Curio No. 98
From the Godfrey Reggio IRE Collection
Posts
Terminator Line (4/6)
Lyrics derived from a series of lines I jotted down while watching the Artemis fly-by. AI music is a nostalgia jukebox, but you write the lyrics for all the songs. My pick is "Call of Nature" The moonlight Falls heavy on my soul The soil turned to white Black into the cold Impact flash Injection burn First live look Then another turn Are you ready for when it shines? You're getting close to the terminator line At the start, the mission new Not just you and the terminator view On my pillow, a trillionth of a feather Better look out for the space weather Sitting in the earthshine--adjust the heat Waiting for the fly-by Grooving to the beat Looking at the moon At the terminator line You saw the far side Not ...
February 6ths
2/6/1997 A Pollyanna projection: "By the year 2021, we'll colonize Mars and we'll be able to download all our entertainment from government servers..." Earth-Mars communications will be problematic as it takes four minutes for transmission. How long would it take to download our "entertainment"? Which begs the question: Do we want to spend our lives downloading Earth on Mars? "StarTrek-y" shows need to use more anachronisms, e.g. 78 records, Victorian-era clothing to offset the assumption that "in the future, the world will look like THIS." It would be more convincing if they used bits and pieces from different eras, which is what the real world is anyway 2/6/2010 Idea for performance: reverse the stage setup so the drummer is center-stage and the vocalist in the back or even off-stage sometimes, but put a camera there as well. [2/6/2026: Great treatment for Rush's Limelight on the 2026 tour with the new drummer replacing Peart, but ...
August 6ths
February 6ths 8/6/2001 8/6/2005 8/6/2012 Authenticity is just an evil trap.—Jack White Dynaxioms: All seeing is a random accident; It’s fun to be wrong together and conspire to be right. 8/6/2022 On AI being “beneficial” to the artist: Using cybernetics to create music can be interesting but in my experience, it has a short shelf-life. What you want is to have those forays feed back into your core values as an artist. If you are an artist who doesn’t have any musical skills, making music with computers can be enriching. I’ve used such procedures in the past, then came back to making music manually. But I still use electronic processes in tandem with acoustic music. The term “beneficial” can be applied when something is used in the general flow of creative output, such as when Bob Dylan “went ...
July 6ths
January 6ths 7/6/1999 Reading Alan Lomax’s Folk Song Style and Culture . Fascinating chapter on how different cultures use text. The Navajo have very few concept categories, using mostly nonsense syllables. The function this has is to produce consensus. All the singing group agrees upon is that a certain series of verbal bits are pleasurable and/or appropriate. In this way any sense of conflict is kept out of the text. [7/6/2025: “Folk music” is an interesting topic to explore in the AI age, when we can generate it with an LLM simply by selecting the genre in a drop-down. We’re using text in a different way as well as instructions. So a poem or lyric serves as those “instructions”. Gone are the days of the spirituality of a concert of folk music. But there’s always the possibility of actually performing the folk song you generated]. [7/6/2026: Use of nonsense in lyrics is now more doable with AI because no one has to sing it. To do that kind of nonsense you have to do it yoursel...
May 6ths
5/6/1886 (Thomas Sullivan Diary - AI-Generated) Learned about the terrible events that have been unfolding in Chicago. Haymarket Riot/Labor strikes turned violent and police firing at workers. I cannot help but reflect on the state of our country. I hope that we can find a way to resolve these conflicts peacefully, and that we can move forward as a nation with compassion and understanding. Received a letter from my friend Sally who recently moved to California. It was lovely to hear about her new life on the West Coast. [The original idea for the diaries is that I would have a character in the 1880s keeping a diary. as well as a diarist in the 2040s (Tony Townes from Reset 2046). At the time I generated this 1886 entry, ChatGPT was in its early days (2022) and has gotten exponentially better. The problem at the time is that AI has no long-term memory, so it doesn't know what it did yesterday or last week.] Here's an entry generated for May 6, 1887, better, but still full of...
January 6ths
1/6/1966 Yet more overdubbing onto the tape of “Penny Lane”...none of the instruments was taped pure...recorded at 47-1/2 cycles to speed up on replay. [1/6/2021: What a difference 55 years makes...from bouncy Beatles pop to the potential end of democracy in the US. Apparently, "We Can Work It Out" by The Beatles was the number 1 song in the US. This would make for an ironic video treatment. I’d detune the track by a half-step]. 1/6/1995 (Brian Eno Diary) “I’ve never kept a diary past about 6 January (so I know a lot about the early Januaries of my life).” 1/6/1999 In general, when people look for answers to their problems, they tend to live the information in the books they’re currently reading. There was a book that cited an incident where Jackson Pollock smashed a violin when he couldn’t get the right sound out of it. A friend related it to a similar event in her own life: “It’s okay to smash things, it d...
June 6ths
6/6/1886 (Sullivan Diary) Jury selection continues. Each candidate questioned about anarchist sympathies, labor opinions, newspaper preferences. Mrs. O’Brien refuses to shop at Kowalski’s store—claims he harbors radical sympathies. Evidence: he hired a German who attended union meetings. Democracy’s fragile…how quickly neighbors become suspects, workers become threats. 6/6/1907 (Paris) (Kessler Diary) Lunch with Rodin who reminisced about the late ‘70s, early ‘80s monthly “Dinner of the Cossacks”. 6/6/1944 (Diary of Anne Frank) “This is D Day,” the BBC announced at twelve. “This is the day.” The invasion has begun!...BBC broadcast in English: “This is 0 Day.” General Eisenhower said to the French people: “Stiff fighting will come now, but after this the victory. The year 1944 is the year of complete victory. Good luck!”” [18 years in the future in a postwar zeitgeist teens are playing amplified guitars in a new form of music based on a mel...
6/6/2010
Absolutely gorgeous day. Annual Day In Our Village. Did a 60 Minutes recording: FL Wright Home and Studio, church bells, bell tower at Grace Episcopal church, Scoville Park, resale shop, more bells, organ.
11/6/2015
Partch , 29x20 inches, acrylic and pastel on rice paper (2015) Abstract homage to composer and theorist Harry Partch. It has a quasi-oriental quality, perhaps relating to the microtonal nature of some Japanese music.
