July 2025 – Pearl of Civilization

Art is when everyone else makes money

I have been watching documentaries about art forgeries, and I keep being struck by what an unstoppable economic force art is.

You fund a fringe festival and the entire city or even region makes money even if all the plays are bad– restaurants, taxis, hotels, venues, bartenders, poster designers, print shops, and then later maybe youtubers and critics and fan conventions…

This is probably the wrong take-away from art forgery stories, but even criminals are making millions of dollars in secondary activities because of the original art, which then means these filmmakers are making money talking about the forgery, which means cinemas and festivals can make money showing the films… Unstoppable.

This is the worst test for whether art is “real” but the way AI-generated content leaves a bunch of economic destruction in its wake is probably telling.

They invented a type of content that has zero cultural capital lol

Related/unrelated I would like to visit a museum of famous forgeries. Probably cheap to set up.

The Colour of Ink

Today’s little pleasure was this ink documentary and a heating pad. Recommended if you like artists at work, foraging, history of pigments and dyes, diy, or ink in particular. It features several inkmakers, cartoonists, calligraphers, artists, tattooists, and even a paleontologist.

Streaming free on CBC: The Colour of Ink

I yelped out loud when the film cut to Thomas Little in a pawn shop. He is a gentle soul who makes truly haunted iron-gall ink by dissolving guns in sulfuric acid. Very cool to see part of his process.

I make iron-gall ink too, using rusty bits of junk, vinegar, and the beautiful native oak trees in my neighbourhood. Amazing how different the vibes can be for similar recipes. I have some of Thomas’ gun ink and I haven’t been able to bring myself to open it, it just sits on my desk and whispers

Anyway I do think the documentary conveys the profound pleasure of making tiny batches of ink out of weird things you find out in the world

At one point Jason Logan from Toronto Ink Company makes black ink for a tattooist out of charcoal from a recent forest fire in the area. Part of what is so moving to me about this kind of poetic or haunted ink is the scale– you can make a bottle of ink out of a couple of grams of carbon dust, which leaves whole mountainsides of charcoal behind. Something about reasserting human scale is such a relief

Mulder and Scully and the Unacknowledged Magic Hospital

I am used to spotting docaganda on medical dramas, but it has been awhile since I watched a show where the propaganda comes from the patient perspective. I’m comfort-watching old X-Files and the Hollywood Healing is so shameless and funny. Gunshots, housefires, novel virus, hit by cars, left for dead in the desert, dehydrated by magic salt? Just get to a hospital for a health reset 😂

Deluxe hydration

Friends! Comrades! Did you know you can put a salt rim on any beverage? I recently had an icy soda water with lime and a salt rim and this is my whole personality now.