Why did Jack Kerouac’s On the Road work as a premise? Legend has it he wrote it in three weeks on 120 feet of typewriter paper taped together into a scroll, a continuous flow of typewriter clacking to riff out a best seller.
You see, it’s a matter of rhythm, you’d think anyhow, because of the jazz. Realize that jazz is a matter of momentum, it has enough energy that it will carry forth under it’s own premise, and because of that, momentum, there is a lot of room for variation.
So in On the Road, Kerouac captured the premise, but at the time it was known as the beat generation, the beat to keep like the heart, it moves to the beat, there’s a beat to it, there’s a rhythm, and underlying frequency.
It’ssssss gotta pulse to it, there’s highhats, freaking A brother it’s jazz. Came to be known as spontaneous prose, and Kerouac’s writing slowly devolved into chaos and sentimental nonsense. The beat kind of died out and we got the freaking eighties somehow. The hippies kind of had a real premise, because they understood enough time dilation to play the long game. Like the loooonnnngggggg generational game, eternal art objects and whatnot. There was enough history for the record to retain it. Nobody knows about the beats, they’re too freaking niche. Except everyone’s read On the Road, so the beat in fact lives on, it’s never really over it’s freaking jazz after all, and jazz never dies.
I think if everyone would collectively decide that they, too, in fact were worthy of riffing out a Kerouac esque riff on their own life, nothing too fancy just condense your experience into a couple hundred words for the people of earth, you know. Just let the gang know what you've been up to. Everyone had some weird transformative vision quest covid coming of age story and now we're all just floating around in the aftermath of it with new priorities and a vague sense of timelines.
ASMR Golf
— Y’know I think something really died out when people stopped pulling the flag out. You miss the sound, it’s like the best sound in golf, when it goes in the hole. It’s like what you’re shooting for. Why would I shoot at a stick in the middle it’s like in the way. I mean like, put it in the hole, it’s like the whole point. Super simple
— Yeah it’s like ASMR golf, super good sound.
— And like, it’s part of the premise, there’s an interaction to it. You take the flag out. There’s like a social element, we’re not just all huddled around some contrived object. There’s a ritual. You take the flag out.
Tending the Flag
Ryan hitting a thirty footer, up over a little ridge and down a rise, decent putt, good roller. The kind of put that could tip in at a moments notice.
— want me to tend it? Hell I haven’t tended a flag in years.
— Yeah you could pull it
— you want it tended or you want me to pull it?
— …you can tend it
freaking talked him into it, what a funny small barrier of trust, to tend the flag for a man. If i don’t pull it out and the ball hits it, it’s technically a two stroke penalty. Technically. It never happens, that’d be a ridiculous breach in the social contract, and unlikely besides. But still, there’s an element of executing a simple task correctly.
And if the putt isn’t really on line then it’s common courtesy to just leave the flag in, but then it’s like, a matter of judgement. How close is close enough that you pull the pin? If you’re really on your golf etiquette, you loosen the flag early on in the roll, so that there’s no possibility that it gets stuck and you accidentally end up with a two stroke penalty.
What a strange ritual that just died off without a moment’s thought. The PGA golf bureaucracy vaguely said “leave the flag in it’s more efficient” and now everyone just loops around and around, rolling their ball into the flagpole, listening to it clank rather than resonate in the bottom of the cup, and kind of don’t look at each other in the eye.
Resonant Iphone Golf Cart
Ryan grabbed his phone and turned on some music. I tensed up slightly; I've always been a golf-course-music-complainer. Point being, it's a golf course, it's grass, it's outside, do we really need electric noise here, too? Constant stimulation?
But alas, I was inclined to trust Ryan with the vibe, because of the resonance, because he looks like a freaking sculpture dressed in vintage clothing and good vibes and the afterimage of a california baseball tan.
The iphone music, just low enough, just high enough, creamy floaty electro music, and the frequencies just filled up the golf cart. A nice resonant orb of sound, contained inside the cockpit. You couldn't even hear it outside the cart, the perfect background buzz. Almost like a metaphorical cigarette, like the kind of buzz you get when you've been addicted to nicotine enough times to get a sense for the buzz itself, and now you're sober but you still have a permanent nicotine imprint, buzzing away, easily replaceable with electric noise of the right wavelength and sunlight as a catalyst.
Point being, the iphone didn't interfere with the pristine silence of the golf course, it fell into harmony with the ratting and clanking of the gasoline engines of the golf carts, and the breeze in the trees, and the general structure of the whole thing.
Water Resonance
— I mean, the course is in pretty good shape
— Considering how much play it gets, I'm often surprised. It really holds up well.
— Yeah and it's like a thousand degrees, not easy to keep the course alive when it's that hot.
