Spencer Tweedy's Blog

Your periodic reminder that worrying ≠ working.

Married

Casey and I got married last weekend!

Basil sniffed the recent piss on the lakefront trail like it was a goddamn newspaper. Out-of-town piss.

The Web We Love

I’d like to read more bloggers who don’t (only) write about tech. Can you send me some?

No offense to tech bloggers. It’s a naturally techy medium. But sometimes it gets a touch self-referential. Songwriters don’t just write about songwriting.

Sometimes there’s also a bit of head-in-ass tunnel vision. Who doesn’t have it from time to time? But recently I’ve been disappointed by:

• an OG blogger who said Bill Gates could’ve done more good for the world by fighting to keep the web open instead of fighting malaria
• a leader of a blogging platform whose primary reaction to ICE shooting someone in Austin was that Meta prioritizes divisive content

Don’t even get me started on DHH analogizing Roma people with predator wolves and advocating for a “culling.”

No community’s perfect or pure but, hey, there’s more to life than the nuts and bolts of the web we love so dearly. And tossing out racist metaphors is no way to live life in the first place.

Next Record “Valentine’s” Store Day: Jeff Tweedy, Twilight in Paris, out on pink vinyl.

On Rubber Soul outtakes George says more than once something like, “I know the part, it’s just when.” Haha.

I had a pleasant call with the Illinois tax authority and it left me nearly clicking my heels.

God, I love NetNewsWire. If you’re sick of scrolling social media, just download an RSS reader and scroll whatever media you want.

The Forward: German city bans stumbling stone memorials to Nazi victims

This is disturbing.

Teaching history, and even feeling a certain amount of contrition about your people’s past, shouldn’t be an obstacle to pride. If anything it can make your love for your people richer, because it’s part of making it better. Sounds sappy, but where’s the lie?

And yet over and over again, men without real respect for themselves, men with some gnawing hole in their soul, think that things like Stolpersteine are designed to make them smaller and less magnificent. But no stone can do that. Only you can do that.

Really this policy has less to do with individual feelings and more to do with its usefulness to rally a base. The Heidenau city council members might not really care about pride and shame, but they can play off people’s sense of it to build power.

I recommend Clint Smith’s 2022 article about Stolpersteine and slavery, “Monuments to the Unthinkable.”

Twilight Override is one year old as of yesterday. We put out a new music video for “Enough”—from Pedro’s basement, like the “Lou Reed” video—to celebrate.

Dan Sinker: What If We Just Stopped?

Dan Sinker:

I’m not sure what keeps me [on social media], what keeps any of us there, beyond inertia. We’re in the Looney Tunes stage of the end of social, where we’ve glided well past the edge of the cliff and it’s slowing dawning on us that the only way left is down. Fast.

What if we just stopped?

What if we stopped plugging our selves into the machines, stopped performing (wittingly and unwittingly) for the algorithm, stopped letting bots bait us, stopped all of it and figured out new ways—our ways—to do things again.

You can still make photos and videos to post to promote your art/tour/book/life coaching business, whatever. You can roll cigarettes for the cigarette factory without smoking yourself, as I’ve seen it put.

Zoe Keziah Mendelson has been writing about how Instagram gives you (what can pretty rightly be called) a dopamine addiction. A well-known fact, but Zoe points out some Silicon Valley history you may not have seen before.

I like that momentum is building to do other things, spend our time with other media, do marketing for art in other ways.

It’s always been way too much power for the whole bulletin board, the one main way to tell the world that you’ve made something, to be controlled by one company. (Two if you count TikTok, but while every record label hopes some teenagers will discover your music and make a viral dance for it, that doesn’t have a lot to do with “how you relate to your audience every day” or even “how you connect with your friends.”) Even in the Hearst newspaper days, there were a billion newspapers with a billion half-empowered editors.

Now we could go really deep and get into work like Spring ’83 or whatever the hell Dave Winer is cooking up with his rebirth of UserLand Frontier.

You’re still allowed to use computers like it’s 2007.

Been reading Kagi News lately. Learning a lot from the Today in History section, too.

I spent the entire day, ass-in-chair, editing in Logic and Pro Tools. Album is starting to show signs of browning and doneness.

