Not just one iota, two iotas.
A one-off stripped-down groove for September, but won't be on the album.
Not just one iota, two iotas.
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Threads, 13x17 inches (11x14 opening), in black 16x20 mat, acrylic on paper. (9/2015)
Piece is for sale. P.O.R. 9/16/2000, Saturday
Film: Girl on the Bridge. I think the moral is: In order to get lucky (or delude yourself that you are), you have to confront your mortality. If you see yourself as that girl on the bridge, you need to see this movie. Life will always provide lucky moments, and in order to seize the day, we have to let go of fear and trust that the blind knife thrower will also be lucky. 9/16/2001 While listening to music on the radio, you get these very interesting coincidences, or "collisions of context". You"d be listening to a report about an Islamic holy war, change the dial to a rock station and hear Lennon's "Instant Karma", followed by Tom Petty's "I won't Back Down"—I"ll stand my ground. (Prediction: song lyrics will become more important. Songwriters will also have to censor their own work.) The bad thing about recorded media is that it prolongs bad memories. 9/16/2004 Bush extols the virtues of democracy, when in fact democracies are prone to eventually become victim of their own hubris, i.e. the Pollyanna view that everyone will live a blissed-out life, with endless salad days of cheap oil, Hummers, eternal youth and eternal erections. This is the subtext of every Bush pep talk I've heard thus far. I'd rather hear what the devil's advocate has to say before I sign any more of my tax dollars to feckless pursuits at the democratization of the world by the American Standard. Hmm, what would happen if the world was one big democracy and had one big election? Bush seems like he is afraid of the looming darkness, and he feels that the more intensely he shines his light into the darkness of space, he'll rid the universe of its darkness. This is the epitome of a messianic view of the universe. *** One of the wonders of digitized information is that you can endlessly edit it. It is possible to scan the original documents typed on a typewriter, convert it to text, edit the text, then make another original. These could be merely proxies of the virgin originals. This process is very common in music and art. Even Edvard Munch, the artist of the stolen "Scream" painting painted several additional copies after the first one was sold. We assume that works of art or authoritative documents are originals, when in fact they can be versions or assemblages of originals. Here's the article on Munch, One-of-a-kind doesn't apply to masterpieces [Chicago Tribune, 9/15/04] *** The president now has more power over documents and information according to an article in The Economist titled, "The Contradictory Conservative" (Aug. 26) 9/16/2005 Rash of suicide car bombings in Iraq. Lots of Iraqis now say a civil war is inevitable. Browsed at library. They have whole sections of books on terrorism. 9/16/2010 Dyn: Democracy needs to "breathe". Ricardo Muti starts his first season as Maestro for the CSO succeeding Barenboim. As usual, the classical music wonks are talking about his "sound". Virga submission accepted by Pandora. The contemporary equivalent of getting a single played on the radio. Young Urban Millennials: "Yummies" Field audio: Millennium Park 9/16/2015 From an evolutionary perspective, the physical size of an organism in relation to its environment is always in proportion (an aspect ratio of sorts). The digital realm likes to use that as a metaphor, but it breaks down at some point. Life is not a matter of "responsive experience", as in "responsive design" in web parlance.Almost everything we do now is mediated (and probably distorted) by screens, and the various systems that produce what is displayed on them. For all the interesting possibilities in digital art, something elemental is lost, particularly the sense of scale. To discover Picasso's Guernica on a smartphone is a deceiving experience. The painting is 26x11 feet. Merely knowing the dimensions of something is not the same as experiencing it. For all the reality that Virtual Reality may have, one is not physically occupying those spaces. Pixels tend to focus the attention on color, and distort spatiality, and the overall feel of a space. 9/16/2022, Friday Bass video: Invisibilized. Possible lyric: They lost their lives/they couldn't cry, They were invisiblized, They had invisible eyes... 9/11/1906 (Chocorua, New Hampshire) William James letter to H.G. Wells: Dear Mr. Wells,—I've read your "Two Studies in Disappointment" in "Harper's Weekly," and must thank you from the bottom of my heart. Rem acu tetegisti! Exactly that callousness to abstract justice is the sinister feature and, to me as well as to you, the incomprehensible feature, of our U. S. civilization...."Scoundrelly, as you say,"but understandable, "from the point of view of parties interested"—but understandable in onlooking citizens only as a symptom of the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That—with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success—is our national disease..." 