Celeb at Navy Pier. Extremely cold!! Saw Titanic. Great movie in the sense that they produced a blockbuster that everyone wants to see, but do we need a play-by-play of people perishing? I found it "pornographic' in that it stays in the mind. It was a unique disaster because it was such a slow death for thousands of people. And it was a telling commentary on the human condition, i.e. how selfish people really are when push comes to shove.
12/31/1998
The irony about Y2K is that fixing the bug may make the problem worse than it could ever be.
12/31/1999, Friday
Gorgeous day, 45 degrees.
New Year's Celebrations begin at 9 a.m. from around the world. No Y2K glitches yet. Today is the defining moment as to whether our lives are truly pervaded by the computer age, and if something goes awry in Russia the world the be toast tomorrow.
President Yeltsin abruptly resigns. Putin, a former KGB agent, takes over. Disturbing.
The "brand new day". Honeymoon will last for a while, but will it withstand the vagaries of real life?
12/31/2001
Celebration this year at CSO with SZ and Erin Wall from Lyric Opera. She was called to be a ringer when the scheduled diva called in sick with stomach flu. (She only had four hours to prepare for the show!) People thought I was her agent.
12/31/2007
Clinton and Obama in dead heat in Iowa. (Caucus 1/3) Hard to predict whether this is the first woman or black president. (Is the country ready?)
12/31/2009
A blue moon (second full moon in a month).
Video: The Known Universe. I realized that as we celebrate the arrival of a new year, we are still very much a solar society, organizing our lives around the movement of one solitary planet around one solitary star—and that our society is not that much different than it was thousands of years ago. It is also comforting to think that time is not going fast at all, as technology leads us to believe.
Perused 2000 diary—finding some interesting things. Dad died 10 years ago (1/20/2000) and my "life collage" idea—that you could make an interesting life by doing a variety of things.
12/31/2010, Friday
Unseasonably warm, 50 degrees/ thunderstorms
In studio: Painted 'Johns' target on Anachronistic Time Inversion. Will finish on date certain 2-6-2011. What will be the news on that day? Title: Telephone to God
12/31/2012
The country is at the fiscal cliff, a (flexible) boundary. Never have boundaries become such a fixture of American life in the 21st century. As of now, the soundbyte is that some kind of "deal" is being made by Congress on behalf of "The American People" as Republicans like to say, but I'm not a person in their America.
Went to Lake Theater to see Django Unchained. A typical Tarantino treatment of American history pushed through a comic book. As usual, the violent imagery is delivered in a perfunctory way. Most people get Tarantino, but the few that don't take everything they see as being literal depictions of reality and aren't ready to lighten up. I call it "gag violence", ketchup blood. Went to Dragon Lounge for Sam Hight jazz band, a sextet of 20-somethings playing 50s jazz and trading solos, just like their grandparents. It's nice to see young people playing jazz straight ahead, but without the power of modernity and a young artist, that kind of jazz rings hollow. I'd prefer to see young people play their own music and not like it, rather than see them play old genres anachronistically.