January 3rds

1/3/1998

Some Picasso quotes:

• About children's work: When I was their age I could draw like them, but it has taken me a whole lifetime to learn how to draw like them.[This perhaps has to do with learning how to be more of a right-hemispheric person--if that is even possible. People that become this is usually the result of getting struck by lightning--like the orthopedic surgeon who became a pianist and composer and became known for The Lightning Sonata].
•  My paintings are never done. That would sentence them to premature death.
• We invented cubism. We had no intention of inventing cubism, but simply of expressing what was in us.
• Don't expect me to repeat myself. My past does not interest me anymore. Rather than recopy myself, I would prefer to recopy others. At least I would bring something new to them. I like discovery too much… What after all is a painter? He is a collector who wants to make a collection by doing the paintings he saw in others’ collections. That's how it starts, but then it becomes something else.”[This is how it works for young musicians as well, where you’re influenced by an instrument that you picked up that was at a friend’s house, albums they played, things you heard om the radio. I’m not sure how that works now because of the isolated nature of human interaction stove-piped through the internet and social media. There are of course playlists, but it’s not remotely the same].
•  A work of art must not be something that leaves a man unmoved, something he passes by with a casual glance. It has to make him react, feel strongly, start creating as well…He must be jerked out of his torpor. 
• You can only work against something. I make paintings that bite, are violent, [have] clanging symbols, explosions. A good painting should bristle with razor blades.
• All of my paintings are research. There is a logical sequence. That is why I number them. It's an experiment in time. I number and date them. Maybe one day someone will be grateful. [I have always had some kind of numbering system. It gives you a framework to work from because you’re always making the next one and assigning it the next number. Even if it wasn’t successful, it’s “of a piece”.]
• It's not sufficient to know an artist's work. It is necessary to know when he did them, why, under what circumstances. Someday there will undoubtedly be a science which will seek to learn about man through the study of creative man.
• A picture doesn't change. The first vision remains intact in spite of appearances.[I’m of two minds about this. They do in fact evolve and the provisional versions mean nothing, but can be re-worked later to resolve the original vision that got lost in the shuffle of the evolution.]
• Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy. 
  

1/3/1999            

Back in studio to work on Smooth Blue Lake. I love the original one I did months ago that had that beautiful floating vibe. When I try to put it into a song format it destroys the mood. I wonder if it’s possible to create two versions, one ambient, and one in song mode without anyone noticing that it’s a recycled idea. 

1/3/2000 

Rhythm is a language, language is a rhythm.

(Strophic rhythm with various wordplay)

 

[1/3/2026: This is when I started getting interested in hte connection between music and language. Things can take decades to evolve, but it's amazing that it's become persistent interest and is now being used for the Songdays].
            
Interesting: The “Say Hello” woman who wants to say hello to a million people so that she gets the trust from everyone.

1/3/2007

Interesting: the cave paintings at Altamira are suspected of being fakes, they were too good to be ancient. ( Fake graffiti, fake ambiguity)

Article in New York Times about composer Maria Schneider. Things I liked: she tapes parts of the work in progress and dances to it to see if it has the most motion she wants. She was influenced by Gil Evans, who she said knew how to “dress” a soloist, set up structures for the improvisers so that phrasing became part of the music. 

Excerpt Library: ‘Discuss the connection between dancing and language”

1/3/2018

On a Facebook group I asked the question: “If film was invented during the Baroque, which composers would have gotten the film score gigs up through the Classical period?            

Film in the 18th century would have been a major disrupter of music history. Composers would have been seeking fame and social status instead of art for art’s sake, or at least the new medium would have made things more important so as to utilize the new medium, as opposed to the practicing of one’s craft with the primary medium: musical instruments, ensembles, and orchestras.            
Conceivably the course of music history would have been drastically changed by the introduction of new technologies that had major psycho-social implications, as the internet has.            

I predict AI will be next, and will almost completely remove creativity, unless creativity is in the writing of the code that has some kind of aesthetic or experiential result. I do some of everything, but I find the programming of music completely joyless compared to playing it on a traditional instrument. But some may believe the exact opposite.            

“Creativity” is a term of art more than ever.            

[1/3/2025: After watching the Morricone documentary I realized that it’s new technologies that make new forms possible–a simple variation on McLuhan’s famous maxim. AI is making things possible, but we don’t know which artists will catch the big fish. In any event, the patterns will be the same, i.e. an artist does the new thing, becomes famous for it, then has an identity crisis. Morricone never really wanted to be known as just the Spaghetti Western composer. “When I score a film I am a composer. When I write for myself, I am someone else. So I become a very diverse and opposite composer—it feels like I have a double face”.]

 1/3/2023

Boomers were “radio natives” just as there are now social media natives. I listened to top-40 radio in the 70s as did everyone because it was almost a binary choice. I (we) used to buy all the Elton John records and sat around singing along with them.

[1/3/2025: We now have AI natives, people old enough to get in on the ground floor of something technical which will change the world just as much as Bill Gates did in the 1970s. It’s easy to see a zeitgeist and harder to see its shadow].    

***

On dilettantism: It’s quite easy for me to skip around from thing to thing, but I finish everything. You really need to focus in order to really push something out the door like an album. A rule of thumb that I had been using all along was “the magic three”: a piece of art, a piece of music, and some writing. When I’m working on art I refer to them as being “resolved”. When I’m working on music it’s just basically “finished”. I don’t know why I make this distinction. Art tends to incubate in the background in a different way. I’ll do something to it and it’ll just sit there for days or weeks and as I’m looking at it I think about what I need to do next. Whereas music has to be played—it’s hidden until you activate it.

When I’m working on art I refer to them as being “resolved”. When I’m working on music it’s just basically “finished”. I don’t know why I make this distinction. Art tends to incubate in the background in a different way. I’ll do something to it and it’ll just sit there for days or weeks and as I’m looking at it I think about what I need to do next. Whereas music has to be played—it’s hidden until you activate it.

1/3/2025

From Alex Van Halen's Brothers:

"The thing about making music is that when you get to something really good, it doesn’t feel like you’ve created it, it feels more like you’ve found it—like that song or that lick has always existed and was just waiting for you to play it. It’s probably the same way with painting and poetry and every other art form—when you finally hit it, there’s just something about the sound or the look or whatever it is that feels meant to be. Think of the chord progression in “Jump” . . . can you imagine that melody not existing? It’s almost inconceivable. But it’s torture along the way. You’re groping in the dark. As inevitable as a great song feels, that’s how ««sure and frustrated you feel until you get there."

[Creating art and music with AI is a matter of finding. But there are two kinds of finds: one is which it presents itself to you while you're in a mindset of a craft, and one where you're just running permutations and finding the one that "wins". The latter is more a form of gambling. Very often after I've generated something I like, I actually do feel like I've created it, when I really haven't done much as a craft].