9/11/1968, Wednesday, 7:30PM-3:30AM (The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions) John's song for those despised people who dissected his lyrics for hidden - but almost always unintended - revelations and conundrums. One of two songs on The Beatles to give mention in its lyric to another Beatles song title ("Savoy Truffle" mentioned "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da"), "Glass Onion" is peppered with references to the Beatles' recent output: "Strawberry Fields Forever", "I Am The Walrus", "Lady Madonna", "The Fool On The Hill" and "Fixing A Hole". John also tossed in what may seem a cryptic line, about the "Cast Iron Shore". This is a real place in Liverpool. 9/11/1998, Friday Prayer meeting at the White House "to help president heal." It's interesting that he's taking the evangelical approach.... 9/11/2001 Left work at 11A and roamed for a while downtown trying to intuit whether others might be feeling what I was feeling. I was taken aback by how calm everyone seemed given the gravity of the situation, "normalcy by denial"—that we could just go on with things, and perhaps engage in some gallows humor about it. I kept thinking about what this means for the world, what the future will hold: financial collapse, WWIII, all the while people seemed happy. On the train home people sat quietly and read books and chit-chatted. I heard no conversation about what was happening. This is a milestone in world history. Watched news coverage all day to almost "pornographic" levels. Images so horrifying and so shocking—that two huge skyscrapers are totally gone, and the sense that something like this has finally happened. (It's the "Titanic" of the 21st century that I thought about). I kept hearing "act of war", "US will retaliate", and I shuddered at the thought of a world war starting. Perhaps this is our way of sharing the world's pain. Other thoughts: Took some pix with camera, but settings wrong, pix overexposed, but I will try to use them in some way.
9/11/2002 First anniversary of attacks. Absorption into the events seems almost addictive, now with so many images associated with them, unlike 12/7/41. Most people I talked to wanted to forget, not remember. (Quote in Tribune: "We must not just always remember, we must never forget." What is the boundary between forgetting and remembering?) Went to service at noon at Tribune Plaza with people from work. There were three minutes of silence, and it was so nice, but I"ll bet people were mentally preoccupied. Went to candlelight vigil at Scoville Park in Oak Park. The speakers kept mentioning "interfaith" and "secular"—that people could say "God" if they wanted. 9/11/2004, Saturday 9/11 Year 3. Interesting context collision: Hurricane Ivan decimates Jamaica, headed for US Gulf. Candlelight vigil at the lakefront honoring the war dead. It was almost totally silent. You got the impression that something was amiss. This war shouldn't have been. One of the things I liked about Reagan was his notion of a "quiet faith"—a spirituality that rests below the surface but is never expressed outwardly. In politics, one's religious persuasion is a kind of secret to yourself, in only a language you understand. *** Things to think about/explore: How much would it cost to capture 10 world tyrants? How long would it take? Would Republicans always be in charge? How many can you find? The cost for ridding the world of tyrants: Saddam Hussein: $200 Billion (plus trial) Kim Jong IL: >$500 Billion, Charles Taylor ??? Sudanese Janjaweed Militias: $200 billion, Chechen rebel leaders (only Russia's problem, but not for long). *** Read Ron Reagan's article "The Case Against George W. Bush": To some, this might appear shamelessly blasphemous. It gives one the feeling that the Bush administration is merely a shadow group of the more genuine Reaganites. 9/11/2005, Sunday 4th anniversary of attacks. There's more evidence of proliferation of homegrown terrorism a la John Walker Lindh. 9/11/2009 Weather is exactly what it was 8 years ago: clear blue skies. They're replaying the events in real-time on the news shows. Interesting how it puts you back in that exact context. (Memory is made more salient with repetition in the media). 9/11/2010, Saturday Since so many copies can be made, burning Korans is insignificant. This is hugely ironic since paper books are dying there is no need to burn them. Once ideas are suffused in electronic media, the ideas can exist without a physical object. Ergo, if your sense of spirituality is strong, the mere burning of paper books should not affect it. But it is the provocative act of summarily denouncing an entire culture. 9/11/2011, Sunday Beautiful morning, as it was 10 years ago. TIL: The power of names and how musically they are recited, music performed at ceremonies is always immediately powerful and resonant: The sound of memory, The sound of 9/11... They say cities are not about the buildings, but the people. As regards religion, cathedrals can have the effect of reversing that equation: you may not care for the dogma, but the product of what we do as humans rise above the human condition. Some may argue that the communal experience of all believing and acting on the same ideas makes cathedrals possible. 