The Beatles wrote lots of “hardy perennials.” They’re songs that most every recognizes instantly and likes well enough to hear you butcher them in cover bands. The beginning of their songbook is filled with stuff any garage band can bang out.
Then they got a little weird. Good weird, mostly, but not rock weird. Paul McCartney was a music hall guy at heart, and he started to take over the proceedings after their manager died in a haze of booze and seconals. Lennon had a harder edge, but it wasn’t like he couldn’t do the same sort of musical things if he wanted to. Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite was an engaging, offhand shot at McCartney’s satin suit suites, for instance.
The real dividing line began when they stopped playing live, because no one made amplifiers loud enough to hear themselves over all the screaming. Then they started making artifacts, not songs. The songs were put together out of disparate pieces into a whole, and they essentially couldn’t be performed live in their final form. Hell, some of the stuff featured tapes being played backwards. The songs were assembled by the very able producer George Martin into vinyl confections that exceeded anything that had come before.
It’s still not easy to put together the same sort of musical agglomerations in today’s world, but technology makes it at least possible. You’re still going to need someone who knows their way around a piccolo trumpet if you want to keep it real. David Mason, the fellow who played the original track, was from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London. Not a slouch.
Luckily for Eisuke Yoshino, he knows Manami Nishiyama.
If you’re new around here, every Tuesday is trash day. We clean out our bookmarks folder, ridding ourselves once and for all from all the news articles we meant to read, but never got around to. This has a salutary effect. On me, I mean. My readers end up having to read them for me, and I get off scot free.
The FBI is warning the public that cyber criminals are using search engine advertisement services to impersonate brands and direct users to malicious sites that host ransomware and steal login credentials and other financial information.
The FBI recommends that people install ad-blocking extensions on their browsers. Well, 2005 called, and they’d like their advice back. Unfortunately, I have no advice on how to install FBI-blocking extensions on your browser
The company’s first vessel, called Anemos, is very different from a traditional sailing ship. It takes some inspiration from sailboats used in racing. First, the masts are made from carbon fiber. That makes them so lightweight that they can be much taller than the traditional version made from wood. The extra height means that they can hold up sails that are around twice as large, and catch more wind.
The Cutty Sark called, and they’d like their propulsion idea back.
Recently I was hired to write a 200-word article based on an 800-word press release about a new coffee shop. I finished and turned it in, then it hit me: It’s just a matter of time before the client who hired me realizes AI programs can write these things for free.
To size up my competition, I pasted the original press release into ChatGPT and asked it to create its own 200-word article, then I compared our work.
The writer is complaining about the quality of the Chat GPT output compared to hers. I’ve read both. I’ve probably written and edited more online text by others than just about anyone. The Chat GPT output is better than hers. And using Chat GPT has another benefit. No whining.
As a thinker and mystic whose life work entirely centred on the transformation of the human mind, Krishnamurti worried that an insufficiently cultivated mind that had been employed merely for material and mechanical purposes would be perfectly imitable and thus replaceable by computers and other machines. Thus, our main concern should not be machines attaining humanlike minds, but people having machinelike minds.
Chat GPT’s output is just an amalgam of existing online writing, which is almost uniformly bad. Ol’ Jiddu was a wag to point that out, and in advance, too.
NaNoWriMo, known for its annual challenge where participants write a 50,000-word manuscript in November, argued in its post that condemning AI would ignore issues of class and ability, suggesting the technology could benefit those who might otherwise need to hire human writing assistants or have differing cognitive abilities.
Got that? If you banned AI from a writing contest, only people who know how to write stuff would be able to write stuff.
A North Carolina musician has been indicted by federal prosecutors over allegations that he used AI to help create “hundreds of thousands” of songs and then used the AI tracks to earn more than $10 million in fraudulent streaming royalty payments since 2017.
He used bots to compose songs, and then used bots to listen to the songs over and over, and then got paid by the bots that lord over streaming music sites. I’m not sure if he should be prosecuted, or given a medal.
A few months ago, our AM radio hot dog experiment went mildly viral. That was a result of me asking my Dad ‘what would happen if you ground a hot dog to one of your AM radio towers?’ He didn’t know, so one night on the way to my son’s volleyball practice, we tested it. And it was awesome.
