October 25ths

10/25/1914, Sunday

Wittgenstein receives “suspicious” news that Paris had fallen. He felt pleased at first then realized it sounded absurd. (“Such incredible news is always a bad sign”.) Thinks they were under gunfire from Russians, but was just an airplane. Spends the night in Tarnobrzeg then tomorrow morning to Szczucin.

[10/25/2024: 90 years later, perhaps on the brink of another World War, the fog of it will be a different kind of fog. We are experiencing it now because the pillars of journalism as we once knew them have collapsed. There’s a continuous cognitive dissonance between what you hear or read in one place, and an alternate universe in another. (Feeling pleased at first, then realizing it sounded absurd.) Whenever I walk past the Tribune Tower, now converted into luxury residences, I think about that collapse. I was also there when it was being "renovated" (2019)]

 

10/25/1944

 [Norman Lewis - Naples 44]

It is astonishing to witness the struggle of this city so shattered, so starved, so deprived of all those things that justify a city's existence, to adapt itself to a collapse into conditions which must resemble life in the dark ages… 

10/25/2002            

Chechen rebels take 800 hostages in a theater. Russian government gases them out and kills throngs of innocent people in the process. They won’t say what the gas was. (A government will protect order first and its citizens second).            

[10/25/2024: My current fear is that this kind of iron-fist rule is coming to the US, probably brought about by 9/11 and terrorist/guerrilla warfare tactics. After over a decade of the war on terror, we gave in to terrorism]. 

10/25/2005

World Series—Sox 3/0 to Astros (14 innings)

Title: “Swipe Out”

[Eventually released on Frontiers in 2022. Sometimes ideas, even title ideas, can hibernate for 17 years, like a cicada. It was a riff on The Surfari’s Wipe Out.]

Lyric snip: I go through life pretending to care.

[Became a Songday in 2024].

Pretending To Care (10-9-2021) by meta4s

10/25/2007

Studio: Tracks on “Dark Park” based on photo of the same title (2004). 

 

[Used for Photographs For Music. It's another example of how I "continue" or "extend" existing works, as a CONTINUA-TION].

10/25/2023

Apparently, Barenboim has staged a concert by his academy orchestra of Israelis and Palestinians. Is it naive to think the music of the enlightenment is anodyne for this conflict? They’re playing all Beethoven and it’s gotten glowing reviews. People like the idea that we can play music for a sense of unity. I think it’s a great thing, but at the same time, people are thinking it’s a bit naive, considering where we are–that we’re just going to go to a concert and everything is going to be hunky dory. It will be for the duration, especially for musicians. They have to be focused on the performance, which allows them to “escape” into it. If you were to attend that concert, perhaps the performance wasn’t that great because you know the musicians are traumatized in some way, and so they’re not playing optimally. The naivete of it is kind of interesting because it can be seen as a form of hope–the fact that people still want to play music even when they don’t feel like it, or if people don’t feel like listening to it or it’s not relevant. It’s still an exercise in hope–hope that we can return to a time when hope is easier or when you don’t need hope. When things are going well, you’re not hoping and praying, but everybody hopes for something at some point in their life–even when times are good. When we play music. It’s a hope that it’s going to make things better. But music can have a lot of cultural baggage that isn’t cross-cultural at all. We realized that was the case after 9/11 with the demonization of Arabic music, which is something that I’ve always loved, well before 9/11. My affinity for world music goes back to the 1980s, when Peter Gabriel started incorporating recordings of ethnic music using the then cutting-edge samplers like the Fairlight, sampling all kinds of things off of cassettes. I liked it as well, but you weren’t thinking about where that music was coming from. Some African music might be coming from areas where there were dictators and social unrest, not unlike what’s happening right now. So the fact that their music emerged from those places (even though it seems naive) that they could ever go anywhere with it. It was an exercise in hope. Naivete can be an exercise in hope. #riff

10/25/2024

10/25/2025

It doesn't matter if AI-generated has soul or not. Like all recordings, unlike live performances, they are disembodied. 

*** 

Saw the new Springsteen biopic. It's interesting how American cinema embraced depressing psychodramas about people with mental health struggles. It's decidedly a postwar phenomenon. The seminal film in my view was the 1966 film Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff, depicting marital angst with alcoholism, and in this film as well. But if it's supposed to be didactic and informative (like a PSA for depression) it might simply be needlessly making people depressed--and not a good time in American history when the collective unconscious is brimming with various daily insanities. 

The scenes showing the songwriting process are both accurate and a shopworn cliche. His getting a cassette 4-track in 1981 is probably inaccurate. I didn't get mine until 1988. It is true that you could get unique magic on them, and you would want to release them as-is. But in his case, he could have just replayed them in the studio, just as you would need to perform them on a tour, but of course, there was no tour for that album. 

I like the idea that albums are a form of visual art. The common metaphor is the "blue" period (Picasso, Joni Mitchell, probably others), and that your songs are a group of paintings you made while in a funk of some kind. Songwriting is a very introspective endeavor because you're immersed in language. People who've never done any kind of writing probably don't understand the process. Instrumental music can of course, be introspective, but words dig deeper into the psyche for the songwriter/storyteller as opposed to the composer. I see language as an engine for rhythm, with words as the fuel. Whatever stories emerge are the ones that literally emerge from context. The story tells itself without you having to obsess over it. This is why I prefer economical lyrics as opposed to poetry recitations, which was Springsteen's style. I'd prefer a collection of disparate couplets and quatrains with a rhythmic schema driving the music. 

Apparently there's a biopic coming out about Neil Diamond. I sense we're entering "biopicamania", an escape for Boomers and GenX. 

Moody: