About cycling, walking, and photographing

Du Pham has a nice essay which she calls a declaration of love to her bicycle (in German, in case you understand that). In it, she describes the happiness she feels on her daily commute of 3 kilometers, or the visiting of her mum’s, which are 72 km – that’s more than your average Joe would cycle, so brava to her! I also love my (non-electrical) steel bike, and I should use it more often indeed.

In the same medium, Alke Wierth writes about walking, and about her difficulties of doing it. She thinks that the metaphorical meaning of someone “being gone”, either physically or mentally, might influence her and be the cause of it, but is also mentioning that she’s a smoker. I was, too, until August of 2017, and according to my doc that was the main reason of developing an atherosclerosis, my known cause of pain while walking. I didn’t have an operation, but early last year started to count my steps with one of these little fitness trackers, and I don’t want to brag about it, but that little thing does keep me motivated – and I take the time to walk, and so to care a bit of myself.

While I was still working, I used to walk with a colleague during our lunch breaks, until I became a really much slower walker than him, so I was always asking for a cigarette break, or for a short stop to take a photograph – signs of developing pAVK, or as we call it in German, “Schaufensterkrankheit”. You ask for breaks to window-shop, so to say.

A propos photographing: Mike Johnston has a nice article featuring Paloma Dooley who is photographing landscapes in and around L.A. using an 8 by 10 inch film camera. That is not a camera which you could carry around for excuses, and 50 dollars per “shot” also means that you wouldn’t take as many – she says that sometimes she takes two photographs in a month. But it’s still a nice article and video about her, and it also pays to look at her web page. I would love to see one of her contact prints, but at 100$ each, couldn’t afford it.

As always, thanks for reading.

No “AI” needed…

This:

7e7_2215065-flageolet-16-to-10_lens-blur-radius-200
Flageolet, MΓΆrfelden-Walldorf 2023

… is the same as my blog header photo, but heavily blurred with The Gimp‘s “Lens Blur”, using a radius of 200.

I took inspiration from the wonderful wallpapers (especially the “Sage” one) of the Google Pixel 6a mobile phone, which let you really concentrate on your foreground instead of the underlying background. See here as an example:

my desktop as of now

See how much the browser window and also the Conky system monitor stand out if the background just isn’t that sharp and detailed? What a simple but effective idea from Google’s artist crew; bravi! See 9to5google, and especially this image which would also be big enough to cover my desktop…

Like always, thanks for reading.

LibreArts – 2023 in preview

Free and open source software, short: FOSS has come a long way. For artists, 2022 has been very good in particular. Read the article 2023 in preview on LibreArts on what’s next for the coming year.

Also, the artwork for that article is about the nicest version of “2023” I’ve seen so far:

Like always, thanks for your interest.

Professional film makers use Linux

Andrew Cunningham writes about the Apple Mac Pro and compares it with the newer but not that expandable Mac Studio – but the most interesting part at least for me in that article was that professional film makers don’t actually use these that much. And the bigger the studios, the more people use Linux instead of a Mac for their artistic work (and smaller studios seem to prefer Windows). See the graphs here in case you don’t want to go and read the whole article:

60% market share for Linux, who would have thought?

I would have suspected to have Linux on about every render farm (and you need lots of rack servers to make a movie), and something like Windows and Macs on the artists’ desks, but this shows otherwise perhaps – interesting.

So as someone who makes music on a Linux system, am I ahead of my time? πŸ˜€

Like always, thanks for reading πŸ™‚

In art, there can’t be contests, period.

Recently there was the “European Song Contest” again, according to the headlines – and I only read headlines about these, just as I don’t like America/Britain’s “got talent”, or Germany’s next top whatever.

There have been numerous articles, dissertations, and books about the topic, even those who *do* “judge” about such “contests” write that in the end, it’s all personal taste. See or search for instance the online photographer, and you’ll come up with articles/blog posts like the ones from Ctein, or from Michael Johnston. Still, and repeatedly, our (in this case German speaking) forae are full of this, like here, or here. Or in photography, this.

I agree in that there were numerous great, relevant, or even important pictures, and maybe the same can be said about music or any other art. But who could say which are the best? Or worst? Or most/least “important”? Art itself defies any such criteria in my opinion. In the end such contests are nothing but exploitation, like the second episode of the first season of “Black Mirror” with the title “Fifteen Million Merits” showed us.

Think about it. There can be winners in sports if you absolutely care for the fastest runner or such things (and even then, there might be one who runs the 100 meters in five seconds, but you’ll never know her/him). But winners in art? Come on… and forget about it, please. Or tell me why a Picasso would be better than a van Gogh. Or the Beatles vs. Mozart. See?

Thanks.

Congrats Chuck!

Needless to say that this is well deserved…

Berklee College of Music Commencement 2022 – Chuck Rainey receives honorary Doctorate in Music

About the statement of the most recorded bass player, I think that title could still be Ron Carter’s. Or with the electric bass, maybe James Jamerson’s. But still, Chuck is worth studying if you care for the low end. His work on Steely Dan’s “Aja” alone is worth it…

So again, a round of applause and congrats to you, Sir!

See also at No Treble, and at Bass Magazine. Or at the site of Berklee College of Music.

By the way: in an interview with Cory Wong and Victor Wooten which I saw yesterday, Victor told us that Chuck is in fact older than the (first commercially available) electric bass. Incredible, and worth listening to if you care for the bass.