#monkees in paris

[nowordsformylove]

[margflower]

[mygirlnesmith]

do you think something happened in paris?

[rig-a-rendal]

[monkeesmvs]

Don't Call on Me From Season 2, Episode 22 - "The Monkees in Paris"

[davy-zeppeli]

also because I have eyes and can appreciate when a person is good looking, there was a guy out with us tonight and won't lie. cute af. I'm happy with my own guy atm but he had the whole pinstriped shirt and slacks thing going on and a shaggy indie hairstyle. and then he said he liked my monkees shirt and said "Oh man I love the Monkees". so I gotta recruit this man into my arsenal of friends as fast as humanly possible.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

AI art has no anti-cooption immune system

TONIGHT (July 20), I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

One thing Myspace had going for it: it was exuberantly ugly. The decision to let users with no design training loose on a highly customizable user-interface led to a proliferation of Myspace pages that vibrated with personality.

The ugliness of Myspace wasn't just exciting in a kind of outsider/folk-art way (though it was that). Myspace's ugliness was an anti-cooption force-field, because corporate designers and art-directors would, by and large, rather break their fingers and gouge out their eyes than produce pages that looked like that.

In this regard, Myspace was the heir to successive generations of "design democratization" that gave amateur communities, especially countercultural ones, a space to operate in where authentic community members could be easily distinguished between parasitic commercializers.

The immediate predecessors to Myspace's ugliness-as-a-feature were the web, and desktop publishing. Between the img tag, imagemaps, the blink tag, animated GIFs, and the million ways that you could weird a page with tables and padding, the early web was positively bursting with individual personality. The early web balanced in an equilibrium between the plunder-friendliness of "view source" and the topsy-turvy design imperatives of web-based layout, which confounded both print designers (no fixed fonts! RGB colorspaces! dithering!) and even multimedia designers who'd cut their teeth on Hypercard and CD ROMs (no fixed layout!).

Before the web came desktop publishing, the million tractor-feed ransom notes combining Broderbund Print Shop fonts, joystick-edited pixel-art, and a cohort of enthusiasts ranging from punk zinesters to community newsletter publishers. As this work proliferated on coffee-shop counters and telephone poles, it was visibly, obviously distinct from the work produced by "real" designers – that is, designers who'd been a) trained and b) paid by a corporation to employ that training.

All of this matters, and not just for aesthetic reasons. Communities – especially countercultural ones – are where our society's creative ferment starts. Getting your start in the trenches of the counterculture wars is no proof against being co-opted later (indeed, many of the designers who cut their teeth desktop publishing weird zines went on to pull their hair and roll their eyes at the incredible fuggliness of the web). But without that zone of noncommercial, antiestablishment, communitarian low weirdness, design and culture would stagnate.

I started thinking about this 25 years ago, the first time I met William Gibson. I'd been assigned by the Globe and Mail to interview him for the launch of All Tomorrow's Parties:

https://craphound.com/nonfic/transcript.html

One of the questions I asked was about his famous aphorism, "The street finds its own use for things." Given how quickly each post-punk tendency had been absorbed by commercial culture, couldn't we say that "Madison Avenue finds its own use for the street"? His answer started me down a quarter-century of thinking and writing about this subject:

I worry about what we'll do in the future, [about the instantaneous co-opting of pop culture]. Where is our new stuff going to come from? What we're doing pop culturally is like burning the rain forest. The biodiversity of pop culture is really, really in danger. I didn't see it coming until a few years ago, but looking back it's very apparent.

I watch a sort of primitive form of the recommodification machine around my friends and myself in sixties, and it took about two years for this clumsy mechanism to get and try to sell us The Monkees.

In 1977, it took about eight months for a slightly faster more refined mechanism to put punk in the window of Holt Renfrew. It's gotten faster ever since. The scene in Seattle that Nirvana came from: as soon as it had a label, it was on the runways of Paris.

Ugliness, transgressiveness and shock all represent an incoherent, grasping attempt to keep the world out of your demimonde – not just normies and squares, but also and especially enthusiastic marketers who want to figure out how to sell stuff to you, and use you to sell stuff to normies and squares.

I think this is what drove a lot of people to 4chan (remember, before 4chan was famous for incubating neofascism, it was the birthplace of Anonymous): its shock culture, combined with a strong cultural norm of anonymity, made for a difficult-to-digest, thoroughly spiky morsel that resisted recommodification (for a while).

