My head was briefly removed from the sand and medical treatment sought as the flames of sciatica engulfed me last week. A month of trying to ignore my occasional hobbling ended when I woke up and could barely walk because my hip, butt cheek, thigh and knee were on fire. Never experienced anything like it but at least it wasn’t the broken hip (and worse) that I imagined in my neurotic quest, usually medical in nature, to buy trouble and worry about shit I don’t need to. Why I avoid doctors in the first place.
Physical therapy and a course of steroids were prescribed and are dulling the sharpness and frequency. It’ll take some time but am on the mend.
Publishing wise the book covers are covered. Home Cookin’ The Stories Behind The Food via Midjourney (an advanced AI image generator utilizing text prompts) apparently preferred over ChatPT, or so I’m told by the people helping me. This from their website “explore the intersection of personality and aesthetics”. I’m paraphrasing what I’ve heard but it seems to humanize the machine, and therefore the image created. That you can do things, like ask it how it would do it better? The answer to that comes as the knowledge is attained but in the meantime this is for true:
Asking a machine for an opinion is some crazy shit.
The image for my memoiresque Cooler By The Lake may come from the mind of my best friend- winner of a dance contest at my Bar Mitzvah and he of the highest art director and cult filmmaker order. Speaking on his birthday last week as we have pretty much done every year since 1966 he offered up a concept tbd. I’m honored but not surprised.
No one knows you better than people you went through puberty with and are still around a lifetime later. It will be interesting to see the results of both.
It seems some chapters were missing in the Home Cookin’ manuscript being formatted. Discovered while searching the table of contents for another reason that it only went to 17… but there’s 20. Until then I’d relied on my not quite so good memory and forgot there were chapters on an older computer I hadn’t included. Apologies to my book formatter who thought he was done with me. Sorry Damian.
Sloppy proof reading leaves a bad taste in my mouth. More so now that I’m responsible for it than ever. I recently read an bio of a drummer I revere that was so poorly edited, besides outrage I was sad that his name was attached to something representing him so poorly. Multiple formatting errors (over 20) were bad enough but whoever published this sorry example of a poorly published book didn’t even remove questions regarding that very same poor publishing someone they were working with was commenting upon in the same manner.
“Are you sure you want this left in?” appeared a few times under some of the most egregious errors.
Apparently they did as they were there seared onto the page, much like the sciatica in my leg.
Alan Lake
Chef/percussionist/writer/