I wasn’t really wondering about what happens. I was too busy wondering why he capitalized “Pickle.”
Scientific inaccuracies plagued many of the science fiction movies/series during the late 70’s and early 80’s. It was not until the mid-80’s that Hollywood began to really tap NASA and other aerospace scientists for assistance in fine tuning the technobable [sic] being used in science fiction films and TV shows.
Other WM Motor owners reported that the smartphone app was unusable, and the built-in car stereo, which required an internet connection, had stopped working. Multiple WM Motor owners filed complaints on 12365auto, a Chinese automobile review site. “The car system is paralyzed and I can’t log in. The entire entertainment system is unusable, and the vehicle status cannot be checked,” one owner wrote. “The car has become a huge safety hazard!”
The word “still” in the headline is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Avis Rent A Car System has alerted 299,006 customers across multiple US states that their personal information was stolen in an August data breach.
The digital break-in occurred between August 3 and August 6, according to the car rental giant in filings with the Maine and California attorneys general.
Avis’ slogan used to be “We Try Harder.” Apparently, they should try harderer.
Have a great Tuesday, everyone. If that’s even possible.
Take me in your arms and our little world
Will be the place of places
Nothing else to make
But breakfast and love
We’ll hang a little sign that just says
Paradise
Population two
The world is incrementally less pretty today. Sergio won’t be down for breakfast.
Please observe that we’re discussing why it’s a masterpiece. If you’re still wondering if it’s a masterpiece, you’re obviously lost and need to hit the back button on your browser a few times to get back to safety. It is. We’re only here to analyze the why.
We have to put aside the fact that it’s funny. It was obviously supposed to be funny. They put Don Rickles in it, for instance. I’ve seen a short list of the scenes that were edited out of the movie. It’s pretty obvious that KH was intended to be the Animal House of Hohenzollern. The out-edits mostly involved girls with their shirts off and assorted other 70s bilge. The Ingrid Pitt Breast Delivery System was hired to bring some sort of incongruous feminine presence, but she was laid off before they even started filming. Like many good movies, its sounds like the producers tried to ruin the venture as hard as they could, but couldn’t manage it.
Clint Eastwood leads the cast. He’s always been a replacement for John Wayne in the firmament of Hollywood. He just plays himself, over and over, just like the Duke did. It doesn’t matter whether he’s driving around with an orangutan in a pickup truck, or with Donald Sutherland barking like a dog in a Sherman tank, Clint the Squint is just Clint. Complaining about Clint’s acting style is like getting up a petition to put Franklin Pierce on Mount Rushmore instead of one of the Borglund four. Clint might not know a Strasberg from a Starbucks, but he knows what he’s about. Try imagining anyone else as Kelly in this role. Kelly has to appear stoic, stolid, fearless, formidable, a man to be followed. Actors who can project that are always in short supply. And he wasn’t afraid to sort of poke fun at his carefully cultivated image, if the moment called for it. Here’s the spaghetti western meeting the German deli:
Telly Savalas has a big part in the show. He was supposed to be George Kennedy. George wanted too much money to be in the movie, so they got Kojak. He turned out to be perfect for the job. Once again, the producers won by losing. The movie would have been diminished some if you replaced Telly’s bald pate with Kennedy’s combover, but it’s not like they were trying to hire Don Knotts. It wouldn’t have been a trainwreck. Without Clint, the premiere would have been held at a drive-in.
Hollywood has always been full of actors that don’t, ahem, know their limitations. Another giant slab of beef, Charlton Heston, never knew enough to stick to his knitting, and embarrassed himself numerous times by trying to act in things, instead of standing in the right spot, remembering his lines, and avoiding knocking over the furniture. Clint has never made that mistake.