No thoughts, no words for da blog. Only Case Oats mixing concerns in my head.

Palette Cycling Art by Mark Ferrari

These are so beautiful, and they only use 256 colors.

The Voice

Probably about half the things I’ve read on social media since February have been written by LLMs. That’s when OpenClaw was released and a million humans used it to spawn a billion lead-generating bots. They write bogus financial advice and even weird creative drip-threads about things like William Egleston’s photography technique, all toward the end of selling self-help ebooks or something.

But more recently the “LLM Voice” that we all know and recognize has permeated even deeper into things like newsletters from an art space I subscribe to in Chicago, and science publications that are otherwise credible and steered by humans.

Like Craig Mod I’m concerned about the LLM Voice seeping into my own brain, influencing my writing. What goes in eventually comes out. But I’m not too worried about it, because I can’t really feel my mirror neurons activating when I read text written by Claude or ChatGPT, whether in my own querying or out in the wild. I feel like I’m reading with blinders on, trying to glean the information without letting the style itself in. Reading around the words. Mainly avoiding that horrible, awful, soul-sucking construct, “No this. No that. It’s genuinely this.” Maybe I’m kidding myself; my guard is still up. But I know I’m not open and willing, guzzling even, when I read LLM-text the way I am when I read Denis Johnson or Mary Roach.

Still, I’d rather not have to wonder or be on the look-out for these cognitive hairballs all the time, even when I’m reading emails from people who formerly expressed their own thoughts in their own words to me!

I don’t expect the LLM Voice to stay like this for much longer. The shark-scientists are probably hard at work on making it less predictable and more palatable even for literary dorks like Craig, me, you? Even then, I think the ideas that Craig wrote about will be relevant for a long time. Maybe as long as humans and computers exist.

The headline… Be strange. Surprise yourself. If you’re surprising yourself, you’re probably doing something that a language model that’s ingested virtually all written works and recorded music wouldn’t do on its first, second, third, or millionth pass. It’s kinda funny, because that was that goal before LLMs existed anyway, to not be the same as everyone/anyone else. But it has a special survival funk now.

My best response to the “horde of agents colonizing our brains” is: Be as weird as possible.

One way to do this: take the Venn diagram of your lived experiences and what’s been talked about in the world. Now focus on the part of your life that doesn’t overlap. Out pops: pizza toast. …

The more [Claude Voice] I see, the weirder and “messier” it makes me want to write.

My dad often says about Wilco, “AI can’t make mistakes like us.”

Casey and I are working on a record right now and I can tell you: it will be messy. And that makes us happy.

Big Ears 2027 Lineup

Dad, Sammy, Sima, Macie, Liam, Casey, and I are headed to Big Ears, the best festival that isn’t Solid Sound, with all our bands :-)

Accomplished

One thing I’ve realized about working on long-term projects is that you have to figure out how to feel accomplished every once in a while. Otherwise it’s hard to stay motivated. Sometimes the feeling of accomplishment can come from inside the project, other times you gotta get it elsewhere. Something as little as taking a shower and shaving can make you feel like you’re not a failure. You know, the old “clean yourself, love yourself” routine.

Chuggin’ away on Case Oats 2.

Mannequin Pussy Power

I played with Finom last night in Madison, WI, opening for Mannequin Pussy.

Mannequin Pussy doesn’t do encores, they do end-of-show speeches.

Missy’s two big points as I took them were: incremental change is worth believing in, and anger is a poison. You can’t avoid feeling angry, you should feel angry today, and yet if you don’t figure out something to do with it, then it will hurt your soul. Missy offered songwriting, and sewing, and making a meal for someone you love. As a precursor to political activity. To keep your soul alive.

I’ve found those things to be true in my life and it was cathartic to hear them said by someone with the sterling lefty art-world credibility she has.

Especially the first part. Incrementalism is a dirty word to a lot of young people. It’s considered worse than pointless. It’s wrong to want to improve existing systems, because that takes time and money away from revolution. Because it’s like putting lipstick (liberalism) on a pig (the white-supremacist state). Meanwhile, everyone has bills that are growing, wages that are stagnating, and relatives or neighbors who are being snatched in the street. And none of us could agree what revolution means in a 21st-century, financialized economy of derivatives and imports anyway.

