The World Central Kitchen Cookbook by José Andrés was just announced as a finalist for a James Beard Award. WCK resumed their work in Gaza yesterday, serving 200,000 meals to displaced Palestinians.
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Bubblegum Aliens
These bubblegum sculptures created and photographed by artist Suzanne Saroff are delightfully disgusting.
I found this via Grace Ebert at Colossal, who writes:
Conjuring memories of childhood competitions and absent-minded chomping, the photos zoom in on chewed wads of pink, blue, and green that appear almost corporeal, their pudgy folds and pockets evoking the beauty and repulsion of the human body.
I love these but grrrrossssss. (And I don’t know why, but these remind me of Roe Ethridge’s photo of Andrew W.K.)
Great piece on the existential threat faced by TV & film writers. It’s a familiar story: low interest rates, private equity, execs squeezing workers. “The general sense is that you’re an absolutely fungible widget… It is fucking broken.”
“What they are afraid of grows even as they starve it, which is why these people, with all their power, are always so insecure. They know how bad it would be for them to be seen clearly; they are fucking terrified of being treated as they treat others.”
PLEASE STOP EMAILING US HARRIET. The internet is still good, people are still good.
Love this: a grid-based CSS solution for displaying sheet music (staffs, notes, clefs, time signatures, etc.)
Electronic Plastic
Oh wow, this takes me right back to my childhood: Electronic Plastic, a museum of portable, old-school electronic toys. We didn’t have a gaming system in my house growing up — I had to settle going over to my friend Steve’s house for Atari 2600 and my big city cousins’ Intellivision — but we did have a couple of these handheld games. Specifically: Baseball (upper right), Football 2 (lower left), and Q*bert (lower right). The football game was my favorite. I played it for hours and hours — so many touchdowns. (And look at these Soviet handhelds!)
Friends at school had other games: I particularly remember the watches, some of the mini arcade cabinets from Coleco, and these pre-Game Boy Nintendo handhelds. The teachers hated them…I think they probably got banned at some point.
I know that my dad still has these games stashed somewhere in the house I grew up in…I’d love to play Football 2 again. 🤖🏈 (via present and correct)
Gen X and millennials who have been posting selfies on social media for more than a decade are “watching [their] identities shift in real time in a way no previous generation has experienced en masse”.
Artist Alex Tomlinson wonders, “What if owls had flags?”
Amazon has renewed Fallout for a second season. I’ve been watching this with my son and we’ve been enjoying it so far.
Mike Masnick shares how he uses AI to help write Techdirt. “No, it’s not to write articles. It’s basically to help me brainstorm, critique my articles, and make suggestions on how to improve them.”
Art Celebrity Doppelgängers
Whenever Beauford Delaney’s Portrait of Howard Swanson (1967) pops up in MoMA’s New Tab extension in Chrome, I’m like, “Jerry Seinfeld?!”
There are a number of celebrities who have art doppelgängers — the Robert De Niro and John Krasinski ones are particularly good. Have you noticed any of these?
A lovely profile of Daniel Radcliffe. “If there’s a sweet spot to be found between deeply fucking weird and strange and almost unsettling, and kind of wholesome and earnest and very sincere, then that’s the stuff I really love doing.”
The JWST recently captured the Horsehead Nebula in “unprecedented detail”.
The AP is reporting that the DEA will reclassify marijuana as a Schedule III drug in a “historic shift”.
AI Image Feedback Loop
Data artist Robert Hodgin recently created a feedback loop between Midjourney and ChatGPT-4 — he prompted MJ to create an image of an old man in a messy room wearing a VR headset, asked ChatGPT to describe the image, then fed that description back into MJ to generate another image, and did that 10 times. Here was the first image:
And here’s one of the last images:
Recursive art like this has a long history — see Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room from 1969 — but Hodgin’s project also hints at the challenges facing AI companies seeking to keep their training data free of material created by AI. Ted Chiang has encouraged us to “think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web”:
It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a jpeg retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation. But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it’s usually acceptable. You’re still looking at a blurry jpeg, but the blurriness occurs in a way that doesn’t make the picture as a whole look less sharp.
And we already know what you get if you recursively save JPEGs…
See also La Demoiselle d’Instagram, I Am Sitting in a Room (with a video camera), Google Image Search Recursion, and Dueling Carls.
