Category: Arte
Life update (09/15/2026)
I’ve been cursed to be the kind of human being that suffers for impossible things. I’ve never genuinely wished for a particular car, a good job, a marriage. I suffer because I wasn’t born as someone else; because I didn’t grow up during a particular decade (particularly the 1970s, for a long time now); because I didn’t get to meet certain people, if only to have a five-minute conversation with them.
Easy for me to understand why I have, for most of my life, yearned to be someone else. Born with a screwed-up brain. Tormented by intrusive imagery even as a child, before I had any business knowing most of the things I was being shown. Born with a pituitary tumor that was discovered late and that permanently fucked up my body. Grew up through trauma and neglect. Merely being awake involves a baseline of psychological and physical discomfort that never goes away.
I depend upon the moments every day when I can distract myself from my consciousness to be able to endure being myself for yet another day. Most of the time that involves losing myself in daydreams. Sometimes that involves writing stories, creating songs. Reading doesn’t do much for me anymore, not with my kind of vivid imagination. I don’t create things because I want to be known or because I want to leave beautiful things for others. I make things because I’m compelled to do them, and because that allows me to forget I’m myself for as long as their production lasts.
A weight that I’ve been carrying all my life is my obsessive nature. I doubt regular people feel even an inkling of how that’s truly like. When my brain switches on the obsession for something, I live and breathe it every day. I think about it even if I don’t want to. I have to consume more details about it, and being impeded from doing so feels like mental torture. Most of the time the subject of my obsession is some topic or project, which proceeds to consume most of my waking life. Sometimes the obsession is a fictional person. I fell tremendously hard for Cormac McCarthy’s Alicia Western for whatever reason that my brain won’t entirely share, and she remains one of the main subjects of my daydreams to this day.
The worst subjects of spontaneous obsessions are, by far, real humans. I got it so bad for Joanna Newsom back in 2010-2012 that listening to her albums (mainly Ys and Have One on Me) felt like the sole connection to beauty in this world. Throughout the day, I wondered what Joanna would think about this or that. And to this day I can’t think of Joanna Newsom, let alone listen to her music, without being dragged back emotionally against my will to that period in my life in which she felt like the sole salvation that existed from the ever-present risk of losing my mind.
I’m not sure what sparked it, but somewhat-recently I asked ChatGPT to recommend me movies from the 1970s, a period that as I mentioned, I’ve felt the absurd ache of wishing I had lived through while conscious enough (and I didn’t experience it at all, as I was born in 1985). I’m not entirely sure how to explain it. The 1970s felt to me like the last chance we had as a civilization, perhaps as a human species, to be real. As if there was a turning point that could have gone in the right direction but instead we ended up in the image-obsessed, cocaine-fueled 80s. Even as a child I felt that pull. There were photos from the 70s in homes of relatives in which people seemed more alive than what I was experiencing in the 90s. It felt like they were able to be idiosyncratically themselves. It still feels like that when I listen to music or watch movies from that era. Likely this is just one of my delusions, but it doesn’t stop me from feeling that way.
The request for movies led me to Nicholson’s Five Easy Pieces. I realized soon that it had been a clear inspiration for McCarthy to produce his last two novels, which he started writing or at least researching in the mid-to-late seventies. That led me to figure out what other movies McCarthy had appreciated. That led me to Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. That led me to Malick’s Badlands, starring Sissy Spacek. And now I’ve been cursed again.
Fifty-three fucking years ago. Somehow feels like yesterday. Badlands led me to Altman’s 3 Women. To the godawful Welcome to L. A. Just to be able to experience whatever was captured of this creature during the 70s. It’s not just the beauty, that somehow appeals to me perfectly. It’s every single detail: her voice, her little expressions, her mannerisms. Something in my brain is telling me “this is the most special being you’ve ever encountered.” And as a 41-year-old man, I have to suffer because I can’t go back in time and just talk to her for five minutes. Why I had to be born so late and as myself.
This is going to be one of those nights in which I close my eyes and wish earnestly that I don’t wake up again. And I’ll surely wake up to endure yet another day as myself.
New Song “Piss in the Mouth of the Lord” from Odes to My Triceratops, Vol. 4
Second song of the Suno 6.0 era, going through my unrendered set of song lyrics for this latest part of William’s story.
This one had an interesting pre-production stage: I had assumed I was going to pursue the default post-hardcore with dark punk route for this song, but when I swept exhaustively through my list of genres, this unorthodox combination came up (funk rock with candombe), and it was just the right kind of unhinged and angry to fit. I briefly also considered making it an art pop with progressive rock piece, which would have chased after “Bohemian Rhapsody.” I’m happy how this song eventually came out. Quite the difficult lyrics to conceptualize musically in a way that would fit them properly.
New song “Hermit Hemisphere” from Odes to My Triceratops, Vol. 4
I’ve bitten the bullet and decided to create my first new Odes song from the fourth album on Suno 6.0. I’ve genuinely explored alternative services and models, but none are up to par even with the original Udio, so I’m all out of luck when it comes to keeping my previous workflow. But I’ve made it work with Suno 6.0, I think. I’m quite happy with how “Hermit Hemisphere” came out.
