Blue Paintings
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January 13ths
Antipode: July 13ths 1/13/1998 The cloning idea is out of the bottle and it won’t be long before all the wrong people abuse the technology. [In 2002 the Raelians claimed they had cloned a human. A central tenet of Raelianism is the pursuit of biological immortality through human cloning. A company associated with the movement, Clonaid, gained worldwide notoriety by claiming to have produced a clone.] [More] Reading Edward Hall’s The Dance of Life. He made an interesting observation of Hopi culture with respect to time and rituals. Ritual was much more important than any finished product–sort of like playing music but never writing or recording it. Apparently, the Hopi had a hard time finishing projects because they weren’t driven to bring closure to all their activities, as do Westerners. [1/13/2025: Most primitive cultures don’t see art as a product. They can be objects of course, but they’re not decorations]. Excerpt ...
September 13ths
13th History Overlay 9/13/1998 The musician converts mental states into a pattern that evokes the same (or different) mental states in the listener. If we want to understand the Beatles, we have to concentrate on what led to that sound, the distillation of spirit and inspiration, which eventually results in sound that listeners hear and convert to exformation. German physicist Peter Richter said that in his studies of chaos theory and fractals he came to the analysis that people tend to be drawn to boundaries, coasts, rivers, mountain chains...Because they are transitions from one element to another. “The beauty of boundaries comes about because it is a place where something complicated and interesting happens. If we are in only one domain, our lives are not as interesting as they would be if we lived on the boundary, where we can be influenced by many different things. I like the ...
August 13ths
8/13/2016 We hate ear worms, but they constitute the “encyclopedia of similarity” that we use to make comparisons. How often is our first response to something new “It reminds me of...” Somehow I got infected by an ear worm of Turning Japanese by The Vapors the other day out of nowhere. Then later on there was a song playing in a store that sounded just like it. 8/13/2018 Time spent practicing doesn’t necessarily equate with artistic merit. Most rock musicians throughout history only spent enough time to be as good as the musicians they admired, and some went beyond that and became cultural icons. What’s missing now might be soul, and a spiritual feeling in the music. You can’t practice that—you have to develop an inner life first. I think jazz is a music that is made better the more it is practiced and studied. Musicians who had an interest in jazz, or dabbled in it, usually became better musicians, as its roots are dee...
July 13ths
January 13ths 7/13/2016 David Bowie wasn’t poisoned by cynicism or sour grapes, even when he knew he was dying. Arguably, his last experimental works were not as finely experimental as, say, Outside . But that is not the point. *** This song , written by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, was recorded at RCA Victor Studio B in Hollywood on July 25, 1966. Can’t get any more “summer” than this. ( Sondheim using the summer season ) 7/13/2021 Back in the early aughts I had this idea that was called “Video 45s” because very often I would go see films and there would be certain scenes that I really liked and my idea was that instead of watching the movie over and over again in its entirety, we’d watch scenes as “singles”. When you played the single or “watched the single” it would remind you of the entire film so it would save you time from watching the entire film again. That was almost 30 years ago and now we have Shorts... [7/2024: What’s interesting about creating music that is exact...
June 13ths
Antipode: December 13ths 6/13/1886, Sunday Churches preach reconciliation while congregations whisper of revolution. Sermons and sedition share the same summer air. Kindness persists despite the fear. Perhaps this is how we survive—one gesture at a time. The war took my certainties. The city took my youth. What remains? The daily choice between compassion and convenience. [It's interesting that Civil War babies are still traumatized by it--at least as inferred by AI. I see this as plausible. Sometimes the plausibility of something can stand for a partial truth. This is like a 30-year old in 1975 feeling traumatized by World War II--probably not plausible, but perhaps plausible in the mid-1880s relating to 1855]. https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/f6ae1bd0-0ea0-4643-930e-73e410a29999 6/13/1949 (Denver) Kerouac gets settled in and types 10,000 words for “On the Road”. “Beautiful summer is mine”. Songday idea: [The Suno version which interprets it as pure B...
March 13ths
3/13/1995 Eno: "Songs that don’t depend on composition depend instead on performance - so the fire has to be there in the playing, which it isn’t after several long days’ work". [Is there ever a “fire” in composition? A rule of thumb for completing a symphony would be to write a minute of music a day. That can be hard on some days when you might have lots of 16th notes at fast tempos. Old master composers needed a different kind of fire to get through those days scratching with a calligraphy pen into manuscript paper--including drawing in the staves]. 3/13/2014 Working on ambient music that should sound like this (Iceland--glacial outwash): 3/13/2024 As I was looking at Magritte paintings online I was thinking that it’s interesting now that when you do research on art pieces and artists you can easily spot the artists who are copying other artists in some way or doing send-ups. If you take this back to the surrealist period and asked one of the surrealis...
February 13ths
2/13/1999 Called typist about typing up this diary. She charges $25 an hour. That's quite pricey for just typing. Perhaps I'll just dictate it. [2/13/2025: Which is what I did ultimately. Nothing like speaking what you wrote 26 years ago]. 2/13/2018 Ideas On A Napkin 2/13/2024 I’m currently in a weird limbo between albums. The idea was that I was going to continue on with the In Sum series so I would be making Sum II which is the “songday” idea. I liked working on just one song a month and perhaps I should continue on with that because it’s a way of working efficiently rather than working on this and that, although that’s been my typical way of working all along where I just make things and then at some point I collect them, curate them, and assemble them into some kind of package. Songs can be created over the course of even decades and some of the old stuff will be on the new album. I suppose all artists go through these periods where one thing is finished and you’re thinkin...
December 13ths
12/13/1999 On horizon: Caves, Access Grids, Active Murals. [12/13/2024 @25 : Advent of VR] 12/13/2001 Program on NPR on music of Madagascar. They said one of the goals in their music is to make it sound like fast talking. Then you listen to their language and you can see the connection. [12/13/2025: I think the best bottom-up way to be musical is to start with rhythms, and language can supply it. See: The Singing Neanderthals 12/13/2016 The cashier at a Whole Foods, probably around 18, commented that she preferred 50s music over 70s music. What was appealing about them? Perhaps it’s not the song but what they represent in a nostalgic sense. Songs are evergreen in some ways when people tire of bare trees . [12/2024: in The Endless Refrain by David Rowell he argues that music runs only on nostalgia now. This is because experimentation in music is not popular at the moment. You couldn’t have a mid-...
October 13ths
A mashup of entries from 10/13/1996 and 10/13/1997, using the old songwriting trick of superimposing the chorus with a repeat of the one of the verses, in this case Victorian Flowers, a song I wrote with a lyricist friend in 1996. The chorus lyrics would also be cross-alternated. *** 10/13/1997 John Denver dies in plane crash. Interesting that Wong Kar Wai ( Chungking Express ) talks about American pop music as “noise” or “sound”. Pop music really is not about lyrical content. It’s all about feel and the sound around the sound. He chose California Dreamin’ because it reminded him of an orange juice commercial and the image that “orange” conveys. He also wants his films to move like what the song sounds like. (Portishead does this to me, where I actually “feel” the “black-and-whiteness” of the sound.) 10/13/2013 Sometimes the most banal urban photos can become”tableaux”—in this case five lives at a street corner: 10/13/2019 Marquee Poetry/Lyric: Hustlers abominable Ad A...
4/13/2024
Weather very pleasant, 60 degrees. Oldest living conjoined twins die at 62. Two people that were never lonely.