Shop talk at work goes âround and âround; it is an attractive veneer laid over the work experience.
Talk about music is common, the Olson twins who work with me have wide tastes (excepting that Don is allergic to Country) and that helps the day go by a little easier. Eventually, the Shaggs came up in conversation.
They were a group of girls from Fremont, New Hampshire, who recorded an album of original songs unlike anything made before or since. The complete story is here. My co-workersâ minds were suitably blown by the girlsâ unique musical vision. The thing that keeps me intrigued is the philosophy (implied and overtly stated) that comes through:
It doesnât matter what you do It doesnât matter what you say There will always be one who wants things the opposite way We do our best, we try to please But weâre like the rest we're never at ease You can never please Anybody In this world
-Philosophy Of the World, by Dorothy Wiggins
With titles such as: What Should I Do? Things I Wonder Why Do I Feel? Who are parents? -and, the ultimate Shaggs song::
The Shaggs gave an honest inside view of the world from an adolescent perspective, free of pretense, influence or accepted musical conventions.
âWhich animal would you like to see the most?â
âThat would be you, Kim.â
The Weaver and I had an invite to get a behind-the-scenes tour of the Honolulu Zoo, a dear friend of mine is a zookeeper. Upon hearing my corny remark, she did a little double-take, and then flashed that laughing smile for an instant, that smile I remembered so well from the days we worked together. We went with her and met a pair of friendly elephants, the worldâs fourth oldest hippopotamus, a trio of frisky giraffes and a pair of curious zebras. All the animals (except the cranky hippo) seemed to love her. Then she called out âKrueger, Krueger, come here boy⌠â A 5000 pound white rhinoceros came trotting up, like an obedient dog. She stroked his snout, talked softly to him, and fed apples into his soft, gaping maw. I fed him too, his wary brown eye giving me a once over before accepting my offerings. (Please note: we had a MASSIVE steel fence separating us.)
A rhino is a dangerous wild animal, with a reputation of having a bad temper. But this one had a gentler side, an obvious intelligence, and a friend named Kim.
I recently watched the 2023 cinematic blockbuster Oppenheimer, a three-hour montage of set- pieces based on the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer. I thought it was pretty good, in the sense that it held my attention for three hours.
Its flitting back and forth between multiple time-frames might have been a bit much. I thought it could have been more effective as a mini-series with only occasional flashbacks but then it would have been over 12 hours long!
One scene that did catch my eye, however, was when Oppenheimer gave a speech to the scientists who had developed the bomb (after its successful test.) It was in a hall and it was not a movie set: it was the actual main building of the Los Alamos Ranch School. I had been there ten years ago as seen captured in my stylized rendition above. Oppenheimer wasnât the only person of note whose presence graced this space, the writers Gore Vidal and William S. Burroughs were there before the warâas students!
Historians believe the original San Ildefonso people abandoned their
original villages at Mesa Verde and Bandelier due to drastic changes in
the environment⌠Today, the Pueblo is a flourishing art community with about 1,500
residents. It was the home of the late Maria Martinez, who along with
her husband, Julian, developed the world-renowned, black-on-black
pottery with black matte designs. Artisansâ homes throughout the Pueblo
are open to the public for shopping. With an average of 20,000 visitors
each year, San Ildefonso is one of the most visited Pueblos in the
state. Permits for non-commercial photography, sketching and recording are availableâŚ
~ San Ildefonso website
When we were in Santa Fe recently, we stopped and spoke with one of the artists selling pottery across from the plaza in the city center. He was from the San Ildefonso pueblo, where we had visited on our first trip here, ten years ago:
The Weaver mentioned that she had bought some pottery there, but couldnât remember the name. I remembered: âIt was Elvis.â
The potter laughed and said âEverybody remembers the name Elvis.â
After returning from a less than productive Spring Break, I said to myself, âComica baby, you are a confident, capable woman. You can take anything any male throws at you.â I am invincible, a superhero. Wonder Woman ainât got nuttinâ on me! The first official day of Spring further initiated this belief because the day was mine, the birds were delightfully chipper (as were my professors), and everything was just hunky dory.
Then later on, I began to falter. First, I fell out of my roommateâs bed. Nothing too unusual about that. Clumsy has always been my first, middle, and last name, so thatâs nothing to sneeze at. But when I suggested a night out at the Village CafĂŠ to exert my newfound glorious feminine superpowers to Lil Lindy (a.k.a. Nikki), everything fell short of perfect.
There is a delightfully attractive male waiter that works there, and he always dishes out free coffee to my roomie, Lil Lindy, and myself. Thereâs nothing wrong with that. Perhaps it was when his coworker caught me snapping a picture of him with my new cell phone that everything went haywire. Soon, my hot coffee decided to plunge into my lap, and I explained to the James Bond of waiters that I âhad an accident.â Not so suave, Comica. He caught me staring at his curly locks many, many times as well. I attempted the old college try, but when youâre a giddy five year old trapped in a college student body, the romantic sparks just donât occur the way you want them to.
I think it's time to hide under my bed until itâs time to retire.
Regular readers of FITK (is there such an animal?) will have noted a plague spate of âmusic videosâ here in the last several months.
I used the program Suno to generate songs from poems and stories that have been published here over the last 20 years. This is an ongoing experiment. As my dealings with Chat GPT and other online AI services have been generally awful, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the music generated by Suno. Supply a lyric and a genre, press the âcreateâ button and ten seconds later you have two fully rendered songs. There were many failures of courseâonly about 5% of all attempts I would deem successfulâalthough a couple did work the first time. I used Suno V3.5 for most of these; they have a newer version (V4) that is actually worse!
