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 rallies in venues where performance royalties are collected, or is covered under fair use. It is conceivable that the Supreme Court would now rule that it was fair use under absolute presidential immunity. Imagine that…]            

West Nkosi, South African sax player died. He was the guy that invented Mbanqanga, which was a melange of different tribal styles, an “intertextuality” of traditions. Paul Simon tried to weave Americana into it and got lambasted for it—which goes to show that the acculturation we think is so easy is met by much resistance.
            
Studio. Asked A. to do background vocals on a remix of Obsidian Dreams. Turns out he liked my vocal, which I thought sounded flat. 
            
[10/22/2024: I recently re-imagined Obsidian in a video short using a text-to-speech voice, perhaps as a way of sending up my own voice].

            

 10/22/2015            

After watching the Glen Campbell documentary I’ll Be Me, I realized that music exists in another dimension in consciousness, not necessarily connected or parented to anything like thinking, language, or making and using tools. Music can stand on its own when everything else falls apart, probably because it exists in many parts of the brain, and can be restored from the vestiges.            

[10/22/2024: Dan Levitin’s mentions Campbell in his new book. “He had built up so much knowledge, and so much neural and cognitive reserve, that the music continued to flow out of him. even with half of his brain offline, he was still among the best guitarists on the planet.”]

10/22/2021

Either you’re moving or the world is moving around you and you’ll never be able to differentiate between the two. So you can just stay put and things will happen to you or they won’t happen to you. If you decide to move, other things are moving as well—the world is moving around you. 

The people that seem to be doing things are doing things. To get it to move in the direction that you want I suppose it’s better to opt for doing something rather than nothing. But the question becomes is that something something, or is that something just anything? I think something has to be something because if you’re just doing anything it might be something. But if you do some of something, then it’s better than nothing. #riff

 

10/22/2021

Last night I watched an old video from the 1980s about Peter Gabriel when he was working on the Security album, essentially his creative process during that time. It was that winnowing process where a wireframe gets shaped over time as one would shape a piece of stone. Ultimately, the piece is performed live and you see all the little steps where he made little nudges that push it in this direction or that direction. It’s also recursive in the sense that it’s taking a set and then doing something to the set by splitting it in many ways and then saving all of it. This is essentially what I’m doing with text in Evernote: it’s a mass of information that can be searched and reshaped. In the end, you have a final essay or a piece or something and that gets added back to the universe of knowledge. Peter Gabriel amassed a lot of recordings. He’d have the band come in and jam for a couple of hours and he saved all of it. To some extent, it becomes too much unless you can readily access it.            

It may seem kind of anal to people that you’re collecting all this information but some people do it and I think it’s a useful function in society–that people are gleaners of history. The weird thing now is that it’s the reshaping of the future through deepfakes, so you don’t know the veracity of the information without somebody speaking for it.            

People are amassing things and are going back and looking at them but it’s deracinated, its roots are pulled out and there’s nobody there to talk about it. I’m talking now and it’s going to be posted on YouTube and I might make an audio version of it. But who has the time to do all that stuff? It’s an important function nonetheless. #riff

Musing on Music LLM: "Discuss recursion in art" 

Same prompt in Music Articles and Book Excerpts 

10/22/2023

Photographing something even only twice leaves an emotional residue on both the object and on memory. Both have been transformed. There’s a particular tree that I photograph every year on the second or third weekend in October.