Cinemorphosis

Category: philosophy

  • Smoke, Sheets, and the Spectacle of Faith

    Smoke, Sheets, and the Spectacle of Faith

    This morning, I was deep in the ritual of pre-cleaning for the cleaning ladies. Yes, the Marías—both of them named Maria, as if summoned from a 1960s sitcom or a Vatican registry. I was stripping beds, scrubbing dishes, and hoisting laundry baskets like I was auditioning for a domestic CrossFit competition. Because as every self-deluded homeowner knows: your house must be cleaned before the cleaners arrive, lest they judge you and your sloth.

    In the background, Larry Mantle’s AirTalk droned dutifully on LAist 89.3. Then, mid-sentence, the broadcast was interrupted—an old-school news bulletin, the kind that makes you expect a war or a celebrity scandal. But no. Something rarer: a new pope had been chosen. The signal? White smoke rising from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel.

    I had never heard of this protocol before. My first thought? Not theology. Not history. But the shared aesthetic DNA between this and the Golden Globes. The Oscars. The artificial wonder of Peter Pan’s Flight at Disneyland. If you want transcendence, baby, you’d better stage it.

    The Catholic Church, whatever its flaws, understands showmanship. They know airtight theological arguments are no match for spectacle. You don’t capture the masses with hermeneutics—you hook them with enchantment. Thus: white smoke. Bells. Angels singing in Dolby surround. The Vatican doesn’t inform you a pope’s been picked. They stage it like a cosmic halftime show.

    Religion, in its enduring wisdom, knows austerity is a losing brand. Dry dogma doesn’t sell. You need magic. Mystery. A sense that the universe has backstage lighting and a fog machine.

    Because man does not live on bread alone.

    No, man also lives on bells, incense, pageantry, and the theatrical flourish of divine appointment announced via rooftop smoke signals. What’s the metaphysical takeaway? That God, like Hollywood, knows how to build suspense.

  • The Design Space Is Shrinking: How A.I. Trains Us to Stop Trying

    The Design Space Is Shrinking: How A.I. Trains Us to Stop Trying

    New Yorker writer Joshua Rothman asks the question that haunts every creative in the age of algorithmic assistance: Why even try if A.I. can do it for you?
     His essay  “Why Even Try If You Have A.I.?”unpacks a cultural crossroads: we can be passive passengers on an automated flight to mediocrity, or we can grab the yoke, face the headwinds, and fly the damn plane ourselves. The latter takes effort and agency. The former? Just surrender, recline your seat, and trust the software.

    Rothman begins with a deceptively simple truth: human excellence is born through repetition and variation. Take a piano sonata. Play it every day and it evolves—new inflections emerge, tempo shifts, harmonies stretch and bend. The music becomes yours not because it’s perfect, but because it’s lived. This principle holds across any discipline: cooking, lifting, writing, woodworking, improv jazz. The point isn’t to chase perfection, but to expand what engineers call your “design space”—the evolving terrain of mastery passed from one generation to the next. It’s how we adapt, create, and flourish. Variation, not polish, is the currency of human survival.

    A.I. disrupts that process. Not through catastrophe, but convenience. It lifts the burden of repetition, which sounds like mercy, but may be slow annihilation. Why wrestle with phrasing when a chatbot can generate ten variations in a second? Why compose from scratch when you can scroll through synthetic riffs until one sounds “good enough”? At some point, you’re not a creator—you’re a casting agent, auditioning content for a machine-written reality show.

    This is the creep of A.I.—not Terminator-style annihilation, but frictionless delegation.
    Repetition gets replaced by selection. Cognitive strain is erased. The design space—the sacred ground of human flourishing—gets paved over with one-size-fits-all templates. And we love it, because it’s easy.

    Take car shopping. Do I really want to endure a gauntlet of slick-haired salesmen and endless test drives? Or would I rather ask ChatGPT to confirm what I already believe—that the 2025 Honda Accord Hybrid Touring is the best sedan under 40K, and that metallic eggshell is obviously the right color for my soulful-but-sensible lifestyle?
    A.I. doesn’t challenge me. It affirms me, reflects me, flatters me. That’s the trap.

