December 28ths

12/28/1998

Re: marketing strategy for Secret Sphinx. I'd rather have some story to tell about it–just writing songs and arbitrarily sticking them on a CD is boring. We'll have to get the story straight. 

12/28/2008

Incredibly warm, 60°, which created interesting fog conditions. Went out in PM And took photos at park. I called them “Blackfrost” .

 12/28/2010

Interesting: Recordings in the age of mashups are ‘organic’, like fruit on a tree, free for the taking and consumed/enjoyed for its properties without knowing what produced it.

[12/28/2024: “Not knowing what produced it”, or how it was made will be the mystery of the future when there will be seas of content created by AI, originally generated in 2024, then remixed and restyled generation after generation throughout the 21st century with no attribution at all. All a historian might have is a generic username].

12/28/2014

A new photo series: Architectural Deconstruction. This particular series has to do with the “deconstruction” (or parody as in Stanley Tigerman’s “Titanic of 1978”) whereby shards are broken off and floated off into the sky, sometimes obscuring the sky altogether.

12/28/2022

Very often modifications of a work such as adding lyrics, don’t always work well with music that was originally intended to be instrumental. This is like adding lyrics to instrumental prog rock for the “holiday mix”. In my own experience with my own work is that if something started with words in mind, then became instrumental, words can more easily be added later because language was originally driving the idea.

[12/28/2024: As I’ve been generating music with AI, I’ve noticed that the best results arise from lyrics that are already musical. AI will attempt to find the music in prose, but the lyric writer already knows what it is, and at best, AI makes interesting suggestions, but not better than what a real writer does. AI-generation is not writing, and never will be. I may be eating those words].

12/28/2024

Watched the Ennio Morricone documentary--2:30 of reading Italian subtitles. Lots of takeaways: defined the sound of the American West (the guitar “gallops”, whistled melodies, whip lashes, trumpet mordents, “Good Bad and the Ugly” coyote howls), ironic that it was “shocking” by early 60s standards, when Tarantino was born, literally and figuratively. Here’s a GenX person being influenced by someone who was a part of the greatest generation, seeing the world in entirely different ways: someone with roots in the Catholicity of traditional Italian song and someone almost defining postmodernism in film, right around 1966. The access point for boomers was the guitar sound on The GBU. To Morricone, it probably didn’t have the same importance, but to some boomers it was a Beatles Ed Sullivan moment. He lived fully in the moment of his time, willing to do what his peers were doing, as opposed to doing what an academic composer was supposed to be doing to burnish his reputation with his other peers and hating what he was doing. The essence of film music (and Photographs For Music) is that something “fits perfectly”. In the evolution of film as a technology, it didn’t originally have sound associated with it, so it is never fully integrated. Sound was the adopted child of film. It’s an abstraction--something “literally” pulled from the ideas in both the story and the film, but not separately. You couldn’t write the same music for a novel. Once the idea that still images could have a sequential motion the idea that there would be sound with them was inevitable because many people were collectively having that same idea at the time. The same thing will happen with new technologies in the future and there will be Morricone figures (archetypes) for the new technology of the time. 

Excerpt Library (Cinema): "Discuss how films changed in the 1960s"