Issue 1
AI-powered poetry camera, new and old remixes, and wonky emoji
Spotify discovery
Spotify announced big discovery changes to their home experience. I’m reminded of an old interaction, touch to preview on iOS. "You can press and hold on any song, album, artist or playlist to start listening. The music starts instantly.” That was sunset in 2017, Spotify saying the feature was rarely used (it currently has 4,675 votes to bring it back, and is 10th most requested feature of all time.) I used it all the time browsing my friends’ playlists as an alternative to hunting for music on Hype Machine. The interaction doesn’t solve for the discovery problem (I still have to find tracks to preview), but it does make me wonder what does Spotify lose by enabling such a feature? (cough, artists paying for discovery-boosting placement). Will this make it back?
Translucent latex leather
Tay Russell arrived in (???) to Loewe’s January menswear show, Louis Gabriel Nouchi showed a number of translucent pieces (Lady Gaga’s *Born This Way* at the Grammy’s egg fantasy anyone?) …that I assumed were latex, but are actually translucent leather. And just last week I walked into Rick Owens and found an unsettlingly beautiful material, a gelatinous translucent leather from their SS23 show. It smelled truly like rotting flesh, and I’m told it was treated three times to dampen the fleshy odor. Rick pieces start at $3,470, while LGN’s pieces using ECCO leather should be available over the summer.
AI-powered poetry camera
Kelin Carolyn Zhang and Ryan Mather are building an exciting application of AI and physical media, the Poetry Camera. This small battery-powered device uses BLIP-2 for image recognition, and prints a poem via GPT-3.5. This feels like something you’d find 3 years ago at The Broad with a 1 hour ticked wait… and today it’s portable and not unfathomable that it could be a consumer product, or at the very least an open source project that many could use in their homes with friends. Rooting for this one, and all of the delight it may bring.
Not quite right emoji
I was trying to show a friend a winking kissy face emoji and remembered this beautiful tweet showing the spectrum of interpretations on different platforms, with Mozilla not quite getting it right. I always misattributed it to Samsung getting it wrong (my Apple bias is showing), but in trying to find it, I stumbled upon something with even more horror, a swollen eyed stoner kissy face. I don’t know if they’re intentionally bad, but I love them all.
On rotation
KAYTRANADA’s new remix of Sam Gellaitry’s “Assumptions” is out and it has me even more excited for the “secret” guest of an upcoming NYC queer party
Yawning Portal’s 2020 chop of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Cut to the Feeling” has been sent to me and I’m instantly hooked by its 4 minutes of rising SOPHIE-like synthscape
40~ minutes into Madonna’s 1991 documentary Truth or Dare, there’s a great house track briefly playing in the background and I’ve been unable to identify it for years until this last week: Mixmasters’ “In the Mix — Fast Eddie Mix”
Events
STAND UP NYC is a benefit for our trans & drag family in Tennesee and beyond, March 21 at 3 Dollar Bill
“anonymous” from Dylan Thomas is showing at through March 27 at C’mon Everybody
“Hush-a-bye Dreams” from Clifford Prince King is showing through April 23 at Gordon Robichaux