    But here’s where I resist: I’m 63, and I still train like a lunatic in my garage with kettlebells five days a week. No algorithm writes my workouts. I improvise like a jazz drummer on creatine—Workout A (heavy), Workout B (medium), Workout C (light). It’s messy, adaptive, and real. I rely on sweat, not suggestions. Pain is the feedback loop. Soreness is the algorithm.

    Same goes for piano. Every day, I sit and play. Some pieces have taken a decade to shape. A.I. can’t help here—not meaningfully. Because writing music isn’t about what works. It’s about what moves. And that takes time. Revision. Tension. Discomfort.

    That said, I’ve made peace with the fact that A.I. is to writing what steroids are to a bodybuilder. I like to think I’ve got a decent handle on rhetoric—my tone, my voice, my structure, my knack for crafting an argument. But let’s not kid ourselves: I’ve run my prose against ChatGPT, and in more than a few rounds, it’s left me eating dust. Without A.I., I’m a natural bodybuilder—posing clean, proud, and underwhelming. With A.I., I’m a chemically enhanced colossus, veins bulging with metaphor and syntax so tight it could cut glass. In the literary arena, if the choice is between my authentic, mortal self and the algorithmic beast? Hand me the syringe. I’ll flex with the machine.

    Still, I know the difference. And knowing the difference is everything.

  • If You Only Watch One Black Mirror episode, Let It Be “Joan Is Awful”

    If You Only Watch One Black Mirror episode, Let It Be “Joan Is Awful”

    If you only watch one episode of Black Mirror, let it be Joan Is Awful—especially if you have a low tolerance for tech-dystopian fever dreams involving eye-implants, social scores, or digital consciousness uploaded to bees. This one doesn’t take place in a dark tomorrow—it’s about the pathology of right now. It skewers the Curated Era we already live in, where selfhood has been gamified, privacy is casually torched, and we’re all trapped in the compulsion to turn our lives into content—often awful, but clickable content.

    Joan, the title character, is painfully ordinary: a mid-level tech worker trying to swap out one man (her manic ex) for another (her milquetoast fiancé) and coast into a life of retail therapy and artisanal beverages. Her existence—Instagrammable, calibrated, aggressively average—is exactly the kind of raw material the in-universe Netflix clone Streamberry is looking for. They turn her life into a show called “Joan Is Awful,” starring a CGI deepfake Salma Hayek version of Joan, who reenacts her life with heightened melodrama and algorithmically-optimized awfulness.

    This isn’t speculative fiction. It’s just fiction.
    Streamberry’s vision of a personalized show for everyone—one that amplifies your worst traits and pushes them out for mass consumption—is barely an exaggeration of what Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are already doing. We’ve all become our own showrunners, stylists, and publicists. Every TikTok tantrum and curated dinner plate is an audition for relevance, and the platforms reward us for veering into the grotesque. The more unhinged you become, the more “engagement” you earn.

    “Joan Is Awful” works both as a laugh-out-loud satire and as a metaphysical gut-punch. It invites us to contemplate the slippery nature of selfhood under surveillance capitalism. At its core is the concept of “Fiction Level 1”: the dramatized version of Joan’s life generated by AI, crafted from data scraped from her phone, her apps, her browsing history. Joan doesn’t write the script. She doesn’t even get to protest. She’s just the original dataset—fodder for narrative extraction. Her real self is mined, exaggerated, and repackaged for mass appeal.

    Sound familiar?

    In the real world, we all star in our own low-budget version of “Joan Is Awful,” plastered across social media feeds. These platforms don’t need deepfakes. We willingly create them, editing ourselves into marketable parodies. We offer up a polished persona while our actual selves starve for air—authenticity traded for audience, spontaneity traded for algorithmic approval.

    You can enjoy “Joan Is Awful” as slick satire or you can unpack its metafictional mind games—it rewards both approaches. Either way, it’s easily one of Black Mirror’s top-tier episodes, alongside “Nosedive,” “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too,” and “Smithereens.” It’s not science fiction. It’s just a very well-lit mirror.

