Sloth, Maybe?

  This is late in the game to discuss the pros and cons of Apple Vision Pro, but I’m not a tech expert.   I’m just a blogger with interests ranging from anime to Legos to mythology to why I was looking under rocks to find one good thing about The Book of Boba Fett. So where was I?   Ah, yes.   The Apple Vision Pro. I arrived half an hour early to the demo I scheduled at my local Apple Store to try on this device and go on a - not virtual reality… not augmented reality… but a spatial computing experience!   In previous emails, they asked me about if I wore glasses (I do) and asked basic questions as to whether I’m near or farsighted (bit of both).   The expert (let’s call him “Steve”)   took me to a semicircular demo space and asked for my glasses.   I handed them over and he walked quietly over to a device I originally thought was a coffee machine.   No.   It was to scan my lenses in greater detail so I could have lenses calibrated to my...

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  

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...

As a teenager, I was a student majoring in "visual art" at the LaGuardia High School of Music, Art, and Performing Arts in Mid-Manhattan.  It's an unsightly block of concrete and glass hidden behind Lincoln Center.  Hidden within the unsightly block is a hive of painters, sculptors, pen and ink, charcoal pencil journeymen.  Included are students of the performing arts:  Dance, Vocal, Instrumental, and Drama.  It was and is where aspiring artists gestate. Some students continue in their artistic pursuits.  Others set aside their youthful pursuits to work in other professions - perhaps continuing in their passion as an avocation.  Others, like me, sought other avenues of expression, leaving our brushes, pallets, canvass and sketchpads to die on the vine. After I graduated from LaGuardia, I moved on to study film at Hunter College CUNY.  I had the passion, I learned the technique, but I did not have the connections to enter the field.  Undeterre...

I may have discussed this in a previous post, but this time I want to zero in on my addiction. It's not as serious as heroin or cocaine to be sure.  Nonetheless, it impinges on my ability to work on my scripts, take time to exercise, and to finish the most menial of tasks. I'm talking about social media.  Public enemy number meh. When I was working a normal nine to five,  I was fidgeting with my smart phone to check out any news on Facebook.  If I wanted to do something extraordinary, I would add a YouTube clip in the FB post to show how clever I was.  Sometimes I would go to a meme generator, find an image, add text, and post it either on FB, Twitter (hereafter known as Shitter) and Instagram.  Here are some examples: Ha, Ha. Ha ha ha. I thought I was a genius for putting together these bon mots.  It helped pass the time and break up the monotony at work. The problem was, when I got home I was still at it. Clips, memes, gifs, more of the same.  E...

  See this image?  It's a sketch I did in 2012 on an iPad at the Upper West Side Apple Store using the app ProCreate.  I drew it on the fly.  It features Inanna, my favorite go to mythological character, considering an unseen subject out of frame with delight and interest.  You couldn't tell because the subject is off screen.  On the fly, folks.  I didn't think it out. Even so, customers and employees in the store would stop by, look at the sketch and say, "That's really good!"  This stroked my frail ego, for I create drawings and paintings as infrequently as Axl Rose releases a new Guns n' Roses album.  I was drawing the image with my finger, so essentially it was a finger painting.  A finger painting masqerading as a charcoal sketch. Now I hadn't purchased this particular iPad, so I knew if I touched the home button, the image would be erased for good and all.  Impulsively, I felt the need to preserve this work, so I asked Suze to...