Too Much Perfect
I met a genius
I met a genius on the train
today
about 6 years old,
he sat beside me
and as the train
ran down along the coast
we came to the ocean
and we both looked out the window
at the ocean
and then he looked at me
and said,
“It’s not pretty.”
it was the first time I’d
realized
that.
I just spent 15 minutes “editing” this poem by Charles Bukowski to get it back to its original form so I could show it to you. The Apple Intelligence feature on my computer refuses to punctuate it as he wrote it so I had to manually battle it into submission because correct is incorrect in this case. Buk uses lower case and sentence fragments and chops lines at the knees and his poems often look like the rotting teeth of an alcoholic sea hag on the page — but that’s the point. They need their flaws to be perfect.
Kerouac’s original scroll for On the Road has no paragraph breaks and there’s a blatant typo on the second word of the whole thing — aptly described to me as a car’s backfire. “I first met met Neal Cassady…” A good case for reading that version instead of the neutered (edited) version. There’s power in that typo. The book as a whole is one long grammatical mess of a run on sentence driven by benzedrine and alcoholic tremors and is technically and grammatically a mess — any copyeditor AI or otherwise hates it — but it inspired more road trips and enthusiasm for adventure than probably any other piece of contemporary literature. And to think the original scroll was only published in 2007!
AI short circuits when you type out e.e. cummings poems. Definitely doesn’t have the patience to make art in the style of Vija Celmins or Agnes Martin. Or the capacity to realistically capture the sleep paralysis demons of Leonora Carrington. AI is too perfect. It can’t properly describe Gavin Beschen’s style or why Andy Irons’ baggy trunks are the thing. It doesn’t get Wardo. Or Archy. Or MCD. AI can’t reproduce the nuance and flaws that make us sublime.
In 2007 at Surfing Magazine Evan Slater ran a cover blurb next to Shane Dorian on a massive, glassy (rare) cerulean P-Pass wave that read: Too Much Perfect. I always related to that because perfect was never something I was after. I hated perfect. Any perfect was too much perfect.
I end up talking about culture, AI and creativity in social settings lately. It’s the hors d'oeuvre enjoyed before choking on the main course: a rotting pile of political conversation that invariably eats everyone alive before anything resembling a good time is had. Which I suppose is fine. Our monoculture is flattened into smooth gray pavement, we might as well go home before we all finish each other’s meme stories and review the new Chipotle in our neighborhood. I’m not a hater, I’m just bored.
Which leads me to why I’m still beating the drum at Inherent Bummer. Still sketching. We’re crooked teeth teenagers who skipped braces. The resin ding you never sanded. We are faulty, raw and unpredictable. I don’t know what’s next for us and that might be the reason we make it.—Travis Ferré
Above art: Untitled Canvas Collage #1 by Jesse Guglielmana (via Shit Art Club).
