Five Things Worth Sharing (VI)
Over on Disney, there’s a new documentary called Camden, which zooms in on what a hotbed that little corner of London really is. I can honestly say it’s a great mini series because I don’t particularly like 99% of the acts featured but the natural process behind the “fuck it, let’s just do something” attitude gets under your skin. Punk is not dead - even if you’re in Coldplay (apparently).
Watching it made me want to get back out and play.
I have a very poor view of what the live circuit is like these days but that might be because I’ve been looking through the wrong lens. The older I get, the more I find I need to rethink things I once thought were my truth when the only truth really available to the world is that everything changes and you’d better be good at running if you want to stay in touch with it… so maybe I’m not as wrong as I think, more like just a bit slow to change my mind.
That’s right! It sounds like an existential crisis on infinite earths.
I found this great little documentary about one of my favourite comic book artists. Bill Sienkiewicz is a law unto himself but this video is great even if you don’t like art or comics. I’d love to see a video like this made of every creative person on the planet. The whole world could learn a lot in ten minutes of straight from the hip talk.
Much like the first thing on this list, it’s a great lesson in “I have nothing at all to lose except my pride and I can even get something out of that if I’m smart”. The best of Bill can be found in his graphic novel Stray Toasters (1991 - which is not an easy read any day of the week) but if you want to come more mainstream, Elektra, Assassin is fantastic as is his run on Daredevil. If you’re feeling brave, the off kilter Big Numbers sees him team up with Alan Moore - though they only published two issues of this epic about a shopping centre being developed in a town in England. The story shows how something as simple as a shopping center project can have a profound effect on all sorts of various characters.
Quote of the month - Catherynne M. Valente:
“Noir isn’t really a new thing at all. It’s just a fairy tale with guns. Your hardscrabble detective is nothing more than a noble knight with a cigarette and a disease where his heart should be. He talks prettier, that’s all. He’s no less idealistic—there’re good women and bad women, good jobs and bad jobs. Justice and truth are always worth seeking. He pulls his fedora down like the visor on a suit of armour. He serves his lord faithfully whether he wants to or not. And he is in thrall to the idea of a woman. It’s just that in detective stories, women are usually dead before the curtain goes up. In fairy tales, they’re usually alive.”
Despite recently having a full-on love affair with my AI music partner (and yes, I keep going back to her no matter how much I know she’s bad for me - it’s the noir detective in me, I swear), I’m not entirely sure about the place of AI in the creative world. The hypocrisy is not lost on me - though I would prefer to call it irony because it seems gentler on my mortal soul.
I was trying to figure out my chances of getting Robert Crumb on the podcast and fell down something of a rabbit hole. Crumb is a pivotal figure in most things I’ve ever liked from the counter-culture era. He gets lot of grief for how he draws women (even though I believe it comes from a place of love)… here’s an example:
Regardless of what you think (and this one is quite tame - you can look up the rest online), you can’t deny he’s a great cartoonist. He first came onto my radar when I fell in love with Mr Dream Whip who graced the cover of Creem magazine #2 which looks like this:
…and was intended as a finger in the air to magazines that took themselves far too seriously (such as LIFE magazine). His greatest creation is possibly Mr Natural - I would buy this shirt immediately if it wasn’t $200:
And then I saw this in the search results which is an AI rendering of Robert Crumb’s style of work:
As a fan, I can see that a) that’s not from Crumb’s hand but b) it sure as hell shares more than 95% of Crumb’s DNA. I mean, it’s great - if you were a writer and were handy at playing with AI, you could absolutely put out a comic book tomorrow of your own that sort of looked like Crumb was sitting at your kitchen table.
If you did enough of them, it would become your own thing very quickly because - truth be told - I suspect perhaps 2% of my subscribers here have ever heard of Crumb - which is also probably a larger percentage of people than who have heard of Bill Sienkiewicz.
There are even people taking on his whole persona on MidJourney (one of the better AI art generators). Like this guy - his page is here but here’s an example:
and here’s a Crumb original":
The difference is clear as day - and I think the realisation I’ve come to is that whenever technology gets involved in a creation, it can’t help but immediately clean everything up. There’s no dirt in technology and damn I like dirt in my creations.
I like dirty rock n roll, I like creatives on the edge of falling apart, I like hand-made art, stop motion animation, fountain pens, gardens dug out with a spade, hand made sweaters, hair that’s not cut, backs of envelopes used as notebooks, women who don’t wear make-up, toast that you had to watch under a grill, watches that need winding… and I will always be that way.
However, the future is here now and creatives of all the arts need to get ahead with their lives because food and petrol are not free. Maybe some will use it my way - which is to play with the robots and marvel at what it can do because it makes you feel like you did something whilst still sitting in the corner of the dirt with an acoustic guitar.
Some creatives will ignore it completely, rail against it and that’s a beautiful thing too.
But I can’t help feeling that those with pencils and brushes in hand will find themselves sitting on their horse on a motorway as a fleet of Porsche 911s speed by. It’s won’t even be about the creation at the end of the day - it will be about what the people of the world are prepared to buy into - and I know exactly which way it will go because the next Star Wars movie will not be made with stop-motion animation of any kind and not a soul will blink an eye.
It’s just the way things are.
Hmmm… number four went on a bit, huh. Not so much a share as a “get the hell out of my head” post. Let’s wrap up with a man doing a cover of Blind Melon’s Mouthful of Cavities - just because it makes everything that has tech attached to it look stupid and pointless: