Ever the optimists
Responding to Ever The Optimist — Trashcan Sinatras trashcansinatras.comThe Trashcan Sinatras put out their seventh album today. Ever The Optimist, their first in a decade. I’ve followed them for over thirty years and I still buy the records.
Today also happens to be the day I published an essay with the band sitting in the middle of it. I’d love to claim I timed it. I found out after the essay was done.
The short version of why they’re in there: they took their first advance and bought a studio, then the label got swallowed and the studio went with it, bankruptcy and all. When they came back, the first show was in a fan’s living room in Portland, and the next record was funded directly by the people in rooms like that one. Forty years on, they’re still shipping. The album title reads like they know exactly what they survived.
The essay is about the configuration they rebuilt on, the one I’m building toward myself:
Read the essay
The Intimacy Economy
Article 22 of 22 so far in The Automation Line
There is a third path beyond the brand-around-art treadmill: small community, no scoreboard, the artifact does the work. It doesn't scale to mass, and that's the point. A working configuration for creative work in the AI era, and the one my AI-assisted projects are deliberately trying to occupy.
Read the essay →Becoming Gnarly, by email