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I find that anger appears suddenly and noisily while happiness sneaks up steadily and quietly… like turning your back on the sea and suddenly it’s high tide and how did that happen without me witnessing it?
In my experience anger is a flash, an attack, an explosion. It arrives quickly and can disappear quickly, too. Happiness is quiet and it is in quiet moments that I become aware of it. The silent visitation of happiness. The silence of contentment. And the best part is that happiness can linger.
Sure, happiness can be noisy and celebratory and that’s the experience most people likely have. For me it’s in quiet moments where I suddenly feel that my experience feels so rich and full… and then I know, happiness did sneak up on me again.
24 September
I listened to a Dan Harris/Happier podcast with Ellen Langer. LINK I so recommend that podcast. Ms. Langer, a professor in the Psychology Department at Harvard University, is very smart and feisty and shares a lot of research that confirms what many of us may already have intuited. Some of the things she says about illness and aging is less surprising and more affirming. Have a listen. I bet you will thank me later. ;-)
Gut microbiome disruptions in infancy increase aggression later in life:
Gut bacteria that have been disrupted in infancy can lead to greater aggression later in life, including causing changes to aggression-related genes, according to a new study. The findings warrant more research into the complex interplay between the gut, brain, and aggression.
When we say that everything is connected we can’t overstate that fact.
Until three days ago, I would consider an idea I had and mull it over but not start writing because I thought I needed to learn more. However, it was only on the second day of writing desperately and furiously that I realized that this was the wrong way of approaching things. You need the writing to do the thinking. Plotting might work for the academic essay and for authors who know how to reach the end. But essays are explorations, not itineraries. You don’t know where you’re supposed to go. The only thing you know is that you must start. Which is what I do, every time I look at a sentence or quote that intrigues me or interests me. I can’t wait for it to inspire something in me–that happens too infrequently to be a reliable technique for an essayist who has very many words to write in order to become an essayist. I have to write that other author’s words with my own fingers and then write what comes to mind. Try to figure out what I think. This is how essays are made.
By Ratika Deshpande and found HERE. Thinking with your fingers. Like the Leuchtturm slogan Denken mit der Hand, which means to think with your hand. To think with one’s hand on paper. For me, making music, especially playing guitar, is thinking with your hands… which is why I understand that quote. Too often I make the mistake described above, where I have a thought or an idea and then wait for inspiration instead of simply starting to write, or play guitar. It’s a devilish Western idea that the brain is separate from the body. When we read the word Mind in an English translation from a Chinese text I am told it is always a character that actually means Heart-Mind. Not one and not the other: both. (((in the above linked podcast Ellen Langer says she doesn’t like the term Body Mind Connection because it implies that they are separate but connected. Instead she refers to Body Mind Unity…))) I learn by doing, whether it’s bread-making, guitar-playing, image-making, or writing. Often it feels like the hardest step is simply to get started… once the process is underway it (almost always) feels good. During Covid my partner and I committed to a daily writing session. We would take turns to come up with a word, then take 25 minutes to write anything about that word. A story, an essay, whatever came to mind. There was no time to think about it too much. Just get started and see where it leads. Then we would read to each other whatever we had written. It was an amazing experience and led to useful insights for me. The most important insight was that I need to show up, to get started, to do the time.
The Web Renaissance takes off – Anil Dash
I’m not a pollyanna about the fact that there are still going to be lots of horrible things on the internet, and that too many of the tycoons who rule the tech industry are trying to make the bad things worse. (After all, look what the last wild era online lead to.) There’s not going to be some new killer app that displaces Google or Facebook or Twitter with a love-powered alternative. But that’s because there shouldn’t be. There should be lots of different, human-scale alternative experiences on the internet that offer up home-cooked, locally-grown, ethically-sourced, code-to-table alternatives to the factory-farmed junk food of the internet. And they should be weird.
Book Design
Book Covers of Note, September 2024
PSA
found HERE
Got my sixth (seventh if you include the first booster) Covid shot this morning.
