July 8ths

January 8ths 

7/8/2000

The arts are like a big subduction zone, where ideas, products and so on are taken under, and rise again as new “crust”.

Interesting bit in an article: “The excessive use of technology not founded on logic has done real damage where we hoped it would help.”

[7/8/2025: This was in the early hours of the internet. The issue of logic in new technologies is evergreen and universal: It seemed logical that the internet would be like a card catalog–obviating the need to go to libraries to do research. It still serves that function but it went off those rails. The same question persists: why do we need AI when we did fine without it, and would continue to be fine with older technologies].  

7/8/2022

It might be too difficult to read certain things into cultural objects without the proper context. “Honesty” to the composer is not always what’s important when you’re creating the work because it might all be a mechanical operation of pushing notes (or sounds) up a hill. “Honesty” might come in the form of being mindful of things happening on the periphery of that, or having the ability to be both player and listener, then saying “that sounds like something I would do” which I think would seem to be honest. But I don’t think honesty is an absolute and is at best subjective and mercurial. If you know your intentions intimately, then that might be what honesty is.

[7/8/2025: You have to remind yourself sometimes to put on the philosophical hat and question intentions and impulses, but then the work is less spontaneous. I find that certain instruments and sounds add spontaneity but at risk of being too oblique to tasks at hand. At some point divergence is more of a guilty pleasure].

7/8/2025

Very often customs emerge from people doing something wrong. [For example, people using technology in ways that it wasn’t intended then becomes a cultural meme—or custom. Blues in music sometimes emerged from open tunings on guitar, which isn’t typically used in classical guitar repertoire. Even standard tuning can be “wrong”—for example, why is there a major third between the second and third strings as opposed to a fourth? Usually these aberrations are done for the sake of making certain things easier]. 

7/8/2026

Systems are our "personal assembly lines". This is true. It's how I've always worked. The reason people can't start or finish things is that they don't even believe in systems, or that systems don't have anything to do with art-making because it's too cold and mechanical. A system provides meaning because it connects things that are otherwise unrelated. Two things you've made can be in different domains, but they relate to the "system of you".