Category: organizing writing

And So it Goes

Speaker 1
You.

Speaker 1
Hello, aloha and mahalo. It is Monday, September 11, day of remembrance for all of us.

Speaker 1
My name is Thomas Farley, F-A-R-L-E-Y-I have a friend who is is dying and he has been dying for many years, but it is certainly the end of the line.

Speaker 1
It will be the end of the line very soon for him, it seems, unless there’s some miraculous intervention from beyond science.

Speaker 1
I and he’s a good man. He doesn’t deserve to die, die poorly like this. I would not trade places with him. I envy him, though, in a way, with the enormous amount of resources that he’s been able to get to apply to his condition. He has a physical disease.

Speaker 1
He has a number of things wrong with them, but they are in the end, all physical.

Speaker 1
He’s had good insurance with Kaiser and I’m sure some of his own money. Similarly, I’ve had good insurance plans and money and I’m actually paid out of pocket for nearly all of my mental health treatment because compared with physical diseases, you cannot get seen by a doctor routinely enough to do any good in mental health. For a psychiatrist. Well, he has Kaiser. I think under Kaiser, probably you wouldn’t be able to see a doctor psychiatrist more than once every couple of months.

Speaker 1
Instead, you’re kicked down to therapists and technicians. So I’ve always paid out of pocket for regular psychiatric treatment.

Speaker 1
So that’s one big difference between mental health and physical health. Another is that routinely, for years now, most of the major insurance companies have provided a 24 hours nurse talk line so that you can talk to a nurse at any time of day except that. And I’ve talked to these nurses on these health lines before. They say they’ve never, ever had a psych nurse assigned to one of these 24 hours help lines. They could have a psych nurse, a telephone line in addition to the physical, the regular RNS.

Speaker 1
They could have that. These groups, Intermountain, Southwest, Kaiser, multibillion dollar corporations, they could pay for a 24 hours psych nurse telephone line so he wouldn’t wind up at the emergency room or some other place victim of suicide. But they don’t because mental health does not exist for these people. They talk about these institutions, talk about the rising rate of suicide, and isn’t that awful? But they won’t fund for it.

Speaker 1
They will not fund for it. They will instead give out some pity, some false pity and give some money to other groups, other agencies that are working on the problem, but they themselves don’t participate. And in the last few years, we’ve all seen how they want to really focus. They really want to throw everybody into two categories that of depression or anxiety. And if you’re not in that category, then good luck to you.

Speaker 1
I don’t want to dwell on my particular problem, although I’ll just say that it’s severe insomnia and nightmares and yeah, you hear about research, say, into PTSD and related, but it’s not really in my opinion. And I’ve been almost become a professional consultant on this subject since I so much want to get better. And I’ve tried everything. So I’ve become sort of an expert on what’s current, and I’ve done everything, including electroshock, or ECT as it’s politely called. Electroconvulsive therapy didn’t work for me, paid for all that out of pocket.

Speaker 1
Physical diseases, especially the physical diseases that happen to a lot of people, that Big Pharma has a market for. Those seem hopeful. As far as research getting spent, I know there’s some incurable, seemingly incurable problems like autism, and so there’s just major diseases, although autism goes to great deal of mental health fields, so it’s inherently not going to see the amount of research or funding to begin with. My friend has got all of these resources now available to him as far as end of life treatments and hospice, just like my parents had hospice and people willing to help stepping in. And there’s nothing for end of life, for mental health problems.

Speaker 1
My condition is not livable, and all I get in a response as far as end of life is that it can’t be that bad.

Speaker 1
And I sometimes say, yeah, you’re right, it’s not that bad. It’s a hell of a lot worse. You live with this, you live with this. But it’s a mental health problem that they can’t capture with a microscope or a thermometer going up or down, or blood pressure they can measure or blood they can sample. They just have to take the word of the patient, and our word doesn’t mean a damn thing.

Speaker 1
And I feel for people with mental health problems that are not as articulate or verbal as I am, that can’t express themselves or they express the hell they’re going through. They really have. That just I can’t imagine the misery funding needs to be addressed for my friend. There’s all sorts of patient advocates available for him. He’s actually had genetic engineering things done for him at Stanford Hospital.

Speaker 1
There’s been housing available for family and relatives nearby, just on and on and on. And I am glad that he’s had that care. It’s extended his life for many, many years. It’s just there is no equivalent in mental health for this. And it just devalue you.

Speaker 1
It devalues a person over and over and over again. You’re not worth it. And if you want something done, you got to pay for it yourself, because we can’t see it, so we don’t think it’s a problem. I’ll give you a simple example of how much I often have needed a patient advocate to deal with people just on the phone, for example. One of the things that really induces my nightmares is being a mean person and having to argue endlessly.

Speaker 1
And if anybody’s dealt with any customer support, any healthcare organization over the last many years, you’ll know that it is impossible sometimes to get across what you’re trying to say to a person that keeps falling back on a script will not transfer you to a supervisor about the websites and email addresses that they hand out that don’t work, telephone numbers they never call to make sure that they actually work. It just goes on and on. Well, that all forces me to get service, forces me to be a mean person with these people. And I don’t want to be a mean person. It’s toxic.

Speaker 1
It’s toxic to everybody, but especially in my condition. And I can’t tell them that that just engendering more and more nightmares. And it would be great if I had a patient advocate that would be able to speak for me and would be able to sit for hours and hours on a phone trying to get something arranged and it’s just not possible, not even with paying for it out of pocket. These people don’t exist. And it is very frustrating every step of the way you’re told that your condition doesn’t mean anything and it is indescribable as I try to make myself, as I try to make other people comfortable with me.

Speaker 1
You can’t mention, for example, that you have violent nightmares anymore. They’ll call the cops on you.

Speaker 1
People today are so scared by corporate media that they associate mental health with violence when in fact the mental health are far more likely to be victims of crimes than actually committing the crime. But corporate media doesn’t want to hear that. And it is the more and more I try to make other people comfortable around me, the less credibility I have, the more well spoken I am, the less people think there’s anything wrong. If I keep up appearances, then just what’s the problem? And I’ll try to say, well, how many times do you have to watch your mother or your best friend get chainsawed to death?

Speaker 1
Well, it’s not real. No, it actually feels real. And shock after shock and this has been going on since 1988 with me and it just breaks you down. I probably have less than 4 hours of sleep every night and tell you this is how these professionals, they just want a measurement. How many hours of sleep are you getting?

Speaker 1
And their limited thinking is insane. Well, four or 5 hours, it doesn’t matter. It’s the quality of sleep. It’s all broken up. I’m pacing around at 233 30 in the morning, waking up every other half hour.

Speaker 1
It’s the quality of sleep. But they can’t measure that. They have to rely on your word. And your word doesn’t count. Your word doesn’t mean a damn thing.

Speaker 1
Well, we’re sorry for you, but there’s no at this point I’ve tried literally everything, including, like I said, ECT. And that program when it first came out, using the Apple Watch, which is a dedicated Apple Watch and a dedicated iPhone that goes with it called nightwear. I’ve written a multi part review on YouTube about it that also failed.

Speaker 1
But in the end in the end, my friend has a ton of services he’s going to have measured, respectful, end of life experience, I guess you would call it. But no, I’m going to have to take care of things myself. And it’s tragic, but it’s consistent with the disregard that mental health gets in this country. I’m not sure it’s that much better anywhere else, and I don’t have any suggestions other than fund, but it’s all about money, and so I just don’t especially Intermountain. They’re an incredibly toxic group, incredibly damaging to mental health people.

Speaker 1
And you can read on my website, Thomasfarleyblot.com, what they did to me, how they treated me. I think a real fundamental problem in healthcare is how the line personnel, or the people responding to their Twitter and social accounts have no idea what duty of care means. We are patients first and then customers. This is not a typical industry where you have a customer. No, we’re patients first.

Speaker 1
When you extend the duty of care, if you have to explain what duty of care means to somebody picking up the phone, they need some real training or they need some days in the hospital tending to patients. Once you accept the duty of care, again, it’s just not my dad was a brilliant physician, brilliant doctor, and his colleagues were all well mannered, neat, professional, all of them caring. And they accepted the responsibility for a patient once they took them on. And once a system takes them on, like Inner Mountain or Kaiser or what have you, that duty of care is extended. That umbrella applies to everybody under their name.

Speaker 1
Well, that’s enough for now. I wish I could give you some hope, but there really isn’t any. Not at least for people with my condition. And I think that they would actually prefer a lot of us just to die off so they don’t have to deal with them. I think that’s what’s going on with a lot of the homeless, with mental health problems.

Speaker 1
It’s just get these people off the books and we can go back to treating people for just anxiety and depression and everybody else is on their own.

Speaker 1
But if you know more about the subject, let me know. But there’s no dignity in this, not for people with mental health.

Tags mental health

art business posters editing writing free speech Free Tibet music organizing writing Photoshop

Some of my Designs — One Hour

Post author By thomasfarley01
Post date September 10, 2023
No Comments on Some of my Designs — One Hour

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Greetings.

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My name is Thomas Farley and Aloha
and Mahalo from Wakaki in Honolulu,

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where I am recording this on Saturday,
September 9, 2023.

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It is 05:00 p.m. For this segment.

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I wish you peace.

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I truly wish that you
have peace in your life.

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Wakaki is a great place for surrealists.

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Familiar objects and
familiar objects in unfamiliar situations,

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as this surfboard rider seems
to be surfing on hot lava.

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More on Wauke later.

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Starting this off with a photograph,
but I call these Copper Roses at the

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New Casino in under
construction in Beatty, Nevada.

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It’s going to be a fully developed
vision of steampunk.

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And I think it’s I’ll look up the name and
put it in on the screen for you later.

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But.

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This is photography.

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I’m in between the brush people

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and photographers, so I don’t
try to do this too often.

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But this made and I don’t
have a picture of it.

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A nice work on fabric.

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Goldfield, Nevada a balance of desires.

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I have my four main Goldfield business

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posters balancing on the back of her back.

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It started out as
some sort of rice advertisement and one

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of the dozens of books from Japan and
China that I pick up to use as clip arts.

