As a burgeoning writer, I was enamored by the possibilities Postmodernism appeared to offer me. But what felt like a world of creative possibilities has come to feel like a narrow hallway of foreclosures. But lately, amidst the rise of fascism, I have found myself returning to Modernism — in both my reading and my writing practices — and coming to my senses.

In a world where reality is unverifiable, cynicism seems as dangerous a rhetorical tactic as nihilism in a world without God. I have operated as an optimistic nihilist since I got sober over a decade ago. Only more recently have I signed on to the ideology of New Sincerity, an artistic movement privileging earnestness, emotional candor and interiority. But art and politics are never far apart and I don’t think the stakes could be higher.

Today, we confront a technofascist regime that battles on the front of reality. Or unreality. It is in their interest to confuse and conflate the real and the hyperreal, digital and material reality, truth and fiction. It is, in a word, antihuman. And while empirical truth is something that might be difficult to establish in any sort of consensus capacity, individual experience cannot be argued. It is the authentic expression of individual human experience that is as close to the truth as we might hope to get — and is in dangerously short supply.

Plenty has been written about the return to Modernist tendencies across art and entertainment in the last few decades, ushering in the arrival at what has been coined “New Sincerity” or “Metamodernism.” In a very Postmodern sense, I’m not sure I have too much more to add. My aim with this essay is to hash out the ways in which my own return to Modernism constitutes a passage through the gauntlet of Postmodernism and has delivered me onto the side of Reality. I want art that touches grass.

In art and literature, Modernism was defined by the explorations of human consciousness and emotions, and relationships between individuals and social groups. Postmodernism, on the other hand, was a more self-conscious form, discarding individualism for collectivism and exploring society through the effects of globalization, often manifesting in self-referentialism and satire. Both did away with any notion of objective reality and privileged subjective experience, but one is more interested in an expression of earnest interiority and the other in pointing out the contradictions in contemporary life by formally reproducing them. The difference can be distilled down to that of head versus heart.

But is a return to Modernism — or any cultural epoch, for that matter — possible? Is the only way forward? Postmodernism would seem to disagree on both counts. Postmodernism creates a sort of rhetorical feedback loop whereby it seems inescapable. It co-opts everything. It is the great glutton of culture. almost definitional, culture cannot move beyond Postmodernism, which performs a sort of rhetorical capture. In a Postmodern world, a return to Modernism becomes a self-conscious, Postmodern expression.

We’re currently up against a political project that also knows how to co-opt everything in a very Postmodern way, filtering reality through a screen of misinformation and subjective misinterpretation, decentering any sense of common experience. What I think this political project cannot do is co-opt reality. First of all, their political claims are founded on falsehoods. Second of all, none of it really holds up in the real world.

Some people will suggest that material reality has become indistinguishable from digital reality. I just don’t agree. And, in fact, material reality is quite easily accessed. The conflation of the two arenas only really threatens to exist in our minds. And as long as we keep a clear head about this stuff, I don’t think we’re in any real danger of that.

(I remember, a decade ago already, one of my poetry professors exclaiming that she often caught herself trying to zoom in on the pages of physical books, illustrating her story by making the the reverse pinching gesture used to zoom in on digital touchscreens. Donal Trump was elected a few weeks later.)

A museum curator recently, — and disparagingly — told me that my insistence on the regionalism of Bay Area art was narrowly Modernist. I took it as a compliment. I think the impulse towards globalization and decentralization is dangerously technofascist and obviously capitalist. Just think about who is aided by the decentralization and dislocation of art and culture and who is . Remember when folks in Leftist circles would talk about how Facebook was going to help activist networks collaborate globally? Look at how that turned out.

To me, the differences are incredibly clear cut.

This impulse towards Modernism has manifested in my own writing in a few ways. I am trying to write with more heart. With more feeling. With less cold, digital distance from myself and others. I am trying to write about authentic human experience, which ultimately boils down to interiority.

A work of art must operate in reality and on reality and, perhaps most importantly, it must allow reality to operate on it. This is why things like AI cannot make art, only money. And if making money is the goal, the premise is flawed.

But here’s where it gets sticky — real life has become so muddled that Postmodernism has become the new Modernsim. By this, I mean that Postmodernism is perhaps a more accurate expression of human experience and human consciousness now than it ever was. But it’s lost its satirical edge — if absurdism has simply become realism, then it isn’t really absurdism anymore, is it? In a weird reversal, maybe Modernism has become the absurd, unreal mode of expression. Or at least, an expression of an uncommon experience. An individual experience. And isn’t that what art ought to be?

The ultimate sin — and cynicism — of Postmodernism is in its denial of the possibility of a supreme fiction, the term coined by the Modernist poet Wallace Stevens to describe an art that might supplant religion in its capacity for helping humans make sense of life. In a very Postmodern way, Stevens proposed this theory in a poem. And I do think that we must use our art to express what we want from our art (I’ve written about my desire for didactic art before). I also think that we can find each other in and through art. I think that art can show us what reality is really like. Or at least what it means to live.

I think it comes down to this: art should reflect both the world we live in and the world we want to live in. It should maintain the rigor to confront reality without succumbing to the impulse towards pessimism and the honesty to look inward without losing touch with the sensual. This is all a fancy way of saying I believe that we have a moral imperative towards Realism and Romanticism and to tell — if not the truth — our truths, in all their humanity.

This funny thing happens as you get older — summer disappears. It no longer marks vacations, time off from school, or the feeling of falling through a perpetual weekend. It just becomes a bunch of weeks like any other. As a kid, I never liked summer. It always felt endlessly boring. But the older I get, the more an extended period of rest sounds appealing. Maybe I’ll become a teacher.

But for now, I’m an art reporter.

Last month, I reviewed the Emory Douglas retrospective at San Francisco’s African American Arts and Culture Complex. The show covers everything from Douglas’s work with the Black Panther Party to personal painting projects and even digital art, touching a broad range of human stories and progressive ideology. Douglas is a force and San Franciscans are lucky to be able to see so much of his work in one place. This is the cultural history the city ought to be proud of. But the show seems to be getting less attention than it should for the relevance it has. I don’t know if this is the result of a weak PR push or a sort of shadow-banning. Anyway, if you’re reading this, please go see that show. It’s free!

I also wrote about San Francisco’s most recent public art initiative — a good one, this time! The Shaping Legacy initiative places temporary monuments and memorials throughout San Francisco, created by artists in close collaboration with community members and neighborhood residents. It’s an overdue correction to the the narrative the city’s monuments have long-told and a welcome shift. Hopefully, this paves the way for a change in permanent public art, too.

On the topic of the Arts Commission, I had the chance to sit down with the agency’s newly appointed director, Matthew Goudeau, and hear about his plans for supporting a thriving art scene in the coming years.

An art scene that has, as I unpacked in my latest recap, been less than thriving in recent months. It’s hard to rehash the same horror story over and over. It’s traumatic, weighty, and frustrating. My hope is that this article feels less like rehashing and more like recapping so that we can move forward with the stakes established.

I also finished a draft of my novel. I wrote a whole Substack about this. You can read it if you care.

As far as reading goes, I’m back on Baldwin, tearing through the Library of America’s Collected Essays. Not one stinker. I mixed the Baldwin essays with a couple of novellas I bought way back at AWP in February, and which both came highly recommended from friends and booksellers at that conference. The first was Killing Stella, by Marlen Haushofer, which is a really sad novel about how a dysfunctional family dynamic contributes to the possible suicide the family’s adopted teenage daughter. The second, Grace Period, by Maria Judite de Carvalho, was about a man who is trying to sell his childhood home to but his girlfriend her dream vacation before she dies of cancer. Light stuff! Of the two, I would recommend the latter. It is surprisingly funny and out now from San Francisco’s very own Two Lines Press.

After singing the praises of Anuk Arudpragasam debut novel The Story of a Brief Marriage in my last newsletter, I had to run out and read his second novel, A Passage North, which did not disappoint. In fact, it exceeded expectations. I’m a certified Arudpragasam super-fan. Please do the world — and yourself — a favor and go read both of these books.

Then, I read Sigrid Nunez’s new collection of old short stories. I am mixed on Nunez. I was very high on The Friend back when it was a big deal. I thought her subsequent two novels diminished respectively. A collection of short stories — especially one that spans a writer’s entire career — is bound to be at least half good. I’d say this one is half great. One story in particular, “The Balloon,” ends with maybe my favorite sentence ever written in the English language. Actually, the whole paragraph is great. Nunez’s punctuation could be the subject pf an entire essay. Here, read the story It’s like five pages long. But if you really can’t be bothered, here is the paragraph that I love:

I have not eaten tonight, so I get up and go heat some soup. I eat the soup and some toast in the kitchen and then I go back to my bed. I look out the window and I see that the balloon is still there. The wind blows, the tree shakes, the balloon stirs in the branches but does not lift. I have an important meeting in the morning, I need a good night's sleep. You know how it happens sometimes: you're in a certain situation where you would give anything for a particular object, and often that object is something you're least likely to have. Like me right now and a slingshot.

Isn’t that nice?

Until next time,

M

Last week, I completed the fifth and, to-date, the most finished, draft of my novel. For the first time, it feels like an actual book, finally taking the shape that I have been molding it into for almost four years. This week, I have not been writing any fiction at all. I feel liberated and entirely unsure what to do with myself, like I just got fired from a toxic job.

I’ve spent the week focusing on work writing (this has been a busy month). I slept in (I usually wake up early to write fiction). I read a book (Sigrid Nunez’s new story collection). I felt totally insane, like I should be working on something. Recharging my creative battery is a foreign concept to me. I am so used to running on empty, I think I’ve actually gotten good at it.

Writing a novel is a war of attrition, a game of inches, more long work than hard work (though it is that, too). But length is also relative and who is to say if the four years I’ve spent writing this novel is actually a long time. It only really feels long during the actual writing process, when you open up your laptop and look at the blinking cursor where you left off in the document the day before (if things have been going well) and think, I’m still writing this?

Writing a novel is like trying to discern the layout of a room by feeling in the dark, while also building the house and rearranging all the furniture at the same time. You can only pray that when the lights come on, everything will look like it has always been there and that the curtains will match the couch. Most days, this seems utterly impossible. You cannot imagine nay of it ever making sense.

Those are the moments when you almost give up, and when it is most important not to. You have to persist through the uncertainty and learn to live with it. That is the only transferable lesson of writing — how to live in a state of uncertainty.

But this raises the question: If the journey is the destination, then what is the point of arrival? Why not toil forever? For one thing, I’m pretty sure this is a mental trap to keep me hostage in this dark room forever. For another thing, I have an idea for another novel I that I’d like to write. I’m also a believer in seeing projects through to their conclusions. And, in the case of writing, I believe that conclusion means publication.

I don’t think a work of art is truly finished until it is viewed and so, at a certain point, you have to let your art go out int the world and let someone else finish it by engaging in the process from the other side. It’s a very Roland Barthes, Death of the Author conception of artistic creation but it’s also the truth so I stand by it.

Last week I told someone I was almost done with my novel and rattled off a synopsis. It was the first time I had verbalized what the book was about in a succinct, not totally harebrained way. It felt good — correct, even. I heard myself talking and I was like, Yes, this is what my novel is about and this is a pretty good sounding book. That is an immensely relieving experience. It’s also disorienting. It is impossible to know, at any point along the way, if you will ever arrive at that place, and so when you do, you don’t really know what to do with that information.

Okay, well I know one thing I’m going to do — start looking for a literary agent! (If you know anyone, send them my way.) With that prospect comes a whole new batch of anxieties and concerns. What if the book gets rejected? What if it isn’t good enough? What if this piece of my soul is not seen as valuable in the marketplace? More work for my therapist! Every artist should have a therapist on speed dial. If you’re doing your job right, you will feel insane several times a day.

This is not the first time I’ve written a novel but it is the first time I have written a novel on my own. The first was my MFA thesis projects, which was strapped to strict deadlines and felt more like an academic project than a creative pursuit. The second was a therapeutic project, fictionalizing my divorce in order to help process it, which my therapist was very involved in. This was the first novel I got to write wholly on my own time. Which is, perhaps in part, why it took so long. The first full year was a process of feeling my way in the dark to arrive at what I even wanted the book to really be about. And at many points along the way, I was stymied by fear and creative blocks.

But this time around, I was able to bring the psychosis of the writing process into therapy separate from the explicit content of the novel. That helped me work through what it is in the writing process itself that triggers all sorts of anxieties and pathologies.

I’m always amazed by the way that the process always feels new. I think that’s because it is. Every novel has different needs and demands that make it fundamentally unlike anything you’ve written before so that, to write the book you want, you must also relearn writing itself. You must learn how to write this novel.

I think I’ve done that here. While I lament the fact that I can’t take more of the lessons I learned along the way with me to the next book, I’m glad that arriving at this destination does not foreclose the possibility and benefit of another journey. I’ll enjoy this harbor for a little while, gathering myself before setting sail again, into the unknown.

It’s summer in San Francisco, which means one thing — it’s overcast and cold. And I love it. This has been an ideal melancholy summer. A lot of shit seems to be hitting the fan.

As I wrote about at some length in my last Substack essay, the San Francisco Giants have turned their back on the City, their fanbase and moral decency altogether. If you missed it — at the team’s annual Pride Night game last month, three Giants pitchers chalked bible verses onto their rainbow caps. The team’s media response has been a masterclass is mishandled PR. The fiasco will haunt the Giants at least til the end of this year, if not beyond depending on how it all shakes out. For me, it’s more indicative of a rightward shift in San Francisco’s political and cultural landscape broadly, rather than an isolated incident in sports. Regular readers will know that I have been beyond disappointed in the 2026 Giants from a performance perspective. This just adds insult to injury.

