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hollenius · 5 years ago

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Super long interview that I wanted to show a friend earlier but was unable to...so I am hiding it under the cut. Covers everything from Forrest Gump to the influence of television to rock critics never escaping their English Major roots.

Rock Criticism and the Rocker: A Conversation With Peter Buck

(originally appearing in Anthony DeCurtis, Rocking My Life Away, 1998)

IN SEPTEMBER 1994 R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck kindly took time off from promoting R.E.M.'s Monster to do an interview with Anthony DeCurtis, who wanted an artist's perspective on rock criticism.

"Peter was an ideal candidate for the job," DeCurtis wrote in his introduction to the interview, "both because R.E.M. is the very definition of a critics' darling and because he has a sharp critical sensibility himself. He keeps up with the music and with the writing about the music and loves to talk about both. In addition, I've known Peter since before the release of R.E.M.'s first independent single in 1981, and have always held his intelligence, humor and passion for music in the highest regard. It's a pleasure to have any excuse to speak with him."

Buck and DeCurtis met in the bar of the Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan, drank a glass of wine or two and talked for about an hour. "This conversation proceeds the way so many of our talks have. It begins with a focus, wanders through a variety of related topics and eventually meanders back to our original subject. It was a fun trip, and I hope you didn't have to be there."

ADC: You read a lot of rock writing. It must be a different experience to read about yourself than it is to read about other bands or to read a review of somebody else's record. What's the difference between what you want to see when you're reading something about R.E.M. and what you want to see when you're reading about somebody else?

PB: I do read a lot of music stuff, and I always have �� it's not simply because I’m "in the business." And of course I always like to read about people who say controversial things and admit to drug problems and ornate sexual peccadillos. That's what you want to read – it just is. It's fun and exciting – and it's the last thing I want to have anything to do with my band.

The English press, especially, is focused completely on the personal. With the English magazines, it seems that if you sit in a room and you just want to talk about the music, they'll find a way to make it not about the music. Maybe it's because the magazines come out every week and you have to appeal on a flash level. I mean, a lot of the English press are closer to the Enquirer than to The New York Times. So every three years you get this generation of English bands who make absolutely great copy, and maybe not necessarily such great records.

Of course, when I read about R.E.M., I always want the writer to be a seasoned, knowledgeable person who respects and loves us and gives us the benefit of the doubt every step of the way – which isn't really what rock criticism is about.

What do you think it is about? What do you think it can do? Is it different from other kinds of criticism, like movie reviews or a book reviews?

I think it's closer to movie reviews. With book reviews, most likely the writers aren't going to be much more literate than the readers. But the readers of rock criticism are definitely different. The person who reads Rolling Stone or Melody Maker isn't the person who reads The New York Times Book Review. I read them both, but I'm one person.

Rock & roll is first and foremost kids' music. Even though most of us are adults and we write about adult things, the records are bought and the reviews are read by teenagers who don't necessarily know who Kafka is – or even which college they're going to go to. So rock criticism tends to be about minutiae in a lot of ways. It's about small things. Especially the English reviews – you can read reviews of a record without ever finding out what kind of music it is. That always blows my mind. They’ll review an album, talk about the lyrics and personalize what they want to make of the record, and not say, "And by the way, it's an album of polkas." You just don't know. Sometimes I'll read a review and think, "Gee, that sounds pretty interesting – this record is about alienation and identity." Then I'll actually listen to it and go, "Whoa, it sounds like the Doobie Brothers."

What kind of impact do you think rock criticism has?

Again – I could be completely wrong – but with book reviews, there's kind of a received critical opinion about things that people tend to stick to. I'll read several reviews of the same book and they won't differ that much. People know good writing and bad writing. Whereas with rock & roll, sometimes bad playing is good playing. I mean, you would never find a guy who writes books the way the Ramones make records. And if you did, you certainly couldn't appreciate it. And yet the Ramones made pretty perfect records. So with rock criticism, there aren't rules and laws that can be followed. It's basically "Do I like it? Do you like it?" As for the audience, I think three quarters of them just look at the picture and the headline and see how many stars it got. You get to the point where you wonder how many people are influenced to go out and buy the record because of what they read.

I think it's cumulative. I think that most seventeen-year-olds won't go out and buy a record they never heard because they read one article. But if they see articles everywhere, the picture everywhere, they heard the single – you know, that’s how Guns N' Roses happened. They were just everywhere all of a sudden. It's fascinating – I think about it all the time: What does this mean, the fact that we do these interviews, and they appear in the press, especially when it's in something like People, something that isn’t necessarily for people who like music. You wonder, who does this reach? Does anyone say, "God, I have to buy that record because these guys talked about their personal lives."

Do you approach those kinds of interviews differently? What is your preparation? Do you think, "This is going to appear here, and these people might be interested in this and might not be interested in that?" You're obviously not going talk about what kind of guitar strings you use to People.

No, not really. We have never actually talked to People – I don't know why. Generally we talk to the music media, although lately we've been doing things with Vogue and GQ and places like that. Still, the journalists for those stories seem to come from the same perspective – they're people who like music and get hired by those magazines to write about music. They tend to have to write more generally there. In Vogue, you have to explain when we got together and all that. So, for me, it's about understanding that it's going to be just the simple facts. Whereas Rolling Stone or Melody Maker has interviewed us every year since 1983, and I don't have to cover biographical data. I can feel a little freer free associating about what's going on with the new record or the new tour or whatever.

But we've never done a lot of press that was not music-oriented. I mean, Rod Stewart is a celebrity, and he gets celebrity things. We tend, at this point, to still get articles about music. Then there also are the specialist magazines, the guitar-player magazines, and that's something totally different. It's all right in those places to talk about effects and strings and picks, stuff that is boring to everyone in the world except the people who buy those magazines.

You were very influenced by rock criticism as a young person, but the cultural environment is different now from the way it was when you were growing up. Young people are much more likely to get most of their information from MTV and to a lesser extent maybe radio, and then magazines. Certainly when I was growing up, just to see a picture of a band was amazing. Now you've seen them a hundred times before you've heard three of their songs. Talk about the kind of impact that reading rock criticism had on you.

When I was growing up I lived in Georgia, and bands just didn't come down there. I mean, they really didn't. On TV – this is parenthetical – I remember when the New York Dolls were on Don Kirshner's rock concert in 1973. It was such a big event that a band I liked was going to be on TV that I had my three friends who also liked T. Rex and the Dolls over to my house. My parents had a basement, and we took old mattresses down there and brought the TV down and smuggled in a case of beer. I was about 16. We got drunk and watched the Dolls and it was an epochal event – real music on television. It wasn't just the usual suspects. Back then there were like two rock shows, and, you know, Helen Reddy would be hosting one. I remember that pretty specifically.

So I got a huge amount of information from the print media. I subscribed to the Village Voice for a couple of years, luckily enough for me, right when punk started happening in about '74, '75, '76. I always had access to the Voice. So I was reading Robert Christgau, and Lester Bangs writing about Blondie – I think he reviewed the first Blondie record. I found out about Television. I was buying those records the day they came out, which for Georgia was pretty different. I read Creem magazine. I hadn't discovered the English papers yet, because I don't think they came to Georgia in those days. Creem was a big one, because they liked Iggy and the Stooges. So I got turned onto a lot of stuff .

I lived in California for a year and a half when I was 12 and 13. There was a writer named John Mendelssohn, who was also in a band called Christopher Milk. He wrote for a magazine called Coast, which doesn't exist anymore, and he wrote articles about Iggy and the Stooges. I went out and bought the Christopher Milk records. This was like 1971. So I became a fan of Iggy, the Velvet Underground, the Nazz, Crazy Horse. I'd be the only 13-year-old on the block going, "I think I need to buy this Iggy and the Stooges record." The guys at the counter would be like, "You better wear rubber gloves when you hold this album, kid." So I got turned onto a lot of stuff that was really foreign to me through print.

Mendelssohn actually was a big influence on me, as well. He was one of the first writers whose byline I learned to recognize. Much later, he said something nice about me in print, while disparaging a number of people I know, which only made it better, of course.

Of course.

In real life we tried to work together a few times, but it didn't really work out.

He wrote like what he thought he was: a rock star. I bought the Christopher Milk records when I was 14, and thought they were kind of cool. And they are kind of cool, but you can read their influences pretty easily. He reviewed for Rolling Stone in the old days – I've seen his stuff in the collections. I started reading Rolling Stone when I was 13, but still that was 1971 or whatever. But his stuff in the collections is really fascinating.

But criticism helped me elucidate a lot of things. Living in Roswell, Georgia, in 1971, everyone liked the Allman Brothers. I can't tell you why – that’s all there was to it. It was a law. I didn't really have friends who could tell me why they liked something. I had two friends in Roswell who liked T. Rex, because they looked cool in make-up. I don't think it had anything to do with the way it sounded. It helps to have some kind of critical acumen about things when you're in a vacuum. I mean, completely in a vacuum. I had to define for myself why I thought T. Rex was cool and Sweet was less cool.

What do you think about the situation now? Does it make a difference if kids are not getting information from print, that they're getting their information visually, from television? At the same time, coverage of rock & roll is ubiquitous. Every newspaper has a rock critic, every TV show covers it, every news program covers it. Bands like Pavement play on the Tonight Show. How are people making sense of what's coming at them?

It seems that kids now are a lot more knowledgeable about the processes. MTV goes "backstage with so-and-so." I must admit to having been really naive about that kind of stuff. When I’d see a band open for another band at a place in Atlanta that held 300 people, I just assumed that the opening band had a Lear jet.

Right. Exactly.

And that a limo would pick them up and they’d probably have an orgy with teenage girls in the back of the car on the way to the show. That's what I assumed. Now I realize that the headliner probably arrived in a station wagon. Kids today have a real understanding of the mechanics of the business. They know about sound-checks. I didn't know about sound-checks, I figured you just played. They know how people make videos, how people make records. They understand what demo tapes are. I had never met anyone who had been in a band who had even had a single out, ever, until the mid-'70s, '76. I knew people who played in bands, but it was such a huge gap from playing Foghat covers to being one of the guys actually making records. You just assumed that gap was completely unbridgeable, that that would never be you or your friends. In a way it's really great that there's so much coverage now, because while the machine eats people up and spits them out, it still means that, well, Pavement is on Leno.

That wouldn't have happened 10 years ago. We were never on Johnny Carson. They would never take us. They would never take us right up until Jay was on. In '89, when everyone was fighting for us, they were like, "No, we're not really interested in having R.E.M. on." I can't say I blame them – we really weren’t that big and Johnny Carson had no knowledge of us. We weren't right for their audience. But Jay Leno probably listens to Pavement, or at least has heard of them. Still, I do think it's odd. When I was 13, 45-year-old guys didn't listen to what teenagers listened to. They just didn't. 45-year-old guys, their experience was 1953 or something.

Along those lines, it was pretty amazing a while ago when MTV threw a party for R.E.M.'s work for Rock the Vote and President Clinton sent a videotaped message to the band.

Yeah. I know.

