Lee Barry's Blog, page 17

Some April

Given the popularity of the Gentleman Jack series, for April in my In Sum series I am including a few entries inspired by the diaries of Anne Lister (4/13/1820, 4/16/1818, 4/19/1819, 4/22/1817), in addition to Keith Haring, Brian Eno, William James, and Anne Frank.As I've interlaced the journals and diaries of others with my own, interesting juxtapositions emerge. For example, an entry of 4/16/

On Intentions

 Cy Twombly -- BloomingIntention is a bit like the idea of having free will. If you feel that you have free will, then you can say your intentions are pure. But if your intention is to really want to make one thing, but you make other things just because everyone else does, and it doesn’t fully resonate with you, then I’d say intention matters. But very often I have intended to make something and

This Is Not a Drill

  I've been enjoying watching clips of the current Roger Water tour. His spectacular shows aren’t so removed from what’s been on TV since the 1970s in terms of its capacity for a depiction of dystopia as a form of entertainment, with generous dollops of f*ck-off.What should have been included, and perhaps it was, were imagery of desiccating lakes and the world ablaze, as if the red we have

On Hording (Cont.)

  It's the annual Oak Park Library Book Fair this (hot) weekend. Packed with people, most of whom the ones that donated books. I spotted a few of my donations, like The Design of Cities by Edmund Bacon--which I bought used in the 1980s. And as I was browsing The Book of Virtues by William Bennett someone said "that's my donation". Are readers essentially knowledge hoarders? Or does the idea of

Joniana

 Every Boomer and older Gen-Xer knows of Joni Mitchell because her hits were in rotation on AM radio in the 1970s, but it's only until later, much later, that we begin to really know the depth of her artistry.Her heart-rending performance at Newport last week still has me reeling and wanting to revisit again and again. Sometimes there are other things that happen in the flow of events that

Phantom Threads

The Nag Hammadi CodexThe big problem with technology is that we're too reliant on things having to be charged all the time. What you want is a system where devices are always charged and don't ever have to be plugged in. A Moleskine notebook is always "charged" for example.Playing things "unplugged" was a thing in the 1980s where pop songs would be rearranged and played just on acoustic

The Sound of History

 Nostalgia seems to be getting more compressed as we move into the future. Young people now have access to the same histories as everyone now living. This is one of the wonders of the Internet and streaming media. Before the Internet people used to have to spend lots of time in libraries or had many subscriptions to newspapers and periodicals. I certainly had many of them, in addition to the

Audio Grocery

 Any effect that is overused becomes cliche. If Auto-Tune is required for the integrity of the music, then you’ll always have to have it on hand. There is music where a Hammond B3 and a Prophet 5 are required and you’ll always need them. You can’t play Pink Floyd songs without organs, electric pianos, and vintage synths, and the guitar always has to sound like David Gilmour. The sound of the

Doomwatch

 (Doomwatch was a  British TV series from the early 70s).One of the new aspects of living in today's world is deciding whether we should be alarmed and how to act accordingly. The US has often been accused of kicking the can down the road as a way of squelching cognitive dissonance. It's an easy way to turn down the volume. Then you don't have to do anything.In terms of what is happening with

Changes of State

One of my favorite lines about creativity is by Walter Murch: "It is frequently at the edges of things that we learn most about the middle: ice and steam can reveal more about the nature of water than water alone ever could." As I've collected aphorisms over the past 30 years (Dynaxioms), some of them have become lyrics or have generated rhythms for possible pieces of music without words. It is