Mike Scardino’s Post

A "Star" and a "Pick" from Publishers Weekly...and a "Thank You" from yours truly... https://lnkd.in/g-kDe2sV

NOW WE ARE SIX. Got a very nice "birth announcement" from my editor Jean Garnett on the occasion of BAD CALL's coming into this world July 18, 2018. Still selling. Looking for that video deal. Gonna have some cake with the fam. Yay.

SO WHAT IS AI, REALLY? A long time ago, in college, I was asked to write about photography for a campus "arts" pub. I said there existed, in my view, a spectrum: going from pure photojournalism, selecting images only from reality, to the use of photography as simply another "art" medium like paint or clay or whatever. I likened the realist end of the spectrum to the Kafka short story "A Hunger Artist" where a traveling "faster" went from town to town and folks bet on how long he'd go without eating. He finally starved himself to death because he could never find a food he "liked". I wrote that, in theory, a really discerning photojournalist could go a lifetime without taking a single photograph -- because they never saw the image they felt worthy of capturing. On the "art only" side there are countless "inert" media to use (photography is just one) and the only limit is the artist's imagination. But AI is not an "inert" medium -- it's composed of curated and salvaged and used up ideas and images, of widely variable quality, that others have conceived and abandoned. And I'm wondering where the creativity of AI lies? And whose creativity is it? Am I wrong about this?

Joelton, TN, 1970. He was trying to lose enough weight to fail his draft physical. Living in a smokehouse on a professor's farm many miles from Vanderbilt and running to class back and forth. Something like a marathon every day. He was on the verge of starvation and freezing weather had set in before he had time to fully "chink" the logs in the smokehouse. I don't think his kitty liked this plan. (photograph copyright 2017 Mike Scardino)

Take me to the beach. https://lnkd.in/gWm5iurU

Lord Jim? Good lord. (Thank you, Stephen!) https://lnkd.in/gKanMMzz

"James freakin' Joyce?". Aw shucks, Mike. And Thank you. https://lnkd.in/gCVdGBBH

"I read your book on the beach this past weekend. Holy sh-t." - Ellis DeVito, President at DeVito/Verdi

Honored to be included in this group... https://lnkd.in/gE7TDRZb

THANK YOU Apple Books! "...Scardino’s exhilarating, gritty memoir about working as an ambulance attendant in the late ’60s makes you feel lucky to be alive. The book’s tone can be summed up in one of Scardino’s many rhetorical questions: 'Who calls an ambulance unless something bad has happened?' Each chapter explores a different emergency, providing a sometimes-macabre, occasionally-beautiful peek into the lives of real New Yorkers from all walks of life. It’s heartbreaking, horrifying, and redemptive—but always human—and it’ll stick with you long after you’ve finished the last page."