They call me the wolf, man

I feel that today's post features a classic piece of early AI technology. It was produced by me more or less (metaphorically) yelling instructions at my computer for many hours in every different way possible I could think of, and almost never getting what I wanted. All this yelling though did cause something miraculous to happen one percent of the time, which was just enough to keep me going for another hundred futile attempts.

I completed my little werewolf film near midnight on Halloween and am happy with the result. As ever, it is much better with audio. Simply click through the picture for the show, which is less than 30 seconds long.

 

Zombies for Halloween

 

I have been working with zombies.

Artistically, not actually.

This is not like me. I am more a ghosts and goblins and all the pretty glowing lights of purple and orange. I am a Linus in his sincere pumpkin patch sort of Halloween person. I am all in for the only slightly scary but also slightly comic sort of Halloween aesthetic. 

But there is a corner near where walk, and it spoke to me today. It whispered for me to put a zombie there. So I took a picture of the corner, and when I put all my ingredients in my AI oven to make zombie, well, it came out serious.

It was one hardcore flesh eating zombie!

I'll show it to you tomorrow maybe. I kind of want to make it even worse. But I advise you to not watch it.

Don't worry though, I'll fully warn you.

Tonight when we were closing the library, or just me, when just I was closing the library, two young men came down the stairs. They were the last of the day's patrons. One of them was wearing a T-shirt that said, in big letters "I love brains" Which is nice and suitable for a library I think. But then, in smaller letters underneath, it said "I wish more people had them".

Maybe you'll see where I'm going with this.

As I was ushering them out, I said to the kid with the T-shirt: "You could dress as a zombie for Halloween and wear that shirt."

He looked down at his shirt. 

He seemed to like the idea.

Fox for Halloween

 

My music videos can take so long to put together that I was tempted to eschew comment here, and merely place the link, and thus the video, as today's post.

But I'm a talker, or, er, writer. And there is one aspect of today's video that I couldn't resist discussing.

I have been working on fox videos, though until today, I haven't shown any here. And in that process I have written lyrics for fox songs and set out to employ an extraordinary tool called "Udio" to make a suitable song out of what I wrote. I love the picture ai generators I use, and I love, though am often frustrated by, the video generators out there as well. But these music generators might be my favorite, because their surprises are the kind that can change everything.

Today's video is an excellent example of this. Coming up with a two minute song like this "fox is your heart" one can involve making dozens upon dozens of generations, maybe up to a hundred, carefully listened to, discarded, and altered. I may tweak my lyrics to nudge the results in a better direction. I don't know when to give up. And telling the computer what I want it to do with my song lyrics is an absolute crapshoot. I might have dozens of different ideas for where I want the song to go. Every rare and thrilling once in awhile I get just what I'm looking for. But also, rarely, and just as wonderfully, I get something that goes way out of what I was looking for, but is nevertheless so fantastic that it changes everything.

And that's how I got a Halloween song today!

Getting the song in this video caused me to spend hours redesigning all the footage I'd already worked on to make the whole thing come together properly. 

It was worth it.

(as ever, click the picture)

Selling the costume

 

As I write, it is the actual day of Halloween and I am at the front desk of the library with a meat cleaver embedded in my skull.

This is not a metaphor, nor is it a meataphor, and it is not an actual cleaver in my head, rather it's a costume headband that looks very plausibly like a bloody cleaver is deeply embedded into my brains. 

Sometimes people look at me and laugh, or sometimes they smile and say "I forgot what day today was." Sometimes they don't react to me at all. Sometimes they make a joke, like "Wow, you must have a headache."  And sometimes they say something that's probably unrelated to the cleaver, like "So I had my colonoscopy yesterday."

But one young man just looked at me and sighed. 

"Oh my gosh." He said.

I regarded him sternly.

I waggled a finger.

"Be careful in the kitchen." I warned. 

The Halloween

I was working on a series of pictures of Saint Minneapolis in the Autumn. These were pictures from when I wandered with my darling wife in the city on my birthday, and I took a photo of Fox and Skunk everywhere I saw them. 

But then, in the midst of working on these, I made a picture that came along effortlessly. It was from down in a fantastical place near St. Anthony Main, in a strange pocket of wild in the beating heart of Saint Minneapolis, nestled beneath old mills and falls that built the city. And though this picture is not very scary or spooky, or even all that fanciful, and even though it takes place in the harmlessness of day, and it has no particular symbols of the holiday, it nevertheless decided to leap off of my screen and cry...

Halloween!

This, this picture below, is exactly what it feels like where I live right now.

So I thought it deserved its own post: 

A fox and skunk Halloween

 

It's the most wonderful time of the year! 

Or that's what the song says... about Christmas. 