I mean, the president...

...knows who we are.

An unthinkable thing.

You've got to remember that up until George Bush, you can guarantee that he never listened to anything. He didn't know who any of us were. He thought that Boy George was in U2.

Or even more incredibly, he denounced Elvis at the 1992 Republican convention. Who does this guy think his audience is? He's from Texas. Everybody in every state that is crucially important worships Elvis. And he referred to U2 as teeny-boppers, when they were calling the White House from the stage during the Zoo TV tour.

I guess U2 met with Clinton, and Bush said, "Well, George Clinton... " – great, George Clinton – "Well, Bill Clinton can talk to Boy George all he wants to." I'm sure someone thought that was a funny line, but it showed how out of touch he is. It's going to be a long time before I'm as old as the president. But it's really weird to think that those guys grew up and probably dated people who listened to the Grateful Dead and dropped acid.

Getting back to the earlier question, there's a sense now that everybody knows everything. Everybody knows what producers do. Everybody knows how a studio works. Everybody knows the kind of stuff that used to be specialist knowledge.

It's funny how that works. I was reading some article, this was years ago, it might have been in Rolling Stone. I think Ahmet Ertegun was cutting some record in Memphis, and he thought, "Let's get some kids off the street to hear what they think," and they brought some kids off the street. The first guy goes, "Man, I think this mix is EQ'd wrong. I think it's too high-endy." Ahmet says, "What the fuck are you talking about, mix, EQ? I pull some kid off the street and you tell me how to EQ a record?"

That is certainly the way it is now. In a way it's good. It demystifies it a lot. Kids understand more of what's going on. Think about Green Day for a minute – they're 22 and this is their 3rd record. They were in bands when they were 14 and put out their own record when the lead singer was 17. They're heirs to a tradition: you're 16, you're a punk, you write punk songs, you make your own record on a small label, you tour. I think they’re all just legal-age for drinking now, after 5 years in the business. I just didn't have any awareness that you could do that when I was that age. I was kind of trying to write songs when I was 17, but I didn't know what I was doing.

The flip side of everyday people having specialist knowledge is that cult phenomena become totally mainstream. So someone like William Burroughs has become like a rock star.

That blows my mind, and this gets back to the media thing. William Burroughs is not the best writer in the world. People have a teenage fascination for his writing. I think he's interesting and has said some interesting stuff. He's gay or at least bisexual, a guy who was a junkie for 40 years, way outside of society. And he's selling sports shoes right now! You turn the TV on and go, "What marketing whiz decided that an octogenarian ex-drug addict avowed homosexual beatnik is the guy to sell tennis shoes to 17-year-olds?" For me, it's totally great. But that was unthinkable 20 years ago. 20 years ago, if they did sell tennis shoes on TV–

It would be a tennis player–

Or a basketball player. And he would have to be white, of course.

Well, we've drifted off from rock criticism to the media in general, though, obviously, they are connected. But it simultaneously seems that everything is closed down and everything is wide open. In a sense, there really does seem not to be any outside anymore. There's no real underground or counterculture that's thriving and really represents some kind of alternative stream. Maybe there never was. But on the other hand, it seems like consequently you do get William Burroughs in an advertisement. Everything is all up in the air, and no one knows exactly where things are.

Again, I hate to go back to when I was a kid, but all through the '70s, Patti Smith was considered weird and scary, and she wouldn't have been in People no matter how many records she sold. Part of the reason for that is that the generation in control of things in the '70s grew up in the '40s and '50s, and they just didn't get it and didn't understand it and felt threatened by it. Anyone who's involved in the music industry now grew up in the '60s or the '70s even, and a lot of barriers did come down in those times. David Geffen is not going to be terrified of something new. He's seen it all. He probably dropped acid and ran around naked at Woodstock. David Geffen, what is he, maybe 52? When I was a kid, a 52-year-old man would send you off to Vietnam and get you killed. Now 52-year-old guys, they're probably listening to whatever's happening and going, "God, that's really great. I wish I'd signed them."

So in a way it's good, because since everything is acceptable, the only thing that gradates things is cash. Everyone knows you can make money off this stuff, and anything can get in the back door. Anything. So GG Allen would have been on the cover of People if he'd sold a million records – it has nothing to do with how good or bad you are. And he would have made great copy. I'm actually surprised they didn't do an article about him.

Rock & roll is a demented, mindless business where there aren’t principles you can follow. Rules that you think are hard and fast all of a sudden go right out the window. I think that's great. The fact that there is no outside anymore is cool because anything can really influence the culture then. Of course, most of the stuff that sells millions and millions tends to be lowest common denominator.

That's true of anything, though. That's true of books or movies, as well. Underground now has almost nothing to do with style; it only has to do with content. So if you're writing about some alienated 25-year-old kid who's a junkie, even if you're the most cliched writer who ever lived, you're underground. Whereas somebody who's stylistically adventurous but writing about a more conventional subject is regarded as mainstream. It's become almost a more conservative environment than in the past in a funny way, because then it was about stylistic innovation. So James Joyce writes Ulysses, and it's just about a guy walking around Dublin, except in terms of its style and language. And that's a revolution. Whereas now, it's solely content-driven.

Having gone through my teenage years, I know that the writing that appeals to teenagers tends not to be of the highest order. I can't tell you how many 20-year-olds I know think Charles Bukowski is the best writer ever.

Perfect example.

He is the one. And I've read most of his stuff. I don't care for the poems. But I like it for what it is. But what it is is just kind of–

It's one riff.

Yeah, it's the same book. I've read a couple of books, and I go, "Is this the same one I read before? Is he still working at the post office now?" I like the stuff near the end of his life when he was just this old drunken sot celebrity. Hollywood was pretty interesting. But all these kids will routinely name people who are not great writers, but who write about alienation or drugs or homosexuality or whatever. Whereas it's funny, any bookstore you go to now, there's a gay novelist section, which is totally fascinating and cool. Gay kids aren't reading it because it's not about being alienated. Most of it has to do with the past it seems to me, the things I've read. It's making sense of –

Finding your identity as a gay person.

And putting yourself in perspective. A lot of the ones I've read seem to deal with childhood. That doesn’t seem revolutionary and wild. You get these teenagers as often as not gay or bisexual and they're going to read Bukowski, who’s really kind of an old fart reactionary. And they’ll go, "Man, this guy is totally wild." Why, because he drank and worked at the post office? I drink. I was a janitor.

Talk about the first times you were written about? Did it throw you to see yourself represented and discussed in that way? How is it different from seeing your picture or seeing yourself on tv?

I remember our first reviews. We’d just played around Georgia, so college juniors were writing about us and I was like, "This isn't the real deal." We were being written about in the Red and Black, the University of Georgia newspaper, and then the hippy alternative paper. We weren't on the cover of Rolling Stone. But I remember the first time I actually read an article about us, and I looked at it and I was like, "This is weird." I read it a couple of times and I was like, "God, I was there. I remember that." It was a review of the show that we did the day before. It's kind of off-putting.

Some of the English things were kind of odd. Those were around '83. We just came out of nowhere and we got really amazing reviews. Nobody should get reviews like that. One magazine reviewed our album twice, because the first guy didn't say it was the best album ever made. The editor went back and said, "I just want people to know how good this really is." And the first guy had given it the highest rating you could get – but that was not quite good enough. I appreciate that, because they were really on a mission to find new things to be excited about. But I had read these magazines, and I always tended to think that the people in them were to some degree – not special – but somehow validated. This must mean they're famous and big.

Someone sent me the Allan Jones review of Murmur in Melody Maker, which was really good. But I was driving a van with no air conditioning to be 6th on the bill to the Police in Philadelphia. It was 110 degrees and we were also doing a gig that night somewhere else. I was like, "God, this doesn't validate us, because we're still poor and starving." I remember, we played Philadelphia, it was 100 degrees, and there were 90,000 people there. We went on, I think it was 1:00 in the afternoon, and it was so hot I threw up afterwards. And then someone gave me the Alan Jones review and I'm reading it in the van on the way to the next gig and I was like "Man, I wish I had an ice cold beer right now." In a way it's kind of distancing. Immediately, I thought, "Well, this isn't like the stuff I read when I was a kid." Because once you're in that position, unless you're a really shallow person, when you see yourself on the cover of a magazine, you don't feel validated. I mean, I don't. I try not to even read them anymore. I don't want to read about myself that much. It's just like anything else. You want something really bad, and then when you get it, you realize that it doesn't mean as much as you think it should.

The first time I published something in Rolling Stone, I literally thought that people would recognize me on the street. And then you realize it's on the stand for two weeks, a few of your friends see it and then it's over.

And you go on.

It was strange.

You know, what validates people to the outside world is television. When I was living in Athens, I used to walk downtown by the Coca-Cola plant everyday, and everyday there were the same fat guys with pot bellies. I had short hair and I'd wear sunglasses and a trench coat, and they'd be like, "Hey faggot, hey faggot, blow me, faggot." And I'd blow them kisses as I walked by – I wasn't going to let them drive me off the street. Then we appeared on David Letterman. I was home about a month later, walked down the street. The same guys who'd been going, "Hey, faggot," were like "Hey, I saw you on David Letterman. Way to go man, hey, cool." I liked it better when they were yelling "Hey fag."

At least it was sincere.

Yeah, it was real. Now it's like I'm a famous guy who was on David Letterman. And, again, being on TV, we did David Letterman that afternoon, then we played Maxwell's the next night. I was glad we were on TV, though. I thought it was kind of cool.

I remember seeing that performance.

I was the first person I knew who had ever been on TV – I guess maybe the B-52s were on Saturday Night Live. This is when there wasn't a world of difference between us and Pylon and Love Tractor. We all had record deals, we all had records out. R.E.M. worked harder.

And all the Athens bands got written about all the time.

Yeah, it wasn't that big of a difference. We'd go to parties, and if you liked Pylon better, then Pylon were the coolest people at the party. And then all of a sudden, being on Letterman made a big difference. We were perceived as big-time because we got on TV. To me, again, we were in the middle of a tour – taping that TV show was like having a night off. We played two songs and were done by 6:00, and then we played Maxwell's the next night. But to the world, by which I mean, people on airplanes – because you always get "Who are you guys?" Obviously we're not a bowling team. In an airport, you always get people who walk up and ask, "Are you a band? Do we know you?" "Well no, not really." "Have you done anything I might have heard on the radio?" "No." "Have you been on TV?" "Well, yeah, we were on David Letterman once." And they'd go, "Wow!" They don't know who we are, never heard any of our songs, but I was on David Letterman.

I remember the first time I appeared on one of the morning shows. To the superintendent of my building I had just been another tenant – I might get my faucet fixed 6 months from now if I asked politely. But that night I was coming in at about 1:00 in the morning from being out, bleary-eyed. The super comes out of his apartment with his wife – they had waited up for me to get home, because they had seen me on Good Morning America. I had no idea how significant television was. The degree to which it penetrates is amazing.

