Latino, Latina, Latinx.

Perhaps, our children, raised in the US, will choose the LatinX for themselves. It has a great sound to it. Not unlike the call sign of a great Tijuana American alternative music radio station: 91x.

ideas