Sloth, Maybe?

  When you work in the complaint office of the police department, you become wise to the many methods of identity theft. Many complainants came in with stories of receiving phone calls from dodgy characters claiming to be the FBI.   These hucksters often say that they owe money to the government and if they don’t pay the outstanding amount by MoneyGram or another means of renumeration, they will be arrested. They often go after older people.   People who aren’t well versed in the most recent forms of telephone robocalls.   Younger folk fall for scams on the internet:   Surprise gifts of the latest entertainment console. Students coming into the big city who reach out for apartment space to rent through sketchy sites like Craigslist are often given tours of a building and shown an apartment - only to find out later that they were given the wrong keys.   Or they get a virtual tour of an apartment allegedly at a certain building with convenient subway and bus ...

  A pal of mine, let's call him Ollie T, knows of my fascination with Sumerian mythology and my previous employment with a renowned law enforcement department.  On a whim, he made the following inquiry with Chat GPT: OLLIE T. My query to ChatGPT: How is working for the NYPD similar to being a writer of ancient Sumerian mythology? CHAT GPT   Working for the NYPD and being a writer of ancient Sumerian mythology are very different activities, and it may be challenging to find many similarities between the two. However, here are a few possible comparisons: Both involve storytelling: Working for the NYPD often involves communicating important information through written reports and other forms of documentation, while writing ancient Sumerian mythology involves creating stories that were passed down through oral tradition. Both activities involve the use of language and storytelling to convey meaning and information. Both involve conveying a sense of order: Working for the NYPD...

It is odd that, after years of training as an artist and a painter, I find more satifaction out of creating art by feeding some keywords into an AI art program called MidJourney.  I was rewarded with fantastic images like the one you see above. Sometimes I feel like a cheat and a fraud.  Other times, I feel nothing but love for the compostition I created with nothing more than "punch card" information. Do I think AI will surpass the artists who draw on millennia of history and years of experience?  No, I do not.  Will art such as the one I "composed" above appear in a gallery or a museum?  The scales tip towards "doubtful." I love this work just the same. - JJB  

  On Sunday, February 26th, my wife indulged my fondest wish for the beginning of the moviegoing year.   We went to see the much ballyhooed Cocaine Bear . Now I have seen two films this year prior to Cocaine Bear.   There was the three hour epic Avatar: The Way of Water .   I went into the theater for that film with great trepidation.   I had had my fill of three hour epics since Avengers: End Game and wanted no more of it.   However, I had been surprised by how well James Cameron mapped out the flora, fauna, astronomy, and culture of the various tribes of Na’vi of the moon of Pandora.   It is a lower tier Middle Earth, but it had me ask questions of the clash of cultures and how our own local astronomy helped mold our cultures and psyches. Wait, was I talking about Cocaine Bear ?   One more digression. Todd Field’s film TÁR , the tale of the rise and fall of a fictitious musical conductor played by Cate Blanchett is another exploration into an e...

All I did was enter the title above into the MidJourney site and this was the end result. What I actually wrote was "Inanna Arrives at the Emerald City."  I wanted to combine the Sumerian goddess' adventure with Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. What I got was an image of Inanna's silhouette from behind.  She pauses on a half overgrown strip of two lane blacktop.  Her objective is in the distance. Why does she want to go to the Amethyst City?  Is it her ultimate goal?  Does she wish to make a new home at this oasis in the wasteland of an abandoned interstate civilization?  Is it just a way station on an ongoing or even infinite quest?  Is she pausing to admire the city from a distance?  Is she simply walking past it?  What if the Amethyst City is just a ruin among many artifacts of the old world?  Perhaps in contrast it is a thriving metropolis? The technique of MidJourney wavers between the fantasy artist Roger Dean and the much deplored i...