YetiBlog

You'll have a single mother of three who's fleeing a DV relationship. She has no recent work history because her ex kept her barefoot and pregnant. She's struggling with depression+PTSD while trying to find work in a horrific job market.

Now I have to be the one to tell her "Dept of Social Services insists every child over the age of 5 have their own bedroom, so you'll have to get a 4 bedroom, which will likely cost $5000/mo. You will get a housing voucher that covers 50% of the cost, so $2500/mo. You will need to make $90k/yr to comfortably afford this"

You and her both know a full-time minimum wage job comes out to $32k/yr in your area and most of that is going to go towards child care so she can work a job that will never pay enough to cover her living expenses. Even if she worked two full-time jobs, she'd still be ~$30k/yr short of the required income.

She can do everything right, she can work her ass off, she can get benefits, and it still won't make a difference. Her abusive ex is going to get the kids in the divorce simply because he has a steady income and home.

Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.

But... Stochastic Parrots.

Typography Tuesday

Today we present some fancy Caslon capitals, borders, and ornaments from The Manual of Linotype Typography, printed by the Plimpton Press for the Mergenthaler Linotype Company in Brooklyn, New York, in 1923. William Caslon (1692-1766) famously introduced the first superior British Roman font in his 1734 specimen sheet. Various iterations of the Caslon typefounding house persisted until the 1930s when it was acquired by Stephenson Blake, but the Caslon Roman typeface remains the classic British font.

View another post from this manual.

She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.

Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesn’t sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.

Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. She’ll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.

The record label will never put her name on the album.

Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crew—elite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.

The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldn’t read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didn’t get called for the next session.

Carol could do it on the first try.

She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldn’t pay the electric bill. Music wasn’t a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a job—factory work with better acoustics and lower pay.

But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.

That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to “La Bamba”? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.

She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.

Bassists spent years—decades—trying to crack the secret of the Beach Boys’ gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.

She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.

The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didn’t fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.

For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musicians’ anonymity betrayed them.

Think about it. Every time you heard “Good Vibrations,” “River Deep – Mountain High,” the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generation’s youth.

And yet the records still say nothing. She’s now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.

But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the “Beach Boys” were, in fact, Carol Kaye’s.

Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.

I build and maintain my life around making things.

It is really that straight forward, if unsatisfyingly lacking in drama or strategy.

I work out physically to build and maintain muscle and flexibility, I read intellectually stimulating things similarly so.

I also occsaionally say "ah hell it's time for salt water taffy and root beer while watching ultra cheesy movies" because is as important to embrace the high-brow as the low-brow.

My personal relationships are similarly treated. Am I making your life better, are you making mine? Yes? Great we continue, let's be weird together. No? I wish you well and I remove myself.

I work until I can't then I don't until I can again.

When I am feeling toasted on the burnout scale, I look to become an audience member. Not in hopes of recreating the work, but in the raw enjoyment that it exsits. It is as important to experience and enjoy things as it is to make them. Two sides, one coin.

My life is a series of side quests. There is no main goal, no main purpose.

I make small things, without apology or remorse that they will never be large or complex, they'll never make me famous, they will never win awards or get written up in prestigious publications.

I want to revisit something because in re-reading I missed something really, really, really important.

I was writing the intial reply at 3 AM before coffee and now that I've had coffee and a giant bowl of stir fry it is time to

Properly answer your question this time

YOUR COMMENT: "...this part is really hard for me because it feels like I’m failing at the one thing I really love."

Look at me.

Look into my beautiful eyes.

YOU. CANNOT. FAIL. AT. CREATIVITY. THAT. IS. NOT. A. THING.

You can fail at capitalism.

That's not necessarily a bad thing

considering what winning at capitalism looks like.

tw: jeff bezos

The history of life --

and I'm going to assume you're alive -- if you are a sentient AI then fuck off, if you're a human or other, stay --

-- revolves around SURVIVING and THRIVING.

Guilt you feel, negativity you feel, anything other than desire to make more you feel is a systematic vice gripping around you by some mother fucker with more resources than you have attempting to squeeze juice from your bones so they can have even more resources.