Covers of “The Burning Heart Inside Your Throat” from Odes to My Triceratops, Vol. 1
I’m remaking my old Udio-era songs with the new Suno 6.0, which is terrible for making songs from zero, but amazing at remixing them.
This song, the first album’s closer, is one of my favorites from William’s middle-school era, but the quality of the audio was so bad that it hurt to listen. Now that we’ve gotten the boys in the studio again, the song can finally be listened to in all its magnificence.
Covers of “Supernova Snack” from Odes to My Triceratops, Vol. 2
Created with the recently-released Suno 6.0.
Since I produced the original version of this song about two years ago, I’ve often found myself singing its lyrics in my head. I don’t think I’ve ever made anything else that better captures the pure joy of being lost in artistic creation with your subconscious.
Covers of “Lorenzo” from Odes to My Triceratops, Vol. 1
Suno is terrible at allowing you to create music in an exploratory, coherent manner, but it’s exceptional at covering songs made in the glory days of Udio.
The combination of this song’s retarded lyrics and its hard-rock earnestness will never cease to be funny to me.
I’m Cactus from Odes to My Triceratops, Vol. 1 (Redux)
Suno will legitimately be useless to create most of the new songs of the fourth album, but I can still spend my subscription redoing songs from the previous albums whose sound quality had suffered. Here’s one of my favorites from the first album: “I’m Cactus,” the tale of young William’s inability to take care properly of his single plant.
I’ve already redone other songs, so soon enough I’ll upload new YouTube videos with the redone versions.
Life update (09/09/2026)
My disappointment of the month: Suno 6.0 has come out, and it’s shit. Not only that: it’s the Udio debacle all over again. The music industry has castrated the leading music generator. I tried generating a segment with four simple lines of lyrics from my Odes to My Triceratops cycle of songs, and they were moderated due to copyright even though there were no true copyright issues. Next batch of lyrics: moderated due to violence. And the music sounds more artificial than it used to two models ago. Suno is done.
The sole alternative is to wait for a local model to sound as good as Udio did during its Wild West days. This may happen. But I doubt it’ll happen for at least a couple of years or so. Which means I have to park my fourth album even though I’ve written all the lyrics.
Cormac McCarthy’s artistic landscape contributed heavily (didn’t start it) to my long-lived obsession with the 70s, or at least the 70s like I prefer to think of them. A time before the internet, before the image-obsessed 80s, after the peak of the damn hippies. An era when a new way of living could have settled, only for the 80s to come and make everything mostly a cocaine-infused joke (I enjoy the 80s, don’t get me wrong, but it did ruin the promise of the seventies). Anyway, due to finding out that McCarthy loved Five Easy Pieces, the 1970 movie, and that it seems to have fed into my favorite books of his, which are The Passenger/Stella Maris, I proceeded to watch other movies related to directors McCarthy had loved. That led me to Terrence Malick, which led me to his exceptional Badlands, which introduced me to Sissy Spacek, and now I’m enamoured with Spacek.
Earlier today I watched Altman’s 3 Women, which I didn’t like much as a movie, but it features another mesmerizing interpretation by Sissy Spacek as a sort of a wild child alongside Shelley Duvall, that weird-faced poor lady who got abused by Kubrick and Nicholson on The Shining. Partly due to my sudden infatuation with Spacek, partly due to the fact that her character in 3 Women was an innocent, wild, lovely flower (possibly autistic?), a moment in the movie when Duvall basically tells Spacek to fuck off made me want to slap the hell out of that woman. I had to ask ChatGPT why would anyone do this to poor innocent Spacek’s character, and ChatGPT told me to calm down and keep watching. The movie had interesting shots, and it made me inhabit the isolated, strange 70s again, so I appreciate it for that, but it was quite the mess of a story, and that score was godawful.
It really pisses me off that, having been born in 1985, I didn’t grow up with a crush on Spacek. I didn’t even know about her until my teens, I think, and the impression of her was heavily distorted by her having acted as Carrie in that adaptation of the Stephen King novel. I can barely stand Stephen King (and only his adaptations; I despise his writing), and I hate even more that the impression most people have gotten out of Sissy Spacek is her being covered in pig blood and telekinetically massacring everyone.
Spacek was the most gorgeous, unique creature in the 70s as far as I’m concerned, and the sole actress I can imagine playing Alicia Western. And there’s an additional connection to Alicia Western that leads me to believe that McCarthy would have agreed on the casting. Spacek pushed for the production of and to star in a movie adaptation of a play named ‘Night, Mother. It’s about a mother and her suicidal daughter, with the mother spending the night trying to talk the daughter out of suicide. McCarthy praised that play. About twenty years later, McCarthy wrote The Sunset Limited, about a man trying to stop another man from killing himself. It also takes place in basically one place, and only the two characters are present. And McCarthy’s final book was Stella Maris, featuring two characters in a room: a therapist and Alicia Western, with the first one trying to prevent (unknowingly) the second’s suicide.
Time destroys the present tense of everything. An online music service allows you to generate beautiful songs that sound backed by a real band, only for the music industry to make the model disappear. Magnificent people exist at their best for a short period and then fade away. Reality is too heavy and painful and soaked in melancholy for it to be carried on one’s shoulders all the time. No wonder people drown themselves in their jobs and their families and their sports teams.
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