On the topic of San Francisco skewing to the political right, I have continued to track the turmoil in City Hall when it comes to arts funding. It’s relevant if slightly old news at this point, since the city has voted on the new budget this article anticipated and some of the overall proposed cuts have been restored. What hasn’t changed since I wrote that article are the cuts to the arts, specifically the Arts Commission gallery program. So read up if you want to now what’s going on with that.

I also wrote about an exhibition focusing on the Oakland artist’s housing community The Dome and how it might model solutions for the affordability crisis in the Bay Area. A couple of big takeaways from working on this story was the fact that affordability has always been an issue for artists and gentrification has always had a sticky relationship with the arts community. Developers have long-used art as a way to gentrify blighted areas and artists, being a desperately underpaid economic class, will often jump at the opportunity for subsidized or below-market-rate rent only to have the rug pulled out from under them when a real tenant comes along. The Dome, artist-owned and operated, models a different strategy, one that got me thinking about other potential models.

On the note of community-based solutions, I also wrote about Slice of the Pie, a collaborative exhibition organized by Fraenkel Gallery featuring art from 14 local galleries. From arts education to commercial sales, it seems like collaboration, over competition, is going to be what gets a lot of arts organizations through the current bottleneck. It’s nice to see collaboration extend beyond artists to the actual arts infrastructure and hopefully some other institutions take note.

Beyond the written word, I went on Toshio Meronek’s Sad Francisco podcast to run my mouth about, among other things, the Big Art Loop and the City’s ongoing lending of public space to private interests. I’ve said it before, I say it a lot on the show, and I’ll say it again — this stuff is evil. Big Art is the Trojan Horse of right wing ideology in San Francisco and constitutes a kind of land grab by a class of people who want to privatize and deregulate everything. Anyway, listen to the show. We cover all that and more.

And if that’s not enough for you, my expanded summer guide to Bay Area art shows can be found over at Hyperallergic.

I recently finished reading Anuk Arudpragasam The Story of a Brief Marriage, which is a small novel I cannot recommend enough. I am not a plot-driven reader and this is not a plot-driven book but the basic premise is so engaging I was hooked from the start — a man and a woman living in a refugee camp get married. The setting is so devoid of typical real-world associations, that it creates the perfect ground for the novel to focus on essential human function and feeling — I’ve never read such a moving description of shitting as I did in this book. It also raises the question of why honor and human connection continue to matter in such a place, and by extension, why and if they really matter in the first place. It’s such a meaning-full book that reading it actually made me angry that more books waste more pages on feeling through and thinking about much less. Bring back this kind of unapologetic modernism!

Modernism is something I have been thinking so much about. From last year’s blockbusters like Superman and One Battle After Another to novels like The Story of a Brief Marriage and Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain, it’s clear to me that postmodernism is over. I mean, there are still people trying to make it happen but it’s clearly a wack movement. Now is the time for feelings, interiority, human consciousness, romanticism! We need to inject all the things that are being taken way from us by technology and fascism back into our art, not fall into the solipsistic trap of postmodern tomfoolery.

On the other end of the spectrum, I also recently read Percival Everett’s clever and comedic novel Erasure (which was adapted into the less-than-stellar film American Fiction a couple of years ago). The movie put me off reading the book for a while, but I’m glad I got over it and read the novel. It’s very good, very meta, very intertextual. In other words, it’s a book that just needs to be a book. Like, at one point the protagonist of Erasure writes a novel titled Fuck! that is a parody of Richard Wright’s Native Son and Everett just includes the entirety of Fuck! in the middle of Erasure. It is very Roland Barthes. Which is probably why Everett also has his protagonist deliver a lecture on Roland Barthes.

But is that postmodern? Or is it the ultimate modernist retort. Better scholars will be interested in finding distinctions. But I’m not a scholar when it comes to fiction — I’m a practitioner. And I think a good practice requires a little flexibility.

Novels like Erasure are self-selecting and you will know already if you will like it or not. I loved it. But my love of it gave me pause, because it is also nothing like the kind of novel I am writing, which is very much straight fiction without any postmodern accoutrements. Although I suppose part of Everett’s point is that all novels are postmodern to some degree, everything references what came before, and I certainly owe much to my influences (always Baldwin).

I am aiming to complete another draft of my novel by the end of this month, and plan to write a Substack about the novel writing process. This will be the most close-to-finished draft yet — as, I suppose, it should be — and I think that warrants a little reflection. It will also be a nice opportunity to clarify for myself some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way.

Anyway, back to writing.

Until next time,

M

Regular readers will know that I have spent a decent portion of my last few newsletters complaining about the San Francisco Giants. Until now, those complaints have been based on the team’s abysmal performance on the field and unintuitive coaching decisions this season. Earlier this week, my disappointment became political.

During the team’s annual Pride Night celebration, on June 12, four of the five pitchers who took the mound inscribed their rainbow logo caps with a Bible verse. Specifically, Genesis 9:12-16, in which God places a rainbow in the sky as a sign of covenant that he will not again flood the earth. It’s also used as a common rebuttal to the queer community’s usage of the rainbow in the Pride flag. The Giant’s pitchers’ action mirrors a 2022 season protest by five Tampa Bay Rays players, who opted not to wear rainbow emblazoned jersey’s during that team’s Pride Night. The Ray’s fiasco made headlines, but I guess we coastal elites expect a certain amount of bigotry to be on display in the American South. We don’t expect it on our home turf. Maybe we should.

Giants pitchers aren’t the only staff to refute Pride caps this season. Earlier this month, Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Blake Trienan refused to wear his team’s Pride cap during Pride Night at Dodger’s Stadium. Again, a little surprising for the West Coast, but it’s the Dodgers — as a lifelong Giants fan, I expect the worst from them. While the issue of express homophobia on the pitcher’s mound isn’t endemic to San Francisco, the behavior of today’s Giants pitchers is a symptom of a greater illness infecting our fair City.

In recent years, San Francisco’s municipal government and overall vibe, if you’ll allow me, has been moving rather quickly towards the political right.

The recall of progressive prosecutor and District Attorney Chesa Boudin, in 2022, was a harbinger of things to come. That recall campaign, funded by centrist and right-wing tech elites, paved the way the subsequent, post-pandemic gentrification project mostly centered in the City’s Downtown. The effort to repopulate the neighborhood was the platform Mayor Daniel Lurie ran on, and one close to his family business interests. It’s a project that has coincided with increased policing and surveillance of the City and shady phone calls with President Trump — and is backed, at least in part, by MAGA donors.

In fact, there’s plenty of crossover between MAGA and San Francisco’s tech elite. Trump has toyed with the idea of turning the Presidio into a Freedom City, the sort of special economic zone being pushed for by San Francisco tech royalty Mark Andreessen and Peter Thiel, recently stacking the Presidio board with tech CEOs. Mark Zuckerberg, the idol of many young software engineers, has gone full Joe Rogan. And let’s not forget Twitter exec Elon Musk’s tenure in the White House. If there’s one precedent for Mayor Lurie’s approach to right-sizing the city budget, DOGE comes to mind.

Whose feelings do the Giants organization care about protecting in their decision not to reprimand the players who protested Pride night (even when the MLB did)? Whose civic identity does our baseball team represent? Not yours, you say? Well, I’m afraid you’re wrong. As long as baseball is America’s pastime, then we can look to baseball to help us diagnose America’s condition. Back in 2018, Giants President and CEO Larry Baer warned fans that the team couldn’t control who their right-wing ownership supported politically. Unfortunately, I think the Giants have showed us exactly what San Francisco has become.

San Francisco was once a city of freaks, misfits and, of course, queer activism and community. Or, at least, that was the way the City marketed itself, and local politics and culture mostly reflected the sentiment. But the current shift isn’t only a matter of conservatism pushing out marginalized communities (though that happens, too). The call is also coming from inside the house.

Today, San Francisco is a playground for the ultra-rich across a broad spectrum of identities. Some of the region’s most high-profile gay denizens are right-wingers and billionaires who have built their wealth through surveillance technology and military contracts. In some cases, all three at once. Sam Altman — Russian Hill resident and co-chair of Mayor Lurie’s transition team — has partnered with Trump on several occasions, as recently as this month. In other words, these men are hardly the political successors of Harvey Milk.

With all the talk of “adoption” in San Francisco’s tech industry, one wonders what is being adopted? MAGA politics have trickled in from Washington. Christianity is reportedly on the rise amongst AI leaders. I guess the Giants devout Methodist Head of Baseball Operations Buster Posey is not alone (oh, how the mighty have fallen).

It wasn’t always this way. San Francisco used to welcome misfits and weirdos. Even the yuppies were yuppies who had been nimby’d out of other city’s. They didn’t used to have the weirdest right-wing character arcs you could imagine. And the Giants used to represent what the City stood for.

In 1994, the Giants became the first professional sports team to host an HIV/AIDS awareness game, hosted by reliever Rod Beck. From the MLB website:

In 2015, the Giants signed an amicus brief for marriage equality as it speaks directly to the organization’s core values of equality and social justice for all people. In 2021, the Giants became the first MLB team to incorporate Pride colors into their on-field uniform for the Pride game.

In 2011, Tim Lincecum partnered with the AIDS awareness non-profit Until There’s A Cure, campaigning by wearing The Bracelet and appearing in an HIV/AIDS awareness PSA that was posted on BART trains. A play on the first campaign, “Until there’s a cure, Tim Lincecum wears the bracelet,” the second one read, “Until the there’s a cure, Tim Lincecum throws strikes.”

Well, today’s Giants pitchers have certainly stopped throwing strikes. But what will cure their bigotry? Or maybe focusing on the Giants is a waste of time — because treating the symptom won’t eradicate the disease.

At the risk of sounding like some totally lame old guy — I can’t believe the year is almost halfway over! I know that time goes faster the older you get but seriously, where did the last five months go? I have no idea.

This overall quickening seems to have necessitated writing at odd times. On the train (good WiFi). In the dentist’s office (better WiFi). Being on the move competes strangely with the sedentary mental state of writing.

I had a little freak out about AI last month. What happened was that I had a long talk with my friend, the painter Hiroshi Sato, and then I got pissed off, and then I wrote a thing from a place of anger. And that is totally necessary sometimes. I think too much writing happens from an intellectual place and not an emotional one. But sometimes, when emotions run high, we make mistakes. So I do have to make one correction.

In the essay, I claimed that I am not a luddite. What I meant by that was that I use a computer and a smartphone and I am not, like, a strictly anti-technology person, I am not a bozo who writes on a typewriter or whatever. I said this to try to underscore the fact that I think there is a line and that AI has crossed it. However, one of my brilliant readers wrote me an e-mail educating me on what a luddite really is. This is what my reader wrote to me:

The history of technology has been so distorted by the forces who define progress as the advancement of technology. [So well said!] The luddites were not actually against technology, but against technology being used to disenfranchise people by replacing work. They were expert artisans whose work was degraded to the point that their families were starving. I think they are sorely in need of a rethinking, because they were some of the very first people to go through what is happening right now on a large scale (ie, the “replacement” of skilled laborers by middling technologies).

This is totally right on and aligned with my argument — I am also against technology being used to disenfranchise people by replacing work. That’s actually my entire argument. So, all of that to say, I guess I really am a luddite and I welcome any and all feedback from my amazing readers. And I’m sorry for being so angry that I spoke unfairly of the people whose position prefigures my own. I will now proudly take up the mantle.

Last month, I also wrote a story about the future of arts education in San Francisco, which is in transition. Our last art school is on the verge of closing. Non-accredited residency programs may be the only option once the dust settles. I am of two minds on this. One the one hand, these programs will never replace art schools. On the other hand, art schools are becoming increasingly inaccessible and unaffordable. But also, we are in the End Times, so does it matter?

My chief concern is that artists get direct support. If residencies are able to offer that to them, great. And art schools should find a way to do the same. Ultimately, though, art school’s aren’t closing because they’re too expensive, they’re closing because the ruling class has determined that art and culture are superfluous and/or a threat to their agenda. And that’s the real problem we must rail against.

In other news, I got to catch up with Saif Azzuz at his studio and write about it for Hyperallergic. We had a great conversation about ecology and cultural traditions of environmental preservation. It was such a pleasure to get to have this kind of conversation on the record. Saif is the kind of artist (and human) that the Bay Area absolutely cannot stand to lose.

Finally, if you’re wondering what art shows to go see in San Francisco this summer, look no further than my handy guide. It is by no means comprehensive, and my expanded edition is forthcoming in Hyperallergic, but it’s a good place to start for the culture curious. If you just see these five shows, you’ll be seeing plenty of art.

Also last month, I had my television debut on ABC7, in a story about San Francisco’s monuments, which was very special and cool because one day you’re watching Lyanne Melendez on TV before the Giants game starts and the next day you’re standing across from her behind the camera. Weird how life works out sometimes. And then we ran into each other on the train going to the Giants game a few days later. Providence.

So now that I have cleanly segued into talking about the Giants, time for my regular newsletter rant about how much the Giants fucking stink!

The Giants are so unbelievably bad! They are losing in ways I never imagined possible! At this point, I am beyond the delusion that they will somehow pull it together and end the season with a positive record. Or even a respectable losing record. I am going full slash-and-burn. Fire everyone. Fire Posey. Sell the team. Giants baseball is a god damn embarrassment! 2010, 2012, and 2014 don’t even matter anymore. We are over a decade removed from the last World Series and that is not a claim we can continue to hang our hat on. We can’t even play like we did in 2021! We are a joke, a clown show, a spectacle of mismanagement.

