Thousands of Tiny Cuts (Cats)
Meatyard -- Untitled (I-Cross)., Circa 1959 Thousands of Tiny Cuts (Cats) (10-31-2024) by meta4s
Posts
Wax Museum
My last song of the 20th century. Flying snakes leaving their mark Shadows left from when the world was dark The spoken tongues we didn’t understand Humor hissing in a frying pan... (Lyrics: P. Gardner)
Wax Museum
A Halloween Video 45 of Wax Museum (1999)--incidentally my last song of the 20th century). Footage is from the 1963 Spanish film of the same title.
October 31sts
10/31/1978 On Kawara , from the 'Today" series. {What I'm doing essentially with the Songday series.] 10/31/1998 Bill Laswell: The only way to arrive at something different is now by combining things. [10/31/2024: In retrospect, the beginning of Remix at the leading edge of the internet]. 10/31/2004 In music, you can leave out a repeat of a melody and their brains will still hear it. (Phantom effect). You can also hear this phenomenon when you hear someone playing a solo with implied chord changes. 10/31/2005 Melissa Etheridge, recovering from breast cancer, was interviewed on TV. She was talking about the crossroads in her life. (If you present yourself with Crossroads, it doesn’t give you the option of a third choice, which can become a shell game, and you’ll have to always wonder about whether the other two were better options. With a crossroad, you only regret once). [ A ...
October Rhythms
Rhythms of the words drawn from the October diary, minus the words. Some are already songs. October Rhythms by meta4s
August 27ths
8/27/1998 Dream: In a southern Baptist town working at a studio there. One of the songs was an old spiritual that I arranged. When the album finally came out, the credit read as “God/Lee Barry”. Town had yellow church buses with black-out windows and curb feelers. An AI-generation using this as a prompt: 8/27/2019 AI, in general, hasn’t yet impacted the future of music, at least not in an aesthetic sense, but that could be a possibility, as could the blockchain, such as turning samples on and off. But that will essentially be the avant-garde, not pop music. The problem I have with new technologies is they just barely overlap with artistic expression as has been defined through history. We’ve already explored cybernetics and systems theory in the 20th century, so anything we do with blockchain or anything involving computers will be a variation on what’s already been explored. It may be interesting but that’s jus...
October 30ths
10/30/1996 Documentary on the search for a lost city in the Arabian desert. I thought that it was interesting that our digital culture will leave no artifacts at all, even in a time capsule that is never found. 10/30/2021 Throughout the last 300-400 years, there’s been a compromise in music, and it will continue as musicians create both new instruments and sounds that will either be integral (as in an acoustic instrument) or are separated, as controllers or interfaces are. Guitars started to become controllers once amps and effects produced the sound. If you just heard people playing them acoustically, it doesn’t sound like much compositionally. It’s not composition per se. So using instruments as sound controllers is one of the compromises we make in music. #riff [10/30/2024: AI-generated music is another compromise because it makes music that is good enough and disincentivizes the exploration of it. We are no longer explorers of knowledge...
History Overlays
History Overlays is now a series. There are some missing days, which is because there are no images on those days that can be overlaid in an interesting way. The main rule is that you have to only use the Overlay transfer mode.
October 29ths
10/29/1998 Article in Guitar magazine about Andy Summers. He said that he uses a small tape recorder when he’s writing songs for an album. Too much tweaking in the beginning spoils the creative process. My experience is that even if you sketch ideas, you still have to get them down formally on a multi-track, and in the process, you’ve lost the original magic. What you have to do is multiple takes and edit out the bad stuff. [“Embracing the Flow: For a creative work to truly succeed, there must be a period where the artist surrenders rational controls and becomes a "servant of the work rather than master of it". This surrender allows the work to take on an identity and dictate its own necessary future moves.” LLM: “ Discuss spontaneity in the creative process ”] 10/29/2000 Interesting: Tammy Wynette’s Stand By Your Man took 20 minutes to write and 30 years to defend. Ironic that she divorced 5 men. Her defense was that the song was about an ideal woman, the devoted wife of t...
