The Educated

I felt so bad yesterday, I didn't manage to visit my mother.  I'm trying to figure out what is causing this.  I do wish I'd wake one morning soon and not feel tremendous dread.  I used to love two things: going to bed at night and rising in the morning.  Silly, I know.  It runs counter to a hip/bohemian thing to say.  The old saw:  Ghandi said that a man should do two things every day that he doesn't wish to do every day.  Churchill said he did.  He went to bed every night and got up every morning.  That's clever, and Churchill led a tremendously interesting life.  But I've always been an early to bed, early to rise kind of fellow, and it always made me happy.  

But this year, for the most part, I have dreaded both.  

Selavy.  

I know I've already said that Charlie Kirk was a dope, factory made for the anti-intellectual.  I watched three YouTube videos last night that were released a week before the shooting of Kirk debating some kids at Cambridge.  They were prepared for him.  They had his schtick figured out, as predictable as a drumbeat.  If you are interested, here are links to the three videos: (link) (link) and (link).  If you are not, I understand.  Watching his bullshit is tedious.  But here's the teaser for a Vanity Fair article.

“It is not just, for instance, that Kirk held disagreeable views—that he was pro-life, that he believed in public executions, or that he rejected the separation of church and state,” Ta-Nehisi Coates writes. “It’s that Kirk reveled in open bigotry.” 

By ignoring the rhetoric and actions of the Turning Point USA founder, Coates argues, pundits and politicians are sanitizing Charlie Kirk’s legacy.

Duh.  

Of course, there is the morally required disclaimer that must be made: His murder is a horrible and terrible thing.  And I mean it, too.  Having such a person as a standard bearer for the Republican Party was like shooting retarded fish in a very small barrel.  

He also showed, by and large, how unprepared American college students are for debate.  An education system run by congressional republicans has failed the country pitifully.  O.K.  Maybe it isn't just republicans.  "Every kid a winner, every child a success" rhetoric from the left has been equally harmful.  But the idea that everyone deserves a non-competitive college degree has not been helpful.  Funding based on "success rates" has been a travesty.  Even the Ivy Leagues schools have fallen victim.  Look at what has happened to GPAs there in the last twenty years and you'll see the cost of the easy "A."  

But enough of that.  

Last night, I watched a documentary on Goya.  I guess I really knew nothing of Goya.  His biography is a crazy narrative of tragedy, and yet he succeeded through multiple political wars and the rapid changing of monarchs, survived the Inquisition, and managed to make insane portraits of he Royal families which one critic claimed made them all look like "butchers who had just won the lottery."  And it's true.  They are the most unflattering portraits of royals ever created.  And they loved him.  He was being paid a salary of $250,000 a year in today's money--plus perks.  

And for half his life, he was totally deaf.  

He was, I learned, the first painter to paint a nude that was not allegorical, The Nude Maja.  Even before the more well known "Olympia" by Manet.  

And it just goes to show that anyone can succeed if they try hard enough and keep at it.  

Ha!  Just kidding.  That is one of those idiotic things people who win some award usually say.  

These painterly illustrations of my photos are killing me.  As you know, I am not opposed to the straight old photograph, but I've spent much of my time messing them up.  I've scratched negatives and solarized them in the days before digital processing.  I "invented" a process for using Polaroid 669 film to make grungy, painterly things, and when the film was gone, I began to make encaustic works and used alternative processes like image transfers and hand colored and drawn on prints.  So using A.I. to fool around with my images is just another step toward "the next thing."  

But I have yet to find an A.I. platform that will process much of my body of photographs.  So yesterday, I asked ChatGPT if it could give me some prompts that would allow me to do much the same thing in Photoshop.  It did.  It gave me a whole lot.  

When I tried it, however, it was too tedious and didn't really work.  I will spend some more time with what it told me, though, and maybe find some new tools to let me "mess up" my photos.  I've been printing out some of the altered versions to see how they look on different types of paper, and I am impressed.  Now I am trying to think of ways to work with them so that they become "mine" again.  

A fool's errand, probably. . . but I am enjoying it and it helps distract me from my current situation.  

And so. . . .  

That k.d. lang version of "Angel Eyes" from yesterday's post was a lovely surprise, but you know, that's what happens to the educated ear.  Often now, the algorithms give me things like this. . . and the algorithms are right.  Here's one from yesterday that soothes me.  Hey. . . let's go to the Cafe Carlyle and sit, have a drink, listen, and relax.