June 28ths

December 28ths 

6/28/2001            
         
The digital world is immersed in an analog world.

Software is not philosophically important. The most important questions are human questions, old fashioned art and science are just as important as computers. Analog is more powerful than digital and was proven 20 years ago.

[6/28/2025: It could be that it’s now reversed: analog is immersed (scraped) into a digital world. I don’t know what I meant by “Analog is more powerful than digital and was proven 20 years ago.” Now it’s more of a matter of defining metamodernism and working within that space].     

6/28/2008

David Smith and Henry Moore sculptures, Art Institute North Garden. The telephoto puts them side-by-side, when they are perhaps 20-30 feet apart.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 6/28/2011

Favorite spot, Turning Basin:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6/28/2018

1920s music was dead by the 1960s (or not memorable). Perhaps if you add 40 years to any genre (roughly 2 generations), the effects fade away. Nostalgia can revive it, but nostalgia has to be experienced by the people who have direct memories. Most revivals aren’t as good as the real thing, but can be interesting. Try writing music in the style that your parents listened to (or wrote) when they were in their 20s. It can be copied, but the essence isn’t there.

[6/25/2025: AI music can create sonic nostalgias, but they’re usually terrible, especially in jazz. But you can create it as “fictional” music, which is all that might be possible when you can’t easily recreate the “non-fiction”. Who’s going to transcribe and create a score for something performed in the 1930s? You’ll just use the stems in an LLM]. 

[6/28/2026: Recently, I've used Suno to develop the short Curios ideas and it spins them out for full orchestra. But they could never be performed as no one is going to create a score and parts, and there are no orchestras that would play it. That's the essence of AI music: You could attempt to recreate a recording live, but it wouldn't sound like the recording. I had asked a question on Reddit whether anyone attempted to play the music they generated, and there was only one reply: "Hell no..."]

6/28/2024

Today's Songday based on a diary entry by Edward Weston, 6/28/1934:

I have often noted Sonya sitting in the little Mexican chair, knees crossed, and one leg twined around the other in a seemingly impossible way...suggesting one vine twisting around another...it had a dynamic flow which at once suggested new subject matter. With time, and a new idea, I get into action at once. 

 

6/28/2025

I like this idea of not fake music or fake artists but fictional artists. It's interesting to create a band persona and create the songs that they might do. AI can be an interesting tool for artists to explore on the periphery. For me it's important to always come back to the things that I prefer to do and have always done because music is sacred to me. 

It's important for all artists to be philosophical: It informs and directs what they end up doing. The thing that still bothers me about AI music is that perhaps it's just too much hi jinks without usable discovery, which is why “musical fiction” in contrast with "nonfiction" is interesting. Instead of just cranking out more material you can extrapolate a narrative where all the band members lives create other overlapping narratives. Since you only have to be concerned with crafting a lyric (libretto perhaps), you're disabused of having to record and produce the music and can focus on other aspects. Then at some point in the future you can use the music as a template or seed for actual performable music. Ultimately what you want is to use the elements more mindfully and deliberately. 

A fictional band, mocked up from a prompt. It's usually the bald guy that's the singer, but this is the reverse.

 

6/28/2026

One thing I realized as I've been watching some of the concert footage of the current Rush tour is that here's two men in their mid-70s playing music that I listened to when I was 17. By 1980, I had kind of moved on from Rush, but Rush hasn't moved on from itself.  With Anika Nilles, it's now an intergenerational band, an idea I had back in the aughts