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This was eventually
about 40 inches tall by 18 inches wide.

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Astrid at Enigmata Esoterica has
one of these prints.

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She quite likes it.

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This is the pleasures of going to the ANW

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in Tonopah, which is about 30 miles
west of Goldfield, Nevada.

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Goldfield, Nevada is between

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Las Vegas and Reno, about the center
and this sort of thing.

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I think if I tried to ask to photograph

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her from the front,
she would just automatically reject, and

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it just seemed like
an opportunity to do something colorful.

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Although I know it may have a
I’m not even gonna try to I’m tired.

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I’ll look up that later.

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Word later.

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Bardot Forever.

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This started out as a very small,

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low res screen grab, probably in the late
1950s of her holding a puppy.

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Bardot was is a great welfare
animal rights activist.

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And this was
the thought balloons, as I’ll call them.

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They were on a template.

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The background is mostly of an office

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building that I took a photograph of in
February of 2022 when I was in San Diego.

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And then that was
hypersaturated with color.

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I made this design into a jacket.

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I might show that later.

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My protest against ubiquitous omnipresent

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Ted Talks, which used to be a really nice
look into the future with some really

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genius people, and now
they’re just book tours.

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There’s a Ted Talk for everything silly,

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stupid, and they really
devalued their brand.

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So I have this as talking about a new

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Ted Talk to
focus on the triumph of American barnyard

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discipline as compared to Soviet
collectivization to achieve the same.

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And

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the rooster Foghorn Leghorn going after
the barnyard dog in his usual fashion.

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The failure of Soviet
collectivization to achieve the same.

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I don’t have a foot fetish,

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but I do like high fashion
and high fashion photography.

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Everything about fashion, even, of course,

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it has trends, but is focused
on making something beautiful.

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Beautiful photography, beautiful products,
beautiful shoes, beautiful clothes,

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and all of that on beautiful women
in beautiful settings.

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You’re just trying to make something

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pretty and wonderful with no apologies or
explanations from some idiot art professor

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trying to tell you that something
ugly is actually beautiful.

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Everyone knows what’s beautiful.

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And you’re not fooling anything,
professor, with your nonsense.

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This is a poster that was done

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in the 1920s by a MercedesBenz
automobile dealer who was trying

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to attract the very rich
time traveler crowd.

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And as you know,
they have a lot of options.

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A lot of choices.

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So he knew that he had the pyramids,

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which is a great draw,
but needed something more.

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So the plan is,

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and was to bring in Cindy Crawford
from her days with MTV’s House of Style.

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So she’ll be signing autographs

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in the market square here in Cairo in July
of 1927 to help

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promote the sale of MercedesBenz
automobiles in the kingdom of Egypt.

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I happen to miss the appearance,

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but I can talk to you about
my relation with Cindy later.

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Here we have a Mile poster redone

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to celebrate His Highness His Holiness I’m
sorry, His Holiness, the Dalai Lama,

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whom Mao certainly would
have had shot on site.

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These political posters are
very easy to rework because

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the composition, the artistry,
is so beautiful.

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To begin with, I

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simply substituted His Holiness’s picture
for Mao, took away Mao’s picture,

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and then bled in the Tibetan
flag into the background.

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The Chinese people support Tibet.

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That is accurate as far as
the lettering and wording goes.

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Free Tibet.

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I gave away the digital rights to.

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This to Freetobet.org in the UK.

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In case they want to use it for merch,
and they were happy to get that.

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Sharon Artlip, the town
mother of goldfield.

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The Gemfield gem claims
Gemfield probably was a site.

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You’ll see it on maps.

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It’s an area to collect colored quartz.

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Calcidony people endlessly discuss

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the differences between Calcidony
and Agate and jasper.

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Basically, it’s all colored quartz sio.

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Two jasper in a thin section
will not have translucency.

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Agate will.

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Agate’s generally
marked by a wavy type of pattern.

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The colors reflect the geology
of the area, what elements are present,

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and Sharon does a great
job managing these claims.

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The rocks are a dollar a pound.

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I can hear him now.

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This is from Life magazine.

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This is the.

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Son of Franklin Delanor Roosevelt running

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for governor of California
after World War II.

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And the crowd this is
a Life magazine article.

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This is triple exposure.

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The Life magazine reporter thought

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that many people in the crowd thought
they heard echoes of Roosevelt SR.

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When Roosevelt Jr.

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Was talking.

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Hence the title.

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I can hear him now.

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Unfortunately, he was oh,

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maybe fortunately,
he was defeated in a total landslide.

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In that governor’s race walking in Ibiza,
but dreaming of goldfield.

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That direction sign in the middle is

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from Silver Peak, which is
in Esmeralda County, where Goldfield is.

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And so she’s walking around
this is from some catalog.

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She’s walking around Ibiza
and dreaming of goldfield.

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The direction sign is, as I said,

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from the center of Silver Peak,
which is a mining town for lithium.

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As we say in Esmeralda County, life,
liberty, and the pursuit of lithium.

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No services, really,

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and even less services in Silver Peak
right now than goldfield.

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But things are never quite the same
over the history of the Great Basin.

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Kate Moss, one of many things I’ve done
around her and about her.

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She seems to be, over the years, decades,
one of the most durable models.

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I understand that she has a reputation

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for just showing up and never asking for
any explanation from any photographer.

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She’ll just pose however you want,

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never complains, never explains herself,
just appears and disappears again.

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She doesn’t have a hammer.
Hold on.

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Copyright on Etsy you can find all sorts

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of images of her for sale,
apparently not going after

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any of those people for reproducing
her work without permission.

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The nine lives of John Charles Fremont.
The Explorer.

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My cat, he’s actually a silver tabby,
but I put him into a buff or brown color

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for this, with a radial blur that makes
it look like they’re tree rings.

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And then I started his history,

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which you can read
when you see the real poster up front.

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But essentially he was born in Catalonia,

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possibly involved in the great tuna train
robbery around 1917,

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because cats have nine lives,
so you have to do a lot of research.

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Much of this was covered up by other
people trying to hide his past.

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But the real problem was the free catnip
movement that he started in the later he

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had to disappear most of his
opposition in Argentina in the 80s.

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It’s a long story.

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Reno poster.

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I’ve watched Reno downtown literally die
away since when I was a young child.

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It was a pretty amazing
main street, the biggest little city

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in the world,
and it was a vibrant downtown with Harris

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and Harold’s, and there’s just
homeless all over the place now.

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It’s a wreck, it’s a mess.

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El Dorado Casino.

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They have an off duty sheriff

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officer at every elevator bank
to keep the criminals out.

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And
the car collection, harris car collection

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is long gone, but they do have
the Bowling Hall of Fame there.

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It’s sad, no posers
in authentic Goldfield, Nevada.

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Of course, if you look like any of these
women in profile like that,

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I think that we would be happy to have
you walking around town posing like that.

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And the background is filled
in with what you may see later.

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The front of my old gallery,
which is called the Stop,

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and the adjoining BNB rentals
are called the Stop in.

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It used to be the Elite trading
Post when the Faucis took it over.

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About eight years ago.

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And then I made it into my gallery

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for a while and simply didn’t get any real
traffic at all, except for the people

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running out of gas or
wanting to use the bathroom.

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So there’s no need
to be in there all day, every day.

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This is one of my very
few political posters.

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Goodness, I don’t know who consumes more

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Chinese baloney, the Biden administration
or my family through social media.

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So this is a life illustration
for deviled ham that’s been converted.

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Tricky part is putting
into texture the dark spaces.

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Just charcoal black doesn’t work,
especially for printing.

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You need to have some sort of texture,
some sort of lightness in an all black.

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Otherwise all black really goes toward

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being a photograph and then you’ll
have to print it out on glossy paper.

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It goes away from being poster art,

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it goes to being photography
with more black.

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Life, liberty and the pursuit of lithium.

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As I said, this is the Esmeralda County.

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Well, it’s my unofficial
slogan for the county.

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And this is a old Soviet Union
political poster.

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But I just simply inverted it, added the
lettering, adjusted the color a bit.

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But it does look like
people off to a salt mine.

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And with lithium,
it’s more like a Brine mine.

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You take the soil of the Great Basin

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and put water in it, make it into a brine,
extract the minerals from there in a place

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that doesn’t look like a mine at all,
it looks like a factory.

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You’ll see steam coming out of
the main vent at Silver Peak.

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You can always have the Dinky Diner

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in Goldfield, Nevada, whereas you
might never have Paris in the rain.

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How true.

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Paris in the rain.

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Somebody that you love
under that umbrella.

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Very difficult, especially to have that
sick looking, very cool looking Pontiac.

[00:17:05.480]
But you can have the Dinky Diner,
of course.

[00:17:10.170]
The car was added, the parking lot added,
the building in the back,

[00:17:14.320]
that’s the hotel,
which actually isn’t in that position,

[00:17:18.250]
but the diner has kind of a poor looking
location, so we could fix that up.

[00:17:24.800]
The map in the background is
an old town map of Goldfield.

[00:17:29.320]
The large one, probably 24 x 32,

[00:17:33.170]
is in the Dinky Diner if you
want to go in and see it.

[00:17:37.600]
The Burgers of Calais.

[00:17:41.170]
Borgers.

[00:17:42.770]
I’m sorry if I can’t pronounce this.

[00:17:47.480]
This is Rodan, of course.

[00:17:53.720]
I don’t know how to pronounce French

[00:17:56.280]
correctly, but these are the six or
seven guys that sacrificed themselves.

[00:18:04.170]
Their town was under siege.

[00:18:06.560]
The whole town was going to be completely

[00:18:09.170]
wrecked and ravished
and destroyed and looted.

[00:18:14.320]
Townspeople killed.

[00:18:15.690]
These six or seven volunteered to

[00:18:19.760]
sacrifice themselves, to be killed
themselves if the town were spared.

[00:18:24.280]
And that is what happened.

[00:18:25.690]
These are these people at the moment.

[00:18:28.320]
They realize that they’re
off to their deaths.

[00:18:34.920]
A sight for sore eyes.

[00:18:37.080]
Goldfield, Nevada.

