December 5ths

12/5/1997

Interesting that Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures film was done with poor-quality film stock, no special lighting, and so on. yet achieved some degree of artistic merit, which goes to show that you don't need the best of technology to make good art, or at least art that someone might think has merit.

[12/5/2024: We have the best technology with AI, but it is lo-fi and DIY at the same time. It’s different because we don’t have any top-down or self-imposed constraints].

"The film was produced under extremely marginal, improvisatory conditions in early‑1960s Lower Manhattan, then assembled through a largely hand-crafted post-production process that used almost all of the camera footage. These material constraints shaped both its distinctive degraded, “foggy” visual texture and its loosely structured, vignette-like form." [More}

 

 

 

 

12/5/2001            

Interesting: the guy at the Atlanta airport who breached security. They announced it over the PA, but he didn’t realize it was him that was causing the hysteria.     

12/5/2007            

Bought cheap Holga camera for $20. (The whole point is that it is designed to malfunction and produce happy accidents.) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 12/5/2012 
            
Dave Brubeck died at 91. He introduced odd meters and polyrhythms to jazz, and it became his brand, even though he didn’t write Take Five.

12/5/2015

Doppler:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

12/5/2023

On "new squeezes": I re-watched a 1956 interview with Marcel Duchamp about his retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum. He was already in his 70s at that point and stopped making art. It's very common that artists stop making art in old age. In music, the band Rush stopped writing in 2015, then Neil Peart retired from drumming and later passed away from a protracted illness. Geddy Lee has become an author and is frequently on book tours--a proxy for music touring. I wonder if he's even picking up his instruments?

At some point artists simply don't want to do what they used to do and found something else to do. I'm at that point as well, but music is still so compelling. I love "building" music. I like making the "floor plans" for it. #riff
 

12/5/2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

12/5/2025

Frank Gehry died at 96. He was one of my favorite architects beginning in the late 90s when I was interested in deconstructionism and probably mentioned him quite often in the diary. His work was an interesting slippage between sculpture and architecture in the same way that Frank Stella's sculptures were (The Two Franks). He was an interesting figure in the late 90s when postmodernism (not the art movement) was full-tilt with the Millennium (and Millennium Park) approaching. He was particularly successful in bridging art and science, i.e. they were engineering challenges, not unlike art fabrication. Artists were going to the extremes--and they still are--but it the lat 90s were a Zeitgeist--at least from my perspective. 

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Everyone wants something different from art, even artists. Artists usually know what they want but sometimes initially they don't and get started making something and wait for the engine to warm up. Viewers always know what they want and the engine has to be ready to go. As a viewer I can go with a cold engine and wait to see how long it takes. As a songwriter I'm not sure of what I want or what listeners want. If I'm using AI to generate songs I'm in the role of a listener and will listen to things as if I didn't write them, so I don't have to "own" them.  I'll like the "colder engine" things because they might move me in such a way that would make me stay and wait for the warm up.