January 10ths
Book: Creating Minds by Howard Gardner. Of all the books that I have read on creativity, this is one of the finest. Gardner writes like an intellectual without completely losing his less-educated audience. I like his theory of “asynchrony” and the notion of “where is creativity” rather than “what is creativity”, and wherein the space bounded by individual talent, the field (critics), and the domain, lies creativity. I now see that creativity is a mixed bag of elements that, in the right combination, constitute revolutionary ways of understanding a domain, e.g. The Beatles were creative because music was changed by what they did. Gardner defines Creativity as having the capability to withstand “fruitful asynchrony” or rather to withstand the vagaries of creative life. Great book.
Excerpt Library (On Creativity): “Discuss how creativity is defined historically”
The most interesting in art is that which extends beyond the edges of the frame, beyond the movie theater, beyond the concert hall.
[1/10/2025: Very often after you’ve seen a good film it lingers in your mind. Things that impact you change you in lots of ways. It’s galvanizing.]
1/10/2001
[1/6/2026: Interesting: Wilco used some of the recordings and got sued and the defense was that there was no substantiation of the copyright claim because there was no real creativity involved: "Copyright requires some amount of creativity by an author ... Simply pressing the record button on your radio receiver hardly qualifies to me." Sounds like AI-generation: Simply writing a prompt isn’t that creative].
Interesting: Spanish artist Enrique Santana. His work is ordinarily public relations work, but the fourth dimension aspects make it more interesting. He loves Chicago and wants to create a visual record in painting. I like what he said about memory: you could use your memory of a place to enhance a similar place, for example, a boyhood memory of an ocean to a painter of Lake Michigan. How you think during the creative process makes a big, yet subtle difference.
1/10/2007
Bush proposes surge of troops into Iraq and is lambasted by Democratic congress. The days of rallying behind a president went out with Nixon.
[1/10/2025: And came back in spades with Trump in 2016 but he’s exponentially worse than Nixon in terms of what now “rallying” means. “Rallying” is mostly a bad thing because it’s based around groupthink leading to hooliganism].
In 10 or 20 years we’ll see how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan really screwed with a lot of heads, and our society.
1/10/2022
This new album will either be titled Central Coast or Alternate West, and will be an album that will use mostly traditional instruments. Yesterday I was working on a piece with the working title of Some September–connected with the Some September diary, using some of the words from the entries to create the lyrics.
I think I want to use less synth and use more piano, organs, guitars, with very little synth and electronic treatments. It’s essentially a philosophical position you take at the beginning of a record where you decide what the production strategy is going to be. You can waste so much time hunting for sounds and synths can actually get in the way of creativity. They have a different sonic footprint. I’m reminded of Mitch Froom back in the 90s saying that he hated synthesizers and never used them. I always loved his productions because they were so interesting and quirky and he just used organs and pianos and guitars. But as to the philosophical position about what you’re going to do and avoid, you can also say you’re just going to use synths and avoid traditional instruments. To make these kinds of design decisions I often use the metaphor of a control panel where you can dial up or dial down things. In the case of Central Coast, I’m dialing down synths. On Miles From Mars I dialed down traditional songwriting and made it an ambient album. Say you want to have it sound like certain bands: you can have a control knob for “Beatles/Less Beatles”, because once I get in the trenches I have to spend so much time just on the writing and performance, setting a philosophical position about things leaves more room for it. Also, how much time do you want to spend in the mixing process? I find a lot of that kind of tedious. It’s something that I try to avoid doing because all my energy has gone into the the song itself, doing the arrangement, playing the bass parts playing the guitar parts as best I can, and then considering how those instruments sound–especially guitars: what kind of guitar sound do you want to use. I'm not a guitar player. I write on guitar and I can play the parts as I would play the part on a keyboard, and the instrument is kind of insignificant, as is timbre. For me that's another job. #riffs
[1/10/2026: This eventually became the Frontiers album. My current philosophy for the Curios is that they will start as classical music, then extrapolate them with synths and other instruments. This way I can completely focus on composition].
1/10/2025
Lyric video for Dynaxiom 1960. The Cassady/Kerouac photos seemed to resonate visually, but it’s not entirely about that cultural history. Songs sometimes need lots of wordplay in order for them to be “singable”. I would use a nonsense lyric over one that made literal sense if it was easy or fun to sing. The rocky production isn’t one I’d choose. I particularly like the “Somewhere else, not somewhere less” line, meaning “I want to make a change but not less than where I am”, or a “somewhereless”—a “no place”. The song is obviously about individualism, but perhaps in the Jungian definition as being a means to resolve your problems apart from the crowd and groupthink.
1/10/2026
I look at videos of young bass players and I see myself in them. If I was 18 or 19 I'd be making such videos. But by the time I was in music school in 1981, that kind of thing was been-there-done-that. But I have frequently revisited my bass-hero days--even today as "been-there-went-back". There were other periods where I was bass-focused such as in 2020 with Peripherique and making YouTube videos of those tracks.
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