Howdy and happy holidays! - Dec. 2023
Hello lovely people of the planet!
Ok and so several of you have asked recently to resend our list of favorite holiday and winter movies and so there’s that but this list doesn’t include some new favorites we’ve discovered since publishing like “Klaus (on Netflix)” or our recent favorite as of last night “The Man Who Invented Christmas (available here and there).” Oh and I need to clarify that Jennifer does not approve of all of these movies so don’t blame her if you watch the slant retelling of a Christmas Carol but instead of ghosts they smoke the weed of Christmas present, past, and future, in the buddy film called, “The Night Before (here and there)” that includes the expected grand gesture with Miley Cyrus singing “Wrecking Ball.” So it goes.
We’ve found some great winter and holiday music that we’re listening to on repeat this season. The titles link to these albums on Amazon Music so if you have an account, you can listen there. I don’t think these are affiliate links so I don’t think I legally have to disclose that I’m not paid by Amazon or getting $0.0002 by sharing. Ugh. So, these things continue to inspire me leading up to winter solstice:
“Neve” by Georg Buljo and Nils Økland — “Neve” means snow in the Sami language (among their words for snow), the people native to Greenland and Northern Scandinavia). Blujo sings in the yoik tradition and Økland (from Western Norway) plays Hardinger fiddle which is a violin with a second set of strings under the played strings which create a lovely ethereal sound. My dad and I were introduced to Økland’s music on a road trip through Belgium a few years ago. Very meditative/contemplative album.
“Glimmer” by Nils Økland and Sigbjørn Apeland — Økland on fiddle and Apeland on some kind of wind organ. Another quiet and contemplative album that I find very satisfying this time of year.
“Christmas: A cappella carols and hymns” by Owain Park and performed by the Gesualdo Six. You’ll likely recognize many of the tunes on this album and the arrangements by Park, along with both the performance of the vocalists and recording engineers, bring these familiar tunes to life in surprising ways to my ears.
Where have I been?
I know, I know…I promised back in the summer to write to you more often at the same time I was unsubscribing from more and more email lists that (trigger warning ML) frankly keep my inbox at above 710 unread messages for several months now—not yours of course because emails from actual people actually mean something to me and I read those more or less immediately so thanks for those. No really, thanks for the emails friends.
Very quickly—I had an incredibly difficult year professionally and ineluctably left the day job at the university in early November for all kinds of reasons. Mostly because I have allowed my work as a creative professional (writer, photographer, video producer,...) to become a shadow career, a stand in for my desire to create art for myself. So I’m taking a moment and writing through my expectations and issues so that I can take on work again soon as a professional and not as a frustrated artist.
Yes, that’s why my personal website is a wreck at the moment and why I started the other one which I’m going to kill soon and go back to one website because...ok, well, one website and the Oliver Bicycle Works website.
Oliver Bicycle Works
Oliver Bicycle Works is an online art gallery where I post photography, prints, and stories I’ve created around my love of bicycles and riding a bike. Essentially, an art project that generates a little revenue. If you’re looking for a gift for a cyclist, I humbly ask that you consider checking out what’s going on at www.oliverbicycleworks.com to see if there’s a fit. We have new designs and remixes of some favorites like the simple elegance collection which started as a photograph of the front wheel of the All-City Big Block track bike.
Delivery Deadline—sorry…
So you know, we do have a Dec. 10 deadline to print and deliver before Christmas (yeah, I know. I should have sent this sooner but, and so working on the artist part of things right now).
OBW and AI-generated Images
I recently started exploring/experimenting with the paid version of OpenAI’s DALL-E image generator to see what kinds of artworks it could generate that I couldn’t. And there’s the problem. Can a robot generate art? Is it art if it’s not made by humans? What if that human spent hours and hours refining prompts to feed an AI to produce a desired image? How does using AI to generate images differ from using a camera to generate images?
Ugh! I don’t know! Is AI art as ineluctable as quitting a day job where I was miserable? Is it ok for me since I’m not a visual artist? I don’t know. No. Maybe? What’s fascinating is how AI clearly can not create functional images. As humans have experienced seeing and riding bicycles so any of us could produce primitive images of bicycles that at least look like a bicycle that works. Ok, you can tell from my sketches that I’m trying but maybe not creating plans someone could use to build a bicycle. For a computer that has no experience of its own, a bicycle is clearly a difficult “object” to conceive. This feels right.
So what if a human generates AI images and writes short poems or stories about these—what if a human looks for the story in an image? That feels a little more human to me. Then is the image just scaffolding for the writer? Or part of an artwork that couldn’t have happened otherwise?
Here’s where this exploration is headed. I’m working on a book that will likely include these ideas so I would sincerely love to hear your thoughts. On the left we have “Elsa and her Green Hat” and Charles in “Lunchtime in San Francisco” on the right. You can click the images to read the short stories that correspond to these images.
Elsa and Her Green Hat
Lunchtime in San Francisco
Otherwise
I would love to write more often. Maybe in the new year we can feel it out together? Maybe I’ll try for once a month, something like this? Some have asked about the unedited podcast from the bicycle too—I’d love to find ways to exploit this format…that has less of me in it.
Happy holidays lovely people.