Westmoreland and James M Wood

Beverly and Alvarado

Slow Rose bookended a wild, curated 26-hour show over the weekend at 2220 Arts and Archives and I only saw about seven hours of it and judging from what I did see, I missed out on not being there for the other 19. Nevertheless, a couple photos from driving around before and after.

The Stratford, Eighth and Hoover

My new LA snapshot method is just highlighting intersections while waiting for the light to change.

Wilton and Wilshire

For some time now, I’ve used the Adobe Lightroom mobile app to edit photos I take on my phone, such as this one snapped today on my drive home. However, when I went to edit the photo upon getting home, Adobe had an update to promote to me:

On Lightroom Desktop and Mobile, the headline feature is Generative Expand, which Adobe first rolled out in Photoshop in mid-2023. The tool uses generative AI to extend a photo beyond its original borders, filling transparent areas created by perspective adjustments or making room for new aspect ratios without leaving blank edges

The Generative UI in question

There’s plenty of debate about AI ‘art,’ even though most people who are pro-AI have little to no appreciation for creative process or results—however when it comes to photography, using Generative AI is somehow more offensive. Photography, by its fundamental nature, is documentation. Evidence. An account of reality, interpreted through a lens certainly, but otherwise, nothing that exists in a photograph was not in the scene that was shot.

To use Gen AI in any kind of photographic tool is to go against the very nature of photography. While the people who are shoving AI down our throats at every corner have absolutely no appreciation for the nature of the foundations of how we make things, they also disregard why we make them, or how significant these processes and results are to the relationship humanity has to itself and the world.

People promoting AI exist completely within the idea of technologically-driven bubbles that serve purposes of, well, I don’t even know, coordinating meetings better? Client pitches? Coding apps? A projected version of the world that doesn’t exist but serves the idea of selfish indulgence? Certainly nothing honest, nothing dignified, nothing human.

While there are likely ballistic wars coming over resources such as water, wealth, energy, and political domain, there’s this brewing existential, intangible conflict about the fundamental nature of how we relate to one another, how we share reality, how we celebrate it, and what it actually comprises that is becoming an increasingly depressing landscape.

There’s an interaction in the new movie Tony where the Anthony Bourdain character tells his chef mentor he doesn’t believe in God, and the mentor replies, “What is that? That’s like saying you don’t believe in air, but you continue to breathe.”

What’s funny to me about this sentiment—which I hear plenty of similar-orbit shit constantly by just going to AA meetings—is that it works on paper, the same way any structure of authority does. (It is not lost on me that very religious conservative Americans will say communism only works on paper but the word of God, as it is written in the Bible, is indelible.) It’s pretty easy to conceptualize of the idea that there could be something that we, as humans, are incapable of truly grasping the all-encompassing nature of out in the universe.

But that isn’t the premise that the movie talks about, and that is so often confused in these theological debates. The idea posited isn’t Can you conceptualize of a god?—the question usually asks Do you believe in God?

There is a fundamental difference between these acts. I can understand the idea of capitalism the same way I can understand the idea of communism, but I will not believe in the former the way I will the latter. With the argument surrounding some kind of higher power, these understandings of ideas against beliefs become more abstracted but the premise remains—what does your individual relationship with reality allow you to feel aligned with at a spiritual level so much that you can have faith in it?

Looking at the world, both in this moment and throughout history, I can’t believe in any sort of god that centers humanity. We are a vile species hell-bent on self-destruction—at either a massive scale through balances of power or individual scale through vice and corruption. I certainly won’t lend my belief to any god that is talked of as representing countries like the United States or Israel. Does a god that created humans to create religion, and all the subsequent death and destruction in its name, exist? Maybe, but I don’t have to—and will not—believe in that.

So often people who adhere to organized religion cherry-pick what to believe in from a religious text and excuse incongruent ideas by the passive dismissal of, “It’s not for us to understand.” This feels like such a catch-all justification for perpetuating destructive behavior or ideas without feeling the need to improve (or, perhaps, the guilt for being associated with it).

Part of it is just being sick of an ongoing genocide and settler-colonial project being justified by ‘God’s promise,’ but it’s mostly how one-dimensional a lot of theological talk feels in general public discourse. Comprehension, imagination and faith are separate concepts that get conflated and then used as justification for the selfish deeds of humanity and it’s just so goddamn stupid.

The Grove

On The Sidewalk

Swap Meet

I live in a pretty rough-and-tumble part of LA now, so on days when I go to see a movie and the theater is in a upper-middle-class outdoor mall, it can be quite a diverse experience of people-watching.