January 18ths (Lynchiana)

1/18/1998

Talked with MD. I found myself talking about the exciting future of music, all the while talking about the sad deficiencies of today's music.

[1/18/2025: Once you are in your 30s you begin to either completely drop out of culture (oblivious to anything that’s new, bad or good) or you take the good and leave the rest. I’m in the latter category. I never dropped out completely, but as anyone ages, regardless of generation, you’re seeing a decline in quality. This is the result of the march of postmodernism, which has now fully transformed culture. Once it reaches politics, anything goes. The idea of metamodernism is still too diffuse to say there is a real post-postmodernism period. It’s up to artists to take a stand on it, but it’s difficult because postmodernism is pretty exciting. David Lynch was mostly a postmodernist, but not at the expense of his influences from other film eras. Again, take what you can use, and leave the rest].

1/18/2003

Chicago Photo Network tour at graphic design studio in Wheeling. Impressive $50,000 digital camera, dinner at Leona's in Oak Park. Video: Mulholland Drive, third viewing. I still think the girl in the diner at the end was having the dream.

1/18/2006

Story idea: Guy dupes media with a fake story, Does mea culpa that he lied, but media finds an identical story and is lost in the fog of media. The reader/viewer comes away with a sense of unresolved ambiguity that resonates with real life events depicted in the media.

[1/18/2025: What I loved about Lynch’s work was the ambiguity. There really is no one definitive answer because the artist isn’t really sure what it’s about either, just like life].

1/18/2023

Rick Rubin has just written a book on creativity. In an interview he was talking about the game Go, and he was using it as a metaphor. What he was trying to describe was that when you put machines and humans in competition, the idea is that the machine is always going to win. The way he explained it was that the reason that it won was because it wasn’t reverent of the rules. A machine doesn’t know all the rules so it goes by its own rules. It doesn’t know what your rules are (or care—a machine doesn’t understand “caring”). I don’t know how humans could live in that kind of environment because we’re separate from machines—we have a longer history—we have mythologies and archetypes. If machines don’t know what those are—or they’re just randomly generating them—it’s just based on our inputs into their system. In human history, it’s going to be a tiny blip that will get lost on the axis of human history. We’re now singing its praises but I just don’t see how it’s going to fit in the scheme of things. #riff

[1/18/2025: I have actually found a way to use AI as human-in-the-loop. It’s a test of your own creative strength. AI will win at creativity (or just productivity) because it’s “Turnkey” art–just turn the key (click the mouse) and it’s done. But if you have actual skills you’ll like using them. If you were good at a sport you wouldn’t want a machine to do your playing. “Winning” is a different story].