Categories
quotes

Odds & Ends

A collection of quotes I’ve stumbled across and wanted to write something about or share but never finished a proper post. Collected here with half finished or no commentary…

I have the most devoted and ardent of friends, and affectionate relatives — and of enemies I really make no account.

Walt Whitman, in a letter to a German friend on his sixty fourth birthday

Words to live by? Contrast with “keep your friends close but your enemies closer,” from The Godfather Part II.

Fluidity of memory and a capacity to forget is perhaps the most haunting trait of our species.

Wade Davis in The Unraveling of America [rollingstone.com], published in Rolling Stone

The whole article is worth reading, depressing as it is. But if Americans don’t start to internalize the decline of America and its ideals, replaced as they have become by quick and catchy political slogans and dogma packaged as identity then nothing will change and America is doomed as an idea if not a country.

Someone once told me that the founding documents of America, the. Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, and the Constitution with the Bill of Rights, are some of the most enlightened and important documents in the history of humanity and human thought. A bit of hyperbole but point taken. He also said that America’s history is an ongoing experiment to see if humanity can live up to such lofty ideals. It took us “four score and seven years” to even begin to live up to the first line of the Declaration, that “all men are create equal” and as we approach 250 years we are still struggling with that one.

Progress has been slow and fitful, but there has been progress. But somehow there is always a significant number of Americans that fall back on their tribalism and unite in their fear of the other. It’s a sad irony that those who publicly shout about the greatness and sanctity of the Constitution are the ones who seem to be the furthest for living up to ideals on which it is based.

In competitive athletics you play the best you can on that day, and sometimes you lose and sometimes you win. It is best to not be overly attached to the final result if you want to play your best…

Richard Geib, posted in “Mushin” – A Legacy to My Daughter [rjgeib.com] on rjgeib.com

[W]e judge the sophistication of our peers by how sophisticated they are with use of language. Your smartest friends can use deadpan sarcasm, and your smartest friends can get it when you’re deadpanning sarcasm

Stanley Dubinsky, quoted in “The Dad-Joke Doctrine” [theatlantic.com], pubished by The Atlantic

The article is from 2018 but it showed up in a list of Fathers Day related articles this year. It’s interesting giving some theories on why the dad joke exists, how there is analogous ‘traditions’ in some other cultures and languages. Serious lack of dad jokes in the article through. And the few they do give just re-enforce the “dad-jokes = bad-jokes” stereotype.

Anyway, it’s not the dad jokes that this quote is about, it’s about the use of complex linguistics like sarcasm, or puns. I love sarcasm and puns. But living in Singapore I think a lot of my sarcasm and puns go over most peoples heads. To the point that I use a lot less of them than I used to, though sometimes I can’t help myself, the immediate response or comment to a what someone says just comes out without conscious thought, it has to for it to work, if you wait five minutes to make a sarcastic remark or come up with a pun as part of your response then there is no point.

The issue is mostly because English is not most people’s first or primary language. Even when it is the primary language for a lot of Singaporeans, taught in school as the main language, the proficiency and vocabulary is not strong enough to handle more complex puns and sarcasm. There is just too high a proportion of non-native speakers you talk to in daily life, daily interactions demand simpler language. People just don’t use puns and sarcasm so much.

I feel like many snappy retorts and come-backs are lost on most people I speak with, they just don’t immediately get the joke.

My mother is very religious so I’m very much aware of the attitude that these are the last days. But, let’s face it, no matter where we have been in history, whoever has existed has been living in the last days… their own. When each of us dies the world ends for us.

Octavia E. Butler, in Octavia E. Butler: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

I’ve never read Octavia Butler, always on the list, never at the top. But I like this quote I found in a post on The Marginalian [themarginalian.org].

Expressing oneself in the world and creativity are the same. It may not be possible to know who you are without somehow expressing it.

Rick Ruben, in The Creative Act

I’ve always had to desire to create, but never the drive to truly create. I play at it but I don’t put in the hours to be a truly creative person.

For example, I’ve been doing photography for more than 25 years, but I’ve never tried to truly learn to be a photographer. I never took a class or read a book. I’ve googled my way to solving specific problems or copying a cool effect I see. I’ve absorbed a lot of lingo and I can control my camera fairly well. Even enough to master full manual mode.

I use Lightroom to clean up my photo. And it comes with photoshop but I’ve rarely opened photoshop. The closest to creativity with images I get is using Adobe’s Express to make the featured images on my posts. I am happy with most of those, especially the ones I did for my series of posts covering my best mobile photos [confusion.cc] year by year since 2004.

