April 19ths

4/19/2016 
            
I love Scott Walker (Noel Scott Engel)--a true artist. An artist should be able to make art across genre lines, from pop music to the avant-garde, From the Walker Brothers (with perhaps an Elvis influence) to “Jesse”. Frank Zappa on the other hand never compromised being a wag--even when he wanted to be serious--but that was his M.O.

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Today's song goes back to the lockdown in 2020. The feel is darkly cinematic and "Hopperesque", and I was musing on how the moment would inform film-making. At the time, Hopper paintings were popular because of their lonely vibe. It's also self-referential in the sense that the process of abstraction of text is kind of an "exhaust" or by-product of existing material as Remix.

4/19/2020

All film-watching is now nostalgic because it is the way the world was. Social-distancing in any films that are theatrical in nature can't exist as before, evincing the over-the-shoulder shot, with characters in a blurred pull-focus, large wide-angle shots with just a few people in the distance, or the "0-Shot" (essentially landscapes), or all bleakly-staged like a Gregory Crewdson or Jeff Wall shot—and of course the great-grandfather of the vacuity of urban and suburban landscapes, Edward Hopper...We are in a great moment for film-making, image-making, or even sound and music-making, because it gives us new constraints, new metaphors to live and create by—pregnant with the revival of the humanities. For those people already predestined for art-making, this is a good time to get into making pictures.

4/19/2022

In terms of the appreciation of art, technology hasn't changed my mind about what I've always valued. It's interesting to see what randomized processes can do but the human isn't in the loop to any large degree. What's more interesting is to use the "exhaust" from neural nets and use it as raw material.

4/19/2026

AI music has renewed my interest in writing lyrics. Now I'm continuously writing lyrics in the flow of other writing. Some of the music feels alien to what I’ve written in the past, but I like the fact that lyric-writing has become more possible because of the ability to try it out.  I’m thinking that songwriting may become a new form of communicating--without having any musical skills--but people will realize the connection between language and music the longer they are doing it.

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Quiet Room: Finished Bowie "God" book. My biggest takeaway is more of a reflection into my own life, right around the Outside-Earthling period (1995-1997) when I started to prefer more of an edgy approach. I wasn't "spiritual" at all then and was more of a postmodernist/atheist/scientist. It's still my theory that age 28 is probably the final burn-in year, when your life gets the final "glazing" over the burn-in. A spiritual life will become almost necessary beyond that point. I realized around 2022 that I had gone neoclassical or metamodern. If Bowie were still alive I think he's be a metamodernist. I think at heart he was purely postmodern, but at some point it's not feasible. But you do it anyway because there's a youthfulness in it, tinged with nostalgia.