Two moments with Bob Dylan

 

Just to make you feel better about the world

 

My second favorite music video:

The Peanuts albums

 

Yesterday I announced a series of pictures done in a "Peanuts" or "Charles Schulz" style, but didn't get to it because I had so many "Dr. Seuss Style" pictures to show first. But with that done, I have pictures of all kinds right now in this charming Peanuts style, ranging from shots of the library, to a particularly darling portrait of an especially well-liked bald co-worker, all the way to pictures of Clerkmanifestoland.

But at some point I took a picture of a donated album we had randomly on display at the library (Abbey Road). I applied the style to that, and...

From there there was no looking back.

They're just so cute!

After ten album covers I decided maybe it was time to move along.

Here is the whole set:

Behind every door: The endless journey part one

 

Because we are taking you on the first part of an endless mystical journey today, we couldn't fit our video here, so it's off to YouTube land for you again. I am not certain the first link will work, so you can also hit the second one by clicking through. They both go to the same thing. 

Music is essential with this journey so please set up your state of the art sound systems. Thank you, and I hope you'll come to the Planetarium "Behind Every Door Experience" when it arrives your town. Drop me a comment and I'll make sure you get comped tickets and some edibles.

Peace.

I could stand to be more humble

 

"I could stand to be more humble."

I say in an act of self reflection so awe inspiring grown men weep.

This thought came to me when I turned on a jazz station driving to work today. Well, not the second part of the thought. That came later. But the first, humble part came when I heard, as I usually do, a terrific song on the jazz station and, luckily, my car radio was displaying who the song was by:

Chick Corea.

I have nothing against Chick Corea.

I have heard of Chick Corea pretty much all my life in the way one hears of someone and then just thinks:

Eh, whatever.

And it never occurred to me that Chick Corea might be absolutely fantastic to listen to.

I probably don't know a lot of things.

I like the jazz station because it is a nice place to be ignorant. Pretty much everything is a pleasant surprise.

After the Chick Corea song, a song came on by, well, I can't remember the name, maybe Joey Defrancesco? It was just as good really as the Chick Corea one. The title was something like:

Things You Don't Know.

There are still a few.

I wouldn't mind finding some more.

Caravaggio's David and Goliath

 

Most of my AI video confections are me half being led around by what the technology can conjure on its own. I have ideas of my own, but the results pull me this way and that. If I try to impose my will I usually end up in a losing battle with the technology, a technology that can be mercurial, imperious, and blindingly idiotic. But sometimes I start out, develop an idea of my own, and am actually able (not without struggle) to make it into something bigger than I thought possible.

So it is with this 50 second music video interpretation of the great Caravaggio's painting of David and Goliath coming to life. The mere trick of the painting coming to life is the initial small thing, more messily done than I would have liked, but being able to develop it into its own study of the aftermath David's beheading was a surprising accomplishment for me.

As ever, click through the picture to watch and listen.

So many animals!

 

You might be surprised after all my elephant poems yesterday to find a very different song and video here, this one about there being a lot of animals. I wrote this song about so many animals, but I only kind of know what the song is about.

I'm pretty sure that's how songs are supposed to work. That's how they can get all stealthy and then, bam! Right to the heart!

Not that this one does that. I'm just laying out the principle.

Anyway, we have your picture ready for you and you just click on it to be taken away for one whole minute. And while you do that I'll work on my elephant short movies, unless I get distracted.

The horse of many colors

 

I have been working for days on this video, although it might be more of a prototype for future, more polished versions of the same video. Nevertheless it is late and so I have little to offer you today other than this music video. 

It is exploring some of the abilities of one of my AI's to completely filter and change the nature of another already filmed scene, or, in my case, already constructed fabricated scenes to begin with. 

If that doesn't make sense, well, you'll see.

Of course, that's just the technical side of things.

There's a song, and it's all... about stuff.

As ever, click through the picture...

Planting the seed

 

When people have something famous in their name, one tries to be circumspect from the point of view that they've heard it all a million times. But not everyone is over-versed in the history of pop culture, and venturing a small joke about someone's name, very carefully, under the proviso that they've heard it all a million times, may, instead of weariness, elicit confoundment on the part of the so named person.

And so it was with Jacob Dylan today when I was registering him for a library card. Granted, he was barely out of his teens, and also that these were merely a first and middle name. But when I mentioned, perhaps too sideways, that his first two names, "Jacob Dylan", were rather Wallflower type names, he took me to be suggesting that they didn't much stand out from the crowd.

I let the confusion stand, hoping that one day, perhaps decades from now, Jacob will hear "One Headlight" and have one of those moments.