— we get all our water the river, it's irrigated
and he gestured and pointed and, in general terms, explained that the golf course was irrigated, off of the same flow as the botanical garden, just over the rise there, and yeah, makes sense.
— Boise seems like it's really made some good city planning decisions, in general
and I imagined the branches of the river, through who knows how many layers of irrigation and canals, especially if you consider that every tree is, fundamentally, a branch of the river, given how freaking dry it is and how little it rains. City of trees, lot of branches, freaking so many branches in a tiny little patch of america.
and on and on, in the hundred degree heat beating down, dry foothills in the distance between thick green patches of leaves. Hard to get perspective, mostly obscured, half perspective becoming a classic boise experience.
In the South I felt like I had no perspective, driving around hills in half-mississippi where you could never see over the next one, just leafed in hundred foot hills for hundreds of miles. In the mountains you always feel like you kind of have perspective, there's sharp outlines to things.
Boise has some sort of middle ground, loosely hill country, loosely mountains, half obscured perspective, like it could just dissolve into middle America or be at the forefront some sort of new wave or like neither, it's just kind of resonant with itself. People float in but like from where, from everywhere practically, draws a pretty even gradient of folks across the western half of america, with good reach to the south, and the northeast too if we're being honest, and a surprising amount of international characters floating around.
Center of the north american field or whatever, 45th parallel resonant structure equal spacing etcetera
Art Room Kreb's Cycle
Today we floated around the art room momentum coffee house, pottery everywhere
and I told kyle loosely about how the pots are in fact like the krebs cycle
a cycle of forms where the useful ones get bled off to make a new lineage of pots
right now the cycle pretty much contains everything from bowl to cup, there’s a really good middle ground of bell bowls with fingerprints in the side that have become the signature “Momentum Roasting Co.” triangle bowl latte bowl, emerging from the primordial bell bowl and a bunch of drab brown pseudobowls.
The thing about the triangle latte bowls is they have a lot of different information in them, lots of layers. Fingerprints in the frozen momentum of the wheel spinning, finger divots for the triangle, wax resist diagrams over the top, the bowl is a freaking triangle. There’s a ton of information but enough contrast between layers that your brain can read it. It’s in fact not chaos, it’s just a lot of information to get through. It’s structured and ordered, it has a syntax, it’s legible.
The language is information density.
And so I’m just waiting for Kyle to turn prophecy hour into a monetizable product so that money will just manifest in exchange for some sort of latte art latte bowl prophecy kind of thing. Surely the people of boise would pay good money for a latte art reading, kind of like going to a tarot reading but new and more accurate, part of a long lineage of vaguely spiritual ceramics, tea ceremony etcetera but now it’s freaking fourth wave coffee. Obviously the first step is to give away latte art prophecies for free and see what people think of that, the art room gets more surreal and absurdist every day and just wait until we start making floating shelves, the whole freaking place might start floating.
Resonant Structures
Speaking of which, Kyle’s new riff is tree houses; he has a lobsided three pronged tree that’s prefect for a treehouse, with 3 struts so that the tree-house becomes a nice, evenly spaced orb with a hexagon for a skeleton. The tree was made for a treehouse.
We talked about how a beehive is a good resonant structure, good evenly spaced kind of thing. Arches are strong, all objects eventually become spheres etcetera. Man’s got a beehive living room planned out for his treehouse, and I was telling him about some sort of ergonomic field, based on everything being evenly spaced in relation to your posture, hence the beehive living room, dome in a tree, vitruvian man kind of superstructure.
Fitment Resonance, as he says. Emergent structure of the posture field, as I say. Same difference
Resonance
Evenly spaced structures create the possibility of resonance. A vibration can propagate through them, it can ring like a bell. Beauty is based on resonance often. There’s a superstructure that emerges from the balance, where the entire structure can vibrate, and the resonant vibration has emergent properties.
A bell has the ability to ring, but a half-built bell doesn’t. It’s an emergent phenomena. All a structure is is a consistent emergent phenomena. Kind of sort of loosely surely
That’s why I like drawing abstract branched patterns. There’s not really rules per se but it’s fairly easy to see if they have good resonance or not, good structure. I think a balanced branched network has an emergent resonance, just like two balanced pieces of metal will make a tuning fork that rings. Or like how, a tree with equally spaced branches forms a good resonant structure to absorb forces from the environment, like the wind. All the branches move together and it makes shocks diffuse.
The emergent structure of a balanced brain is the ability for it to work like an antenna, to have some sort of emergent field from the balanced vibration.
Coherence
Coherence and resonance are the same thing.
When you have a coherent syntax, you can maintain a vibration without any interference, which over time creates resonance.
I've said resonance too many times in a row and now it could mean freaking anything
thanks for reading
J
10/31