Categories
albums

Flood

Artist
They Might be Giants
Relaese Date
January 15, 1990

Flood [discogs] by They Might be Giants [discogs] may be the greatest alternative, indie, college rock album ever. TMBG might be known as comedy music, joke rock to most people, not serious music, but fans know that the music is as good as any mainstream rock band, the lyrics are —far from being jokes— often complex and meaningful, they have a lighter side but they are not just jokes. Also two of the songs on Flood had faux music videos on Tiny Toon Adventures [wikipedia.org] in early 1991, and I definitely remember watching those on Fox after school.

Due to the Tiny Toons videos I think Flood was a the gateway to TMBG for many people my age, much too young to have been in the core college fan demographic of the time. But Flood was not my gateway to TMBG. I do remember watching the videos for “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” [youtube.com] and “Particle Man” [youtube.com] on Tiny Toons —much later I found there was an “official” video for Istanbul [youtube.com]. But in 1991 I had just turned 13 and it was not a good time in my life, According to Wikipedia the Tiny Toons episode containing “Istanbul” and “Particle” Man aired in February 1991… right in the middle of the Gulf War, or Operation Desert Storm, and my mom was serving. She was not in the Middle East, she was a reservist and was called up in late 1991 to replace the active duty people who were deployed to the Middle East. But my mom was away from home all the time stationed several hours away, and I did not get along with my dad. So, the whole period of late 1990 to late 1991 while she was on active duty was not a good time in my house.

Anyway, it was a couple of years later that I got into TMBG. My (re)introduction was via a couple of friends in high school: S████ and G████. S████ especially used to listen to them all the time, Apollo 18 [discogs.com] and John Henry [discogs.com] were more recent and I recall he listened to them more, but Flood was in the mix. And it was the album that made the biggest impression on me. It was the first TMBG album I bought for myself. It was in the little CD wallet I kept in my backpack in senior year, along with other albums that are or will be on this list of my favorite: Under the Table and Dreaming [confusion.cc], and Garbage for two examples.

As for the music, Flood is an eclectic album like all TMBG albums. Besides “Istanbul” and “Particle Man”, both excellent songs, my three favorite would be: “Birdhouse In Your Soul”, “We Want a Rock”, and “Your Racist Friend”. “Your Racist Friend” in particular is one of the first political songs I really listened to, getting in to the politically charged music of Rage Against the Machine about the same time, late in senior your of high school when Evil Empire was released. It also has to be said that “Minimum Wage” is a brilliant… song? I’m not sure it counts as a song, jingle I guess.

I will admit that the first half of the album holds my attention better than the second half. But, I still listen to Flood from start to finish regularly.

But take a listen for yourself, on Apple:

Or on Spotify:

Categories
quotes ranting

The Artists and the AIs

Would I forbid the teaching (if that is the word) of my stories to computers? Not even if I could. I might as well be King Canute, forbidding the tide to come in. Or a Luddite trying to stop industrial progress by hammering a steam loom to pieces.

Stephen King, from Stephen King: My Books Were Used to Train AI [theatlantic.com] published by The Atlantic.

I read that back in August and it’s stuck with me. I’ve had several conversations about this topic with various people. There are a lot of people out there who are railing against the use of their work in training AI. Screaming everything from plagiarism to copyright infrengement.

On the one hand I can understand the fear and anger. If you spend your time to create something and you hope to make your living from that creation and subsequent creations that may depend on consumers liking your style… then the idea that your style can be mimicked, cheaply and quickly, by an AI is an existential threat.

But, here’s the thing. Is an silicon-and-copper AI, trained on the works of any artist, living or dead, copyrighted material or not, and then asked to mimic the style of said artist, any different than a flesh-and-blood artist who spends time studying the works of another artist to mimic the style because they like it or because people will buy works in that style? I’m not sure I see a significant difference.

I remember spending hours in the art museums in DC and London and seeing artists sitting there with their notebooks or, sometimes, even an easel setup copying the works. They would sketch or paint in full or in part, a copy of a work hanging in the museum. They were literally copying the work of another artist. I assume they were learning.