"Who is this singer?" He might ask someone. And when they answer, he will fall silent and introspective for a moment, a far past minor mystery suddenly plugged in. And quietly he will say to himself, "Oh." 

The Animals in your library

 

Perhaps it was all building up to this. But with the aid of the holiday I was able to complete my tour de force "Animals in the Library" music video. It is three minutes long, has a song according to my lyrics and the work of my robot friends, and features 20 to 30 different animals, though I am now thinking I forgot to put in the Mastodon.

Ah well, it's too late now. It belongs to the world now...

As ever, click the picture to the video, though this is not a precise comes alive match up today.

Now with music

 

I have now discovered putting music to my little animal clips. As ever, when I add a new layer of complexity to whatever projects I'm working on, I feel a pull to go back and update every single thing I have done in the past so that it meets my new standard. Once I just had pictures. Then they all had to have animals, and suchlike, magicked into them. Then they had to be able to become realistic live video footage. And now they have to have their own song to go with it.

I enjoy doing it, but going back and updating past clips to my newer standard may or may not happen. There are so many things I am interested in making right now that it's an issue of time. It doesn't take me very long to write a short bit of lyrics. And generating a song is frankly all too easy. All the time cost comes in choosing between the smorgasbord of delightful 30 second songs. Do I choose the one that sounds like Ella Fitzgerald, or the one that sounds like Tom Waits? Whatever I don't choose will never ever ever see the light of day.

Anyway, here are some of my first "Talkies", so to speak. They are all new and not retrofitted. As ever, click the picture for it to come to life, but they have sound too, if you are interested in putting in your headphone, or turning on the volume, or whatever.

Mad Scientist

 

Laying in bed with a cracked rib, I reread a favorite Jasper Fforde book of mine, The Big Over Easy. It has a mad scientist in it, the sort of person who is interested in grafting haddocks and kittens together. Sure, she is monstrous, but who am I to judge. Look at me!

Today I have taken a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay and had, with the assistance of some diabolical AI, the Velvet Underground layer a song version of it over their own "Lisa Says". Then I cut up two one hundred year old films, a moderately famous silent era drama and an experimental piece about a city in the rain and, yes, grafted it all together, like a kitten and a haddock!

And I came up with a very sad music video of about two minutes duration.

Will you like it?

Probably better than that silly "Venice: I Can't Drive Through" one.

Venice: I can't drive through

 

A couple days ago we featured some pictures that diabolically reimagined Venice, Italy with its canals paved over for the convenience of cars. While evil in design, and meant as the darkest critique, we nevertheless found it fun to make.

So we tried our hand at a music video of it all.

It is a little more on the comical side of the equation, but I think it's in the spirit.

I hope you enjoy it and find it catchy!

The reimagination of a cracked rib

I have thus far resisted the decade old (at least) impulse to occasionally post repeats here. I seriously doubt that if while feeling too sick or injured to make something new I posted up a particularly winsome piece of writing from a post here from early 2016 there would be many among you who would cry out "Wait a second! This is super familiar!"

But as fond as I am of all you readers out there, that wouldn't be my reason anyway.

Keeping up with clerkmanifesto is a calling, and it's a practice. Making some kind of finished creative work every day (on average) is sustaining to my soul. So I do it. And I leave the rereading of clerkmanifesto to whoever wants it. It's all out there in the back floodwaters of the Internet.

So it's a little odd that I am here reintroducing a post I wrote a mere three days ago!

I woke one morning with a lot of discomfort and wrote "Cracked Rib". It was okay. It seemed a little like a poem. 

And you know what we do to poems around here?

Set them to music.

In the end my text was radically altered to work as lyrics. But I and my robot friends made a song out of it through many trials and errors. Then I pounded it into a music video with footage from a sixties Zen movie, a thirties flood movie, and some AI flotsam.

And so I brought my blogpost to life.

What's old (three days) is new again.

I am satisfied.

And my rib is cracked.

 

Bob Dylan and Neil Young at the VFW

 

Bob Dylan was extremely interested in my account of my library job's social hour/farewell at the local VFW. Bob and I go out for drinks whenever he's in town, but more at cool cocktail bars and good smelling distilleries that serve, you know, good food and drinks. No shade on the local VFW, but... it doesn't.

Nevertheless, Bob loved the idea of the VFW, so he flew in from... somewhere. I think the South, where he'd been touring.

He's always touring.

I met him at the VFW. He brought a friend, or an acquaintance. Bob knows a lot of people. I knew this person too, but only by virtue of his fame. It was Neil Young.

