DAX NORMAN's Online Museum of Curios

Just found Dax Norman’s god damn awesome art on tumblr and this stuff is freakin awesome. He is on Giphy as well, which happens to be where I make my stupid music show gifs.

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.

AI song mastering is a thing now.

Arstechnica does a write comparing Apple, OZone, LANDR and Bandlabs AI Mastering Assistants.

I liked most of the results I got. Mastering Assistant, Ozone, and LANDR were each clearly capable of pro-sounding results; the web-based services I tried, including Bandlab and Waves, were somewhat more variable.

Apple's Mastering Assistant offered a less compressed and more open sound on my demo track, which sounded very nice. (Indeed, on another track of mine, I preferred Apple's approach for precisely this reason.) LANDR was also great, though it offered a much more controlled sound. For this demo track, however, Ozone's compressed-but-not-completely-crushed sound and its excellent handling of the overall EQ (the highs were present but never sizzling, for instance, and it dealt with one or two moments of sibilance better) won me over.

Funky Tuesday.

Some good old Meters, though not quiet fat Tuesday. Close enough.

Music Monday: Rock and Roll Animal

How I have never heard this version before? This is a crazy ass take on Sweet Jane. INterview with Steve Hunter who plays guitar on it.

Ryan: You get asked a lot about the seminal intro on the live version of “Sweet Jane” on Lou Reed’s Rock ‘n Roll Animal album. My understanding is that you had previously worked up something similar during your time with Detroit and also The Chambers Brothers, is that right?

Steve: That’s exactly right. I started writing it when I was with Mitch Ryder in Detroit in around ’71

Final note on 'Intro'

Before the album was released Steve was 'persuaded' to sign away all his rights as the composer in the USA, his choice was simple, sign or 'Intro' would be cut out. Despite his name being on the album as composer from the release date, he did not begin to get any royalties as the writer until 2011. The statute of rights only goes back seven years, so 38 years of income was lost. 


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.

Oregon coast webcam morning check in

I check these webcams waaaay to much. But this mornings were quite nice.

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.”

Today I learned: Strobes go boom.

Of course I have a ton of photo gear laying around the studio but I never knew the strobes could blow up. Yikes. Here is a thing from Strobist to help avoid that.

Have a flash that's been sitting, unused, for a long time? Or did you buy a used flash with an unknown history? Turn it on the wrong way and you may be in for a bit of a surprise.

Example: Paul Buff Flashes

1. Dial the power control slider all the way down before turning the flash on. If the flash is a powerful model such as a WLX1600 or WLX3200 (with capacitor switching) make sure the quarter-power switch is not engaged. (You want all of the caps to be involved in the process, and they are not so at the quarter-power setting.)

2. Turn the flash on.

3. Pop the flash for 5-10 shots at the lowest-power setting. (If you can trigger the flash remotely, that probably would not be a bad idea.) This process will partially cycle the capacitor while giving it time to reform the thin, insulating oxide layer that it needs to work properly.

4. Raise the power level one stop and repeat step #4, slowly working your way up to full power. This will help to avoid the possible "thermal runaway" vicious cycle described above and will in many cases safely rejuvenate (or "re-form") a capacitor that may have deteriorated over time.

Why Are Alaska’s Rivers Turning Orange?

The thaw of permafrost soil under a wetland allows bacteria to start reducing that oxidized iron, Cooper thinks. And reduced iron, unlike oxidized iron, is soluble in water. If it's carried by groundwater out into an oxygenated stream, it can once again be oxidized. When that happens, it will fall out of the water as “rust” and turn the stream orange. While digging trenches on marshy ground near Timber Creek this past August, Cooper and Dial found water as deep as 1.5 meters under the once frozen soil, as well as dirt the gray color of reduced iron. New groundwater flows have developed in the thawing earth, Cooper said, and they have “really awakened a lot of these geochemical processes that have been basically stalled out for 5,000 years because the ground's been frozen.”

We stumbled on another burn among the raking willow shrubs as we descended toward the creek, and the trickle from the lumpy black crust there was strongly acidic, too. Below the black spots, an orange slime covered the rocks of the Anaktok, rubbing off on the hands of Alexander Lee, an Alaska Pacific University philosophy professor who was helping to sample fish and invertebrates. A small stream coming down from the hills had a highly acidic pH of 3.5. “Wow, this is crazy,” Dial said.

New Work in the Wild! Nike SB Ishod Wair

Some stuff we worked on with the nice people at Big Giant just went live on Nike SB.

Photography by Jerry Buttles.

Pretty fun being a crusty old skater myself. Sweepers and laybacks, like everyone else my age ya know?

Pretty cool custom couch. Was asked to keep it very film-like. So a lot of little subtle tweaks going on.

Any of you Portland people out there, try to stay warm and stay off that ice… yeeesh…

Why Is Everything So Ugly?

Interesting read on Greige and the blandification of everything. Another interesting piece I read, that I will try to dig up, is about how any “authentic” space, like a coffee shop, wine bar or straight up bar bar, has all been smeared into the same styled spaces because of social media. Once on barista posts their new paint, every other barista on instagram does the same shit. I’ll look for it. Anyways, some takeaways from this piece.

“Our new neighbor is a classic 5-over-1: retail on the ground floor, topped with several stories of apartments one wouldn’t want to be able to afford.

...

Attempts have been made to classify structures like this one and the ethos behind their appearance: SimCityist, McCentury Modern, fast-casual architecture. We prefer cardboard modernism, in part because The Josh looks like it might turn to pulp at the first sign of a hundred-year flood.

...

In 2020, a study by London’s Science Museum Group’s Digital Lab used image processing to analyze photographs of consumer objects manufactured between 1800 and the present. They found that things have become less colorful over time, converging on a spectrum between steel and charcoal, as though consumers want their gadgets to resemble the raw materials of the industries that produce them. If The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit once offered a warning about conformity, he is now an inspiration, although the outfit has gotten an upgrade. Today he is The Man in the Gray Bonobos, or The Man in the Gray Buck Mason Crew Neck, or The Man in the Gray Mack Weldon Sweatpants — all delivered via gray Amazon van. The imagined color of life under communism, gray has revealed itself to be the actual hue of globalized capital. “The distinct national colors of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow,” wrote Hardt and Negri. What color does a blended rainbow produce? Greige, evidently.”