October 26ths
10/26/1933
From 803 Griffith Park Bvld in Santa Monica, John Cage writes to Henry Cowell. He is currently working on the Sonata for Two Voices.
10/26/1997, Sunday
Interesting show on CBC about the abstract associations between music and other arts and disciplines, hosted by Yo-Yo Ma. He was saying things like “Bach built cathedrals out of music” and “traveled in his head”...I’ve always believed that art is more powerful when metaphors are applied or suggested. Either the artist and/or the audience can apply them. I also think the artist should explain her/his metaphorical theories, but I also suspect that metaphors are inherent in all artistic (and linguistic) expressions. (I should think more abstractly about music).
Worked on “Dome City” concept idea.
[Dome City was ultimately released in October 2006].
This is a song idea based on these two disparate entries. Ultimately, it could be antiphonal in some way, with the words replaced, yet retaining the original roots to Cage. That address in Santa Monica no longer exists. Even in 50 years an urban landscape can be unrecognizable. The dome city concept was conceived and prototyped by Buckminster Fuller in 1959. Fuller and Cage collaborated in the summer of 1948 at Black Mountain College. Interesting: The Finishing School: "John Cage and Merce [Cunningham] and I had breakfast every morning together out under the trees. And we really did have a very great deal of fun because I spent that summer with them on a fun schematic new school, and I called it “the finishing school.” We would finish anything. In other words, we would really break down all of the conventional ways of approaching school. And “the finishing school” was going to be a caravan, and we would travel from city to city." [More]
10/26/2002, Saturday
Went to peace rally in Federal Plaza at noon. Took lots of pics. Could be historical.
[10/26/2025: Little did we think 23 years ago that eventually we’d have a dictator in the US. It’s interesting to look at Federal Plaza where we now protest that dictator, who’s making Chicago a war zone like a city in Iraq, that needs “Shock and Awe”, a “Midway Blitz”. You couldn’t make this stuff up in 2002, but our reality has in fact been so corrupted by cinema and TV that it’s become an idea for a film. All the wars since the Vietnam war have been TV wars, and now you can’t tell them apart. Now we make such films by bringing the whole film-making apparatus to the invasions, as in the apartment raid in South Shore, as if it were Osama Bin Laden’s bunker in Pakistan. Cinema, but more so TV, screwed up our sense of reality].
10/26/2003, Sunday
Kid, 22 years old, MIT professor, was on the radio talking about “computational origami”. When you apply metaphors for the purpose of solving problems, it opens up entirely new ways of thinking, but that’s not to say that metaphorical thinking is a panacea. Metaphors are really artificial meanings placed on real situations to illuminate them. But once you take away the “illumination” the challenges can still be there. He also said he spends more time thinking out problems rather than just jumping in and doing it. This is the smart way because it gives you time to give up.
10/26/2004
Promenade by the old Sun-Times Building. I loved this spot, now the Trump Tower Plaza, which I think is an uninspiring maze. It is also interesting as a documentary photo on how the US has been gradually collapsing over the past 20 years.
Sox win World Series! (Write a fight song—or do songs just become them...)
Shirley Horn died. It’s interesting to hear her sing and speak—and it sounds identical. Her singing is a good example of the fuzzy boundary between speech and song.
10/26/2011
10/26/2015
I like the ability to use text-to-speech in addition to grammar and spell-checking. It’s very useful. I was surprised that even after those processes and even re-writes, hearing how the prose sounds refined it even further by its musical characteristics. How prose sounds in the mind’s ear is different from pronunciation. The best prose probably comes from a combination of writing as we speak, and writing as we think. As more writers simply use dictation, the less readable it will be.
[10/26/2025: I actually found that not to be true. If you can speak clearly, the prose will have fewer grammatical errors and be more readable. Readability might go down the more we tweak. Speak, don’t tweak.]
“I’m not the kind of writer who sits around having ideas and developing them, then writing books to illustrate them. I write books in order to have ideas.”— William Gibson
If you are involved in one focused task, how can you not see things on the periphery that might be more interesting? Paying too much attention means you might not be paying attention. New possibilities are always there; We have to constantly be vigilant of them, then incorporate what we have learned from that diversion into the primary work. In fact, it is this peripheral activity that gets people into flow experiences.
From flow flows focus.
10/26/2024
10/26/2025, Sunday
Perused Tonight in Jungleland, The Making of Born to Run. Later in the evening I was watching various Springsteen videos and I was wondering why, because I wasn't that much into him. I always thought he talked too much in his songs and that the productions were bland.
Riff idea: Being interested in something and not knowing why, and why you care. I suspect it might be because I see my younger self in him. Back in the 70s lots of guys had the same rocker attitude. The cover of that book could have been me in 1982, and lots of other guys. Boomers came of age when Reganism hollowed out the working class. It hit men harder because they are wired to be strong and successful and always out to prove themselves. Perhaps that's what fascinates me about Springsteen: the angry energy of a hard-guy always trying to prove himself, probably because he wasn't validated in adolescence by his father. There was a "softening" of that bravado in the mid-late 80s when men became yuppies and explored their feminine side and took office jobs, essentially doing secretarial work. I don't think men ever came to terms with that in the end because we're biologically hard-wired for physical work. Computers may have softened men too much. It's interesting that his mother was a legal secretary and was the main breadwinner of the family.
["Discuss how Reagan changed the cultural and political landscape and its effect on the arts, especially music, beginning in the late 1970s" ]
Comments
Post a Comment