Bob didn't introduce us. And Neil had the slightly stunned look of a person who left a rare day off on his own tour in order to fly to Minnesota and go to a VFW because of god knows what Dylan told him.

We signed in, which I learned one does at a VFW, and we grabbed a table. No one recognized us. We fit the average age demographic, with me being the youngster. We ordered Bulleit Ryes and ginger ale. Bob looked super happy for some reason I could not fathom. Neil fidgeted, but settled down drinking. He finally noticed me. "Are you a musician?" He asked.

"No. I write a blog." I replied. "Clerkmanifesto."

"It's sort of good and read by no one." Bob commented drily, insulting at least six of you out there on the Internet who do actually read it. Look at you now! But I've never noticed any of you to take offense at this sort of thing. Also, Bob reads clerkmanifesto or we wouldn't have been sitting in a raw VFW in a Saint Minneapolis suburb.

Neil took out his phone and started fiddling with it, I assumed to conduct some personal or professional business, but no. He showed me the screen. It was clerkmanifesto. "Is this it?" He asked.

"Yes."

Neil started reading.

Bob and I drank and talked about what we always talk about, which is pretty much anything, and I won't go into these discussions in this particular post. Maybe in a future account. Every once in awhile I'd sneak a peak at Neil's phone. It was always clerkmanifesto. He was quietly reading slowly through, though the sheer volume of clerkmanifesto was bound to defeat him sometime in the evening.

After too many drinks and a wind down with barely tolerable burgers and fries, the VFW closed and spit us into the night. Neil put away his phone and politely said goodbye. He had to get going.

Bob and I went to a nearby swamp to go for a walk in the warmish night.

We didn't say much. We just walked along with the strange sounds in the water. Then I asked "Do you think he liked it?"

"Who?" Bob asked.

"Neil Young. He said nothing and read clerkmanifesto for five straight hours." I exclaimed. "Do you think he liked it?"

"Why would that matter?" Bob asked with genuine interest.

I thought about the question for awhile, but didn't answer.

We walked quietly for awhile more.

Then I started singing softly:

"Oh, the hours we'd spent inside the Coliseum

Dodging lions and a wasting time

Oh, those mighty kings of the jungle, I hardly stand to see em"

Usually when I start singing Bob Dylan to Bob Dylan he gets quietly and amusingly irritated. But for some strange reason he started singing along with me!

"It sure has been a long, hard climb

Train wheels running through the back of my memory

When I ran on the hilltop following a pack of wild geese

Someday everything is gonna sound like a rhapsody

When I paint my masterpiece"

Poetry classics from history! Faeries: the music video

 

Today in poetry corner we are featuring a nineteenth century Irish poem about wee men, by William Allingham, called "The Faeries". It's about little faerie men! But it's kind of a classic dark fairy tale, so those of you troubled by such creepy themes of children in peril and people tormented for digging up thorn bushes may want to steer clear today. 

Though I was not specifically familiar with this poem, its influence courses through some of my favorite more contemporary fantasy. It can be found lurking fiercely in the best work of Terry Pratchett, and is referenced in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". This is surely why so much of the poem was so wildly familiar to me.

It is set to music by it's own glorious internal rhythms, by AI and, well, by me through all manner of editing. But mostly it sounds an awful lot like it's written and performed by The Band. In that guise, it gets frankly uncanny at times, particularly when Richard Manuel Robot sings. The images are a barrage of something a bit like moving photographs, which speaks to the current level of AI video. As to the quality of things syncing up nicely in the video, it is, mmmm, erratic, which speaks to my refusal to spend any more of what was probably already too many hours fiddling with this. 

Also, for reasons related to this above, and to my limitations with these tools, we also lost a verse from this poem about the king who is old and gray and losing his wits. 

Once again I am astonished by what AI music can do at this point, but AI video isn't quite all there yet, and nearly always comes, as you will see, in rough, tiny clips. For those interested though, there are demonstrations of work in progress on AI video that suggest brilliant new astonishments are not far off.

I have probably at this point 15 other poetry songs collected, but none are likely to be suited to this approach, and I am not sure I would like to take this route again. So if there is another poetry music video it will likely be as different from this as was this from my Emily Dickinson video.

I do hope you'll enjoy it.

Poetry

 

I am no great reader of poetry. I have been touched by it here and there over the years, but rarely deeply and lastingly. So I am finding myself in both a curious project, and an illuminating one.

