Just a quick, loose sketch I did of our rabbi at the bimah while she was leading Rosh Hashanah services. (Our particular rabbi trained as a cantor before being ordained, and happens to play harp; harp isn’t a standard part of Jewish services.)
My son voted this sketch of the week because “I really like the curves on the harp. All the geometry in that one is very beautiful.” (I spent most of last week working on faces, which I’m terrible at; weak as it is, this is the best sketch of the lot 🤷♀️)
My son nominated this sketch, noting: “That one in the back looks like it has strong opinions.” I can’t quite recall where I saw these little guys, just that it was in a Michigan State Park this past summer, as part of a canoe trip that went moderately off the rails (massive duckweed, inclement weather, thousands of dead fish blocking the river, etc.) This park was maybe our third choice, in terms of places we were supposed to be that night.
For the record, I was almost positive he was either gonna chose the Jubilant Sorceress or Captain Tenacity:
Mostly I like how the two images interact (they were in adjacent slots on the spread). The reference for the sorceress is my wife in a Halloween costume she got for cheap at a thrift shop a few years back, while the captain is me about 20 years ago. Serendipitously, the ratio between their sizes is roughly our real-life size difference.
My best sketch from Week #37-2024 is this one of a young Salvador Dali:
My reference for the sketch was this picture of Dali and Man Ray I stumbled across on the Library of Congress website:
Until I saw this photograph, it never dawned on me that Man Ray might be Jewish (which he was), nor that he was American-born (I thought he was French, because he was most famous for the work he did while living in France), nor that he thought of himself as a painter (I knew him for his photography). 🤦♀️
For the record, the Young Dali sketch narrowly beat out this space captain from Friday, September 13. She is taking no shit, folks:
My son suggested I share this one, which he characterizes as “handception” . The sketch I’m highlighting is the lower one, but it doesn’t make sense without the context of the larger page, so here you go:
In order to be good at a craft, we need to accept and embrace the fact that we are an intelligent conduit for that craft. We are nothing more, and certainly nothing less.
Hanks says basically that in a gajillion little different ways here, and each is worth hearing.
OK, those scare quotes are unfair; this is indeed art, even if the creator is phoning in bits where he or she could certainly have applied a small amount and greatly improved their work.
Yes, “Pooky Park” is credited like so:
This is an AI-generated 1950s TV commercial for a family theme park called Pooky Park, where customers are chased by giant, somewhat terrifying puppets. Script: ChatGPT Photos: Midjourney Video: PikaLabs, Runway
That leaves the impression that someone typed “Make a 1950s TV commercial for a family theme park called Pooky Park, where customers are chased by giant, somewhat terrifying puppets” into ArtGT, hit the GO! button, and it pooped out this short, festive romp whole.
But that’s not how any of these tools work. For example, I can tell you from experience that Runway only gives you three or so seconds of footage at a time. The creator is eliding the fact that a lot has gone into editing the visuals and creating the audio. Yes, the script sounds like it’s straight ChatGPT (“Colossal howdy-doody-type puppets”? 🙄), and us thus hella week. But this is still an excellent creative application of new artistic tools—evidenced by the fact that I watched it and shared it not because of the gimmick (“AI made this!!!1!“), but because it captivated me and entertained me and unsettled me and made me want to share it with other people so they could be captivated and entertained and unsettled, too. And that, my best belovéd, is what art is all about.
I write horror, SF, and DIY stuff—occasionally in book form. If you want autographed/personalized copies for your lovelies this holiday season, I can help!
Junkyard Jam Band: DIY Musical Instruments and Noisemakers: Again, we like titles that make description redundant. These are oddball little homebrew instruments and effects: an electric ukulele, a synth or two, thumb pianos, lofi audio effects, etc.
There Was No Sound of Thunder: A Time Portal Novel: Fresh out of college Taylor lucks into a cushy job in human resources. Now he’s tangled up with dishonest bosses, domestic terrorists, meth dealers, the “Problem of Too Many Hitlers,” and threats to space-time integrity. What’s a fella to do?
There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House(a cosmic horror novel): Downtrodden Glenn and his none-too-bright sidekick Lennie work for a crooked real estate baron flipping houses in downtrodden Detroit. But this latest flipper has some odd geometry, a really off library—and a knack for keeping itself occupied.
Heinrich Lossow’s “The Sin“, but it’s a throw pillow.
As an aside, the artist (Heinrich Lossow) deserves props for the best two-sentence bio on all of Wikipedia:
“Heinrich Lossow (10 March 1843 in Munich, Kingdom of Bavaria – 19 May 1897 in Schleissheim, Austria-Hungary) was a German genre painter and illustrator. He was a prolific pornographer in his spare time with an emphasis on analingus.”