So, instead of watching baseball — I mean, who am I kidding, I still watch baseball — I have been reading Mary Gaitskill, who I owe a profound apology. Mary, I was not familiar with your game. Her short story collection Bad Behavior is really good and probably the best place to start; her novel Veronica is, like, stunning in several ways. I’m also reading Paige Lewis’s debut novel / epic-poem-in-disguise Canon and really enjoying it. It’s sort of like queer millennial O Brother, Where Art Thou? It’s a lot of fun.

I spent last weekend reading through my novel front to back. You know, the way I would read a real book. And I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it pretty much is a real book! All the real book stuff is there. It’s definitely not done, and reading through it this way helped me to see the things that need to be fixed and rewritten, but it is the most done it has ever been and that is really exciting and relieving because for maybe the first time in three or four years I am confident that it is a work of art that holds water and does most of the art things I want art to do. You guys, it has been such an incoherent Word document for so long. And now it is a coherent Word document. And some day, when all goes well, it will be a real book in the real world and you will hold it and read it and I think I will be happy. Also, if any of you know any literary agents, let me know…

And as long as we’re on the subject of supporting my writing, I want to wrap up with a little shameless self-promotion. If you are reading this Substack and you somehow are not a subscriber, consider becoming one. If you’re a free subscriber, maybe consider becoming a paid subscriber. If you’re a paid subscriber, thank you. I put a decent amount of time and effort into this project and the only compensation I get is from you, the readers. Your support means the world.

Until next time,

M

I think the prospect of an interesting conversation about AI is an oxymoron. In recent months, more and more museums, galleries and other arts professionals I’ve encountered have wanted to engage, seemingly in good faith, in conversations about the legitimacy of AI, whether they think that they have something interesting to say or are just rubbernecking the train wreck that is contemporary culture. Those conversation are not worth having.

And it seems like I’m not alone in feeling this way, because last week at least two graduating college cohorts booed commencement speakers glazing AI. Maybe the kids are all right. But some of these boomers are cooked. (Also, this essay is very good.)

First of all, I am not a luddite. And AI is not like the printing press. Everyone wants to tell me how AI is just like the printing press. This is the popular defense of the subject and the reasoning for why conversations about the effects of AI might be relevant to the arts. But AI is absolutely not like the printing press. The printing press revolutionized a specific, physical technology. It created infrastructure and consolidated capital around the production of physical objects resulting from the tangible creative efforts of real human beings. AI does not do this. If you think that this is what AI does you’re part of a league of morons.

I’m sorry. This is obviously why I can’t have conversations about AI anymore. I will turn mean and nasty. But I think the way out of this cultural circle of hell we’ve found ourselves in requires some degree of harshness. From now on, I will be engaging in these conversations in bad faith. Because you are, too. This whole discourse is so unserious.

Entertaining AI, even as a risqué, silly topic of speculative conversation, lends it underserved credence. “But you have to admit it’s an interesting conversation,” the last person I tried to disagree with countered. My position is more like the “I don’t think about you at all” meme. The premise of these conversations is flawed and I am just not interested. And honestly, you shouldn’t be either. So, I won’t spend the rest of this essay discussing it. Instead, I will discuss the alternative that I stand staunchly in support of — reality.

I’m a Romanticist. I need you to know that I know that about myself and that that is where I’m coming from. That’s my orientation toward the world and art and technology. So you will not catch me out by being like, “Max you don’t have a well-rounded perspective.” That’s absolutely correct — I do not. I am biased and now I am angry. I am angry and biased and those are the table stakes. Just so we’re clear.

I believe in real shit. No fake shit. There is a reason that I have spent my life looking at paintings, reading books, throwing myself into mosh pits, and telling other people to do the same thing — I really believe that engaging directly with art might be the most immediate conduit to accessing reality and that reality — by which I guess I really mean human connection — especially as it vanishes — is the highest premium of human experience. Art like that is the physical product of real human effort made to communicate thoughts and feelings with other human beings. I got sober a decade ago, in part, because I didn’t like the idea that substance abuse was preventing me from having full, authentic experiences. This is your life.

A friend of mine recently pondered that the digital slop era might be a sort of cultural feedback loop. But I don’t think we’re stuck on a hamster wheel — I think things are moving forward, just in the wrong direction. Getting dumber faster or something like that. Maybe there is no way out of the simulacrum. But there’s a way to, at least, not participate in the most obvious grifts of our quarter-century.

I think now is the time for radical regression. I’m not the first person to say this. Critics and theorists have been calling for the return to Modernism for a while now. Like, pre-9/11 (does such a time exist?!) Here, you can do your homework. But no more philosophizing. We need to feel our way on this one. Us Romanticists need to take a hard-line stance. Reality is too precious a thing to risk or squander. It’s worth fighting for. And maybe that fight is actually getting easier.

In a way, I am glad that we are now at a point where just the act of writing a novel, or painting a painting or playing a guitar is radical again, simply by the virtue of being real. The contents of the artworks produced by those mediums almost doesn’t matter. Now that the vernacular has become so degraded, the medium is the message again. It’s easier than ever to be an avant-gardist. Just do something outside of the digital world. I promise you, it’s not that hard.

I say the contents of those artworks almost doesn’t matter, but I also think that they do, a little bit. Like, I want art that is about real life as much as it exists in real life. I can hear you saying, “But Max, real life happens on the Internet now!” Only as long as we let it. And it can only be so real. And I’m not even saying I want art that pretends cell phones and Facebook don’t exist! But I definitely do not want art that happens inside cell phones and Facebook, or uses them as accomplices in their own creation. I just think we have to be seriously careful about what we let inside our art and what we let our art inside of, too. And guess what? The same thing is true of our real lives! You wouldn’t let your life happen online, would you? Oh, wait, yes you would — that’s why we’re in this situation!

I just feel like some of you are not taking your art as seriously as your life and it shows. And I’m not even saying everyone has to take it as seriously as I (obviously) do. But, because I take it seriously, it offends me when other people don’t.

Realism and humanism can offer a counterbalance to the un-reality and anti-humanity of AI slop aesthetics and ChatGPT writing. Also, I’m afraid we have no time to waste on purely decorative art at this particular moment in time. (Abstraction has long been utilized as CIA propoganda.) Give me figurative painting. Give me sentimental prose. I want to feel something other than blasé capitulation to the modes of capital that have governed the art world for, well, maybe forever.

I also think that now is a time for didactic art. Subtlety has become the tool of the enemy. The question of veracity — of whether or not an image is real, of whether or not a piece of writing was written by a human being, whether or not what I’m seeing is fake news — is merged with the uncertainty of meaning. Earnestness and honesty feel important. Being direct feels necessary. We can’t afford ambiguity about where we stand. Some things are grey. Others are black and white. You have to be able to assess what kind of situation you’re in and respond accordingly. In a time of unstable reality, I want art that reflects real life and real life is, actually, pretty didactic, inasmuch as it is mostly made up of conversations about opinions and current events.

I encourage you to use your real, adult brain to consider, for a moment, who might benefit the most from the increasing merging of reality and unreality. I’m not going to answer for you. Because if there’s one point to this whole screed it is use your brain! But I will give you a hint: One major problem with AI is that it will materially impact the real world. It will, given enough time, destroy it. It seems to me that that is blatantly antithetical to the work artists are trying to do.

I think this essay on the didactic properties of art by David S. Wallace, in The New Yorker, has some pretty good anecdotal data about the current critical stance towards didactic art. The New York Times praised Marty Supreme because “it isn’t didactic and doesn’t serve up any life lessons” as if that’s a good thing. I guess part of the question is, what do we want from art? I, at least, want to learn something. Maybe that is one of the reasons I did not like Marty Supreme. Variety praised One Battle After Another (a film I did like) because “it’s not some in-your-face didactic absurdist thing,” which makes me wonder if the Variety reviewer even watched the movie because it was actually over the top in its didactic approach to political finger-wagging — which was one of the reasons that I liked it.

“Didactic art has a bad reputation because so often it simply falls flat,” Wallace writes, “a canned lesson in the mouth of a character has tough work to do against the uncanny surprises of reality. But maybe, then, it’s just that our idea of teaching that needs to be recalibrated.”

I mostly agree with this. But I also think plenty of canned lessons get passed around verbally in real life. In part, as a way of coping with the uncanny surprises of reality. We simplify things in order to make sense of them. Why should our art be above this? Why should we strive to create art that seemingly exists in some idealized world of indirect communication and layered symbolism? That strikes me as a dangerous desire, dangerously close to the kind of intentionally ambiguous experience passed off as artistry that is present in the slippage between reality and falsehood resulting from the use of AI.

“To open the channel of the didactic is, in part, to expect more of ourselves and of others,” Wallace writes, “to hope that we might grow together.”

Why shouldn’t we desire art that strives to teach, to communicate, to signal clearly our intentions and beliefs, not in the interest of divisiveness but in aid of coming together? We should. I think it literally might be our only hope. Maybe this is a foolish hope, but one that I find myself still holding onto. Why ask for less from each other? This is the standard I would want to be held to, at the very least. And, for as long as we are all in this same, shared reality together, we have to keep working hard to make it the best possible reality it can be. So I will be holding you to the same standard. And it starts by not having another conversation about AI.

Last month, Anna and I spent about two weeks in Paris and the UK. We spent the majority of our time in Paris, where Anna was attending a glaze chemistry workshop and I was walking around the city. I saw some great art, ate good food, and visited friends. It was a breath of fresh air to be outside America and I tried very hard not to rubberneck from a distance but be as present as possible in my shifted context.

I more or less wandered into a Leonora Carrington survey at the Musée du Luxembourg which absolutely blew me away. I also took an obligatory spin through the Musée d’Orsay which defended its title as my favorite Parisian museum. Overall, though, I didn’t overdo the art, trying my best to lean into the idea of this as a proper vacation.

In London, we did spend almost an entire day in the Victoria and Albert Museum, where Anna got to geek out on pottery and I drooled over the collection of cameras and photographs in the Photography Centre. I also visited the mecca of hardcore music that is All Ages Records in Camden, the kind of place that you hear whispers of in the annals of music history. Being there made me feel like a kid again.

We spent the last few days of our trip relaxing in the Scottish countryside an hour-ish outside Edinburgh, which I was pleasantly surprised to see how much it resembled the Northern California coast. It was nice to end the trip in peace and quiet, visiting friends who moved there a couple years ago and getting a good dose of country life.

Amidst my time off last month, I managed to write a couple of urgent articles that have not lost their urgency and would be worth your time to click on now. The first was a piece about the connections between the board members at the Djerassi Artist Residency and Jeffrey Epstein and the second was about the merger of San Francisco’s City arts agencies and how it might negatively impact the local nonprofit landscape.

I am still reading Solvej Balle’s Calculation of Volume series and loving it. The second volume is the weakest so far, in my opinion, but things really pick up in volumes three and four. These books are such a smart, wide-ranging exploration of one of art’s most tired sci-fi tropes that the execution of the form itself is a victory. And then, on top of that, the writing is good, the ideas are intriguing, the emotional landscape is deep. I look forward to enjoying the rest of the series over the next two-ish years as my life, like the lives of the characters, unfolds at the behest of Balle’s timeline.

I also read Ben Lerner’s new little novel Transcription on the flight home. Its brevity does not lend itself to digestibility and in typical Lerner fashion it takes a series of heady digressions into philosophical territory. Unfortunately, the whole thing is just sort of cringe. It reads like boomer dad screed against phone culture because, well, that’s exactly what it is. Accept Lerner is not a boomer and he is too smart for old-man-shakes-fist-at-cloud reductionism. So instead, we get boomer dad screed against phone culture in the guise of smart young guy thinking about the way technology governs culture and social interaction have made life weird. The narrator is always reaching for his phone, everyone is talking about phones and social media, both of the children in the books develop social-media informed eating disorders. It’s a realistic portrait of phone culture (which is to say culture) — I guess — but who wants that? We live it everyday and it sucks.

This problem isn’t limited to Lerner. I can’t think of a single compelling work of art about technology and its effects on contemporary society. And I think that’s because the subject just isn’t interesting. But Max, you say, any subject can be interesting in the hands of the right artist. I’m not so sure. I think that technology — specifically phones and social media — and the way that it has taken over our lives is so antithetical to art-making and art-experiencing that it is actually impossible to transmute it into art. That’s not a knock against the limitations of art — it’s an illustration of how insidious and evil technology has become. It has moved beyond any correlation to humanity. I mean, not even Ben fucking Lerner can make it interesting!

If your curiosity is piqued, I like a lot of what the novelist Brandon Taylor has to say in his review.

Returning to the USA meant also returning to the waking nightmare that is baseball fandom.

While I was traveling, I gave myself the gentle mercy of not keeping track of baseball. I glanced at the score, if I remembered, but I largely let it be a thing of another timezone. Catching up on the Giants season has not been inspiring. Since I’ve been home, the team has spiraled into full-blown collapse.

The Giants arrived in Philadelphia last week for a three game series against the Phillies who, with a record worse than the 13-15 Giants, had fired their manager, Rob Thomson, that morning. The Giants directive seemed clear. Hit ‘em while they’re down and hit ‘em hard, recouping an easy three wins and pulling ahead of .500. Instead, the Giants let themselves get swept, losing game one of the series 0-7. Baffling.

