Very often prose will spark Dynaxioms or lyric ideas. This time it did both. I had just finished reading David Brooks' How To Know A Person and was jotting down my thoughts about it and I wrote, "We think we know each other by heart, but the mind is in the way". Voila--a song idea--albeit cliche. But I'm not done yet...
0 Comments
Artists are 'packagers' of ideas. Once a piece of art is finished and framed, it is resolved and packaged for use (viewing). Raw data, including billions of images with no organization, are unpackaged. Packaged photography is typically a singular element on a wall with some other elements, not a digital gallery or slideshow. (~6/2017)
See: On Finishing Here is an excerpt from a book titled Machine Vision which I have just started to read. This relates to how I am using metadata from photographs--specifically the date-taken metadata, and overlaying them--such that the date makes the image “operative” in that it connects points in time. It is not machinic, per se, but uses that aspect of digital photography that film photography didn't have unless you recorded the dates accurately.
Once we realize that images aren't just representational, we can begin to think more about what else images can do. if we understand operative images as images that contain data and instructions for using the data, maybe we could say that all images are operative: they encode visual information in a way that can be processed by our eyes and brains and interpreted as a representation of something actual or imagined. Abstract art and architecture can cause us to feel in certain ways. We can also think of diagrams, maps and visualizations as operative images. One thing I've now grown to appreciate is this idea of "rule drift" that allows you to switch the rules after you've made them. I noticed it happening the past year or so with the writing and recording of Nostalgia Galaxy. The original rule was that I would create a song a month and the month would be determined by the month that I started it. Then I switched the rules so it would be either in the month that I started it or in the month that I finished it. The month in which it was finished actually makes more sense because you're working on it in both months and you might as well use the month when you finished it.
As I've been going through some of my notes, I had been working on songs over the course of sometimes three months, so a song would have started in February and then finished in May. It's probably best that we use rule drift because you don't want to get too locked into rules. At some level being locked into rules as a stricture is probably a good idea if you're trying to do something that's minimal, for example, using only three colors, or in music using certain note values. When I was studying composition with jazz arranger Bill Russo in the 80s, one of his rules was that you couldn't use dots or ties in your rhythms. It was frustratingly restrictive but at some level that's probably a good idea because if you don't have any rules, or if you're always drifting the rules. then you might as well not have any rules at all.
As I've been exploring possibilities for Sum II, an album of songs about certain days, I was going through my November diary. On Saturday, November 4, 2023, there was a protest taking place outside my window. This could be a rhythm I could use:
Sometimes we have to be careful with men to call them journals because men just don't keep diaries. It becomes a semiotic thing: When we say "diary", we envision a younger female keeping a private diary. But people always kept diaries and they called them that. It wasn't done publicly but many diaries were published and still are. The way I decided to do it was to extend the diary as a list into more of a calendar, in my case by day of the month. In the beginning in was basically a 5x7 index card folded in half which I kept in my top pocket (back in the day when I wore Oxfords with a suit) . I would use it as a things-to-do card but also use it for jotting down song titles and lyric ideas. I had a friend that did that and I started to do it. Then I started using spiral-bound notebooks and Moleskines in the 90s and then an electronic diary with Evernote on a smartphone ~2009.
Excerpts from the handwritten diary 1/27/2005
The internet remains free, but I predict that it will eventually be regulated, which would create "sub-internets" ("internettes"). The internet is now in its 1960s but soon will enter its "Reagan" era. May the salad days continue. 1/27/2010 Dream: I was at a fair of some kind, and I came upon a booth that had new-age paraphernalia. Behind it on the other side was a booth that had piles of money and photographs. On each bill or photo was a message (I can't recall the messages!) 1/27/2019 Art doesn't have to be involved in every activity that we do. Sometimes things are too technical and have critical implications to have a consideration of aesthetics at the top level. But art should always be considered at some level; A building can be well-engineered yet be an eyesore because art was not valued. Photos taken on a 27th "Many school curriculums downplay cursive these days. Shame. Allen points to evidence that maintaining a notebook with pen and paper is best for processing and retaining information. It can stave off depression and act as ballast to those struggling with ADHD. It is tactile, a form of “embodied cognition”, another example of the superiority of slowness. A beautiful chapter entitled In Search of Lost Time honours Danish nurses at ICU units who started patient diaries to detail the physical changes and progress made by men and women whose sense of self had been decimated by sickness. Paying attention, caring, handwriting: this is love."
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/dec/01/the-notebook-by-roland-allen-review-notes-on-living
September 26, 2021 more precisely. I was at Thatcher Woods reading a book, and the line "In September, the summer leaves" came to me. It was the notion that the summer had left yet the leaves had not yet changed. (They still looked like summer leaves). I thought, what if you were actually leaving on some journey in September, like a child who leaves for college in September? This was the initial spark for the Nostalgia Galaxy idea. This essentially is the documentary photo for the idea.
|
AuthorLee Barry, Musician/Content Producer Archives
May 2024
Categories
All
|