Eno, 1995:
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8bit — all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.
It’s the sound of failure: so much of modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
The absolute definition of being “in the pocket” is Al McKay’s rhythm guitar on “That’s the Way of the World.”
Feel free to play Guess the Location of this old photo (taken by me) if you want.
The love of humanity is a thing supposed to be professed only by vulgar and officious philanthropists, or by saints of a superhuman detachment and universality. As a matter of fact, love of humanity is the commonest and most natural of the feelings of a fresh nature, and almost every one has felt it alight capriciously upon him when looking at a crowded park or a room full of dancers. The love of those whom we do not know is quite as eternal a sentiment as the love of those whom we do know. In our friends the richness of life is proved to us by what we have gained; in the faces in the street the richness of life is proved to us by the hint of what we have lost. And this feeling for strange faces and strange lives, when it is felt keenly by a young man, almost always expresses itself in a desire after a kind of vagabond beneficence, a desire to go through the world scattering goodness like a capricious god.
— Chesterton, from Robert Browning (1903)
I’ve said most of what I have to say about machine learning, and there are plenty of other people doing the heavy lifting on that topic. Mike Sacasas had a typically wise and incisive post the other day, and The New Atlantis is hosting a council on AI ethics. I’d prefer to make this site a cabinet of curiosities. And when I do comment on AI it will be in the form of haiku, or, as I prefer to style the word, haiku.
Marcin Wichary is absolutely correct: Paste And Match Style solves one problem while creating others.
Austria v. Australia! HItler’s birthplace v. the country where he currently lives in peaceful retirement. ⚽️
Finished reading: Turner and Constable: Art, Life, Landscape by Nicola Moorby. A wonderful book, especially fine on how each painter was moved by rivers: Turner the great Thames, Constable the humble Stour. Now I’m desperate to get back to London to see their paintings again with fresh eyes. 📚
And here is another short film, shot two years later, featuring Dorothy L. Sayers and the cast of her wonderful play The Zeal of Thy House — take a look at the wings on those angels. (At the end there is footage from her far less successful play The Devil to Pay.) I don’t know that there is any other film of Sayers and Eliot from that era.
