Lee Barry's Blog, page 32

Changing the Channels

 

Simply by changing the channel in an image, you can see a new reality--or unreality--an interesting metaphor for consciousness. A few weeks ago when the skies were strangely orange, I was thinking about filters and channels in digital images. Very often when we look at the other channels in an image we either find something that is more interesting or unnerving or less interesting. In some of

RIP EVH

One clip that I really liked of Eddie Van Halen was from 1988 at a Les Paul tribute when he expressed effusive praise for Les Paul, in his 70s at the time. What I liked was the generational deference and realizing the unbroken line from Django Reinhardt, Les Paul’s main influence. 










The power of generational influences in music began to become more diffuse in the 1990s with Remix, in

Soothe The Savage Beast

Dog with two heads (bewitchment fetish)--Zaire 1916Back to music and away from insane media. ("Music hath charms to soothe a savage beast.")In the days and weeks after 9/11 people would escape to the pleasures of the former world. For me, it's old Weather Report performances.Recently, I re-watched Weather Report's performance at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival. The audio is nicely mastered in

Contrafacta

 Getting a word in...On the morning after a presidential debate, there is always lots of unpacking to do, so I dialed up the transcript because I was curious how they handled the crosstalk.In vocal music, contrafactum (or contrafact, pl. contrafacta) is "the substitution of one text for another without substantial change to the music". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraf... reminds me of an

Color Narratives/Orangey Skies

Orange Peel, 
19 x 25 inches, acrylic on paper with iridescent copper patina.

The depth of meaning in blue is as deep as the deep blue sea, and could go on ad infinitum. It’s one of the more difficult words--like orange.This is the first page of my Blue Book, an artist book I'm working on where every page is some shade of blue. I haven't yet decided what the content will be; I have started it

Why Do Anything?

What are your intentions before doing something, particularly in creativity? I see creativity as something quotidian and integral to my understanding of myself. I feel "aligned" when creative, but the Internet has shifted those alignments, which I see as a manifestation of cognitive dissonance.As Joanne McNeil says in her engaging book Lurking:"My life, before I was aware of the bargain, is up

Memories of Memories

As I recall, most of the 9/11 anniversaries I have experienced have been on days that were like the actual day--warm with clear blue skies--which I recall as an “ironic blue”. That morning, if you even noticed it was a beautiful day, it was a fleeting moment and was, in fact, filled with irony. Today, in Chicago it is gloomy and overcast. Even though 2020 is not the 20th anniversary of 9/11, it

Information Gardens

I have been keeping journals since the late 80s. The morning rituals always included the journals (plural, because I kept a separate lyric journal). The main difference between hardcopy and digital journaling is that digital journaling has more capacity for information hoarding, whereas paper journals have length constraints imposed by our tolerance for writing in longhand for pages and pages (

More Than Ever

Distraction@10I first begin using Evernote in 2009 and starting saving articles to read later, which I haven't done until now. My "To Read" tag now has 1458 items in it. Apparently, I was distracted and never read them, and now reading them for the first time. It's almost unnerving (actually "nerving") to read 2010 articles about the perils of distraction and multitasking and realize we are

On Finishing

From the article on a new Lucian Freud (grandson of Sigmund Freud) biography:
 "...when a painting was nearing completion, Freud would step back from the canvas and “as though taunting himself” would murmur “How far can you go?” ..." https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ma... is sometimes even harder than starting, because after a work