Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

   Church, Southeastern U.S., 1936 -- Walker Evans Very often we forget who we were. In the process of understanding the present moment, we lose a sense of our deep history. Should we change, and what for? To what degree does that affect the roots of our own life? If you lose your roots, there’s no way to get nutrients from the soil of life. (12/11/2003)  Seed:   Curio No. 6 by meta4s

  1/21/2025 “What a beautiful name,” he said, pronouncing the phrase with a stress on its last syllable: A-mer-i-CA.  The rhythmic seed:     Curio No. 5 by meta4s

 

 Lighthouse Monolith   Lighthouse  

      Seed:   11/9/1914  [Wittgenstein diary] Russians quickly advancing on Krakow. The entire population must evacuate.  

 11/15/2004 Jazz musicians are music theory gear heads—often over the heads of the audience. Once jazz became suffused in urban environments, it became elite and intellectual. It's now hard to deny that the intelligentsia is part of the fabric of America as a rodeo.  ***  This is an interesting way to put the human in the loop: generate the music based on your words, transcribe the melodies and riffs, then arrange for string quartet.  The original rhythm based on the rhythm of the words, "Part of the fabric (magic) of America is a rodeo". This is how AI interpreted the words using the prompt: R&B, Funky, Normal Tempo, Synth, Electric Guitar, Drums, Bass, and becomes the seed:    

  C Collage of Louis XIV Curio No. 2 by meta4s Seed: 5/11/1968  

Seed:   2/8/1997

 Sacred and Profane  

 No Kings Rally - WWI Memorial       I'm most interested in the context of the event and the history of a place (particularly Oak Park, a liberal enclave since the 70s). These kinds of shots are difficult to get because you have to be at the ready and on the hunt. I've always said that your eyes take the best photos because things are happening quickly in the flow of life, and if you're armed with a camera, the shots have to be decisive and perfectly framed.  Street photography is a real skill which I don't have, or has to be practiced. There are always shots I regret not getting--like the teenage boy sitting in the Potbelly eating a sandwich watching the march. The facial expression is key: He's witnessing an event that is at the beginning of a new period in the US, watching people who are the age of his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. There was another possible shot of a Carmen Ghia with people waving placards. I did get one of a vintage red Fia...

 Duotone (One For Each Eye)  

10/15/2006 Dome City released. The Dome is seen as a protective shell, hermetically sealed from corruption and moral decay, but ultimately is transformed into a world where Utopian visions coexist with dystopian realities. 10/15/2006 CBGB closes in New York! Such great bands came out of such a slimy dump : Patti Smith, The Sex Pistols....” Patti Smith: “October 15, 2006 marks the closing of CBGB. My band, joined by Flea, gave the final performance, ending with a eulogy of our departed musicians and friends. The last flower is received were calla lilies, symbolizing innocent and rebirth.”  10/15/2011               Rhythm By Addition released.  10/15/2015             Attended a lecture on the topic of happiness. Someone in the audience posed the question of whether video games are Flow Experiences. Many think they are distracting, but perhaps they are precisely about Flow. Add another two related ...

10/14/2003             Is there such a thing as a certified diarist? A registry? (Diary Registry) 10/14/2013 Martha Beck, “ 10 Life Lessons You Should Unlearn”: “If you've abandoned yourself in the effort to keep anyone or anything else, unlearn that pattern.”      [10/14/2025: 3311. Very often, we break ourselves in order to fix ourselves [Dynaxiom 3311-3320] 10/14/2023             Video 45 of Blue Star Eclipse.        [10/14/2025: Ambient music doesn't work well as shorts. They exist in different worlds] Cloud Deck: 

   10/12/2004             Article in paper about Salvador Dali’s 7 secrets for creative success : blow your own horn; keep up with current events; collaborate with the best; make new friends; expand your horizons; don’t just do one thing; dream big; believe in yourself.              [10/12/2024: I can’t imagine what Dali, or any surrealist artists would be doing in the 21st century, He wouldn’t be doing just one thing.] 10/12/2005             Apple releases the video iPod, of course with U2 in the promo spots. Now with the advent of mobile video, movie studios should offer individual chapters or scenes from movies. This is interesting because it also wags the dog, whereby individual scenes can be pre-released as an enticement to see the movie.             [10/12/2024: I still use the idea of the “Video 45”, although YouTube has recently in...

