Crocheted Turntable Covers
Take Me Anywhere, I Don't Care, I Don't Care
Mark Rushton’s Interpolation in the Arts is a weekly email on Substack where I talk about my ongoing work as a recording artist and visual artist.
This email is brought to you by the Mark Rushton Gallery, for printed and original artworks. License my music, sound fx, and illustrations at Pond 5 for your creative project. I’m on Bandcamp and all the usual streaming services.
This week’s topics:
Crocheted Turntable Cover
Healthy Birthday
My Ever Changing AI Opinion
Rick Astley with Blossoms - “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out”
Crocheted Turntable Cover
My wife’s been knitting for over 30 years and crocheting for longer.
The new turntable cover would get dusty, plus the cat liked to sit there occasionally, so I asked my wife to make a little sweater.
Our cat, Peeps, won’t stay on it long enough to take a photo. Maybe eventually.
I thought that turntable cover turned out excellent.
I hope somebody happens upon this post in the future and gets inspired to do something similar for their turntable.
Healthy Birthday
Yep, today’s my birthday. I’m 58. Am I allowed to say that? I don’t feel old.
I normally avoid mentioning anything about it. Some people make a big deal out of their birthdays. And that’s OK.
My wife asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I joked and said that I’m so old now that she should ask what of mine can be donated or thrown in the trash.
I do need some new socks, but I’ll buy those on my own. I’m picky.
I usually don’t like to be taken out for a meal or anything. I’m a homebody.
No, I don’t want a cake. I don’t really eat cake anymore. The sugar and other things. Quitting all that is how I got back down to normal weight.
What about a drink? I have mostly quit alcohol. It was never a problem. After I crossed 50, even a single drink interfered with my sleep. And I need to sleep.
I’m doing good. Normal everything. I practice time-restricted eating. Ketogenic. Organic. Grass-fed. Various supplements. I stay away from the sugars, the seed oils, and the Donald Rumsfeld chemicals. No meds needed. Funny that.
And it’s how I’m able to pull my head above a bar 20 or 30 times in the morning in the gym. Until late 2023, I was never able to do a single chin-up or pull-up in my life.
But yeah, I don’t do anything special for my birthday. I’m just working on making a better version of myself. Might as well. This lease on life only goes on so long.
I have been working on new music and I’ll mention some of it in a couple of weeks when it’s out. I’ve also been working on finding new places to send and submit and pitch my music.
My Ever Changing AI Opinion
I stand behind all my past cranky opinions about “Aye Eye”:
It’s a parlor trick.
It’s largely a scam to inflate the valuation of tech companies after the huge stock drops in the tech sector until late 2022.
Don’t rely on it for anything involving creativity or abstraction.
ChatGPT is fine as a thesaurus, but that’s about it. Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati is definitely evil, anti-artist, and could never build anything on her own.
MS Copilot reminds me of when search engines first came out, except it is wildly inaccurate at times. At least it doesn’t have a bunch of “pay to play” ads prior to showing inaccurate results, as all search engines do today, although I’m sure that’s in the feature backlog.
I’ve read and seen enough about Apple Stupidity to know to avoid it.
That’s six bullet points. I was hoping to get it done in five…
That said, I starting using the Grok 3 beta on X after listening (not watching) the opening of JRE #2281 - where Leon Muss and JRE (I jokingly refer to Joe Rogan as the “Gen X Larry King”) were messing around with the “unhinged” edition of Grok.
If you can’t laugh during the first few minutes here....
Listen, I’m skeptical of all the carnival barkers, but this carnival barker’s trick worked. JRE’s Medicine Show got me to try Grok, although it’s not in “unhinged” mode.
From the start, I used Grok 3 Beta to find more places to submit my music in the genres I work in: radio stations, syndicated programs, reviewers, playlist curators, etc.
I had a fairly good list already built up, but my initial Grok prompts uncovered things I couldn’t find through traditional search engines or the other robots.
So we’ll see where this goes.
Rick Astley with Blossoms - “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out”
Well, everybody always knew that The Smiths were never ever ever getting back together again.
Like, ever.
Morrissey’s still around with his own band. And that’s fine. He’s been unfairly trashed in the corporate media for years for having opinions. Morrissey’s always been angry. I played “Hand In Glove” on the radio in 1983 and totally enjoyed his controversies back then. If anybody read Morrissey’s autobiography, they’d understand. And guitarist Johnny Marr had his own book, which was worth reading, although it’s from a different angle. The problem with The Smiths was that they didn’t have a conventional management setup. And drugs.
Rick Astley. Now there’s a guy who made it through The SAW machine (Stock, Aitken, Waterman) and survived. And he moved beyond the whole “Rick Roll” thing that rebooted his singing career.
But who saw this coming?
Morrissey loved it. Johnny Marr was a grump. That says it all.
The crowd in the tent at Glastonbury 2023 are singing their hearts out.
The songs that saved your life.
Crocheted turntable cover = greatness!
Also Rick Astley singing The Smiths?? Worlds collide.