[00:18:38.230]
Here we have Alfred E.

[00:18:39.790]
Newman and also Flash,

[00:18:42.360]
which is the resident plywood donkey, or

[00:18:50.120]
another parody, just copyright.

[00:18:54.690]
I’m not sure I should talk about this,

[00:18:57.080]
but Mad Magazine is famous for well,
if you do an original work,

[00:19:02.250]
you can mock social commentary, do
anything you want on any public figure.

[00:19:08.040]
That’s what editorial
cartoons do every single day.

[00:19:13.320]
Recognizable people Mad Magazine would,

[00:19:16.930]
and they’re still in business,
would parody things like Star Wars just

[00:19:21.750]
by changing the z and changing
the war s making into a z.

[00:19:30.120]
Great beauty suggests the invisible
presence of the gods.

[00:19:35.490]
This is Giselle italian edition of Vogue.

[00:19:40.080]
After she broke up with Tom Brady and

[00:19:46.000]
I had heard that she had
appeared in this issue.

[00:19:50.730]
I just didn’t know that they devoted

[00:19:54.250]
probably twelve full pages
to her in different outfits.

[00:20:00.410]
It was just a remarkable issue.

[00:20:05.400]
Every one of those ten or twelve pages had
her in a different costume,

[00:20:08.970]
with a different look, and just still
an incredible top model.

[00:20:17.800]
Great beauty suggests
the invisible presence of the god.

[00:20:22.450]
This is the only thing
I’ve done on my condition.

[00:20:27.170]
Looks like I don’t have
the lettering here.

[00:20:29.600]
Interesting.

[00:20:32.400]
It’s more about nightlife in goldfield,

[00:20:36.210]
but that’s the way it’s been for
all the cities I’ve gone to.

[00:20:40.960]
Just two in the morning,

[00:20:42.120]
three in the morning,
in the darkest hours of the soul,

[00:20:47.170]
it is always 02:00 in the morning,
or three, according to Elliot.

[00:20:51.490]
He’s very true.
Got the cat, the sleeping medicine

[00:20:55.080]
that doesn’t work,
the clock that never moves any faster,

[00:21:02.680]
the nightmares that are always coming

[00:21:10.960]
and always reappearing.

[00:21:17.040]
Flowers at Rayleigh’s
supermarket tona Pot, Nevada.

[00:21:20.690]
This is through.

[00:21:23.600]
A program called Adobe Express.

[00:21:29.690]
You can get the app for your iPad.

[00:21:32.840]
It’s interesting how this application,
it’s incredibly crazy good on the iPad.

[00:21:38.600]
The version of it Photoshop Express
for the iPhone is much more limited.

[00:21:44.840]
The version for doing collages

[00:21:47.170]
on the desktop using Photoshop Express
is almost crippleware.

[00:21:51.920]
It’s just practically no good.

[00:21:53.360]
I don’t understand the variations
between the platforms,

[00:21:58.250]
but this is an easy peasy
with Photoshop Express

[00:22:04.800]
just using flowers that you walk into
and find at almost any grocery store.

[00:22:11.840]
Elysium Fields Tobacco more than
a Pipe Dream I caught JCF

[00:22:18.490]
smoking some catnip and I asked him where
he got it from, and apparently

[00:22:23.890]
he had been on the sly fronting or
promoting Elysium Fields Tobacco

[00:22:29.530]
in Goldfield on his own
without any authorization.

[00:22:33.890]
This is him generated by AI.

[00:22:37.170]
I fed or gave the service 20 photographs

[00:22:40.050]
of Fremont, and they turned around
and gave me 50 different variations.

[00:22:44.840]
This is one of them.
The clip art is mine of the woman

[00:22:47.690]
with the pipe and colorized that
got the correct font

[00:22:55.360]
and the lettering and the writing
is correct for Elysium Fields.

[00:22:59.570]
But we are very disappointed in JCF.

[00:23:01.770]
He is on the pipe, as he says,
on the pipe, off the pipe.

[00:23:06.770]
It’s all about the pipe.

[00:23:08.450]
Operation Doomtown.

[00:23:09.840]
This is carried out in the early 1950s
at the nearby Nevada Test Site where they

[00:23:18.450]
for a long time did above
ground nuclear testing.

[00:23:21.320]
This was a truly crazy
operation in the 1950s.

[00:23:25.400]
They did a bunch of tests on what would

[00:23:26.970]
happen to buildings if they
exposed them to a nuclear blast.

[00:23:31.210]
Well, I think we could tell them.

[00:23:36.800]
One of the things that I don’t see here is

[00:23:39.690]
in the original poster I have,
the Nevada Test Site does not want you.

[00:23:45.690]
It is closed.

[00:23:46.970]
Believe me, it is closed.

[00:23:49.450]
This is Area 51 is in there.

[00:23:52.120]
That’s about 35 miles from Goldfield.

[00:23:54.170]
But there are a lot of people
that do work out on the test site.

[00:23:57.690]
They’re bust in usually and it’s secure.

[00:24:05.650]
They’ll find you at the fence
if you get even close.

[00:24:10.450]
This is Kokomi.

[00:24:12.770]
She’s a flutist,

[00:24:18.530]
a young woman, classical flute artist and
also fashion model, as you can see here.

[00:24:25.970]
Although I don’t think she’s quite
tall enough for high fashion.

[00:24:29.490]
But this would be my reimagining
of a Vogue cover, magazine cover.

[00:24:35.250]
Ovals aren’t done much.

[00:24:37.450]
I really like them,
but you don’t see them anymore.

[00:24:40.410]
So this is how there is some writing.

[00:24:42.570]
It sideways,
but that’s artistic expression.

[00:24:57.360]
This is a moschino ad.

[00:25:00.650]
Perhaps an L.

[00:25:02.290]
I doubt it was in vogue.

[00:25:05.290]
Note these are two different
positions for the model.

[00:25:11.210]
It was a two page spread.

[00:25:13.840]
You can see the model that I did a find
edges filter on in the background.

[00:25:21.530]
Has her arm more akimbo.

[00:25:25.360]
So I kept the original.

[00:25:27.080]
I highlighted the edges on the original,
which you can see on the left.

[00:25:30.810]
And then totally did a fine edges

[00:25:33.970]
for the second image
and then did this sort of double exposure

[00:25:39.360]
when in fact, they are
two different shots.

[00:25:51.360]
This is at the International Car Forest
of the last church in Goldfield, Nevada.

[00:25:58.290]
It’s a thing.

[00:25:59.770]
Lots of cars buried into
the soil of the Great Basin.

[00:26:06.890]
This profile is of Richard.

[00:26:09.210]
He is the wife of Astrid.

[00:26:12.510]
They own Enigmata esoterica
of which I’ve done a poster for them.

[00:26:17.970]
This is his silhouette.

[00:26:19.450]
I’m not sure the story behind it.

[00:26:25.320]
And I’m not showing the original
photograph, but basically

[00:26:30.450]
completely in black and white and some
mix of colors on the graffiti.

[00:26:47.760]
This is a very poor I took a photograph.

[00:26:53.360]
All the images you’re now seeing are
not from the original digital files.

[00:26:57.650]
They are photographs taken of printouts.

[00:26:59.930]
That’s what I have here at the time.

[00:27:01.770]
The color correction here
is very poor, very blotchy.

[00:27:06.320]
This was difficult because
of the perspective.

[00:27:09.250]
I couldn’t figure out what
I was doing incorrectly.

[00:27:12.890]
Very difficult.

[00:27:14.210]
Of course, the car multiple
exposures of the same car.

[00:27:18.840]
The car in the background

[00:27:22.920]
has to be in proportion
to the cars in front.

[00:27:26.290]
The cars in front have a wider look.

[00:27:28.650]
It’s a perspective challenge and
I’m not sure that I really got it.

[00:27:41.040]
This is a portal looking window at the
Administration center on Treasure Island.

[00:27:50.530]
In San Francisco Bay.

[00:27:53.210]
The administration building
was owned by the Navy.

[00:27:57.730]
It’s now in private hands.

[00:27:59.210]
This treasure island has been turned

[00:28:01.170]
into some sort of high tech center
and low cost housing project.

[00:28:07.890]
Anyway, this club apparently
opens on the weekend.

[00:28:10.840]
And you can see on the left is

[00:28:12.320]
the original photograph
and how easily this was

[00:28:18.050]
put in with several different
filters and framed.

[00:28:22.600]
Devised this.

[00:28:23.680]
It looks like a frame,

[00:28:24.790]
but devised it digitally to make
it more painterly looking.

[00:28:36.680]
From Jubilate agno.

[00:28:41.400]
This is a very large poster
gentleman named Scott.

[00:28:49.690]
I’m not sure if I can read this.

[00:28:54.440]
I have to look up his name.

[00:29:00.280]
Even with my reading glasses.

[00:29:01.930]
I’m not sure I can read
this on the screen.

[00:29:04.890]
But the best cat poem ever written,
if you have a chance to look it up.

[00:29:14.570]
This is just a segment from a much,

[00:29:16.770]
much longer epic poem that Scott did
hundreds of years ago, and still the best.

[00:29:29.240]
I should have mentioned that the cats

[00:29:31.110]
that you saw on the left were AI
generated from the previous discussion.

[00:29:35.690]
I mentioned the Cat Gallery in Chicago.

[00:29:39.650]
Those are variations,
AI variations of our leader,

[00:29:43.290]
John Charles Fremont, the explorer,
seen here in fully AI.

[00:29:48.410]
That is, artificially intelligence
generated in the background.

[00:29:54.570]
Now I put Elysium fields.

[00:29:57.120]
That’s correct.

[00:29:59.290]
I had a person,
a Chinese gentleman, produce that.

[00:30:05.250]
And
the story goes that I found him smoking

[00:30:11.600]
catnip and then later found out he was
being sponsored by Elysium Fields.

[00:30:16.080]
And they’re up to no good.

[00:30:18.520]
The lady there with the hookah

[00:30:19.990]
with the pipe is like a 1920s
photograph that I colorized.

[00:30:26.360]
This is probably from l
French the the French edition.

[00:30:34.410]
One month.