Last Week
In a box, untouched since my move, I found several chops or seals, and inkpads. I love the red color used with Asian seals. I learned the color is called Carmine. Cochineal is another word for this color because those beetles were crushed to obtain their red coloring power as early as 700 BC! Also, Cochineal was at one time a major source of income for the Spanish Crown. By weight, it was a far more valuable commodity than sugar. Made a little mark I can use in booklets or CD packages:
I learned that Napa Cabbage has nothing to do with Napa California. In fact the name comes from colloquial and regional Japanese, where nappa (菜っ葉) refers to the leaves of any vegetable, especially when used as food. This type of Chinese cabbage originating near the Beijing region of China…
PERFECT DAYS is a breath of fresh air in a media landscape dominated by the normalization of gluttonous consumerism, a facet of which fast fashion is very much a part of. One particular company that is quite big in the fast fashion world is Uniqlo. And it just so happens that PERFECT DAYS was commissioned by Uniqlo.
Very surprising considering the nature of the film. The story goes that Koji Yanai, the son of Uniqlo’s founder, approached Wim Wenders to create a film about the Tokyo Toilet Project, an initiative to renovate some of the public toilets in Shibuya, an initiative in which Uniqlo was involved. Granted, that in and of itself is a great public project for a company called Fast Retailing Co., Ltd. to be involved in at all and as such deserves some props. I don’t see Forever 21, Urban Outfitters, or American Eagle even considering public toilets in the United States.
Still, for Wenders to take that brief and create what is genuinely a landmark film in cinematic history is no small feat. A lesser director would have likely turned in a hokey non-profit-style advertisement, or at best turned down the project altogether. I cannot say enough great things about PERFECT DAYS.
That’s a quote from Ganzeer’s newsletter. I also read his blog. Now I have to wonder how many people visit those toilets in Tokyo because they saw them in the movie and also whether there is a Uniqlo sign in every toilet… I decided it doesn’t matter at all because the movie is a wonderful statement. But I will have a look at those toilets this Fall!
Saw this webpage for an art exhibition called Dream and Error.
Woven All of Dream and Error is an exhibition presenting a collection of films, images, and sounds that consider the overlap of two areas of the history of technology: the sites of abandoned railway lines, and the emergence of machine learning — or what has popularly come to be referred to as artificial intelligence.
Perhaps hallucinations are the best part of AI? It’s AI dreaming, creating. The sounds that accompany the Dream and Error video are very interesting. AI imagining what a train sounds like.
I listened to Radiolab’s podcast entitled Shell Game.
Today, we feature veteran journalist Evan Ratliff who – for his new podcast Shell Game – decided to slowly replace himself bit by bit with an AI voice clone, to see how far he could actually take it. Could it do the mundane phone calls he’d prefer to skip? Could it get legal advice for him? Could it go to therapy for him? Could it parent his kids?
Will the future bring advertisements that use an AI fake of our partner’s voice to dupe us into buying product XYZ at the supermarket? Just in case, I will develop safe words with my friends. If they say something that sounds even a little strange to me, I will ask them for the safe word… if they don’t know or don’t remember the word I will have to conclude that they are an AI agent.
I made paella yesterday and used my partner’s dashi instead of chicken broth. Asked her whether she could think of a good name for a company that delivers dashi to cooks. She rolled her eyes and said Door Dashi… she knows me well. Paella made with dashi instead of chicken broth is lighter and has a very nice flavor. Yesterday’s paella was quite the international mix as it contained dashi, kimchi, napa cabbage, spanish rice, sofrito, and asparagus.
Full Moon
Big Cave
This is a piece from one guitar two, recorded during my recent retreat in the cave at the Prajna Mountain Refuge. The album was published to Backstage this week and will make its way to Bandcamp in a few months.
The piece has the working title Wednesday because that’s the day it was recorded. What would it sound like if the cave was really really huge? I used a plugin called Valhalla (perfect name, isn’t it?) to simulate a gigantic cave. The beauty of a simulated cave is that it can be turned on and turned off. What you hear is just my guitar… no other instrument was added. Some people imagine they hear synthesizers but it’s just the guitar and reverb. So now I want to give this treatment to all of the slow pieces from one guitar two, which means there will be a second volume called one guitar two – Big Cave Versions.
I hope you like it.
Brush Photography
Al on Rain Poems
I sent Rain Poems to my friend Al, who was my product manager at Epic Records from 1991 until 1999. This is his reply:
Here is my REVIEW on Rain Poems… by hopefully your Favorite Product Manager:
WOW! Did I hear that SOUND!!!
