Friday. Successful week? I think so: three pieces for the paper, three podcasts, one of which was the Diner "improv" or whatever it is. Lots of webwork, steady gym exertion - although I do not know how youcan huff and thump on the treadmill at a brisk pace for 25 minutes and the screen says you've shed 32 calories. Walk three blocks to the car and my watch says I burned 9000 KILOCALORIES or something. Did 25 pages of the book - the AI "art" book, which is full of hilarious accidental pictures. You'll have to trust me: I made no specific requests. Vague prompts make for entertaining madness. The calendars you see in the index redirects are the absolute mildest form of the stuff I have.
Hey how's your back? It's there, which is good. Having a back is one of those things that makes life easier. It still has a juicy, electric tang of occasional pain, but that's why aspirin is for! So you can mask the discomfort, go to the gym, and exacerbate and attenuate the pain under the alias of analgesic surcease.
Hey are you still taking pictures of Minneapolis, including things you've photographed dozens of times before, but for some reason the light and composition seems different? Why yes
A jumble. I could do without the metal exhaust stack, but removing it would falsify the image.
Some stuff that's neither here nor there. Not Detritus! That's web junk. These are leftovers from various web stops / searches / magazine scans, etc.
Behold the sin of Steubenville:
This was inflicted on so many old towers across the country. It just doesn't work. It's an insult to everyone - to the architect, to the building, to the people who can't possibly conceive of an old style having any relevance or purpose in the post-war era.
Now and then . . . a happy ending.
We learn something interesting here: how filthy it looked when it was covered up. Coal and exhaust.
Somewhat related, inasmuch as it's part of early 1960s public abstraction: do you know what this?
An unironic period usage of "Thinking Man"!
The "jaundiced report preceding" was an Esquire story about the 1964 World's Fair. Now do you recognize it?
It's the IBM egg. People sat in steeply raked bleachers, which then rose from the ground into the egg, where they saw a multimedia presentation. The Charles Eames IBM Fair movie has a brief excerpt - and note that these go to precise moments in the video. You can stop after 30 seconds or so.
Pretty cool, eh? Well, I think so. I'm not sure how easy it was to follow all those screens.
The Esquire article also had a discussion of some IBM attractions:
The magazine has a page of storyboards, telling the tale in great detail. Twelve drawings like this.
From the same film: here's how it turned out.
I don't have the same feeling for the '64 as I do for the '33 and the '39, but I'm starting to regard it with a bit more affection. It must have been a tremendous tonic at the time.
I was in Cancun and had inadvertently come into possession of a white plastic garbage bag filled with pre-packed pounds of heroin.
I had no need for the stuff, so I gave two flavors (bone and tea) to a fellow we’d met on the vacation. They were in a gym bag, and he took the whole gym bag and disappeared.
I thought we were going back to his room, and that’s why he’d taken my bag, so I wasn’t too concerned. I tried to find his room, going through different buildings I thought were the right one. The first had the resort’s main lobby. The second was much older, and designed like a college instruction facility. I made my way through some rooms that were set up like labs; there was a professor in a tux who was pressing some weights and making horrible, theatrical grimaces. It didn’t seem much like a Cancun resort now at all.
But once I was outside of that building, it was a resort again. I was stopped by a short female Mexican policewoman who wanted to know if my stay had been good. Why, yes. Had anyone mistreated me in any way? No. She kept asking questions, and I kept answering them, quite at ease, because it wasn’t my heroin, and she just seemed to be doing some routine check. But the questions grew more persistent and she was angling around to get into the room, which meant I had to come up with a plausible story that explained why I had so much heroin. It occurred to me I was going to end up in a Mexican jail that night and it was likely I would never get out. Woke with a jolt.
The prompt "a gym bag of white powder in a Mexican jail" was instantaneously banned as a violation of the rules.
And now, a related feature that will provide some Friday amusements:
I was playing around with "empty main streets," and this is what low prompts produced.
Every church was a little bit different.
The AI decided that all shall be drawn to the bright energy of the church after the rapture:
Sometimes it gave a generous interpretation of "main street," if I specified a City Hall.
None of these are indicative of the book I'm working on, BTW.
And that's it for Fridays! Ha ha kidding, of course it's not.
Last year I cut out the tunes, but heck, why not bring them back. We'll be counting down the bottom 50 songs as listed by Whitburn. It'll be fun! Stuff you've never heard. A grab-bag of styles.
Ladies and gentlemen, the SWINGING BLUE JEANS.
Sounds familiar, doesn't it? I don't mean the song, I just mean the Merseybeat style. Wikipedia:
Now we're done. Off to the Permanent Collection, where the art historians of the future attempt to find meaning in the ads of the 50s and 60s. Thanks for your visit, and I'll see you Monday.
