What Would Herzog Do?

When I was given the chance to host the live on stage conversation with Werner Herzog for City Arts and Lectures in San Francisco I was barely able to believe it. What a gift! What a chance!

In preparation I did all the reading–and watching. I watched Aguirre Wrath of God again, marveled at Grizzly Man and the tragedy–or maybe triumph?–of Timothy Treadwell. I watched Stroszek again, my favorite Herzog movie. I watched a lot of his documentaries. Herzog is preposterously prolific, having made over 70 films, so if you can spend weeks in the dark, watching. (soon you can, at the PFA Herzog retrospective in November). They are all great; as Roger Ebert said, not a single one is compromised, even the failures are magnificent. I watched the video of him getting shot while being interviewed for the BBC, possibly the most Herzog response ever: he looks mildly startled and looks up. “What was that?” he says, once again cheating death. He’s a pop icon and has played various villains in movies and TV, including in Jack Reacher. He’s been in The Mandalorian and The Simpsons, and my favorite of his roles: the downcast voice of a heartbroken plastic bag, who’d lost his “creator”, the woman who first brought him home from the grocery store. 

Herzog has also written books and poetry. He’s said that he thinks he will be remembered more for his writing than his films. Films are the voyage, he says. But writing is home. He’s just written a memoir, Every Man for Himself, and God Against All, which is what we would be talking about, in San Francisco, soon. His publicist said: don’t ask about his films. Talk about his memoir, his books and his writing. OK. 

The memoir was everything I’d hoped: ecstatic truth, the wisdom of the snake; the exhilaration of getting shot at and missed, episodes of arrest and detention, rule-bending and working around the obstacles endlessly presented by bureaucrats and uniformed underpersons. Mike Tyson appeared unexpectedly. A Caliban on the island. There was a paean to the Oxford English Dictionary, the actual, physical, 20 volume set, which he thinks of as one of the greatest cultural achievements of all time. I agree! There’s more charm and sweetness than you’d expect from this sometimes gruff Bavarian man of the mountains, the tundra, the jungle, the desert. 

After spending much of a day with him, I left feeling energized and ready to undertake ambitious projects! I thought–knew!–what I was capable of. This is what it can be like being around people like him. I hope some of you got to hear the conversation in person, because in person is different than watching it on a screen. Herzog was insightful, warm and funny; he told stories uplifting and harrowing and often completely unexpected and at the end he got a standing ovation, which went on and on. It made him happy. And made me happy.

Now, a week later, I am thinking about that experience, and how people like Herzog make good and hard work possible for others. If what’s impossible for others is possible for him, it’s possible for you too. You can ask yourself, when you find someone worth emulating, what would they do? You could make a bracelet, and whenever you were about to give up, when things got too hard you could snap it against your wrist and remember who you meant to become, get your gumption going again. What Would Herzog Do? 

We know more about how Herzog creates his movies because he talks about it a lot, first of all, because he is asked about it, because the way he works is fascinating and sometimes extreme. There’s a lot of second hand material, accounts of the making of his work too. Les Blank made The Burden of Dreams, a documentary of the making of Fitzcarraldo, a movie about the nearly impossible and completely irrational desire of a man to move a steamboat over a mountain, to build an opera house, so Caruso could sing there, in the middle of the jungle. The making of the Fitzcarraldo was itself even more difficult than moving the steamboat, more difficult than the story it was meant to depict. It was like a reflection, phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny, Triple E Extreme Exaggerated Ekphrasis, a Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Ashbery’s), a movie bursting from the borders of itself. 

What Would Herzog Do? Maybe walk over mountains, machete his way through a jungle, travel to remote, icy, volcanic, idyllic or dangerous regions, consort with grizzly bears, be a ski jumper. He would definitely advise you to love deeply. Definitely advise you to read. When Herzog advertised his Rogue Film School in 2014 (which was already full by the time I applied, to my great disappointment) he published a reading list, which included The Peregrine by J.A. Baker, which he frequently recommends (it’s great, read it) The Poetic Eddas and The Conquest of New Spain, neither of which I finished. 