Super cool photos from this story about a nuclear-powered submarine. Interesting detail: “Day 31 is sometimes the lowest morale day while underway. App downloads expire: Spotify, Netflix, etc.”
I love watching these genetic algorithm thingies. “The program uses a simple genetic algorithm to evolve random two-wheeled shapes into cars over generations.”
Check In On Those Around You
This is a powerful public service announcement about mental health from Norwich City FC and Samaritans (note the content warning at the start of the video). That’s all I’m going to say about it — just watch it.
“It’s clear to me that sharing our shortcomings and weaknesses with each other is our greatest strength. Our salvation.” I was very moved by this By the Book interview with former NFL player Steve Gleason. His book is out today.
A live-action, 1950s version of The Simpsons, imagined by AI. From the same person who did 50s Futurama and Harry Potter by Balenciaga.
“Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America”
That’s the title of a poem by Matthew Olzmann. It begins:
Tell me what it’s like to live without
curiosity, without awe. To sail
on clear water, rolling your eyes
at the kelp reefs swaying
beneath you, ignoring the flicker
of mermaid scales in the mist,
looking at the world and feeling
only boredom.
You can read the rest at Tin House.
From Lacy M. Johnson in Orion Magazine, The Brutal Legacy of the Longleaf Pine:
The oldest longleaf pine tree in the world, I remember, is a nameless tree in Weymouth Woods in North Carolina. It is roughly 474 years old, taking root around the time Michelangelo took over construction of the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, fifty-nine years before European colonizers arrived at Jamestown. In 2016, when the tree turned 468, visitors to the North Carolina State Parks system held a “Party for the Pine.” They celebrated by hiking to the tree, cutting cake, singing it “Happy Birthday.”
Illustration above of a longleaf pine by Edith Zimmerman.
From 1994, a collection of segments from a screening of The Grinch hosted by Phil Hartman. Seuss’s widow drives a Cadillac with customized “GRINCH” license plates called the Grinchmobile!
With MovieCart, you can create Atari 2600 cartridges that will play full-length movies. “Joystick controls brightness, volume, and shuttle position. Console switches control b/w, ten second rewind and full rewind.”
Drawing Media, an Interview With Zaria Forman
Edith here. For the latest installment of my newish illustrated column, I interviewed my friend and neighbor, the artist and climate activist Zaria Forman. Zaria makes pastel drawings of ice, among other things, and her solo show “Fellsfjara, Iceland” is currently on exhibition at Winston Wächter gallery in New York until May 4. (I’ve rendered a miniature version of some of it right below these words, but definitely click here for the actual images.) Zaria is also on Instagram.
Zaria, have you read, watched, listened to, or otherwise experienced anything good recently?
Poor Things. It was so visually stimulating and imaginative — more than anything I’ve seen in a while.
Possibly more interesting: the ice storm a few weekends ago! I’d never seen an ice storm before moving to upstate New York, and although the storms are destructive, they’re so beautiful. It was the most spectacular one I’ve ever experienced.
Seen anything bad?
Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the new version. I thought it was poorly cast and just plain dumb. OR: All the mud, now that the ice has melted ;)
What’s something you’ve read or seen that changed your life?
Seeing glaciers and icebergs for the first time absolutely changed my life. But if we’re sticking to books, etc., one that changed my way of thinking was Love Between Equals: Relationship as a Spiritual Path, by Polly Young-Eisendrath.
She’s a psychologist and couples therapist, and the book just kind of reframed the idea of relationships in my mind — of how you relate to someone you’re in a long-term relationship with, and how you can grow with them. And how, like, love is.
She talks about radical acceptance, fully accepting someone for who they are, learning how to do the same for yourself, and then figuring out how all of that can work together.
Another one that changed my way of thinking was Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships, by Christopher Ryan and Calcida Jetha.
Does anything make you laugh online?
Memes on Instagram!
What’s a recent one?
I just forwarded you the last one I sent to [my husband] this morning.
Are there any cultural moments you currently think about unusually often? Like are you haunted by a moment from a TV show, or anything like that?
More “inspired” than “haunted,” but the artists Ray and Charles Eames made a 10-minute documentary in 1977 called “Powers of 10” that made a big impact on me. The Tang Teaching Museum in Saratoga Springs exhibited the film in a show during my years at Skidmore College, and it’s probably the one film I think about more than any other.
What’s it about?