Donald Sutherland steals the picture, of course, with his oddball Oddball character. It was completely misunderstood at the time, and even moreso now. Everyone describes him and his crew as hippies, which they find incongruous in a story that includes a mention of Omaha Beach not once, but twice. It’s the result of two errors. First, they assumed that everyone came home from the war, kept their crewcuts, got a job making cars with fins, and had 2.3 children and a dog to kick. But just like after WWI, lots of WWII vets had trouble fitting in after the war, and were quite bohemian, if not downright criminal. The Wild One is one example of that sort of man. Oddball and his ilk are another. He isn’t a hippie. He’s not even a proto-hippie if you ask me. He’s a Beat Generation free spirit all the way. Hell, what hippie ever listened to country music, whether he’s flattening a railroad crossing in a tank, or not? The Beat Generation worshiped idiosyncrasy for its own sake, just like Oddball’s crew. There has never been a more lockstep bunch than the hippies.
That’s the second error. To the modern eye, hippies were a new phenomenon, peculiar to the late sixties and pre-disco seventies. Nonsense. It was a warmed over fad. Hell, Germany had hippies wandering around the Black Forest, who called themselves wandervogel. They liked to commune with nature in the woods while singing folk songs, and had been doing it since the 19th century. After Charlie Chaplin’s accession to Fuhrer, they were either invited to become Hitler jugend or were directed to commune with nature more closely, as mulch. At any rate, the Greatest Generation had a lot more variation than how they’re usually portrayed, and the generations who followed had a lot less.
So the movie doesn’t really rely on comic relief. Comedy is a strand woven right through it. It’s not a series of rest areas on the usual highway to shooting other people, and blowing stuff up. It’s funny, but the premise of the movie, a bank robbery that’s quasi-legal because the bank is behind a shifting dotted line on a military map, sounds more outrageous than any number of more staid WWII movies. The problem is, it’s a true story. Some soldiers from various armies robbed a NAZI bank and made off with lots of gold, almost none of which was subsequently recovered. Kelly’s Heroes, which is supposed to be a romp, might have more truth in it than one of those slavish war movies with the Germans floating on a cushion of subtitles.
The miracles in the movie’s production are legion. The director was Brian G. Hutton, who wasn’t exactly David Lean. He was a bit actor for a while, before he decided it was easier to sit in a sling chair with his name on it. He’d just got finished making Where Eagles Dare in ’68, so he was a natural to put an x in gaffer’s tape on the floor and point Clint towards it.
It’s fun to compare WED to KH, since they share so many details in their productions and cast. Where Eagles Dare made a small fortune, but it’s a really dumb movie. It’s dumb fun, but admit it, it’s really dumb. There isn’t any comedy in it, but it’s very funny accidentally. Richard Burton is completely miscast, yelling his lines like drunken Hamlet, while stolid Clint just sort of glares at him and wonders why he doesn’t just say the lines. The plot is like fourteen war/spy movies put in a Cuisinart and put back together as a papier-mache movie. All the German soldiers are basically NPCs who throw their arms straight up and fall over a second or two before one of the heroes shoots them. It’s a hoot.
So Brian tried again, and got it exactly right this time. He left Burton at the happy hour drink rail, took Clint to Yugoslavia, and blew up more of the country than the Allies and the Wehrmacht ever did. The second-rate actors were all first-rate. The battle scenes are better than Saving Private Ryan by a long shot. The campfire scenes mostly show guys as they are, believably pensive, tired, and tongue-tied, instead of exposition factories. Their dumbfounded, silent expressions when their fellows are killed have more pathos in them than any ten anti-war movies. And their motivations are completely believable, instead of the usual supermen charging at machine guns to die for freedom words.
It’s a masterpiece. So watch it again. Don’t worry about being bored because you know how it turns out. Have a little faith, baby.
I never really recovered from Junior Wells’ album Hoodoo Man Blues. A zillion years ago I asked my older brother to teach me how to play the bass in a blues band, and he handed me the record, nearly twenty years old already. “That’s about it,” he said, and he was right.
The album cover showed Junior Wells in the 1965, nobody’s business business suit bluesman regalia that was captured so accurately and amiably in The Blues Brothers.
But by 1971, Junior Wells and Buddy Guy and friends were in orbit around the planet Dacron in the Huggy Bear galaxy:
The sartorial fastball might be coming in high and outside, but with the same amount of mustard as ever.
Month: September 2024
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
Recent Comments