April 20ths

4/20/2002

Nigerian Band at Hot House. Forgot battery for video camera and took some slow-shutter shots with still cam.    

4/20/2021

The book I'm currently reading is They Are Already Here UFO Culture And Why We See Saucers. There was another book that came out a couple years ago called American Cosmic which I thought was the better book but this one is good too. It hasn't changed my mind about them because first of all, I've never seen them and I always wonder how it is that they have the technology to traverse the galaxy or intergalactic space…

4/20/2022

Reading book of Man Ray’s writings. Simply amazing how long letters were. In the book sometimes they span 3 or 4 pages in a small font. It’s also remarkable that people used them to create closer bonds with people, and people would usually respond in kind. It’s just the way the world worked, it was the (good) norm. Artists would send letters to their contemporaries about things they were working on. Now everyone is too overwhelmed to even think about making anything.

4/20/2023

Some of the greatest art of the 20th century was created without consideration of “talent”. “Talent” is too gray of a word for it to be an accurate measure of anything. Sometimes “de-skilling” is effective, but you can’t force it.     

4/20/2024

Song idea based Man Ray's writings. This is just the outro vamp, with repeating antiphonal phrases.

The latest demo:

9 

 

4/20/2025

It’s crucial for an artist to look forward to going to the studio and working all day on things that interest them. I don’t think this is always the case. I suspect a lot of artists are making choices and perhaps are stuck with them. I want to be excited to wake up and want to work on something as opposed to working on things that I’m not interested in and don’t believe in. You can usually tell whether an artist believes in the things that they do because they probably go into flow states more easily and can stay in them for weeks or months. This is hard to do! If it takes ping-ponging from thing to thing, then that’s what you need to do in order to get your sea legs. 

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Another distinction between AI-generated music and music that we make organically is that we go to the art store, we buy the paint, we buy the brushes, we take them home, and we make something with just those tools, which is drastically different from using some software or app that millions of other people are using. Take for example, there's one art store in a city of millions of people, and those are the only materials that anybody could ever use. What would the art exhibition be like with the results of millions of people using the same materials from that one store? Actually, I've been doing it in art for some time with my Black White and Red series. Sometimes constraints can make you more creative.

4/20/2047

(Anthony Townes Diary) 

Went to the Favela. Bumped into Yuthe who was rummaging around old hard drives and old cassette tapes and machines. He bought Eddie Johns and the Van Halen. I brought up “Pre-Raphaelite” he looked at-sea. Then I told him the story about Ophelia.