[00:30:35.360]
Interesting how they have some really
women’s magazine.

[00:30:41.810]
Obviously women’s magazine.

[00:30:43.530]
And yet the pictures inside,
especially for this photo shoot,

[00:30:47.600]
were far more,
I think women would say,

[00:30:51.240]
in the United States,
if they were looking at Sports Illustrated

[00:30:54.110]
swimsuit issue, they would
say they were exploitive.

[00:30:57.010]
Much more, quote unquote,
exploitive than Si.

[00:31:01.360]
But obviously the French don’t have

[00:31:04.770]
a problem with beautiful women
and maybe women as art,

[00:31:11.890]
because the layout is very,
I shall say, explicit, but beautiful.

[00:31:17.410]
Maybe we just can’t tolerate
that here in the States.

[00:31:21.050]
But speaking of France, this is one of a
number of things, paint by the numbers.

[00:31:29.570]
If you see this in person,

[00:31:31.450]
this is a rarely popular piece where I
took a standard paint by the numbers

[00:31:37.930]
illustration and then just pasted,
blended in color from all over.

[00:31:43.810]
Disregarding the lines.

[00:31:45.290]
I have something of myself.

[00:31:48.210]
Portrait in the easel on the right,

[00:31:51.730]
and Bianca Salming is
on the left of my portrait.

[00:31:57.010]
She’s a Swedish athlete.

[00:31:58.630]
I’m kind of stalking from a distance.

[00:32:02.080]
We used to call it a secret admirer.

[00:32:04.050]
I guess that term is
no longer in currency.

[00:32:07.600]
But, yeah, this is very well received.

[00:32:32.280]
Here’s a look at some of the landscape
orientation images that I’ve done.

[00:32:39.570]
This is a cute couple.

[00:32:41.730]
They actually fell off this boat for me.

[00:32:46.120]
But I was unable to capture that moment.

[00:32:51.890]
This is off of wakaki.

[00:32:54.650]
The front edge of that surfboard
actually was missing.

[00:32:59.810]
I used AI to put the oh,

[00:33:05.360]
I would say 20% of the board created.

[00:33:10.360]
AI created the tip of that board.

[00:33:12.320]
Very complex to do by hand
that hemispherical shape.

[00:33:17.410]
Experimenting with some textures.

[00:33:20.210]
This is a design that hasn’t gone to
completion.

[00:33:27.640]
The white foam is blown out.

[00:33:29.320]
There’s no real texture in it.

[00:33:30.770]
Very hard to get that correct.

[00:33:34.050]
Here is a find edges filter.

[00:33:40.050]
And then I laid in with
the original photograph.

[00:33:44.690]
A room with a view.

[00:33:47.050]
This is from the Hyatt Regency
Wauke Beach Resort, 19th floor.

[00:33:52.250]
Took the original photograph and then laid
in cut in the green belt, essentially.

[00:33:59.570]
It’s kind of a nice contrast.

[00:34:02.890]
This is just done at the airport.

[00:34:04.570]
A mix of the new plane and the old black
and white photograph of the old field.

[00:34:13.240]
And this is something I did
at the Hilton in Davis.

[00:34:19.010]
Kind of looks like
an architectural rendering.

[00:34:22.440]
They were pleased to get it.

[00:34:23.720]
I gave them a frame 16 x 20 of this.

[00:34:28.440]
And there’s another place in Davis.

[00:34:33.450]
The Varsity Theater.

[00:34:35.130]
I did one quick doodle.

[00:34:37.930]
Davis, California.

[00:34:39.720]
All the hallmarks of a dangerously
innocent culture.

[00:34:45.050]
And, yeah, it needs something
up in the upper left.

[00:34:49.090]
Maybe a happy moon or some such.

[00:34:53.520]
So this image is incomplete.

[00:34:57.810]
I have a much more finished
one in the gallery.

[00:35:00.530]
This is my rejection of the Ted Talks,
which are now just a bookselling tour.

[00:35:07.240]
They go into such obscure
subject now subject.

[00:35:10.650]
So this is a new Ted Talk to focus
on the triumph of American barnyard

[00:35:15.810]
discipline and the failure of Soviet
collectivization to achieve the same.

[00:35:22.200]
This is a number of things I did
kind of envisioning.

[00:35:31.290]
Heaven’s waiting room where
you’re hoping for admittance.

[00:35:35.680]
You can see Biden there in the center,

[00:35:37.610]
just still watching over your life,
trying to control you.

[00:35:42.050]
This is Claudia Schiffer.

[00:35:43.530]
Still modeling well into her 40s.
Good for her.

[00:35:47.200]
One of the most beautiful
women who have ever lived.

[00:35:51.450]
This is a well received montage.

[00:35:55.050]
Possibly the most complex
photo montage I’ve done.

[00:35:58.610]
Notable is my cat with this thousand
mile stare in the driver’s seat.

[00:36:04.770]
And there’s an image of a woman
off of an old Cars record album.

[00:36:11.330]
Some clip art.
The American flag woven into everything.

[00:36:15.760]
This took some time.

[00:36:18.160]
This is a Kylie Jenner
comparison between the pink of the 50s or

[00:36:25.770]
perhaps today because it’s
going to soft pastels today.

[00:36:29.930]
And the hot pink of the this
is the Fouts house.

[00:36:35.850]
This is one variation.

[00:36:37.410]
I like the one with my tarot
card border better.

[00:36:40.610]
This was an earlier attempt.

[00:36:42.050]
This is Jerry Fouts.

[00:36:44.130]
This is my first private commission.

[00:36:46.530]
And this was photograph
and then posterized.

[00:36:50.720]
There’s a woman in the clouds.

[00:36:53.810]
There’s a lot of details here.

[00:36:55.880]
About two and a half days to get this

[00:36:57.680]
mount columbia
wasn’t scaled until the mid 60s because

[00:37:02.290]
of yeti lot of abominable
snowman there goldfield.

[00:37:07.160]
Yeti they have an attitude.

[00:37:08.610]
Apparently the first time it was
climbed was in the mid sixty s.

[00:37:12.850]
A group of hippies under acid.

[00:37:14.850]
Somehow they were able to climb up

[00:37:17.200]
Columbia and communicate with them
under the influence and what else?

[00:37:22.720]
So this is the hood of a car
at the International Car Force.

[00:37:26.490]
The last church, Goldfield, Nevada,
recently sold eight by ten of this.

[00:37:32.290]
And then Goldfield
and Anime and Magna Magma.

[00:37:37.370]
I still can’t.
Magma magna.

[00:37:40.240]
I still don’t get it.

[00:37:41.450]
And these young girls are questioning

[00:37:44.330]
Goldfield as well as I
question this whole art form.

[00:37:50.680]
What’s seen next?

[00:37:51.810]
Here is a poster I did
for the Johnstons in Perrump.

[00:37:56.650]
It was originally intended to highlight

[00:38:01.130]
their RV, but it turned
out to be a memory board.

[00:38:04.570]
In the driver’s and passenger side window

[00:38:07.090]
I have a reflection of their dog
that used to ride up in that position.

[00:38:11.890]
Now he’s gone.

[00:38:13.450]
His name was Buddy, but he’s now
in their vehicle forever.

[00:38:18.650]
This is a very complex montage.

[00:38:20.600]
You’d have to really look at it in person.

[00:38:22.160]
Each of these stamps, each of these
people are having personal problems.

[00:38:26.010]
Nothing to wear in white in Rhodesia.

[00:38:28.680]
Another woman is missing her peloton.

[00:38:31.570]
Another person suffering
from ANWI and malaise.

[00:38:35.810]
Another one of Alicia Newman.

[00:38:37.810]
Really need the original to show you

[00:38:40.650]
what’s going on with think this was a fine
edge filter and then inverted the image.

[00:38:48.240]
These are just some of the ones that I

[00:38:50.970]
have done in landscape
rather than portrait.

[00:39:28.040]
Well, this one deserves a

[00:39:31.650]
lot more attention perhaps than
I can give it here in a minute.

[00:39:36.970]
It started out as a low res green grab.

[00:39:39.970]
You can see in the lower left
bardot holding a puppy.

[00:39:44.410]
She’s always been a great
animal welfare activist.

[00:39:51.010]
And this was converted this to color.

[00:39:54.160]
Very, very difficult to get her
skin tone down and blonde hair.

[00:39:59.090]
The background is actually
a building in San Diego.

[00:40:02.330]
I.

[00:40:04.640]
Took some photographs of for a shoot I
was doing for In Focus, my old employer.

[00:40:11.570]
And then the whole thing
colorized up and gone crazy.

[00:40:19.640]
This was fairly unretouched
photograph in a fashion magazine.

[00:40:26.960]
And it’s just her against a wall.

[00:40:33.680]
I know they’re trying to set this

[00:40:36.160]
tough girl attitude, but I thought I could
make it into something more interesting.

[00:40:41.770]
This is the Japanese flag.

[00:40:46.530]
Portions of it in the rising sun motif.
In the background.

[00:40:52.720]
A lot of black, red.

[00:40:55.010]
That’s a dependable combination.

[00:40:58.530]
I’m not even sure if she is Japanese.

[00:41:03.880]
Don’t want to guess at that,
but still I think it works.

[00:41:14.560]
Operation Doomtown, early 1950s.

[00:41:19.450]
For some reason this is very near

[00:41:21.610]
Goldfield, Nevada,
where I lived early 50s.

[00:41:26.670]
They were experimenting
with nuclear weapons.

[00:41:29.850]
Above ground testing.

[00:41:31.770]
Set up an entire house to see what
a nuclear bomb would do to a house.

[00:41:36.850]
And yeah, you can guess what happened.

[00:41:42.160]
But this is really an incomplete version.

[00:41:45.520]
I’m not sure where the original is.

[00:41:47.090]
Where I have the Nevada test site does not

[00:41:50.050]
welcome you at the bottom
and there’s a red border.

[00:41:54.010]
This one’s not showing it.

[00:41:55.650]
So this is an incomplete version.

[00:41:58.530]
And it’s big, so that you
can read all of the text.

[00:42:02.330]
Can’t do that here.

