10/1/2022 #83
Here & Now (awesome pinays), Art & Events, Anders Sandberg, Chloe Zhao, Uncle Jack, Dave Beer and Geoff Dyer, medieval tritone, Herndon + (AI), and Prince.
HERE & NOW
I spent the afternoon having lunch and talk with an awesome group of pinays, all creatives and scholars, including Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Jenifer Wofford, Karen Meece, Christina Ayson Planck, Kat Cruz Guttierez, and Trisha Lagaso Goldberg. We talked about families, migration stories, neighborhoods, and the incidents and pressures that shaped our circumstances and journeys.
Afterwards, I spent some time in a nearby artists’ supply store, where I indulged my obsession with art supplies.
Tomorrow, I prepare myself for a rather intense period of editing and copyediting work for the remainder of this year and the first half of 2023. After that, perhaps a “sabbatical”?
Author and activist Tony Robles will be featured next Saturday, Sept. 8, answering the SIX QUESTIONS!
ART & EVENTS
I’m seriously into my book making (which is also a learning process). My focus so far is entirely on making accordion-fold artist books. I have no interest in creating fancy bindings or stitchings, pockets, winged or tea bag pages (yes, there are “teabag” books). There’s something about the visual narrative potential of the simple accordion-fold structure that is pulling me in this direction. Yet, I don’t know where this is going. That’s fine—it’ll be interesting to see what happens.
I’ve been daguerreotyped (along with a few other folks who have some connection to Salinas Chinatown). This gives me the odd—even unsettling—feeling of looking at the “ghost” of myself through the eyes of history, with the “ghosts” of the manongs in the same image, behind me (I was standing in front of a life-size photograph of them). Thanks to a grant from the Walter & Elise Haas Foundation, daguerreotype artist Binh Danh has been working with Visual & Public Art (CSUMB) to mount an exhibit focusing on Salinas Chinatown’s past, present, and future. Come to the opening on October 6. Details below:
If you’re in the Monterey area, stop by the Carl Cherry Center for the Arts on Oct. 15th and 16th during Arts Habitat’s 2022 Artists Studio Tour. I’ll have some art up on the walls, and a few artist books and handmade blank sketchbooks for sale on the table. Stop by and say hello!
LINKS
“AI Generated Art and the Future of Artists,” an article by Anders Sandberg.
Recent Marvel film aside, this video (CinemaStix) takes a look at film director Chloe Zhao’s practice of casting non-actors in her award-winning films:
Uncle Jack Charles on pottery, prison, and pride (video):
Some thoughts on “writing gaps” from Dave Beer’s newsletter, The Fragment. He also links to an interesting video interview with nonfiction writer Geoff Dyer (his book Zona, on Andre Tarkovsky’s film, Stalker, is on my bookshelf):
SOUNDINGS
The devil is in the music. Adam Neely on the great myth of the medieval tritone ban:
Holly Herndon + and what she calls “identity play” (with AI). I’m trying to approach this with an open mind, but it does creep me out, a little.
Related article in the UK Guardian: “Holly Herndon: The musician who birthed an AI baby.”
I miss Prince, although I never had the chance to hear him in a live concert. There are a handful of videos from the Webster Hall concert on Youtube; his joy in performing and interacting with the audience (and their joy in him) is apparent. Here he is, live, at Webster Hall in 2004, performing “Cream”:
May your Sunday be whatever you need it to be . . .