TV does penetrate in a way that print never does. Nobody remembers the TV shows, though. I remember reviews of things that made me go out and buy the record. Steve Seimels used to write about Patti Smith with a mission. He wrote for Stereo Review, which my father subscribed to. We didn't even have a stereo, basically, but we subscribed to Stereo Review. We had a mono, and I had a little Close'n'Play. But I think the Patti Smith piece was in 1973, because he was just raving that this woman was going to be bigger than god. So I was fascinated. I had Horses on order before it was out, because I'd read reviews of the shows. I was 17. I was like, "Maybe I'll run away and go to New York." In a way, I wish I had. That kind of stuff can reach into your life – criticism can really change something and give you a perspective. Whereas with television, well, there it is. It is what it is. So with TV, it's almost like a celebration of celebrity-hood. You're not going to get any depth out of it. It's just a flat image. Whereas with print, I mean, I've read reviews that are better than the records.

Oh, well, that's very often true.

I'll buy the record, and go, "This guy loved this record so much that he produced a piece of art about it that is better than the record." I remember a review of Prefab Sprout that was just great. I bought the record and I kind of liked it. But if I hadn't read that review – let's just say I didn't get what the reviewer got out of it.

I assign and edit reviews all the time, and when they come in I often find myself thinking, "If only the record were as good as this." Rather than write what we think of as a review, they, as you say, create a piece of art about it. Since a magazine is about writing, I feel torn. Part of me is a person who, for so many years, was reading magazines and going out to buy those records with my spare money, and coming back and saying, "Man, this is disappointing." But then I'm also thinking, "Well, this is beautifully written, it's got some interesting ideas in it. It's 75% true." It's something I struggle with. I remember I had somebody review a Madonna record, and she attributed all these sophisticated cultural motives to Madonna. I said, "Look, I've spoken to Madonna, and I can tell you that none of what you're saying would ever have occurred to her in a hundred years. You can say that her record affects you in a certain way, or functions in the culture in a certain way, but it doesn't mean that she intended that. Your response is perfectly valid, but I'm not going to let you say she intended it because I know for a fact that that's not true."

I must say, we get away with that sometimes. When I feel the worst about the band, I think, "We're not as good as people think we are." Inevitably, then I'll read a review and someone will get something out of one of our songs that is totally unintentional. This is a good example: on Monster, 'I Don't Sleep, I Dream'. That's not an unintentional song, it's about sex and identity. I think it's supposed to be a little funnier than people think it is, but whatever. We couldn't think of a way of ending it, and for some reason we decided the bridge should be at the end of the song and we didn't want to fade it, so we just cut the tape. And Vic Garbarini was explaining why the song ends that suddenly, and he says, "The song is a dream state and when the tape gets cut, that's when you wake up." And I went, "You know, Vic, that's totally great. I never would have thought of that." I guess unconsciously, we knew we wanted a fast ending to jerk you out of it, but I would never have associated that with sleeping and waking.

But I think that's a valid reading.

It's a valid point, and I said, "Vic, you can say that if you want to, but you'd be imputing more conscious motive than we put into it. We couldn't think of a way to end it, so we just cut the tape."

It seems to me that that's one of differences between art and criticism. An academic friend of mine once said that he was sure that Bob Dylan had read all of Ezra Pound. I said that I thought he had probably read the table of contents and flipped through a collection of Pound's poems while hanging out at Allen Ginsberg's apartment one day. Artists, people writing songs or poems, don't really have to be responsbile to anything else when they're writing. What you want is something that gives you a vibe, something you can then take and do what you want with. So in a certain way critics both overvalue and undervalue what artists do. They overvalue it by attributing every conceivable intention to it. And they undervalue it because, essentially what they're saying is, that person thinks exactly the way I do. But they don't.

I would say probably 80% of the people who write rock criticism went to college and majored in English.

So their writing centers totally on lyrics.

And they are more comfortable finding meanings than letting things be. In academic circles, you can't write a paper that says, "Well, it is what it is." So you tend to explicate things that should just stand as they are. Every lyricist, every single one, throws in lines that don't mean anything to flesh out a space, or just because they sound good. Like, in 'Crush With Eyeliner' on Monster, there's that line "My kiss breath turpentine." That doesn't mean anything. I mean, it's evocative. It sounds great. It's stuck in there to fill the space. It doesn't take away from the song, but it doesn't have any literal meaning. If you were to find some literal meaning in it, that's your literal meaning. But English majors tend to think that everything means something.

One of my favorite discussions about that was in James Joyce’s Ulysses apparently they found – do you remember reading this a few years ago? – they found some proofs? It turns out that people had been explaining what certain sections meant that turned out to be misprints. They had attributed full meaning to them – and that was not what was on the page. They had managed to explain typos as part of the process. You can just go too far with that.

Again, in academic circles, letting things be what they are is not a concern. You're either into the semiotics aspect of it, or you're deconstructing it. I've read real clever deconstructions of TV shows. I mean, like, the Village Voice has a TV critic. But I've met the people who do TV shows, and I know they're sitting there thinking, "We can sell a million dollars worth of Buick ads if we do this." That is what it's about. I'm not saying there isn't some good work on TV occasionally. But I've learned never to watch television, because what's on TV sucks. But I do read TV criticism, and every year I'll read something about a show that says, "This is a ground-breaking innovative show." And you turn it on and you go, "Wait a minute. It's a television show about cops." I just don't care if it's a really good television show about cops. There's a million of them.

Still, you can analyze television from a cultural perspective, even though attributing anything to the writers of those shows is ridiculous. There are reasons why a studio would spend tens of millions of dollars to make a particular kind of movie, for example. Take Forrest Gump. It's brilliant, in a certain way. It's not brilliant as a work of art, but it manages to hit every hot button of American culture for the last 25 years without coming down anywhere or taking any positions at all, thereby not alienating one person who would be willing to spend 8 dollars to see it. So you get the Vietnam war, race, child abuse, AIDS – all of these things that you would think, "No one could ever do that without alienating somebody." It's perfectly nuanced.

I had some real problems with that movie – it's a feel-good movie about the most horrific catastrophes that have befallen the country. And the guy who gets through it is really stupid, and it's all OK with him. He just walks through, leaving a pile of dead bodies every step of the way. Not that any of it's his fault, but the fact is here's this millionaire who's happy in his stupidity. How many people have to die for him to get to that place? How many people have to be victims of really awful circumstances?

The ultimate conservative message of the movie is that knowledge only fucks you up. The message is, "Your mother's aphorisms – that's all you need to get through life, Hallmark Card messages." Still, can you imagine the script meetings as that movie was being put together? Somebody must continually have been saying: "If we show the protesters this way, we also have to show the protesters that way. If we show this kind of political figure, we need to show that kind of political figure." Even down to the end where the question is raised, "Are we drifting through life without any kind of destiny? Or do we really have something that we're being propelled toward? Well, the answer is both." Well, of course it's both. Because, from a marketing perspective, you don't want any one person who believes one way or the other to leave the theater and not tell 20 of their friends to go see the movie – and that goes for every other issue in the movie, too.

It's certainly an odd movie. The messages in it were kind of scary. It's like, "Don't worry, be happy. Things will work out OK." And the fact is, they don't work out OK. There's a whole other movie in the Louisiana kid who gets killed in Vietnam and his family. What did they do? They were lucky enough that someone gave them a check for 10 million dollars, but does that ever happen in real life? No. For me, the movie also didn't really work as entertainment, so philosophically, it doesn't really matter what it is. Forgetting all the theories about what the movie's about and why, I think it should have been 30 minutes shorter. That's my main critical carp about it. After Vietnam, it just started to get real slow.

Early on, before you began to sell a lot of records, R.E.M. were sustained by the response you were getting, both from critics and also just people who would go to your shows. How do you respond to writing about you now? You said before that you don't necessarily read all of it. What are your feelings about it?

It is different. When we started out, we didn’t make any money, and we didn't really care. The critics who were in our peer group at the time – they were 21, and we were 21 or 22, or whatever – could write these long passionate stories that would reach the 30 people in Pittsburgh who wanted to see us. And when you're not getting any financial rewards and have no comfort level, it makes it worthwhile to have your fans, whether they're critics or the people who come to the shows, as few as they are on occasion, to be really intense about it. I was always proud that we might get 40 people, but they'd be like, "Wow, you're the best band in America – I can't believe you're only playing to 40 people." That is sustaining. I have a lot of friends who've quit bands that were doing OK because they were nobody's favorite band. That was probably what happened to Guadalcanal Diary. They were slogging all over the world making OK money, but it wasn't like a celebration. The critics only gave the records 3 stars. Fans would come and maybe leave before the encore. It's hard to sustain it if you don't really feel that you're reaching people.

At our level, it's such a huge machine. It's odd, because I know it really affects some people, but if you sell 10 million records, the odds are a huge portion of those people are gonna play it a couple of times, then file it under R. I mean, you can't change every person's life. It's different now. We get really good reviews, but the stakes are not as high. The record company’s stakes are higher, because we're talking about millions of dollars in marketing. But they're not as high for us, because we're being compensated financially – which is not the main reason we do this, by any stretch of the imagination. But we're making these records, we know their worth. The reviews now for us, all they can do is hurt the sales marginally. If every reviewer says, "This record really stinks," we'll still sell several million.

But, I mean, I want to get good reviews. I'd prefer to get good reviews and maybe sell a few less copies, because critics still tend to be my peer group. They're the people who listen to the same amount of music I do and get excited about new discoveries, but also have some kind of critical acuity to put things in perspective. That's why I get a kick out of the English mags, because they're always hiring a new generation of kids to write. They always have 23-year-olds who've never heard of the Beatles.

There's actually an economic reason for that. Those publications pay so badly that only young people will write for them.

It changes the way the music business is over there. Here people still can remember Talking Heads when they were a brand new band. I mean, forget the Beatles – Talking Heads. Over there, they'll review things that are in every conceivable way not all that important or exciting, but they're brand new, and the writer is 21 years old and going nuts, so the Manic Street Preachers are the best band ever. Which is kind of good – you get people excited. But there is a lack of critical background. You read these things – "This performance by the Manic Street Preachers was the best performance ever." You read a real lot of those. Guys who are third on the bill get that. And then you buy the records and go, "This is second-rate Clash."

In a way, it's nice to have the press have an adversarial relationship to the bands because it keeps you on your toes. You can't get away with doing the same-old. The criticism you could make about American criticism is that established favorites get more latitude in making not-good records. I don't think that's happened to us yet, because we don't have any bad records. But certainly there are plenty of artists who make records that nobody really cares that much about, but because they’re who they are, they'll get 4 stars and a big treatment and a big article about their personal lives. Whereas if it was a first record by a new band, it would be, "This is pretty OK. It’s not that great." You don't tend to get that in England so much. Since they're a bit younger, they're totally willing to say how awful and old-fashioned we are.

I'll tell you why it works the way it does over here. Critics get excited about the opportunity to say something about a band they've loved for a long time and maybe rarely have had the chance to write about. So even if the new album by R.E.M. or U2 or whomever isn't their best work, it may well be that writer's best chance to say something about them. So between their desire to hang a bunch of major ideas on the album and their general enthusiasm about having the chance to do it, the review sometimes ends up sounding more positive than even the writer believes it should be.