History Overlays
History Overlays is an ongoing photography series, in which photographs taken on the same day of the month are superimposed using the overlay mode in Photoshop. Using a musical metaphor, it is like superimposed triads, e.g. D/C (D over C). In this image, a photograph taken of an Ellsworth Kelly sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago on February 7, 2017, is superimposed over people walking in the rain on August 7, 2009, a historical distance of 90 months, and a physical distance of two city blocks. The superimposition is a kind of "double exposure", making history translucent, allowing us to see both the present and past simultaneously. If exhibited in a gallery, the images would be printed on glass and hung so that the viewer can see through history while walking around the gallery space, similar to Gerhard Richter's House of Cards . VIEW GALLERY
October 28ths
10/28/1998 Watched documentaries on PBS about John Glenn and Leonard Bernstein. Interestingly ironic that Glenn quit politics because of his age, but now is going up into space at age 77. I suppose when you have a passion for something you want to have immortality. Bernstein was the same way--he never wanted to let go of music because he loved it so much. I really admire this. This reminded me of what Susan said about music being just fluff. It's not just fluff. The beauty and the passion always brings you Deception is a vehicle of survival. [Fate is a vehicle that gets you where you're going. Dynaxiom 0256] “Discuss age and involvement in the arts” The AI-generated version with added lyrics, 10/28/2005, Friday Warm, 65 degrees. White Sox Victory Parade on LaSalle Street. Throngs of people. Sports victories are very much like military victories. It was ironic that hardly anyone was at the Iraq war protest at Federal Plaza. (Been there done that) 10/28/2016...
October 27ths
10/27/1998 Dream: In Kazakhstan. I was living with a family there and participated in a ritual where the oldest son was dressed in a brightly-colored feathered costume and cast off into the wilderness. Another fragment where I was preparing for an approaching storm, gathering all my valuables. 10/27/2000 Observation: Pop music now is sort of like using an idiot appliance, where everything is pre-programmed and pre-made. There’s no interest in learning theory. Why learn a blues scale, when you can just find a recording of one? Recordings are an attempt at a perfect performance, so we don’t have to worry about the anticlimax of a human being making mistakes. [10/27/2024: LLMs are now that idiot appliance. To some extent, synths started to become idiot appliances around this time. As regards learning music, if you look at Reddit or Quora, there is still an interest in learning theory. On YouTube there are perhaps too many unqualified people teaching it. Last night I watched Peter Fra...
Photos Taken On A Weekend
Back in 2019, I wrote a blog post titled Suburbs Exist For the Weekend . During the week, suburbs can be veritable ghost towns, but on the weekends they spring to life when people can be disabused of the daily grind. In that post, I used a photo taken by Robert Adams in 1970 taken during his trip through Colorado and other Western states. That photo of suburban tract homes probably wasn’t taken on a weekend but is emblematic of the bleakness of American suburbia, a generation after the postwar suburban boom circa 1950. The suburban routines of lawn mowing, barbecues, and so on, are the corollary of going out with a camera and taking snapshots and home movies as a part of that routine. Before smartphone cameras, photography probably was another exclusive weekend activity, and the photos perhaps had a visual vibe of having been taken on a weekend–or couldn’t have been taken during the week: Adults splashing in a backyard pool is decidedly a weekend activity. It wouldn’t be a Monday...
October 26ths
10/26/1933 From 803 Griffith Park Bvld in Santa Monica, John Cage writes to Henry Cowell . He is currently working on the Sonata for Two Voices . 10/26/1997, Sunday Interesting show on CBC about the abstract associations between music and other arts and disciplines, hosted by Yo-Yo Ma. He was saying things like “Bach built cathedrals out of music” and “traveled in his head”...I’ve always believed that art is more powerful when metaphors are applied or suggested. Either the artist and/or the audience can apply them. I also think the artist should explain her/his metaphorical theories, but I also suspect that metaphors are inherent in all artistic (and linguistic) expressions. (I should think more abstractly about music). Worked on “Dome City” concept idea. [ Dome City was ultimately released in October 2006]. This is a song idea based on these two disparate entries. Ultimately, it could be antiphonal in some way, with the words replaced, yet retaining the original roots to C...
