October 24ths

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10/24/1944

[Norman Lewis - Naples 44]

The FSO called me in this morning to say that yesterday's great fiasco was the result of a carefully organized plot, designed to cause the maximum disruption to the life of the city. A young German soldier named Sauro had volunteered to stay behind when the troops pulled out and then as soon as the [bombed] buildings started to go out, to turn himself in with this story of the whole of the town having been [bombed].

10/24/1997         

Went to free jazz concert. Free jazz improvs is 40 years behind the times. One of the reasons people played free jazz was to be ahead of the times! Free jazz was also a rebellion in its time. Why rebel against something (jazz) that has no real bearing on pop culture? 

[10/24/2025: Relevance in art is something that’s always shifting. What I’ve noticed about the shifts in the 2020s is that art has less relevance generally because people are in complete survival mode and are always scanning for threats, so there’s no time to be making art, compared to 60 years ago. Now you have to force people to look at things because there is a lack of general relevance. To the extent that free jazz is still performed, it has to exist in the world of the smartphone and social media, which kills its original essence. People might attend events as a “journalist”, only reporting on the event for a social media story rather than absorbing the art]. 

[10/24/2026: In the context of AI, music is only relevant if it is created by humans, which is a variation of the "unplugged" movement, which was a variation on Stuckism. I'm still a stuckist because I still use craft in music, as opposed to moving on from it to do postmodern things. AI music is hugely postmodern because you get away with it by "cheating". Sometimes the art made by "cheating" has more relevance in a postmodern world. But that doesn't mean to totally capitulate. I would imagine you could prompt a free-jazz sound, but the cultural context isn't there, and doesn't work as rebellion or activism.

10/24/2020

 Patti Smith’s book: Photo with Christopher Maria Schlingensief in Venice at the home of Marco Polo. “He was a life force, and artist, activist, director, and filmmaker. Of his death shortly before his 50th birthday, Elfriede Jelinek wrote, “I always thought someone like him cannot die. It is as if life itself had died.” 

 


10/24/2024 

Art can be the most powerful after the fact when you can entertain regrets, and it becomes unsettling when you hear about what happened. A documentary that comes to mind is Patricio Guzmán’s Cordillera of Dreams about the aftermath of the military coup in Chile on September 11, 1973. (Just the irony of the date is unnerving). When I saw it in 2020 it was galvanizing because I saw how it could happen in the US, in many of the same ways: kidnappings, torture, the Disappeared. Why would anyone in their right mind entertain the notion that it’s what is needed in the US? I think it is partly because of the disaster movie, which so far has been kept behind the fourth wall. America is every kind of movie, but that it is “only a movie” is no longer true: we are all in the movie–which stands to reason given our obsession with celebrity.   

***

Gary Indiana died. He called himself a “talented amateur”, and was always at work. “When he wasn’t writing plays, Indiana was taking photographs. He was working on a new novel as of last spring.” Hey, that’s me...and Andy Summers, and lots of other so-called polymaths. I’m definitely in the “would-be” category. People don’t like people who do more than one thing. Someone asked,. “Do you fish?” 

10/24/2025

Given all the possible sounds that can be made by a vocal apparatus, lots of them can become musical if you make that the focus. Music is something that we notice, just as photographers might see things others don't, simply because they have an interest in cameras. When we're in System 2 mode, we are more in notice mode--as opposed to not allowing ourselves to see things. To have a "good eye" or a "good ear" might have something to do with System 2, although those things can be instinctual (System 1). In terms of say Neanderthals being musical, they must have noticed that the sounds they were making had a patternicity to them. Young Neanderthal children at age 8 might have discovered that patternicity just as we do--and it is instinctual (System 1). 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

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