9/11/2012 Beautiful blue skies, 85 degrees. Same weather as 9/11/01. 11th anniversary of 9/11. The numbers and the context will last for at least a century. And terrorists will continue on with their various ideologies and the "idea" of terrorism until the score is settled. It is amazing that modernity still does not understand this core precept about terrorism. Safety and security in a clash of civilizations is a chimera. Every generation understands the past, present, and future in entirely different ways. Artists more than anyone else are more acutely aware of this phenomenon and use the present and future to define the era. It is only later that a deeper history gets woven into what they do. 9/11/2013 Putin writes Op-Ed in the NYT about the situation in Syria. I can't make the connection between the American demonization and the spirit of this letter. One would not even believe it was written by him. 9/11/2014 Dream: Witnessed collapse of a building. Synchronicity with history! 9/11/2016, Sunday When something becomes too difficult and not worth pursuing, we often take the easy way. Rock 'n' Roll was an easy way of obviating music education. Audio art, once a sub-department of Music, had revolutionized pop music over forty years ago, as a kind of easy way of being a musician by saying you were really a non-musician by nonchalance, implying that music education was passe, and your main instrument was the studio. These tropes always repeat themselves, when old ways of doing things have enough nostalgic energy to make them resurface in the future as traditional Music, with the "Neo" label. (Again as coy nonchalance, i.e. "I'm not really a musician, but I am really, just in this new way). "Post" and "neo" labels are too easy to use to obfuscate the reality that it's really not neo, and stripping away the labels. If you want to turn music back to a raw "three-chord" state, just put the focus on the music rather than its production and see what happens. If you can play music stripped down to its rudiments (including words), then it can be Music. Otherwise, it is audio art. Both can stand alone as Art, but adding post/neo prefixes is almost the same as a new iPhone version, which is mostly the same with little tweaks. Same thing with pronouncements that certain forms are "dead". That's just sour grapes. There's always a next one or a revival. 9/11/2019 Around the first anniversary of 9/11 in 2002, I wrote a guitar instrumental titled Forget September. My feeling at the time was that we needed closure—--not more media coverage; We needed to begin to "forget" it—meaning we needed to move on, for at least the general public. (I called it "normalcy by denial" in one of the entries). It was already one year into the invasion of Afghanistan, so the idea of closure or normalcy was a fantasy. Music was an anodyne. I used to frequently have conversations with an aunt who had memories of both world wars, the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, and the Korean War. I now realize more profoundly how many young people have no direct memory of 9/11. I also realized that there have always been lots of young people who have no memory of major events: I don't have a memory of the Kennedy assassination. Not many people are living that have a good memory of Pearl Harbor, and the various annual commemorations that followed; They were all children then. In retrospect, the narrative seems consistent for the current state of our nation, and that remembering (and revisiting--two different things) are hugely important. There are more people that don't remember anything. For those with a memory, you never forget. 9/11/2021, Saturday Same weather as 9/11/2001. If you want good weather in Chicago come the week of 9/11. As I walked and biked around my neighborhood I was subconsciously scouting for that 9/11@20 photo. We tend to think there is a palpable vibe in the air when it's just like any other pleasant Saturday. The 2020 lockdown had more photographic power, with towns looking like ghost towns, like lower Manhattan that week. I always thought 9/11 was the beginning of the Fourth Turning because it looked so apocalyptic. *** I was just watching an interview with Peter Bergen who was one of the journalists that were in Afghanistan and managed to interview Bin Laden. The thing that I always focus on is the metaphor of film--that there's a slippage between reality and a film. There are similarities that we put together in our heads, but they are very different, and very much like dreams. Another salient point about information, in general, is that we're always getting it from screens now, and screens obviously have a connection with film. There was a connection between film and print at some level--where a novel would be translated into a screenplay and a film would be made out of it. In a film experience, we have a simulation of reality that can be very close or very distant, but we can't always tell. Media are also "celebrity machines", so the conflation of dreams, books, films, and screens of all kinds form our perception of reality. What I prefer to do is to find the people that were actually on the ground