Fix The Tracking

We were in New York for Lysh’s birthday, the day after my book event with Maris Kreizman at Rough Trade and the day before we had to drive to Boston for my event with Luke O’Neil at the Harvard Book Store. Lysh’s birthday was an in-between day, a rare opportunity to stare into the void and seek for answers in the expanse of a day off. We walked around the city, looked for breakfast and coffee and charming things. It rained, and we hid from it. Watched Bones on hotel TV when our feet hurt from walking, and then went for Detroit style pizza in Williamsburg at a retro pizza place called Ace’s so I could burn the roof of my mouth to a degree never before thought possible.

It’s hard, I think, to recreate a memory. It’s hard to want to live in the ghost of the past, as the past becomes less real while lines form on our faces. I’ve been on the road, and off, talking about my memoir and my past and then here we were, in a pizza place dressed up like the bar in a 90s bowling alley with a TV on the counter playing Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade with the tracking uncalibrated and suddenly the past was real enough.

Fixing the tracking is a lost art, as there is no more tracking in need of any kind of fix. My TV turns on automatically when I hit the button on my PS5, it comes in clear and perfect. All finely balanced and calibrated. I, a fool, pay extra for 4k streaming, and I pay extra to no longer know if there’s a difference. I tell myself there is, and I tell myself I can see when there isn’t, but this could all be justifying the expense. 4K becomes its own memory, something lost in my mind, swimming there and bouncing to the surface. Lying to me and telling me it’s real. But it wasn’t always this way.

We had one TV when I was a kid, like most families but not all, and it lived in the basement. It was heavy, made of wood and glass and secret things. Rabbit ears that sprung from its body that were duct taped and tied with wire to the ceiling because my dad swore it was how we could get the best reception for the 3 channels we got. At midnight I snuck out to watch Kids In The Hall on CBC and held my tape recorder up to the screen to record the into by Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet and my favourite jokes from the show. Adjust the rabbit ears, click the volume up and then down when I was worried someone might hear. Tap the TV lightly my hand when the picture wavers. These memories are perfect little treasure to me, and I often wonder if they’re real at all.

I don’t trust myself at times. I trust what I know but only just. I trust the roof of my mouth, raw and sore from the too-hot sauce on my personal size pepperoni. I trust the sugar in a Mexican Coke in a glass bottle. It’s swift and fleeting energy like blood in my body. I trust the TV on the bar top with the tracking off and the flickering lines and discoloured bars that prove it is real. I trust that if asked I could fix it. I could turn the dial finely and carefully until everything appeared perfect, or as close to as you would get. An analog kind of perfect, tactile and fallible, but good enough for perfect before we knew what perfect could be.

Every day I log on and it seems like AI has only gotten worse. Now there are generated comedians in generated clubs telling jokes that don’t work but don’t seem to matter. Content creators are making thousands of dollars off selling AI generated women who have no agency to say no to their placement on the screen. They only exist as generated fantasies, memories for sale that were never real. It is all fake, and many no longer care. They are just happy for the toys, and inconsiderate of the damage and the loss and the things we will lose as these technologies run rampant through the industries that once sustained us. They won’t create anything of value, nothing left to remember, but people don’t seem to care. There will be no 2020’s themed retro pizza place with an AI generated movie on the bar top. This will all be dust, and no one will recall how the dust was once the idea of a body.

The Chicago Sun-Times ran a summer reading list of fake books by real people and no one noticed until it hit print. We have stripped away all the people who would have seen and cared enough to put a stop to it. We have a shiny toy that can create anything we ask of it, but none of it has enough context to hold a soul and without one, all of it becomes nothing. Skin without muscles pulled over bones built of sand. We can never ask AI to generate the past we want to hold onto, or the perfect world we believe was promised to us and I guess for some it is easier to hope that someday a computer will make this world perfect for you than to accept that real perfect will always be broken. Perfect will shake and falter, perfect will need to be adjusted and tapped lightly. Perfect won’t hold without tape and careful wire holding it in place. Perfect will crumble, and in years to come we will struggle to recall how clear our memory of perfect even is. Perfect will become nostalgia, and it will be sold back to you. And even then, it will feel nice, because the alternative feels like nothing.

My mouth is burned but the pizza is good and good overrides pain enough that I can finish most of it, knowing that the damage is done and all that is left is the healing process. I know healing will take long. It might take forever. I might never recover, it might leave a scar but wouldn’t that be perfect. A scar, like tracking on my body, I can fix it but only just. It might always be there, slightly out of focus and shifting focus. Tactile and fallible. Perfect.

What I’m listening to

Laura Stevenson - “Honey”

I’m a big fan of Laura Stevenson, having thoroughly spun through her previous self-titled record on a cross country road trip when the pandemic first broke and we were allowed to go visit family. Stevenson’s work conjures haunting beauty from the depths of the well of the soul. Her voice raspy, beautiful, lingering and wistful, it is everything. Guitars and pedal steels and expert percussion a conspiratorial network of expert collaboration. It at times feels like finding a record you thought was lost that belonged to someone loved and lost. “Honey”, the first single from her upcoming record Late Great is another stone at the base of a monument to the beautiful splendour of sadness. She sings Get aboard my sinking ship, it’s empty and I only want more, as the song rises and falls like the waves hitting against the hull slowly finding the depth of the water. It’s dark, sure, but the melody betrays the darkness, lifting and rising to the heavens not as an act of finality but instead something resolute. The desire found in the hardest corners of a life, the sadness that keeps us alive. I want more, and I can’t wait to hear the rest of it.

Laurie Woolever - Care and Feeding (audiobook)

This is a cheat perhaps, as it is not an album, but a book. Laurie Woolever’s latest, Care and Feeding: a memoir, that is such a tender, sad, charming, and funny journey through her past. I love how well she writes about the self-destruction one wrecks on the soul in the years spent trying to vocalize our own desires, how honest she is about substances used to mask lingering questions and haunting thoughts. She writes with such transparency about labour as well, coming from a working class family and finding her route through an industry that is painfully challenging to people who come from that particular diorama. I feel this all too well, and what I have appreciated listening through her recounting her past is how it makes me feel less alone as I struggle in my 40s to do the same. Woolever achieves this perfect kind of clarity, telling her own story with such refreshing clarity that it creates an image before you. The New York she creates in her book becomes real as I listen, as if I lived there too, as if the streets below her feet marked themselves on my own soles. I am not all the way through it yet, as my time to read/listen is short these days, but I am sneaking what pockets of time I can. Balancing my phone on an unstable canister in the bathroom while I run through a skincare regime stolen from the internet and giving her time to read through one more chapter. Shedding tears when barbs cut close to the hear as she recounts sexual harassment, body shaming, substance abuse and more, and laughing at her quick wit as she cuts the tension with the sharp edge of her keen wit and deft wordplay. This is the vivid truth of a good memoir, and it is alive in Woolever’s book.

Buy the book, listen to it if audio is more your speed, but however you get there, I promise the journey is with it

Upcoming

I’ll be in Washington, DC next week at the Black Cat with Rex King on May 29 , and then sticking around for Liberation Weekend. Come out!