Of course these studies can’t be sold, I guess, if the original work is still in copyright. If the original work is out of copyright, in the public domain, the then anyone can sell a copy. There is a whole industry creating copies of famous paintings, as accurately as possible, to sell to people (or companies) who want a copy. Check out this story about the village in China that turns out endless copies of famous paintings: On the Ground: Van Gogh lives here. So does Rembrandt. A Chinese village where the great masters live on (in replication) [latimes.com]. But copies for selling aren’t my point; copying for the sake of learning, of training the artist to be able to reproduce the style or incorporate the style into their own works is the point.

There is a whole industry of artist out there creating works that are “in the style of”. See this story on the work or a Disney artist who did Star Wars in the style of Calvin and Hobbes [theverge.com], I love it, I love both Star Wars and Calvin and Hobbes and as this falls under the rules I parody, I’m total down to buy a tee shirt of this. Or, go search Etsy, Redbubble, or DeviantArt for “Calvin and Hobbes” for examples of artists drawing the famous duo in all manner of styles. Or search DeviantArt for “Studio Ghibli” and see the plethora of works that are either characters or scenes from Studio Ghibli works done in other styles or the works of others done in the style of Ghibli Studio.

If our art is popular people on the internet are going to mimic it. And a lot of them are going to sell it.

All of this is to say that training an artist —a physical human or a digital AI— on existing art is fine. Copyright rules are supposed to protect the ability of the original artist to make a living while allowing others to produce derivative works (copyright has many issues, including abuse by individuals and corporations to stifle legitimate derivative works just because they have the money to hire better lawyers, but that is beyond the scope of this post, my point is there is a system). If I ask an AI to write me a story in the style of Steven King and it is not literally reproducing large swaths of text from King’s works then how is that different from anyone inspired by Steven King writing stories? Remember what Picasso Bansky said: Good artists copy. Great artists steal.

IMG_8216

I recently saw a post of AI created “Disney Princesses in the style of Studio Ghibli” making the rounds on social media. That’s an old trope, what’s new is that they did it with AI, the output was good, and they used that output to create a YouTube video, with AI voice over, that they could post and make money on ads.

And I think his issue of not paying someone to create the art, but going cheap on an AI so that they can make more profit by pushing out more content to social media is the real issue. In the end the issue is that commerce trumps creativity; and if you are trying to make a living from your creativity commerce and the AI is going to destroy you.

The ease and speed with which the AI can pump out the Disney-Ghibli princesses means more profit for the person who posts the video than if they had to pay an actual artist to do the work. It’s the age old issue of capitalism valuing art only in so far as it makes money. Profitability trumps artistic vision. Nothing new there. Artists will need to adapt, it’s never been an easy living, and throwing their sabots at the AIs won’t stop it.

The more industry is able to use AI to replace actual human creativity the more our culture will suffer. Art, in all its forms, more than anything else is what makes us human. Since the first humans pressed their hands to a rock and spit ochre to leave their mark art has been a defining characteristic of humanity. It would be a great pity if the AI drove human artists to extinction.

I have purchased a fair bit of actual art from internet artists over the years. I have a cabinet full of posters, books and figurines by various creators: A Lesson is Learned by the Damage is Irreversible [alessonislearned.com], Josh Cooley and Gaping Void [gapingvoid.com] (which the artist seems to have turned into a successful consulting business, but they were selling prints of their art back in 2010), ARt from these three is in the featured image of this post, as long ago I downloaded images of what I bought to create a layout for my wall, but I never got them up. I’ve also supported Dresden Codak [dresdencodak.com], Little Gamers [little-gamers.com], CHAKAL666, Steve Bailik, and many more. Most seem to be offline these days. I wish I had room to display all the art I have, but most of it is in a boxes or poster tubes.

Would I buy AI art? I don’t know, right now I don’t see anything that I think is so amazing and honestly the money is going to who? Most AI art seems to be clickbait. Prompt engineering is a skill, just go and take a look at the prompts that are being used to generate images with Midjourny or Dall-E. The people generating good AI art are working at it, though it might not be compariable to the work of an artists who spent years developing the muscle memory and eye for painting.

Anyway, support culture, support artists. Buy art from people. But, avoid things that are obvious copyright violations. Parody is your friend.

Categories
photography travel

Paris, France, November-December 2022

I’m setting a new record for delay in posting my travel photos. normally it takes me six months, this time it’s closer to ten. In my defense I had to replace my external storage and, twice, send my Mac for repair. But, anyway. Yea, I went to Paris last year with the family.

Since my first visit, more than twenty years ago, before this blog existed, I have loved Paris. Not the first of course, but I really feel a je ne sais quoi. Walking the streets, sitting in the cafes or visiting the museums. This feeling survives the rude people, the stink of the Metro, the homeless, and the bitter cold we had on this trip. London, New York and Tokyo are the only other cities that I have spent a significant amount of time in that have a similar sort of presence and mystic in my mind.