The roadtrip continued to Tampa, Florida, for another three games against the 18-12 Rays. Again, the Giants got swept, this time tantalizing fans with early leads and potential comeback innings, only to squander every opportunity, hit into routine outs and present a masterclass in some of the worst pitching decisions I’ve ever witnessed.

The Giants appear to be operating on a game plan of one bad decision to the next.

A buddy of mine went so far as to make the claim that the hiring of G’s legend Buster Posey to the position of President of Baseball Operations was a mistake. My knee-jerk reaction was to refute this. But then I sat with it and… I kind of think he’s right? Posey may be a great ball player but he’s never had this kind of job before. It’s like promoting a server to head chef, an artist to museum director, an actor to director. Just because the two jobs are adjacent does not mean that one provides all — or any — of the requisite experience for the other. And what the heck is Bruce Bochy doing in his position as Special Advisor to Baseball Operations? I can’t imagine he’s doing anything, other than collecting a golden parachute and appeasing the fanbase with his spectral presence.

So, the Giants return home to San Francisco 13-21 — one game behind the Rockies, for crying out loud — to face the 20-13 San Diego Padres who are one game behind the Dodgers in a three game series that starts tonight.

My hope-o-meter has ticked past zero. And it’s a real shame, because baseball is one of the precious few things I rely on to keep me sane during the downward spiral of insanity that is the 21st century. Maybe that was my mistake.

It’s gotten to the point where the only logical explanation, to those of us who have suffered the follies of this organization long enough, is that the team actually wants to lose. Or, at the very least doesn’t care about winning.

Oh, also the team sold a minority stake to Joshua Kushner’s investment firm?!

For a while now, I have argued for the return of the Giants much maligned 1984 mascot Crazy Crab. The orange monstrosity only graced the field for one season, but I’ve always found him charmingly eccentric. He was also a harbinger of bad baseball. The Giants finished that season dead last in the division, with a record of 66-96. We an only hope for such a record this season. If Crazy Crab was the mascot for Giants misery, then his time to shine is now more than ever.

Until next time,

M

First things first — it’s baseball season again. Which means this is a baseball blog now. Just kidding. Or am I?

I’ve been a baseball fan pretty much my entire life. Specifically, a San Francisco Giants fan. I’ve dipped in and out of strident fandom, but it’s always been in the background of my life. It’s something I have always associated with simplicity, ease, happiness — with a time before the burdens and complications and awarenesses and injustices of adulthood. Going to games with my father. Playing little league. Watching the Giants win three consecutive World Series. But being a Giants fan has also always come with a certain amount of strife — and never more than now.

The Giants are off to generationally bad start this season. The dynasty years are beginning to seem anomalous and not the other way around. Maybe this is not news to the old heads. But it is a slowly dawning realization of horror for fans who grew up in the recent golden age of Giants baseball.

It’s pretty demoralizing. But that seems somehow fitting for the year 2026 in San Francisco — a group of people sucked dry by corporate interests and unable to coalesce around a common goal. Anyway, we’ll see if things get better. And since this is a baseball blog now, I’ll be sure let you know.

In other new, I think I annoyed a lot of people with my recent post about the commercialism inherent to the art world. Well, I don’t know what to tell you. And if you were really annoyed you’re probably not even reading this, because I actually lost subscribers! I guess I just feel like if you’re bothered by the idea that art is a big business, and that big business is inherently antagonistic to community-building, you’re buying what they’re selling. I do think that artists can create community. I think that’s what I experience in the literary world, among fellow fiction writers. But I think once the disruptive force of a certain amount of imaginary money is introduced, those communities become compromised in all sorts of ways. I think I can hate the business of art and the negative impacts it has on the artistic community and still love art.

Last month, I wrote a review of Jonathan Calm’s show at de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University. I think I can handle myself in art spaces like university museums because they at least appear to operate in service of education over commerce. And the show was really good. Calm is a historian, an anthropologist and a cartographer all in one, his photographs the aesthetically elegant and surprisingly straightforward product of that heady and academic suite of interests. If you live in the Bay Area, it’s worth the trek to Santa Clara to see the show.

I also reviewed Ambreen Butt’s show at Gallery Wendi Norris through a new and very interesting platform called Artlance. The idea is that vetted writers can apply to be Artlance writers and participating galleries and museums can commission reviews. The writers get to claim the commissions from an open board, so arts organizations aren’t directly commissioning specific writers. And writers aren’t required to write anything favorable. They just have to meet the requisite deadline and publish their review on their own platform (like Substack). It’s an interesting concept for a new model of art criticism — something closer to catalog essay writing than traditional art criticism that follows the bylaws of journalism.

Lastly, I wrote yet another challenge to the privatization of San Francisco’s public art, inspired by a recent decision by San Francisco’s Arts Commission to extend the flagship sculpture of this particular movement. This article felt like a last-ditch effort to make a case for why we oughtn’t blindly hand control of public space over to private interest groups. I’m not sure I have the stomach to write too much more about this particular topic because, well, no one in a position of power seems to give a shit. And preaching to the choir only does so much good when it doesn’t translate to policy change. Beating a dead horse can be a little insane-making.

Anyway, I finally finished Biography of X and Octavia Butler’s collected short stories. I started reading Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, which was the talk of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference (again, see here for a recap). Calculation promises to be a seven volume series of novels and I’m sat for it. There are three books out now, and I’ve devoured two-and-a-half of them. Number four is out in a few days, with five to follow later this year and six and seven promised for next year, or something like that.

I also skimmed the first ten pages of like a dozen very well regarded contemporary American novels and just could not get into a single one of them. I think I am just really bearish on contemporary American fiction right now. Which is maybe not a great position to take as a contemporary American fiction writer. But I also feel like this judgement extends to a lot of contemporary American art, general speaking. It’s all pretty… timid? Safe? Unambitious? I guess I just really feel like I need art to take risks right now. The stakes are too high for inanity, for kitsch, for tropes. I would rather read a novel that fails, that is riddled with imperfections, as a result of the author’s effort and ambition, than a novel that just sort of drifts away on the weightlessness of its polish. Baldwin would never do this! Why can’t contemporary writers have the guts of Baldwin? Is that too much to ask? I mean, obviously, it is. And, like, I could go on at length about why we — meaning American artists — have no excuse for gutlessness, but I will just say I want everyone to get it together and put a little more of their blood into their art. I truly think it is, like, the lease we can do.

I realize that I sound pretty grumpy and more than a little dispirited in this month’s dispatch. I mean, look, not even the Giants can put together a convincing effort. And I’m not getting paid anywhere near the salary of a professional athlete. So I think I’m entitled to a certain degree of grump. In fact, I think grumpiness is a reasonable response to the culture-wide enshittification we’re all living through. But now I’m headed to Paris and Scotland to visit expat friends and hopefully get some writing done and it is hard to be grumpy about that. Maybe getting out of America for a few days will fix me.

Until next time,

M

Butt’s latest body of work, all pieces dated 2026, is the conclusion of a trilogy of exhibitions a decade in the making: the first, “Say My Name,” in 2020, collected the names and ages of the victims of US drone strikes during the war on terror. “Lay Bare My Arms,” in 2023, explored gun culture. The most recent series retroactively addresses the themes of the previous two as well as the current media landscape, asking what it means to bear witness to the horrors of genocide, war and terrorism as they are livestreamed almost in real time for public consumption.

Both pieces in the diptych “Awladi (My Children)” and “Awladna (Our Children)” feature a woman wearing a headscarf and holding a potted plant in her arms and balanced on her head. The plant, which recurs throughout several pieces in “I Bear Witness” is a “walking iris,” a flower that blooms for just half a day and propagates itself via offshoots. In each piece, the title has been woven into the surface with keffiyeh fabric. The female subjects stand in the center of decorative borders, reminiscent of illuminated manuscripts, laced with gold leaf and collaged, printed text. In Awladi (My Children),” the titular text references an online video Butt watched of parents crying out for their children in the aftermath of missile strikes. “Awladna (Our Children)” has been collaged with the text of the 1980 poem, “Lullaby For A Palestinian Child,” by the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz. Applied today, the half-century old poem offers a symbol of the endurance of bearing witness and of artistic modes of protest.

The works in “I Bear Witness” don’t translate the frantic, schizoid experience of social media’s incoherence. In contrast to the bombardment of digital images, Butt’s paintings are rigorously analog. Butt works in a mix of media, including watercolor and gouache paints, natural plant-based pigments and dyes, thread, gold leaf, and keffiyeh. The density of materials, textures, and text is antithetical to viewing Butt’s work at a passing glance. One is forced to linger, to consider the larger implications and consequences. Here, social media videos of dead children and grieving grandparents morph into something meditative, positing slowness as an antidote to the rapidity of the social media news cycle. Each piece creates time and space for reflection that is often overlooked or impossible when images of violence are delivered with the speed of social media.

The difficulty metabolizing violent imagery is one that will be familiar to most readers: You open Instagram and within a few minutes of scrolling, you’ve been bombarded by snuff footage from war zones interspersed within a slew of pictures from your cousin’s wedding and AI cat videos. It’s a schizophrenic visual experience, triggering a torrent of emotions that are often difficult to parse or respond to sanely. And then there’s another kind of post that crops up and only deepens one’s sense of helplessness — the call to action. So you donate, you repost, you wonder if it did any good, and you move on to the next cat video. Butt answers the call to action with art, giving viewers the chance to deepen their own responses.

In “Rupture,” we get a familiar character of social media protest culture. The repeated collaged character of a woman raising her fist smashes through the surface of the artwork, which has been illustrated in pencil with the pattern of a keffiyeh. The figure is based on an image taken from a 1980s women’s march in Pakistan — not a contemporary image — though it could be any number of protestors spotted at recent No Kings or anti-ICE rallies. It’s a hopeful reminder that, like the seeming perennialism of the oppressive conditions that birth them, protest movements are undying. But they don’t always make their way into contemporary art spaces.

Too many museums and commercial galleries have taken a milquetoast approach in response to the current political moment, ranging from silence to outright censorship. Bay Area artists have experienced their own share of institutional censorship when speaking publicly from a pro-Palestinian position. But all art is political and the choice to exhibit seemingly apolitical, decorative, or tone-deaf art is a political choice, too. As shapers of culture, art institutions have a responsibility to present art that records and contends with contemporary life, as a matter of negotiating the present and preserving a record of history for posterity. It’s refreshing to see a commercial gallery take a vocal position.

In the related pieces “Speak!” and “Silence!” figures illustrated with red thread stitched into the surface of tea-stained paper offer two counterintuitive moments from scenes of protest. The figure in “Speak!” covers their mouth with a hand, a look of sorrow and frustration in their eyes, at the breaking point of their silence, poised to make themselves heard. Butterflies dance around the figure’s head, signaling the imminent metamorphosis. In “Silence!” a woman wearing a keffiyeh headscarf shouts, a hand cupped to her mouth and a stream of marigolds issuing from her lips, perhaps on the verge of being forcibly silenced. In “Speak!” and “Silence!,” the resonance of both censorship and assertion ring loud, their inverse impacts made tangible. It’s an apt reminder that our choice to speak up matters, too, even if it often feels ineffective and catatonia is the more familiar response.

“To witness without the power to intervene is an act of endurance,” Butt says in the exhibition’s press release, “this endurance in itself is a form of resistance.”

Witnessing without the power to act describes the circumstance we’re all victims of as citizens of the Internet. But desensitization oughtn’t be confused for endurance. The strength of Butt’s work is not in passivity, but in showing how the act of witnessing can become an interrogation and negotiation of our collective circumstances and those beyond our reach. It might not constitute an intervention, but it is an inspiration and invocation — one that is impossible to ignore.

Ambreen Butt “I Bear Witness” is on view at Gallery Wendi Norris through May 9, 436 Jackson Street, San Francisco, California. This review was commissioned via Artlance.

Earlier this month, I attended the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference in Baltimore, Maryland. I’d been to the conference a couple times before, once with my MFA cohort and once with my friend and poet . Something I had always enjoyed about AWP was the sense of community it provides. This year, I was more than a little nervous to be going alone.

I finished reading Biography of X on the plane, seated next to two women who obviously knew each other from the same MFA program but who, I got the impression, hadn’t seen each other in a long time. It made me miss my MFA cohort, almost a decade removed and scattered, now, across the world. When we landed, the weather in Baltimore was cold and bleak. I hurried to the convention center to pick up my badge. In the convention hall, I watched as more people’s faces lit up with recognition at the sight of each other. I was beginning to feel like the odd man out. As I lay awake in my hotel bed, I couldn’t help but wonder if I would have been better off staying home and writing, or at least trying to write. But as the weekend went on, I found some warmth — and an unexpected sense of estrangement when I returned home.

My career oscillates between the art world and the literary world. I work as a journalist and critic by day, novelist and short story writer by nights and weekends (or very early mornings). In both worlds, I find myself walking a fine line between a feeling of belonging and a feeling of estrangement. I haven’t managed to make the two feel cohesive — not that I want to — and I haven’t found a way to make myself totally make sense as a character in either world.

In the art world, whether operating as a journalist or a critic, I am necessarily an outsider. A journalist needs to remain impartial and a critic has no allegiance to anyone other than the reader. That said, I have gotten a lot further in the art world, as a journalist and critic, than I have in the literary world, approaching a status some might consider to be that of an insider. And insider-outsider. My art writing informs my creative writing, too — I’m always writing about art or artists, in some capacity — but it also detracts from it. There are only so many hours in the day.

