More and more, diary revisitations are becoming a cozy nostalgia, including books I read back in the 90s when I first began the diaries, one in particular, the book The Vernacular Landscape, which incidentally became the title of one of the songdays. I took it out the library again. What a great book a la Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language. The theme of the book is in fact about the patterns of language and how they shape our understanding of them. There are landscapes in all kinds of things if you want to see them as metaphors, such as the landscape of relationships, reshaped by the shifting tectonic plates by the "magma" of technology. Using that metaphor, social media is the volcano or earthquake. It changes the landscape such that rifts form and they become so wide you can't easily navigate them. Also, I realized how books have changed. Now it's difficult to find a book I can give 5 stars to and put it on my Top-150 list, which Vernacular Landscape is. It also brings me back to my roots as a would-be architect. (I'm grateful I've lived in Chicago and Oak Park, architectural Meccas). The other interesting thing was that the book was written in the early 8os, even before computers, and 15 years before I read the book in 1997, just when computers were coming online.
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Sometimes when I watch the Mars Rover videos I wonder that if you lived in a colony there, and were looking out the window across a rocky landscape--perhaps with a low mountain range on the horizon--whether it would always be a numinous experience. I would imagine that would fade over time where you'd lose the appreciation for the strangeness of the environment and would start to see it as routine: same old rock, same old mountain range, and you'd be feeling homesick. I don't think everyone would experience it in the same way. There would have to be a very cohesive community in which you would collectively find it more transcendent, as opposed to on an individual level. Say you were a photographer and you went around every day and took photographs. The variety of subjects would diminish over time: same old rocks, perhaps some interesting formations that you found. In any event, Mars missions may be informed by adaptations on Earth to its own harsh conditions. By the time people are living there in 100 or 200 years they will know how to adapt and cope with both boredom and anxiety.
The Illuminated Riff, which is the audio of the Riff, with images. Doing the Riffs spontaneously as a kind of dictaphone (remember those?) is a form of spontaneous writing for me, which can later be repurposed or remixed as new content. Using AI to make art is sort of like being an interior designer: you pick and choose all the materials as a form of decoration/redecoration. It doesn't really require any skill of your own other than your "eye". (It's a form of phoning in the plans: someone else is doing the work or the fabrication. If you have an idea for a sculpture that's 20 ft high you're not going to be doing that yourself; you'll hire somebody to do it).
Making art has always been something anybody can do. Now it's the idea that democracy facilitates that as a matter of right and/or privilege. But interior decorating is typically something that requires wealth and privilege and isn't something anyone can do. But AI creates that illusion--as does the internet. Designing your website in 1999 is not unlike creating art with AI and posting it on social media, albeit disabused from writing the HTML. (What if you actually had to code art and would take skill?) Last night I watched a few interviews with David Brooks about his new book How To Know A Person. He gives a good talk, but I think he's a bit scripted. The two interviews that I listened to were almost identical. But he's particularly interesting in that he's warmed up over the years, although still a centrist conservative at the core. I think that's a good thing. It keeps you grounded to come back to the things you value personally. Artists have gone through similar changes in their lives yet still have a consistency of always working on something that doesn't always involve introspection. The fact that I'm listening to David Brooks about his new book doesn't have anything to do with what I'm working on in music, but we can "code-switch": When you're with friends playing sports you're not having in-depth philosophical conversations, but when you're with your friends who you can have those conversations.
I know some guys who’ve been in a monthly basketball game together for years. They may never have had a deep conversation, but they’d lay down their lives for one another, so deep are the bonds between them—bonds that were formed by play. But it can also be the opposite: you're not veering towards small talk, or the conversation isn't meandering around to different things. Desultory conversations with no thread between them where one person is talking about what they want to talk about and the other is talking about what they want to talk about don't lead to good conversations because there's no thread between them. Conversations can bottom out when you don't have any shared talking points. As an artist, the things that you're doing are a form of constancy. The piece that you're working on doesn't necessarily have to reflect all the things that are going on in the world. Sometimes I let them fly in through the window, but I don't always have the window open, whereas some artists do. On October 7 I was working on something where I opened the window and reacted, but for me it's rare. I'm not reflexively going to pivot on current events. It seems more natural to always be reactive to the core elements of what one could possibly be reactive to, as opposed to major inflection points, e.g. the idea of endless wars as a facet of the human condition. This way it becomes thematic or conceptual to your individual way of working. It's helpful to have a script. It's a way of keeping your story straight as an artist. You can move from project to project and the fact that you're changing projects doesn't change you as a person. As the late Svetlana Boym said in her book The Future of Nostalgia--way back in 2001 when the advent of the Internet began disrupting culture in a big way:
"With the waning of the role of the art and humanities, there are fewer and fewer venues for exploring nostalgia, which is compensated for with an overabundance of nostalgic readymades. The problem with prefabricated nostalgia is that it does not help us to deal with the future. Creative nostalgia reveals the fantasies of the age, and it is in those fantasies and potentialities that the future is born. One is nostalgic not for the past the way it was, but for the past the way it could have been. It is this past perfect that one strives to realize in the future." [More] Aspect ratios are interesting in that they are a "technostalgia" that brings with it elements from the era in which it emerged and can feed the narrative. For example, portrait video nested within the full horizontal frame can suggest something confined or compressed or "shortened"--using a recent metaphor concerning aspect ratios. In 20 years (the typical time for a new nostalgia to be re-used), the Short from the 2020s will have other meanings, and so on.
Not to say I am a sage of some kind, but this is a diary entry from 2004 where I was thinking film should use the aspect ratio of a piece of paper. In some sense, portrait video is based on this idea. Of course, we use landscape orientation in the paper world but I think our natural instinct is to use portrait mode as a preference. Humans exist in a landscape, not vice-versa, but that's an interesting metaphor that you could play with as a concept. 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. 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 Ultimately, it doesn't really matter how you were raised. I think people are going to go their individual ways regardless of what's in their DNA or what's in the environment, which tends to make me want to place more emphasis on the idea that there is some kind of preordained Self in the universe that we're connected to. So it doesn't matter what your tribe is or what your family is--you're just going to go your own way anyway. I find it in spades in my family because none of us followed what my father did. My father was an ironworker and none of the sons followed in his footsteps--although I got a lot of my creative skills or proclivities from my father's side. My mother was creative in some ways, but I think I got more of the industrious creativity from my father as a kind of builder. I became a builder early on by playing with blocks and Legos and then having an interest in architecture as a result. For the most part, I'm sort of following my own nose. I like the idea that you're connected to the universe in some way so you have to capitulate to that option and hopefully, it will work either way. If you capitulate to the family business or family traditions that might not necessarily work either so it has to be a mix of everything.
Riff: 6/7/2021 |
AuthorLee Barry, Musician/Content Producer Archives
May 2024
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