November 5ths

11/5/1997            

The artist of the future should develop the ability to see things from all angles and all disciplines. We should write music from an architectural standpoint, or design structures based on music or sound. Art should be a synesthetic experience rather than one-dimensional, “unisensorial” or from a purely literal perspective. Not only does a musician need to play in-tune and in-time, but be of the times.            

[11/5/2024: Quincy Jones certainly was of the times in the time of his prime. He was already into rap in the mid-70s, using it in context with African drumming and chanting].

LLM: “Discuss interdisciplinary approaches to creativity” 

11/5/1999

New Gehry bandshell design unveiled for Millennium Park. Clearly an example of “go to an extreme and retreat to a more useful position.” 

11/5/2000 
            
Artist Marcos Raya: “My head is full of ideas, so having a big place is like a dream studio. The bigger the space the bigger the ideas and more enthusiasm for the work. I used to be in a little studio, a closet. I did big things in it, but I had to do them in parts. Here I have the ability to stand back and look at it.”

[11/5/2025: Lots of creative blockages come from being in one small windowless room or even one large beautiful place too long. Going to another place can sometimes solve impasses when trying to solve problems. Sometimes going into a place where music is playing gives me ideas because the endless loop running in my head as I'm working on something merges with what is playing in the space].  

11/5/2002            

Mid-term elections. Stopped after work to vote. Lots of people there. Hope the Dems win this time. There was a Russian guy on the radio that said he would be watching the election results closely. He was rooting for the Dems. The perception in foreign countries is that a democratic government is more world-friendly.

11/5/2004            

Watched film: Control Room. Things I liked: The toppling of the Saddam statue was a staged event; Why didn’t they use the Iraqi flag as a victory flag, but rather used the US flag?; 

When you look at what America is post 9/11, the terrorists have truly won because they’ve sown the seeds of (at least) ideological destruction of the idea of American freedom. A civil war has begun in the US.

[11/5/2025: Hasn't happened yet].

Life is like riding on your very own bus: people get on, people get off, sometimes they get back on every day at the same time and sometimes you never see them again, and the bus never stops, endlessly riding into the sunset.

Became an AI-generated song series (EP of 3 songs, all the same lyrics)

 

11/5/2011, Saturday

Weather stunning, 70 degrees.

Occupy rally in Oak Park, the first one. [Listen to Audio] The pathos and anger are palpable at most rallies, but you still have to make a concerted effort to see the real issues amid the noise of grievances. One speaker goaded people to close their Chase accounts and asked for a show of hands—one person—an older woman.

The thing I find most interesting about OWS rallies are the layers of generations.

Andy Rooney dead at 92. He was a part of the generation that reaped the benefits, comforts and entitlements of post-WWII America. And now here we are...

[11/5/2024: 2011 was an inflection point in retrospect. This is when the temperatures really started to go up. It was also when Millennials born in the early 90s came of age and were taking to the streets–just as Boomers born in 1950 were taking to the streets in 1968. That’s when you realize how the world really is and always was. The passing of Quincy Jones at 91 evokes the same nostalgia for "better" times].

11/5/2014

t is getting more frequent that people say to me that they don't "get" jazz, and immediately dismiss it as an art form. And it's not for lack of admiration for talent and skill: fewer people examine paintings older than the 1800s. In my own observation, the impressionist galleries at the Art Institute get the most traffic. People "get" these paintings. I always see them as the "pop snapshots" of the 19th Century, light and easy to relate to. The art world equivalent of jazz is Pollock and Rothko, and appropriately so, as both are residues of modernity. Debussy was a part of a zeitgeist that let 7th chords out of the prison of classical theory, that never accepted that sound as being a resolved sonority. (The major 7th was always understood as the leading tone to the tonic, according to the rules of harmony in the baroque and classical periods). 

1/5/2022

One of the human universals is “practice to improve skills”. It’s something that we’re not doing anymore, especially now with more people using AI. 

LLM: "Discuss skill versus de-skilling" 

Alternate Tunings Riff on F7:

 

11/5/2024
            
A diary is a “pen” to connect the dots of history.

A reprise of Gore Vidal, 2009: “Does anyone care what Americans think? They’re the worst-educated people in the First World. They don’t have any thoughts, they have emotional responses, which good advertisers know how to provoke.” My hope is that it is going to be a repeat of 2008 but there’s been all the aforementioned rigging since that point. Vidal said Obama wasn’t the answer.