But if they thought about it surely they would amend it to be about America's new favorite holiday- Halloween! And why wouldn't they amend it, it was two Jews who wrote the damn song in the first place!

But I digress. Or, actually, since I started out that way, rather, I'd like to digress now and talk about Halloween.

I love and prefer the Disneyfied, faux scary but almost scary, colorful lights version of Halloween. But fox and skunk live in a different world than you and I. And so their Halloween, as you will see below, while not entirely removed from my ideal, more cozy, picturesque Halloween, has a bit more verisimilitude to it.

These houses are probably abandoned?

These houses might not be haunted?

But we won't know until the sun sets. And do we really want to stick around for that?

Fox and skunk at the library

 

Fox and skunk come into it, of course, but there are other animals as well. And the last picture even has a Halloween theme. This may be a harbinger of imagery to come! Or it might not. One of the striking things about the generative AI's that I use is that they are randomly functional, not fundamentally functional. The amazing thing is that this is essentially true of ALL technologies. Their wonder and power lies in being able to do specific things extremely well, and their rise depends on our conforming ourselves and our set of needs to what they are capable of. So telling my AI to put a ghost or spider into a picture may turn out to be an exercise in frustration, but zombies or rats might come out a charm!

Basically I am saying that the pictures below are the result of my struggle with a powerful, obtuse, and mercurial force.

Halloween costume

 

 

 

 

Because, as I write, it is Halloween, I am wearing a butcher's cleaver through my head. It's a blood splattered butcher's cleaver and it does look an awful lot like it's sticking through my skull. Hundreds and hundreds of people are coming through my library for early voting and none of them are wearing Halloween costumes. This epic two hour line, in a Pandemic, to vote in the most emotionally fraught election of our lifetimes, is serious business. No vampires. No ghosts. No pumpkins. Just me with a cleaver through my head.

Sometimes people look at me and laugh or smile, and I have a half-second of "What?" Then I remember: It's funny how I have a cleaver through my head! I find myself in more than a few jokey conversations about my "splitting headache". Once I went out to the front desk and said to a co-worker who just showed up for work "Keep an eye out. There was a lunatic in here a little while ago hurling knives at people. I was almost hit, but fortunately I ducked just in time!" That one got a pretty good laugh.

Mostly though, people just stare at me and don't say anything. It's a bit unnerving, but I accept it. I'm terribly fond of Halloween, and if I have to carry it all by myself this year so be it. I'm willing to take the hit. 

My wee commitment

As you may or may not know I write a brief essay for publication every single day, 365 days a year. I have done this without fail for over 2,000 consecutive days now. And when I say "every single day" I mean it. Even on my birthday. Even on vacation. Even on Halloween. And yes, even on Christmas.

No one is reading Clerkmanifesto on Christmas. It is a holiday! It is THE HOLIDAY. The cities are locked down. The fields are full of crows. Lights glow in the hearths and soft covers are thrown over somnolent computers everywhere. No one is cruising the Internet looking for a touch of only slightly difficult to digest enlightenment on the greatest holiday of the year. No one is here at all, but I write anyway. That is my commitment.

"But wait," You cry out, "I am here."

Good point.

I got you this.

It's not much.

Still flu week?

So is it still flu week?

Oh yeah, totally. Today I have this terrible headache that feels like a cleaver is being slammed down on my skull when I cough.

Oh, do you, er, cough much?

All the time! Except now they tend to be these feeble little fake coughs because the real ones are so awful I have to work up my pain tolerance for them. So I sort try to trick myself into thinking "That was totally a cough!" And sometimes it works, sort of.

Did you stay home from work then today?

NO! I went for four whole hours before packing it in. Everybody said "You look terrible." which was strangely gratifying. I am finding I prefer it slightly more than the dubious but trying to be optimistic "You look like you're starting to get better." But I like both of them.

You have been profoundly ill for more than nine days now. Why are you so cheerful?

I don't know. I really don't know. Do you wanna see my Halloween outfit?

Sure, what is it.

Here. It's a giant bloody cleaver that goes right through my skull! I got it in Tivoli. Even when I wore it there all the Danes stared at me and laughed.

It's... very nice.

It's just exactly how I feel.

Why the library is closed

Because we are closed for our most terrifying, bone-chilling event of the year, an October event of pure horror called, brace yourself, "In Service Day", someone at my library put out a big sign in our entry. It's a four foot tall A-Frame that says:

Library Closed

Then they taped a piece of paper to it with the fine print:

Library will be closed on Monday. 

So it goes something like this:

Library Closed

Library will be closed on Monday.

I was pretty alarmed by this sign. It was a Saturday morning and I thought all the people would come to our library, see the sign from a distance, and just... go away.