Every time you make something you win.

Devil bless my beautiful boobs bones heart and soul.

You cannot fucking fail at creativity.

Your role in this world, in this life, is not "make creativity machine go brrrrr."

Your role is to live the most fulfilled life possible.

As your non-doctor non-professor art doctor professor, I diagnose you with

HAVING SEEN GENERATIONAL WEALTH IN ACTION-ITIUS

I do not have generational wealth.

I am in my middle age. It's beautiful and I love it here.

I started working in my early teens and have only recently started relaxing to the point where my office is (figuratively) a swim-up pool bar where I drink pineapple juice and tell embarrasingly cheesy jokes as I make mocktails for everyone.

It has taken me decades to achieve things that people with generational wealth achieve nearly immediately.

People with generational wealth -- and assholes -- love to say shit like "as an artist you should sacrifice--"

how about... no...?

People whom make work explicitly to sell at galleries -- and assholes -- love to say shit like "You can't do [whatever metric I personally deem not worthy] and be an artist."

how about... no...?

There are no guards.

I checked.

there is one

just one

singular metric

DO YOU MAKE ART?

if so: you are an artist

if not: you can become an artist if you want to, go on, go make art

IF YOU ARE AN ARTIST, DO YOU WANT TO MAKE MORE ART? BETTER ART? MORE BETTER ART BETTER MORE?

congrates babe we all do

that's like

the whole thing

we are all trying to figure out how to make more, better (however we specifically define it) art

I have had friends whom have painted things so fucking incredible I kissed them on the goddamn mouth to celebrate this artistic accomplishment.

I have had friends who then stopped painting at all and got desk jobs because they didn't want to make art anymore and I have kissed them on the goddamn mouth to celebrate our friendship.

I guess my point is I'll kiss you on the goddamn mouth if you're into it

i guess my point is that art is a core component to some lives, but it's not everything.

If it was everything, we could outsource it to robots to generate automatically to our tastes, instead of going through the glorious ordeal of figuring out how to make it, how to experiment, how to learn

the entire point of all of this is you are a tiny fragment of the universe figuring out what it means to be energy and matter comprised in your current form

you are expanding the totality of experiences

measure yourself broadly

experiment widely

be an audience deeply

enjoy enjoy enjoy enjoy enjoy enjoy enjoy enjoy enjoy

NEGLECTED MURDERESSES SERIES

Angelica Transome — so disposed of her infant brother that he was not found until many years later (Nether Postlude, 1889).

Miss Elspeth Lipsleigh — eventually succeeded in causing the death of Arthur Glumm in Towage Regis, 1892.

Nurse J. Rosebeetle — tilted her employer out of the wheelchair and over the cliff at Sludgemouth in 1898.

Mrs. Fledaway — laced her husband's tea with atropine in the spring of 1903 at Locusts, near Puddingbasin, Mortshire.

Sarah Jane (“Batears”) Olafsen — hacked to collops nineteen loggers between March 1904 and November 1907 in and around Bindweed, Oregon.

Madame Galoche — in May 1911 added a tin of insecticide to a potate purée Crécy aux perles at the soup kitchen she operated for the indigent of Berchem-Sainte-Agathe, Belgium.

Miss Emily Toastwater — smothered her father after evening prayers, London S. W. 7 (1916).

Mrs. Daisy Sallow — eviscerated her daughter-in-law with a No. 7 hook afterwards crotcheting, over the course of three evenings her shroud in snowflake pattern (1921).

Natasha Batti-Loupstein — pulverized a paste necklace and sprinkled it over a tray of canapés, Villa Libellule, Nice, 1923.

Lady Violet Natheless — strangeled the hon. Opal Gentian at Gilravage Hall on Midsummer's Eve, 1925.

Lettice Finding — shot Edgar Cutlet, whose mistress she was, during the interval of a touring repertory company production of Rosmersholm in Manchester 1934.

Miss Q. P. Urkheimer — brained her fiancé after failing to pick up an easy spare at Glover's Lane's, Poxville, Kansas, 1936.

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$180,000 island and cabin Addison, ME

[househunting on ig]