[00:42:09.160]
This is the one poster
I did on my condition.

[00:42:14.760]
There’s John Charles Fremont
in the right hand corner.

[00:42:22.880]
But I don’t want people
to feel sorry for me.

[00:42:29.530]
But this is just
even here in Waka Key, this hotel has

[00:42:39.840]
1100 rooms, thousands of employees,
thousands of guests.

[00:42:43.850]
I’m the only one,

[00:42:46.130]
literally the only person walking
around at 230 in the morning.

[00:42:50.240]
Three, four o’clock.

[00:42:51.720]
I am.

[00:42:53.200]
It with me.

[00:42:55.650]
Just me and my so it goes.

[00:43:05.320]
Here’s Jay Law.

[00:43:06.720]
Another color photograph
trying to put into a sketch type effect.

[00:43:15.970]
I don’t use Actions,
which you may have heard of.

[00:43:18.430]
Actions are little tiny programs
that you can buy to do different things.

[00:43:24.720]
What they do is a little program that runs
in Photoshop that may do 1520 operations,

[00:43:30.090]
enlarge, reduce focus filters,
blah, blah, blah, blah.

[00:43:35.610]
This isn’t doing that.

[00:43:38.050]
To get the sketch effect, I’m using
HDR Toning, which is not an action.

[00:43:44.050]
And then the color half
Toning is another filter.

[00:43:47.730]
But when you’re not using Actions, you’re
not going to look like everybody else.

[00:43:53.930]
You’re going to have your own look.

[00:43:59.520]
This is Ron Mathaney

[00:44:00.830]
of Diamondfield Gulch, which is about
9 miles outside of Goldfield, Nevada.

[00:44:05.210]
Diamondfield Gulch was
a real small mining town.

[00:44:10.960]
He has an event center out there.

[00:44:15.440]
He’s an amazing guy.

[00:44:17.610]
Very conversational.

[00:44:18.970]
Heavy equipment operator in great demand

[00:44:21.450]
all over the area for his
expertise with heavy equipment.

[00:44:25.650]
The event center is rented out.

[00:44:28.130]
It’s amazing.

[00:44:30.530]
This is the unretouched photographed here.

[00:44:33.330]
And you’ll see what I did with it.

[00:44:37.160]
He wasn’t smiling,

[00:44:38.730]
but I got him into that doorway
to at least frame him and his shot.

[00:44:43.370]
He later said that he looks like
a homeless person, but he smiles

[00:44:50.650]
when he says that because his kids
apparently really like the poster.

[00:44:54.890]
And here he is.

[00:44:57.130]
You’ll note that he’s smiling here.

[00:45:03.840]
That’s courtesy of Photoshop
neural filters.

[00:45:09.050]
If you’re very careful,

[00:45:11.090]
you can tweak something of a presentable

[00:45:16.240]
smile, but you have to be really careful.

[00:45:21.810]
They’re so good, you can even get
Megan Fox to smile a bit.

[00:45:28.850]
You can’t stop her from drinking blood,
but you can possibly tweak out a little

[00:45:35.930]
smile, although on her it
looks unnatural and weird.

[00:45:50.800]
This is another very poorly rendered.

[00:45:54.010]
Again, what you’re seeing here
are photographs of prints.

[00:46:00.410]
They’re not the original digital files.

[00:46:06.650]
So the loss of resolution,
color, everything is just gone.

[00:46:11.770]
But I just don’t have time to put
together I don’t have time to.

[00:46:15.030]
Find all these files and put them.

[00:46:16.870]
Into a video format like this.

[00:46:20.770]
But this is at the a w and Tonapa.

[00:46:27.320]
Yeah.
Getting permission to take a photograph.

[00:46:31.050]
On the front these days is very,

[00:46:34.370]
well, difficult, and you’re
going to look like a creep.

[00:46:39.090]
So I guess it’s better just to be
a creep from the other way around.

[00:46:45.680]
Here’s more myth building

[00:46:46.850]
for John Charles Fremont,
the explorer likening him

[00:46:50.690]
to Stephen Seagal, who we really
don’t know where he got his training.

[00:46:57.650]
He just sort of appeared on the scene,
sort of like JCF.

[00:47:04.370]
And this is a old
karate or kung fu magazine.

[00:47:11.890]
And then this photo montage of him.

[00:47:16.600]
About how everybody owes JCF a debt.

[00:47:21.430]
Of gratitude for his martial arts skills
and influence far more than Bruce Lee.

[00:47:30.240]
This poster simply acknowledges that debt.

[00:47:40.360]
And this one is super complicated.

[00:47:42.650]
As far as the subject matter, Chandra Voz,
not sure I’m pronouncing that correctly,

[00:47:47.670]
he was a strong man of India
compared to Gandhi.

[00:47:52.760]
Gandhi, well, big subject, but Chandra.

[00:48:02.240]
He.

[00:48:02.590]
Was going to wrest power away
from the British.

[00:48:06.970]
He was not going to wait until they got
around to granting freedom for India.

[00:48:14.090]
He was going to take it.

[00:48:15.530]
And
it’s only because of the British

[00:48:20.210]
eventually being civilized
people that they let it go.

[00:48:23.050]
This peaceful, nonviolent stuff,

[00:48:25.360]
it’s only allowable,
it’s only possible when there’s

[00:48:27.890]
a government that you’re dealing
with that is willing to talk,

[00:48:32.770]
even with mountbatten’s mistakes
and cruelty at times.

[00:48:38.450]
The British government was
a civilized government.

[00:48:42.130]
This is about the hypnotizing power
of cigarettes and advertising.

[00:48:48.610]
This is advertisement from Life magazine.

[00:48:54.640]
All of the people.

[00:48:56.570]
This is multiple exposure, of course,
but there are probably

[00:49:01.450]
15 or 20 individual celebrities
and other personalities all endorsing

[00:49:08.570]
Camel cigarettes
and just spiraling into addiction.

[00:49:19.640]
And of course, not as much was.

[00:49:21.890]
Known then, but.

[00:49:49.400]
My ode to Colonel Sanders.

[00:49:54.370]
Yeah, chicken.

[00:49:56.050]
Got chicken if you want it.

[00:49:58.290]
Did I say chicken?

[00:50:01.090]
What part of chicken
do you not understand?

[00:50:06.840]
If you want chicken, you talk to me.

[00:50:10.610]
Got chicken.

[00:50:12.010]
Chicken all day, chicken all night.

[00:50:14.170]
It’s all about the chicken.

[00:50:17.130]
Did you know that I am a Kentucky Colonel?

[00:50:20.330]
All of us colonels.

[00:50:22.010]
Like our chicken gonna form a goddamn
army full of chicken eaters.

[00:50:27.410]
You’ll see, I was thinking about chicken

[00:50:30.850]
the other day, and I got see,
I got this thing about chicken.

[00:50:38.530]
Anyway, it goes on and on.

[00:50:44.160]
And this is about the decision making

[00:50:46.930]
process, about if you’re considering
buying a Thomas Farley original design.

[00:50:53.930]
So you have a lot of chicken.

[00:50:56.490]
A lot of chicken, yeah, a lot of choices.

[00:50:59.930]
None of them hear about chicken.

[00:51:01.770]
You can go back to the previous one.

[00:51:04.930]
Basically, no matter how you work this,

[00:51:07.690]
you’re going to wind up whether
you can afford it or not.

[00:51:13.170]
So even if you’re
making payments on a second girlfriend or

[00:51:19.170]
a card that doesn’t actually run,
this chart will point you to the way that

[00:51:27.090]
buying a Thomas Farley original is
the best choice each and every time.

[00:51:32.490]
Art rules and bill collector’s drool.

[00:51:39.400]
This is a lot more green than

[00:51:41.890]
the original, although I like the top
dark green band and the lower green,

[00:51:49.330]
darker green band here
more than the original.

[00:51:52.550]
This was from some

[00:52:00.880]
Italian fashion magazine.

[00:52:04.730]
And it’s part of what you can’t see.

[00:52:06.930]
Which was to print out a print on,

[00:52:16.170]
put it in a frame without
glass or an acrylic shield.

[00:52:21.170]
So you have a fairly nice wood frame.

[00:52:23.930]
But this would just be heavy Bond paper.

[00:52:27.450]
And this came out really well.

[00:52:34.880]
This work isn’t my own.

[00:52:37.170]
It was in a old Nevada Highways magazine.

[00:52:41.650]
Uncredited author.

[00:52:42.830]
I have a lot more about this at my
website thomasfarleyblog.com

[00:52:50.770]
and my Adobe Portfolio site,
which I’ll link somewhere.

[00:52:58.050]
This was rescuing these wonderful images.

[00:53:02.210]
Scanning them and then putting them online
for anybody to use.

[00:53:06.930]
This is the low rise Las Vegas strip
before everything went totally crazy.

[00:53:15.440]
Again.
Just very pure line art.

[00:53:17.570]
A lot of zipotone
which was used for shading.

[00:53:22.490]
One artist thinks that a lot of it was
done actually in pointillism style.

[00:53:26.810]
But I’m not buying it.

[00:53:29.770]
This was round about Easter.

[00:53:33.850]
I did two posters celebrating
Rio or Carnival.

[00:53:42.920]
And this image was
another stock photo taken

[00:53:51.890]
from Depositphotos.com. But then
it was natural skin tone, natural color.

[00:54:01.930]
Very confused street background.

[00:54:05.690]
And I eliminated the street background,
added the lettering.

[00:54:12.730]
The oval the curve of the oval cropped.

[00:54:16.350]
It just substantive change.

[00:54:20.450]
That’s for sure.

[00:54:21.490]
This is probably 18 x 24.

[00:54:25.120]
This was a design that I might

[00:54:31.570]
have done for a record album.

[00:54:37.640]
This.

[00:54:41.080]
The record is called I Like Them Girls.
That’s it.

[00:54:44.530]
That’s all the words in the song.

[00:54:46.690]
It’s sort of an electronic
dance music anthem done by Black Vneck.

[00:54:54.890]
And just this tattler.

[00:55:00.810]
The Russian edition
with that woman on the COVID And this

[00:55:05.930]
spiral that looks like a cleft note is one
of the few things I’ve done with Curves.