Before I go into the making of the songs, I would like to talk about AI: its definitions, its problems, its promises.
In its simplest form, a series of suggestions (prompts) is inputted to a program. I have experimented with AI image creation for a couple of years and found it to be useful, not necessarily to create great art, but to create illustrations that are simplified abstractions of concepts that actually work better to support a post or essay. The image adds a dimension to but remains subservient of the intent of the piece. An extremely arresting image is sometimes just too much and usurps the intent of the post. In one of the music videos I created AI-generated images to represent people. It would be difficult, and expensive to use real people as models. This use of AI is a real threat to commercial artists and photographers and has already devastated that industry. For my use Iâm not making glossy magazine articles for mass media fareâthis is a blog with about thirty readers MAX. Many of my photographic illustrations here have been AI augmented, not in the sense of creating false content, but for subtle enhancement of the photographic process. I use Topaz Photo AI⢠to reduce noise, sharpen, and otherwise enhance the image quality, especially of highly-cropped images from my small-sensor camera (Pentax Q-7, before and after):
Similar results can be obtained with the newer versions of Adobe Photoshopâ˘, although that program goes a step further in that you can prompt it to alter your existing images or even create new images from scratch using image elements that have been sampled (i.e., stolen) from other Photoshop users! The whole concept of original photography is threatened by this but, unless intended to deceive, it doesn't bother me greatly. The creatorâs personal integrity is on the line, not the validity of the image.
Language-based AI efforts (LLMs) create a similar quandary. Many of YouTube's videos are already written from AI content, usually bland, often over-simplified, and disingenuous. Suno can generate lyrics from your prompts, and this can work well with free-form styles. Proper lyrical content produces better results as the better the poetry that goes in, the better the song that comes out, sometimes the results are astonishing. âMassaging the metersââmaking small changes to the linesâcan improve the songs, but that is not-AI, it is what human songwriters have done for centuries. Another way to make effective lyrics is to input straight prose, the results are somewhat flakier, but the right match of material and genre can also be remarkable. This use of AI is, to my mind at least, new and exciting, holding great promise. It is not the malicious copying of existing artists and their songs.
This post marks the end of my experiments in AI music for a while. While I have been pleased with my results overall, there is a definite limit as to how much I can take, much less impose on my readers/listeners. If all of the songs I made with Suno were to be put on a traditional LP or CD I would have 5 full-length albums of this stuff! Iâve already done an album of love songs; there may be more in the future.
In a related development, my other website, Laxness in Translation has been linked to by ChatGPTâIâm now the source material of an AI program!
After nine trips to Iceland over 24 years I felt that I had begun reaching a point of diminishing returns.
No hard feelings, Iceland, but I had spent a third of my life obsessing over that rock in the North Atlantic. It was time for a change, and it worked. Iâve mostly stopped ruminatiing on things Icelandic with one notable exception: Dinner at Ăx, a Michelin star restaurant located behind a bookcase in an underground speakeasy at 55 Laugavegur. I've been pretty consistent in my resolution to refrain from posting about Iceland this year and although this restaurant is located in ReykjavĂk, it really exists in its own little world of seventeen patrons and eight staff all around a U-shaped bar in a room with modest decor reminiscent of a country kitchen.
On a foodie level, it's impossible to fault any of the 20+ items I enjoyed over the four hour experience. Iâve had a few other small plates that were more intense (at Dill, another Michelin Star restaurant in ReykjavĂk), but never have I been wowed with such a long string of dishes. The wine pairings were also excellent (although the cocktails were a bit much for my delicate constitution.)
The thing that put it over the top was the interaction with the four main chefs, their two helpers, the sommelier, and the bartender. More than just dinner, it was a fully-realized stage-play. Obviously, at 66000ISK (about $460 USD) the patrons really wanted to be there; they too became part of the production. I was the oldest person there (by at least twenty years) but felt welcome and not the least bit invisible (as is common when I go out in public.) After the meal was over I had to leave (to catch a concert) forgoing yet another round of drinks. One of the chefs (at the left in the above picture) saw me out and was interested in my reaction.
I wrote about this at length last year, but the memory of that night persists in my reveries.
The cobwebbed Flippist records studio was in use again this past weekend.
A certain young Mr. Frankie Lee (progeny of my late friend Frankie Paradise) came over to record some demos. In the same basement that his father used 20 years ago, he laid down some nice, home-grown tunes in a Dylan-country-folk vein. Of course, to hear the new generation take up the musical quest is bittersweet for me. The successes and failures we (the band members) experienced before Mr. Lee was born are distant now, but still capable of evoking strong feelings. Mr. Lee has to deal with those kind of issues now, and is off to a good (good meaning rocky, bumpy and confusedâit can be much worse) start, with a dozen meaningful, fine songs (even the grammar in them is proper!)
We led parallel lives, Mr. Leeâs father and me. Went to the same school, were in the same band for years, had similar interests, had kids of the same age who played together. But the years always change things. He couldnât make his family work. I was lucky (or maybe Iâm just dumb enough not to wreck everything) and kept mine. Mr. Leeâs father has been gone for nearly a decade now, dead in a motorcycle crash.
As the young Mr. Lee left today, he spoke of getting a motorcycle.
