June 7ths

6/7/1989

(Keith Haring Journal)

“Had lunch with Yoko and Sam Havadtoy and then went shopping for a vase for her performance tonight....We went to see an incredible installation by Nam Jun Paik at the MoMA of Paris. It's amazing what images he gets out of a TV screen and the speed with which they change. This is what television as an art form is all about....” 

[From the advent of computers, while artists are using cathode ray tubes and a material. It's interesting how screens themselves have now lost their ability to be sufficiently ironic to be used as a medium. The current satire and irony is now all in what AI can churn].

6/7/1995 

(Eno Diary) 

“...why is it so hard to pay attention to anything on a screen?). I feel no difficulty whatsoever in ignoring most of it. Worked with my new super-fast computer on Photoshop.”  

6/7/2005

Story idea: World where humans have devolved, such that they have lost abilities, traits, emotions, empathy because they have atrophied through non-use.

[6/7/2025: The story is now reality with the use of AI, but AI will produce abilities and skill as well. Ability and skill are shape-shifters]. 

6/7/2010

Now that I have been doing more field recording I’ve noticed that my attention is drawn to sonic events rather than things that I see that might be pictorial for a photograph or painting.

[6/7/2025: We are shifting our collective focus to AI. I have been vigilant of this effect by continuing to maintain and develop older skills, like orchestration. AI can do all this but it’s not a skill. Just because I was doing field recording in 2010 didn’t obviate or obsolesce other parts of music I liked].

6/7/2021

Ideally, what you want in music as a player and as a composer is something that’s “high context”—where things are tacitly implied and you don’t have to specify everything. You should be able to give a chord chart to the guitar player and then they’ll work it out. You don’t have to specify anything else. It is exformation.    

***

Playing music manually is in lots of ways like barefoot running which I understand is very natural once you learn how to do it. When I first started playing it was "barefoot" on an acoustic guitar with no amp or electronics, with the guitar mostly out of tune. Musical instrument manufacturers create the "padding" to prevent the pain involved in the vulnerability of performance.

_ 

6/7/2023

I do my most rigorous work in music. I’m more of an outsider in visual art and work mostly from ideas (like a Bruce Nauman). I like to play with concepts as I do in music but the skill isn’t there. I’m at the point where I’m not interested in going back and learning how to make portraits and landscapes as they would not inform the things that I’m doing now and would be a waste of time and wouldn’t be that interesting. The corollary in music is that there are musicians who don’t want to do that either—they’d rather just dive in and make things. I think that’s a valid way of working. But over the years I’ve become more of a traditionalist: I see the value of having a wider range of skills that I can draw from and use different strategies on the axis between traditional and purely conceptual work.

Very often I’ll revisit my “4 Levels” theory: at Level 1 you’re just learning the instrument and you’re on the ground floor of learning music; on Level 2 you’re at the point where you have a greater degree of skill—you know all the scales, you can play around with odd meters, and so on. Progressive Rock is an example of a Level 2 music. Rock in general is Level 2. Level 3 involves concepts. The primary example of Level 3 music is Pink Floyd. It’s musically progressive and is deeply conceptual. At Level 4 the musical rudiments aren’t even a factor—it’s essentially audio art. John Cage’s 4’33’ is a perfect example of Level 4 music in which music as we know it is left out. It’s the experience of being in the moment in a room where you become mindful of the sounds that are there and/or sounds conjured by the imagination or just your own mind chatter. We can do that in art as well: Digital art is a way to go to Level 3. Video art is very Level 4 although it does take skill so you’re not at the ground floor, you’re not just learning how to use a camera at that point.

6/7/2024 

Today’s Songday, Joinery, is more funky than it is Japanese. Possible lyric meaning: Our lives should be like a form of joinery, or architectural, based on building blocks, seeds, or “acorns”.