January 18ths

1/18/1998

Was thinking about the exciting future of music amid its decline.

[1/18/2025: Once you are in your 30s you begin to either completely drop out of culture (oblivious to anything that’s new, bad or good) or you take the good and leave the rest. I’m in the latter category. I never dropped out completely, but as anyone ages, regardless of generation, you’re seeing a decline in quality. This is the result of the march of postmodernism, which has now fully transformed culture. Once it reaches politics, anything goes. The idea of metamodernism is still too diffuse to say there is a real post-postmodernism period. It’s up to artists to take a stand on it, but it’s difficult because postmodernism is pretty exciting. David Lynch was mostly a postmodernist, but not at the expense of his influences from other film eras. Again, take what you can use, and leave the rest].

Discuss the philosophy of metamodernism and how it is currently being expressed in art and music. 

1/18/2003

Video: Mulholland Drive, third viewing. I still think the girl in the diner at the end is having the dream. 

1/18/2006

Story idea: Guy dupes media with a fake story, Does mea culpa that he lied, but media finds an identical story and is lost in the fog of media. The reader/viewer is left with a sense of unresolved ambiguity that resonates with real-life events depicted in the media.

[1/18/2025: What I loved about Lynch’s work was the ambiguity. There really is no one definitive answer because the artist isn’t really sure what it’s about either, just like life].

1/18/2022 
            
Pleasant January day. Pleasant Home, Mills Park, in stark contrast to the depressing COVID world:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1/18/2011            

Prepared for 'Tools of the Trade' exhibition at Oak Park Village Hall. Even with only 6 pieces, all the details seem to take forever. 

1/18/2023

Rick Rubin has just written a book on creativity. In an interview he was talking about the game Go, and he was using it as a metaphor. What he was trying to describe was that when you put machines and humans in competition, the idea is that the machine is always going to win. The way he explained it was that the reason that it won was because it wasn’t reverent of the rules. A machine doesn’t know all the rules so it goes by its own rules. It doesn’t know what your rules are (or care—a machine doesn’t understand “caring”). I don’t know how humans could live in that kind of environment because we’re separate from machines—we have a longer history—we have mythologies and archetypes. If machines don’t know what those are—or they’re just randomly generating them—it’s just based on our inputs into their system. In human history, it’s going to be a tiny blip that will get lost on the axis of human history. We’re now singing its praises but I just don’t see how it’s going to fit in the scheme of things. #riff

[1/18/2025: I have actually found a way to use AI as human-in-the-loop. It’s a test of your own creative strength. AI will win at creativity (or just productivity) because it’s “Turnkey” art–just turn the key (click the mouse) and it’s done. But if you have actual skills you’ll like using them. If you were good at a sport you wouldn’t want a machine to do your playing. “Winning” is a different story].       

1/18/2024 
            
Nostalgia release finalized for tomorrow 1/19. There is always some superstition involved in selecting a release date. Apparently, there is some magic in Fridays as a release date, and I was trying to decide whether it would be in January or February. Reviewing the January 19ths and 26ths in the diary, I chose 1/19. 1/19/1967 in Beatles diary: “From little acorns...The song which was to become the stunning finale of the Beatles’ next album. “A Day In the Life”, started it out simply...as a stark bare recording...” The “acorn” planted in this case was last January. 
            
It’s also interesting that it will be a seed planted for the next in the series, Sum II: ______. It will be calendrical like Sum I, but will be songs about specific days. One of them might be January 19, 2024 to connect the two albums.

1/18/2025

In Geddy Lee’s memoir there’s an interesting  section about the release of his solo album:
            
“In fact nobody in my family made so much as a peep about the record. But you know what? That’s okay. I don’t demand it of them. I imagine it’s weird for them. I didn’t seek my band mates approval either, but I got a nice nod and a note from Neil. Alex was not very expressive other than saying the guitar sounds were not to his taste nor did anyone else suggest Rush play a song from the record should we ever reunite any more than one from Alex’s solo record. We considered those things personal business. Actually I had little time to consider any of that, let alone suffer my usual bout of post-album depression partly because I enjoyed a boatload of confidence in my myself as a songwriter independent of Alex...”

[1/18/2026: Solo work is more like making paintings: you're doing everything yourself, and I think they may be perceived in the same way. When we look at art, we're always passing by it quickly--even Old Master paintings. But music is hard to glance at because of its temporal nature. In this respect, music requires more of a concerted intimacy where you have to sit with it a number of times (at least twice) in order to fully "see" it. We don't take the necessary time with it unless we decide we want to invest the time. People also may not want to explore your inner world or process. Ideally, all art or music has to make an impression within 2 seconds. But all music can't always punch you in the face--but fast punk music from the 70s always did. All the songs had very short intros or no intro at all. This has continued on to video where people have become inured to short videos. Even 5-minute videos are too long]. 

Musing On Music: “Discuss duration in music”