What Else Would Herzog Do? For one thing, he probably wouldn’t bother reading anyone else’s reading list, but stick with what interests him. He’d stick to his own vision. He doesn’t see very many movies, maybe 3 or 4 a year. Unlike Scorcese, who sees movies constantly. Herzog has conviction in his own filmic vision and he’s not influenceable. At dinner before our talk someone asked if he’d seen the Barbie movie, maybe just to bait him? Unsurprisingly he hadn’t seen it, but he had seen the ads. He assumed a sour expression. “Hell,” he concluded. “The world of Barbie looks like how I imagine hell.” 

It’s a privilege to be around brilliant people doing brilliant things, and gives you the energy you need to work on your own great undertaking, your own impossible project. So make the effort to go out and see amazing people like Herzog at places like City Arts and Lectures, 92nd Street Y, or  other places near you.  Read. Don’t get distracted by meaningless tripe. Don’t fight for prizes not worth winning. Follow through, get it done, persist, learn to pick locks and walk long distances. Be strong, be smart, bring your toothbrush, be kind, work hard, be loving, be you, be beautiful.

Bring your toothbrush? It’ll make sense when you listen to the conversation.

More things to read, see and do: 

  • My conversation with Herzog will come out on December 3, 2023 on KQED. Watch for it! 

W. Kamau Bell on the Ingenious podcast

Listen to me and W. Kamau Bell on the Ingenious podcast!

I hadn’t seen Kamau for maybe 15 years, and there he was with his great hair and warm smile and nerdy glasses in the movie theatre at Sundance, at the screening for a documentary on Aum Shinrikyo, edging into the judge’s area next to the amazing Filipina director Ramona Diaz. Hey! I said and smiled because he remembered me.

We were early in our respective careers when we first met on a panel at the San Francisco JCC, he a standup comic, me a startup founder. Since I’d last seen him he’d hosted a TV show on CNN about race in America, United Shades of America, had directed a documentary, We need to talk about Cosby (nominated for four Emmys and a Peabody!), and another doc about me and everyone else: 1000% Me, about growing up mixed race, between cultures.

He agreed to meet me at the Chinese Historical Society where Bruce Lee, reproduced in 8 foot photos, stood for unity. From Bruce’s own words, the name of the show: We Are Bruce Lee: Under The Sky, One Family. In a world that is fighting itself into fragments, we need Bruce’s example, and Kamau’s example, of how to have hard conversations, and fight instead for human dignity and mutual respect. Bruce was mixed race himself, and ahead of his time.

A great place to continue Bruce’s work to be one family is Kamau’s book: Do the Work! And Antiracist activity book

How do we talk about and think about our heroes when our heroes turn out to be terrible people? Watch the amazing Cosby documentary. Another recommendation I have on this subject is the book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer, which is fantastic.

Come to the Bay Area and see the Bruce Lee exhibit at the Chinese Historical Society.

And of course, listen to the podcast episode!

Dave Eggers on the Ingenious podcast

Listen to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

“We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things, like, say masturbatory habits (for me, about once a day, usually in the shower), we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our pasts and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself. But it’s just the opposite, more is more is more – more bleeding, more giving. These things, details, stories, whatever, are like the skin shed by snakes, who leave theirs for anyone to see. What does he care where it is, who sees it, this snake, and his skin? He leaves it where he molts. Hours, days, or months later, we come across a snake’s long-shed skin and we know something of the snake, we know that it’s of this approximate girth and that approximate length, but we know very little else. Do we know where the snake is now? What the snake is thinking now? No. By now the snake could be wearing fur; the snake could be selling pencils in Hanoi. The skin is no longer his, he wore it because it grew from him, but then it dried and slipped off and he and everyone could look at it.

And you’re the snake?
Sure. I’m the snake. So, should the snake bring it with him, this skin, should he tuck it under his arm? Should he?

No?
NO, of course not! He’s got no fucking arms! How the fuck would a snake carry a skin? Please.

― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

We’re the snake.

And I have a dog in this fight.

Because I deeply believed at one time that we were all the snake and that by being the snake (at least how Dave is describing it here, back in his very first book) the more we showed of ourselves and left our skins behind, the better. Of course that doesn’t mean we should all go online and tell on ourselves. But we should be able to do what writers do (or artists, musicians—anyone really—priests, dog trainers, maintenance workers, phlebotomists) which is make something which, and be somebody who, reveals ourselves and is true to our warty, actual selves. Not be too precious about ourselves. We sound so young when we say this, but: Let’s stay true to the people we were and the dreams we had.

The story about how indigenous people didn’t want to be photographed because they feared it would steal their souls has new currency in the age of AI. I know this first hand. I was a big advocate for free culture and the open software movement in the early aughts, implementing Creative Commons licenses in Flickr, thereby creating the largest library of shareable media in the world, at least, at the time. I shared my own photos with Creative Commons licenses and joined the Creative Commons board. Artists and filmmakers and other creative people were able to use them to make fantastic things. Jonathan Coulton wrote a song (and made a short movie) named after Flickr using the Creative Commons licensed photos—that’s MY dog with glasses!

Flickr photos appeared in low budget movies, in band posters, in this incredible installation by Erik Kessel at a gallery in Amsterdam. The installation featured prints of every single photograph uploaded to Flickr within a 24-hour period. The more than a million photos are piled up nearly to the ceiling, and spill over into several rooms.

I never got to see it in person. It was an artwork about how we are drowning in photos, in media. How no one can look at all of the photos. It was still a newish idea at the time, 2011. What a wonderful time that was.

It was an era of optimism and trust. We trusted humanity. We knew people to be honest, well-meaning. We trusted technology, audiences, artists—there was so much trust, we were just bursting with trust. It seems almost inconceivable now, so jaded and weary we’ve become. We believed that people are essentially good, operating in good faith, trustworthy, reasonable. We were not wrong. But we discovered that even if 999 out of a thousand people are honest and trustworthy, one bad actor can be incredibly destructive. A mob of angry tweeters. Or, enemy nations.

I talked about this with Chris Anderson, who had been the Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine, on my last podcast Should This Exist?. He had an open source drone company, 3D Robotics, and they open sourced their drone software. A lot of hobbyists hacked their Lego Mindstorms and had a lot of fun making flowers or M&Ms rain down on children’s parties, searching for lost elephants in vast African wildernesses and other great things. Then one unhappy day, on the front page of the New York Times, Chris learned that ISIS had been using his drone software to kill people.

This was about as bad of a consequence as you can imagine. The worst consequence of sharing something online. But it was also happening in my world, the online world. Media, social media, was becoming more and more toxic. We had started out as the aforementioned snakes, sharing our photos, jokes, stories, poems, lives. But at many of the hosting companies, it was no longer about sharing; a lot of it was about stealing. Harvesting and exploiting your “data”, which you had thought of as your life. To my surprise, chagrin and increasing anger, I realized that the Creative Commons licensed photos on Flickr were being used to train AI. That even though no human could ever look at every single one of the photos in Erik Kessel’s artwork, or in the Creative Commons archive, or anywhere on the internet, a computer could.

Another conversation I had during the first season of Should This Exist? was with Sam Altman of OpenAI, a company we now know best as the maker of ChatGPT, but which at the time was a non-profit looking to protect humanity from the consequences of what was in the process of being invented. Money came, moral compasses spun around and lost true north—we know the rest. And now we’re seeing the results, watching the whole experiment unfold in real time: people’s faces and data and art and words being stolen, repurposed and put into formats and contexts they never intended or wanted, exploited for purposes that hadn’t existed when they innocently shared pictures of their weddings and kittens online, swindled and diddled and flimflammed and worse. All those words and images, pressed into service for manufacturing lies, flipping elections, and creating enemies where once were friends.