All of this brings me to AI art (or AI "art"). In his essay on the "eerieness" of AI art, Henry Farrell quotes Mark Fisher's "The Weird and the Eerie":

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/large-language-models-are-uncanny

"Eeriness" here is defined as "when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there is nothing present when there should be something." AI is eerie because it produces the seeming of intent, without any intender:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

When we contemplate "authentic" countercultural work – ransom-note DTP, the weird old web, seizure-inducing Myspace GIFs – it is arresting because the personality of the human entity responsible for it shines through. We might be able to recognize where that person ganked their source-viewed HTML or pixel-optimized GIF, but we can also make inferences about the emotional meaning of those choices. To see that work is to connect to a mind. That mind might not necessarily belong to someone you want to be friends with or ever meet in person, but it is unmistakably another person, and you can't help but learn something about yourself from the way that their work makes you feel.

This is why corporate work is so often called "soulless." The point of corporate art is to dress the artificial person of the corporation in the stolen skins of the humans it uses as its substrate. Corporations are potentially immortal, artificial colony organisms. They maintain the pretense of personality, but they have no mind, only action that is the crescendo of an orchestra of improvised instruments played by hundreds or thousands of employees and a handful of executives who are often working directly against one another:

https://locusmag.com/2022/03/cory-doctorow-vertically-challenged/

The corporation is – as Charlie Stross has it – the "slow AI" that is slowly converting our planet to the long-prophesied grey goo (or, more prosaically, wildfire ashes and boiled oceans). The real thing that is signified by CEOs' professed fears of runaway AI is runaway corporations. As Ted Chiang says, the experience of being nominally in charge of a corporation that refuses to do what you tell it to is the kind of thing that will give you nightmares about autonomous AI turning on its masters:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

The job of corporate designers is to find the signifiers of authenticity and dress up the corporate entity's robotic imperatives in this stolen flesh. Everything about AI is done in service to this goal: the chatbots that replace customer service reps are meant to both perfectly mimic a real, competent corporate representative while also hewing perfectly to corporate policy, without ever betraying the real human frailties that none of us can escape.

In the same way, the shillbots that pretend to be corporate superfans online are supposed to perfectly amplify the corporate message, the slow AI's conception of its own virtues, without injecting their own off-script, potentially cringey enthusiasms.

The Hollywood writers' strike was, at root, about the studio execs' dream that they could convert the "insights" of focus groups and audience research into a perfect script, without having to go through a phalanx of lippy screenwriters who insisted on explaining why they think your idea is stupid. "Hey, nerd, make me another ET, except make the hero a dog, and set it on Mars" is exactly how you prompt an AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/20/everything-made-by-an-ai-is-in-the-public-domain/

Corporate design's job is to produce the seeming of intention without any intender. The "personality" we're meant to sense when we encounter corporate design isn't the designer's, nor the art director's, nor even the CEO's. The "personality" is meant to be the slow AI's, but a corporation doesn't have a personality.

In his 2018 short story "Noon in the antilibrary," Karl Schroeder describes an "antilibrary" as an endlessly deep anaerobic lagoon of generative botshit:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/08/18/104097/noon-in-the-antilibrary/

The antilibrary is a generative AI system that can produce entire librarys’-worth of fake books with fake authors, fake citations by other fake experts with their own fake books and biographies and fake social media accounts, on-demand and instantly. It was speculation in 2018; it’s possible now. Creating an antilibrary is just a matter of investing in a sufficient number of graphics cards and electricity.

https://kschroeder.substack.com/p/after-the-internet

Reading Karl's reflections on the antilibrary crystallized something for me that I've been thinking about for a quarter-century, since I interviewed Gibson at the Penguin offices in north Toronto. It snapped something into place that I've trying to fit since encountering Henry's thoughts on the "eeriness" of AI work and the intent without an intender.

It made me realize why I dislike AI art so much, on a deep, aesthetic level. The point of an image generator is to buffer the intention of the prompter (which might be genuinely creative and bursting with personality) in layers of automated decision-making that flense the final product of any hint of the mind that caused its creation.

The most febrile, deeply weird and authentic prompts of the most excluded outsiders produce images that feel the same as the corporate AI illustrations that project the illusion of personality from the immortal, transhuman colony organism that is the limited liability corporation.