In the literary world, I get to be the artist. Working earnestly at the craft of writing (and I wonder if this is how artists working in other mediums feel) necessitates being alone. It is insular work, which transpires locked behind a closed door, turned inward within one’s own mind. Fiction writing is as much about observing human interiority as it is about observing the state of humanity and society. Both parts of that task require being slightly removed from the proceedings, maintaining an observational distance.

My first morning at the AWP conference, I wandered the halls of the book fair, where every publisher from a Midwestern community college with an online literary magazine to Penguin Random House has set up shop, and tracked down as many magazines that have published my short fiction as I could. I see my byline all the time. I even see my name in print pretty often (one perk of working at a newspaper). But this is different. This is affirmation of the highest order. When I see my published fiction in the world, I see myself as I want to be. And I don’t mean that as a diminishment of the work I do as an art writer — but getting to see oneself as an artist is a whole other magnitude of self-actualizing euphoria. That’s me.

I participated in a reading co-presented by L’Espirit Literary Review and ARTWIFE, which has published two of my short stories. The event was hosted by a bookstore-plant shop-art gallery-bar in north Baltimore and we packed the house. It was exhilarating to read my short fiction in the company of strangers, many of whom were fellow writers, and to hear their short stories, poems and essays. There was an immediate sense of camaraderie, of companionship, of community. For once, I didn’t feel like an outsider. I felt like I belonged, in a place I had created for myself.

I flew home Sunday evening and returned to work the next morning feeling unexpectedly apprehensive. Taking a few days off from the art world had been surprisingly refreshing. And that apprehension is something I still haven’t shaken. Ever since I’ve been home, I’ve been thinking about what differentiates the two creative industries, what generates a stronger sense of community in one and undercuts it in the other, and I think I have an answer.

The art world is, secretly and not so secretly, all about money. And yes, books are a commercial industry, too. But the art world is about money in a way the book world can’t really be. At least in America, but probably globally. There just isn’t enough money in books, and there certainly isn’t the potential to generate large sums of money very quickly on little more than speculation.

I went to a gallery opening a few days after returning home to San Francisco. I saw a lot of people I knew. But more than ever, I felt like the odd man out. I don’t go to gallery openings with the idea, even vaguely in the back of my head, that I might strike it rich. that’s partly because I’m not a visual artist, a collector or a dealer. I think a lot of people — heck, I will even say most people — do this. Whether they know it or not. There is some implicit notion that anyone in the room could get rich if they can catch the zeitgeist at just the right moment, in just the right way. It leads to a lot of performativity and divisiveness you just don’t see at midnight at the hotel bar at the writing conference.

And I think it is this specter of fast cash keeps real community from fully forming in the art world. In the literary world, everyone knows that there is no money to be made. They’re just in it for the love of the game. This creates a sense of camaraderie and places the emphasis on the merit of the creative work. Too often, in the art world, bad art makes buckets of money. That’s because visual art is not a merit-based field. The necessity of quality has been surgically removed from the valuation process. What art sells is based on what art collectors can be convinced will generate a return on investment. Art is, as a business, about investment. In a way that literature can never be. And literature is about culture, and community, in a way that art can never be. Just look at the modes of production governing each industry: one-of-a-kind paintings versus mass market paperbacks. Art has aura, in the Bejaminian sense, but books has soul. It’s for the people.

So selling my novel might my ticket out of the art world. Not financially. But creatively, philosophically, communally. I think I’d like to see how the other half lives.

This past month has felt like a downward spiral. We’ve seen a further number of art spaces close in the Bay Area — including the venerable Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, which is just a few blocks from my house. To see what feels like the continued free fall of the local art scene is disheartening, at best, and existentially compromising, at worst. Pair that with reports of our mayor’s (or should I say, friend of Christie Noem’s) continued public fumbles, and it’s increasingly hard to feel like San Francisco cares about, well, San Franciscans.

But there has been one thing that has been keeping me sane and that is, of course, art.

I participated on a Cultural Connections panel about Censorship in Artwork, and you can request a recording of that event from the organizer. Maybe I’ll post a transcript of my own portion of the talk on here. It was an incredibly inspiring and fruitful discussion, even if most of what we were talking about was the doom and gloom of the current state of the arts in the Bay Area. But the positive takeaway was that those of us down in the trenches need to support each other and we can. Nothing is stopping us — if anything, the increased threats to external funding and support should encourage us to band together.

I took up the heavy task of revising my previously held position on the outlook of the health of the San Francisco art scene in this article. Where before I held out hope that San Francisco would save its art scene, I now feel strongly that we must save ourselves. And while that comes with attendant frustrations, it is also a great source of empowerment. I encourage all of you, wherever you are in the world, to think about how your community can leverage the ways in which it has been overlooked as a means for unification and strengthening.

In light of this, I wrote a pair of articles highlighting some of the most exciting art stuff happening in the region this spring. Between my institutionally focused roundup for Hyperallergic and my locally focused list for the San Francisco Examiner, you’ll find 15 shows to see this spring. But I encourage you to not stop there — these lists are by no means exhaustive. There’s a ton of cool stuff coming up and plenty more that is on around town now.

One of those things is Open Your Eyes to Water, San Francisco-artist Trina Michelle Robinson’s double-feature solo show at 500 Capp Street and Root Division, which I reviewed here. The show is an amazing synthesis of the last decade of Robinson’s practice, which illuminates local Black history through the lens of the artist’s ancestry in videos, sculptures and prints. Plus, it’s at two of the coolest art spaces in the City — Root Division, which does amazing work for the community — and 500 Capp which is an art gallery inside a haunted mansion.

I also had the very special opportunity of writing a small essay for local artist Arleene Correa Valencia’s first solo show in New York City, which opens at Fridman Gallery later this month. The show continues and expands Valencia’s exploration of family history and Mexican migrant narratives through multimedia paintings and textile. You can read that here.

My last newsletter was all about Baldwin and his collected essays, which I’m currently taking a break from. I just needed a change of pace, and to return to fiction, so I’ve been reading a bunch of Richard Wright (Native Son, Uncle Tom’s Children and Eight Men, ) and Octavia Butler (Fledgling and the collected short stories). Then, I’ll get to back to Baldwin’s collected essays. I found a used copy of Biography of X so I can finally return the long-overdue library copy — and then maybe actually finish the book (long-time readers of this newsletter will know how long I have been attempting that feat). It feels like every time I pick that book up I either love it or hate it. Right now, I’m loving it again.

By mid-February, I had reached the bottom of the barrel on a string of trashy movies — Wild Things is a blast, Palmetto is extremely forgettable. And then I watched a movie that has been languishing at the bottom of the movie list on my notes app for literal years, the Wachowski sisters first film, Bound. First of all, I’m a Matrix stan. Second of all, this movie is just really, really good in its own right.

This inevitably led me to re-watch all four Matrix movies. I found myself appreciating the series in new and unexpected ways. This was partially thanks to my own ability for interpretation and appreciation, refined since my last viewing some 10 years ago when I cared much more about cool guns and car chases than about the pertinent philosophy of free will and self-determination how it applies in today’s political landscape. I also realized that I just never really understood the plot before. Like, the actual plot. Which, in all fairness, is kind of obfuscated by some very flowery dialogue in a few non-actiony scenes. This breakdown is pretty solid.

I’m not going to rehash it all here but, basically, the key revelation for me on this viewing of the series was that both the titular Matrix and the perceived real world beyond it are being governed by the machines. In other words, the real world and the human’s sense of freedom within it are a controlled circumstance as carefully designed as the Matrix itself to act as a pressure valve for the human tendency towards resisting the machine’s system. In the end, Neo doesn’t break the humans out of the Matrix — instead, he brokers a peace agreement with the machines by which humans and machines can co-exist harmoniously. This plot point felt intensely relevant to my matured political consciousness. There is no place outside the superstructure. Your best option is to make an uneasy alliance with your place within it. But also — and this is the really important part — don’t stop there.

Finding a way to exist within an insane world while maintaining your sanity does not equal complacency. In Neo’s case, it equals potential. At the end of The Matrix Resurrections Neo and Trinity have learned to harness this potential to remake the world of their Matrix, limited only by the the power of imagination. In response to this, the Analyst (an updated version of the original trilogy’s Architect) delivers perhaps the most important line of the film:

“The sheeple aren’t going anywhere. They like my world. They don’t want this sentimentality. They don’t want freedom or empowerment. They want to be controlled. They crave the comfort of certainty.”

On the surface, this is typical bad guy monologuing. But the inverse proposition, which Neo and Trinity embody, is that freedom and empowerment are a choice each individual makes for themselves. Oh, and there’s also a lovely Romantic implication that sentimentality is the enemy of oppression. So, choose freedom, choose empowerment, choose love. Because that choice is the only thing we have.

Until next time,

M

“Publicly I was a teacher of the arts which they call liberal; privately I professed a false religion — in the former role arrogant, in the latter superstitious, in everything vain.” — Saint Augustine

I am having a crisis of faith. In San Francisco, in the United States, in art, in writing. The world around me seems to be changing rapidly and my craft seems increasingly ineffectual when confronting the daunting political reality of life in the United States today. I have been thinking a lot lately about the effectiveness — or lack of effectiveness — of writing. Less about how to write and more about why to write. And I think it has everything to do with faith.

Late last year, in my newsletter, I wrote a bit about reading Saint Augustine’s Confessions and my desire to (re)orient myself toward ascetic artmaking. Augustine employs the image of oil and water to describe the experience of locating one’s moral values and principals towards vocation. If oil is poured into water, it rises to the surface, if water is poured onto oil, it sinks below the oil, “finding its right level,” he writes. “Love,” he writes, “is the weight by which I act.”

Augustine is a figure of uncertain faith. I think that’s what makes him so relatable. Confessions can more or less be boiled down to a chronicle of the narrator’s attempt to justify his own beliefs to himself. In Augustine’s case, this means his belief — or lack thereof — in God.

Where I find the book almost hopelessly frustrating is in Augustine’s insistence on the Biblical framework as a natural given. I don’t believe in God, as such, at all, so when Augustine starts going down the rabbit hole of trying to apply logic to his faith, I just feel like the premise is flawed. Many of Augustine’s own logical impasses are the result of a self-imposed difficulty. Like, sometimes Augustine gets so close to a breakthrough and then steers himself away from that revelation because it doesn’t map comfortably onto the “facts” of biblical scripture. This annoyed me. But it also made me wonder how many of my own beliefs people might have a similar reaction to.

Because I do relate to Augustine immensely. I, too, feel like a character of uncertain faith. Only my faith isn’t in God. It’s in art. And, just like Augustine, I also take the framework of my God as a given, even when I am questioning it and even when questioning this complicates my own perceptions of the world. I am aware that both Augustine and I are probably our own worst enemies. But I do this because art is the only thing I have ever totally believed in, the only thing I have never questioned in itself. I guess I am describing … faith.

So, I’m not sure it’s fair to say that I am actually having a crisis of faith. Or, it is better to say that I am having a crisis of faith in a very Augustinian way. Which is to say that the core tenets of my belief are not in question but I am freaking out about them anyway.

Beseeching God, Augustine writes, “I show you my love, but if it is too little, give me strength to love you more.”

This is how I feel, too, wondering if writing can be enough. Writing — about art, as art — is a devotional act. It is my mode of prayer, of “showing my love” to my God. And if that act is too little, then I depend on the very thing I am genuflecting to to reciprocate my faith. And when this faith does not feel reciprocated, the crisis intensifies.

I think a major contributor to this intensified crisis is the fact that writing takes time. Like, so much time. Augustine ponders why God has not spoken to him, while he has spent so much of his life speaking to God. Maybe God is as slow to work his ways as writing is. Still, Augustine keeps waiting for it to happen. But I have very little patience. And the necessary slowness of writing can seem infuriating when effecting change seems pressing, when the issues we are confronting seem immediate and effect us imminently. I guess that’s where the faith part comes in. Because writing is not about external change in the immediate sense. It can’t be. Like prayer, it is about demonstrating devotion and belief in a higher order.

Writing will always miss its mark, temporally. And maybe it misses it’s mark entirely. But I’m not ready to give up yet. I believe that writing can serve two roles, one oriented toward the past and the other forward-looking. Writing can document the present for the sake of history, creating entries for the archive, a sort of writing history in real time. It can also steadfastly articulate a vision of the future in anticipation of our eventual arrival there. But writing will always miss its mark, temporally, because writing takes time. So perhaps its effectiveness also takes time. Writing is a long game. And maintaining faith is required. Especially during a dark night of the soul.

“Men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars,” Augustine writes, “yet pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought.”

Even if my devotional act does not seem to bring me closer to God, I have to ask myself, what has it done. I think you have to ask yourself, as a writer, as an artist — as a theologian, even, like Augustine — who is this for? And does it bring me a sense of fulfillment? Does the mere act of prayer, the display of faith, actually bring me any sense of accomplishment?

Yes and no.

I think that writing or art or theology, as a vocation, is less about the discrete projects that make up the totality of that vocation and more about the totality itself. The quality of my vocation is not defined by the success or failure of a single day of writing, a single page, the sincerity of a single prayer uttered. I think the quality of a life in art is judged by the compounded repetition of that act of faith, the repeated demonstration of faith in spite of the intermittent — or ongoing — crises of faith that come with it.

