Lee Barry's Blog, page 29

Some Of Everything

 The interesting thing about keeping a diary is that even while you're
keeping it you're not thinking about the day that you would go back and
look at it. But that's what I'm doing now, and typically I'll see
patterns emerge over decades. I had not been creating diary entries about politics all that much—at least not in the paper diaries--in longhand. Digital text has made writing a lot easier

Some March

Selected entries in the month of March, 1997-2016, essentially from the advent of the internet under Clinton through the Obama presidency, with a large part through the Iraq occupation.3/1/1997Loaded Windows 95 (3.1 upgrade). Everything is going smoothly...so far.[Windows 3.1 was notorious for crashing. In retrospect it's amazing how stable the OS become.]3/24/1997Mad Cow Disease is the result of

Strange Semiotics

 Linked from Ron Cobb’s ALIEN art pages, this one is entitled, “Nostromo semiotic icons.”I don't like to re-hash older work (well maybe sometimes), but this was on-point regarding how we interpret messages based on the medium and/or device in which they are written. [To David Bowie it might be rechaufee (or leftovers), as used in the lyric for Strangers When We Meet from the excellent (then

Rewiring For Unity

 
Unity is a non-denominational spiritual organization based out of Unity Village Missouri, a place in the  Heartland, a region recently romanticized by Bruce Springsteen in a Jeep ad (Jeeps are still a global operation by the way)--which is kind of poetic given that the Heartland was where family vacations in a station wagon had passed through on Interstates. I was a member of Unity in the 1980s

RIP Chick Corea

As someone who views Scientology as a kind of cult, I believe at the individual level, even someone following something that is controversial can inform art-making at the individual spiritual level. Instrumental music perhaps allows more room for the transcendent because it doesn't use language, often fraught with polemics. He certainly was a "Clear" and it showed in the sense of joy that came

Conceptual Packaging/Un-branding

 
On Steven Wilson, TFBTo some degree, music has always been--or had the capacity to be--a form of conceptual art. We naturally want to group things that are similar. Once you've been doing something for a long time you begin to see it as continua, or having some kind of logical sequence or serialization. Now I see it conceptually as "Covidism"--if that was ever coined as a genre or art movement.

Some February

2/12/1997The music scene is anarchic. There new rules are more tribal rather that democratic, and will also change music education. It will have an  “anyone can do it” feel to it. Remember it was this philosophy that created alternative, techno, industrial, etc.2/1/1998This presidential scandal is evidence that now it's journalism's turn to go through a deconstruction--much like what music went

Space Forces

Artist's rendering of NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive satellite. Credit: NASA/JPL-CaltechIt's logical that we'd come up with the "Space Force" idea eventually. The space program in many ways has its roots going back to Teddy Roosevelt's forays into the American West. But as Mark Twain eventually discovered--and wrote in his memoir--it was largely anticlimactic. Heading west always seems like

Some January

Selected diary entries from January 1998-2012.SOME JANUARY 1/1/1998Excellent performance of Joe Jackson's 7 Deadly Sins on Sessions at West 54th. I should do an extended orchestrated piece like this. I like the unique combinations of orchestral and rock instrumentation. It eludes any attempt to label the music as strictly classical or strictly rock.    1/4/1998Guitarist Michael Hedges killed in

Something I Saw in A Movie

   Or a painting, or a photograph...As I got older, I began to realize that I didn't want art to mirror real life. I didn't want to associate too closely with any of the characters or scenes. I am wondering why lots of films that I watch these days are depressing.It's easier to engage with artwork if there is a comfortable distance from it. The passage of time will usually dissolve the anxieties