  • Why I Refuse to Journal Like a Good Little Introvert

    Why I Refuse to Journal Like a Good Little Introvert

    One of my most cherished moments of accidental transcendence happened somewhere between the cow-scented fields of Bakersfield and the fog-choked sprawl of San Francisco in the spring of 1990. I was climbing the Altamont Pass in a battered 1982 Toyota Tercel that handled like a shopping cart when The Sundays’ “Here’s Where the Story Ends” crackled to life on the radio. Harriet Wheeler’s voice—equal parts cathedral and confession booth—floated through the speakers, and suddenly I wasn’t commuting through California; I was levitating above it. I wasn’t driving—I was ascending. In that moment, I stumbled into something bigger than myself, gifted by two Brits, David Gavurin and his partner Wheeler, who recorded their luminous dispatches, then vanished from the stage like saints escaping the tabloid apocalypse.

    They made beauty, and then they walked away. No farewell tour, no social media mea culpas, no sad attempts at reinvention. Just a few perfect songs and the audacity to say, that’s enough. They’re my heroes—not for what they did, but for what they didn’t do. They resisted the narcotic of attention. They said no to the stage and yes to obscurity, which in our fame-gluttonous culture is the moral equivalent of monkhood.

    I, by contrast, never quite shut up.

    I’ve been peddling stories since high school, where I’d hold court at lunch tables, unspooling feverish tales of misadventure like a cracked-out bard. At 63, I still haven’t kicked the habit. But unlike the craven influencer class, I hope I’m not just hustling dopamine hits. I tell stories because I need to make sense of this deranged carnival we call modern life. It’s an instinct, like blinking or checking the fridge when you’re not even hungry.

    Some stories are survival tools disguised as art. Viktor Frankl wrote to preserve his sanity in a death camp. Phil Stutz prescribes narrative like medicine. And when I hear a brilliant podcaster dissect the absurdity of daily life, it feels like eavesdropping on salvation. It’s not just performance—it’s connection. Human beings, after all, are just gossiping apes trying to explain why the hell we’re here.

    Storytelling is the futile, glorious act of forcing chaos into coherence. It’s pinning butterflies to corkboard. Life is all noise—emails, funerals, fast food, missed calls—and stories give it a beat, a structure, a moral, even if it’s just “don’t marry a narcissist” or “never trust a man who wears sandals to a job interview.”

    So why not keep it to myself? Why not scribble in a journal and hide it in the sock drawer next to my failed dreams and mismatched batteries? Because I find journaling about as appealing as listening to my own Spotify playlist on repeat in a sensory deprivation tank. No thanks. I don’t want to be alone with my curated echo chamber. I want a café. A digital one, maybe, with only a few scattered patrons. But still—voices, questions, and the hum of others trying to make sense of it all.

    I’ll never be famous. I’ll never go viral. But if someone reads my ramblings and thinks, me too—then that’s enough. I’m not trying to be an algorithm’s golden child. I’m just trying to find some order in the mess. Just like I always have.

  • New Yorker’s Remorse Syndrome

    New Yorker’s Remorse Syndrome

    It’s a charming form of cosplay, really — striding around as a “well-informed citizen” while sinking ungodly hours into consumer research. Watches, radios, headphones, laptops, Chromebooks, mechanical keyboards, high-end sweatshirts, orthopedic luxury sneakers, protein powders, protein bars, athletic-grade water bottles — an entire temple of optimized living, curated with clerical devotion.

    Meanwhile, out in the real world, society is fraying like an ancient flag in a hurricane. Yeats’ prophecy is no longer a chilling warning — it’s a project status update.
    The center isn’t holding. The center left the chat months ago.
    But instead of reckoning with the slow dissolve of civil society, it’s so much easier, so much kinder to the blood pressure, to compare toaster ovens with touchless air fryer settings.

    Yes, yes, I know — one must be informed. George Carlin gave us front-row tickets to the Freak Show. We owe it to the species, or at least to our own dim dignity, to bear witness.
    But honestly? Some days, it feels like sanity demands partial withdrawal. A news podcast here. A curated briefing there. Enough to feign civic engagement at parties without having to call a therapist immediately afterward.