I’ve seen just about everything there is to see in Paris over my many visits, but this was my daughters first trip. So, we marched our way through all of the sites I think are worth it:

Arc de Triomphe

IMG_0884

The Arc [wikipedia.org] was our first stop. Seemingly every flight from Singapore to Europe lands at six AM and the hotels don’t want you until two or three in the afternoon. So after dropping our bags at our hotel in the Latin Quarter we hiked down to and across the river, and then up the Avenue des Champs-Élysées to the Arc. It was cold and windy and the sky was overcast, parils of winter travel, but the Arc is as good an introduction to Paris as any; a Napoleonic monument seated at the intersection of grand boulevards with views of the Eiffel Tower, Sacré-Cœur atop Montmartre, the hideous Tour Montparnasse. Notre Dame was hidden by the renovation works.

Tour Eiffel

You have to, the only reason not to visit is just to be contrarian, the Eiffel Tower [wikipeidia.org] is Paris, dispite the fact that the parisians hated it when it was first built. No one wanted to climb the stairs. There is a new (to me) glass wall that goes all the way around the base of the tower so they herd people through security screening. It ruins all the photos. C’est la vie.

Musée du Louvre

IMG_1809

We went to the Lourve [wikipedia.org], twice in fact. It’s much too big for one visit. We got really lucky on the first visit, it was on a Friday, they have extended hours and when we made our way to the Mona Lisa [wikipedia.org] there were surprisingly few people. Even with two visits the Louvre is overwhelming. We checked off the majors: Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo [wikipedia.org], Nike of Samothrace [wikipedia.org], Liberty Leading the People [wikipedia.org], the apartments of Napoleon III, and much more. So much more…

Musée de Cluny/Musée du Moyen Âge

The Moyen Âge is a smaller museum, less crowded. You feel like you can take your time. But really you go for one thing: ze tapestries. The Lady and The Unicorn [wikipedia.org], six large tapestries that are always linked in my mind with opening titles of The Last Unicorn [wikipedia.org], the 1982 Rankin/Bass animated movie. Though younger people may associate them with the Gryffindor common room in the Harry Potter movies.

Musée d’Orsay

IMG_3296

The Orsay [wikipedia.org] is my favorite musum in Paris. I love the collection, focusing on art from the late 19th and early 20th century. There is something about the transition from classical painting and sculpture to fully modern art that just works for me. I love the impressionist and post-impressionist; the Orsay has a huge collection: Monet [wikipeida.org], Van Gogh [wikipedia.org], Cézanne [wikipedia.0rg], Degas [wikipedia.org], and many more. I love also the sculpture of Rodin [wikipedia.org] his student Camille Claudel [wikipedia.org], and those of Carpeaux [wikipedia.org]. The Orsay is the right size, not as massive as the Lourve, not so small as the Cluny. A long lazy afternoon wondering among great art. This time there was a exhibit on the works of Edvard Munch [wikipedia.org], we got to see an early hand colored lithograph of The Scream [wikipedia.org].

Musée de l’Orangerie

The main attraction in the Oragnerie [wikipedia.org] is eight massive paintings by Cloude Monet in his Water Lilies [wikipeida.org] series. If you’ve never seen these or the other large format ones that are in other museums, you will be shocked at how large they are. While many of the Water Lilies in museams like the Orsay are ‘normal’ size, typically around 1 meter by 1 meter or so, the eight that hang in the Orangerie are two meters high and range in width from six to seventeen meters. The museum also houses many more other impressionist and post-impressionist paintings.

Musée Rodin

IMG_1286

Rodin [wikipedia.org] is my favorite sculpture (Dalí comes close), and the Rodin Museum [wikipedia.org] in Paris is wonderful place. A quiet garden and manor house that once housed Rodin’s studio, set not too far from the Eiffel Tower. It’s a great escape from the city without leaving the city. You can spend hours wondering around the garden and inside the house. Among hundreds of Rodin’s works; including The Thinker [wikipedia.org] and The Kiss [wikipedia.org] as well as a cast of the full The Gates of Hell [wikipedia.org] (both The Kiss and the Thinker were orginally part of the Gates).

