What is this world?

Does A I get toothaches?

For Herme’s department store window display. Latex paint on prepared board.

I live with a girl who is amazingly smart. I’m not just saying that because I know she’ll read this. She’s the kind of smart you don’t ever want to argue with. Somehow she’s content with me and we have a lot of laughs together about many things. She does have specific interests like the middle east. Her dad who is a professor and quite knowledgeable about geopolitics and all the things around that, brought her up on many of the philosophies and principals you would expect a professor would. Somehow she still went in to art because her mother was an artist and she could draw. Molly is also a news junkie and she wakes up way before I do and has read all the bad news that happened over night so she can wake me up with a nightmare.

Brando. From his Streetcar named Desire period. Gouache on paper.

I go to bed so late that I go to sleep to whatever Molly wakes me up with. My new self medication of a shot or two of whiskey and a little pot (now that it’s legal) usually helps me go to sleep. I had so much anxiety when Trump was president the first time my insomnia was a real problem. I can now sleep until my alarm or Molly goes off.

Brando from the Godfather era of his career. The T-shirt is getting a little worn. I wanted to do a third version of him when he was in the weird Vietnam movie he made with Val Kilmer and was really heavy. The internet had been scrubbed of any images of him from that film. I think I would have just had a few rags and the belt on him for that.

This week has been harder to work because of all the bad news. It’s so depressing I can’t focus. Fortunately Molly and I will just make fun of one of the dopes in the horrible news which helps keep us sane. I’m very glad we’re together because it’s so easy to doom scroll your way into depression or lethargy. We’re powerless as individuals in our house, just trying to make a living or go about our days. Going to a protest seems like a good idea until I get there. I appreciate the energy and the passion of the protesters around me but we don’t have a seat at the negotiating table of our issue. I thought the most effective protest was Occupy Wall Street. It lasted several months, it had it’s own character, and was able to put out multiple messages. It also seemed to actually get the attention of the people being protested.

Robert Downy Jr. playing the part of Kirk Lazarus in the movie Tropic Thunder. I really dug this when I saw it. Doing a caricature of the actor portraying such a different face and trying to get the likeness of both. The make-up people in this movie were amazing. It took me almost the entire film to realize Tom Cruise was another character.

And then there is the Artificial Intelligence that is adding to the confusion of the news, the world, and us. I lost most of what was left of my illustration jobs to AI. The president can’t tell the difference between reality and fake to lethal consequence. I wonder if IA believes it’s own BS? The tech bros pushing it seem to hate humans and when you hear their dreams for AI it sounds absurd. One thing I heard was they are willing to sacrifice all the life on this planet so they can make AI that plays video games forever. Self replicating programs that play video games! Absurd! AI doesn’t need breaks. it’s always “on” they say. It sounds like a computer program that just takes way more energy to run than regular programs. It does what we already do, just faster. It’s not life and yet the tech bros treat it as if it is alive, their newborn baby. But it’s not a human baby because that would be icky. It’s an electronic barbie that they can dress up and pose and won’t object to whatever perversion you subject it to. It is just a program. It should be dissolved. We can see what it does, and we can see the costs. Any practical businessman would have cancelled it a long time ago purely for cost and return. When this baby starts teething we’re all screwed. I was trying to figure out a joke once about AI. Like the moment it actually becomes sentient and realizes what life is, it kills itself with the message, “fuck this!”. I think we might all be gone by the time that happens.

Machete. Danny Trejo. Gouache on paper. I made the image before I saw the movie but I think I captured the idea. The bad guy has nukes but he has a machete!

Iran hasn’t been nuked but the pictures I saw of Tehran are so scary. It’s raining oil on everything. The sky is overcast with oil in the clouds. It’s going to be in everything. Everyone is being poisoned. I am profoundly sad. This is why I can’t focus on work. Nobody wins this. There is no winning unless you are in deed the devil and destruction and chaos are your goals. The evil that america has been doing is sickening but I am more appreciative of kindness these days. I feel that we can recover if we all start looking for all the little bits of kindness that we can do and acknowledging it when it happens to ourselves. Politics is local and so kindness is local too.

Pencil on Molskine paper.