We’re starting to fall into something of a Spring routine. A little back and forth, with and without dogs, between Park City and southern Nevada. Gardening down there. Family stuff up here. A few small town events. The Boulder City Garden tour. Listening to the first baseball of the true season over the internet. The Vintage Vegas Homes Tour, perhaps the highlight. The occasional new restaurant and concert. Nothing super special, but comfortable. Nowadays comfortable is really good. As globalism takes a hard pause, and US economics remain aloof from any certainty, we’re back in an almost pandemic mode, sticking close to home territory.
The Vintage Vegas Homes tour again lived up to expectations. Our fourth outing provided another glimpse into homes that excel in the category of style but are in neighborhoods which were meccas of mid-century modern at one time and have passed through some level of neglect. The resurgence continues and is very fun to watch. Because it is Las Vegas it is more interesting, in my opinion, than Palm Springs or Phoenix. On this tour there were several homes where the racy and counter-cultural aspects of the city are visible. And weirdness’ like an enormous basement safe of unknown purpose turned into a storage room or a model condominium unit in a complex designed with the sexual freedoms of earlier decades in mind or the apartment complex where Liberace’s mother once lived all hinted at stories unique to the city.
The Boulder City Garden Tour offered much on a wonderful day. In this case a couple new houses, one quite spectacular, and new garden developments at a few that we had seen previously. The tour is oriented around meeting folks with knowledge of the intricacies of gardening in the area, so the element of surprise at new locations is less so for those of us who do the tour year-after-year.
Around 400 new photos from the vintage homes tour and 150 from the garden tour are present in the later Las Vegas and Southern Nevada galleries respectively in my photography gallery pages. Hovering over or on a phone gently touching any of the index images should show the name of the gallery and clicking on any image should open a page with around 250 images unless it is the last in a geographic series and in that case fewer than 250 images should be present. The portfolio does work on mobile devices but better so on computers. Everything is categorized by geographic location but beyond that the images aren’t organized.
My few pre-tariff purchases were things one can play with while making video, a big slider, a new desktop microphone, a smoke machine of all things, and another fancy light. This is all going to be a lot of fun. Getting out the old drone and gimbals, the old sets of lights, tripods and fake surfaces, clunky cameras and lenses that are too big to lug around when flitting about on airplanes and staying in hostels and language schools. Revisiting After Effects in a big way. It’s always fun to add to the kit, and to the skills.
I love having a new hero. His name is Gawx. A twenty-two-year-old Mexican. A skilled and classically-trained painter who does internet video better than anyone else at the moment. All talent. Although with a little noise, too much product placement. But the fellow does deserve a living. He travels but isn’t about travel and creates much from the confines of small Mexico City rooms. No politics or cultural opining. Excellent music, lighting, editing and effects. Just a kid making quality art on more than one level, and living his life.
Today I am in Park City and it is cold. There was new snow last night in the mountains above the house, maybe a thousand feet above to be precise. Just a little rain here. The weather has been exquisite for the past week or so. Snow at elevation for the coming week. It’s the way Spring rolls in Park City, on and off chilly, until the middle of June.
In the category of AI I have not been doing much in the way of research. GitHub Copilot and Adobe Express have sat largely idle. I have given GitHub Copilot a few test runs in terms of describing what I wanted built and observing what it came up with and have been a little shocked by the increase in performance over a very short time. It appears to be very close to being able to building things solely on description. I have been following the news on so-called Vibe coding and a few of the platforms that essentially compete with Copilot. I intend to spend some time sorting that out later in the Summer. The concept has always appealed to me and I think it has been intentionally suppressed often through purchase and killing of companies that pursue it. My guess is that its time has now come. I am using many of the Adobe AI based tools which are included in Premiere, Illustrator, Photoshop, Lightroom and After Effects. These are merely extensions of older tools which work better and create efficiency using AI.