AI art is born coopted. Even the 4chan equivalent of AI – the deeply transgressive and immoral nonconsensual pornography – feels no different from the "official" AI porn churned out by "real" pornographers. "Shrimp Jesus" and other SEO-optimized Facebook slop is so uncanny because it is simultaneously "weird" ("that which does not belong") and yet it belongs in the same aesthetic bucket of the most anodyne Corporate Memphis ephemera:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis

We call it "generative" but AI art can't generate the kind of turnover that aerates the aesthetic soil. An artform that can't be transgressive is sterile, stillborn, a dead end.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/20/ransom-note-force-field/#antilibraries

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

Jake (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1970s_fanzines_(21224199545).jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[amalthea9]

Thank you so much for the tag dear!! This got me thinkin' because I haven't listened to a full album in so long! I usually bounce from song to song these days! I had fun because I dug deep into childhood and bring back the first album I bought for myself on cassette tape! Which was The Monkees Greatest Hits!🥰😄

In the order I best remember when each album came into my life.😆 I thought of a few more I really loved recently. But I brought it down to the ones that " if I was rich and could spend copious amounts of money to have on vinyl" lol💜

9 Favourite Albums - Choose 9 & then tag 9 people! Or you can do nine singles or EPs, whatever lol.

Thank you for tagging me in this @ginevralinton!

As you can see my taste in music / albums is not typical. Even as a child, I rarely liked entire albums - most of the time, it was only one or two particular songs on them. And this selection reflects that pretty well. When I listen to an album all the way through, it's often a film score or musical album. Apart from that, I tend to listen to sea shanties, traditional folk songs or live albums (which I always prefer to a studio recording btw because raw emotion is always better than auto-tune).

Tagging @magicaltear @amalthea9 @professorlehnsherr-almashy @fandomsmeantheworldtome @viola-halogen @the-20th-century-girl @iris-in-the-rain @a-small-bear @tobys-walrus-crew but as always no pressure!

[thislovintime]

In Paris during the filming of “Monkees In Paris,” June 1967. Photo published by The Monkees Monthly.

“Tork was pegged to play ‘the offbeat one,’ he said. ‘But I enjoyed it. I preferred hiding behind a character as opposed to playing myself.’” - The Record, January 19, 2001 “[Tork is] a confessed ‘metaphysical’ sort, with a penchant for heavy reading and a habit of pausing to sculpt his sentences perfectly. ‘But nobody really cares about that,’ he laughs. ‘So, professionally, what gets shown is my other side: “Hey, weren’t you the dummy in the band? Let’s see the dummy!”’ - The Morning News, May 29, 1986 “‘They had two regular guys and a tiny heartthrob and they needed an offbeat kind of guy,’ says Peter Tork. ‘So I brought that simpleton in, a part I had developed on the Greenwich Village scene. I enjoyed that role. I still do, sometimes.’” - Washington Post, July 27, 1986

[xomby]

Remember when they fall and die together in The Monkees in Paris

I wanted to draw this cause the picture I took on my phone of my laptop screen has no detail 🫠 it’s a very simple drawing anyway + my yard was green and lovely for the background

[faramirsonofgondor]

Songs That Remind Me of Buck

Matilda by Harry Styles

My Alcoholic Friends by The Dresden Dolls

Somebody Told Me by The Killers

Til Forever Falls Apart by Ashe & Finneas

Delicious Things by Wolf Alice

Feeling Myself by Wolf Alice

Things To Do by Alex G

Brand New City by Mitski

Circle by Mitski

Washing Machine Heart by Mitski

Shame by Mitski

It’s Called: Freefall (Paris Paloma cover)

Anything by Adrianne Lenker

Cradle by Adrianne Lenker

Evol by Adrianne Lenker

There Is a Light That Never Goes Out by The Smiths

That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore by The Smiths

Ring of Fire (Lykke Li cover)

Hot To Go by Chappell Roan

Naked In Manhattan by Chappell Roan

Our Own World by The Monkees

End of Beginning by Djo

Ready for Love by Pixies

Please Don’t Go by Pixies

Wave of Mutilation by Pixies

Here Comes Your Man by Pixies

Classic Masher by Pixies

Teenage Dream by Olivia Rodrigo

My Iron Lung by Radiohead

How To Disappear Completely by Radiohead

Kangaroo by This Mortal Coil

Bite My Hip by Bauhaus

Promiscuous by Nelly Furtado

Work Song by Hozier

Pale Blue Eyes by The Velvet Underground

After Hours by The Velvet Underground

Night Shift by Lucy Dacus

She’s Always a Woman by Billy Joel

Vienna by Billy Joel

I Know The End by Phoebe Bridgers

Not Strong Enough by Boygenius

[1967-shades-of-gray]

Very targeted Davy Jones bed clip from Monkees In Paris.

