02023-06-29 | Movies, Music, Rain Music, Travel
This time I scheduled my flights so I would have over six hours between arriving in Philly on my national flight and leaving on my international flight, because in March I had only three hours between flights and American Airlines managed to delay my national flight so much that I had to run between terminals and barely made my flight to Lisbon. There is a nice Amex lounge in terminal A and I don’t mind waiting… And yet, and yet, American Airlines managed to get me to Philly late again, and yes, I had to run again. Planning a six hours layover is crazy enough, but now that’s not even sufficient?
ENT doc gave me a prescription for a cream last week. Used it once and it made my ears well. During the flight I listened to Rain Poems on my AirPods Max at least four times all the way through. I probably used the headphones for six hours altogether and my ears are still clear. The album is coming together nicely and I really enjoyed the experience. I have a couple of melodies to finish and Jon has a few bass parts to record but it’s not long now. This is my first album record with the new mobile set up and the first album NOT recorded in my studio in Santa Fe since 1995. Oh, that’s not entirely true… most of Pedals On the Path was recorded at Jon’s studio, but I mixed and mastered it at mine.
Lisbon is hot during the day but cools off nicely during the night. The trick is to get up early because at 0600 it is 65ºF. At 0700 I walked a little over four miles and didn’t get lost. A few times I wasn’t sure where I was but at this point I just have to keep going in a direction and I will eventually find a landmark I know. Look ma, no GPS.
Watched the first half of the movie Tár last night. Wow. If the second half keeps up with the first, this is an amazing movie!!
In a statement accompanying the teaser trailer in August 2022, Field said that he wrote the script for Blanchett, and that he would not have made the film if she had declined it.
Wikipedia
I can understand that because she is truly amazing in the role.
02023-06-28 | Music
The growth is happening in all the worst places. Money is shifting from creative artists to technocrats, lawyers, and pencil pushers of all sorts.
If you play a guitar your career prospects suck. But if you’re a fund manager who owns song publishing rights, you can earn huge paychecks.
If you write songs, you may struggle to pay the rent. But if you’re a lawyer who specializes in song copyright lawsuits, you’re living in high style.
If you make music, you keep asking why it’s so tough. But if you’re a technocrat who streams music, you’re sitting pretty.
Get Ready to Pay More for Music – by Ted Gioia
02023-06-21 | Computer, Music
The same thing will happen with AI tracks by dead musicians. It seems like a stunt today, but it can quickly metastasize into a whole industry.
That’s likely, because the greed level among corporate and individual owners of the estates of dead musicians is off the charts. I’ve met some greedy musicians over the years, but the great ones always cared more about artistry. The heirs often have very different priorities, and they will have superstars singing ringtones and radio jingles if the money is right.
So AI will lead to a Beatles reunion. Hendrix will jam again. Miles will make another album with the Kind of Blue band. Sonny will croon with Cher once more, and Simon will sing with Garfunkel.
Twelve Brutal Truths about AI Music – by Ted Gioia
02023-05-06 | Food, Music
When a person is offered lots of food that they know they love, do they still try strange and unfamiliar food? When hungry, doesn’t one prefer to eat what one knows rather than try something that looks and smells… unusual? Isn’t the same true for streamed music? How often do we listen to favorite albums, or our own playlists, rather than explore unknown music?
One great element of travel used to be the immersion into a food culture. You traveled somewhere and ate the local food. There was no choice and that was all that was available. A few decades ago Italy only had Italian food – as if that could be a hardship because Italian cuisine is really great. This is no longer true, of course, and nowadays you can observe tourists going to the familiar McDonalds near the Pantheon in Rome, rather than exploring the Italian restaurants in the area. Or going to an Asian restaurant in Milan. The same is true almost everywhere in the world.
We are cocooned inside a bubble of our own preferred music, food, clothing, atmosphere, etc. etc. The same is true for opinions. No matter what our opinion, however unusual, we can always find places where this opinion will be reenforced. Social Media provides. Perhaps we can say we are choking on our own preferences which, in the process, are becoming narrower and narrower.
Except for public radio and college stations, all commercial radio has a cultural bandwidth of maybe five degrees. Everything sounds the same. Everything is constantly repeated. Every hour sounds similar to the last. Some people were shocked when AI created a perfect simile of a Drake song… why?
I don’t have a solution. Eat local food, wherever. Avoid chain-anything. Have Shazam at the ready to discover the music you might hear in the Uber to the airport, or in a local shop – I keep Shazam accessible on the Apple Watch, to be immediately engaged at a whim. Follow RSS blog feeds by people with different musical tastes… that’s how I discovered the Bandcamp page from my earlier post about Voices + Paintings.
What are some of the things you do to discover food, music, etc.?
02023-05-06 | Music
When I dug more into Csontváry’s life story, I found many similarities between his and my personality and artistic philosophy. He was profoundly spiritual yet not religious. He was an apothecary and scientist who started to paint in his middle age only because of a transcendental impulse he received. He gave up his pharmacist career and, for the rest of his life, focused only on art and painting to fulfil his soul’s desires and not for any other earthly or egoistic reason. He never had an exhibition, and he never intended to sell any of his paintings. He became a vegetarian and an outsider of society. Towards the end of his life, he even wrote some advanced philosophical writings challenging the hidden hands behind the governments and world leaders. Unfortunately and typically, he was only recognised decades after his death. His paintings were forgotten and almost sold as canvas to cover trucks after WWII. Then, at the last minute of an auction, somebody recognised their artistic value, bought up and saved these priceless paintings, which was like a miracle itself. Csontváry is now considered to be one of the most critical and influential Hungarian painters of all time! Sometimes I wonder how much invaluable art might have disappeared through the dark times of our history.
▶︎ Void Ov Voices : Baalbek | Attila Csihar | Ideologic Organ
I came across this album on Bandcamp. It’s not my cup of tea but I love how different and deeply personal it is. I am very happy it exists. I also love the above quoted story about the Hungarian painter. Never had an exhibition, never sold a painting, and yet became one of the most influential painters. This is absolutely true: Sometimes I wonder how much invaluable art might have disappeared through the dark times of our history.
Vincent van Gogh’s work could very easily have been burned and forgotten. And certainly that is what happened to countless works of art that were misunderstood at the time.
02023-04-21 | Music, Website
Spotify Gives 49 Different Names to the Same Song
Composers and recording artists are all different too, but the music is identical—what’s going on?
Spotify Gives 49 Different Names to the Same Song
(via The Music of Sound)
It’s called diluting the pot and Spotify has been doing that, in different ways, for years.
The good news is that Canton is hard at work finishing Backstage. 2023 will be a new beginning. Maybe I am riding against windmills, but that’s where I am headed. I hope you will join me. Backstage will be revealed within a month, I think.