Writing has given me a place is the world, a sense of purpose. And while I regularly question whether or not the result of my writing is valuable — or, in Augustinian terms, whether or not God exists — I never question the value of the act itself. Like prayer, it is a demand to have my existence confirmed by something beyond me, even if that thing never speaks back. Perhaps it is not even God that matters, but the faith itself and Gd is just the illusion that facilitates that faith. We return, gain and again, to our art because we believe in it — even when we don’t. Because we love it. And love must be the weight by which we act.

January was a difficult month. An object lesson in persisting while it feels like the world is ending. A distended tragedy. The feeling of free fall.

I did one thing in January that helped, more than anything else, to preserve my sanity. I went to a protest. There were thousands of people there and thousands of those thousands were teenagers. Being in the company of so many other human beings standing up for, well, humanity and seeing actual children participate in that was incredibly moving. If you’re ever wallowing too deeply in isolation and despair (which, by the way, is by design), I highly recommend marching in the streets. I cried, I lost my voice, I left with a feeling of fullness that has carried me through the week. And the most important part is that I have not forgotten the omnipresent horrors — I have felt this renewed sense of hope in spite of the horrors and in light of my actions in relation to them.

I think protesting feels particularly good for someone who mostly works in isolation. It is difficult to gauge the effectiveness of anything I write and send off into the world. It’s like tossing a bottle message in the ocean and wondering if it has washed up on some distant shore, or merely continues to drift in the space between. And by the time it is received, it is never as urgent as it was when I wrote it.

Perhaps the most urgent thing I wrote in January was an essay on the sudden closure of the California College of the Arts. I wrote the piece very quickly after the news broke and I hadn’t processed it yet. I still haven’t. I moved to San Francisco almost 15 years ago to study art history at the San Francisco Art Institute. When that school closed, in 2022, I was devastated, but took heart in the fact that we still had CCA. Now, we have neither. It is now difficult to imagine San Francisco being a city that attracts young artists. And I think that is, partially, by design. This news could not have had more darkly comedic timing: a few days before San Francisco Art Week. Everyone was walking around looking shellshocked, clinging to each other like long-lost survivors of a war. Maybe we are. Hold your loved ones close.

In that spirit, I wrote two stories about all the new art fairs that came to town during SF Art Week. The first story was a broad overview, making the hopeful argument that these fairs — small and grassroots — might be the antidote to what feels like a dying scene. The second story focused specifically on just one of these fairs, Creativity Explored x Open Invitational, which brought together over 20 progressive art studios from across the country working with artists with disabilities. That was pretty special. Finally, I reviewed Anoushka Mirchandani’s first museum solo show, at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José, which was a homecoming for the Bay Area painter, who has been in residency in New York.

At a press preview last week, I met a journalist who writes for a general interest publication and doesn’t usually focus on the arts. We got to talking and when I offhandedly mentioned Art Week, they asked me, curious and wide-eyed, “What’s art week?” Some of you might be sad to hear this. I was overjoyed. It was the reminder I didn’t know I needed that some people live sane lives. I explained what Art Week was. We had just been talking about the ICE raids in Minneapolis. I sounded insane.

It is difficult to maintain one’s belief in the political and humanitarian power of art when the art industry one works in has essentially boiled the whole enterprise of, oh, I don’t know, humanity, down to a luxury goods market. I find it difficult, during periods of time when that “enormous incoherence” is pushed to the fore, to feel that the goings on of my little life have any significance. But I suppose that is what they — the perpetrators and perpetuators of this incoherence — want me to think.

And still, I find solace in art. Or at least, I find escapism which, this month, took the form of movies. I watched all five Mad Max movies as well as the same director’s fairy tale epic 3,000 Years of Longing, which is a delightful sort of two-person play between Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba. I also rewatched Basic Instinct and Body Heat, masterpieces in the trashy thriller genre, and a new addition — and a decent San Francisco movie (and possible Saw inspiration?) — The Game. Lastly, I watched Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden. I know I’m late to the game on this one but, like, holy shit what a great flick.

I keep listening to this song, which is an incredible work of ekphrasis, and its sequel, which is one of the best essays on art I’ve heard in a long time.

I was going to use Munch’s The Scream as the key image for this newsletter. But, so trite! went with David Johnson’s Boys and Flag instead. Not a picture that represents incoherence, so much as one that represents perseverance, a great image of in-spite-it-all instead of in-the-clutches. Johnson was a San Francisco guy — the first Black MFA student in Ansel Adams’s photography department at the San Francisco Art Institute, who studied photography on the GI Bill in the 1940s. I wrote about his retrospective at San Francisco City Hall in 2022, and you can read that review here. Johnson was a great shooter, but what he shot was great, too.

And because, for me, everything comes back to Baldwin, I would be remiss not to mention the 1963 KQED special Take This Hammer, which features Baldwin in San Francisco performing a post-mortem on the so-called “urban renewal” efforts that obliterated the thriving Black community Johnson had photographed. In the film, Baldwin drives around interviewing Black San Franciscans in order to illustrate “the real situation of Negroes in the city, as opposed to the image San Francisco would like to present"and ultimately prove his hypothesis that “there is no moral distance ... between the facts of life in San Francisco and the facts of life in Birmingham.” San Francisco does not come away from this interrogation with much of its moral distance intact.

So, of course, I have been reading James Baldwin’s collected essays. It is both disturbing and consoling how relevant his writings are. Disturbing, because one wants to imagine that change might have occurred in the half-century since Baldwin battled against American turmoil and consoling because his lessons remain relevant and guiding.

In his lecture ‘Notes for a Hypothetical Novel,’ James Baldwin speaks of the “bottomless confusion which is both public and private, of the American republic” which he later describes concisely as an “enormous incoherence.”

This pretty much sums up the — or at least my — American experience. The feeling I mentioned up top: the world ending; tragedy; free fall. But Baldwin also offers some consolation.

“There is never a time in the future when we will work out our salvation,” he writes in an essay titled Faulkner and Desegregation. “The challenge is the moment, the time is always now.”

One quick piece of housekeeping: I’m making a change to my subscription tiers. Instead of dividing the content on this blog into free and paid, I’m moving to a paid first model, where all paid posts will lose their paywall after a month or so. That way, financial supporters of this project get a little exclusivity, but everyone has access to everything eventually. I appreciate anyone and everyone’s support and, at the same time, I just can’t justify indefinitely paywalling my work. And any form of support — whether it’s financial or just reading this far — means the world.

Until next time,

M

This piece originally ran in my old e-mail newsletter, in March 2025. It seemed relevant to repost it now.

Joy is not optional. My therapist told me that a couple of weeks ago. It is not frivolous, she said, it is not the same as taking your eye off the ball. It is as necessary to life as breathing.

Since Trump took office for the second time, in January, I have been mostly joyless. I already operate at a low-grade register of melancholy, with minor ups and downs, but the last three months the base register has dropped several levels, the ups have been lower, the downs deeper. I have been indulging more and more in avoidant behaviors: too much YouTube, porn, doom scrolling.

In many conversations — with my fiancée, with friends, with my therapist — I have referred to the persistent state of being that I am existing in as “anxiety.” But that is not an accurate descriptor, or not the only descriptor. I do feel anxious. But that anxiety is the manifestation of a much larger, looming feeling. And that feeling is fear.

I am scared.

Maybe saying (writing) it out loud will help. Not to alleviate my fear, but to articulate what, exactly, I’m scared of. But where to start? And, good grief, where to end?

I’m scared, in the words of Adrien Piper, that everything will be taken away. I’m scared that the climate around free speech in the United States could reach a boiling point, making me and other journalists eligible for prosecution. I’m scared that the overturning of Roe vs. Wade could presage the overturning of Loving vs. Virginia, making my approaching marriage unrecognized in certain states. And I’m not just scared for myself – I’m scared for everyone who might have some or all of their rights squashed under the authoritarian thumb.

I’m not the only one feeling the squeeze. In the last month, on two separate instances, I’ve heard friends joke about what life in a concentration camp would be like. People are being deported and detained. One of the country’s leading experts on fascism has fled for Canada, claiming that the censoring of free speech and scholarly work here is “inevitable.”

But I still find myself regularly caught between two poles of uncertainty. Is it paranoid of me to be so worried about any of these things coming to pass? Is it naïve of me to not be more frightened? There is no real way of assessing the legitimacy of the extent of one’s fear, when its causes continue to appear increasingly erratic.

Lucky for me, I have experience with this sort of insoluble fear. As a child, I was terrified of the dark. Well, not of the dark. Of what might be in the dark, of what the darkness obscured. In other words, I was terrified of uncertainty. We don’t know what’s going to happen, which fears will become reality. That’s part of what’s so scary. But amidst my fear, I’ve lost sight of what is certain and concrete.

In the last couple of months, I’ve written about an exhibition of seminal Black photographers, including Gordon Parks’s Civil Rights-era images, and a show of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian art at SOMArts in San Francisco. In both of these, I found myself staggered by the human capacity to bend towards hope in times of grave dehumanization. In both cases, art, humanity, beauty and joy persist. Whatever form of fascism we’re verging on or living through, whatever history re-shits itself, joy will persist, too.

I have been treating my joy as an option, and one that I too often decline. But joy is everywhere, and declining it has become exhausting. Why not work just as hard to recognize it?

I find joy, then, in art, in books (Katie Kitamura novels), in movies (Sean Baker, Bong Joon Ho, Steven Soderbergh), in music (Poison the Well fits the mood) in nature (the sunlight through leaves, the scent of rose geranium on my afternoon walks), in playing tennis (a new habit), in my daily ritual of eating overnight oats for breakfast (rolled, extra thick), in good television (Daredevil delivers; Severance verges on art), going to the ballet with Anna (Frankenstein), in writing with the cat on my lap (no notes).

My point is, joyful things happen all the time, just as often as scary things. Miracles and atrocities are not mutually exclusive. It’s just that sometimes the miracles are small and easy to lose track of, while the atrocities are catastrophic in scale and coming at us a mile a minute. Joy, then, is not a practice of losing sight, but rather a practice of paying attention, of keeping your eye on the ball.

Joy is not optional. But it is something we choose to recognize – or not. And it is through that choice that we have any hope of creating any measure of meaningful resistance.

I’m not the only one who felt like 2025 went by super fast, right? Hell, even January of this year feels like it’s going by fast. And, with San Francisco Art Week looming in the near distance, it will be over before we know it. There are a lot of openings and events. See as much as possible — but choose wisely.

It would help to have more hours in the day. I’ve been thinking about this since last week when I told my therapist why I don’t like sleeping. I have stuff to do. But rest is important and I don’t know how to slow down time. But I am figuring out ways to incorporate more slowness into these fleeting days. I’m trying to read in bed instead of bringing my phone with me. I’m hiking on the weekends. I’m taking the bus. I’m doing chores without headphones.

In the final weeks of 2025, I published a new short story called “Approximate Distance” in an online magazine called Same Faces Collective. You can read it here. It’s actually an old short story, several years old, and seeing it finally come to life was gratifying. The story is, in many ways, about the cyclicality of time, so this felt fitting. It’s also about a painter, a poet, a museum visit, a novel, and rain.

I also reviewed the Alejandro Cartagena survey at SFMOMA. It’s a great show, highlighting the potential that comes when an artist follows one theme very closely across several years and methods. Here on my Substack, I transcribed a public conversation I had with the painter Hiroshi Sato and posted it free for all subscribers. Here’s a link, in case you missed it. Hiroshi is brilliant, I hold my own. The conversation illuminated for me a lot of things I’ve been thinking about — or thinking around — for some time, like how to be a modernist in the post-postmodernism 21st century, how to accurately portray reality in art when reality becomes inundated with unreality, and why real life matters. You can expect a forthcoming Substack that gets into these weeds on some of these ideas. Talking is one thing, but I need to write about them.

Finally, I had the very special opportunity to reflect on Rebecca Solnit and Susan Shwarzeberg’s book Hollow City, published 25 years ago, and how things have changed — or stayed the same — in San Francisco since the turn of the millennium. The book is about the dot-com boom the late 1990s and how it irreparably altered San Francisco’s cultural landscape and real estate market, focusing on the impact this had on the City’s creative class. Then, I wrote a dire Year in Review which forced me to elucidate a lot of the problems facing San Francisco in 2025. I felt caught in the middle of these two articles, in temporal opposition to each other, past and future — which is to say, I felt caught in the present. And the present often feels powerless.

What I can say is that San Francisco now feels very precarious. At least for the creative class and the arts writ-large. But it also seems that it has always felt that way. That isn’t comforting, per se, but it is enlightening. And knowing that art in San Francisco has always been embattled makes me more sure of my conviction in art — and San Francisco — than ever. It means something to me because it means something to history, and to the future. How to manage that in the present is the tightrope walk of time.

Which brings me back to slowness.

I finished Samanta Schweblin’s new-ish collection Good and Evil and Other Stories, which is probably her best stuff to date, and re-read Teju Cole’s novel Every Day is For the Thief, which I liked less than I did the first time I read it a decade ago. I also finished James Baldwin’s final novel Just Above My Head which was stunning. Easily a top three Baldwin novel for me — maybe top two (nothing can unseat Another Country). And you know how much of a Baldwin stan I am. Like, the guy can write no wrong. And this one is a hell of a swan song. Now I’m in that awkward position of not knowing what to read next. Of having to choose something I know won’t measure up to the last thing I read. But I did just pick up the Library of America’s Collected Essays of Baldwin so maybe I’m saved.

I didn’t watch as many movies as I would have liked last month (aside from the usual deluge of Christmas and airplane movies during holiday travel). Anna and I tried to watch Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis and barely made it halfway. It was my second attempt and there won’t be a third. That movie is bad. Like, incoherent. An embarrassment. I caught about two-thirds of The Fifth Element on TV last night, which is such a trashy, lovable flick. Watching more movies is one of my New Year’s resolutions.

