Stars imploding The long night passing Electrons dancing in the frozen crystal dawn Here's one left stranded at the zero crossing With a hole in it's half-life left to carry on
…and because this inky Maui midnight shakes the memory as a madman shakes a dead geranium *, it seems right for this snake to eat its tail and double back to the beginning of the after.
The first video I posted after Walter passed was of a Grimes arch top, the dinner table, and him —
doing his best to recall an amusing ditty from the depths of memory.
Today we post the live version — his encore from Slims (April 7, 1995).
That night, he had all the verses.
Enjoy.
* T.S. Eliot
Video by Matthew Kerns, using the AI program Mid Journey And hey, here's Matt with more on his most productive journey through The Uncanny Valley:
That desperate mid-morning score...
What's great is I've been listening to late era SD and Walter's two albums a lot over the last few days as the weather cools off. It seems to suit the vibe of the season. This track hits the spot
I don’t want to go to Chelsea to see the girl of my dreams. Still, if she’ll meet me at the diner on 8th Avenue, I‘ll ask her to forgive me and please come back and live with me and we’ll live happily ever after in my dreams.
Who else would have used a physics metaphor for a crumbling life - and made it work? And I haven’t forgotten the “the laws of curved spacetime” in “Surf And/Or Die,” or the Icarus metaphor barely a line earlier… Damn. I miss that mind so much.
"Stars imploding The long night passing Electrons dancing in the frozen crystal dawn Here's one left stranded at the zero crossing With a hole in it's half-life left to carry on" - that's probably one of my favorite parts on "book of liars"
I really miss him. He was such an amazing musician.
I've always wondered why he stopped doing solo shows after this.
Regarding "AI", I feel like that term has recently gotten way overused and no longer applies to its original intent: a machine that doesn't just think like a human but actually wakes up and becomes self-aware. That to me is true AI (and quite scary too). Anyway...
Thanks as always. This is a beautiful reminder of just what we lost: a truly unique and brilliantly talented human being who was able to share his gifts with the world for so many years. Lucky for us that never even personally knew him that his music makes our lives just that little bit better every day. And lucky for those that were close to him that his memory will live on for all the best reasons.
Thank you for sharing this, Walter is missed by many, think of him often
Five years on . 💙🙏 I miss his presence in the world
thank you for sharing :
Heya D,
For this video, I decided to check out what all the fuss is/was about AI-generated imagery. Every image in this vid was generated by Mid Journey (www.midjourney.com), which takes a text prompt and turns it into art. It's a pretty amazing tool, with an immense amount of possibilities, which requires some finesse to turn into something approaching useful/useable art. If we look at just one of the images in this video (the one that corresponds to "So I’m waiting for mine on the methadone line / Yes I’ve come down to the end of my run."), we can get an idea for what the AI is doing.
I started with the prompt "a lonely man waits in a line of people at a methodone clinic." From that phrase, the AI popped back these four images:
Those are pretty good, but I wanted to try to give all of the images in the video a cohesive feel, and I also wanted to subject to be more "in" line than just at a methadone clinic, so I rephrased my prompt to "a man waits in line at a methadone clinic. gritty and moody." To narrow the stylistic choices the AI would return, I added to this (and to the other prompts I used in this video) the instructions "neo noir, blue ambiance, photorealistic render, ray tracing, extremely detailed, center composition, unreal engine 5, vfx, octane render, 8k," and I set an aspect ratio of 16:9 (sixteen parts wide by 9 high, as appears in the video). This time, the AI returned these four images:
The bottom left one was closest to what was in my head, a guy waiting his turn at the counter in the methadone clinic, so I enlarged it and used it in the video.
And so it went for the rest of the "scenes." Sometimes I got an immediate result that was exactly what I was looking for, and sometimes I had to change my phrasing to get the AI to understand what I wanted. It really makes you think about a lot of things (what is art?) but I found myself returning to the idea that language is a fickle, funny thing and that seeing how a computer interprets your words sheds some light on the nature of language itself. When I tried to get an image for the line "Now for me to get straight costs a big buck three eighty," the AI kept returning pictures of a large buck deer, standing majestically in a field, likely awaiting the bullet of a hunter. I knew what buck meant, in context, but why would a computer have any idea? So some of these images were drawn from lines in the song and some from descriptions of what that scene may have meant.
So there you have it. I encourage everyone with hours, days, weeks, or months to spare to play around with these AI art tools. Even in their infancy, they are pretty impressive.