Which brings us to today’s podcast with Dave Eggers. He is the writer, artist, philanthropist and co-founder of 826 Valencia, a non-profit tutoring center for kids that teaches the next generation reading, writing and how to tell their own story. Which seems a paltry effort when you look at the giants and masters of the tech universe thrusting their rockets into space and colonizing everyone’s brains. Just patiently teaching a kid to read and write. Dave, who stands for a value system that is contrary to all this.

Dave and I go way back. We worked together circa 1996-8, at Salon.com, one of the very first online media publishers, which published, and still publishes, thinky articles on society and culture. They also host thoughtful online conversations and civil discourse. Again, it was an amazing time to be online.

Now I’m on the board of McSweeneys, the publishing company that Dave also founded. It publishes books and magazines, old media. So Dave and I have invested a lot of our energy into making places and spaces for writers doing creative work, finding an audience and getting paid. But these are fraught times for writers. The writers in Hollywood are on strike, AI is taking their jobs, teachers are saying the high school essay is dead. You’re here too and you’ve seen it—there’s a lot of dread to go around. Think we’re reactionary luddites? I don’t think so. Techno-optimists turned tech skeptics, maybe. I think we’ve all become a lot more wary since our salad days.

In any case, there’s a lot of these values and thinking and ideation in this podcast. It is a special episode because Dave and I are old friends, and share a lot of the same hopes for the humans. So give it a listen!

I’m so proud of this podcast, Ingenious, which was the co-creation of me and my friend and producer Mary Beth Kirchner, with the tireless assistance of Jyri Engestrom and Beth Malin and the Yes VC team and a host of others. Including the brilliant guests who have always found a way to surprise me, energize me and pave new avenues of thought. I hope it’ll do the same for you.

Thanks Dave, for this and all you do. How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.

Some resources:

Reading by Night: The Makioka Sisters

If you are an avid follower of all my online doings, you may have seen that I have a relatively new Instagram account, Reading by Night. I also read by day, but it is so named because I am a devotee of The Hour of the Wolf–the wee hours, as they’re sometimes called, the interstice between Two Sleeps. Also reading by night is better! Romantic and mysterious, interruptionless.

I have just read The Makioka Sisters, by Junichiro Tanizaki, written in 1957. Kindle and many newspapers and blogs will tell you how long it takes to read something. I don’t think that’s a great way to decide what to read, I wish such estimates didn’t exist. But you can tell when you hold this book in your hand: it’s going to take a while. You flip to the end: 600 pages. I had heard it would be worth it. It is. It was.

The Makioka Sisters is a masterpiece of post war Japanese literature. A perfect portrayal of the pretension, snobbery and sufferings of a declining aristocratic family from Osaka, four sisters, trying to get one of them married, and trying to keep the youngest, most modern one from destroying what little remains of the respectability the family once enjoyed.

As WWII encroaches inexorably and illness and scandal descend, you feel their losses: the grace and beauty of the firefly hunting parties, the repose and solitude of the lost country estates, occasions for elaborate kimonos, traditional songs and dances, the cherry blossoms of Kyoto, the temples and rituals. The sacred trampled by the profane, like sakura.

But much was gained: women freed from subordination to make their own way in life, release from the straitjackets of class and hierarchy; and much that was exciting and new: train travel, television, a sense of freedom, Europeans coming to Japan, new food, expansion—and Western dress.

This is the Japanese women’s version of the Radezsky March by Joseph Roth, another masterpiece, in which gaudily uniformed men in fanciful dress and plumed helmets rattled their sabres and sat stiffly erect on prancing horses—while the Austro-Hungarian empire collapsed around them.

I had forgotten how much I’d liked Japanese literature! I went to the shelf to look: Kobo Abe, Kenzaburo Oe, Murakami, Yoko Ogawa, and the first Japanese novel I’d loved: Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata. More recently, Yoko Tawada. I think I’ll go back and read them again.