It's understandable, and, certainly, history tends to color the present. I can't tell you how many records I've got where, if I were to divorce the band from its past work, I would go, "This isn't very good." But if you're fond of what the band does and willing to find the things you like – even if what you say is, "Well, there's two good songs, and the rest just sounds pleasant" – you're letting them get away with a lot.

It's also true that if you really like a band, almost nothing they do is uninteresting to you. You might like it or not, but after a while, if you're inside it, everything reveals something. And sometimes, because the bad records are less artful, they're more revealing. They open things up in a way, because the good stuff transcends category, and you don't necessarily know where it came from. But when you hear the 3 bad versions of a song, you go, "Oh, right, that was an attempt to do this, and that's how they failed, and that's how it works when it works." So if you like the best stuff, even the bad records can be intriguing.

Again, in England, they tend to go the other way. They don't have a lot of perspective on the past. You read reviews of solo records from guys in bands that never were all that good, and they treat it like this is the most amazing thing in the world. And you listen to it and realize, "It sounds kind of like Tom Waits." And yet Tom Waits was totally unhip over there until recently. Again, I'm one of those guys who buys records because of reviews, and I can't tell you how often there is a disparity between the rave review and the actual record that you listen to and go, "Well, that's just not there. This is a second-rate selection of imitative songs that sound kind of like Nick Cave."

Right. Or Van Morrison. Or the Velvet Underground. I wanted to ask you one last question about R.E.M. Ever since you began to sell records, there's been a subtheme of negative writing about the band, a small backlash. But, apart from that, you've always been treated very generously by critics. Even in the English press, you've been immune to the kinds of attacks virtually every other band that's attained your level of success has undergone. Obviously, you believe the albums are good, but, as you know, that sometimes has nothing to do with it. So, setting aside the quality of the albums, why do you think R.E.M. have been treated so well?

In 1989, there was a period there when some magazines stuck by us, but a couple, one of which is not in business anymore, looked for someone who didn't like the record to assign it to. I talked to people who told me about this, and I'm not saying it's bad. It's fine, because the editor didn't feel it was a strong record. But I was talking to someone who told him, "I like that record." And there were plenty of people who would have written good reviews of it. They consciously wanted someone who wouldn't. They sent the non-believers to the shows. And that's fine. If we can only show people who like us that we're good, then maybe we're not that good. But they picked people who didn't like us. I accept that. I understood it, and I don't mind.

Funnily enough, then we stayed off the road and consciously turned our backs on what people expected us to be – a multi-platinum, billion-dollar touring machine. We could have turned into Pink Floyd if we’d done a tour after the Green tour. I think it was surprising to people that we just said, "OK, we're going to make a couple of weird acoustic records, and we're not going to tour." We then sold a boatload of records. But the idea is that we thought we were kissing our career good-bye to take some time to do what we wanted to do. Every record has been something we wanted to do. But we wanted to distance ourselves from the machinery a bit. And I think that was such a surprising move that we got a fair amount of respect for it.

I mean, Automatic for the People, for instance. It's a really good record. It's maybe the best that we've done. But it sold for almost two years in England. For like a year and a half it was on the charts, in the top ten. Everyone used it as a hallmark. I think we won Band of the Year in some magazine, and we didn't even do anything. We didn't tour, we did videos, we didn't do press, hardly. I think part of it is just that we took the unexpected choice at a point when most people would have gone for the throat and done a huge triumphant stadium tour, and the big rock record. I think it was great for us not to do that, but critically, I think that's why the press has stuck with us. Because at the point when amost any other band would have said, "OK, now, this is gonna be the big moment," we walked away from it.

It turns out record-wise it was the best thing we could have ever done. Band-wise it was the best thing we could have ever done. But that's not what everyone told us at the time. Our manager had meetings with us about how we were going to have to lay people off. We have a pension plan; were we going to have to cut our pension plan? The record company people were like, "Well, you're not going to sell a million records ever again if you don't tour." And, you know, they loved the records. But it was not the way to go about it. And we all made the decision, "We'll take a salary cut if we need to. We'll cut the pension this year, if it comes to that, that's cool." Then we sold 10 million records. In part, that's why we've been seen as pretty hip, because we didn't embrace success. I like it, I like being successful. But I did it exactly on my own terms.

One last question: You have plenty of friends who are writers and critics, which contradicts the idea that that relationship is adversarial. What do you have in common?

I do have a lot of friends who are critics, because our interests are the same. If you name a band that's at our level, I doubt there are that many of them who buy as many records and listen to as much different music and read as many fanzines as I do. It’s just something I'm fascinated by. I still read those mimeographed fanzines – there's a bunch of them that are really cool. I look for 7-inches on obscure labels and go to little punk clubs to see bands. And at the shows I go to, I see music critics. In Seattle, I see two of the four critics really often. I don't see the guys from Mudhoney or Nirvana there. Those are my friends and my peer group, but musicians tend to not go out and do this kind of stuff so much. Thurston does, I see Thurston Moore at shows, and we have a lot of things in common. But I see critics all the time. It's part of the world I'm involved in. It has to do with getting advance cassettes and being excited about new bands and seeing what's happening. So it's natural that you’d be friends with these people. Not all of them – there's a lot of people I disagree with. But especially in Seattle, I keep seeing the same two critics at every show I go to. I think it's interesting that they're there. They'll write a review, and I'm there because I'm digging it. But we're there for the same reason.

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scarletgardensrpg · 4 years ago

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UNDEAD ♦ TWENTY-SIX ♦ NEUTRAL

EVANDER BUCHANAN is the Gravekeeper of the Oude Kerk. While Evander does not uphold most traditional priestly duties, such as Sunday sermons and rituals, he offers Undead baptisms, wherein the newly rehabilitated are “purified” as a means of initiation into Amsterdam—a common practice for nearly all Undead citizens, regardless of their religious affiliation. He was killed and transformed into a rotbeest at the age of twenty-six by Cecile, then resurrected in the Carpathian Mountains by Julian in 2045.

BIOGRAPHY

tw: alcohol and drug abuse, death

“Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck.” Julian, on the other end of the line, sounded tinny and unimpressed. Thank you for that, good morning to you as well. Now if you'll be more specific... “Okay, um. I’m still at the beach.” A long silence. “I took Papa’s Porsche.” An even longer silence. “It’s, like, not in great condition. Anymore.” This last stretch of silence went on for so long, Evander pulled his phone back from his ear to make sure the call hadn’t disconnected. “Julian.” Is it still driveable? “Yeah, I think so. Maybe. I dunno, the wheels look fine?” That’s not—okay. Drive it to the nearest collision center. Now, it was Evander’s turn to be silent. For the first time, in a long time, he felt something akin to shame. He was nineteen, and still trying—failing—to make his brother proud. “I’m, uh, still kind of drunk. Sorry. Do you think you could—” Yes. I’ll be there soon. Click. Evander swore under his breath and shoved his phone back into his pocket. His eyes hurt, there was sand in the depths of his ass crack, and Ce was going to mock him for a week.

- ❀ -

Spare the rod and spoil the child. He came last: after Julian had been born and deemed favorite and heir, after Cecile had been born and deemed illegitimate and unwanted. Evander, then, found himself with nothing to prove and nothing to endure: it was all roses. Handsome, good grades, star of the football team; he’d spend his youth living out some iteration of the American fantasy: a young prince without a care in the world, idling indulgently by an emerald infinity pool—the very picture of privilege. But, of course, as with all things that seemed too good to be true, there was the untarnished gleam of good appearances and saved face—and then, there was the truth. The Buchanans, for all their money’s worth, were a study in psychopathy: generations of well-dressed bastards who had lied and cheated their way up to Heaven, and scaled up the ladder of power using their claws and teeth. A thousand ruined lives could be put to Papa’s name—his own children’s being chief among them. It was a beautiful life, filled with exotic vacations and designer clothes, more money than he’d ever need, enough to fill entire rooms with—and it was an ugly life, marred by screaming matches, broken furniture, and five perpetually unoccupied seats at the dinner table.

In the end, it was enough to drive Julian to heartlessness, Cecile to madness, and Evander to debauchery. He, especially, wanted no part in any of it all. His siblings were formidable and hungry: the boldest and brightest of the Buchanan clan, with enough conviction to set the world aflame and enough ambition to swallow it whole. What candle could he have held to those big people, those big dreams? He had no interest in trying. Instead, at Dartmouth, he would retreat into his expensive amusements and vices: liquor and wine, lines of cocaine, a quarter-million dollars blown on a bad bet in the casino, yes-men all around him. You’re so pathetic, Cecile would say disdainfully each morning she found him passed out in the foyer—and this, Evander knew, was the one thing she and Julian could agree on. He didn’t mind. That meant there was one less thing he had to listen to them fight about. He loved them, dearly and inexplicably—and he had thought they loved him, too. Wasn’t it enough that they had one another? The answer was, printed in neat clinical letters atop a stack of biochemical consent forms: No. He had underestimated both of them. Julian’s love and Julian’s ambition were two breeds of the same beast. Cecile’s wrath and her ambition were two strains of the same poison.

So: he would die by the hands of his siblings. At this point, it was so trite to talk about: six years of experimentation, Cecile shouldering the brunt of it—not out of concern for Evander, but a twisted need for it to fucking work, already before it got to Julian. When at last it did, and Cecile came out of the bloody waters a dead woman with gleaming eyes, she’d make plans to raise hell, as was so typical of her—but this time, intended Evander to partake in the chaos, too. He had bled to death at her feet, cheek pressed to the filthy basement floor, more afraid than ever. When his mind sank away from him at last, Cecile let him up and swung the door open. It’s me, Ce, she cooed. You always liked to have fun. We’re going to have some fun. And was it fun? In the moment, it might’ve been. Evander couldn’t say. He would come to in three years, in the mountains with Julian’s blood in his mouth and no recollection of what had occurred in the time between the night he’d died and now. His brother looked older, icier than ever. Cecile was nowhere to be found. There’s no need to save her, Evander had spat into the snow. She saved herself.

At least I’ve saved you, Julian said. To that, Evander could only laugh and laugh, until the incredulity wore off, and there was only grief.

CONNECTIONS

IVONNE – PESKY WOMAN. Evander understands she is his counterpart of sorts—a Priestess to the living in the same way he is a Gravekeeper for the dead. Evander doesn’t understand how this, alone, is sufficient justification in Ivonne’s eyes to enter and leave his church as she pleases (“Evander, this is public property. Your attitude is un-priestly.” “I’m not a priest!”) with armfuls of baked goods, insisting matter-of-factly that he doesn’t eat enough, among a myriad of other baseless declarations she makes to him, about him. They are, in Evander's opinion, vastly different people: where he had happened upon the abandoned Oude Kerk and, in seeing no better option, made a reluctant home for himself there, Ivonne is a zealous New Worlder type. She is a peculiar woman in general: for all her power and popularity, it doesn’t seem she has many friends, nor particularly wants them. In some ways, Evander thinks she’s even lonelier than him. Despite this, he remains quick to brush her off—sometimes aggressively, the hurt of having someone to look after him after so many years both sharp and jarring, and other times begrudgingly, between bitefuls of (admittedly delicious) lemon meringue. She is not exactly motherly, per se—Ivonne acts more like a disapproving corporate manager, or a disinterested therapist—but her attentiveness for Evander is both overwhelming and...neither appreciated, nor unappreciated. He’s conflicted. You know, I can take care of myself, he told her once. Ivonne had lifted a single, elegant brow. Yes, I know. I wonder all the time why you don’t.