10/11/2011             Weather continued summery.             Protests continue at LaSalle and Jackson. The energy here is amazing at both ends of the spectrum, with people looking downtrodden or completely electric. There’s a very loud drum circle grooving away, with car horns providing melody. [ Listen to a field recording taken simultaneously ] Transcribed drum:   10/11/2015             It was the MP3 file that killed music. It reduced music to a shareable file, first through emails, then on the Internet. It made music “good enough” as a freebie, disincentivized it, and placed too much value on recording technology. Music was once a wonder of the world.              The thing that killed music wasn’t equal temperament. It was the recording. But who knew in 1970 that this would happen? Technology is weird in that it giveth and taketh away. [1...

10/10/1997 Todd Rundgren’s new album is just straight Bossa Nova renditions of his own songs. Why is he doing this? But it’s interesting that he has all these different voices and personas. This album is back to the “Hello It’s Me” basics. Saw interesting book of photo mosaics where hundreds of tiny photos were arranged to form Gestalt images. How can this be done with samples for the same effect, i.e. the subject of all the images equals the portrait? [ 10/10/2025: This was done by Beeple in 2021, but the parts didn’t stand for the whole and couldn’t in music either. The closest we’ve come to a corollary in music is the pattern works of Phil Glass and Steve Reich. A temporal art form is a grid but everything has to be locked to bar lines, beats , and subdivisions. Music is (usually) unforgiving in this way, but there are attempts to free music from grids, such as Nestup .] 10/10/1998             The job of the musician is to fill unwanted silences wit...

  10/9/1914 Wittgenstein hears continuous cannon fire in the distance for 12 hours. [A cinematic audio treatment from Rings of Saturn that could underscore this moment, although they’re different World Wars]       10/9/1997             Classical music stations should have programs or specials where they play only adagio movements or scherzos, allegrettos, etc. Adagios could be played late in the evening for example.     10/9/1998 Andrew Vachss, legal advocate, crime novelist, blues musician writes essay in Pulse magazine, “Can music be a vehicle for social change?” He makes a valid point that song lyrics are generally innocuous. The power of text (McLuhan: the invention of the alphabet) is somehow tamed when combined with music, not as powerful. (Does anyone really pay attention to the lyrics?) The real vehicle for social change is visual media because it has the capacity to simulate reality. Music is more a “pa...

 Sunday  

 3 Views of a Tree    

10/8/1944 (Naples 44) "A most embarrassing episode happened today. Mobs of youths gathered in the gardens of the Villa Nazionale, overlooked by the front windows of our palazzo, and began to assault girls...Soldiers who intervened to defend their girls were promptly beaten up. We heard a few distant yells, saw running figures, but no more. A few minutes later No. 3 District was on the phone to the FSO ordering us out into the streets to keep order. Once again it’s evident that nobody knows what we’re really supposed to be doing here. This time we seem to be seen as a sort of watered-down version of the SS. Yet over and over again we’ve been told it is not our job to take over the duties of the Italian police..." 10/8/1968             (Beatles Studio Diary)             By 1968 standards this was fast going. Two new songs started and finished, with no overdubs to follow, in one session, albeit at a 16-hour one. It ...

10/7/1968             (Diary of John Barrett, from the book, The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, The Official Story of the Abbey Road Years, 1962 to 1970).  [White Album sessions]             It took 67 run-throughs of the basic rhythm track, acoustic guitar and vocal (George), organ (Paul), and drums, (Ringo)—before the best version of “Long Long Long “was found and onto which the overdubs would be made. There’s a sound near the end of the song in which a bottle of Blue Nun wine was rattling away on the top of a Leslie speaker cabinet. It just happened. Paul hit a certain note and the bottle started vibrating. We thought it was so good that we set up mics and did it again. The Beatles always took advantage of accidents.     10/7/2000           Benjamin Orr, bass player for The Cars died of pancreatic cancer at 53.    10/7/2001       ...

