fool.

i’m not sure what it is exactly that i’m painting these days, but it has got my attention. and it makes sense to do it. it feels good to “step off of the ledge.” to take the training wheels off. to let something emerge. everything i am going to do from now on is going to be entirely improvised. it seems much more sincere.

and by my previous post i sincerely mean no ill will to anyone who might be pigeonholed as a “hipster.” some of my best friends are hipsters. i was merely referring to memes.

memes have been around probably since the time that bipedal apes first invented the hammer. it used to irritate me, and sometimes still does, but now i delight in watching its pandemic. it’s like watching a nature show.

the fact that something that has no real substance can propagate itself and follow rules of natural selection is fascinating to me. and only in the world of human beings does it take shape. cats like to watch birds fly outside the window. i enjoy watching my fellow hominids mutate according to a pattern that they themselves had no part in creating.

so i was reading up on these so-called “hipsters” that everyone seems to be going on about. when time magazine writes about your scene, your scene is over.

kudos to the hipsters. and i mean that sincerely. it has taken this bastardized, empty, pointless youth culture to expose how empty, pointless, and bastardized youth culture is. they already did that with punk in the 70s, but you guys took it to its plateau! it couldn’t have played out better, really. irony is finally DEAD. and i couldn’t be happier. and the best part is… i don’t even think you guys were aware of it. haha. that just makes it perfect.

duchamp was right. ideas do have a life of their own. they’re downright virulent.

anyway, thanks.

i was just watching art 21. in it richard serra is always sketching.

he said it is to keep his hand and eye in sync.

i wonder if that is necessarily a good thing…

agree to disagree.

disclaimer: this is just my point of view regarding what i do. anyway…

the other day when i was playing around with ideas for scat party i was plagued by a need. that need was that anything that i did had to reproducible in a live context. then it occurred to me…. why?

while there certainly is a place for live performance in the context of modern music, it is only one option of many. musical performance was once the only way to make musical compositions audible. if you wanted to hear the latest chopin, you bought the sheet music and played it yo damn self.

then came that blasted phonograph. you didn’t have to play or know someone who did in order to listen to music. being that we were still attached to the romanticism of show business, the record was seen primarily as a promotional item. you sell the record to get people to come to your shows.

then came that damn magnetic tape. NOW you can not only record, but you can cut up the tape and splice it! thus the divorce from traditional music began. of course, most of the time this was only exploited to its conclusion by high brow avant garde types. the way it was employed in popular music was much more subtle. just to give it some polish.

so electronic music becomes accessible to the masses. computers and such. prior to that inexpensive samplers gave rise to new musical forms. editing became as much a part of the music as any “traditional composition” was.

so at this stage, you’d think that the musical performance would be obsolete. i always found it ridiculous that people would put on electronic shows… i mean staring at a guy on a laptop… i soon learned not to look at the performer but to listen instead. the performer is irrelevant. it’s just hero worship.

why would you want to reproduce a record live? the jazz folks had the right idea. they just improvised on a theme. each time it’s different. i’ll just listen to the record if i want to hear the record. you don’t ask a painter to perform a painting. you just look at the painting.