JULIAN & CECILE – TWO KNIVES IN HIS BACK. It’s hard—no, impossible—for him to reconcile that Julian, who read him to sleep after nightmares and took a welt to the cheek for Evander after he’d crashed the Porsche, had also watched impassively from across the expanse of an infinite table while Evander signed his life away—and that Cecile, who cried in the bathroom when nobody came to her recital, and accepted expulsion from six successive schools for the simple want of being loved, had been the same woman to draw Evander calmly into her arms, only to kill him between teethfuls of flesh and blood. Once, Evander thought his older brother and sister hung the moon. Cecile never was able to accept Julian’s kindnesses—ones she called debts, mouth wrapped sourly around the word—but Evander would have been content to bask in that kindness forever: diamonds and Jaguars, exotic beaches, lovers in every city—and above all other luxuries, the one of knowing the three of them would be together, always. That hope of his has come true, he supposes, in the most twisted of ways. True, he has Cecile to thank for not abandoning him in a basement in Palestrina—but she’d left him three years later instead in Poland. And he has Julian to thank for resurrecting him—but Julian was the pronouncer of his death sentence to begin with; and what’s more, he’s carried him out of one Hell, only to drag him into another. They were never a happy family, but they were a family. Now, whatever it is that’s keeping them together—science, death, and that ugly word, debts—Evander wishes it wouldn’t.

KISARA & OKSANA – THE LOVERS. He really, really, wishes they would stop making out in his cemetery. Well—they are not exactly kissing, but by the way they spar and wrestle, eyes gleaming bright with the closest thing to feeling alive : it might as well be kissing. Kisara is an old friend—someone he used to visit at the Moulin Rouge when he’d first arrived in Amsterdam, having defaulted back to sex and gambling to quell his misery. The two of them had once gone to depraved depths with one another, lost their minds eating seeds, tumbled about in satin sheets— Eventually, he turned his back on all of it once and for all, but Kisara stuck around. According to her, Oksana is new meat. I’m showing her around, she says, feinting disinterest as she goes to examine her perfect, shiny red nails. Evander snorts. Yeah, showing her around your bed. When Kisara jabs him in the rib with a snarl, he has to roll on the ground and make exaggerated sounds of pain for like, a while, before she finally laughs and forgives him. Kisara and Oksana have been coming around more often—De Wallen is cramped and unsightly, while Centraal Station tends to overrun itself with creepy 200 junkies when it gets late enough. The Oude Kerk, decrepit and, exempting Evander himself, void of people, is an admittedly good place to have some privacy. In truth, Evander doesn’t really mind. Kisara is welcome to come whenever she’d like, and he likes Oksana enough: she’s witty, abrasive, and reminds him a lot of Cecile. But perhaps it’s that very resemblance to his conniving sister that makes him uneasy about her. Kisara, too wrapped up in whatever it is they have going on, doesn’t seem to see the way Oksana holds herself: calmly and calculatively, showing just enough teeth to pass off as fully feral. Evander knows her kind. He’s not inclined to trust her.

OPEN ♦ FC: SEAN O'PRY

#evander #o #ud #neutral #all #lsrpg #lsrp #bio rp

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michelletheemann-blog · 5 years ago

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The Irony

There is no space more aptly named than the sanctuary in a black church. It is a meeting space, a room of creation and inspiration, a refuge from a country that often refuses to acknowledge your humanity.

At my church, our pastor can sing very, very well, and he can conjure the holy spirit at the drop of a hat in that truly Southern Baptist way. As a kid, I loved to look at the photo of Jesus—loose black curls, milk chocolate skin, and a short wooly beard—hanging crooked in the stairwell. My best friend from youth choir’s granny always sat in the same seat crowned with a new hat. With fondness, I used to look around at the giants, black kings and queens, clothed in their finest royal Sunday garb and always with a smile and hug to give to Tony and Colette’s baby girl. After service, I would lollygag between the pews, poorly helping my dad, the head usher, pick up any forgotten bulletins and whine about going to McDonald’s when I knew good and well I ain’t have no McDonald’s money. On special Sunday’s the smell of fried chicken and greens would waft up from the basement into the sanctuary, flirting with my nose, and when my friends and I would rush down the stairs to be the first in line we were chastised by Mrs. Somebody for running only to have an Auntie save us with a definitive, “let the babies eat, girl.”

This is a village that raises many a child, myself included, and reminds us children that it is our duty to honor those that have come before and work hard to make things better in the future. I grew up in love with everything church and it has always been my home and foundation, my sanctuary. So, one day in college when I finally stopped pushing down those dark, omnipresent feelings and said “I’m gay” out loud I knew I was going to have a few problems.

Twenty or so years ago my parents carefully chose a church, a village, to balance the experiences that my younger sister and I would have in the suburban life they hesitantly birthed us into. Yes, they wanted us to know God for ourselves and for us to have a strong sense of religion but they also wanted to make sure their kids would have a taste of the blackness they were raised on. They knew that our upper-middle-class, white education wouldn’t teach us about Henrietta Lacks or Madam CJ Walker and the name Fannie Lou Hamer wasn’t going to make it into our lessons about black history. Instead, my understanding of blackness and black excellence came from the Vacation Bible School talks, Sunday School Black History Month celebrations, and the pulpit. I was to have examples of all sorts of black people in my church and role models for me to look up to, a village to raise me. Though in the suburbs schools may have been better and the crime rates low, my parents made sure I knew that these white people were never supposed to be my everything because them white folks is crazy and my church, my people, are my real foundation in this world.

But herein lies the problem. “The fact that this particular child had been born when and where he was born had dictated certain expectations” (“Introduction”, xvi). For most of my life, these invisible expectations felt like simple—unachievable—goals and the drive to meet them was fueled by an incessant desire for perfection and affirmation. Follow your parents’ footsteps. Be successful. Achieve even more than your parents and your grandparents, they have worked so hard. Help your people prosper. You’re going to make us all so proud. As a girl, I remember that one lady who always dressed a little different, the woman with the short-cut who was whispered about at book clubs and post-church brunches. She was raised here too and she very quickly hauled ass out of the church, occasionally slipping into the back row on holidays. Yes, there was an expectation for her, an expectation for people like that, which I did not know how to articulate, but I knew that she was doing something wrong. “The child does not really know what these expectations are—does not know how real they are—until he begins to fail, challenge, or defeat them” (“Introduction”, xvi). I had a sense of these expectations and still one day I came home and broke my mother’s heart. Apparently, I had been keeping up my farce a little too well, both for hers and my own sake. “Since when??? How can you want this for yourself???” she pleaded. I am sorry, Mom, but when you imported boys from church for me to take to homecoming dances (the black boys at white schools “don’t go for black girls”, but that is another essay) I was looking over their shoulders at Grace, the only openly black lesbian at my school who, paradoxically, wanted nothing to do with me.

Anyway, there is indeed a difference for when black people are gay than for white people. It is not that black people are more homophobic nor do I believe that the black struggle can be compared to the white, queer struggle. The difference is that when a young black person is gay there is something more at stake: the possibility of losing the only community that accepts you. As a black geek articulated, “Blackness can be a rigid, didactic identity, with people stepping out of line facing ridicule and admonishment or, worse, condemnation. Those who reject the perceived identity of Blackness can be seen as rejecting the whole of black worth itself” (Johnson, 15).

Personally, I gained my entire sense of self, associated all my blackness with an organization that had very specific rules for what it meant to be black. The politics of respectability once disguised as a coat of armor and nobility now choked me like a straitjacket, locked into an idea of who I was supposed to be one day: a successful career woman, a role model in my church just as my parents had been, and, most importantly, a wife to a strong black man. I have always been gay but it is only recently that I have begun to accept and love myself for being gay, for changing a small yet fundamental part of that vision. Still, for a long while, I thought that I had betrayed my people and felt the need to hide that which would make me a stranger in my own village. I would return to the sanctuary and look upon the kings and queens with fear and sadness as “…they move[d] with an authority which I shall never have” (“Stranger”, 83). Instead, I would avoid going to church, stay at school for breaks, drop my girlfriend’s hand every time anyone who knew my family walked by. When I did go to church I felt like everyone could see all the lies pulsing just beneath my skin. My sanctuary became a jungle in which I did not know where to hide and where the possibility of being eaten alive felt invisibly imminent.

Then one day I met Audre Lorde. And Bayard Rustin. I learned that there is quite a bit more to Angela Davis’ story than just having a sick afro. Suddenly I had a new village and I had a reason to hope. After a lot of self-reflection, a very simple yet revolutionary idea crossed my mind. I realized, really considered for the first time, that I could be just as gay as I am black. I learned that the person whose love is most important in my life is that which I have for myself. “Coming out to yourself and to others, and then staying out as you walk out the door brings strength in its action,” and, yes, I could feel my strength beginning to build (Johnson, 17). At times the old thinking that lurks on the fringes of my memory, that which is embedded in my reflexes, begins to creep up and make me doubt myself and my wholeness once again, but now more than ever I refuse to let it control or define me. One day far from now my soul will look back and wonder how I got over.

Works Cited Baldwin, James. "Introduction: The Price of the Ticket." The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non Fiction. New York:St. Martin's/Marek, 1985. Print.

Baldwin, James. "Stranger in the Village" The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-Fiction. New York: St. Martin's/Marek, 1985. Print.

Walker, Rebecca and Mat Johnson, “The Geek” Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness. Berkeley, Soft Skull Press, 2012. Print.

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mizu-writes-kumo · 6 years ago

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Sorry this took a bit to get up. I was traveling and with family for most of the weekend. So I didn’t have much time to actually do a lot of writing like I would if I was just at home.

Based of @rigb0ner‘s Shance Beauty and the Beast AU! Or more specifically this post right here.

----

Seriously, why Keith thought it was a good idea to leave at night, when a storm was approaching, was lost on Shiro.

He was pretty sure the people Keith was venturing off to see, would more than understand if he was a day late due to weather. It’s not an unheard of thing to happen. But Keith acted like they would blame him personally for brewing up a storm if he didn’t leave right that instant.

And don’t worry, he’d taken that route before way later in way worse weather many times before, he would be fine. Back in a week’s time like nothing ever happened.

Except something did happen.

Red, Keith’s horse, came back like it saw some godawful sight....with no Keith.