It was a BIG Beautiful Ultimate… Never Ending feeling that You & Jon were PLAYING IN MY LIVING-ROOM. Your recording is a…. GREAT Example of hearing the exceptional quality of musical instruments that feel like it came out of a VINTAGE Era like a fine Stradivarius.As a music lover I will not complain about about an Artist like You… that NEVER just stay in one box doing a same music category for a whole life.
This release is truly a Step Above… with a Crisp Sound like a Neumann TLM103 has on my ears. If you want to know what tracks stood out to me… it was the whole CD!
There’s always been Ethel
Woke up this morning with bits and pieces of a Genesis album in my head. After making coffee I figured out they were from Selling England by the Pound, the 1973 album. Hadn’t heard it in many decades.
When I was 14 or 15 I’d often walk to a class mate’s apartment. He had a stereo and LPs and we would listen to music and talk. He also had Nursery Crime and Trespass.
I can’t remember whether the bits and pieces of Genesis were connected to a dream. I imagine they were but that’s blank.
Streaming
A North Carolina man is facing fraud charges after allegedly uploading hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs to streaming services and using bots to play them billions of times. Michael Smith is said to have received over $10 million in royalties since 2017 via the scheme.
Alleged fraudster got $10 million in royalties using robots to stream AI-made music
and later the same article describes a scheme that apparently is “not illegal” but see whether you think it is right:
Matt Farley has written, recorded and uploaded tens of thousands of songs to streaming services about anything and everything people might search for, from celebrities and marriage proposals to many tunes about poop. Some songs are just a few seconds long, but the practice seems to be entirely above board. He’s said to have earned around $200,000 from his music in 2023.
I think streaming service algorithms take into account that a two second song should not be equal to an eight minute performance. Perhaps a two second song counts for half a stream, or only a third of a stream, but nevertheless the plays rack up and it obviously pays handsomely. It is quite rare for anybody make $200k a year in streaming. In fact earning $200k would put Matt Farley into the top 0.2% of streaming earners, assuming that he is on multiple platforms.
About 13,400 artists generated $50,000 or more in Spotify royalties during 2020 – though there are an estimated total of approximately seven million acts with music on the platform.
13,400 Artists (Out of 7 Million) Earn $50k or More From Spotify Yearly
Those 13,400 artists are the top 0.2% of 7,000,000 acts.
Written on itself
The body’s journey, written on itself.
I love that sentence. All of life is in it. Find a profession, a job, that you don’t mind having written on your body, your bones, the callous of your hands, the lines in your face. Will you have bitter lines or laughter wrinkles? Find something you don’t mind seeing in the mirror twenty or fifty years from now. This is the best advice for any young person, although they will probably not get it, will laugh or shrug their shoulders and continue with whatever they are doing.
I read that sentence in the novella The Marylebone Drop, in the collection Standing by the Wall, from the series Slough House, by Mike Herron. I am reading the novella collection because I already finished all eight books in the series.
Haunted or Stuck
If you are under the age of 30 you may think things are normal. But to someone who has lived 3 decades or more you may notice something odd: we haven’t had a shift like we did in the past. Culture is frozen. Throughout the 20th century we had changes almost every decade. Changes in fashion, in music, in aesthetics, hairstyles, style of comedy, television shows and movies. It sort of felt like someone was directing society from the top down, dictating a big shift every 10 years to something new. A director. If I show you a photo or play you a song from the 20th century, you’d probably be able to guess the decade. It was that clean of a break.
But I haven’t felt that change since the mid 2000s
here is a second quote from the linked post:
AI generated content seems depressingly suited to a culture where everything is just a recycled version of the past, because that’s all AI can do – it can’t innovate, it can only replicate. It can produce text or images in the style of something that’s already been done, but it can’t create a new style because it can only use what already exists.
It’s never just one thing. It’s always a whole bunch of things that come together to build a perfect storm. Sometimes a whole bunch of harmless things interact to become a brand new horror. I would love to find a document from the future, in which a historian has dispassionately analyzed the shifts in culture from 1960 through 2030.
The Dancing Animal
one guitar two
Today I posted the new album to Backstage. 14 tracks. 40 minutes of music. Exactly four weeks from start to finish, because I arrived at the refuge on Tuesday 6. August. I loved every moment of working on this album. One guitar in the wilderness… and my reaction to the surroundings and the sound of the cave and six hours of daily zazen. I want to make more recordings like this, especially now that I know the equipment does what I was hoping it could do. one guitar three… next year sometime, somewhere.