But the New Year is already slipping by on the treadmill of time and I’m afraid that I’m already running to catch up.

I am back to working on my novel after an extended break. I started to feel anxious a few weeks into my time off, then got distracted by holiday travel, then started to feel anxious again towards the end. But my time away afforded me several insights into the first draft and I am returning to work on it with renewed energy. There are several big changes I need to implement, tectonic shifts in the structure, subtle alterations of character motivation, and I am trying to do as much as I can while this feeling of forward-momentum is with me.

While maintaining slowness.

Writing a novel is such an all-consuming endeavor, it is like living inside your work for months or years on end (in my case, years). But it is also like building the house while you live in it. Which is something like building the ship while you sail it but also when you change things — or things change unexpectedly — and things change a lot, it is so disorienting. I am finally finding my footing, my sea legs, the layout of the house, or whatever mixed metaphor you want to apply. I am coming home.

Until next time,

M

Max Blue: You’re not only in conversation with Ansel Adams but also Ed Hopper and Bay Area Figurative Movement painters like David Park. I think this comparison is not only stylistic but also conceptual and political. Hopper painting alienation related to the social and economic circumstances of his time feels impossible to divorce from the vibe of your paintings. How are you thinking about these things? I’m interested in this dialogue between the two eras.

Hiroshi Sato: There’s a shifting happening between the formal aspects of painting and the other aspects of art. What the Bay Area Figurative Movement did was understand that there was a shifting happening in the zeitgeist with abstraction coming to an end. And then they took that understanding in a new direction. I think they were pretty successful in how they moved on from that zeitgeist.

MB: To decide to make representational figurative paintings today feels like a very intentional choice in this historical moment. Can you tell me about this choice in direction?

HS: The Ashcan School painters were thinking of a universal visual language. Because we’re humans, representational imagery is the one that is de facto universal. That’s how we see the world. A representational object has an inherent context that’s embedded in it. When you see a cup, you innately understand what it’s for, what it does, even if the basic forms may be slightly different. That kind of trust that we are still living in that consensus reality, and by extension trust in representational imagery, is a language we can use as a thread. That’s why, even though Hopper was painting a long time ago, we can still understand and empathize with what a Hopper painting is doing almost instantaneously. That unmediated aspect is core to what art is and why it’s so powerful as an object in conveying information. In postmodernism, we started to shift ideas of art to being more like content and intellectual property, and the purely formal aspect became something more like branding. But that isn’t really what art is. Art is essentially a communication of shared experience. Now, the reasons why people are making art is more important than ever, because we live in a time of such mediated imagery. Everything you see online is going through a mediated source — a phone, an algorithm. Baudrillard was completely right! That is literally what is happening. It’s not theoretical anymore.

MB: Can you briefly break that idea down for me?

HS: Postmodernism is the cultural logic under late-stage capitalism. In that, we start to enter a media-oriented world, where we’re looking at simulations of things that create the signs and symbols that we in turn make into identity. By looking at symbols and signs in simulations, we start to prefer the simulation rather than the real. In hyperreality, our identity is completely gone and we’re only seeing the real in simulation. Hyperreality is a state that is more real than real. Baudrillard was theorizing what life would be like in postmodernism. Now we’ve lived all the way into the digital, cell-phone age, where the whole reality of your media consumption is completely curated and isolated by your own preferences and mediated by corporations. We’re all choosing our own realities and we prefer them over the real. We all know that. What I’m talking about isn’t novel or new. It’s literally what is apparent to us right now. But we need art to show historians in the future what it was like to be alive during this time.

MB: I want to call out a specific painting in the show which is “Panel 55.” It’s a woman’s face, partially obscured, and behind her are nautical flags. It feels like the most obvious painting in this most recent group of work that directly calls out some of the layered meanings you’re talking about and approaching. Talking about signs and symbols in Baudrillard — those are the most literal signs and symbols in the show. It feels like an invitation to viewers to engage with the work on a deeper level. Someone versed in that symbolic language could decode this painting, whereas someone who isn’t, can’t.

HS: In this isolated, curated reality we all live in, we have our own internal referents and language now. That’s what the internet kind of is. That’s also why another painting is titled “If You Know You Know.”That’s a pretty Internet based meme saying if you don’t know the reference, it’s too long to explain, but if you do, then you can’t unsee it. That is in itself how we’re experiencing the internet and each other’s connections. We’re all getting more isolated into smaller and smaller bubbles where we understand each other’s references or our cultures, but the other people outside of that bubble don’t. In the case of the Internet, a lot of information is third hand or could be wrong or the context is completely destroyed. There’s no knowing. Parsing the data or being overwhelmed by the data essentially is what it is now. These paintings each have a couple layers of “if you know you know.” I am constructing these paintings with people in the future in mind, hoping that they will be able to understand the references I’m making and understand what it’s actually depicting, more than the people in the now.

MB: You’re invested in a project of trying to take some physical lived experience back from the digital world. At the same time, the act of doing that involved being chronically online and painting that experience. that experience of the physical world is no longer wholly divorced from the experience of digital space now. You have an ouroboros of reality.

HS: There’s going to be so much obfuscation when people in the future try to look back to now. There’s so much of that interaction being muddled by bots and AI chat — how could you possibly sort through all of this information to have an accurate understanding of what’s happening now? That’s the problem I’m thinking about. I’m organizing these paintings with the visual references of representational imagery in order to make them a little bit easier to understand. I’m treating the representational as a veneer and a vehicle for what the paintings will mean in the future, obfuscating it on purpose to change the literalness of what people today are seeing it as.

MB: But on some level, these are just beautiful paintings. And that the veneer maybe is one of many layers of the work conceptually but also it can function on that level alone. And in doing so it carries with it a powerful political and cultural statement which is what it means to make a beautiful representational painting in the 21st century and to do so earnestly. Something I think about a lot, with the zombie formalism and cultural schlock that we deal with in the fine art world and online — let alone where those two places intersect, like NFTs — is just what it means to earnestly make art of any kind. I think that we’ve moved through postmodernism and arrived back at modernism as the most earnest exploration of the human mind in art that we saw in the 20th century. You could say that to be a modernist, representational painter in the 21st century is, in a way, a postmodern move. It’s postmodern to be a modernist. What does it mean politically, culturally — even emotionally — to recommit yourself to beauty?

HS: One of the main things I reference in this series of paintings is the documentary Hypernormalisation by Adam Curtis. In that film, what I thought was such a great observation that Curtis made was that postmodernist cynicism and the ironic distancing in postmodern art has made the artists become out of touch with reality. I think we all innately understand that we’re bored with that kind of out of touch-ness. there’s a starvation for sincerity, while even understanding the postmodernist ideas that everything has been done, there’s no monoculture or any of that. Completely serving capital in terms of how art is made is the understanding that it’s just content in that sense. A desire for art to be outside of being content is where I see the sincerity coming from. Everything is completely monetized and mediated by platforms, and we’re looking for something that doesn’t have that kind of value. to the degrees to which tech has monetized human interaction, I think we’re desiring that sincerity again. Who cares if it’s postmodern? We just want it. But because of the capture of market forces and the need to make a living, artists are stuck doing the same thing. I don’t see a lot of art that has shifted. You wouldn’t even know a pandemic happened just looking at their art.

MB: I think this is reflected in the market, too. We see art fairs and galleries that continue, again and again, to exhibit this kind of regressive, 2018 style work, and now the art market is collapsing because people don’t want to buy that work any more.

HS: You can see that in museum shows, too.

MB: One of the thematic threads in your work that is related is the idea of academic freedom and freedom of speech and expression as embattled on college campuses. I think a lot of these initiatives are incredibly earnest. And you see an administration — the college, the presidential administration — trying to snuff that out. That’s another kind of regressive desire.

HS: It’s all interconnected. Our world is so complicated, and in that complication it becomes difficult to disentangle each part. It’s so self-evident — the real, the not real, how we’re mediated. My paintings are also pretty literal. We’re at a point right now where there are so many things you can make art about in the present of what’s happening, I’m just trying to delegate. I’m one artist trying to make cohesive work. What I keep thinking about is, what are other artists doing with their work? Why is it that I’m doing this and not everybody else? Who are the ones being sincere?

MB: I think it was Jackson Pollock and the idea of the American avant-garde that set the precedent for the American art market and the premium that’s put in individualism. Something that you don’t see in art today is collectivism, the way you see that on college campuses.

HS: The hard part is, even if there was to be a collective art movement — in either direction — the question is, what is it going to be? We still can’t conceive of anything new or different. That’s where we’re stuck. And that’s another reason I think of these paintings as being for the people of the future. People in the future may have moved to that next stage. We’re not there yet in terms of art as a whole. We’re still stuck in pre-covid. What I’m doing as an artist is trying to say there’s something that’s the same happening. We all experienced the pandemic. That’s where I think people are starting to coalesce, understanding that there are still things that we can share. In the arts, I think there has to be a move towards that. There is actually a shared aspect to art. That’s starting to take shape, but we don’t know the size of it yet. People consciously starting to think about this over time is the only way it starts moving in a more collective direction.

MB: I want to ask you about another piece in the show, “The Art Department.” It can be read either as a really bleak picture of the end of arts education in this country or as art as the thing that is literally the light in the darkness. Or, it’s both at once. Which side do you fall on? Is art the light in the darkness? Or something that can only be born out of its own death and has to be reinvented?

HS: One thing I love about San Francisco is that there are so many artists here and they’re all so different. I fall on the side of a little bit of hope. In terms of everything becoming data and becoming captured by capital, we’re starting to see people thirst over the idea of art. The idea of a thing that is not created for consumption only is something that is on a lot of people’s minds. San Francisco is one of those places where that’s being thought about in the local arts movements.

MB: I appreciate that more temperate attitude of “a little bit of hope.” Maybe a little bit of hope can be enough.

HS: And the future isn’t written yet. It depends on what artists are going to do going forward. What are younger artists going to make going forward? In that way, it’s not on me at all. It’s on them, it’s on the future.

I’ve noticed that I always start these newsletters by talking about the weather. Maybe it’s the socially anxious side of myself, used to falling back on small-talk to breach a silence or quell an awkward lull in conversation. But also, it has been really, really cold in San Francisco for the past few weeks. Like, more cold than seems normal. Everyone is talking about it.

I’m staying warm in the usual way by looking at art and staying inside to write. This past month, I reviewed the quiet and lyrical Lenka Clayton show at Catharine Clark, and, controversially, the KAWS survey at SFMOMA. I got a lot of online traction for that one which, I think, has less to do with my stance (negative) and more to do with the unimaginable popularity of Brian Donnelly’s KAWS project itself.

In my review, I argued that not only is Donnelly’s art banal and bad, but that it’s banality and badness is precisely what makes it so insidious. It’s the perfect sort of traveling show for SFMOMA to mount, not only because they’re obviously desperate to drive ticket sales, but also because it placates the kind of politically unobtrusive, commercial tastes of the Bay Area’s ruling class — art for the tech bro era.

Pushback to the piece has come in two forms: people who are just happy to see kids and families at the museum who otherwise might not go (why is slop the only thing that gets people through the doors and why should we accept that as fact?) and people who seem to evangelize Donnelly for succeeding on his own terms as an art world outsider. The latter camp aren’t necessarily tech bros (mostly, they seem like aspiring artists and graffiti writers) but their attitude shares an uncanny resemblance to one we see a lot in tech bro culture: stanning someone just because they made a lot of money and maybe have a little bit of an outsider narrative.

Almost none of these “outsider” figures are really as outside as they seem — San Francisco’s mayor, Daniel Lurie, ran on an “outsider” platform and, sure, he didn’t have political experience (yikes) but he did have a massive net worth. Same with Trump. Early in his career, Donnelly parleyed his street art beginnings into brand deals with Japanese toy and clothing companies, licensing himself into millions. With that kind of cash and influence, how “outside” can you be?

But cultural capitulation to tech elites seems to be the way San Francisco is going right now. Public art in the City has been on the skids all year, since the Arts Commission okayed a tech billionaire to litter the landscape with 100 “large-scale artworks” — mostly leftovers from Burning Man. It’s a real bad look, and a clearly corporate move to try to culture wash the City with the most inane and fascistic stuff. I took the time to synthesize some of my thoughts around this public art fiasco in an essay for SF/Arts and posit some ideas about what might make a good piece of public art.

In good news, I also wrote a sweet little story about my archivist friends who are keeping the spirit of the San Francisco Art Institute alive in a basement on Hawthorne Street. And, if you live in the Bay Area and you’re looking for a guide to local galleries this winter, look no further. Not mentioned, but absolutely required viewing: Manet & Morisot at the Legion of Honor.

I am still struggling to read Catherine Lacy’s Biography of X. Actually, that isn’t true. I’ve stopped reading it altogether. I am still reading Saint Augustine’s Confessions, which I like for reasons that probably have to do with the way I like to fantasize about being religious, the devotion of it all. Also, I read Susanna Clark’s Piranesi (which, at first, I extremely disliked — I know, unpopular opinion – and in the end only sort of enjoyed for its Borges and Lovecraft influences) and re-read Garth Greenwell’s absolute banger of a debut novel What Belongs to You. Maybe I’ll go back to Lacy now, just to put this thing behind me before the year ends. But I’ve already started James Baldwin’s Just Above My Head and Samanta Schweblin’s Good and Evil, so that seems unlikely.

