The Thousand Faces of Cassian Andor

“Hollywood script doctor Tony Gilroy had finally decided to write his friend Kathleen Kennedy, the president of Lucasfilm, a long-overdue letter; one that took the experiment that he, Gareth Edwards, and the cast and crew of Rogue One had started years ago to the next level. A radical pitch that framed the Star Wars Galaxy as the backdrop for a story about a revolutionary in-the-making, set upon a collision-course with history, destiny, and the unrelenting forces of Imperial oppression.”

The making of Z by My Morning Jacket - featuring Jim James

Really interesting interview that made me go back and give this one a deeper listen.

“For the 20th anniversary of the fourth My Morning Jacket album, we take a detailed look at how it was made. The band originally formed in 1998 in Louisville, Kentucky by Jim James, Johnny Quaid, Tom Blankenship and J. Glenn. After signing with Darla Records, they released their debut album, The Tennessee Fire in 1999. Danny Cash joined on keyboards before the release of their second album, At Dawn, in 2001. Patrick Hallahan took over on drums as they signed to ATO Records. Their third album, It Still Moves, was released in 2003. At this point, Johnny Quaid and Danny Cash decided to leave the band so they held auditions and recruited Bo Koster and Carl Broemel. For their fourth album, they hired producer John Leckie and began recording outside of their home studio for the first time. Z was eventually released in 2005.”

Magnus Hjalmar Munsterhjelm (19 October 1840 – 2 April 1905) was a Finnish landscape painter

Hjalmar Munsterhjelm was a painter I was digging on last night. Wiki is pretty cool for finding this kind of stuff, bonus points that the jpgs are sometimes in the 4k relm.

Leonard Cohen, “Kanye West is not Picasso” from The Flame (2018)

——-

“Kanye West is not Picasso

I am Picasso

Kanye West is not Edison

I am Edison

I am Tesla

Jay-Z is not the Dylan of anything

I am the Dylan of anything

I am the Kanye West of Kanye West

The Kanye West

Of the great bogus shift of bullshit culture

From one boutique to another

I am Tesla

I am his coil

The coil that made electricity soft as a bed

I am the Kanye West Kanye West thinks he is

When he shoves your ass off the stage

I am the real Kanye West

I don’t get around much anymore

I never have

I only come alive after a war

And we have not had it yet.”

–Leonard Cohen, “Kanye West is not Picasso” from The Flame (2018)


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Quit Taking It Personally

Here is some pretty good advice from Adam Savage when do you creative work for a job / living. I’ve been in these situations in visual art, commercial art and music. It’s all pretty relatable and good advice for the new comers out there.

Neal Stephenson Interview on the Atlantic

Author Neal Stephenson did a recent interview on The Atlantic that is interesting.

Wong: About a year ago, in an interview with the Financial Times, you called the outputs of generative AI “hollow and uninteresting.” Why was that, and has your assessment changed?

Stephenson: I suspect that what I had in mind when I was making those remarks was the current state of image-generating technology. There were a few things about that rubbing me the wrong way, the biggest being that they are benefiting from the uncredited work of thousands of real human artists. I’m going to exaggerate slightly, but it seems like one of the first applications of any new technology is making things even shittier for artists. That’s certainly happened with music. These image-generation systems just seemed like that was mechanized and weaponized on an inconceivable scale.

…

Wong: Do you think we’re seeing some of that naivete today in people looking at how generative AI can be used?

Stephenson: For sure. It’s based on an understandable misconception as to what these things are doing. A chatbot is not an oracle; it’s a statistics engine that creates sentences that sound accurate. Right now my sense is that it’s like we’ve just invented transistors. We’ve got a couple of consumer products that people are starting to adopt, like the transistor radio, but we don’t yet know how the transistor will transform society. We’re in the transistor-radio stage of AI.

Painter Amy Bennett

Interview with painter Amy Bennett on Juxtapoz. Enjoy this work. It’s a mix between Gregory Crewdson and also has elements of macro / tilt shift photos some how. More paintings at Richard Heller Gallery.

“About a quarter of the paintings in Open Season were begun before the pandemic. I made a substantial model inspired by attending a 4H fair, and noting with curiosity that it seemed to attract both extreme ends of the political spectrum. I wanted to challenge myself to make images outside of the domestic realm. Painting crowds in the open air seemed like a counterbalance to the isolated interiors I had been immersed in. But it wasn’t long into lockdown that the theme felt too disconnected from our alarming new reality. We could finally see what a paradise we’d lost. In the very limited studio time I had then, with two kids suddenly needing to attend school at home, I returned to scenes in the home of marriage and family, that in hindsight, reflected a lot of grief, anxiety, and exhaustion.”

VIA Metafilter.

A new treasure trove of Webb images has arrived!

Kinda a space nerd so I can’t help but check these images from the Webb telescope, download the HR tiffs and do some clean up on them.

“Webb’s new images are extraordinary,” said Janice Lee, a project scientist for strategic initiatives at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “They’re mind-blowing even for researchers who have studied these same galaxies for decades. Bubbles and filaments are resolved down to the smallest scales ever observed, and tell a story about the star formation cycle.”

Mike's Motels 1974

Pretty cool photo set here from Mike Mandel on Motels from the 70’s. Some fun stuff that could be interesting to recreate in CG… maybe…

Mike's Motels 1974

Still lifes by Rebecca Ritchie

Was digging on these oil paintings by Rebecca Ritchie. I am such a sucker for this kind of lighting style.

Some VDB Clouds and words from Wil Wheaton

Was playing around with the cloud and cloud noise nodes yesterday in a attempt to make a abstract cloudscape. Here are the results of that. Today I might get away from round shapes and see how they behave when I use angular shapes for the base. Possibly grids scattered like broken shards? Dunno. The Amplitude and Element Size settings in the cloud noise node can really change things up. Rendered in Redshift because Octane in Houdini hates me.

In my efforts to get off social media I am searching out blogs and other sites that allow me to escape the “walled garden” of insta, facebook etc… Go back to the day when the web was more based on people and not giant hoses draining all content, lol. Anyways, Wil Wheaton wrote a nice piece the other day and I thought I’d link it here. I can fall asleep on a dime, but I’ll wake up around 2-3 for a few hours with this crap spinning away in my nogging.

“It’s tough to fall asleep for me, because that’s when my anxiety does its most aggressive work expressing itself. Before I even hit the pillow, my brain is replaying everything I’m pretty sure I did wrong that day, taking occasional breaks to worry about, well, everything. My brain will work itself up so much it actually makes my heart speed up. When I’m supposed to be relaxing.

It’s not great, Dan.

But I started doing something that’s been incredibly helpful, and I thought I’d share it.

Every night as I’m getting ready for bed, I focus on a list of things for which I am grateful. I call it “doing my gratitudes”. I just start somewhere, like “I am grateful that I am going to sleep in a warm, safe bed. I am grateful that I get to share this bed with Anne. I am grateful I have enough food.” Stuff like that. I remind myself that there is so much that is good in my life, and by thinking about those things, recognizing those things, and making space to feel grateful for them, I do not give my anxiety an opportunity to grab hold of anything and go to work on me.”

Clear LCDs as animated stained glass

This is pretty amazing. "‘Illuminated Glass’ is an interactive art experience that reimagines the traditional art of stained glass. The heart of the installation features a 4 panel box made with transparent screens and mirrors. A generative art system plays across the screens, appearing at first like modern stained glass. Light shines through the art, letting colored light into the experience."