Espace Dalí

Dali Paris [wikipedia.org], is a small private museum in Montmartre, devoted to Dalí. There are a number of casts of various images from his surrealest paintings —melting clocks from the Persistance of Memory [wikipedia.org], a long legged Space Elephant from The Elephants, Alice jumping rope and more. It’s small, but if you like Dalí it’s a great stop.

Sainte-Chapelle

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Standing in Sante-Chapelle [wikipedia.org], one a sunny day, the stained glass windows filling the room with all colors of the rainbow, is one of the most peaceful and beautiful experiences you can have. Of all the churches and other places filled with stained glass I’ve visited around Europe (and other places), there is nothing that compares with Sainte-Chapelle.

Sacré-Cœur

Sacré-Cœur [wikipedia.org] is beautiful building, a mix of muted orthodox churches —massive ceiling mosaics and almost onion domes— and the classical revival styles. Nothing gothic about it, but, while it is pretty, it doesn’t do it for me, I prefer the gothic architecture of Norte Dame. The best part of visiting Sacré-Cœur is going up to the dome and getting the view of Paris from the very top of Montmartre.

Shakespeare & Co

IMG_0998

There are other, larger, book stores just around the corner from Shakespeare & Co [wikipedia.org] —though sadly Gibert Jeune closed due to the COVID19 pandemic— but Shakespeare & Co’s focus on English books means I can actually read a book I buy there. And it just feels more cosy. The shops along Boulevard Saint-Michel are massive, Gibert Jeune was 6 stores and Gibert Joseph stretches across multiple locations. Shakespeare & Co is cosy, you can barely turn around in the used book shop. The new book shop is bigger, but still just five irregular shaped rooms, packed with shelves of books. I know this is not the original Shakespeare & Co that published Ulysses, that one closed during the Nazi occupation, but it has the ambiance. I picked up a used copy of Chaucer, The Pardoners Tale edited by Nevill Coghill and Christopher Tolkien.

Catacombes de Paris

“I see dead people”… Well, their bones. Bones everywhere. Millions of bones. I’ve been the theCatacombs of Paris [wikipedia.org] before, twice. This trip was all about taking my teenage daughter. She likes horror movies so this was right up her alley. My wife and younger daughter declined to join us, they went shopping and dinning.

Palais Garnier

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The Palais Garnier or Paris Opera House, is the very definition of over-the-top architecture. Wikipedia says it’s Second Empire or Napoleon III style, which is not technically baroque but includes many elements of baroque as a revival… But the basic principle seems to be leave no surface unadorned. Statues, carvings, mosaics, gilded mirrors… it’s all there. And somehow it works. Even if you don’t appreciate the aesthetic the exterior and, especially, the interior of the Palais Garnier are awesome and worth the visit. And don’t forget this is where the Phantom of the Opera lived.

In addition to all the sights we visited in the city, we made a few trips out to the surrounding areas. We went to Versailles [wikipedia.org] to see the opulent palace of the Sun King [wikipedia.org] and Marie-Antoinette [wikipedia.org]. Actually we had to make two trips, the first day we went we arrived late and the last tickets for the (short) day were sold out. Fortunately we had a few free days so were able to get tickets online for one of those days towards the end of our trip.

We also visited Chartres to see the cathedral [wikipedia.org]. The idea was to make up for not getting to see Notre Dame, since it was still under renovation and repair after the fire. You can’t go to France and not see a proper gothic cathedral. Unfortunately, Chartres is undergoing restoration and cleaning and the tour of the tower and upper floors was closed. C’est la vie. So we had to settle for the main floor and outside views.

So, yea, a long, packed trip to Paris. We marched back and forth across the city, averaging 16 kilometers a day. We rode the Metro nearly every day; using the old school little blue tickets and enjoying the, um, unique, smell of the Paris Metro while navigating the maze-like passages and stairways and braving the overly aggressive doors on the older trains. We ate fresh baguettes and crescents from boulangeries (I will fight you for the last baguette from Maison d’Isabellein Place Maubert!); Comte cheese and yogurt, raspberries and apples for from the markets for breakfast. We wondered the Latin Quarter and Montmatre. I love Paris.

You can see the full Paris, France, November-December 2022 [flickr.com] photoset on Flickr.

Categories
quotes

Capable of Monstrous Acts

The most discomposing thing about people capable of monstrous acts is that they too enjoy art, they too read to their children, they too can be moved to tears by music.

Maria Popova, in Terror, Tenderness, and the Paradoxes of Human Nature: How a Marmoset Saved Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Lives from the Nazis [themarginalian.org] on The Marginalian