P.S. Why were four Chinese women put on the cover of this book? Maybe the art department didn’t have the equivalent of fact checking. The women’s faces are quite Chinese; one of them is even wearing a Cheong Sam! So I put a Japanese doll, one of the themes of the book, next to it (reposing against a Chinese pillow)

A Recommended Book

Having been housebound for the past two days, I was able to read this remarkable book about a family of fourteen, twelve children, of which six–six!–of the sons became schizophrenic in their teens and twenties. An amazing feat of research which follows the family’s story, as well as those of the doctors working to understand this puzzling, difficult and disabling disease.

Thanksgiving debunked

I asked my friend who hates Thanksgiving why he hates it and he said because it is a holiday based on gluttony. But every culture has a harvest festival, I said, every culture has feasts. Since time immemorial. Thanksgiving is just the latest version. The problem with it, by my thinking, I continued, is that feasting doesn’t make sense any more. It made sense during times of scarcity and hunger, but in an era of overabundance and overconsumption it seems excessive. Which is not to say we have eliminated hunger, but we live in a strange world where you can be both obese and starving at the same time. For lack of nutrition.

Lots of other holidays that have a less component, candy, mostly, like Halloween and Valentine’s Day. And of course there are birthday cakes. But sugar isn’t a special treat any more. It is something we have too much of and should probably avoid. But to my friend’s objection: I said, That’s just the food part! I said. I like the gathering of friends and family part, and the gratitude.

Here’s a NY Times article that debunks many of the Thanksgiving myths we grew up with in school, its possible origins in genocide or enslavement, and the myth of the Pilgrim. The Pilgrim! I didn’t know this, for example:

It’s been taught that the Pilgrims came because they were seeking religious freedom, but that’s not entirely true, Mr. Loewen said.

The Pilgrims had religious freedom in Holland, where they first arrived in the early 17th century. Like those who settled Jamestown, Va., in 1607, the Pilgrims came to North America to make money, Mr. Loewen said.

“They were also coming here in order to establish a religious theocracy, which they did,” he said. “That’s not exactly the same as coming here for religious freedom. It’s kind of coming here against religious freedom.”Also, the Pilgrims never called themselves Pilgrims. They were separatists, Mr. Loewen said. The term Pilgrims didn’t surface until around 1880.

There is a constant unearthing of truths obscured by myths. Bogus histories and bullshit. Thus, the National Day of Mourning.

There is nothing wrong with gratitude and gathering, and even occasional feasting, which also have a long history. Happy Thanksgiving!

The Twitter Advertiser Exodus

A $750,000 a month advertiser has left Twitter. One of hundreds. But in her post she explained the bases for the decision vis-a-vis her advertising investment in a neutral, non-ideological way. People picked up this post because it so powerfully predicts the demise of Twitter’s advertising business, already in freefall and now perhaps beyond recovery.

I’ve spent a lot of my career railing against the marriage of advertising and social media. It was once called “online community” or “social software”. an advertising business model almost inevitably leads to so many of the social ills we know so well. The implosion of Twitter allows us see this happening in real time. Given that Elon Musk explained that it was his intention in acquiring Twitter to make it the “free speech” platform, it was with supreme schadenfreude and satisfaction that I read the Techdirt post by Mike Masnick, Hey Elon: Let Me Help You Speed Run The Content Moderation Learning Curve, which those of us who have run user generated content sites have all been through.

The Advertiser Exodus is real. An alternate business model will be required. But the User Exodus is just as real. As @mulegirl on Twitter points out, it will require 93,750 paid users paying $8 per month to replace just this single $750,000 a month advertiser.

Which, in my opinion, is good and correct. I have always thought that the social media platforms should be much less profitable than they are, and that it is only despoiling the civic commons that they have made their billions. They have done this by exploiting their users in three ways: first by taking their users content and displaying advertising against it; second by making them pay to make their content more visible to the communities they themselves have brought or built; and third by harvesting and selling their data to anyone willing to pay, without providing any–or enough!–of the trust and safety, advertising, moderation or curatorial services that would justify it. These platforms have always been unscrupulous and corrupt. A violation of the social contract. So much good that was, is and could be. So little civility, courage and humanity on the part of the founders, CEOs, investors and leaders, cowardice hiding behind the figleaves of The First Amendment, Section 230 and a self-serving technolibertarianism. A real and terrible abdication of leadership in a place that requires it. Subordinating the good to the pursuit of power and money. I could go on, and, well, already have.