there. They are the sources of information that I think are most verifiable. But at the same time, people's memories are like degrading films. History is the impermanence of memory and the fact that the text is always wet on history. So even if people are recounting their experiences, who knows if their memories are actually verifiable. People are always "storifying" memory. When we remember a dream we have to stitch together the various fragments. In my experience, there are always three or four fragments in a dream and when I get up and attempt to write it down, that's where things get lost in translation because you're trying to weave in a narrative. The reality of a dream and the reality that we make when we remember a dream is different so it's hard to really pinpoint where the truth is. So you have to take in a lot of different sources and you have to connect the dots on your own and avoid telling the story to other people who pass it around and then get transformed again, and it keeps going on for years and decades and millennia. So what we come away with is some version of reality or a consensus reality and we have to accept some of it. There might be some similarities and there will be differences. It's like the perception of a color: we all know what red is but what's the shade of the red? How do we experience red? Some cultures call green a blue and some green blues are sometimes called our red. The labels that we put on things aren't reliable. Even text itself is a label or symbol for something and those symbols can vary from culture to culture so there are anthropological aspects to it as well. It's multifactorial which makes it very interesting and engaging. #riff 9/11/2022, Sunday A true break in the rain. Torrential rain for hours. On 9/11 all flights were canceled due to a threat to humanity itself. Now it's the IT breakdown—a similar threat. In September 2047, it will be the 50th anniversary of the death of Princess Diana and the 25th anniversary of the death of Queen Elizabeth II, and in 2051, the 50th anniversary of 9/11, as well as commemorations of events that will occur as 10th and 20th anniversaries. I had thought that YouTube's algorithm results would have featured the annual 9/11 commemoration, but it didn't. This is why organic memory is so important and is one of the good things about moderated and curated media: It reports on things that are more universal and traditional instead of relying on what algorithms perceived were important to me. We shouldn't have to go hunting for our own news. We know what the concept of a Zebra is. 9/1/1997
Saw Pillow Book at Village Theater. Excellent. Story of the power of Japanese calligraphy to drive erotic fantasy and obsession. Interesting bit on keeping diaries. 9/1/2004 Paradigm shift is taking place, at least perceptively: People are finding laziness a better option than multitasking and "being in the loop". Shopping for a new TV. It's amazing what people pay for just a TV, in terms of percentage of their annual income. Advice to myself : Wait until fall 2004 when the new TVs are equipped with the HD3 chip. The Nixon tapes released by The National Archives but not on the internet. You don't want it to be social commentary, when in fact Nixon is the piece de resistance of political parody. 9/1/2009 Interesting: "topless" meetings, where laptops and iPhones are banned, to combat "continuous partial attention." Checking Facebook and Twitter announces: "I'm not interested" in a cultural sense. 9/1/2014 Facebook Feed Overload: The vertical scrolling and screen-viewing in general can be tiring, as the brain decides what to focus on and react to. 9/1/2020 Emotions rely on our ability to surf over them. It's something that we have to do intuitively, and there are no shortcuts to getting there. This is where music has spiritual and philosophical elements. *** Thoughts on the film Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes: When a society can no longer provide meaning in young people's lives as it did at many points in history through the humanities—and if you devalue the humanities (for example the fact that young people didn't have musical instruments), they will find some way to make music. But the bottom-up approach, while it is useful in the beginning, doesn't create a framework for the future, or for history. You can't always be grassroots because it doesn't scale. It had scaled in the 1980s at the beginning of hip-hop and the use of turntables and records to make music because they didn't have access to traditional instruments. It extended the history of blues and jazz but without the same tools. It begs the question of whether you can pass the baton of a genre without the same tools (or knowledge) of the trade. 9/1/2022 I've realized that some people are just "be-ers" as opposed to "doers". Some are not designed to sit idly. As it has been said, "Our brains were not designed for sitting around contemplating what we already have. They don't release excitement for nothing." I suppose for some people, the thought of not doing anything is that excitement. Surprised to not see much coverage of Princess Di. |
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