8pm til sunrise
- youngtobacco
- Apr 7
- 2 min read
1:14 PM
What a wild week.
I won't go into politics, so I'll stay with home economics.
Wednesday was the first time I'd ever seen horizontal rain. I have a leak in my bathroom, and now the sink is catching rainwater.
The storms traumatized the dog into bouts of stress diarrhea, and a power outage ruined all the food in my fridge. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
The studio was offline for a full 24 hours, and I had to pass the time {{gasp}} reading books, burning through a couple of 33 1/3 volumes - Afghan Whigs "Gentlemen" and David Bowie "Low."
I love these deep dives into seminal classics that shine a light on all the studio drama and label palace intrigue and psychological journeys that birthed these works we all know and love.
I live vicariously through Bowie's late 70s bouncing from Hansa in Berlin to the French chateau where he would work inverted hours with Brian Eno, Visconti, et al.
8pm until sunrise.
Vicariously through Greg Dulli's mountains of snuffed cigarettes, marketing frustrations and drives across the Roebling bridge in Cincinnati.
(It should be noted that I do not smoke.)
Been thinking about creative methods that access the subconscious. Namely, the cut-up technique, which Bowie employed through lots of "Low" (borrowing from William S. Burroughs, who borrowed it from the Dadaists).
It almost seems like an analog version of how AI works. Pulling bits of data from existing material, reshuffling it at random, then curating the results.
I wonder if the creative use of AI could be ethical if it was solely trained on your own body of work and no one else's, fed by an LLM containing only things from your own backlog.
Brian Eno was working within this model for decades before Ben Gaya, moving the artistic process from the content into the parameters. I'm not saying I'm gonna do it at some point, but I am open to the thought experiment.
My thoughts are constantly evolving.
Folks that try to write GPT-novels with Midjourney dust jackets and flood them into Kindle can still bite my ass.
The lights are on now. My neighbors chimney cap blew off and landed in my backyard, so I'll hang onto it if he asks.
Or maybe I should walk it over there.
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What I’m reading: The Velvet Underground and Nico (Joe Harvard, for 33 1/3)
What I'm listening to: The Other Hell (Goblin)
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