A big thank you has to go to Roshi Joan Halifax, who has been an important part of my life for two decades and who invited me to stay at the refuge. It was she who suggested the cave as a place to record my guitar. Many thanks also to Sensei Noah Kodo Roen, who built the meditation cave.
Art After Risk
In an era of doxxing and cancellation, nobody wants to be the culture war’s next lightning rod. But if art’s new survivalism can be frustrating, it should also prompt us to ask who art is really for.
Came across this article and LOVE LOVE LOVE the cookies notice in alarm yellow! :-)
Acoustic Laptops
The “acoustic laptops” are wood boxes with various tiny objects attached; springs, stones, metal, rubber, string, needles, memorabilia – amplified by contact mikes (piezos).
They are musical instruments with which you can explore a soundworld that usually pass unnoticed and thus connect with unfiltered reality in a pleasurable way.
They appeared as a practical solution to how Boe´s previous chaotic table-top instrumentation could be easily recreated (and transported) for practice and continuity. So they are instruments, commenting on the current digital reality, social communication tools and (if desired); ritualised objects.
via Music of Sound
Music can enhance + reshape memories
Two recently published studies, led by Yiren Ren, a PhD student at Georgia Tech’s School of Psychology, explored the concepts of music as an aid to learning and its ability to reshape old memories.
“One paper looks at how music changes the quality of your memory when you’re first forming it – it’s about learning,” said Thackery Brown, a cognitive neuroscientist who runs the Memory, Affect and Planning (MAP) Lab at Georgia Tech, is Ren’s faculty advisor, and was the corresponding author on both studies. “But the other study focuses on memories we already have and asks if we can change the emotions attached to them using music.”
one guitar two
The piece softly softly from the album one guitar two. 40 minutes, 14 tracks, all recorded in hi-def during a week-long retreat at the Prajna Mountain Refuge in the Pecos, New Mexico, in the beginning of this month. I improvised the music between hours of meditation. There are a few upbeat pieces… like how did a rumba appear out of nowhere, or the bossa nova… but there also more quiet, soft, pieces like the one in this video. The album will appear on Backstage in September and will eventually show up on Bandcamp, too, but I don’t yet know when that will happen.
Discovery
It’s been a week of putting my hand into a dark basket and pulling out things I didn’t even remember making. The dark basket was a folder that contained about 50 audio files I recorded in the Wilderness, time-stamped but otherwise untitled. I enjoyed that discovery process a lot. By yesterday afternoon the album had grown to 14 pieces and an overall length of 40 minutes… and there are a few more things to investigate. Discovered a piece I recorded while it rained. I can hear rain drops hitting the window, before I started playing. I left a few seconds of that, of course. While many pieces are quiet, there is also one rumba and one bossa, which is great because it creates a little contrast. Some of the quiet pieces have notes that just hang there in the stillness like water dripping from a pine cone in slomo. Or golden honey from a spoon. Just lovely.
Such an interesting way to make a recording: find a lovely location and spend a week recording anything that comes to mind, reacting to the space and its surroundings. I think I might want to make this part of a series of albums. I could rent a place somewhere and then proceed to discover how I respond to that particular place. I don’t think I have ever gone to a studio with every piece of music worked out. A few sketches, some chord changes… and the rest happens in situ. For some guitarists it’s all about the performance and how to record and execute it perfectly. One has the impression the result would be the same regardless of the recording location. For me it’s about the way I react to the room and what’s going on and my recordings are always tied to a time and a location. Pick another time or another location and the recording will be different. That’s what I hear in this music, the location, the surroundings, the stillness.
A technical note: I love the ability of the MixPre 6II to record 32bit floating point at 96kHz. I didn’t have to pay much attention to the recording levels. Many pieces would have ended up in the red – if they had been recorded 24bit. With 32bit floating point I was able to import a file to my laptop (last week), discover that it was hitting peaks of +4db… and simply normalize down to a max of -0.2db. Don’t ask me how that works, because I still don’t know, but that’s the magic of 32bit floating point. Since the MixPre 6II was designed for audio recording for movies, this was very important… if an actor starts yelling, no problem… just take down the gain afterwards. It’ll be fine. The MixPre 6II is amazing and I can’t imagine working without it.