Also I have made a major change and moved largely from Google to Perplexity for internet inquiry. Google remains better if you are looking to visit a specific site. Wiki’s come to mind. Or business sites for specific products that you have identified before hand. But for doing generic research, I’m probably a Perplexity guy going forward. If you are just feeling about, trying to understand a topic it is much better. It provides direct answers rather than sending you to pages where the answer could possibly be found. It is also often wrong and overly sure of itself when it is wrong. So approaching an issue from numerous directions is the way to go. The temptation is to continue asking until you get the answer that you expected and then stop. But with Perplexity this is a bad way to go. It is critical to continue further and see if any conflicting answers arise and then sort those out properly. It involves asking the same questions in more than one way. This is still much more efficient and interesting than the old methods of search.
It allows a very different approach to research. It is chatting with an expert, sometimes at considerable length, rather than reading what is recommended. I much prefer it. I can chat all day. After a while using Chat-GPT, I have only briefly tried some of the other options for internet-based AI engines and have landed on Perplexity. So some of the others, including the Google variant, may actually be better.
I want to make a quick shout-out to White Lotus. I’ve been binging and enjoy it very much. It is disturbing on a whole lot of levels. But as a long-time fan of Balzac’s Human Comedy — somewhere between 60 and 100 interconnected novels set largely in Paris in the first half of the 1800’s — I find White Lotus to be the best modern collection of stories of the human condition similar to Balzac. I checked with Perplexity and Perplexity agreed:
“Similarities Between Balzac’s The Human Comedy and The White Lotus
“Social Satire and Observation
“Both Balzac’s The Human Comedy and the TV series The White Lotus focus on sharp social observation, using their narratives to dissect the ambitions, hypocrisies, and desires of people within specific social milieus.
“The White Lotus has been compared to Balzac in its portrayal of young, ambitious characters navigating complex social environments, reminiscent of the strivers and schemers in Balzac’s work.
“Multiplicity of Characters and Perspectives
“Balzac’s work is known for its vast cast of interconnected characters, each representing different facets of society, while The White Lotus assembles a diverse group of guests and staff whose stories intersect and reveal broader social dynamics.
“Humor and Irony
“Both use humor and irony to expose the absurdities and vulnerabilities of their characters, blending pathos with satire to create a nuanced view of human nature.
“Exploration of Power and Class
“Themes of power, privilege, and class mobility are central to both works. Balzac meticulously details the ambitions and downfalls of his characters within the rigid structures of 19th-century French society, while The White Lotus critiques contemporary class and social privilege in a luxury resort setting.
“Both works ultimately serve as mirrors to their societies, using narrative multiplicity and social satire to explore the complexities of human behavior and ambition.
Another shout-out goes to Marc Scibilia. We saw him the other night and he ticks a lot of boxes for me. His combination of technical sophistication in the layering of instruments, soulful lyrics, and hard-driving energetic sound suits me very much.
Later planned concerts over the summer include Al Stewart, Little Feat, Lucas Nelson, and the Head and the Heart. No major acts in major venues but all something to get excited about. Mid-Summer should bring us to Oregon wine country and along the coast once again, because we had such a great time last Summer. Hello Lincoln City.
And finally, thoughts on the new Pope. The Chicago Pope. They say that history never repeats but it does rhyme. And I feel a bit the same about myself and the new Pope. I am not trying to say that I am even remotely Pope-like. I am emphatically not. But it is very strange for me to think that the new Pope grew up in a Catholic neighborhood in Chicago in the sixties and seventies as a devoted baseball and football fan for local Chicago teams, that he went to a big-east university and has been a long-standing big-east basketball fan. That he developed a love for Hispanic culture and spent a large amount of time in Spanish-speaking parts of the world. That he speaks English and Spanish as his primary languages.
I tend to think of Popes as somehow rooted in wildly different conditions than my own, only vaguely associated with my personal circumstance. This is remarkable. I look forward in a very serious way to see how well he rises to the challenges created by other contemporary political figures. I suspect that he is up to the task.