    This brings me to the shrine of guilt at the center of my living room: the great, unread New Yorker stack.
    I have subscribed since 1985, back when Reagan was doing his best kingly impression and nobody had heard of an iPhone.
    The stack now functions less as reading material and more as a kind of grim altar — a silent accusation in glossy print.
    Friends glance at it and nod approvingly, as if my very possession of these magazines implies moral seriousness.
    I let them believe.
    Inside, I know better.
    I know that I am a fallen monk, a heretic of intellectual duty, choosing the velvet lure of consumer escapism over the weighty gospels of sociopolitical collapse.

    I have a diagnosis: New Yorker’s Remorse Syndrome — a condition in which one publicly performs allegiance to Enlightenment values while privately seeking refuge among comparison charts and Amazon star ratings.
    The mind knows what it ought to do.
    The heart, however, prefers shopping for the perfect water bottle while Rome burns quietly in the background.

  • Writing a Blog in the Performative Hangover Era

    Writing a Blog in the Performative Hangover Era

    For over a decade, I ran a YouTube channel — a modest operation born in my late forties. Calling it a channel might be too grand: there were no edits, no soundtracks, no backgrounds, no clever image inserts. Just me, my watches, and a stubborn refusal to pretend I knew anything about video production. It was, in essence, a podcast that forgot it was supposed to be seen.

    I built a small but loyal audience — over 10,000 subscribers, steady commenters, familiar names. Within the narrow but fervent watch community, I was a known entity: a man chronicling the eternal scuffle with watch addiction.

    But now, staring down my sixty-fourth birthday this October, I’m stepping away — and not with a heavy heart, but with something closer to relief.

    First, I have no desire to become an influencer. The idea of monetizing my channel, hawking brands I barely tolerate, feels as alien as joining a boy band at my age. Second, I have zero interest in learning the sacred arts of Final Cut Pro wizardry. The polished, professional YouTuber life was never my ambition. Third — and most importantly — the fire that once drove me is gone. And good riddance. Fire, in my case, has always been another word for addiction — the old need for validation, the parasocial buzz of comment sections and endless watch chatter. I don’t want the fire back. I want peace.

    Does this retreat from YouTube mean a pivot to podcasting?
    No.
    I’m not looking for a new mirror in which to admire or define myself. I don’t need the hustle of relevance, or the 3 a.m. panic about subscriber counts. A podcast requires not just a theme but conviction — a genuine need to say something the world hasn’t already heard. Right now, my life is full of smaller, quieter things: amateur piano practice, kettlebell workouts in my garage, a general interest in health and fitness. None of these scream “launch a weekly show.”

    Sure, I could bang out a fitness video for people over fifty — it would take thirty seconds: Stay active, love people, eat real food, prioritize protein, lay off the booze. There, fitness empire built.
    But combing through the absurdly granular debates of the diet-industrial complex? No thanks.

    Truthfully, most social media feels unbearable to me now — bloated with performative sincerity, vibrating with empty gestures. I’m done performing. Like many, I have full-blown social media fatigue.

    And then there’s the nagging ghost of my old literary ambitions — the dream of publishing memoir, fiction, or some slippery hybrid of the two, the sort of “autofiction” the novelist Emmanuel Carrère perfected. That ghost finds me now, not on YouTube, not on a podcast, but on my blog.

    The blog is where I now quietly reign.
    Not as a digital emperor counting clicks, but as a stubborn craftsman hacking away at the weeds of complacency. I don’t know if my writing will “take off” or “storm the world.” I only know it helps me process the madness, fight entropy, and stay alert to the real battle — the one against mindless consumerism and numbing repetition.

    So here I am, in what I suppose I could call the next chapter.
    The Performative Hangover Years.
    The Post-COVID Malaise.
    The Be Brave in Your Sixties Project.

    I’ll get back to you with the final title once I’ve lived it a little longer.

  • Velvet Fists: Sentimentality, Violence, and the Lie of the Crappy Love Song

    Velvet Fists: Sentimentality, Violence, and the Lie of the Crappy Love Song

    In the early ’90s, screenwriter Dennis Potter—whose haunting 1980 film Blade on a Feather once grabbed my imagination by the throat—sat across from Charlie Rose, passionately defending one of humanity’s most derided cultural artifacts: the “crappy love song.”