I have pretty much taken the month off from working on my novel. At first, this felt very good and refreshing. But as the month has worn on, not touching my manuscript has been wearing on me. I have a hard time taking breaks and actually believing in my own need to recharge. The whole thing about resting before you burn out so that you don’t burn out instead of resting once you’re already burnt out? Well, I have a hard time resting even when I am burnt out. But I forced myself to put the manuscript away. And I’m not sure I was resting, really — I had plenty of other stuff going on — but I was letting my manuscript rest. And now that I’ve started working on it again, I can say that doing that has already made it a better book. We needed some time apart from each other.

With this new round of revision, I am trying to find my way back into the ascetic mode of writing, which is not a mode that I was in when I was last working on my novel, or have been in for, like, years. And I really miss it. What I mean by this is, a mode of writing that is very all-consuming. Or a mode of living that is writing focused. Now, I’m sure you’re like, this guy writes for a living, and you would be correct and that is precisely why this distinction is necessary. (Also, I am pretty much writing this part for myself because I need to think this through so feel free to stop reading if you want to.)

Like I said, I’ve been reading Augustine’s Confessions and he has this very famous line about coming to love God too late.

“Too late came I to love you, O Beauty both so ancient and so new! Too late came I to love you — and behold you were with me all the time.”

Now, I’m an atheist, but like many artists, I’ve flirted with the allure of religion my whole adult life. The idea of an organizing principal is very attractive in contrast with the disorder of a creative life. Like I said before, I think I flirt with the idea of that kind of devotion. But not because I wish it was a devotion I had for God or Buddha or whatever. It’s the kind of devotion I wish I had for my art. Always, when I return to writing, I have the feeling of coming too late to love my art, only to beg forgiveness for my absence, praying that my God — my art — will let me back into the flock, into the warm embrace of creative passion.

So the only way to avoid this kind of sinner’s remorse is, I think, to maintain a more regular, ascetic regimen. To read more books. To write when I don’t feel like it. To do my fucking morning pages. But that is really hard to do with things like a job and friendships and the news and video games vying for my attention. Minor sins, perhaps, but sins against my devotion none the less. But then I am reminded that Augustine loved to sin, too. So at least I’m in pretty good company.

Until next time.

– M

This week marks my tenth year of sobriety. My sobriety isn’t something I talk about very often, much less write about. While some people have made whole careers out of being sober, it has always been a deeply personal thing for me, a covenant with myself that doesn’t include anyone else. I never went through rehab or the twelve steps. I never wanted to be the kind of sober person who stands on their soapbox and proselytizes people at parties or concerts, even if I do think the world would be a better place with less substance use in it. Another reason I rarely discuss my sobriety — and this has become truer in the last half of my sober decade — is that I hardly ever think about it. I know this isn’t true for all sober people, and I feel immensely lucky that, after a while, the once omnipresent nag of dependance has faded into silence. But on the occasion of this milestone, I decided to spend some time reflecting on my journey.

You can tell from the title that this story has something to do with music. As in all other parts of my life, art was one of the biggest catalysts for my sobriety. Music, specifically punk and hardcore music, was my gateway into sobriety. And it has been the thing that has kept me here, over all these years. As in all other parts of my life, art has been the greatest source of hope in the dark, a comfort in one of the the places where I have felt isolation.

Before getting sober, I spent about half a decade under one influence or another. I think there was a period of almost three consecutive years when I was stoned every waking moment of every day. Still, you could say I got off pretty easy: I never shot up, I never got seriously hooked on opiates or did an excess or powdered drugs. All things that people I knew certainly did. I just smoked weed all day, every day, drank too much sometimes, and dabbled liberally in psychedelics. I certainly wasn’t alone in this lifestyle. Growing up in Northern California — maybe anywhere — getting fucked up is a pretty common way to socialize and pass the time. But it was enough to make my life pretty miserable.

I remember the first time I heard the term straight edge, at an AFI show in Santa Cruz, California. I was smoking a blunt on the fringes of the mosh pit. When I offered a drag to a tall guy with a mohawk, he declined politely and told me he was straight edge, crossing his arms dramatically over his chest in a large X. I was fourteen or fifteen and I don’t think he was much older. Certainly not legal drinking age. AFI had already been my favorite band for a few years by then and I had known that some of the members were vegan, but I had not known that some of them were also straight edge and I didn’t really know what it meant. I had to look it up later.

Straight edge is a sober lifestyle with roots in the hardcore punk music scene. It emphasizes living drug free not only as a commitment to personal health but also, often, radical politics. the movement got its start, somewhat incongruously, when Minor Threat frontman Ian MacKaye wrote the song “Straight Edge,” which was more about personal choice than starting a movement, the refrain of the song a chant of the affirmation “I’ve got straight edge.” But it resonated with people. I don’t remember what I thought of straight edge when I first encountered it, but I probably thought that it was a little bit pretentious or cool but not for me. I certainly didn’t possess any sort of admiration for it. And I still don’t, really. Today, my straight edge is routine, an incidental fact about myself, like what I ate for breakfast.

That’s what getting high had been like, too. By the middle of college, I was sick of it, aware that I was well beyond the point of fun, teetering on full-blown addiction. I was also aware that most of my social interaction was held together by substance use, something that became even more apparent when I got clean and lost several friends. I was also falling in love with art history and was aware that my academic work suffered from my mental state. Something told me to get out while I still could. So, I made a birthday resolution to get sober, smoked all the weed I had, went to a bar and blacked out. And I’ve been sober ever since.

I had three ways of coping when I first got clean. First, I played God of War: Chains of Olympus on my PlayStation Portable to distract me every time I had the urge to get fucked up (I think I beat it three times). This got me through the first, desolate weeks. Second, every time I would have bought alcohol or drugs, I put that money in a jar. When the jar was full, I used the money to get tattooed. Third, I started seeking out and listening to straight edge bands.

I’m pretty sure one of the most important things in human life — if not the single most important thing — is to not feel alone. Getting high had given me a community, however tenuous. When I got sober, that community vanished. But art was there for me, as it has been through every difficult passage of my life. And nothing quite beats the catharsis of music, especially, perhaps, punk music, with its emphasis on politics and social commentary, raspy singalongs and crowded rooms of like-minded individuals.

Maybe the seed of straight edge had been planted in my mind at that AFI concert. But unlike AFI, the straight edge bands I started listening to carried the message as a forward part of their identity. The singers wrote X’s on the backs of their hands with sharpie for the live photos on the covers of their records, they shouted about sobriety and living drug free. Records by bands like Bane, Have Heart, Insist, Peace, Praise, Refused, Shelter, Stick to Your Guns and True Love, showed me that there was another way to live and, like the best art, the art that stays with us forever, reminded me that I was not alone.

As I’ve gotten older, the isolation of my sobriety has worn away. It isn’t that more people around me are sober, but that I’ve rebuilt my social circle to not include addicts and, the older you get, less people care. The further you get from your early-twenties, the less and less drugs and alcohol are major social lubricants. People just don’t notice if you don’t drink or do drugs and if they do notice, it’s usually because they themselves have an addiction. I used to be worried about how my sobriety would affect people’s perception of me, the odd one out. But as I’ve gotten more comfortable in my skin, I’ve also gotten more comfortable in my sobriety. I don’t need anyone’s approval. I’ve got straight edge.

Straight edge is something no one can quite define. Even Ian MacKaye has never posed a clear definition, other than that it’s about being “out of step” with the rest of society. Straight edge means a lot of things to me. It’s made the life of the mind easier to live, since my mind is always clear. It’s helped me to be more attuned to my emotions, which helps a great deal with writing fiction, which is essentially a process of putting emotions into words. Don’t buy what any number of old boys have said about writing while drunk. It won’t work. Being sober has forced me to sit in the discomfort of low-grade melancholy and anxiety that is my basic emotional state. And learning to sit in that discomfort has made sitting in other kinds of discomfort — like that of creative uncertainty — a little bit easier. But it also means that when I feel joy, I know that it’s earned, not the effect of some numbing substance.

Straight edge, like writing, like art, has been a part of my search for authentic meaning in a very confusing and convoluted world. Hardcore music, like all of my favorite art forms, is nothing if not earnest — raw, brutal, honest. It is expression by any means necessary, often musically novice but emotionally adept. And that’s what matters, I think: feeling something, anything — or everything — all the time. Certainly, the best art, to me, is a desperate act of communication, an urgent cry from one human to another, signaling that something overwhelming has occurred inside them, and inviting the other to join in.

This year’s time change has hit me hard. I have been on the back foot all month, furiously trying to keep pace with an overwhelming work schedule and the final push of completing a first draft of my novel. I love fall and winter, cold and dark. Well, I love being cozy and warm while it is cold and dark outside. And this year, I have been in the streets after dark for all sorts of reasons – art shows, yoga class, social engagements – and that just won’t work for me. No more! From here on out I’m hibernating. If you don’t see me around until Spring, now you know why.

One thing that kept me out well past my bedtime was a trek to Oakland last week to see my favorite band, AFI. They have a new album out that is stolid and goth in ways the band has never quite achieved before. It’s my favorite of their albums since Decemberunderground but I definitely don’t love it like I love the old stuff, the songs that raised me. But not to worry, because they mostly played old stuff — including a few tunes for the first time since the ‘90s, which even predates my time loving the band. Needless to say, this was a big night for me. Like what I imagine going to church is like for some other people.

Over the last month or so, I reviewed Oliver Lee Jackson’s solo show at Rena Bransten and Hiroshi Sato’s solo show at the Barbara D. Goodman Gallery at Dominican University. I also wrote two deep-dives, one on San Francisco’s ongoing public art fiasco and another on the current state of the local art market, which seems dire.

Gallery 16 closed a couple months ago, Altman Siegel is closing, and Rena Bransten is opting for nomadic model. The art market is pressed in ways it seemingly has not been in the last, well, maybe ever? Some of these galleries are half a century old. I don’t buy the idea that the gallery model is outdated, but I do think the art market is confronting unprecedented coincidence of circumstances.

The moneyed class of a generation that benefited from arts education is aging out. Young people with money — at least those in San Francisco — seem more interested in experiences than objects. And tech investors are so enfranchised in start-up culture that the only use they see for their money is to reinvest it in the same business models that got them rich in the first place, lacking the long-tail vision for investment in fine art. I don’t know if any of that’s true, but it feels right, and my Substack is a place for my feelings, not my journalism. Still, it’s worrisome to see galleries go away. I’ve always thought of galleries as free miniature museums financially supported a small subset of their visitor-ship. Maybe more people need to buy art, maybe more art needs to be more affordable, maybe art should be free regardless.

During Halloween week, I had the overzealous ambition of watching a different scary movie every night, but I kept falling asleep on the couch within fifteen minutes. In the end, I only got through two movies. The first was Nia DaCosta’s 2021 Candyman reboot and the other was Guillermo del Toro’s 2015 gothic romance Crimson Peak. I thought Candyman was mostly fun, but spent a little bit too much time re-litigating the events of the previous movies. I also saw del Toro’s new Frankenstein in theaters (now streaming on Netflix), which is what inspired me to watch Crimson Peak, the only del Toro film I had otherwise not yet seen. It was also pretty good, though not my favorite, and Frankenstein is certainly better, though still nothing touches Pan’s Labyrinth or The Shape of Water. I rallied on Halloween and watched both Nightmare Before Christmas (which is my favorite movie, for those of you who don’t know) and Beetlejuice. Not scary, per se, but in the spirit.

Over the least few weeks, I devoured Brandon Taylor’s new novel Minor Black Figures. It’s so thoroughly good. I am still barely reading Catherine Lacy’s Biography of X. I dislike it for reasons I would have to read more of it in order to properly articulate, which is annoying. Instead, I read Kate Zambreno’s recent essay collection Animal Stories and Nnedi Okorofor’s sci-fi masterpiece The Death of the Author, as well as Robin Coste Lewis’s Archive of Desire, an effervescent book-length poem on queerness and Constantine Cavafy. I am currently reading Saint Augustine’s Confessions, Rebeeca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg’s Hollow City and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur which is an absolutely wild book. Despite being a lifelong fan of the Arthurian legends I had never actually picked up the source material until now and, honestly, unpacking what I’ve discovered might require its whole own Substack post.

Also, I finished a draft of my novel. I haven’t had this feeling in years. It is bittersweet. I wrote a novel for my MFA thesis which you will never read and another, shorter book during the pandemic. But neither of those books were as well constructed as this one is so far. I have learned a lot so far writing it. Simple things, too, obvious things. Maybe I learned these things along the way and forgot them, but even so, the process of writing this draft has been clarifying.

These are some things I learned: Characters enter scenes with motivations and everything they do in that scene is a product of those motivations; A chapter is determined by a minor arc, a shift in one or more characters position; The novel, as a form, is all about movement, about getting characters from one place to another. These are a few things I’ll be keeping in mind when I start drafting my next novel (yes, I already have ideas), and they might be good things to keep in mind if you’re writing a novel, too.

Anyway, this time the feeling of relief that comes with completing a draft of this novel is unspeakably enormous. It felt like my whole body exhaled when I shut my laptop on Sunday after pushing through a full weekend of writing. That’s because this draft took so long to write and changed so much along the way. It is mostly unrecognizable as a continuation of the original project, similar in ways that I’m sure are only apparent to me. I like seeing how far the project has come, but I’m glad no one else ever will. I think it is in the best shape it has been so far, well worth all the long hours, and with many more ahead.

Until next time.

– M