November 20ths

11/20/1903 (Paris)  

(Harry Kessler Diary)

He doesn’t think Germans believe in art, even if they are artists themselves or are art historians.            

[11/20/2024: What art was he referring to? Perhaps this was a sea change happening in the older generations born in the 1850s reacting to the change in painting, Cezanne, etc. “Belief in art” means having a tolerance for The New, whatever it may be. Those tolerances are different for everyone].

“Discuss Kessler's opinions of Germans” 

11/20/1947

Jack Kerouac: There's too much of the "pale criminal" with us, and not enough simple beauty", in reverence of the wedding of [Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten]. "A wedding, a young bride, those things are the center of existence..."

11/20/1998            

Reading essays on architecture. One architect described his architect father as “only making monuments to his own ego.”

11/20/1999            
        
Lament: In twenty years, the art of the late-20th century will be described as follows: “Brash, suffused with ego, and completely irreverent of anything that came before it. It was a heady time, and everyone was calling themselves an artist. Sadly though, they failed to realize that the new digital age would produce little or no lasting evidence of their culture.            

[11/20/2024: In 25 years not much has changed. Back in 1999 with Y2K looming we began thinking about the impermanence of the internet. Everyone is still calling themselves an artist, now with AI-generated art and music].

11/20/2001            

Interesting how hip-hop was influenced by Kung Fu movies from the 1970s. (Muhammad Ali was also an influence, but I wonder if he got it from the Kung Fu movies or vice versa.)

"Hip-hop was significantly influenced by Kung Fu movies from the 1970s, especially in its formative years in New York. As Kung Fu films became popular in urban areas—often showing in budget theaters—it provided inspiration to Black and Latin youth who became key architects of hip-hop culture. These movies resonated through their themes of struggle, mastery, and minority heroes, such as Bruce Lee and Jim Kelly, who often defied authority and oppression, paralleling experiences in marginalized communities. [More] 

11/20/2021            

Do we own ideas or do they own us? I just sat down to create some lyrics on an instrumental that I wrote several months ago and when I try to think about how this can possibly be produced with an added lyric and other instruments, such as a guitar part based on the new lyrics.            

At one point does the guitar player start to be a co-writer? The writer who came up with the idea thinks that they own the idea, which I would defend: it’s their “gift”. It’s unique and not something that occurred to other people, as far as we know. The songwriter owns the idea, so they get to be the composer—they get to be the conductor—and in symphonic music, the musicians are fine with that. They don’t have to create ideas...#riff 

[11/20/2024: AI music is an extreme paradigm shift in songwriting. Now that anyone can do everything, attribution for creative input is still unresolved. Sometimes a guitar part is so perfectly phrased you want to at least thank someone or give them a byline. Also, where is the skill? Humans should want skills].

11/20/2022 

Blizzard in Buffalo. Almost 80 inches in some areas.

[Prose is full of rhythmic ideas if you pick the cherries. You don't have to use the original words or ideas. They create the form and you can map other words later, or just use them to create instrumentals].

 

 

The "Curio" version:

Curio No. 18 by meta4s 

11/20/2024

With AI Music everyone is a songwriter, like everyone became a photographer once they got a smartphone. Anyone can be a president, an expert in something without knowing anything about it. Perhaps we prefer living in the illusions of possibility. You won’t know what the real possibilities are without investigation into the deeper aspects of something. That is a possible takeaway from watching Burns’ Leonardo documentary.

***

AI is incapable of a masterpiece because it doesn’t know how it has been defined throughout human history. 

When you look under the hood of AI songs there’s not much there. Musical churros. They addict you just like sugar does, diabetes of your musical soul—but we keep coming back. Read the labels...only ingredients: sugar, soybean oil, salt, other chemicals. Another analogy would be like using what looks like a real map, only to find that when you get to the place you think you’re going to, it’s just an empty field. They’re mirages essentially. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AI-generated summary. The hosts are less nerdy. What I want is Christopher Hitchens and Slavoj Žižek.