October 25ths
10/25/1914, Sunday Wittgenstein receives “suspicious” news that Paris had fallen. He felt pleased at first then realized it sounded absurd. (“Such incredible news is always a bad sign”.) Thinks they were under gunfire from Russians, but was just an airplane. Spends the night in Tarnobrzeg then tomorrow morning to Szczucin. [10/25/2024: 90 years later, perhaps on the brink of another World War, the fog of it will be a different kind of fog. We are experiencing it now because the pillars of journalism as we once knew them have collapsed. There’s a continuous cognitive dissonance between what you hear or read in one place, and an alternate universe in another. (Feeling pleased at first, then realizing it sounded absurd.) Whenever I walk past the Tribune Tower, now converted into luxury residences, I think about that collapse. I was also there when it was being "renovated" (2019)] 10/25/1944 [Norman Lewis - Naples 44] It is astonishing to witness the struggle of this city so s...
October 24ths
10/24/1944 [Norman Lewis - Naples 44] The FSO called me in this morning to say that yesterday's great fiasco was the result of a carefully organized plot, designed to cause the maximum disruption to the life of the city. A young German soldier named Sauro had volunteered to stay behind when the troops pulled out and then as soon as the [bombed] buildings started to go out, to turn himself in with this story of the whole of the town having been [bombed]. 10/24/1997, Friday Went to free jazz concert. I found it completely boring and pointless. Playing free jazz improvs is 40 years behind the times. One of the reasons people played free jazz was to be ahead of the times! Free jazz was also a rebellion in its time. Why rebel against something (jazz) that has no real bearing on pop culture? [10/24/2025: Relevance in art is something that’s always shifting. What I’ve noticed about the shifts in the 2020s is that art has less relevance gene...
Human In The Loop (Cover Art Notes)
What I like about being both a musician and visual artist is that I can alternate between the two and they inform one another. For The Human In the Loop album I was going for a "metamodern" vibe--a mix of modernism and postmodernism, placing traditional Old Master paintings against what is essentially "modernist" music. I call it modernist because I'm incorporating orchestral elements, scored by me. It's my "representational painting", because I am not a traditional artist. My art is all postmodern (and minimalist), and is based on ideas. I grew up in the 60s and 70s so it's in my bones. It's also postmodernist in the sense that I'm juxtaposing the sacred and profane. I had seen some of this type of work at art shows over the years that pulled no punches, and I liked it. But I've had a change of heart over the years and have become somewhat of a Stuckist. I like that I have the necessary skills of a musical stuckist, but it woul...
October 23rds
10/23/2002 Idea: Story about people that have everything except that “one thing.” 10/23/2024 What I love about being both a musician and visual artist is that I can alternate between the two and they inform one another. For the Human In The Loop album, I was going for a “metamodern” vibe—a mix of modernism and postmodernism, placing traditional Old Master paintings against what is essentially “modernist” music. I call it modernist because I’m incorporating orchestral elements, scored by me. It’s my “representational painting”. I am not a traditional artist. My art is all postmodern (and minimalist), and is based on ideas. I grew up in the 60s and 70s so it’s in my bones. It’s also postmodernist in the sense that I’m juxtaposing the sacred and profane. I had seen some of this type of work at art shows over the years that pulled no punches, and I liked it. But I’ve had a change of heart over the years and have become somewhat of a Stuckist. I like that I have the necessary skills o...
October 22nds
10/22/1998 Walked along State Street and there was a preacher on one side and a bongo player on the other. I wish I had something to record this with because the interaction between the two was so interesting. Browsed at Marshall Fields and noticed that they now have puzzles based on the photomosaics book. It is such a great idea, but when they take the image of the Titanic and use [only] fish photographs, it misses the point. The point is to somehow make a commentary on the image itself. [10/22/2024: This happened recently when the Trump campaign used My Heart Will Go On , a song in the Titanic film. What images would we now use for that photomosaic? Generally, most musicians have vociferously objected to the use of their music at Trump rallies, which is indicative of “profane”uses of music on moral grounds. Of course, any music can be played at ...