It starts with a couple on a blanket having a picnic by a lake in Chicago. And then from one of their hands, the camera zooms back 10 meters. And then it continues zooming back by powers of ten. And so you see these squares get smaller and smaller, and it keeps going into the atmosphere, and the solar system, and it’s just mind-boggling how it keeps going.
And then it then zooms back down to the picnic and goes into their skin and all the way down to, like, a molecule inside the body. And it’s crazy to see the similarities between the two.
It’s on YouTube, if you want to watch — I highly recommend!
What were you really into when you were 12?
My So-Called Life, singing along to Alanis Morissette, and a boy named Ben.
Is there a book/movie/whatever you’d like to experience again for the first time?
Burning Man. There’s just no way to really know what it’s like until you’re there, in the middle of it. And when you know what to expect, it’s not as thrilling. But as a climate activist, it doesn’t feel right to continue attending over and over.
What’s a funny or weird way people have described your art?
As “finger painting.” It was a term used first (I think) in the Daily Mail, and then almost every writer used it to describe my work for several years. I wince at a line I say in my TedTalk: “I cringe when people call me a finger painter,” or something like that — my tone just sounds so snobby, I hate it — but I was attempting to detach my work from the term, and it did finally work. It pops up every now and then, but rarely.
Please tell me something silly that you love.
Naked Attraction, the dating show where people are naked.
Thanks, Zaria!
Zaria’s work can be found here. And past installments of Drawing Media can be found here.
Murdle: Volume 1, a book of “100 original murder mystery logic puzzles” from the creator of the daily mystery puzzle site of the same name. One reviewer: “a high-speed game of Clue that tortures your brain in the most enjoyable way”.
“I blame Facebook for January 6.” Aaron Sorkin is writing a sequel to The Social Network. “There’s supposed to be a constant tension at Facebook between growth and integrity. There isn’t. It’s just growth.”
We’re in the Golden Age of Mid TV
TV critic James Poniewozik writing for the NY Times:
Mid TV, on the other hand, almost can’t be bad for some of the same reasons that keep it from being great. It’s often an echo of the last generation of breakthrough TV (so the highs and lows of “Game of Thrones” are succeeded by the faithful adequacy of “House of the Dragon”). Or it’s made by professionals who know how to make TV too well, and therefore miss a prerequisite of making great art, which is training yourself to forget how the thing was ever done and thus coming up with your own way of doing it.
Mid is not a strict genre with a universal definition. But it’s what you get when you raise TV’s production values and lower its ambitions. It reminds you a little of something you once liked a lot. It substitutes great casting for great ideas. (You really liked the star in that other thing! You can’t believe they got Meryl Streep!)
Mid is based on a well-known book or movie or murder. Mid looks great on a big screen. (Though for some reason everything looks blue.) Mid was shot on location in multiple countries. Mid probably could have been a couple episodes shorter. Mid is fine, though. It’s good enough.
Above all, Mid is easy. It’s not dumb easy — it shows evidence that its writers have read books. But the story beats are familiar. Plot points and themes are repeated. You don’t have to immerse yourself single-mindedly the way you might have with, say, “The Wire.” It is prestige TV that you can fold laundry to.
Bullseye. Although I also agree with this caveat from Alan Sepinwall:
I’d only take issue with this excellent Poniewozik essay in the sense that not all Mid TV is created equal. Poker Face and Mr. & Mrs. Smith are great examples of the kinds of shows they want to be. I’d rather have those than all these wild swings by people who don’t understand how to make TV.
For me, the problem with Mid TV is differentiating it from actual good TV…finding shows that you actually don’t want to fold laundry to. I’ve gotten burned a few times on shows that I thought were going to be challenging & interesting — Constellation, 1899, and Mrs. Davis come to mind — but were just sort of aggressively fine (so much so that it turned me off).
Two more thoughts, from the comments section of Poniewozik’s piece. I love this re: specificity:
Shogun is by far the best show released this year, and it has an enormous amount to do with its *specificity* of artistic vision. All of the “mid” shows otherwise referenced here are trying to achieve too many things at once or appeal to too many demographics to have much of an impact. They are content, not art.
It’s a contradictory truth that if you want to create something that really connects with people (even a lot of people), you gotta make it specific or personal (or both). Shōgun is right at the top of my to-watch list (after I finish the five shows I’m stinge watching).