[00:55:11.450]
This is done in freeform,
which is Apple’s new drawing tool.

[00:55:18.760]
This is my sort of tribute to Waco.

[00:55:30.960]
It’s just a tragedy.

[00:55:36.480]
I don’t expect rationality of anyone

[00:55:41.200]
like him or any religious zealot.

[00:55:48.120]
But I do expect rationality

[00:55:50.570]
from the United States government when it
has a gun in its hand and the power

[00:55:56.130]
to arrest you and even
kill you if necessary.

[00:55:59.130]
I expect total rationality
from a weaponized government.

[00:56:03.770]
And there was none there at Waco.

[00:56:08.370]
Not during the process.

[00:56:10.410]
Not cover up was Bungled total mess.

[00:56:15.290]
And here’s Fomke.
Johansson.

[00:56:18.570]
She was a Bond girl in one of the movies.

[00:56:24.410]
And this was a gentleman’s quarterly
magazine.

[00:56:32.480]
I’m showing the illustration
for Funny Girl because

[00:56:36.050]
what you’ll see is how the next
slide is how I would have

[00:56:44.200]
one possibility is how I would present
this poster instead of her complete image.

[00:56:57.320]
I couldn’t even remember
what I was channeling.

[00:57:00.210]
But it must have been
the Funny Girl poster.

[00:57:03.770]
And you’ll see how I would have treated
the opening of this article otherwise.

[00:57:09.850]
Just funky very much.

[00:57:13.120]
I think this works.

[00:57:14.450]
But.

[00:57:17.360]
These major design houses aren’t
going to hire me, that’s for sure.

[00:57:22.960]
And I just started graphic design

[00:57:25.650]
about two years ago, but there was never
chance of anything ever going into this.

[00:57:31.240]
When I was younger,

[00:57:32.930]
I have a severe learning disability,
so I can’t even pass algebra.

[00:57:38.050]
So I went to work with my hands.

[00:57:40.450]
And all of this design equipment would

[00:57:42.570]
have been in the province of workstations
and other equipment only available

[00:57:46.490]
at universities or very
expensive trade schools.

[00:57:50.490]
So that was never going to happen.

[00:57:53.200]
They would have never let somebody do

[00:57:54.970]
layout for Vogue or L without a degree
and without heavy industry training.

[00:58:04.000]
The International Car Forest

[00:58:06.530]
of the Last Church and Han Solo’s
strange explanation.

[00:58:14.450]
They asked him about whether the
Force was real, and he replied instead.

[00:58:21.490]
He must have been really tired or drunk

[00:58:24.130]
about how
he didn’t think the international

[00:58:28.490]
Car Forest of the Last Church was
real either, until he saw it.

[00:58:32.530]
And then

[00:58:34.760]
he saw the tiny town of goldfield and cars
planted in the desert and

[00:58:42.240]
tells the questioner who remains confused
to this day about how it’s true.

[00:58:47.690]
All of it.

[00:58:49.930]
Cars in the desert.

[00:58:52.570]
It’s all true.

[00:58:58.680]
Second poster for Enek Mata esoterica.

[00:59:01.520]
The first didn’t have this title bar

[00:59:03.330]
at the bottom, and that figure
is from a famous painting.

[00:59:10.530]
I can’t recall the artist.

[00:59:13.930]
I think one of those Dutch masters,
I think it’s called The Ambassadors.

[00:59:19.730]
There’s two of those guys,
and one of them now is in the title bar.

[00:59:29.360]
I will look up
a little more detail added this time,

[00:59:36.120]
although I did lose some of the desirable
color and the foreground.

[00:59:43.240]
That sparkly blue I was going for is
a little reduced in this version.

[00:59:54.000]
And Goldfield, Nevada.

[00:59:57.210]
Many things to many people,
perhaps too never.

[01:00:07.290]
I think I never printed this out in poster
form anything bigger than eight by twelve.

[01:00:17.090]
It has so many elements going on.

[01:00:20.610]
I think it may work a little bit,
but it doesn’t work that well.

[01:00:29.170]
I do like the rabbit and woman
in the upper right I’m not sure about.

[01:00:36.490]
Middle center would be Bianca Salming.

[01:00:40.570]
Others I lose track of.

[01:00:46.800]
And this one here is Bauhaus style.

[01:00:53.130]
BA house.

[01:00:54.450]
This is much nicer in person.

[01:00:56.010]
This is a really nice, warm set of colors.

[01:01:00.240]
Kate Moss life as art.

[01:01:02.240]
I’ve also done a conceptual video
with this, where today,

[01:01:06.570]
if you’re on Etsy or some other seller,
you can have your artwork displayed

[01:01:10.690]
on these virtual walls
in these virtual buildings.

[01:01:13.720]
So I have this video that’s kind of neat

[01:01:15.690]
about going from one room to another
in these buildings that don’t exist.

[01:01:20.530]
And on every wall there’s a poster
of her in that bathtub.

[01:01:28.330]
I think she’s reading a book
on how to help your man succeed.

[01:01:35.640]
But of course, what else would she be?

[01:01:41.280]
And we have here
not an art exhibition, but an Art T.

[01:01:49.370]
Johnson exhibition, if you remember Lapin,
which I’m sure you don’t.

[01:01:56.170]
Artie Johnson was, let’s see,
what Rank was he perhaps a colonel.

[01:02:04.330]
He would dress up in a Nazi uniform, and

[01:02:08.050]
if somebody said something
silly, he would come out.

[01:02:11.090]
And his tagline was very interesting.

[01:02:14.450]
So you can see here,

[01:02:16.050]
this is a template done in Adobe Express
where I originally printed it out.

[01:02:23.730]
And I had forgotten about his tagline.

[01:02:28.080]
So that, of course, makes the poster to
people that recognize it or remember it.

[01:02:34.170]
Very interesting at Goldfield.

[01:02:38.970]
This is sort of a one off.

[01:02:41.490]
Not much to report.

[01:02:43.240]
It’s a magazine cover.

[01:02:46.930]
People freak out about this.

[01:02:48.410]
Chicks with guns is a thing that’s true,
but this is actually paintball guns.

[01:02:55.650]
I had a couple of posters

[01:02:59.730]
like this, but I kept them in the back
room because people are ignorant

[01:03:05.570]
and they see what they want to see,
and they will make no effort to

[01:03:10.530]
distinguish good from the bad as
long as they can be frightened.

[01:03:15.610]
They don’t explore their fears.

[01:03:17.370]
They just.

[01:03:20.640]
Buy into what the media says.

[01:03:22.930]
So
it’s sad, but people are

[01:03:30.330]
generally stupid and ignorant and don’t
want to learn more, just paintball guns.

[01:03:37.490]
And this is about the featureless maps

[01:03:39.770]
that the United States Geological Survey
are producing now.

[01:03:45.730]
They’re no good for anybody
except land planners.

[01:03:48.890]
They’re not any good for anybody trying to
navigate across the ground.

[01:03:54.770]
Absolutely impossible these days.

[01:03:59.080]
They stopped sending their own people out

[01:04:01.870]
in the field due to cost cutting,
I think, years ago, 1520 years ago.

[01:04:07.010]
And ever since then,

[01:04:08.810]
all the windmills and water tanks and

[01:04:15.600]
old schoolyards are just been obliterated.

[01:04:19.130]
They’re just literally blank.

[01:04:20.890]
And I give examples about how all of our

[01:04:23.930]
history disappeared when they
made this new map of Tonopah.

[01:04:28.530]
And yet those maps were the most popular

[01:04:30.650]
thing that they did, and they just
destroyed it, continued to destroy them.

[01:04:36.370]
Secret British artist colony revealed.

[01:04:39.330]
And this is about Tristan Deck Goldfield

[01:04:42.810]
in the middle of the Atlantic,
where you get sent if you criticize

[01:04:47.730]
the Queen and are forced to work
on artistic endeavors like

[01:04:54.810]
painting her corgis or racehorses,
but with very limited tools.

[01:05:04.800]
Not enough paint, never enough
paint, not enough canvas.

[01:05:11.320]
But it’s another one of these
things that meant to be read.

[01:05:15.330]
And I think the big size
is what makes it go.

[01:05:19.810]
And so many posters, so many
advertisements have nothing to read.

[01:05:27.330]
Whereas if you look the magazine ads

[01:05:31.030]
of the 60s, it’s quite often half text
and half illustration or half photograph.

[01:05:38.570]
People actually wanted to read new
and different things, and now

[01:05:43.730]
we just need high impact or the
advertisers think that’s what we want.

[01:05:48.800]
And of course, based on test results,
they’re probably right.

[01:05:51.730]
It’s the dumbing down of America.

[01:05:54.530]
This is Alicia Newman in opposed shot.

[01:05:58.290]
And I don’t know exactly why I have this

[01:06:01.890]
here because I don’t have the oh,
I have the this is the before.

[01:06:07.570]
I have the AfterShot on another video.

[01:06:12.730]
So maybe the two will get
together at some time.

[01:06:17.170]
This is an illustration from life.

[01:06:25.690]
Mag no, actually could be
Life or Playboy beef eater.

[01:06:30.570]
Gin and I think I used the find edges

[01:06:37.570]
feature here and a lot of playing
around with the saturation.

[01:06:45.720]
And this was also well, yeah, put in the

[01:06:50.970]
you can see the pink border
in there, the half border.

[01:06:56.490]
Sometimes it’s partial border.

[01:06:58.410]
You don’t have to frame
something completely.

[01:07:01.010]
And you need to know when an image
should go outside the frame.

[01:07:05.680]
It.

Tags graphic arts, thomas farley designs

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These Are the People I Deal With

Post author By thomasfarley01
Post date July 7, 2023
No Comments on These Are the People I Deal With

I don’t expect anyone to read this except for search. And I don’t expect anyone to sympathize with my complaints, either, because this is the way the world is arranged. I’ve was raised to be a nice person but there are too many mean people to overcome. This is not something I can win. And, given my constant nightmares since 1988, not something I can cope with.

