November 26ths

Photos taken on the 26th of any month 

11/26/1997            

Web browsers should have a “this site only” feature to prevent you from straying too far away from your original focus. This makes surfing more like reading just one book with many footnotes, containing hyperlinks that you can explore later.            

[11/26/2024: Even in the beginning of the internet, distraction was an issue–primarily through hyperlinks. But distraction is a bug of our cognitive software. It was once simply called daydreaming, where even if you were reading something you liked, there would be points where you thought of something else, or had an idea. This was always the case for me, where I’d want to jot down a lyric line or title that was inspired by something I was reading. That’s how these diaries started, and here I am 27 years later, commenting on it].

[11/26/2025: The problem we all have is a short attention span. That's always been the case to some extent, especially after the advent of the internet and the use of hyperlinks. As an artist, you have to keep reminding yourself of the things that you're interested in. Every day, there's a barrage of potentially interesting things, and you can begin to explore them. But if you keep doing that every day, you're going to lose sight of what you were initially interested in or trying to do. But there is also the happy accident that occurs in the flow of creativity that steers you off in a more interesting direction].

“Discuss randomness in creativity and how it differs from distraction”  

11/26/2016

My Rules of Practice: To be able to play something in all keys; To be able to play scales or chords in all non-root voicings or positions; Endurance: the ability to play without tiring or becoming bored; Organic sense of time without being metronomic; To be able to spot performance bottlenecks and correct them; To be able to spot creative bottlenecks and go around them. When you're stuck, stop and make another one in a series. 

11/26/2021          

Watched (over 4 hours) the first 2 episodes of Peter Jackson’s Get Back. You can’t ignore the fact that having cameras rolling during the creative process is going to affect the result. Perhaps this became commonplace with the advent of MTV—and certainly did affect the music by thinking how you’d make the video, but the actual filming of collaborations is an interesting slippage between individualistic creativity and team creativity. 

A takeaway on the collaborative aspect: If you get an opportunity for in-person collaboration, seize the day, as it informs your own creative process going forward. That’s the way it ultimately worked for the Beatles. 

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Interesting: What would a record collection look like if all the person bought was something that “trended”? Imagine this was the machine-learned data set for an entire century? 

11/26/2023

Watched interview with Andy Summers. I resonate with what he said about focusing on real intentions and what he really wants to accomplish with creativity. This could be a Boomer thing, whereas Millennial and Gen-Z have to reflexively be making a video about something. There was another video I watched about Geddy Lee’s rig. It was by a guy probably in his mid-20s. I couldn’t understand why someone so young would be going into that much detail, but it's probably something I would have done at that age if YouTube existed then. At about age 40 you begin to become less of a gearhead.

11/26/2024 

Started writing the string Shortets for Sum IV. This makes me feel more rooted and “serious”. 

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When we talk about fidelity in music, we’re usually talking about audio, but it’s actually a nice metaphor. Low-fi creativity is now exemplified by artificial intelligence—where we just type a prompt and it generates images or audio, and then we select the ones that we like. But in hi-fi creativity, those kinds of things just start the creative process. Lo-fi creativity isn’t concerned with developing ideas. There’s a certain laziness in it, and in a lot of ways it’s postmodernist because it’s built on the idea of anything-goes. So we don’t have to take it very seriously to begin with. But I’ve never worked that way, even though a lot of the work that I’ve done, especially in visual art, is postmodern, and doesn’t take a lot of skill. It’s more about the ideas. But lots of times the idea is only the starting point, and you have to use skill and craft to develop it. #riff