Writer of TV here. I won awards for an iconic HBO show. I can tell you that 95 percent of the blame here lies with the executives who are now so scared to lose their jobs that they just go right down the middle — to the mid, if you will. It’s easier to say yes to a show they have seen before than take a risk on something outside the box.
And yes, they are using AI to give us “notes”. I feel very lucky to have worked in this medium when it still rewarded real creativity.
Sounds about right.
How crappy federal legislation has encouraged US automakers to build & sell bigger cars, trucks, and SUVs, which are more dangerous and worse for the climate.
The Louvre wants to put the Mona Lisa in its own room to improve visitor experience. Here’s my suggestion: two rooms, 1 w/ the Mona Lisa (timed entry, no photos) and 1 w/ a fake (free-for-all, selfies, usies, etc.)
Lydia Polgreen: The Student-Led Protests Aren’t Perfect. That Doesn’t Mean They’re Not Right. “These young people seek a worthy cause: to end what may be the most brutal military operation for civilians in the 21st century.”
Yo-Yo Ma Performs Bach in Alaska for Earth Day
This is a nice thing to end the week on: Yo-Yo Ma playing “Bach’s Prélude from Suite No. 2, amidst the melting permafrost on Lower Tanana Dene lands in Fairbanks, Alaska.” He was brought to this birch forest by Princess Daazhraii Johnson, a member of the Neets’aii Gwich’in people, who wrote:
Our relationship to our birch relatives, our salmon relatives, and all the beings of Alaska are sacred. Our traditional stories tell us that at one point we all spoke the same language … we still do. If we find the time to truly listen, we might recognize ourselves in the melting permafrost or the fallen birch, but we might also recognize ourselves in the songs of the birds or the freshness of the Arctic breeze. There is still hope when we experience life. We should all fall in love with the places we live and let this love drive our determination to protect the waters, the salmon, the caribou, and all our plant relatives so that future generations may also experience such joy and sustenance.
Have a good weekend, everyone.
Yesss, Run Lola Run is returning to theaters for its 25th anniversary. A 4K digital restoration will start showing on June 7. I loved this movie — saw it in the theater when it came out but haven’t seen it in many years.
The first episode of the podcast featuring astrophysicist Katie Mack explaining the universe to John Green is up! It’s about the first two minutes of the universe. “We are not just made of stardust; we are also made of Big Bang stuff.”
Adam Roberts and his partner dined at Noma (aka “The Best Restaurant in the World”) and he was thwarted by some pre-meal queasiness & the challenging cuisine. “You don’t seem like yourself. You look haunted.”
The Man Who Killed Google Search, i.e. how “growth-hungry managerial types” from Google’s ad business chased out the old search team “to make Google worse to make the company more money”.
Watch Chuck Jones Draw Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig
This is great: a 25-minute interview with legendary animator Chuck Jones as he sits and draws some of his iconic characters (Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck). He told this anecdote about how Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were both influenced by a particular space-themed cartoon of his:
Porky was just a kind of a little third-string Boy Scout and was not very interesting to me. And then when I put him in a picture called Duck Dodgers in the 24th and a Half Century. Spielberg used that picture in Close Encounters the Third Kind - when his kids were watching television in the picture, they were watching Duck Dodgers in the 24th and a Half Century. And Lucas told me that he saw that picture when he was 12 years old and when when he opened Star Wars in San Francisco he told them they couldn’t have Star Wars in San Francisco unless they ran Duck Dodgers in the 24th and a Half Century.
Christopher Slayton built a bunch of iconic cosmic structures in Minecraft, including the Sun, the Pillars of Creation, galaxies, a supermassive black hole, and galaxies.
An experimental data sonification of what a “decentralized, digitized, decarbonized electricity grid” would sound like. “Should we be dramatic, Hans-Zimmer-style ‘bahhhhhhhhnnnnn’ sounds? Or more ambient?”
Sounds like The Onion has been rescued from an agonizing death by private equity by an acquisition by people who actually care about it. “The Onion is just an institution. It should be preserved and it should be great.”
Just a Beautiful Drawing of Bluebells
…By the artist Skevoulla Gordon. (Prints are available, too, and she’s a good follow on Instagram!)
Life-Ruining Mistakes?
The other day, the novelist Robin Sloan mentioned in his newsletter that he really liked the Financial Times. It seems everyone’s talking up the Financial Times lately, so I went and followed them on Instagram.