[00:00:03.650]
This weekend at a community picnic, I was introduced to an old cowboy who asked me what I did for work. I told him that I work part time online, at which point the conversation quickly drifted south because of him. He told me that the greatest computer was between our two ears, the human brain. And I said, I agree with that.

[00:00:39.770]
He then went on with a whole series of statements and questions that were aggressively going after. I think I think when I start talking about computers and what I do online, it’s so far out of reach of most people that they think that I’m trying to be smarter than them, or somehow they feel inferior. I think that’s a great deal of it. They have an inferiority complex to anybody that’s working with computers. They act as if I’m trying to prove that I’m smarter than them, when in fact, I usually don’t start the conversation at all because I’m so far out of reach with what I’m doing, with what most other people do that it’s not even worth bothering to talk about.

[00:01:31.860]
Like all of the work that I’m doing with AI and Chat right now. And it’s very discouraging because I had a friend say to me recently that it was possibly economic, because not everybody can afford a computer or the resources that I have, and that’s not really the case at all. I should probably stop at this point and refresh everyone’s memory that early on, before the Internet went commercial, back in about 94, 95, with the advent of Mosaic. Mosaic was the first graphical based Internet browser that you could see images with that became relatable to people. Images provided a boost to advertising, but librarians had been on computerizing, their catalog, card catalogs, for years before.

[00:02:42.790]
And so when personal computers came out, they started populating libraries with them. Especially, really around 84, when IBM came out with its own personal computer for the masses. There was this Charlie Chaplin advertising campaign that was hugely successful. But years before, Apple had been trying really, really hard to place computers in the school to get these lucrative contracts, and they did a good job. They started about 1980 with the Apple II.

[00:03:18.270]
So by the end of the 80s, computers were basically in every library and school. And so everyone’s had an opportunity since then to use computers in one way or another. Night school classes, adult education classes since really the late 80s, early ninety s. And I’ve actually been on computers since 1978. Over 40 years.

[00:03:46.230]
Everybody’s had a chance. But an idiot like this that I was talking to, he doesn’t want to go to the library. I’m sure he hasn’t been to the library in decades. He probably can’t remember when he checked out a library book last. I have many computers.

[00:04:02.350]
I think I have two desktops, two laptops, two tablets. I also have a library card from Pahrump. A library card from Goldfield and a library card from Tonopah. And I am in those libraries, actively. I’m checking out books.

[00:04:22.130]
All of those libraries have a computer. I think it’s just laziness on most people’s part and not having an interest. It’s easier to put down somebody for what they do than to ask about it or just say simply nothing at all. These are the people that drive me crazy. There’s so much amazing stuff going on and I don’t mind if they’re not interested, but it’s the librarians that I’m infuriated with.

[00:04:53.090]
They’re the gatekeepers in education and they don’t want to know about Chat or AI. So it’s not really economic. It is a deliberate decision on many people’s part not to engage, not to learn, to let the things go by. And people that are actually interested, that are burning to create, that are trying new things, that are experimenting with new things, those are people that are something to be put down on because I think it might remind them of how little they want to know, how content they are with their own little world. And that’s fine as long as you don’t go out and bully people or put people down.

[00:05:38.570]
This is the way I can make some money. I can make this money part time. I’m doing a good service and yet I have people people commenting who don’t even know the basics of writing and business writing.

[00:05:55.970]
Self-sustaining freelance writers are maybe four or 5% of the population. That’s it. Everybody else is doing a second 3rd, 4th job to enable their hobby or their passion the and as far as nonfiction writing goes, nobody understands that. As far as business SEO, there’s nobody that I know, haven’t known for a couple of decades that has any idea of what I’m doing. But if they ask, if I try to explain, it’s just an immediate putting down of what I do.

[00:06:40.750]
It’s just this prejudice against the unknown, which is really the root cause. If you don’t know something, if somebody knows something you don’t, you don’t want to hear it. Instead of asking questions about it or letting it go, they want to put it down because they’re bullies. That’s all they can do. They’re trolls.

[00:06:59.990]
And maybe it reminds them of the fact that they’re dead to the world, that they have no interest in inquiry.

[00:07:10.170]
Anyway, I just wanted to put down what I have to deal with almost every day in my effort to be creative. I really have to keep it hidden. Can’t discuss it because it’s like we’re going back to the Dark Ages. One idiot, in fact, who’s in charge of something historical, he was talking about computer literacy, computer literacy in such a way that I asked him this:

[00:07:43.400]
You’re not holding out computer illiteracy as a point of pride, are you? And this guy’s a former engineer and he thought about it and said, that’s a good question, actually. I am. This is a living, breathing, talking luddite. He doesn’t want to learn.

[00:08:02.380]
He wants to put down people for learning. We’re going to go back 300 years into the Dark Ages when people were prosecuted and killed for trying to learn things, for trying to advance science. We’re going to try to discredit them. Or Mao’s Cultural Revolution, in which anybody with higher learning or higher ambition was killed. That’s what we’re going to get.

[00:08:29.090]
We’re going to go back to the Dark Ages and then we’re going to take 300 years to come back again. At the end of the Dark Ages, they had to reinvent all the math that the Greeks had done, what, 1500 or 2000 years before, because people were criticized and killed for trying to learn new things. And now we have people writing about chat and AI who don’t actually use it, haven’t experimented with it, but don’t want to learn. They just want to put it down. So it’s frustrating, but that’s the world we live in.

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Going Beyond Optical Code Recognition for Writers

Post author By thomasfarley01
Post date October 2, 2022
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Tremendous amounts of primary research material in newspapers, books and magazines continues to fall apart in libraries and warehouses around the world. Much of it won’t physically survive much longer. And much is still unrecognizable to the best OCR software. What to do? Read it!

I use HappyScribe: https://www.happyscribe.com/ – (external link) to transcribe what I have read to my iPhone or Mac. Both can generate an .mp3 file which is all HappyScribe needs. From there, you upload your file to HappyScribe and it produces a nearly flawless transcription of your reading. (Yes, automated transcription services have now become that good.(

Let’s say I had a badly aged edition of the San Francisco Chronicle in a reserve reading room at a library. Most of us can still read what the best OCR software cannot. Read that article into your phone and then onto HappyScribe or a similar service. Far, far, far easier than typing, especially for long pieces.

You’ll still need to correct and polish the resulting text but at least you will have the article, much of what I see today is simply not possible for any present or future OCR software to read, most often gray smudges too indistinct for anything but the human brain to bring out.

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Caliban in the Coal Mines (slight repost)

Post author By thomasfarley01
Post date September 30, 2022
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Mining powers Nevada as it does so much of the West and the World. An activity as nearly old as Man himself.

I’m reposting this because Untermeyer needs more recognition for his poetry as does Julie Bennett Hume for her haunting performance of this prose.

Caliban in the Coal Mines

By Louis Untermeyer 1885- 1977

Transformed into song by Julie Bennett Hume

God, we don’t like to complain—
We know that the mine is no lark—
But—there’s the pools from the rain;
But—there’s the cold and the dark.

God, You don’t know what it is—
You, in Your well-lighted sky,
Watching the meteors whizz;
Warm, with the sun always by.

God, if You had but the moon
Stuck in Your cap for a lamp,
Even You’d tire of it soon,
Down in the dark and the damp.

Nothing but blackness above,
And nothing that moves but the cars—
God, if You wish for our love,
Fling us a handful of stars!

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Are Writers Made or Born? by Jack Kerouac (transcribed for the first time!)

Post author By thomasfarley01
Post date September 18, 2022
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I transcribed this article from two image files at the Writer’s Digest website. I have introduced line breaks of my own to make the text more readable online.

This is a six minute read. Kerouac reserves the word “genius” (and his attendant praise) to those who originate a writing style, those “born” to write. As he puts it, anyone can write but not everybody can invent a new way of writing.

This is a well planned piece by Kerouac. Notice how he echoes or repeats the use of ‘five thousand’: “five thousand writing class students, “five thousand university trained writers,” and “five thousand ‘trained’ writers plus Joyce.” These echoes are all made at distinct, different points in his work.

Notice, too, the depth of Kerouac’s study and reading of the Great Books. You might think a Beat writer would have laughed off the classics when developing a new way of writing but Kerouac didn’t. This man _studied_. Only the Great Books provide a wellspring deep enough to inspire new thoughts. Although Tom Clancy is an excellent writer, no one will ever pen a Great American Novel by reading how Jack Ryan breaks into a locked file cabinet.

[Thomas Farley, thomasfarleyblog.com (link to this post) September 18, 2022]

The text of this article and post is available here in .pdf format (internal link)

ARE WRITERS MADE OR BORN?

BY Jack Kerouac

Writer’s Digest, January 1962.

Paragraph 1

Writers are made, for anybody who isn’t illiterate can write. But geniuses of the writing art like Melville, Whitman or Thoreau are born. Let’s examine the word “genius.”

It doesn’t mean screwiness or eccentricity or excessive talent. It is derived from the word gignere, (to beget.) And a genius is simply a person who originates something never known before. Nobody but Melville could have written Moby Dick. Not even Whitman or Shakespeare.

Nobody but Whitman could have conceived, originated and written Leaves of Grass. Whitman was born to write a Leaves of Grass and Melville was born to write a Moby Dick. “It ain’t what you do,” Sy Oliver and James Young said. “It’s the way atcha do it.”

Five thousand writing class students who study “required reading” can put their hand to the legend of Faustus but only one, Marlowe, was born to do it the way he did.

Paragraph 2

I always get a laugh to hear Broadway wise guys talk about “talent and genius.” Some perfect virtuoso also who can interpret Brahams on the violin is called a “genius,” but the genius, the originating force, really belongs to Brahams; the violin virtuoso is simply a talented interpreter – in other words, a “Talent.”

Or you’ll hear people say that so and so is a major writer because of his “large talent.” There can be no major writer without original genius. Artists of genius like Jackson Pollock, have painted things that have never been seen before.

Anybody who’s seen his immense Samapattis of color has no right to criticize his “crazy method” of splashing and throwing and dancing around.

Take the case of James Joyce. People said he wasted his talent on the stream of consciousness style when in fact, he was simply born to originate it. How would you like to spend your old age reading books about contemporary life written in the pre-Joycean style of, say, Ruskin or William Dean Howells, or Taine?