    Potter’s argument was simple and oddly noble:
    In a world where we grovel like pigs at the trough of materialism, even the cheesiest love ballad points, however clumsily, toward something higher—a yearning for transformative love, the kind that rattles the soul and redeems our miserable existence.
    And that, Potter insisted, should be celebrated, not sneered at.

    I see his point.
    But I can’t quite choke it down.

    What happens when the music is even crasser than life itself?
    Forgive the offense, but Kenny G springs to mind—a man whose saxophone emits what can only be described as the ambient soundtrack of lobotomized love.
    Millions swoon to his treacly squeals, convinced they’re tasting transcendence.
    But what they’re really swallowing is sentimentality in its most lethal form: syrupy, infantilizing, and vaguely unhinged.

    While I love Potter for wanting to defend the human need for transcendent emotion, I can’t ignore the underlying rot.
    These “crappy love songs,” much like Kenny G’s ambient anesthesia, often peddle not real love, but an emotionally stunted counterfeit—sentimentality, a soft mask stretched tight over something far uglier.

    Sentimentality terrifies me because it is not benign.
    It is childish emotion weaponized.
    It is the refusal to mature, to engage with the complicated ambiguities of real love, real pain, real life.
    And because these stunted feelings are defended with the ferocity of a cornered child, sentimentality often harbors its dark twin: violence.

    Saul Bellow, with his characteristic unsparing clarity in Herzog, nailed it:
    It’s the most sentimental people who are the most violent.

    Why?
    Because sentimentality is a velvet carpet stretched precariously over a tiger’s claw.
    It’s the illusion of sweetness clinging desperately to a subterranean rage—the rage of people who cannot tolerate having their fragile, maudlin dreams challenged.
    To question sentimentality is to trigger a defensive violence, a panicked fury at the idea that real adulthood demands something sterner, braver, and infinitely less sweet.

    So no, Dennis Potter, I can’t fully join you in your defense of the crappy love song.
    Because too often, beneath that soaring key change and saccharine lyric, I hear not the longing for transcendent love—
    but the faint, snarling growl of a soul that refuses to grow up.

  • The Postcard Life: Why Perfection Always Rings Hollow

    The Postcard Life: Why Perfection Always Rings Hollow

    I can’t shake an interview I heard thirty years ago—an offhand confession that stuck to me like burrs on a wool coat.
    Terry Gilliam, the Monty Python animator turned fever-dream film director, was talking with Charlie Rose. Gilliam described a moment straight from a high school dream: he was walking the Santa Monica Pier on a twilight evening, a beautiful woman on his arm, the beach shimmering under a dying sun. It was the kind of moment that screams You’ve Made It! if you’ve ever been a teenage boy with a tragic imagination.

    And yet, Gilliam said, he felt nothing. Not euphoria. Not awe. Just… flatness. Like he wasn’t even in his own life but rather trapped inside one of his own cartoons—a two-dimensional fantasy drawn by someone who had seen too many movies and lived too little.
    That was his grim epiphany: we don’t chase life—we chase the idea of it.

    Gilliam’s teenage dream had come true, but it rang hollow because it wasn’t connection he had caught. It was a postcard of connection, a lifeless image polished smooth by years of expectation.

    I’ve thought about that moment a lot, especially in the slow burns of my own life, in all the arenas where the blueprint of perfection crashed hard against the walls of reality.
    Take teaching: I’ve taught college writing for forty years. More times than I care to admit, I walked into class with what I believed was a masterstroke of a lesson plan—polished, structured, airtight. And then I delivered it like a robot with tenure. The students, bless them, tried not to visibly expire.
    Only when I threw away the script and talked to them like a breathing, flawed human being did I finally see heads lift and eyes focus.

    It’s the same poison at work: that blueprint, that false idol of how it’s supposed to be.
    Therapist Phil Stutz calls it the Magical Moment Frozen in Time—a mental snapshot of ideal beauty, love, success, whatever, that we spend our lives trying to recreate. And like the cruelest mirage, it recedes the closer we get.
    Because it’s not life.
    It’s a knockoff. A counterfeit so slick, it fools even the person living it.

