Arguing with Kristine, an old Norwegian friend I met in the South of France when I was busking there with clowns when I was 15. An Artist. A published writer. She told me how important it was for me to print my songs and the music so that they wouldn't die. I said that I wanted folks to hear my songs not to read them, I explained there were sounds in music that could not be written, breaths etc, and feeling. That spirit can't be captured by written notation. I would prefer people to interpret my songs than to copy them note for note. I would rather they tried to make the song their own.
My Songs are performed by me on record, in that way a performance of mine has been captured, a moment when I had no voice, mistakes etc, warts and all. I am part of a tradition, oral, living. She said I was brave to do this and too generous.
(I've since published a digital Song Book 30 years later.)
I can understand what we have in common is that we both refuse, stubbornly to be slaves and to be manipulated, which doesn't mean to say we don't want to manipulate or make others our slaves! Talking about not seeking fame, I told her, "Fortune yes, but being famous is like being a slave, unhealthy psychologically, more people know you, or think they know you, but you don't know them!" Like Judy Garland found out, you can't take that wonderful applause home to bed with you!
MADRID Art Gallery Tourist bit:
Amazing how Goya captured the arrogance of his subjects, with no flattery, even the illness of his subject, and some of his characters seems to be on a stage, active, doing something, joking, timeless joking is, laughing, pulling legs, surprises. His portrait studies are better than the final tableaux. His religious ones seem like he had to do them, obliged somehow. I missed the dark caprices, and prints which are really what I wanted to see, I saw Goya's, so-called, black paintings, and I learned that these were murals or painted on the walls of his house, he had been ill, these were "copied" apparently by another artist, onto canvas.
The colours change so much, his larger canvases, i.e. the famous and wonderful, execution, are less rich in colour, almost more like sketched tableaus than the portraits of Dukes and kings etc, Maybe these were his own "Art" and "passionate subjects. Yet I wonder if he had more money to spend on paints and colour, as he was being paid to paint these portraits, or whether they had faded because of being exhibited more in sunlight, where as the others "Patronized" portraits, were, perhaps, hung on darker shadowed, castle walls?