The first post in their feed was for an essay by Janan Ganesh, about how although the American self-help industry makes it seems like most mistakes can be salvaged, many are in fact unsalvageable and life-destroying. An excerpt:
The surprise of middle age, and the terror of it, is how much of a person’s fate can boil down to one misjudgement.
Such as? What in particular should the young know? If you marry badly — or marry at all, when it isn’t for you — don’t assume the damage is recoverable. If you make the wrong career choice, and realise it as early as age 30, don’t count on a way back. … A big [mistake], or just an early one, can foreclose all hope of the life you wanted.
At first I found it oddly cheering (if I can’t fix my mistakes, I might as well relax and accept my circumstances), but then I found it sad. (Does my husband feel like he made a life-destroying mistake by marrying me? LMAO.) Now I’m more like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ because things can only ever go the way they go. Anyway, I’m not yet a FT subscriber, but it was a nudge.
The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed
Here is a pleasantly painful trailer for a new movie from the filmmaker Joanna Arnow. It opens this Friday, April 26, at IFC and Lincoln Center in NYC. I don’t know if I’m going to watch it, but I couldn’t really look away.
Arnow also stars as…
an emotionally detached young Brooklynite drifting through unremarkable days and nights. Neither her on-again-off-again BDSM relationship with a mildly disinterested older dom, nor her nondescript corporate job, appear to bring her any satisfaction.
And yet “she finds a core of poignant truth about the ways people search for … emotional happiness and sexual gratification” (per the Lincoln Center summary). It’s currently at a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, FWIW. (This bit also made me laugh out loud.)
Size XXXS, Miniature Sweaters
Oh my gosh — this video about making the teeny-tiny sweaters seen in the movie Coraline! Says artist Althea Crome:
I think knitters are often fascinated by the fact that I use such tiny needles. Some of the needles are almost the dimension of a human hair.
Sublimely absurd, perfection. More info in Reactor. [Thanks, Tobias!]
And here’s another pic, grabbed from Crome’s website:
I don’t know about you, but this makes me want to drop everything and disappear into the process of knitting a microscopic sweater for the next six months. Like her Starry Night one.
Actually, the Starry Night sweater should just be its whole own post:
“I love the paradox of creating an object that takes the form of something you can wear,” Crome writes, “yet is impossible to wear.”
(Her work is also for sale.)
“I have no training for this work. I got the job by bringing in my posters to be framed … and asking the frame shop guy—my boss—if he needed an assistant.” I loved this essay about working in a frame shop (and beyond). “My life has gone off the map, it seems.”
Diary Comics, Dec. 15 & 16
Hello! Here are a few more journal comics from last December, these are a bit cheerier than the ones from last week.
A Huge Collaborative Flipbook Animation
I love this: The Pudding ran an online experiment where they started with a shape (like a straight line or circle) and asked people to trace, as best they could, the tracing of the person before them. This resulted in a series of “flipbook” animation of how the shapes evolved over time — invariably, a squiggle.
One thing I noticed right away was how all the squiggles ended up squished over on the right side of the screen. The Pudding team had a theory on why that happened (the 3:20 mark in this video):
I found this study from like 35 years ago - they were trying to figure out why people kept missing their targets on touch screens. They found people tended to touch below their target and people tended to touch closer to the edges of the screen. And so I figure if it’s like right-handers who are missing, you’re going to be missing to the right. We probably had about half the users on mobile and 90% of the those half are probably going to be right-handed so it would make sense that it would gradually go to the right.
Go read the rest of the post — they also did an experiment about people’s inclination to draw penises on “any free-form drawing project on the internet”. (via waxy)
Kelly Hayes: the double standards of conservatism (i.e. “there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind…”) are about hierarchy (or caste, if you will). “They are outlining the world they want, including who should be victimized at will.”
The Biden administration is imposing new regulations on coal burning power plants. “Taken together, the regulations could deliver a death blow in the United States to coal, the fuel that…has caused global environmental damage.”
What Bird Is That?
As someone who is interested in birds but doesn’t know a whole lot about them, this new animated video series from Will Rose is right up my alley. What Bird Is That? is a beginners guide to birding. The second episode, embedded above, is all about how to identify birds from their calls.
What’s that bird that sounds like Star Wars singing on my roof? What bird sings it’s own name? What’s that laughing sound you heard in the woods?
Right now, I “cheat” by using Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird app, which allows you to record a bit of birdsong and it’ll ID the bird for you. (via the kid should see this)
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