Interviews My Addictive Personality and Jeremy Geddes
I don’t usually free-form converse with you guys. I should probably do it more. (Lord knows I find ways to talk about whatever I want while discussing movies… I do rabbit trail something fierce. Speaking of which.) But I just plan to chat to you at large. Feel free to answer back! Like to know I’m not completely alone in this ivory tower.
A buddy, the other day said to me, you know what Taylor, you should make your interviews available in book format. Consolidate them. (Pierre you know you show up on the blog every time we talk, here’s looking at you baby.) So I spent fifteen minutes and figured out how to build out the book using everything in my interviews section. (I had no idea I had so many cool interviews in there. I’m pretty selfish when I talk to people and ask them crazy stuff that I really want to know about, and really don’t think about anyone else. hahah. So I don’t know if that makes me a great interviewer or not. But they really are a fascinating read if you get a chance. Here’s hoping Pierre’s on to something and I eventually publish a sweet little ebook of said interviews. There are like over 60 different interviews in there? Crap. That’s a ton. And I’d guess there is something like 180,000 words just of interviews? More? Less?
Like, I still can’t believe Mark Demsteader told me what he thought the meaning of life is. Who’s he? Oh, only the most sought after portrait painter in England. Or that basically became best friends with Adam Vinson. Even now I occasionally check back in with the guy and see how his beyond amazing trompe l’oeil paintings are coming along. Game designers. Scientists. Authors. Lots of extraordinarily fantastic. And of course, I have my fair share of movie interviews discussing movie trivia from their movies. But would you guys even be interested in something like that?
So yeah, maybe I’ll work more on pushing out a compilation of the various interviews this weekend. Speaking of which, it’s my first weekend bacherloring it since before my 13 year old was born. Ideas on what I ought to do with the weekend besides creating an interview book? I found a fantastic plugin for WordPress that consumes specific blog posts and kicks them out as an epub template (and other versions as well.) Have you played with it? It’s called Anthologize. I’ve yet to actually do an export, so we’ll see what we see after my first run of the book. A little nervous that the images will all get hashed. But who knows. Gonna try it anyway.
I don’t know if you’ve gathered this from my hectic and frenetic writing style, but I have a fairly addictive personality mindset. I get an idea in my head, and it’s hard to talk to me about anything else. For example, have I mentioned this?, I’ve taken to figuring out how to reverse engineer someone’s social security number. Everyone calm down, I’m just curious how it all works. I’m not busting into bank accounts or anything. It really isn’t rocket science. The Social Security Administration releases this file called the Death Master File. If you were to die, tomorrow, (or soon), you would be added to the death master file. Your name, your birth date, your social security number, cause of death… and some other stuff. I forget now. Now, if I want to figure out person Q’s social security number, who happened to be born in your state, and was born on your birth day… your social security number tells me a LOT about person Q’s social, right?
The first three numbers are your state. The second two are an iterator. (It’s hard to explain what exactly it is). Regardless, the first five are super easy to guess actually after parsing through the death master file. It’s the last 4 that are super tricky to get. Your main goal is to get within like 80 to 90% accurate on the first five in your first couple tries. And then by looking closely at the death master file, guess as to a stripe, or a band wherein Q’s social might land. And then from there, ping the social security administration in that band until they confirm that you got the right one. (Obviously it’s hella-more-complicated than that. Each state handles the distribution and numbering differently. But you get the idea.)
Another example is gaming. I game way too much. Or a better example? Business ideas. When I get an idea for a new internet startup I obsess until I hit a dead end or something unlocks. I also avoid sleeping. I may actually somniphobia. Seriously. Life is ticking people. Sleep just speeds the ticking up. Generally I sleep something like 4 hours a night. And after a couple months of that successively I crash and sleep for 8 hours a couple nights in a row before I am able to get back to my preferred routine. If drugs were my thing – I’d be addicted to speed, I’m sure of it. Have I told you guys about the one time in my life that I sat at a roulette table in Vegas? I think I have told that story. It was like someone had plugged my brain directly into a light socket. I won. I bet reds and then first third, and then blacks… and I won 7 out of 10 bets I made. I took my chips and cashed in and bought the latest Call of Duty game that had just came out the prior day. But oh how the sirens of the roulette table called to me without stop while I was there. Wow. I get it why there are groups for gambling. Totally get it.
My latest addiction though? Jeremy Geddes. Hot damn. I think I talked about how he had a new painting for sale recently? Well I bought it. And it arrived about a week ago. Paid $100 (plus or minus? It was like 130 Australian… so that’s something like $100?) for it, and you can find it right now on Ebay for $250. That’s like printing money. If that isn’t juice for an addictive personality, I don’t know what is. Top it off? I adore the man’s paintings. So, if I can purchase a gorgeous work of art all the while I make money on it? Captain America in a Paddy Wagon. That like hurts me it’s such an attractive proposition. And I only realized I may have a problem when I looked up and now I own 3 of them. My latest is at the top of this post. “Begin Again”. Adore his use of the ephemeral pigeon. His hyper-reality. The sci-fi quality. The story-ness of each painting. WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON HERE?!?
The white unicorn though? The painting that is taunting me? Easy.
Acedia by Jeremy Geddes everyone… and my arch nemesis. I think it’s currently going for around $2,000? So problem number one? Cash. Maybe my social security number obsession could come in handy in that department? hahaha. Second problem? Getting one! They don’t sell hardly ever. But the money problem is the bigger issue as I keep spending every dime I have on other cheaper paintings of Geddes’ that I find.
And don’t get me started on the likes of paintings from Patrick Kramer. I’d probably swap a kidney for this one:
Anyway. So yeah, I’m now totally addicted to art as a conduit for cash. Great. This can’t go poorly for me at all.
Thanks for listening to me ramble. Until next time.
Taylor
