June 8ths

6/8/1886

Trial day 35. Defense lawyers pressed Bonfield on police provocation. Did the raid on workers create the very violence it sought to prevent?     Defendants sit in jail while the conditions that created them persist unchanged. Declined invitation to German singing society—too risky given current atmosphere. [More] 

6/8/1993

I’ve always had a sense of adventure and resourcefulness while composing music. Very often these experiments are the result of accidents that happen while working on something else—what creativity guru Michael Michalko calls a “find”. For instance on “Brain Traffic” the keyboard had crashed and was making some unexpected sounds, which I captured on tape. (This of course is a far cry from making pretty love songs but no less important in the large scheme of creative processes.)

6/8/1995 (Munich)

(Eno Diary)

Eno in (“dreadful”) Munich working with Andre Wilms on an “incomprehensible play”. It was twenty years ago on this day he and Fripp played at the London Palladium, the only performance that his parents attended. After the show his Dad said, “Cor! That was loud, boy.” 

      

6/8/1998            
          
Interesting that Greeks in Alexandria created an amalgam of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian. This is similar to what musicians do today; what we're creating is more “curating”. [In his recent book (2020), The Decadent Society, Ross Douthat posited that repetition through Remix was a symptom of decadence—a continuous remix of nostalgias, rather than an effort to create something from scratch with a spiritual underpinning].

 [6/8/2024: The Songdays are a diary remix and is a form of nostalgia, although ChatGPT is sometimes used. ChatGPT couldn’t possibly be “from scratch with a spiritual underpinning”] 

6/8/2000

Re: the “condensed movie” idea: Short movies are not what you want. What you want is a way of remembering all the films you want to see. The way you do this is to have some type of barcode reader, so that when you see something that you’d like to see, you can save it to your personal organizer. Even if it’s a two-year-old movie, you want to see it because you made note of it earlier that it was interesting.

[6/8/2024: The condensed movie is essentially a Short. To this day, I see films where if I saw it again, it would only be the scenes I liked. The recent Brian Eno documentary is sort of based on this idea, but is rather more of a shuffled playlist of Shorts] 

6/8/2010

It’s showtime today in the corruption trial of Blago.

[Interesting diary juxtaposition with 1886 Haymarket trial]

6/8/2019, Saturday

Johnnie’s Blue

As a vegetarian, I’ve never eaten here, but is a cool building with a cool 50s roadside diner vibe. The image is just the blue channel, hence the title. 

        

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6/8/2023

Of course generative AI can generate permutations based on chosen data sets, but whether it is “original” is unknown. Using the entire internet as a data set makes the results too fuzzy as opposed to using smaller more refined data sets and using those permutations. The only real way to determine true originality is to run experiments and see what appears original. (I see happy accidents as “original” and worthy of exploration). “Original” also has to have the quality of inspiring action, in hopes that the originality has real substance. Also, if everyone is looking for “original”, originality becomes elusive. Truly original is also eccentric, which makes it esoteric and culturally less viable. 

***

AI has increasingly become a political battleground (like everything else) between people who have been studying it for a long time and people who are just getting into it. The latter group of people are singing its praises, just as people were back when the PCs came out. If you look back into that period in the late 70s and into the 80s there were groups of people who were also on opposite ends of that technology—people who were very excited about it and people that were cynical. It was that way with the internet as well.  I suppose we’ll have to decide what’s interesting on a longer axis of people using AI exclusively, people not using AI, and people that are “centrist” or “moderate.

[6/8/2024: I’ve yet to use AI to any large degree. I see image generation as being an extension of what people used to do with fractal art. In music I want to see syllable mapping with lyrics, but that doesn’t take long for me to begin with and is the fun part. AI in many ways takes the fun out of creativity].

[6/8/2025: I use AI for music quite a lot now because I’m not at all threatened by it, except for its produced quality–not that I want a buffed and polished sound–I’d rather it be quirky and interesting. The latest: 2 country demos from a 1997 lyric. They sound kinda nice…] 

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/f6ae1bd0-0ea0-4643-930e-73e410a29999