Which was why Shiro was on Kuro, dragging poor Red along looking for the younger man. Trying not to be worried too much about that fact that Red was being skittish and timid, when Red was never skittish or timid. About like anything. Let alone not wanting to find Keith, who she never failed leave too far behind. Rather Shiro was trying to look around with an air of ‘I told you so...’

It was a lot easier said than done the longer they went along.

Shiro pulled his cloak a little tighter around himself. Shielding himself form a cold breeze as he peered up at the dark branches of the tree tops.

He had never been to this part of the forest before.

There was a weird feeling in the air. One that Shiro can’t really put into exact words to describe. Because it was like someone was watching him, but not. And it was like there was something dark and terrible looming ahead, but also not at the same time. Yet, there was a pull of some kind, like a distant string in the back of his mind. It was weird, Shiro didn’t exactly like it, but he pushed on. The sooner he found Keith the sooner he could get out of there.

It didn’t help that there were old wives tale or rumor of some beast that roamed around within the depths of the forest nipping at the back of his mind. Something only a handful of local hunters had claimed to see and all their drunken stories differed greatly.

All was fine, until Red reared up with a loud neigh.

Snapping the rope tying her to Kuro’s saddle and turned tail. Galloping away from Shiro before he could reach for her reigns or broken rope and calm her down. She was gone by the time Shiro even knew what happened.

He cursed to the sky as he realized it was too late to go after her.

Kuro huffed and puffed below him. Completely indifferent to the events that happened as she stomped her hooves impatiently for Shiro’s command. Making no moves to actually turn and look where Red went.

Shiro sighed as he took as a sign he was going in the right direction. Gently nudging Kuro forward. Knowing Red will wonder back to their little cottage and stay there until they returned. Maybe only venture away to beg someone to take her reigns off, but not much well.

He rode for another five minutes or so, before stumbled upon a castle.

A fresh set of foot and hoof prints in the mud. More than enough evidence to tell Shiro, Keith and Red wiggled open the gate and ventured inside of some hopeful shelter. He just hoped Keith was still inside, completely fine and safe.

And not the victim of whatever scared off Red.

Sliding off Kuro, Shiro takes the reigns and leads his horse through the half open gates. Being carefully mindful of everything he does as he approaches. How and where he steps, like it mattered for some reason as he started up at the huge structure.

It was massive. Quite literally a castle of fine craftsman ship, standing in decently perfect condition. Granted it’s a little run down, and old looking, none of it seemed to be falling apart one bit. Shiro was surprised he had never noticed it before. Even with how tucked away it was in the mountain, it should more than have been visible form the village of Arus down in the valley.

Shiro tied Kuro’s reigns to post outside. Securing them well enough before he ducked under the horse’s head to make his way to the main entrance. Or rather the two huge wooden doors that were opened just a crack. He stared at them in slight awe as he tried to kick as much mud of his boots as he could.

Carefully, Shiro eased his way inside.

“Hello?” He called out softly as he gently eased the door closed.

It echoed slightly through the huge foyer. Which was as ornate and rich in appearance as the outside. And just was run down looking too. A decently thick layer of dust collected on the furniture. Save a sharp line, that Shiro could only guess was from Keith.

“Keith!” Shiro called out lowly as he advanced. “Keith are you in here? It’s Shiro.” He peered around the wide halls, holding himself as close to himself as he can in the dark space. “Keith!?”

Shiro snatched up a three armed candle stick holder from a table. Carefully lightly the three slightly used candles with a match as he advanced further into the place. The soft candle light giving the halls a warm glow. Gently he kept calling out Keith’s name, and listening for any type of sound. It didn’t matter if it was a reply or not, Shiro would take anything he could get with each passing second.

Until finally, when Shiro was peering down some stairs to the cellars or basement or something...there was something.

The smallest, most distant, and confused “Shiro?” he probably ever heard Keith’s voice say.

But it was more than enough.

Shiro raced down, calling out for the other man, who in turned did the same.

Until Shiro fond him looked into looked like some kind of dungeon cell. Calling out over to the bars at the sight of Shiro before him, huge smile plastered on his face. There was a bruise forming on Keith’s temple, but other than that he seemed perfectly okay. Save being locked in a cage like cell.

Shiro quickly took to trying to find a key once he realized Keith was okay.

“What are you doing here Shiro?” Keith asked.

“Trying to find you,” Shiro snapped as he kicked a small hay pile like it was hiding the key to the door. “Red came back to the house without you, I knew something was wrong. I told you not to go out that storm.”

“You shouldn’t be here, Shiro.” Keith snapped sharply. “You need to get out here.”

“Not without you.” Shiro shoot back with a determined glare.

“Yes, without me! It doesn’t know your here, you need to get out here before it finds you and throws you in this damn cell with me...or worse.”

“It?” Shiro asked, pausing his look for the key, to turn to look at Keith confused. “What are you talking about? Keith, who put you in here?”

“More like a what.” Keith snapped in a frustrated tone. But his eyes flicker to the opening of where they were. Like he did whenever he was frightened by something. “Look, I didn’t really get a good look at it, but what I did, wasn’t like anything I saw before. It was big and quick...dragged me all the way down here.”

“I think you hit your head to hard.” Shiro stated after a moment. Going back to his task of searching for a way to get Keith out of the cell.

“Shiro, I’m being serious.”

“Hi Being Seri--”

“Shiro!” Keith groaned as he banged his head against the bars of the cell. Then he let out a desperate sigh. “Please, just get out of here before that thing finds you, and...”

Keith’s words suddenly die away on his lips.

The other’s suddenly silence, caused Shiro to turn. To find Keith staring wide eyes at the doorway of the space they were in. Before he slowly crawled back away from the bars and towards the wall. Eyes staying glued to the opening.

Shiro moved to look, trying to see what he saw and froze.

The hallway of the dungeon like area was suddenly lit. More than Shiro’s three little candles, and more a rage torch fire. The shadow of a large figure hulking figure. A bulky mass that looked to be more fur and muscle than anything Shiro had seen before in the wild. And there are heavy slow footsteps making they way towards the door.

“Who’s down here?” A voice suddenly called out. To was low, and growly, with an undertone of gargling rocks. “I specifically stated no one was to go down here other than myself. I made it very clear.”

Shiro turned to look at Keith, who was just look at him with wide-eyed back.

“Fine don’t answer me then,” The voice continued in a grumble. “I’ll just come in and see.”

Shiro flew to press himself against the wall as silently as possible. Easing himself towards the opening slowly as the sound of footsteps made their way towards the opening. He watched as the huge shadow of the floor shrunk slightly as it moved way from the light, but still a huge figure. Gripping the candle stick tightly, Shiro lifted it above his head to attack when the figure came through the door.

He braced himself as the figure stopped in front of the opening.

Counting down in anticipation.

Three...

Two...

One...

The figure stepped into the room, and Shiro suddenly halted at the sight before him.

Because...well...

It was not the sight he was expecting.

Before him was man...well kind of. Most of his features were human and man-like in appearance. A natural tan to his skin, and brown hair, with a height maybe a two or so inches shorter than Shiro. Save the cat-like ears on the top of his head, on of which was turned in Shiro’s exact direction. And large red stripe like curves on each cheek.

He was dressed in what looked like a thick cloak, lined with fine furs for warmth in the coldest of winters. And his clothes are loose, but they looked like quality materials of someone wealthy. But Shiro can see enough to know the guy has a lean build, more speed and flexibility, than bulk strength.

“Smaller than I expected.” Shiro blurted out loud dumbly.

Suddenly, the man-cat-person-thing turned to Shiro sharply.

And Shiro has a brief thought of angry ocean eyes before he’s suddenly launched backwards.

The candlestick clattering against the floor as the fire went out. Darkness overcame the room again. But there was just enough out the glow from the hallway, for Shiro to make out the outline of the man as he stalked forward.

“Is this just break into random castles and be rude night?” The man question in a growl, but it’s not completely as deep as the first time he talked.

Shiro only groaned weakly at the pain in his chest.

Then suddenly the guy is on top of him. And there is a flicker of something shinny and metal for a second, followed by something cold against Shrio’s throat. He stiffened at the feel of it, and the other chuckled darkly above him as he did do. Shiro could make out just a bit of their smirk and sharp teeth as his eyes adjusted back to the dark.

“Who the quizanack are you?” The man asked from above him.

Shiro glared up the guy, refusing to answer.

Partly because he was still so shocked at the sight in front of him.

This was what Keith was so scared off. Shiro would lift him twenty times, on a good day, no problem.

“Who are you?” The cat-man thing asked him again.

Again Shiro didn’t answer.

Deciding giving his name to something in this weird place was a bad idea.

With a growl, the man got off him. Then yanked him up the collar of his shirt, and slammed Shiro’s back into the wall. The cold metal returned to his neck again like it never really left.

Shiro was half surprised by the guys ease to do so.

“Hey, let Shiro go!” Keith suddenly snapped, with a harsh bit to his voice.

Well there went Shiro’s plan of keeping his name unsaid right out the window. Thanks Keith!

Looking over, Shiro could see Keith was glaring angrily at the man. He almost looked extra annoyed, probably about the fact that man got a jump on him given his less then intimidating appearance. Literally the last thing Shiro thought of what he looked like when Keith talked about him.

But Shiro’s toes where just brushing the floor, and the guy was holding him up by the collar. So the cover of that book was a decoy.

The guy growled lowly, shooting a sharp look back at Keith in the cell.

It caused Keith to stumble a back in surprise.

But then he turned back to Shiro with a wicked grin on his lips. A shadow almost falling over his eyes as his shoulders hunched gleefully. His teeth catching the faint light from the hallway.

“Shiro...” The man said like he was testing the name on his tongue. Rolling the ‘r’ in something a purr, and elongating the ‘o’ of his name. The cold metal of what Shiro is assuming is a knife, pressed a little bit into his neck. And the man tilted his head as his eyes flickered up and down Shiro really quickly. “What are you doing in my house?”

Shiro turned his attention back to the man holding him against the wall. Blinking down at him dumbly for a moment.

Wait...what this the beast from all those tales and rumors?

The one the had scared a handful of hunters. That they claimed fought bears and pushed over huge trees. Rumored to be so ugly that the devil would run and hide and seeing his face.

He was so...small. Scrawny and scrappy looking.

Suddenly there was a dark growl in front of Shiro.

Oh crap Shiro said that out loud.

“I’d watch your mouth!” The man growled out fiercely as he leaned in. “Now, answer my question. What are you doing in my house?”

“Sorry...I was just trying to find my brother, Keith.” Shiro stated hurriedly as he gestured towards Keith in the cell. “His horse returned to our home, I just came to see where he was, and stumbled on this place. If you just let us go, we’ll be out of your hair. It will be like we never here in the first place.”

“Not possible.” The man hissed out.

“Why?” Shiro asked calmly.

“The hideous hair disaster over there,” The man grumbled as he with a slight nod of his head towards Keith. Ignoring Keith’s sharp call of ‘hey’ at the comment, aside from the slightest for frown. “Broke in, stole from me, and started to settle in for the night. Not to mention attacked me when I told him to leave. I don’t like strangers in my house.”