Some geniuses come with heavy feet and march solemnly forward like Dreiser. Yet no one ever wrote about that America of his as well as he. Geniuses can be scintillating and geniuses can be somber, but it’s that inescapable sorrowful depth that shines through – originality.

Paragraph 3

Joyce was insulted all his life by practically all of Ireland and the world for being a genius. Some Celtic Twilight idiots even conceded he had some talent. What else could they say, since they were all going to start imitating him? But five thousand university trained writers could put their hand to a day in June in Dublin in 1904 or one night’s dreams, and never do with it what Joyce did with it: he was simply born to do it.

On the other hand, if the five thousand “trained writers” plus Joyce, all put their hands to a READER’S DIGEST-type article about “Vacation Hints” or “Homemaker’s Tips” even then I think Joyce would stand out because of his inborn originality of language insight.

Bear well in mind what Sinclair Lewis told Thomas Wolfe: “If Thomas Hardy had been given a contract to write stories for the SATURDAY EVENING POST, do you think he would have written like Zane Gray or like Thomas Hardy? I can tell you the answer to that one.

He would have written like Thomas Hardy. He couldn’t have written like anyone else but Thomas Hardy. He would have kept on writing like Thomas Hardy. Whether he wrote for the SATURDAY EVENING POST or CAPTAIN BILLY’S WHIZBANG.”

Paragraph 4

When the question is therefore asked, “Are writers made or born?” one should first ask, “Do you mean writers with talent or writers with originality?

Because anybody can write, but not everybody invents new forms of writing. Gertrude Stein invented a new form of writing, and her imitators are just talents. Hemingway later invented his own form also.

The criterion for judging talent or genius is ephemeral, [ed. note – added the comma] speaking rationally in this world of graphs, but one gets the feeling definitely, when a writer of geniuses amazes him by strokes of force never seen before and yet hauntingly familiar (Wilson’s famous “shock of recognition”).

I got that feeling from Swan’s Way as well as from Sons and Lovers. I do not get it from Colette, but I do get it from Dickinson. I get it from Celine, but I do not get it from Camus. I get it from Hemingway, but not from Raymond Chandler, except when he’s dead serious. I get it from the (sic) Balzac or Cousin Bette, but not from Pierre Loti. And so on.

Paragraph 5

The main thing to remember is that talent imitates genius, because there’s nothing else to imitate. Since talent can’t originate it has to imitate or interpret. The poetry on page 22 of the New York Times, with all its “silent wings of urgency in a dark and seldom wood” and other lapidary trillings, is but a poor imitation of previous poets of genius like Yeats, Dickinson, Apollinaire, Donne, Suckling . . . .

Genius gives birth. Talent delivers. What Rambrandt, Brandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again. No frog can jump in a pond like Basho’s frog. Born writers of the future are amazed already at what they’re seeing now, what we’ll all see in time for the first time, and then see imitated many times by made writers.

Paragraph 6

So in the case of a born writer, genius involves the original formation of a new style. Though the language of Kyd is Elizabethan as far as period goes, the language of Shakespeare can truly be called only Shakespearean. Oftentimes an originator of a new language forms (sic?) is called “pretentious” by jealous talents. But it ain’t whatcha write. It’s the way atcha write it.

–30–

Writer’s Digest’s image files.

External Link (s)

Interesting discussion of this essay: https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/10/17/are-writers-born-or-made-jack-kerouac/

Notes:

Wilson’s “famous shock of recognition”? More fully, Melville, “Genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round”.

Samapattis: The Britanica offers this on Buddhist meditation, “[F]our further spiritual exercises, the samapattis (‘attainments’): (1) consciousness of infinity of space, (2) consciousness of the infinity of cognition, (3) concern with the unreality of things (nihility), and (4) consciousness of unreality as the object of thought.”

Celtic Twilight idiots: Followers of the material Keats and his like penned regarding Irish folklore.

Tags .pdf, advice on writing, Kerouac, transcription, writer, writer's digest, writing, writing style

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Fear Follows Like a Shadow

Post author By thomasfarley01
Post date July 21, 2022
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This is really odd. The green screen trade in still or static photography is well developed and has been steadily growing over the last ten years. Weddings, conventions, special events, all of them have been incorporating green screen booths as possibilities in their plans. It makes money. Video could make money. A lot of money.

But the video green screen trade is in such infancy that I am now the expert, with conventional film producers running away from all of my emails and telephone calls asking if they would like to collaborate. I am, to use an ugly term, on the bleeding edge of this technology. The unspoken response seems to be: We don’t know this, we don’t know you, and we’re the experts. If we don’t know this, if we don’t know you, then it is worthless because we know everything and everyone of value in our trade. You are, and all of your strange ideas, worthless by extension.

What’s happening? With film, and like the still photography trade, most camera people have been using software to adjust things like white balance and exposure and color correction. They have not, for the most part, used software to bring out special effects or an artistic side to their work. They remain squarely within the traditional role of editing in film and stills. No matter how many years in the trade.

Which is fine if you want everything the same with no chance of developing any new ways of making money or gaining creative insights. And God no, never ask an outsider a question or ask for advice. Remain always the acolyte of the trade, as Adobe wants you to be.

Adobe has always kept their software so expensive and so difficult to use that anyone needing assistance in the graphic arts must go to someone paying their outrageous subscription fees every month. Like these professionals who won’t respond to my polite emails and calls. I pay these fees because I’m interested in different media and in film but very, very few hobbyists can afford to be an amateur graphic artist. I am discouraged that Adobe discourages the trade to young people coming along with their prices, can a young artist afford to learn this field?

Interestingly, the green screen trade in Hollywood has been around for over forty years. It’s just a process of adding and overlaying film tracks, much the way one does with adding and overlaying layers in Photoshop. Just watch the old Patty Duke Show or Counterpart on Amazon for something new.

There’s no CGI or A/I involved here or mainframe computers in the cloud. No. For the video below, just me, a ten year old computer, a consumer grade camcorder, software that costs less than a hundred bucks. And I’m old, 64, shouldn’t you youngsters be showing me this?

People run away from this like I represent everything they have run away their whole lives from: the shock of the new, creativity, the effort it will make a single mouse click or to watch two minutes of video that fascinates but repels because it represents something different and hence represents learning, that scourge of scourges, an acidic anathema; yeah it looks fun but I won’t take a chance on fun if its something I’d have to think about for two seconds. Besides, that rerun of Gilligan’s Island just came on.

Begone Ye; and don’t come back unless you bring something relatable to our dead mind and spirit. Like a Sony Walkman, a rotary phone or a six pack of Tab. As Hunter Thompson would say, “We don’t need your kind in Kentucky!”

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Bob Dylan and T.S. Eliot

Dylan read Eliot for the most part not at school. Voluntarily, the best way to go. As I understand it, Dylan read lightly and not deeply, as he did with the Bible. It reminds me of Bono with U2, his Bibilical references sound more out of Bartlett’s Quotations than from the actual text. Whatever.

With both writers there is a fascination with word play and imagery and symbols. You don’t necessarily have to go too deep with Eliot to enjoy many of his references. And, in many cases, Eliot is so brilliant that he can sometimes put an incredibly complex thought into a sentence you can grasp without grasping your Spark notes. Look at the metal sculpture of classic Ferraris or the sculpture of the Greeks. Even if you can’t sculpt, you can appreciate the form. Similarly, as writers, we can appreciate great allusions and turns of phrases by themselves if need be.

As for me, I like the Book of Revelation in the New Testament for its imagery, where the writer is trying to describe how Heaven looks as a physical place, using every kind of language to describe a location in the next world which is more probably a glimmering, somewhat opaque thought of God. In writing on such an impossible subject, the writer does invoke a sense of majesty which is undoubtedly the best one can hope for.

I think the New Jerusalem Bible, first edition, is the best version to have. Hard to find, look for it. Only the first edition! It was a product of Vatican II in the 1960s, with the authors determined to continue the poetic writing style of the King James with the scholarship derived since that was written, especially the findings produced after the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered shortly after World War II.

I have many posts on Eliot at this site. Prufrock and the Wasteland are two favorites. Search and ye shall find.

Great poetry often leaves questions, cryptic remarks meant for each reader to divine their own answers. Commentators suggest Eliot may have been referring to the holy fire on the Day of the Pentecost, when the Lord fulfilled and enabled the early Christian church. Perhaps.

These are just a few lines from “Little Gidding,” the last part of his larger “Four Quartets.”

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always–
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Full text here:

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/history/winter/w3206/edit/tseliotlittlegidding.html (external link)

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Raj: Our Man in India

$7.99 at my local thrift shop. Superbly well executed oil on black velvet.

Okay, I’m never going to get to that level. But what can I do within the poster world? First thing, I’d like to eke out a tiny bit of a smile. I tried Photoshop’s smart portrait feature but PS says it didn’t recognize any face. Hmm. So, I went with some filters.

I then put three of the above image into one large printout. Looked too spaced out so I combined them into one 24X24 inch poster.

No longer liking the below. You’ll see different colors in all of these because of poor indoor lighting and I was changing them constantly in Photoshop.

—

Meanwhile, Bond waits.

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Do You _Love_ to Write?

Do you love to write? I know business writing isn’t often fun, most of the time it isn’t, but do you love the sound of words in your head and do you revel in getting the right words in the right order?

Maurguerite Henry was a spectacularly successful author of children’s books in the 1950s and 1960s. On her acknowledgment page of Album of Horses, illustrated by the gifted and earnest Wesley Dennis, she writes this:

Dedicated to these horsemen
who drove me on with kindly spurs

And then, after naming twenty or so people in great detail, full name,
title, organization, she pens this:

and to
these libraries who provided roomy stalls and plump kernels of fact

To be clear, in this politically incorrect time, she lists several women under the name ‘horsemen’. Horse people understand, even if the socialists in the teacher’s lounge at Berkeley do not.

Let’s not lose this moment: this is a writer who loved writing. It shows! As Denzel would say in the movie Training Day, “Oh, so you get it now?”