December 18ths

 

12/18/1943

(Naples 44) 

An Italian police marshal is only the equivalent in rank of a sergeant major, but he wields a huge and often tyrannical power in small Italian towns, where he is in command of the forces of law and order. 

Benvenuto is said to use the unsatisfactory food situation to spread propaganda against the allies, in the words of one anonymous person, to arrest anybody who doesn't please him. More seriously he is charged with carrying on a personal vendetta against a famous partisan, Giovanni Albano, whom he arrested on allegedly trumped-up charges soon after the allies arrival and who he has since been doing the best to have interned. 

12/18/1999

Lyric idea: If you really want to know me, I'll sell you a ticket to the inside of my mind

[25 years later, a song idea] 

 

12/18/2023

Innovation can take place in things that you wouldn’t normally think that they would. All innovation seems to have been on the internet for the past 25 years, perhaps in ways that it wasn’t needed. The conceptual album, at least to me, is still innovative. If you make the film first, the music will automatically be conceptual and have a narrative framework. If you start with artwork, then it will be painterly. Innovation is easy when you simply change the order of things or use different cameras and lenses. 

Musing On Music Mostly LLM: "Discuss how creativity can be enhanced by changing the sequence of tasks" 

12/18/2024

The popular excuse for AI is that it’s always improving. The lyric generations still suck, as do the AI music generators most of the time. The one I have been using the past month that was fairly interesting, is suddenly stupid. All the results are branded with “Suno” so they are somehow in the equation. Humans are good right out of the box, but are seldom improving their behavior. But they are still stellar creators historically. Then a few hours later the AI was in a better mood, with some nice trip-hop iterations on Talkin’ On A Talk Show. 

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David Rowell’s The Endless Refrain posits that we’re now completely running on nostalgia. This is because cutting-edge experiments are not interesting to any generation and we go back to the material that actually works. But if it wasn’t for the true innovators who lots of other people copied or were inspired by, recordings would all be generic. What people react to is the sound of something and experimental sound would seem like a waste of time or too woo-woo, when part of the history of pop music involved some musicians exploring the more esoteric and arty things. All the innovative prog rock emerging in the late 1960s was “arty”. In fact, at one point it was called Art Rock, not Prog. 

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There is a young musician in Spain who is covering some of the more unknown Elton John songs. She was talking about it being an access point. Access points can be difficult to show to other people because they may seem controlling or arrogant. People won’t explore it because it might seem pushy. A person needs to be open to finding new doors to open, and they will all lead to somewhere unique, and you would have done of your own volition. But her experience is wildly different from mine, someone who bought the Yellow Brick Road album in 1973. 

My understanding of April 1980 is different from all other generations in some way and would have been affected by his assassination 6 months later. 
            
Someone who is now 17 might just be listening to Double Fantasy and watching videos made about it and would be perceiving it in different ways than all the other generations. Silents would still be saying they never liked the Beatles at all, let alone their solo work.

"Discuss how Boomers look at culture"
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

12/18/2046

(Anthony Townes Diary)

All I remember is a white flash. Ox said I was hit by a cab, then confirmed by Dr. Samara. Said I had cracks pre-existing in my skull. He thinks it’s from all the years of boxing.    

Reset 2046 LLM: "Create a chronology of events after the accident on 12/15/2046"