10/6/1988                 “Pickles” (A sketch on bass)        [The new version for the Curios series]  10/6/2004             Photographer Richard Avedon died. He was one of the first to admit that still photography is a “sin of omission”. It’s a cropping of time and context. Something always gets excluded and sometimes it’s the part that’s true.             [10/6/2024: These diary revisitations are an interesting way to see how art has evolved. The collage he made of Audrey Hepburn in 1967 is not unlike something that would be generated by AI. AI is essentially a collage technique without scissors and glue].     10/6/2011  Dynaxiom: The eye expects good design and the heart affirms it.  Steve Jobs connected design and desire. His approach to life was the antithesis of the idea of institutional learning. He was the qu...

  Fishing Near Winchelsea, Sussex , John Horace Hooper   10/5/1899 (Rye, East Sussex, England)             (William James Diary) Letter to Mrs. Henry Whitman:             ...The land is bathed in greenish-yellow light and misty drizzle of rain. The little town, with its miniature brick walls and houses and nooks and coves and gardens, makes a curiously vivid and quaint picture, alternately suggesting English, Dutch, and Japanese effects that one has seen in pictures, all exceedingly tiny.... Prose converted to a poem or lyric: [Discuss the similarities and differences between, prose, poetry, and lyrics] The land is bathed In greenish-yellow light And misty drizzle of rain The little town With its houses and coves Curiously vivid and quaint English, Dutch, and Japanese effects All exceedingly tiny     10/5/2000             Revolution in Serbia. Milosevic overthrown...

10/4/1998          Advent of web radio means anyone can be their own radio station, whether they know something about radio or not. This will bring into play the “broadcast’” metaphor and everyone will start being DJs.             [10/4/2024: This is the very beginning of streaming using the RealAudio format, It was actually “narrowcasting”. It would be 8 years before the first podcasts, which were downloads to the hard drive of the iPod. It was inconceivable, and perhaps unpredictable, that you could “watch” a podcast, let alone “listen” to a photograph. There are inconceivable things now that will be mainstream by 2032, but people are thinking of them, just as da Vinci’s idea for a helicopter didn’t materialize until all the components of it were conceived, invented, and manufactured over the course of hundreds of years. Similar to watching a podcast, we will be mostly watching books. The world is moving towards watching. Thi...

10/3/1994             “Perfect World” finished, a somewhat angry and sarcastic song about the illusion of heaven on earth. But we can live in a place where innocent delusion provides some degree of comfort and happiness, and where hope of a future made of gold will someday be reality. [10/3/2025: In a recent interview Joan Baez said that she has had to embrace denial to find a modicum of normalcy. That seemed shocking coming from her. I once worked with a lyricist who wrote a piece titled Embrace Denial : “Its hopefulness, it deadens the pain…” I also did an AI-generated version of this in the "early days" of AI music, just a year ago and it has evolved exponentially. These are actually good guitar solos, and who played them? It sounds like Michael Schenker, which is why I included the cover of UFO Phenomenon ]. 10/3/2016  You can’t make a whole lifetime (even an artistic practice) out of just-in-time thinking. You have to tap into some kind o...

10/2/1914, Friday             Wittgenstein wonders what his fate is. Will he or will he not stay on the ship?       10/2/2005 10/2/2015 What is a “digital breath?” This is an interesting metaphor that brings together how we play music with the body and how we make it with the mind. Even if we can figure out how to simulate the process of manual phrasing, it is always the mind at work.             There is so much useful information in the history of music that is being discarded in favor of digital techniques that have no correlation in the analog world.             We should always honor the artists who have come before us. This is common in the art world. In the music world, everything is discarded as being “old” and therefore irrelevant to the Now.      [10/2/2025: When we generate music with AI you don't have to be concerned about breaths, so yo...

10/1/2013 The edge of a building (The MCA) against storm clouds, which has a Necker Cube effect where the image “flips".                                          10/1/2021             Tony Bennett, now 90, releases new album with Lady Gaga. I see this as how the generational gap can be bridged, for mutual reverence for old and new generations using music. This reminds me of a similar mutual reverence between Eddie Van Halen and Les Paul back in the 1980s.             Gaga: “I see a young boy every time I sing with him, and it just makes the experience of singing so freeing. To have it be about two souls singing together...and then at the same time, I also take in all his wisdom. The wisdom of all his years.”     [ Musing On Music LLM : "Discuss how music is intergenerational"]      ...