“I’m sure, he didn’t really mean too.” Shiro stated levely. “If he would have known you lived here, surely he would have asked. Right, Keith?” Shiro said glancing over the man’s cat-like ears at Keith, who really didn’t look half as sheepish as he maybe should been.

“Uh...yeah.” Keith answered as the man glanced over his shoulder at him.

“He stays.” The man growled out with an annoyed huff. “You can leave, despite your rudeness and breaking in, you’ve done nothing but wander around looking for him I suppose I can let it slide this once.”

“Surely we can discuss--”

“He stays!” The man snapped with a finality to his words.

“What if I stayed instead?” Shiro blurted out desperately.

“What?!” Both the man and Keith shrieked.

Or rather Keith shrieked.

The man sounded more genuinely surprised and caught of guard. Like he wasn’t sure if he heard what Shiro said right. His ears stood at attention in a way that Shiro would saw almost looked...hopeful. But it’s gone in a simply blink of an eye. And it was like he couldn’t believe Shiro was willingly offering to stay with him.

“You let Keith go, and I’ll stay in his place.” Shiro stated again, like it clarified things.

“Really?” The guy asked.

Shiro nodded quickly.

It was an easy choice for him to make.

Keith was needed more in town than Shiro. Keith was a far better hunter and tradesman than Shiro...even with Keith’s...quarks. Shiro was perhaps just a good stable hand at the most. He was know more for having his eyes to the stars or nose in a book, than anything else.

Really only going into town for supplies and a new book to read.

“Fine.” The man huffed after a moment.

Carefully the cat-man lowered Shiro back towards the ground. His eyes flickering up and down Shiro for a while, slowly easing back away from. Bits of blue in his eyes would catch the light from the hallway as he did so. He wasn’t really hiding the fact that he was sizing Shiro up.

Suddenly he surged forward.

“If this is some kind of ploy...” The man hissed out as he slammed Shiro into the wall. There is a flash of metal. The point of a thin knife placed within the center of Shiro’s vision. “Both of you will be staying here in this dungeon for the rest of your time on Earth. Understand?”

“Or course.” Shiro nodded out.

“Good,” The man stated with a satisfied nod.

He shoved away from Shiro roughly, making a point to add a bit of growl. As he moved away, he reached into his fur lined cloak and tossed something at Shiro. It jingled loudly as Shiro scrambled to both protect his face, and catch the things...which turned out to be keys.

Looking at the man, he just gestured to the door of the cell Keith was in. Then he leaned down to pick up the candlestick Shiro had dropped on the ground. Shiro turned his attention to the cell door as the man started to gently dusting it off.

Shiro made his way to the cell door, quickly working on which figuring out which key worked. Hurriedly shoving each one in and trying to turn them. Keith made his way to the bars be him.

“Shiro, you don’s have t--”

“I know, but I am.” Shiro snapped as the sixth key slide in effortless. With a simple turn the lock clicked out of place. Shiro yanked open the cell door. “End of discussion.”

“Yeah, enough chit-chat you two.” The cat-man’s voice huffed in annoyance, and it was almost like Shiro could hear his eye rolling. He turned to see the other hold the candlestick, which the candles lit again, and his hip jutting out to the side. “Unless you want to stay in that cell, Haircut.”

The cat-man, or Lance as he begrudgingly introduced himself as when Shiro asked (because he didn’t want to call him Beast...or Cat-man), was kind enough to let Shiro and Keith have a good-bye.

He stood in the doorway with the candlestick. Seemingly to be looking slightly more annoyed with every passing moment he was standing there. Shiro had noticed one of his eyebrows starting to twitch, as he glared at Keith. No doubt hearing Keith trying to convince Shiro to just book it with him. They could totally lose that thing, especially on Kuro.

But Lance never actually stepped in on their conversation. Just stood there off to the side waiting.

Which made Shiro wonder if he really wan’t concerned that Shiro would get far if he tried anything. He could lift Shiro with one arm like he was a feather. Shiro wouldn’t be surprise he he could move a great distance in the blink of an eye.

So he just wished Keith save travels. Assuring he would be fine...doing whatever Lance put him to work doing. And he would find some way to keep in touch eventually. Keith should just get going on his way, and go about his life like nothing was wrong.

Eventually Keith crawled on Kuro and rode away.

And Lance made a heavy example of slamming the heaving wooden doors.

“Here.” Lance snapped as he roughly handed Shiro the three-armed candlestick once they were back inside the foyer of the castle. He barely waited for Shiro grab it before he let it go, causing Shiro to fumble with it slightly. “Coran will show you to your room, and only your room,” Lance added pointedly, before he turned. “I’ll be check you’re there in ten minutes. There are some things I need to take off.”

Then he just stormed off in a mix of grumbles and huffs.

Leaving Shiro to just waiting around for whoever Coran was. Shiro glanced around the foyer wondering when some other person was just going show up. Half wondering if they would be a cat-person too, or something.

“Please don’t mind the young master, my boy.” An accented voice suddenly said...like right beside Shiro. It caused Shiro to jump and turn sharply only to the sound. “It’s been a while since he’s had a guest.”

Shiro’s gaze turned to the look at the candlestick in his hand, because that was where the sound was coming from his hand. Only to find the three-armed candlestick looking up at him. Grinning up at him with a face and something that looked like a mustache.

“My name is Coran.” The candlestick said with a wave one of it’s arms. “I suggest we start making our way to your room, before the young master falls into more of a bad mood...if you wo--”

Shiro screamed and dropped the thing.

What the hell was going on?

He watched in shock and some horror, as the candle stick moved to get up. Quickly brushing himself off like it was no issue that Shiro just dropped him. Turn to glance up at Shiro like everyone is just normal, waiting for Shiro to let him guide him to his room.

Laughter suddenly bounces through the halls of the castle.

The snickering undertone told Shiro that it was Lance somewhere else in the house. Like a child who hid a fake snake under a bucket for someone to fine. Some of the other furniture seemed to leaned towards the sound, before turning to look at each other than Shiro.

“You’re room is this way, my good sir.” Coran stated cheerily. He bounced forward with a metal clank of his base against the floor.

And for some reason Shiro followed after him.

----

AN: Yeah! I did. I have like so many ideas for this AU of sort (and Beauty and the Beast really isn’t may favorite Disney Princes movie to being with). But the idea of Shiro being a dork and a slight gay disaster...cause he finds Lance immediately cute because of well...his size and cat like features. I just can’t get enough of it.

Lance is really stand off for a handful of reasons. Most of them do to the curse put on him and generally being alone for a long time. But he really a sweet boy, and he looks like his M&M character, because reasons. Coran, Allura, and Hunk all live in the castle, as well a Candlestick, teapot, and clock respectively. And Keith and Pidge are more in Shiro’s world.

The ending got away from me a bit...but oh well.

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ntrending · 6 years ago

Text

Can AI destroy humanity?| Popular Science

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/can-ai-destroy-humanity-popular-science/

Can AI destroy humanity?| Popular Science

“It began three and a half billion years ago in a pool of muck, when a molecule made a copy of itself and so became the ultimate ancestor of all earthly life. It began four million years ago, when brain volumes began climbing rapidly in the hominid line. Fifty thousand years ago with the rise of Homo sapiens. Ten thousand years ago with the invention of civilization. Five hundred years ago with the invention of the printing press. Fifty years ago with the invention of the computer. In less than thirty years, it will end.”

Jaan Tallinn stumbled across these words in 2007, in an online essay called “Staring into the Singularity.” The “it” is human civilization. Humanity would cease to exist, predicted the essay’s author, with the emergence of superintelligence, or AI that surpasses the human intellect in a broad array of areas.

Tallinn, an Estonia-born computer programmer, has a background in physics and a propensity to approach life like one big programming problem. In 2003, he had co-founded Skype, developing the backend for the app. He cashed in his shares after eBay bought it two years later, and now he was casting about for something to do. “Staring into the Singularity” mashed up computer code, quantum physics, and Calvin and Hobbes quotes. He was hooked.

Tallinn soon discovered that the essay’s author, self-taught theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky, had written more than 1,000 articles and blog posts, many of them devoted to superintelligence. Tallinn wrote a program to scrape Yudkowsky’s writings from the internet, order them chronologically, and format them for his iPhone. Then he spent the better part of a year reading them.

The term “artificial intelligence,” or the simulation of intelligence in computers or machines, was coined back in 1956, only a decade after the creation of the first electronic digital computers. Hope for the field was initially high, but by the 1970s, when early predictions did not pan out, an “AI winter” set in. When Tallinn found Yudkowsky’s essays, AI was undergoing a renaissance. Scientists were developing AIs that excelled in specific areas, such as winning at chess, cleaning the kitchen floor, and recognizing human speech. (In 2007, the resounding win at Jeopardy! of IBM’s Watson was still four years away, while the triumph at Go of DeepMind’s AlphaGo was eight years off.) Such “narrow” AIs, as they’re called, have superhuman capabilities, but only in their specific areas of dominance. A chess-playing AI can’t clean the floor or take you from point A to point B. But super-intelligent AI, Tallinn came to believe, will combine a wide range of skills in one entity. More darkly, it also might use data generated by smartphone-toting humans to excel at social manipulation.

Reading Yudkowsky’s articles, Tallinn became convinced that superintelligence could lead to an explosion or “breakout” of AI that could threaten human existence—that ultrasmart AIs will take our place on the evolutionary ladder and dominate us the way we now dominate apes. Or, worse yet, exterminate us.

After finishing the last of the essays, Tallinn shot off an email to Yudkowsky—all lowercase, as is his style. “i’m jaan, one of the founding engineers of skype,” he wrote. Eventually he got to the point: “i do agree that…preparing for the event of general AI surpassing human intelligence is one of the top tasks for humanity.” He wanted to help. When he flew to the Bay Area for other meetings soon after, he met Yudkowsky at a Panera Bread in Millbrae, California, near where he lives. Their get-together stretched to four hours. “He actually, genuinely understood the underlying concepts and the details,” Yudkowsky recalls. “This is very rare.” Afterward, Tallinn wrote a check for $5,000 to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the nonprofit where Yudkowsky was a research fellow. (The organization changed its name to Machine Intelligence Research Institute, or MIRI, in 2013.) Tallinn has since given it more than $600,000.

The encounter with Yudkowsky brought Tallinn purpose, sending him on a mission to save us from our own creations. As he connected on the issue with other theorists and computer scientists, he embarked on a life of travel, giving talks around the world on the threat posed by superintelligence. Mostly, though, he began funding research into methods that might give humanity a way out: so-called friendly AI. That doesn’t mean a machine or agent is particularly skilled at chatting about the weather, or that it remembers the names of your kids—though super-intelligent AI might be able to do both of those things. It doesn’t mean it is motivated by altruism or love. A common fallacy is assuming that AI has human urges and values. “Friendly” means something much more fundamental: that the machines of tomorrow will not wipe us out in their quest to attain their goals.

