Lee Barry's Blog, page 35

Creative Readiness

Against popular wisdom, don't take breaks to do nothing to jump-start creativity. You probably will have missed something floating through while at rest, and when you get back to the river of ideas, the ones you get might not be as good as the ones you missed. It's best to have the mind at-the-ready. If you're rested, there's no need to rest the mind. Just let it connect that way it wants to

What Do You Have a Taste For?

Giant BLT, Claes Oldenberg (MOMA)This is a common question around dinnertime.In Sartre's Psychology of the Imagination, he describes his experience of "Entoptic Lights", visual artifacts resulting from damage to the optic nerve from a flu virus he had in childhood. It is essentially a form of "acquired synesthesia.""About half an hour after going to bed I see a number of brilliant pointed stars

50 Words Or Less

I suspect that social media is changing our relationships through thousands of tiny cuts. The first clue is the diminution of communication.Word counts of exchanges can seem to drop to 50 words in an entire month, sometimes across email, texting, and social media posts combined.Depending on how fast people speak, a one-hour telephone call could be at least 100 pages if transcribed. Compilations

Demode

"'Imagine' is a bad, bad song."https://theweek.com/articles/918062/i... I can preach from my own choir, one of my aphorisms is "You should never blame someone for being from their generation, or for what their generation produced, even your own."I'm reminded of Frank Lloyd Wright's book When Democracy Builds. It was hard to get through parts of that book. Wright’s writing (at

Blues Of All Things

It's interesting to watch the videos that people take of tornadoes moving through their neighborhoods because they show how ephemeral they are and cause so much destruction in a minute or less, and sometimes followed by a clear blue sky. When you fly around super-cells in a plane they are a mass of peaceful white in blazing sunlight, yet on the ground, they create malefic shadows and

R.I.P Christo

Most artists are familiar with the zeitgeist of a beginning seed idea. It can be an image or a word that you've seen that grows in interesting shapes over time. I always see pieces of music as being in a state of growth. All are essentially prototypes of what they could eventually become as resolved works. But even when they're done you're not done. All works are generative in nature. Jazz is the

#LaunchAmerica

It’s interesting to watch rocket launches and protests at the same time. Both are looking beyond as an escape from earthly miseries, which will go everywhere an unresolved spiritual problem goes.Twitter post: A good choice to leave now:  https://twitter.com/andymilonakis/sta... many ways, SpaceX is still a space fetish reminiscent of a cover of a 1950s Popular Mechanics

On Memory

Entries with "memory/memories/remembering" and/or "war", "history", "hero", "ancient/antiquity"2088. The bad thing about books, as opposed to other media, is that you live with them longer while you're reading them, but they don't necessarily stay with you longer. Even one sentence--or even one word--can stay with you your entire life. Books can sometimes merely be a way of strengthening already

Brain Trains

Sometimes when I’m sitting on the train waiting for it to leave the tunnel--just when it is ready to roll out of the dark station at the set departure time--I experience “phantom motion”. One’s anticipation of motion makes it feel as if the train is moving. I once had the idea for a video installation of a large clock with the second hand slowly moving (or giving the semblance of movement), and a

Phase Changes in Creativity

Like phase changes in matter, people involved with creativity deal with them as well. Composers have been known to have revivals of what they valued before, such as neoclassicism, or in art, a return to representation. Music as a vaporMusic production is a simulation of the listening brain into distinct and digestible inputs. Music production is kind of like a "vapor" (not considering the genre