    It’s sobering, humiliating even, to realize how often my life has been a performance for an audience that doesn’t exist—measuring real experiences against some fantasy standard cooked up in the caves of my mind.
    Maybe Plato had it right all along: we’re prisoners staring at shadows, mistaking flickers on the wall for the blazing, complicated, imperfect mess that is actual life.
    And every time we chase the shadow instead of the fire, we walk the Santa Monica Pier at sunset, hand in hand with a beautiful illusion, and feel… nothing.

  • Reclaiming Your Sanity May Depend on DeBrandification

    Reclaiming Your Sanity May Depend on DeBrandification

    DeBrandification is the conscious, defiant act of peeling away the curated layers of your public persona like old vinyl siding from a house that never needed a makeover in the first place. It’s the moment you look at your bio—“educator, content strategist, latte enthusiast, recovering perfectionist”—and think, Who the hell is this algorithm-optimized mannequin and what has she done with my soul? DeBrandification is not rebranding; it is anti-branding. It’s the willful act of becoming unmarketable, unpredictable, and gloriously unverified. You stop asking, Will this post get engagement? and start wondering, What would I write if no one were watching and no sponsors were lurking?

    It begins subtly: you delete a profile picture, unpublish a blog, or (gasp) let your TikTok account die peacefully of neglect. Soon, you’re off the grid like a suburban Thoreau with Wi-Fi guilt, refusing to hashtag your lunch or quote-tag your trauma. You don’t disappear—you just stop performing. The metrics vanish, and in their place, something odd happens: your thoughts get weirder, your sentences wobblier, your voice less pleasing but more alive. DeBrandification is not career suicide. It’s self-resurrection. And if you do it right, you won’t just lose followers—you’ll lose the craving for them.

    The final scene of Black Mirror’s “Nosedive” is a textbook act of DeBrandification—messy, raw, and utterly liberating. After spending the entire episode contorting herself into a chirpy, pastel-colored caricature to boost her social rating, Lacie finally bottoms out—literally and metaphorically—in a jail cell. Stripped of her devices, her followers, and the suffocating need to be likable, she engages in a gloriously profane scream-fest with her fellow inmate, both of them hurling insults with reckless joy. It’s the first time we see her alive—flushed, furious, and unfiltered. In that moment, Lacie isn’t falling apart; she’s shedding the synthetic skin of her brand. No more forced smiles, no more filtered breakfasts, no more networking by emotional hostage. What remains is a person—not an avatar, not a score—a human being who, for the first time, doesn’t give a five-star damn.

  • A Letter from Søren Kierkegaard to Mr. Francis Sinatra, Upon Hearing “It Was a Very Good Year”

    A Letter from Søren Kierkegaard to Mr. Francis Sinatra, Upon Hearing “It Was a Very Good Year”


    Copenhagen, beneath the long shadow of time

    Dear Mr. Sinatra,

    I have listened to your song “It Was a Very Good Year,” and I confess—I wept. Not the kind of weeping that pleases the sentimentalists or flatters the romantics, but the deeper, quieter kind—the kind that arises when one hears a man sing of life not as a celebration, but as an autopsy performed with a silk glove.

    You sing of years as “vintage wine”—fine, aged, savored. And yet behind every lyric is a sigh. This is not nostalgia; it is resignation. The song begins with youth and ends in winter, as all songs must. But what strikes me most is not the inevitability of decline—it is the illusion that meaning can be harvested from pleasure, that the parade of lovers and seasons might add up to something more than passing time.

    You, sir, are not crooning. You are confessing. You thought you were merely singing of girls in small towns and blue-blooded women on leafy lanes, but what you have revealed is the terrifying symmetry of life: its seductions, its grandeur, and finally, its slow vanishing into the dusk. The “very good years” are not triumphs—they are tombstones in a vineyard.

    You have sung the melody of Either/Or: the aesthetic man, reflecting at last, asking whether the wine was ever enough. I urge you—do not be deceived by your own elegance. Beneath your tuxedo, a soul is asking what all this revelry was for. That question is not to be avoided. It is your truest note.

    Yours in dread and velvet,
    Søren Kierkegaard
    (The man your song already anticipated—though you didn’t know it at the time)