Nine years after his meeting with Yudkowsky, Tallinn joins me for a meal in the dining hall of Cambridge University’s Jesus College. The churchlike space is bedecked with stained-glass windows, gold molding, and oil paintings of men in wigs. Tallinn sits at a heavy mahogany table, wearing the casual garb of Silicon Valley: black jeans, T-shirt, canvas sneakers. A vaulted timber ceiling extends high above his shock of gray-blond hair.

At 46, Tallinn is in some ways your textbook tech entrepreneur. He thinks that thanks to advances in science (and provided AI doesn’t destroy us), he will live for “many, many years.” His concern about superintelligence is common among his cohort. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s foundation has given $1.6 million to MIRI, and in 2015, Tesla founder Elon Musk donated $10 million to the Future of Life Institute, a technology safety organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tallinn’s entrance to this rarefied world came behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s, when a classmate’s father with a government job gave a few bright kids access to mainframe computers. After Estonia became independent, he founded a video-game company. Today, Tallinn still lives in its capital city—which by a quirk of etymology is also called Tallinn—with his wife and the youngest of his six kids. When he wants to meet with researchers, he often just flies them to the Baltic region.

His giving strategy is methodical, like almost everything else he does. He spreads his money among 11 organizations, each working on different approaches to AI safety, in the hope that one might stick. In 2012, he co-founded the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) with an initial outlay of close to $200,000.

Existential risks—or X-risks, as Tallinn calls them—are threats to humanity’s survival. In addition to AI, the 20-odd researchers at CSER study climate change, nuclear war, and bioweapons. But to Tallinn, the other disciplines mostly help legitimize the threat of runaway artificial intelligence. “Those are really just gateway drugs,” he tells me. Concern about more widely accepted threats, such as climate change, might draw people in. The horror of super-intelligent machines taking over the world, he hopes, will convince them to stay. He is here now for a conference because he wants the academic community to take AI safety seriously.

Our dining companions are a random assortment of conference-goers, including a woman from Hong Kong who studies robotics and a British man who graduated from Cambridge in the 1960s. The older man asks everybody at the table where they attended university. (Tallinn’s answer, Estonia’s University of Tartu, does not impress him.) He then tries to steer the conversation toward the news. Tallinn looks at him blankly. “I am not interested in near-term risks,” he says.

Tallinn changes the topic to the threat of superintelligence. When not talking to other programmers, he defaults to metaphors, and he runs through his suite of them now: Advanced AI can dispose of us as swiftly as humans chop down trees. Superintelligence is to us what we are to gorillas. Inscribed in Latin above his head is a line from Psalm 133: “How good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity.” But unity is far from what Tallinn has in mind in a future containing a rogue superintelligence.

An AI would need a body to take over, the older man says. Without some kind of physical casing, how could it possibly gain physical control? Tallinn has another metaphor ready: “Put me in a basement with an internet connection, and I could do a lot of damage,” he says. Then he takes a bite of risotto.

Whether a Roomba or one of its world-dominating descendants, an AI is driven by outcomes. Programmers assign these goals, along with a series of rules on how to pursue them. Advanced AI wouldn’t necessarily need to be given the goal of world domination in order to achieve it—it could just be accidental. And the history of computer programming is rife with small errors that sparked catastrophes. In 2010, for example, a trader working for the mutual-fund company Waddell & Reed sold thousands of futures contracts. The firm’s software left out a key variable from the algorithm that helped execute the trade. The result was the trillion-dollar U.S. “flash crash.”

The researchers Tallinn funds believe that if the reward structure of a superhuman AI is not properly programmed, even benign objectives could have insidious ends. One well-known example, laid out by Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom in his book Superintelligence, is a fictional agent directed to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI might decide that the atoms in human bodies would be put to better use as raw material for them.

Tallinn’s views have their share of detractors, even among the community of people concerned with AI safety. Some object that it is too early to worry about restricting super-intelligent AI when we don’t yet understand it. Others say that focusing on rogue technological actors diverts attention from the most urgent problems facing the field, like the fact that the majority of algorithms are designed by white men, or based on data biased toward them. “We’re in danger of building a world that we don’t want to live in if we don’t address those challenges in the near term,” says Terah Lyons, executive director of the Partnership on AI, a multistakeholder organization focused on AI safety and other issues. (Several of the institutes Tallinn backs are members.) But, she adds, some of the near-term challenges facing researchers—such as weeding out algorithmic bias—are precursors to ones that humanity might see with super-intelligent AI.

Tallinn isn’t so convinced. He counters that super-intelligent AI brings unique threats. Ultimately, he hopes that the AI community might follow the lead of the anti-nuclear movement in the 1940s. In the wake of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, scientists banded together to try to limit further nuclear testing. “The Manhattan Project scientists could have said, ‘Look, we are doing innovation here, and innovation is always good, so let’s just plunge ahead,’” he tells me. “But they were more responsible than that.”

Tallinn warns that any approach to AI safety will be hard to get right. If an AI is sufficiently smart, he explains, it might have a better understanding of the constraints than its creators do. Imagine, he says, “waking up in a prison built by a bunch of blind 5-year-olds.” That is what it might be like for a super-intelligent AI that is confined by humans.

Yudkowsky, the theorist, found evidence this might be true when, starting in 2002, he conducted chat sessions in which he played the role of an AI enclosed in a box, while a rotation of other people played the gatekeeper tasked with keeping the AI in. Three out of five times, Yudkowsky—a mere mortal—says he convinced the gatekeeper to release him. His experiments have not discouraged researchers from trying to design a better box, however.

The researchers that Tallinn funds are pursuing a broad variety of strategies, from the practical to the seemingly far-fetched. Some theorize about boxing AI, either physically, by building an actual structure to contain it, or by programming in limits to what it can do. Others are trying to teach AI to adhere to human values. A few are working on a last-ditch off switch. One researcher who is delving into all three is mathematician and philosopher Stuart Armstrong at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, which Tallinn calls “the most interesting place in the universe.” (Tallinn has given FHI more than $310,000.) Armstrong is one of the few researchers in the world who focuses full time on AI safety.

I meet him for coffee one afternoon in a cafe in Oxford. He wears a rugby shirt unbuttoned at the collar, and has the look of someone who spends his life behind a screen, with a pale face framed by a mess of sandy hair. He peppers his explanations with a disorienting mixture of popular-culture references and math. When I ask him what it might look like to succeed at AI safety, he says: “Have you seen The Lego Movie? Everything is awesome.”

One strain of Armstrong’s research looks at a specific approach to boxing called an “oracle” AI. In a 2012 paper with Nick Bostrom, who co-founded FHI, he proposed not only walling off superintelligence in a holding tank—a physical structure—but also restricting it to answering questions, like a really smart Ouija board. Even with these boundaries, an AI would have immense power to reshape the fate of humanity by subtly manipulating its interrogators. To reduce the possibility of this happening, Armstrong has proposed time limits on conversations, or banning questions that might upend the current world order. He also has suggested giving the oracle proxy measures of human survival, such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average or the number of people crossing the street in Tokyo, and telling it to keep these steady.

Ultimately, Armstrong believes, it could be necessary to create, as he calls it in one paper, a “big red off button”: either a physical switch, or a mechanism programmed into an AI to automatically turn itself off in the event of a breakout. But designing such a switch is far from easy. It’s not just that an advanced AI interested in self-preservation could prevent the button from being pressed. It also could become curious about why humans devised the button, activate it to see what happens, and render itself useless. In 2013, a programmer named Tom Murphy VII designed an AI that could teach itself to play Nintendo Entertainment System games. Determined not to lose at Tetris, the AI simply pressed pause—and kept the game frozen. “Truly, the only winning move is not to play,” Murphy observed wryly, in a paper on his creation.

For the strategy to succeed, an AI has to be uninterested in the button, or, as Tallinn puts it, “it has to assign equal value to the world where it’s not existing and the world where it’s existing.” But even if researchers can achieve that, there are other challenges. What if the AI has copied itself several thousand times across the internet?

The approach that most excites researchers is finding a way to make AI adhere to human values—not by programming them in, but by teaching AIs to learn them. In a world dominated by partisan politics, people often dwell on the ways in which our principles differ. But, Tallinn notes, humans have a lot in common: “Almost everyone values their right leg. We just don’t think about it.” The hope is that an AI might be taught to discern such immutable rules.

In the process, an AI would need to learn and appreciate humans’ less-than-logical side: that we often say one thing and mean another, that some of our preferences conflict with others, and that people are less reliable when drunk. But the data trails we all leave in apps and social media might provide a guide. Despite the challenges, Tallinn believes, we must try because the stakes are so high. “We have to think a few steps ahead,” he says. “Creating an AI that doesn’t share our interests would be a horrible mistake.”

On Tallinn’s last night in Cambridge, I join him and two researchers for dinner at a British steakhouse. A waiter seats our group in a white-washed cellar with a cave-like atmosphere. He hands us a one-page menu that offers three different kinds of mash. A couple sits down at the table next to us, and then a few minutes later asks to move elsewhere. “It’s too claustrophobic,” the woman complains. I think of Tallinn’s comment about the damage he could wreak if locked in a basement with nothing but an internet connection. Here we are, in the box. As if on cue, the men contemplate ways to get out.

Tallinn’s guests include former genomics researcher Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, who is CSER’s executive director, and Matthijs Maas, an AI policy researcher at the University of Copenhagen. They joke about an idea for a nerdy action flick titled Superintelligence vs. Blockchain!, and discuss an online game called Universal Paperclips, which riffs on the scenario in Bostrom’s book. The exercise involves repeatedly clicking your mouse to make paper clips. It’s not exactly flashy, but it does give a sense for why a machine might look for more-expedient ways to produce office supplies.

Eventually, talk shifts toward bigger questions, as it often does when Tallinn is present. The ultimate goal of AI-safety research is to create machines that are, as Cambridge philosopher and CSER co-founder Huw Price once put it, “ethically as well as cognitively superhuman.” Others have raised the question: If we don’t want AI to dominate us, do we want to dominate it? In other words, does AI have rights? Tallinn says this is needless anthropomorphizing. It assumes that intelligence equals consciousness—a misconception that annoys many AI researchers. Earlier in the day, CSER researcher Jose Hernandez-Orallo joked that when speaking with AI researchers, consciousness is “the C-word.” (“And ‘free will’ is the F-word,” he added.)

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In the cellar now, Tallinn says that consciousness is beside the point: “Take the example of a thermostat. No one would say it is conscious. But it’s really inconvenient to face up against that agent if you’re in a room that is set to negative 30 degrees.”

Ó hÉigeartaigh chimes in. “It would be nice to worry about consciousness,” he says, “but we won’t have the luxury to worry about consciousness if we haven’t first solved the technical safety challenges.”

People get overly preoccupied with what super-intelligent AI is, Tallinn says. What form will it take? Should we worry about a single AI taking over, or an army of them? “From our perspective, the important thing is what AI does,” he stresses. And that, he believes, may still be up to humans—for now.

This article was originally published in the Winter 2018 Danger issue of Popular Science.

Written By Mara Hvistendahl

#Science

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