Having discovered a bit of new AI Technological madness call Udio, an extraordinary music generator, I have, among other things, started digging out old, mildly famous poetry, and attempting to fashion it into songs through the use of this innovation. This process, when successful, takes two or three hours steady work to get to a mostly finished song, usually a song two or three minutes long. The style of my songs so made vary from Dylanesque, to Janis Joplin, The Kinks, and Melanie, all the way to garage rock of the aughts, and the work of French Chanteuses from I'm not exactly sure when. There's even a weird bit of carnival music in there. For the poets I use, I avoid anything too modern and also anything too old, and include more famous people like Baudelaire, Rilke, and Emily Dickinson, but also Stevie Smith, William Allingham, Louise Gluck, and Sarojini Naidu- people I have either vaguely heard of or not at all.

I adore these songs I have made.

I

Absolutely

Adore

Them!

Surely it is partly the joy of having made something new. I have always experienced an unavoidable narcissism in that. But also it is in seeing the illumination of these verses I could normally not attend to. Hearing them, as I do in the process of creating these songs, which is surely as much as 30 or 40 times, is all the difference in the world to me. And the blandness I experience in my first encounter reading them is turned, by these songs, into an admiration and passionate reaction I hold for some of my favorite art.

I have one song that came out unnervingly in the style of Janis Joplin, of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, called "Souvenir", and when I hear the verse:

I remember three or four

Things you said in spite,

And an ugly coat you wore,

Plaided black and white.

My feeling and reaction is the same as hearing some great passage from a Leonard Cohen song. The words, in all their art, are for me wholly brought to life. They utterly pierce me. 

Today I was working on another short poem/song, this by Longfellow, called "Loss and Gain". I would always have counted Longfellow as a poet with some nice musicality, but offering nothing to care about in what he said for me. His words seemed to veer too close to some kind of homily. But listening to it as an awesome rock song, and hearing it over and over? I suddenly felt his idea as it developed, and when he drove to a self defiant conclusion of:

But who shall dare

To measure loss and gain in this wise?

Defeat may be victory in disguise;

The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide.

I was struck marveled in his wisdom and in his cry for the value of things unvalued. It was awesome.

You will see here no links to any of these songs I extol, and which, in your hearing them, I feel in my heart would make my point. But I share none of these songs with you now. Possibly some of this can be accounted to the work that must be taken to turn them into videos to make them reachable for you from this place. Some of it, though, is that I simply love them too much. Seeing, after several days, what amounts to three or four views of my YouTube video of my song of a poem of Emily Dickinson is oddly horrifying. This is what happens to something I count among the best things I have ever had a hand in making?

 Although I do recognize the irony in this. The very song itself says:

How dreary to be somebody!

How public like a frog,

To tell one's name the livelong June,

To an admiring bog!

And it hardly seems likely these songs won't show up here sooner or later, if anyone cares.

But for me they are mine. 

And I listen to them with a cold private fury of delight, and find them special.

 

Clerkmanifesto, the video version

It's all in the video today:

The clerkmanifesto song

  

Clerkmanifesto has a song now.

It's called "Dead Things Float"

Here is the music video link, but I've also tried embedding just the song without the video version.

To watch on YouTube

Or try here:

Or with this:

I mean, one of these methods is bound to work.

Lyrics:

I've been staying up too late,

telling you my stories

Obscure clerk manifesto,

Home of all my glories

(Refrain)

Clerk Manifesto

Clerk Manifesto

The cream rises to the top

Clerk Manifesto

Clerk Manifesto

Dead things float

Come hear my song

Singing ten years now

It's getting pretty long,

It's everything I wrote.

I know you know it's dreaming,

Not everything can float.

(Refrain)

Clerk Manifesto,

Clerk Manifesto,

The cream rises to the top,

I'm the least successful goat,

Clerk Manifesto,

I cannot help but gloat,

and,

Dead things,

Dead things,

Dead things float.

Yeah,

Dead things float.

I'm the least successful goat

I may be con deluded,

Bout everything I spoke,

I know just what the clue is,

Not everything's a joke,

Come here to the manifesto,

Dead things float.

Dead things float.

Beatles week day 4

 

Today on the "All Beatles All the Time" clerkmanifesto, we have for you, blue, that is, four pictures done in blue.

"Tell me why?" You might ask.

And there will be an answer, but it mostly has to do with squeezing in Beatle song titles and Beatle lyrics, which I'll try to stop doing now. Also, there are, as best I can tell, 22 Beatles songs that mention the word "Blue".

That is a lot!

It is so much it is worthy of a motif.

What, you wonder, of the 22 "blue" Beatle songs, is my favorite?

Thank you for asking.

I can't quite pick between "Yer Blues" and "Dear Prudence"

Anyway, here are yer blues for the day:

(The birds will sing that you are part of everything)