July 28ths
7/28/1995
(Brian Eno Diary)
“Spent most of the day carefully numbering and cataloging slides and their positions in the carousels. The calming monotony of this activity gives me a lot of thinking space. I love routine work.”
[7/28/2025: You could call this “mantra” or “zone” work where you can focus on one thing in order to incubate ideas and thoughts. It’s better than meditation in some ways because you’re ahead on the things that need to get done].
7/28/1998
Final mixes on Back To Egypt.
From an article, An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days by Maria Papova:
"In that strange combinatorial way the creative impulse has of collaging existing inspirations and passions into something entirely new, I awoke one day with the surprising idea of creating my own card deck of divinations from the birds — forty decks of forty cards each, to give away to forty people I love for my fortieth birthday (which is today, July 28)."
This happened to me a few days ago when I was going through the daily Songday routine, and recalling the previous night's dream:
I was on a train winding through a residential area. The homes had no walls. with exposed kitchens and living rooms, one which was on a slope toward a river. Then I was on a boat on that river.
What resulted is a mashup that combines the dream, an old film L'Atalante, and an old song. There are two sets of lyrics running in counterpoint. The old song, Party Girl has the lyric, "Sail on a boat to some distant shore" as well as "birdbath in the backyard" which has an interesting connection with Maria Papova's article about augury and divination. It's an interesting example of bibliomancy, similar to what I'm doing with the Songdays, where I'm choosing a line from a text and then applying the combinatorial process. "On a boat on a river" became the riff. Then I thought about the Vigo film, whose footage I had used for other music videos. The chords were similar to Party Girl, and I then used some of the lyrics as a counterpoint.
It's interesting to fold in elements from different places, in this case, a "cameo" of a character in another song, which results in a different kind of story made with a collage technique.
7/28/2021
I get a certain cognitive lift from going back to writing things down manually. I prefer the old way of inputting the notes and then playing it. It's a really great way of recycling things that were just fine the way they were. They didn't need innovation.
7/28/2022
Tradition is epigenetic in many ways which is in constant conflict with modern life. There can be cultural traditions and individual traditions which arise from the arc of one’s life. Making music is a tradition for me but it wasn’t for my family. It’s traditional for Boomers to have grown up with both the family values of the 1950s and the individualistic cultural values of the 1960s. They have since become the tectonic plates of 21st century society, now with a reactivation of East versus West philosophies.
7/28/2024
Doing some reading and riffing. Another AI book, AI Mirror. It’s the new self-help genre. I was thinking that AI art and music is the first time an esoteric scientific art has become pop so quickly, and has no connection to the avant-garde with artists making eccentric experimental art like Eno in the 70s. Computer scientists with peripheral interests in the arts and humanities tend to be oblivious to the righteous and sacred. I would be interested in writers who have some knowledge of the SciArt world, which would be far more engaging.
"And when we can no longer know ourselves, we can no longer govern ourselves. In that moment, we will have surrendered our own agency, our collective human capacity for self-determination. not because we won't have it, but because we will not see it in the mirror."
[This relates to mirror art, that which looks at the reflection of society, as opposed to window art, which looks out into the future and into reality and see what's really possible in terms of imagination. Mirror art is driven by what we think we imagine, which is distinctly different from imagination itself. The former is an illusion.]
Comments
Post a Comment