But of course I was wrong. I forgot about how library patrons actually are. I forgot their shambling relentlessness. Library patrons are like the walking dead. No, wait, they're like motivated zombies. If there's a way in they will find it, a loose board covering a window, a gate left ever so slightly ajar, an inaccurate library closed sign, it doesn't matter. They're coming in.

Nothing will stop them. They want brains.

 Braiiiinnnnnssss!

In my neighborhood

I live in a middle class neighborhood.

No, I live in a Middle Class Neighborhood. Like, when the President, all the Politicians, the commentators, lo, all the nightmare of talking heads, when they talk about the middle class, if you scrape all the bullshit off of it, scrub it, wash it down for hours exclaiming wonderingly "I can't believe how much shit they got all over this!", when you finally, hands chapped and red and raw and cramping, get it moderately clean, that middle class.

It's a good city neighborhood near some nice things like waterfalls and coffee shops, and not too far really from anything. The houses are all on average notably smaller than the other houses of these cities and this country, but being built mostly in the teens, twenties, and thirties of the last century, they are all also prettier, cuter, and more human. Crime runs at a tenuously acceptable low rate with the exception of burglaries. We seem to have more than our share of burglaries. If all those burglars were struck dead as I write I would not mind. I do not think that what they do is beyond the possibility of forgiveness, but the fact that they lack the tiny shred of decency to go to one of our many much wealthier neighborhoods deepens their crime too much for me to want to fuss with all that forgiveness stuff. Stealing is like progressive taxation; a million dollars from Bill Gates is a hardly a crime, but a nickel from a beggar is a grave sin. We are not a neighborhood of beggars, but up that nickel to maybe an ipad and that's the same level we're at.

We have trees and cats and birds and usually enough quietude. Squirrels! Flowers! Snow! It's a lovely neighborhood. If there is anything for me to fret about these days it's usually the room additions. I guess that's economics again. People around here mostly seem to have just enough money to do some kind of add-on just so long as they make sure it's as cheap and ugly as possible. So we get more and more of these sweet little stucco craftsman houses with crappy clapboard half stories that look like they were built in the Seventies jammed onto them. I think people around here spend a lot of time in their houses and figure "let's get it better for us on the inside, to hell with outside." in contrast to the elegant, lovely additions going on in our swankiest neighborhoods: "It should look beautiful on the outside because it represents we who only have time to visit our own houses occasionally." 

It all provokes me to sometimes uncharitably think about my neighbors "If you're not willing to sidle around your washing machine to get to a sink maybe you belong in the suburbs!" But I have not given up hope. I think with enough of these freakish ugly additions all the houses will start to look like Frankenstein houses. This will be good for Halloween, when we're at our best anyway as a neighborhood, and it may even start to scare all the burglars away, who, we all know, are cowards, too scared to go where the real money is.

Real Halloween

I have a little dream of one year decorating up my little house proper for Halloween. My unbridled ambition and the grandiosity of my plans likely protect me from ever having to do it. I'm intimidated too right off the bat by all the stone carving. There would be a lot of stone carving: tombstones, monuments of beautiful angels sporting subtle fangs, cracked human heads of stone with film projected onto the sculpture, making it come to mysterious, oddball life. You know, like in the haunted mansion. I suppose I could learn stone carving, or, better yet, I could meet some stone carvers and trade them some short essays. Would anyone out there like to trade several weeks of carving and a bunch of marble for some thoughtful ruminations on library work?

When I say my grandiosity protects me from having to decorate properly for Halloween, I don't mean I don't want to do it. I'm up for it, but I do need a massive grant or a lottery victory at the very least because of the wiring I imagine. Electric work is expensive. I'm thinking enough wiring so that if all the orange and low purple and moody green lights were spread out in a straight line it would be long enough to reach the moon, preferably the full moon, with enough wired lights left over to howl at it once they've arrived. I'm not actually sure if the Twin Cities electrical grid will support that level of power. Plus I need real bats, which probably are expensive to rent in season. I suppose I could save money if I raised them myself in an attic. 

Well, since I'm sort of working up a shopping list anyway:

One black cat that gets along well with bats.
Four hundred feet of antique wrought iron fencing, accompanying very elaborate gate.
One pumpkin patch with enormous pumpkins intertwined with large, carnivorous plants.
One hundred holographic projectors, mainly for ghosts swirling around amorphously.
Animatronic, roof harnessed, full size flying witch and assorted special effects devices.
Thirteen industrial sized fog machines.
Assorted live toads.
A quality toad wrangler.
One giant kettle.
Black lights and 30 gallons or so of assorted black light paint.
One 80 foot tall remote operated anthropomorphic Oak tree.
Five hundred creepy candelabras.

That's a start. I need candy too. We've always been partial to Valrhona around my house. Large bars. 

I'm not giving out just any candy, not from a house that looks like the one I'm putting together.

Maybe next year.

Or the year after.