A lot of the posts I’ve read about companies leaving Twitter talk about trust and safety issues, and some about ideology, some ideological leavers fleeing after the reinstatement of Trump. But from a purely practical standpoint, this post is a pretty damning:

I’ve seen a lot of technical and ideological takes on Elon Twitter but wanted to share the marketing perspective. For background I’m a director at a medium sized b2b tech company (not in finserv anymore) running a team that deploys about $80M in ad spend/year. Twitter was 8-10% of our media mix and we have run cost per engagement (ie download a white paper, register for an event) campaigns successfully since 2016.

I had my team keep our campaigns live for 2 weeks post-takeover on the bet that efficiency would improve with fewer advertisers and the risks were managed and probably overblown. I was wrong and I think the things we saw in these last 2 weeks means many more advertisers will bail on the platform in the coming weeks (for non-ideological or virtue signaling reasons):

  • Performance fell significantly. CPMs didn’t drop but our engagement went way down. Maybe it’s a shift in users on the platform, maybe it’s ad serving related.
  • Serious brand safety issues. Our organic social and CS teams got dozens of screenshots of our ads next to awful content. Replies to our posts with hardcore antisemitism and adult spam remained up for days even when flagged.
  • Our entire account team turned over multiple times in 2 weeks. We had multiple people (AE, AM, analyst, creative specialist) supporting our account and they all vanished without so much as an email. We finally got an email with a name for an AM last week but they quit and we don’t have a new one yet.
  • Ads UI is very buggy and login with SSO and 2FA broken. One of my campaign managers logged in last week and found all our paused creatives from the past 6 years had been reactivated. Campaign changes don’t save. These things cost us real money.

From an anonymous Financial Services exec posting on Team Blind

For me, the best thing that has come from the Twitter dumpster fire is that I have been posting here instead. Let’s hope for a revival of the independent web, the platforms for which people pay, the Substacks and Word Presses and the like. The better internet we all deserve.

A List of Non-Crazy Conservative Journalists and Commentators

It seems like a good time to post this list of non-crazy conservative journalists and commentators to follow online, given to me by my friend Jason Hirschhorn. I haven’t fully vetted these, and I welcome any comments on where these writers lie on the nuts/not nuts continuum, their general merits and/or shortcomings, whether or not they are actually conservative, which ones you read, and who is missing from this list. Many of these writers write for many publications, so if you find someone’s work interesting there’s likely more out there on different sites.

Yes, that is an Elephant Nutcracker.

The List:

George Will writes for the Washington Post

Nick Gillespie writes for Reason

SE Cupp appears on CNN

Matt Lewis writes for The Daily Beast

David Frum writers for the Atlantic

Ross Douthat writes for the NY Times.

Michael Gerson wrote for the Washington Post, but died just this week.

Peggy Noonan writes for the Wall Street Journal

Yural Levin writes for the National Review

  • An image from Dragon’s Delusion by Kongkee, which I saw this weekend at the Asian Art Museum.
  • Amazing Tagalog singers doing karaoke at Via Mare in Daly City on Friday night too, along side enormous portions of sinigang and chicken adobo. We tried all the delivery options for Filipino food in San Francisco, but none were anywhere near as good as Via Mare. But I didn’t know they also had live entertainment!
  • I found this article by Paul Krugman to be edifying on how Democrats can work with and around a Republican party that is more interested in investigating Hunter Biden than in governing, and who lack any kind of mandate other than thwarting Democrats, preventing the rich from paying too many taxes, and eliminating aid to people in need.
  • Yes, the imminent demise of Twitter, the departure of nearly all responsible parties, the readmission of Trump and the general malaise striking all the other social media platforms at the same are inspiring me to write my blog again. Hooray for Independent Online Media! Delighted.