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Weak XLVII

20 November 2025

No. 4,822 (cartoon)

Why can’t you think about anything but sex?

Focus, willpower, and anguish.

Sex is not an exigency.

21 November 2025

Silence in the Artosphere

Paul McCartney just released his first recording in five years, almost three minutes of silence with a bit of background noise added for excitement. It’s a protest song, such as it is, against artificial intelligence companies using copyrighted recordings commercially without paying, i.e., stealing.

The economic argument is straightforward, and then there’s the other proposition. When clever boffins conceived their AI babies, they sent them out into the world to feed off the Internet, which, at the time, was mostly created by humans. As the AI beasties grew, though, they started to ingest other AI critters’ droppings. As a result of the inbreeding, they created an echo chamber where they all started repeating each other.

For example, AI X uses a photograph of a beagle when talking about dogs. AI Y and AI Z “learn” from this, and, taken to its extreme, eventually all dogs look like a beagle.

When it comes to pop music, I got the impression that happened long before AI, when all the popular music I hear, which ain’t much, sounds like the same rancid pablum poured from the same moldy blender.

McCartney’s release is on the B side of Is This What We Want?, an album of silence with a thousand artists credited as cowriters. But I have a problem with all the skint do-gooders going into battle on their high horses with truth, righteousness, and a few brand-name entertainers on their side.

They clearly copied John Cage’s 1952 piece, 4’33” [of silence], without a passing reference to him, let alone acknowledging his work is the music upon which theirs is theoretically and intellectually based. How can a thousand people be so collectively stupid and/or ignorant?

I’m not going to take sides. I steal from artists and corporations alike; that’s how I thrive in the artosphere.

22 November 2025

Nothing Matters at All

I have several photographer friends who are even older than I am. They’ve accomplished a lot over the last fifty or sixty years: museum shows, books, and one even made a lot of money at it, one sixtieth of a second at a time. But now, the lenscaps rarely, if ever, leave their cameras; they’re done, mostly.

To crudely summarize what they’ve said, they’re sitting on a lifetime of great work and have no reason to make more. I don’t get it, but maybe I will once I too get a better view of the great divide if and when I’m closer. Roughly paraphrasing, they say it doesn’t matter whether they make another great photograph or not.

I agree.

The difference between them and me is that I’ve always felt that way. Once I grew out of my teenage stupidity and into my adult stupidity, I realized making art was pointless. That awareness freed me from being distracted by any thoughts of fortune, fame, and other pursuits that have nothing to do with art. Perfect.

Perhaps Arthur James Balfour said it best: “Nothing matters much, and in the end nothing matters at all.”

Postscript: I couldn’t figure out how to incorporate Arnold Newman’s quote, so I didn’t: “Everybody I have ever known or read about who was really a great artist has worked until they dropped dead.”

23 November 2025

That’s E. E. Cummings to You, Pal

Edward Estlin Cummings was a darn good poet who may be more recognized for typographic urban myths than for his work. Here’s a brief, and very possibly inaccurate, synopsis of what happened.

Publishers and graphic designers decided to be clever and use “e. e. cummings” on the cover of one of his books. It caught on, and other books of his poetry used upper and lower case almost randomly. One idiot even claimed Cummings legally changed his name to lowercase.

In case you’re unsure of what to do in a sea of poetic confusion, here’s a bit of advice: That’s E. E. Cummings to you, pal.

24 November 2025

Freedom from Data

The lunatics running the Department of Health and Human Services asylum called a press conference to announce that estrogen-related menopause medications will no longer carry warnings about side effects, including cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, and dementia. The officials, wearing authoritative white lab coats and custom tinfoil hats, made what one scientist called a dangerous, “data-free” decision.

I can easily understand the appeal of such an approach. As an artist, I’ve been relying on my imagination, horrible memory, and wishful thinking for decades. I enjoy being free from rationality and pesky facts, and appreciate why that would appeal to government administraitors.

There’s a crucial difference here that’s worth noting. My aesthetic decisions have not resulted in a single person suffering from cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, or dementia. The most harm I’ve ever done with my artwork is to inflict a small amount of tedium that can be easily remedied with a single cocktail.

Too bad the lethally dangerous morons at the Department of Health and Human Services can’t understand that. Their tinfoil helmets are remarkably effective at preventing any sanity rays from reaching their thick skulls.

25 November 2025

Tenacious Chicken Shit

I received quite a surprise when I opened a carton of Golden Eggs: one of the eggs had a speck of chicken feces on it. Let’s be clear: these weren’t farm-to-table eggs; these were factory-to-fridge eggs. I was incredulous that this speck of excreta remained attached after the industrial pressure-washing process and that it eluded the watchful eyes of the automated quality assurance cameras.

This was perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime find for a city boy, so I grabbed my serious camera with a very sharp micro lens to make Tenacious Chicken Shit. Examining the minute blob under high magnification on my large monitor, I could clearly see bits of undigested chicken feed; that was my brush with the natural world for today.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2025 David Glenn Rinehart