I get it—I know that it’s hard to tell the difference between an incrementalist, who sees that our systems are deeply and horribly fucked up, and a status quoist, who is pretty okay with things staying the way they are, because the fucked-uppedness doesn’t really touch them. They say some of the same things, and they both vote blue.

But the ironic, upsetting thing is that the people who think every incrementalist is a secret status-quoist have, themselves, the same impact on the world as the status-quoists they hate: hardly anything positive.

So, it meant a lot to me to see Missy affirm to a Sylvee full of 1,000+ screaming college students that believing in change over time and change through existing structures doesn’t mean that you don’t see the fundamentally putrid oozing cores of those structures, and it doesn’t mean that you’re secretly okay with leaving them as they are. And she reminded us that believing that we can take positive footsteps means nothing if we don’t also take those steps. The whole point of reminding ourselves that “change” is possible is to have a reason to work. To not mistake our not working for a virtue. And to not punish each other when we could be songwriting, cooking, organizing, and building power together.

Roxane Gay and Debbie Millman in The Creative Independent

Roxane Gay:

As I’ve gotten older and deeper into my career, I have found that people have a lot of conspiracy theories around publishing. And generally those conspiracy theories flourish in a void where there’s not enough information. They also flourish in a void that is created by rejection—and this just happens when you’re not yet mature enough as a writer— where you start to think, “I’m being rejected; clearly it’s a conspiracy theory because I’m brilliant.” You’re probably brilliant, but the writing may also need some work. When I used to nurture some of these conspiracy theories about, “I guess you have to know someone to get anywhere,” it’s because I wasn’t ready to consider the probability that perhaps the work wasn’t good enough. Now I look back and I know the work was not good enough. Whatever else may have been going on in terms of systemic racism, misogyny, etc., the work wasn’t ready.

I also like what Debbie has to say about seeing lots of disciplines as part of one creative life.

Producing a Record Is Like

Producing a record is like:

Oh my god, this is impossible. It’s not gonna sound good. I have no idea how to make that idea happen. It’s too hard to plug all these cables in. The piano is out of tune. I blasted out my ears. My suggestions are stale. I suck at guitar. I suck at drums. The vocals are thin. I haven’t drank water since 10am. I’m starving. My family thinks I’m missing. I forgot my name. I forgot my age. Am I dreaming or awake? Am I going to die… now?

Then:

Oh my god I love this song.

The social web vs the software web

Dave Winer:

Evolution is something we haven’t seen much of in the software world since 2006 or so. Incredible stagnation because of the dominance of the social web. We lost the software web. All the focus was on personalities, celebrity — hype and 99.999% bullshit. It was a 20 year period where all that happened was scaling.

I hadn’t really thought of that, but it feels true.

It’s not like nothing has happened, because a lot of people have come and gone and built huge audiences on the “social web” in the past 20 years. But technologically, it does feel stagnant. The biggest change since 2006 was the replacement of the chronological feed with the algorithmic one. And then TikTok took that even further with the way they sprinkled brand-new, untested content into it. But overall it’s been the same… Just staring at apps. Which is another reason why all this nondeterministic LLM software feels like the first break in two decades.

Thunderbridge

If you’ve tried to use an Apogee Symphony Thunderbridge with macOS Tahoe and haven’t been able to get it to work, try restarting and then going to System Settings > Privacy & Security. Scroll to the bottom, look for something like “extensions need your permission,” and grant permission for the Apogee driver to run. Your Symphony isn’t bricked, yet.

Junior

There was a young huntsman spider in the bathroom at our rental in Puerto Rico. Casey and I named him Junior.

Starship Incoming

The next Starship Casual annual compilation CD is so good. I can’t believe it. But then I can.

It’s too late to sign up to get that CD, but it’s not too late to sign up for next year’s.

Songs For Kids Sing Pavement

Go see them at Shaky Knees!

Benjamin Franklin’s Alter Egos

Used pen names to argue for:

• lower taxes
• women’s rights
• abolition of slavery

He was America’s best blogger.

Gone to Port

On the way to Puerto Rico to do some musicking.