Category: Arts, letters, ideas

  • Valediction

    After some thirty-five years writhing—sometimes happily sometimes not—in the heart of the thing that has become the social web, I’m retiring. Some three hundred thousand words, five thousand photographs, thousands of likes, a dozen blogs, five or six newsletters, four podcasts, a few memorable threads, a couple of careers, a few pieces of music, and nearly fifty pieces of video later, I’m done. 

    It’s not that I’m no longer interested in the creative energies and passionate experimentation that drew me to the internet and to the web all those years ago, and through which I felt often sustained and supported over the last few decades. Rather, it is what it has become that has convinced me—finally, and after frankly too much consideration—to stop. The parts that are wonderful, and affirming, and embrace and support our humanity are diminished constantly by those that are not, and don’t. To participate, rather than simply consume, is exhausting, sapping one’s attention and passion and joy from those things, places, and people for whom it actually makes a difference.

    My creative energies are falling into synch, each valley and peak finding higher and higher resonance. But these need to be independent of the marketplace, regardless of how one defines and measures the latter. Among my greatest loves and joys is the capacity for us to make sense in so many myriad and wonderful ways of the world we inhabit, and our ability to share it with others. It is our greatest and most extraordinary gift—to each other, and to ourselves. We can, of course, sell those things that come from those gifts, sparks forever frozen in form. But the work itself is priceless, regardless of the algorithmic parasites that are burrowing deep into the marrow of our culture, and the sycophantic enablers that reduce everything to nothing.

    As I’ve said before, we are already too corrupted and compromised by this world we’ve created. We can not withdraw entirely if we wish to be in community with those whose efforts we appreciate as manifestations of the best of us. But we can pare, pare, and pare back until we are in a place where energy spent is recouped in pleasure gained. For me, it is a radical proposition, but one that seems completely and self-evidently right.

    On 22 November, those thirty-five years of production will go dark. Of course the machines have copies, but those don’t concern me. I’m not hiding, just withdrawing. But not into utter obscurity. The heart of my work these days is with atelier tushu. It is a place of discovery and experimentation, and in so being captures where I am and what I aspire to. That place remains available to whoever happens to wander by. And, of course, the wonderfully idiosyncratic design firm that Steffany Hollingsworth and I have managed to create, reflecting and evangelizing a shared passion for humans in all their glorious storytelling magnificence and pursuit of meaning, continues along. 

    Thanks to all of you for reading what is almost certainly much too long for the world as it is. And most importantly, my deepest gratitude to those who found communion and joy in whatever it was I did, whenever I did it.

  • We ought to eat like we fuck

    A little bit of slam poetry from the mid-oughts.

    Prelude…
    Piece of uni
    one small bite
    late at night
    exploding rich, across my tongue
    toes curled
    eyes closed
    forehead pressed against the wall
    barely audible moan
    deep in my throat.

    We ought to eat like we fuck

    grocery stores
    farmers markets
    CSAs
    roadside stands
    backyards
    meat markets
    meet markets
    it’s all the same.

    What looks good? What catches your eye?
    What scents make you writhe?

    Plump? Lean?

    Hard? Soft?

    Silky? Rough?

    Stony inside? Stormy inside?

    Burst, and then
    nothing?

    Opening line
    hi, my name’s Peter
    5.99

    Plump melons
    real, or re-engineered?

    Home finally
    frenzied revelations
    no time contemplations
    splay’d open ‘cross the counter
    a little bit of heat
    melting butter, silky smooth
    slippery.

    Foreplay / Fireplay

    Need a good technique
    long, slow simmer
    don’t boil over.

    Fresh white table
    sheets
    scented of lilacs
    and latkes.

    That first taste
    when fevered imaginings
    daytime open eye fantasies
    dry mouth mouth-breathing
    somewhere, just not
    here

    sometime, just not
    now
    then, before you know
    it
    in a moment, blurred by a
    heartbeat and the rush of blood…

    Salivation becomes salvation
    the i disappears
    makes the we.

    Lick your lips
    wet with the flavor and the essence
    of that last delicious taste.

    Eyes closed
    toes curled
    forehead pressed against the wall…


    We ought to eat like we fuck.