October 25ths

10/25/1914

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)]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[The Field Recording of what it sounded like] 

 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) 

10/25/2010

David Brooks NYT Article: "When times get tough, it’s really important to believe in yourself. This is something the Democrats have done splendidly this year. The polls have been terrible, and the party may be heading for a historic defeat, but Democrats have done a magnificent job of maintaining their own self-esteem. This is vital, because even if the public doesn’t approve of you, it is important to approve of yourself. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Democrats have become role models. They have offered us lessons on how we, too, may continue to love ourselves, even in trying circumstances. Lesson one. Think happy thoughts. Never allow yourself to dwell on downer, depressing ones."

10/25/2023

One thing AI music won’t truly be: elegiac.

[10/25/2026: It actually can. People have told me my AI-generated songs have made them cry. But it doesn’t happen all the time. It’s at certain moments when you can be emotionally triggered. Even an ear worm of a song can trigger a memory. That it was created with AI doesn’t matter–unless you knew it was and that it erases your natural emotional response to the music. It happens the same way for visual art. It’s “the idea” of something–the idea that anything a machine does can’t have human qualities. But it’s not true. Everyone likes a cute robot].

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. 

[10/2026: The "documentary" You Can See Everything could be a seminal film in that it strikes a similar cultural nerve]

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. 

Moody: