Show called The Wincher about somebody with a jeep

nice little 20 min doc on the making of the music

One of my favorite audience cutaways of all time OF ALL TIME https://t.co/8tCJBc5FL1

⚡️NEW⚡️How does one of the world’s premiere art museums move? When MoMA updated their design system, they knew much of it would live on screens. Working directly with @momastudio + @order, we established + codified motion guidelines across the new system.????https://t.co/HXWRHTnYNJ https://t.co/KUHNguBDI6

At the end of 2020, instead of 30 Under 30 and NextGen lists, please profile middle-aged people who just got their big breaks. I want to read about a mother of 2 who published her first novel, a director who released their first studio feature at 47, THAT'S THE LIST WE WANT.

this is my daily routine, stare at my computer screen

gotta admit, this seems like it will be entirely necessary as podcasts continue to find their footing in monetization

I promised myself I wouldn't just post about every single new We Own This Town episode here on yewknee but when they're good, they're worth sharing!

Filmography Club is a film discussion podcast in which host Jason Caviness takes a look at the body of work from one particular filmmaker. Season 1 is all about Paul Thomas Anderson. The latest episode is a discussion about The Master, the 2012 post-WWII psychological drama that clearly has some parallels with Scientology, even if Anderson won't directly admit it. The guest for the show is my lovely fiance Becky Delius. Becky is not a cinephile or a film auteur but she is a very studied individual when it comes to Cults and their ilk. She's done lots of reading on Scientology and provides some wonderful insight into how the characters Joaquin Phoenix and Phillip Seymour Hoffman play are at odds with one another. Her takeaway from the movie is right at the top of the episode - "a nihilist exploration on the futility of being a human being." It's dark but it's also correct and the evidence that backs it up through the lens of PTA's storytelling is quite compelling.

Hear it here or wherever you like a podcast.

The newest episode of Nashville Demystified finds host Alex Steed talking with recent Nashville transplant Sean Nelson - a name you may not instantly recognize but likely remember from his role as frontman of the band Harvey Danger. Nelson's accomplishment's far eclipse being a one-hit wonder from the late 90's but it's okay if you don't know that yet, that's what the podcast is for. Nelson has spent a good bit of time writing for The Stranger and creating a wonderful ode to Harry Nilsson called Nelson sings Nilsson. Alex does a great job talking about all the things - Nelson's time in Harvey Danger, his experience covering the Trump election cycle, his ability to interview his idols and what's it like to move back to Nashville after some 20 years.

The episode is available streaming everywhere you like a podcast. I suggest you listen in.

I have long been a fan of Adam Lisagor and his video production company, Sandwich. Their work is always fun, informative and distinctly Sandwich. They recently overhauled their website, rebranded themselves and started selling merch. All good things.

But mostly they just have a massive portfolio of work, all well worth watching. Watch this and this or this, just as a start.

Some folks still releasing music on Tuesdays and I love it.

New interview up today: Extensive chat with @haxan_cloak about his extraordinary score for Midsommar. https://t.co/hvQlhYmR4d

Nicolas Cage / 63 posters https://t.co/jWcEaKqnHo

DM Stith rehearsing his exquisite show at Antwerp’s miXmass ⁦ @dmstith⁩ will blow your mind in 2020 https://t.co/1VXasiSCHy

I wonder what this man did to compel a witch to turn him into a dog https://t.co/y8M10Jbyxu

When I need a pick-me-up, I turn to jjjjjohn. That repository of GIFs never fails to perk a day up.

Happy 2020, hope you aren't back at work yet but, if so, enjoy some mild distraction..

• Pat Sajak: Master Impersonator - it's really uncanny.
• John Mulaney and the Sack Lunch Bunch - I've posted about this before but if you haven't watched the new Netflix special from John Mulaney, please do so. It's the perfect blend of snarky, sweet, absurd and heartwarming. Not an easy balance to pull off but it's really stellar.
• Zoomies - I don't care if this is too Basic for you, it's fantastic.
• Turkey Slurpy - hot new trend for 2020.
• Modified Furby - a horrifying dystopian vision OR the best use of Furby? Maybe both.

the Trapper Keeper vision is the most accurate, bizarrely

Jim clued me in to the passing of Vaughan Oliver, the graphic designer responsible for an unbelievably impressive body of work for a number of artists that were, visually, influential for myself. The Pixies Doolittle, The Breeders Last Splash, Gus Gus's Polydistortion and Lush's Split all quickly come to mind.

I won't claim that as a youth I was aware that each of those albums were all created by the same person (much less an individual at all) but it's impossible to look at a gallery of his work and not feel moved by it.

I've yet to encounter a full, exhaustive, repository of his work but poking around looking for various collections is part of the fun. Check out Oliver's favorite 4AD work, read this interview with him, peruse this Guardian retrospective and then poke around Pinterest and Tumblr for even more treats.

Nashville electronic musician Sugar Sk*-*lls is generally known for creating a bit of dance-y 8-bit inspired music. His work has grown and expanded over time but, in general, his public output has been somewhere in that realm. Recently he released explicit ethical agent, a new full-length album that not only explores new sonic territory but also an entirely new way of making music. With the help of Google's Magento AI, he poses the question - is this music even mine? While I am sure he is not the first to do this, I am rather intrigued by the entire process. His liner notes for the album explain the process in great detail but here's the gist. Google AI powers Magenta, a tool for making music and art via Machine Learning. The free web version of the tool is seeded with 10,000 classical songs and allows you to input some notes or chords to start the process of creating a song. Some small musical input creates a full-length song.

Sugar Sk*-*lls went through this process to input a single chord for each song, got back the MIDI output and ran it through his standard batch of synthesizers. The output is explicit ethical agent. The music is fine - neither offensive nor overtly compelling but the question of "Is this Sugar Sk*-*lls music?" is a fascinating one to ponder. If a musician isn't making the choices of how song is created, can they even claim it as their own?

Even more interesting to ponder is the idea of this AI being seeded with his own back catalog of music. The output would, surely, be more sonically aligned with his previous work but the question would still stand on who the actual "creator" was. It doesn't take much to extract that even further and wonder about an AI seeded with Bowie or Prince or Aphex Twin or anyone for that matter and contemplating what you get back.

None of these curiosities are particularly new - Spotify has been playing with AI music for years and some of it ain't bad. It's not a leap to imagine a world where Spotify's Radio option is seeded based on your actual music interests and entirely new compositions are made; specifically for you.

Sugar Sk*-*lls writeup on the undertaking (which, apparently, only took about 2 hours) is a great read but I particularly enjoy his closing remarks, so I'll leave you with those:

As the technology matures and improves, it will invariably alter the nature of musical creativity. The introduction of photography and the technology’s ability to render an image of an individual didn’t make portrait drawing and painting redundant. Photography changed and opened up the possibilities, meaning, and purpose of human rendered forms. In the case of music, AI driven compositional technology could have a democratizing effect on the creation of music. The creation of music is not just bound to the musician’s ability to perform an idea on an instrument or knowledge of music theory, but also the distillation of a musician’s stylistic influences. A tool that can manipulate content via styles like swatches on a palate already exists for image creation. However, just as deceased musicians can be made into holograms that tour previous material and generate revenue without the musician’s explicit consent, the stylistic essence of a musician can potentially be quantified and made to output new works without the musician present. The technology will present new methods to exploit musicians and create new modes of expression. Ultimately it will further blur the lines of listening to and creating music, which is a kind of subversion I fully support.

an eloquent and insightful postmortem on the mix sharing service