[orchidscurse]

3. and 9. for the end of the year asks..!

favorite musical artist / group you started listening to this year?

definitely the monkees!! i had a few of their songs rotating in my playlists before that but my obsession with the band as a whole didn't start until january this year. i became such a massive fan in a really short time #hyperfixation and i couldn't imagine my year without them and the friends i made because of them as well. ^_^ shoutout to @wutheringdyke especially―i will never forget our chats and you teaching me monkees lore ♡

best month for you this year?

probably september. i saw dan and phil on their tour, opening night! and was lucky enough to afford a meet and greet ticket. it's been a dream to see and meet them since i was around eleven years old, which is crazy!! i never though this day would ever happen tbh. and i met so many people from the groupchat that day and made new friends as well, a few of who i'm gonna see at their amsterdam show. :-)))

september is also the month in which i saw the lemon twigs for the first (and second!) time... and i got to sing and dance my heart out and talk to them and hug them and give them a letter i wrote―all in one week. i also met a wonderful person at their 2nd show and we still keep in touch, we even sent each other christmas presents and i will be visiting her in april!! it's crazy how music/creators etc. can bring people together. makes me smile. 🫶🏻

i'm pretty sure i also saw bill callahan between my twigs shows as well so i got to bawl my eyes out for 2 hours, thanks bill.

aaaand i also visited paris and giverny in september which is so wonderful. i finally got to visit père lachaise but i'm gonna stop myself from rambling... for now... ♡

[theclockinthesky]

Monkees Headcannons 5? 5.

Micky is digging an underground tunnel system under the pad that only he is allowed to use

Peter can’t go down the spiral staircase in the pad because he is scared of swirls, so Mike built him a pulley system baby carrier thing so he can still go up and downstairs

Davy once accidentally ordered 35 flats of canned beans through the mail. For the next 3 months all they ate were beans

Mike attempted to join a bike gang but they beat him up violently. He didn’t leave the house for 3 weeks in fear of them

Davy strictly dates girls over 6 ft. All other women he is spotted with are actually 6ft but they don’t like him so they walk on their knees

Micky tried to buy the state of California so he could legally drop acid everywhere. He was put on the FBI watchlist immediately after

Peter cries when houseguests have to leave. Because of this, no one who comes over is allowed to leave

Mike confuses Stephen Stills and Peter Tork because of his severe blindness in his right eye

Davy bought Micky gloves with claws on them so it isn’t as weird when Micky tries to scratch up the furniture in the pad

When the Monkees went to Paris, Peter got stuck on the top of the Eiffel Tower and a crane had to get him down. He now has a severe fear of anything with a point

Micky drinks Red 40 straight from the bottle

Mike likes to bully the skinny kids at the playground to give them the same trauma he had as a kid

[genericruleroftheflies]

One difference I love between The Monkees showverse and Head-verse is that The Monkees are popular and “made it” in Head, but not really in the show (except for when Peter played harp).

It just makes them feels so different because would there be this huge crowd idolizing them like gods/christ-figures in the show? Probably not. I mean there are French girls chasing them in Paris… which confuses me a little. But maybe The Monkees in Paris is much closer to Head-verse than showverse (like Monkees on tour tho that feels closer to real life)

It’s all very interesting to me.

In Head the show is 100% a show they are on/trapped in, but in The Monkees show it’s also referenced as a tv show a couple times by the characters of the monkees lol. So they blend.

But when Micky or anyone says like “the monkees never made it in the show” I’m like but they did in Head. But I also realize there was probably the assumption no one watched Head for a long time.

Anyway…

[monkeesmvs]

Star Collector From Season 2, Episode 22 - "The Monkees in Paris"