This is a confession. Supposedly doing it is good for the soul, cleansing and renewal and all that … we will see. There have certainly been times in my life when I confessed one thing or another and it didn’t turn out well for me at all, but let’s not go into that, okay? My present admission of wrongdoing is that I am using ChatGPT to muck about with my own photographs, and having quite a bit of fun doing it.
An example is today’s header image of the White River. I took a perfectly good photo, loaded it into ChatGPT, and told the program to make the pic into something on the order of a plein air painting, and you can see the result. I liked it enough to use it for today’s blog entry. Here is the whole deal in a nutshell:
- there is nothing that the program can do that a skilled user of any high-quality photo editing program, like Photoshop, hasn’t been able to do for ages
- I am not a skilled photo editor user, being actually embarrassingly incompetent at it
- all that was required of me in this instance is that I told my AI co-conspirator what to do, in the simplest of terms
- the result made me happy, so I am likely to repeat the offense and the resultant deception of the viewer
- I have no conscience twinges at all about this manipulation
- this is the last time I will ever mention it, from here on in I will take full credit for having talents that I do not in the slightest possess
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I created something in the food department this past week. Earlier I had made another dish that required caramelized onions as an ingredient, and as I was sampling them I thought … you know, I bet these would taste awfully good in that home-made hummus that I brew up periodically. I did a quick web search and found that there are few hummus-making companies that make such a product. Apparently cooking those onions takes time and doesn’t fit well into an industrial model.
So I tried it and voila! ‘Twas delicious! My appreciation for the sweet/savory dish that is caramelized onions is easy to trace. Back in the 1940s my mother would cook liver and onions for our family, and by the time everything was ready to serve those onions were black/brown, crispy, and addictive. We had this tasty stuff rather frequently for a couple of reasons, the first being economy. Organ meats were cheap and available, even in a time of wartime rationing.
The second reason was that every member of our family liked it. As a quasi-cook myself, I know that having something to serve that everyone likes is just too seductive. Such a dish will show up on the table way more often than food that produces grimaces and revulsion.
So, if you are ever served my onion-flavored hummus, know that you are on my A-list. Because making it is some trouble, after all.
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There are some small fires burning here on the Western Slope, and Wednesday morning here’s what our sun looked like through smoke drifting past us.
The fires are in remote areas and not threatening lives or buildings, so don’t get much attention in the media even locally. With so little rain this year, tinder is basically everywhere.
Today I remembered the lines from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner as I walked out onto the now creaking wooden deck in the backyard:
“Water, water, everywhere
And all the boards did shrink”
Yep, shrunk and creaking they are.
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It wouldn’t be a giant leap to call me an escapist. From reality, that is. I like movies and I love music, and both of them provide moments when my thoughts are completely diverted from where I am and what I am doing and what is going on about me. I am escaping. As a card-carrying geezer now I take time to look backward at my life and try to make sense of it, usually failing. It’s a haphazard script with no distinct plot line, but it’s what I have to work with.
Movies hold a special place in that retrospective. From the time I took my 17 cent allowance and walked to a Saturday matinee at the Nokomis Theater in Minneapolis right up to today, I have noticed one continuous thread. When I would leave the theater as a nine year-old, for about an hour or two I would take on the characteristics of the hero of the film, acting like him or talking like him. I was taller, smarter, stronger than everyone else, who were now boring creatures that I was doomed to deal with. I absolutely reeked with suavity and savoir-faire.
Jump forward to 1969 as I was leaving the theater after viewing “The Godfather” along with several friends. This time I felt those same stirrings, but this time I felt guilty about them. I recognized that I had seen something more than an entertainment, I had witnessed a great movie. But what was it about? A bunch of fascinating people who killed other people without a thought. They had a sort of code that they lived and died by, which only meant that while women and children were not to be touched, it was open season on any adult male who stood in their way. So now I walked and talked like an amalgam of Al Pacino and Marlon Brando, but I felt very very uneasy about what had just happened to me. I recognized that I had been completely manipulated. All of that evening’s “heroes” were murderers, and I cared what happened to them.
And here comes Thursday’s NYTimes to shine some light on my personal murk. A film writer (another geezer) has written a book about movies and it touches on exactly those sort of transformations.
“You could argue that ‘The Godfather’ is the key film,” Thomson said. “It did everything the medium is meant to do. It had a gang of absolutely brilliant people. That film brought together talents of an incredible nature.” In addition to Coppola and a cast that included Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall and a parade of first-rate character actors, the movie owes its place in the canon to people like Dean Tavoularis, the production designer; the cinematographer Gordon Willis; and the sound editor Walter Murch.
“It was a smash hit,” Thomson went on. “It won all the prizes, and yet what is not talked about very much is what the film is about. For me what the film is about is persuading men that they want to be in the gang and in the family, and they want to do the terrible things the guys do and they want to shut the women out of the room.”
But here’s the question that still rankles. Why in the world would I want to emulate anything at all, if only for a nanosecond, about this guy?
(Nice suit, though.)
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On Wednesday something unusual happened in our corner of the universe. Around 2:45 in the afternoon there was a 15 minute downpour of much needed rain. Only a quarter of an inch fell, but it caused one significant disturbance here in Paradise.
For the past several months our local City Market grocery store has been undergoing a large restructuring and renovation, and the end is still not in sight. When that rain poured down it found flaws in the workmen’s planning, and water began to pour into the store from one end to the other. At first the management tried to deal with it by closing first this aisle and then that aisle, but they finally gave up and closed the store completely at 3:00 PM.
It was a case of much ado and you can bet there will be finger-pointing of the first magnitude.
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Little Home In The Valley 