Smokingboot

It was sunny & hot by the time I made it to the garden yesterday. And then Claude showed up! Prize-winning chef and former Culinary Institute professor, raised on a farm in post-war Normandy, to me, Claude represents everything that's earthy & solid.



I weeded very happily for a couple of hours, sowed my lettuce seeds.

And then something weird happened. I got suddenly and violently ill, the kind of ill that it involves bathrooms, of which there aren't any at the garden.

No embarrassing accidents, but close call.

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In fact, my usually robust health hasn't been all that robust lately. My lungs feel congested. I find myself getting somewhat winded when I exercise, I cough up fluid, and when I breathe out, I can feel how stiff my lungs are. Classic asthma symptoms. I hate the way inhalers make me feel, so I never use them; I just cough disgustingly.

I've been backburnering a fantasy that I have some sort of fatal but painless disease! Next time I visit my primary care provider, she'll take one look at me and say, "Patrizia, I'm afraid you're suffering from Amaranthinitis. There is no known cure, but here! Let me write you a script for unlimited quantities of morphine!"

I don't care if I cough.

I do care if I feel winded and weak.

But I probably wouldn't if I had unlimited quantities of morphine.

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I'm still feeling kinda ill today, so I have tabled exercise plans. The day is sunny and bright, so I will lounge outside and read. The fabulous smokingboot sent me Hilary Mantel's memoir Giving Up the Ghost last Christmas; it promptly got lost in bedchamber rubble. Recently, though, I unearthed it again & began reading it.

The first two books of Mantel's Wollf Hall trilogy are among my favorite novels of all time. They have a distinctly mannered style that took me around 50 pages to get used to (50 pages during which I didn't like the novels at all), and I guess I was a little afraid that this mannered style was Mantel's voice—which works as a narrative style for novels set in medieval times because we have to assume that people living in those times thought very differently than contemporary people think. I wasn't sure, though, that it would work for a modern-day book.

Not to worry! Giving Up the Ghost does not use Wolf Hall as a style manual.

I'm also piqued because two separate subscribers to my substack told me my prose style reminds them of Hilary Mantel.

I don't agree, but I kinda, sorta see how they got the idea: I break the fourth wall in sort of the same way that Mantel does. In her prose and my prose, there is a very strong sense that the writer is talking to a specific someone (who is not necessarily you, gentle reader.)

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And, of course, the AI video experiments continue.

Today, I animated the cat marginalia on a medieval manuscript:



I wouldn't say it works. Ideally, all the cats would chase the mice as the mice scamper off the page.

Is the limitation my clumsy prompt or the clumsy AI (NightCafe in this instance)?

Dunno, but I may try the same experiment in Sora tomorrow.

Everybody I know is going to Europe.

I am filled with FOMO because Europe! Culture! Museums! Ancient palazzi! Civilization balanced on crumbling plinths! The Camino de Santiago! Rivers flowing past castles! People you can't eavesdrop on in cafés because they are speaking in strange inflections with uvular "r"s!

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Well...

Not quite everyone.

There is that one extremely nice woman I know, 20 years younger than me, who was just diagnosed with a progressive neuromuscular disease that no amount of PT is ever gonna help her compensate for.

And, of course, all those people I read about in the paper—the Gazans being starved & driven from their homes, yes, and that steady torrent of Central American migrants at the southern borders.

But if you want to limit the sample pool to people who share my accent: all those once-highly paid computer programmers struggling to make ends meet by doing DoorDash because by September 2025, 90% of all computer coding will be done by AI. Those senior citizens in their 70s and 80s whose Social Security checks are being garnished because they owe on student loans, and Trump is relentless. (That planned $45 million birthday parade ain't gonna pay for itself!)

Those two last items have an odd kind of synchrony: Colleges & universities are still pushing computer programming as a career, and the best & brightest STEM students are still enrolling in that curriculum—and in the process, accumulating staggering amounts of student debt. Not putting two plus two together, these best and brightest!

I look at these things to remind myself: You have it pretty fuckin' good, girlfriend. And you don't have to fly out of Newark Airport!!!

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Anyway.

The creative high from making my little Mabel-the-Cat-meets-Aslan-the-Lion video lasted two full days. Not coincidentally, those two full days were also sunny & beautiful.

Ah, the thrill of pure imagination! Willie Wonka sings about it.

Then day before yesterday, it began to rain, and it's stayed grey and overcast ever since. The planet needs water, upstate New York is still officially in a drought, blah, blah, blah, but fuck this shit! STOP RAINING.

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I'm obsessed with the idea of making a successful AI movie.

Malcolm Gladwell's observation that you have to put 10,000 hours into something to get really good at it rings true to me.

So far, I have put maybe 30 hours into making AI videos, so it is not surprising my second attempt at AI video production was far less successful than my first.

Although when I put it up online, a singularly creative person I esteem highly texted me: What in the world is this ?? I ❤️❤️❤️ it!!!!!!

We Pure Imaginationists love our fanbase!

I've started playing with AI video generators! I texted back. 'Cause, you know: I don't waste enough time, so I need NEW ways to waste time.

For this one, I took an old 1920s photograph of the Lower East Side and tried to prompt the AI to show a woman walking down the street into the 2020s. What I REALLY wanted to do is turn the color up gradually as she enters the future—but AI won't colorize so I had to do that key frame by hand (rather garish.) Getting the gradual colorization would have required hand-coloring each of the frames: Wayyyyy too labor-intensive! Also, I couldn't find Yiddish street sounds, so I had to use Turkish street sounds.



My first two AI videos were done on NightCafe.

When I woke up last night at 2 a.m., I decided to play with Sora because I read somewhere that director Tyler Perry was so impressed by Sora that he canceled a planned $800 million expansion of his Atlanta-based film studio. He figured that within one year, Sora would have completely transformed the filmmaking industry.

The prompts I gave Sora tried to recreate a scene from my ongoing Work In Progress in which June Miller (better known to Henry Miller aficionados as Mara/Mona) walks away from the Orpheum Dance Hall in Times Square one night in 1932.

I couldn't get the time period at all! I don't know whether this is me being unequal to the task of making good prompts or the limitations of the AI.

But what's kinda interesting is that the character bears a marked resemblance to Uma Thurman who played June Miller in Philip Kaufman's 1990 movie, Henry & June.


This brings me up to 32 hours of AI video practice. Just 9,968 hours to go before I become a PRO! 😀

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Anyway, it is off across the bridge today to weed and plant tomato seedlings at the Community Garden. True, it is coolish. But I think we are done with the frost for the season.