The Cheese Tithe
What a dog, a phone, and no particular reason produced
A few weeks ago, Robin sent me a photo of Birdy. We were sitting in the same room. Birdy was chin down on the blanket, fixed on Robin with the patience of an animal who has already concluded she’s getting some popcorn and is prepared to wait out however long that takes. One blue eye, one brown. Ears up. Robin could have leaned over to show me the shot, but the moment she moved, Birdy would have broken the pose and the picture would have been gone, so she texted it across the couch instead.
I had no plan for it. I opened Gemini, typed give me something fun, which is less a prompt than an abdication, and handed over the photo.
What came back was a character sheet. Birdy as the protagonist of a fantasy role-playing game, stats and all. Charisma boosted by the forehead wrinkles. Perception maxed out, on the reasoning that she can hear a cheese wrapper open from the next room. Stealth close to zero, because she is too striking to blend into anything.
We passed the phone back and forth from there. One of us would read the output, laugh, and prompt the next turn. The sheet asked for Birdy’s name and her real-life superpower, so we told it: Birdy, and mind control, since there is no version of events in which the hand does not eventually produce the treat. The model took that and kept building. Birdy became a sorcerer whose subclass is Absolute Ruler of the Living Room. It asked for her highest-value target. We said cheese. It returned a doctrine, the Cheese Tax, under which the sound of a wrapper travels on a frequency that bypasses ordinary physics.
I installed a phone update that night, and that is how I learned the phone now makes music. Lyria 3, Google’s music model, builds a track from a text prompt. I told Robin I could not wait to send her my first song. She was skeptical there was much use in a phone that writes music. I already knew what the song would be.
I left the update alone until late the next morning before I made anything with it. The play is real. It does not get to cut in front of the work.
The result is called The Cheese Tithe. It runs two minutes and thirty-eight seconds and came with its own cover image. It is a rock anthem about a dog holding a household hostage for dairy.
The lyrics describe the actual room.
One blue, one brown, they’re locking in the static,
Birdy’s on the blanket, keeping it emphatic.
The wire crate is open, the brick wall is a blur,
There is no escaping the gravity of her.
I never told it what the room looked like.
The chorus is the part that gets stuck in your head, which is the job of a chorus:
You feel the voltage, the master command!
There is no stopping the reaching of the hand!
The tithe must be paid, the willpower is gone!
I sent it to Robin. She laughed. She had doubted there was any use in a phone that writes songs, and the use turned out to be this: two and a half minutes of arena rock about our dog’s dairy racket, useful in no sense a spreadsheet would recognize.
None of it was for anything. That is the whole point, and it took me years to trust it.
In graduate school I started making photographs that had no assignment behind them. Macro-close work on train cars parked near a mall, paint and scratches and weather shot so tightly the train stopped reading as a train and became color and line. Ink dropped into water and caught as it fell. Glass lit until it looked like deep space (okay, that one came later). I didn’t think of it as a body of work. I thought of it as play, and I hadn’t yet learned that play could justify itself.
I understand it now. That work became a series I still print and sell, seventeen years on, and one of the glass photographs spent a season on a gallery wall in Los Angeles. I only gave the series a name recently, while rebuilding my website, when I noticed I had been filing the images by how I made them instead of by what they were.
The Birdy session and those grad-school photographs are the same move, seventeen years between them. Each one starts with something in front of me that has no particular use, a gratified train car or a dog waiting on cheese, and each one follows the play without settling the destination first. Sometimes it arrives at a pigment print on cotton rag. Sometimes at a rock anthem about a tithe. The destination does not need to justify the beginning. It doesn’t need to justify the final product either.
That does not make the song an outreach strategy. It was not made for that. But a song about the Cheese Tithe travels in a way a workflow essay never will. Someone forwards it to a person who had decided the whole subject was either frightening or beneath them, and for two and a half minutes it is neither. It is just funny.
Birdy has no idea any of this happened. She is on the blanket by my feet while I write this, snoring gently away.
The cheese will wait.
P.S. I finished this, and then Robin sent me hers.