About inspiration

Inspiration?
Don't know if this is useful or not - worth a look I guess: Sources of inspiration

Songs about Thetans
There is a song here somewhere - this rings familiar - I once met a woman on a bus who tried this on me, then went on to 'help' some teenage girls who were sitting behind me, it quite cringe inducing.

Songs about pictures

There have been albums themed around sets of pictures, or purported to be: "The Six Wives of Henry the Eighth" by Rick Wakeman was inspired by the portraits at the National Gallery, "Pictures at an Exhibition" by the Rod - not so sure there... and some of Laurie Anderson's work has been themed around visual structures I think. Was thinking that some pictures could be good starting points for lyrics, i.e. to take an inspiring or evocative picture and to write a caption or story about it and then to make a song. It is a sort of second-order experience, but it may lead to something different at least.

Jasper Johns

Was interviewed for the New Yorker. He talks about his friendship with Rauschenberg and how their discussions fed their creativity, and he talks about inspiration and work methods. In the end, it is clear that he cannot explain the source or the inspiration, which is the way it often is.

'Asked about the worth of his art, Johns once stated: "To be plain, the best critic of a picture is another picture. I think that one wants from painting a sense of life. The final suggestion... has to be, not a deliberate statement, but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can't avoid saying." '

Perez-Gomez in his latest book comes closest to finding a key, in my opinion. He makes the link to eros, the old idea of bridging the desire gap, creating beauty so as to desire it. The spark is part of this sublimation of the drive. It (kind of) drives a nail through the whole conceptual art thing, unless you really get off on abstraction. The argument is in favour of sensuality, all the senses. Conceptualism is about the ideals - somehow abstracted from the world of senses. Math can be beautiful, but geometry is the basis of much of it. I still struggle with this when I think of music, which is abstract visually but can trigger emotions as strongly as anything else, maybe through memory, but also maybe through other means, resonance, sympathy, who knows. How do minor chords work? The chill in the spine is a goal...