Category: Light

Reading this, I picture our customers, generation upon generation of people floating through the ages with their infinite torrent of saved stuff, their evidence of life, the photos and flags and newspapers, their kids’ drawings and baby teeth, their dead pets, their flower crowns, their diplomas and vintage candy wrappers. I love them so much, these people.

In October, Don Was told me about his session with Lyria. He prompted the model with the name of a famous artist, a legendary singer-songwriter he had worked with in the past, asking for a song about his first car. The DeepMind team suggested adding the command “produced by Don Was.” The A.I. generated four different fragments of songs about cars, all with lyrics, melodies, and orchestration, and sung in the A.I.-generated voice of the artist, which had been learned from YouTube videos. Was described the experience as “a combination of awe and terror simultaneously.” His first thought was “This is better than anything I could have done.” His second was “I could collaborate with myself on my very best day.” For that reason, he told himself, “the songwriters are going to like this more than anybody, as long as you can’t steal from them.” He imagines an A.I. that has been trained on an artist’s complete works, and which other songwriters could collaborate with, for a fee. The songwriter, he mused, “gets paid, and he can put his name on the song if he likes it, take it off if he doesn’t.”

When Coppola showed her father an early cut of the film, he advised her to give Louis XVI more lines. Like Eugenides, he was missing the male perspective. “I was, like, ‘Um, Dad, no,’ ” Coppola remembered, adding, “I honestly don’t care about anyone else’s point of view. Just hers.”

“Part of the exercise was getting all these other voices out of my head—all these people I liked collaborating with,” Frank said. “I wanted to just write for myself.” Perhaps most consequentially, he decided to stop doing rewrite jobs. “My identity for so long was defined by a lack of self-confidence in my own ideas,” he told me. “Pleasing others seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to organize my art around. Until it wasn’t.”

For twenty-seven years, Invader has been decorating the walls, bridges, monuments, tunnels, sidewalks, staircases, railings, gates, curbs, benches, bollards, posts, poles, pipes, columns, fountains, pools, docks, seawalls, roofs, chimneys, medians, bus stops, train stations, storefronts, bookshops, and bars of Paris and beyond with playful mosaics. They have depicted everything from winged insects to cartoon characters and slot-machine fruits. Invader calls his interventions “invasions,” and the mosaics themselves are known as “invaders.” He has executed more than four thousand in a hundred and seventy-two cities in thirty-two countries, grazing permanence in the traditionally ephemeral world of street art.

When he wasn’t racing in circles, he was daydreaming. All his life, thoughts, feelings and sensory information have coursed through him at gale force. His attention is perpetually whipsawing elsewhere or vaporizing entirely. He will say, over dinner, “I’m sorry, but the clavinet took me completely out of the conversation,” when a clavinet suddenly enters the restaurant’s background music. He will say — laughing at himself, after you ask about his difficulty concentrating — “You’re not going to believe this, but ask me again because my mind wandered in the middle of the question.”