November 12ths

11/12/2006

I still think there is a huge disconnect between the acrimonious divorce of McCartney and Heather Mills and the allegation that he lunged at her with a broken glass and the lyric “All You Need Is Love” and “Silly Love Songs”. But people are made of lots of things not evident on the exterior. We all zero in on the “exformation” when more information would be more real. In any event, I think Mills is all confabulation.            

McCartney: “Music is just something I’ve done naturally all my life, almost not meaning to.”

[11/12/2025: Many things in life happen without meaning (to)].         

11/12/2009            

Went to lecture by John Adams. He talked about Proust and how different senses and mediums are “windows” that can be richly expressed in literature. But it could have been more exciting with sound and visuals. The audience was a sea of gray hair. 

The Beatles and communism: “They ended the cold war”. Bootleg recordings were etched onto discarded X-Ray films. 

 11/12/2016

J.G. Ballard's line from the novel High-Rise came to mind as being in the "gap": "Looking up at the endless tiers of balconies, he felt uneasily like a visitor to a malevolent zoo where terraces of vertically mounted cages contained creatures of random and ferocious cruelty."  

 

 

11/12/2021

The metaverse will be unnerving and dystopian in the same way social media turned out to be unnerving and dystopian. They never thought it would be at the outset.

When I was in music school in the 80s, Carl Fisher’s on Wabash was my go-to place for all things musical. A block north of there was Rose Records, also a favorite haunt, closed as a then Tower Records in 2008. How things have really changed. Even in Oak Park, the space formerly occupied by Borders on Lake and Harlem is still vacant after 10 years. Prediction: a developer will convert that into a high-end condo like the Tribune Tower was a few years ago. It’s sickening actually. #riff

[11/12/2025: This is actually going to be a Barnes & Noble, opening January 2026. I hope they still have that little cafe. Little cafes are small joys].

 

11/12/2022

 

 

 

 

 

11/12/2023

Finally finished Susan Neiman’s Why Grow Up? and discovered a new existential pain. Am I becoming the boomer version of Ned Rorem? 

Page 203: "You discover what you want not what you are expected to want, and you know something about how to get it. You care far less about what people think of you, though you may be far more useful to them. friendships will often be richer, in part because you know what it means to have friendships fail. If you've paid attention, you have learned how to keep them, and you've learned to know who you'll forget after years of pleasant collegiality and whose company you'll still see after you change neighborhoods or jobs. you may begin to understand what Kant meant by saying you have duties to yourself, and the basis of these is dignity, preserving the idea of humanity in your own person. Life will still surprise you. If it doesn't you are lost but you learn to trust your own responses to it. You begin to construct the story about how the pieces of your life fit together. The story will be revised more than once and become increasingly coherent if not always increasingly true, giving shape to your life as it goes on. places and objects will make it resonate."

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My diaries started in the early 90s when I was tracking symptoms of a chronic medical issue, then were used as a list for all kinds of things, song titles, lyric ideas, aphorisms. I also used what I called my "nerd card", a folded index card that I kept in my top pocket as a mini diary. Now there are electronic diaries, audio diaries, video diaries, and social media posts, which I integrate into a series of monthly diaries that have a musical component: a song per month, sometimes derived from diary entries. The next album may be songs for specific dates, but it would be networked on social media as a collective effort with other musicians and put into playlists with various hashtags. My vision is to have a "federation" of diaries such that we can cross-pollinate them and discover intersecting points and synchronicities.

11/12/2024

As I was going through the diary this morning, in retrospect I saw the dystopia coming since 2016. My theory still holds that reality is the result of the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious is made more virulent with technology—mostly cinema, radio (now podcasts), TV (now YouTube) and social media. We have to be careful not to stoke the furnaces.

[11/12/2025: That 2016 photo was perhaps an omen, a few days after Trump was elected. Ballard was particularly prescient]. 

Film (at Lake—hadn’t been there in years) “Here”. In many ways truly annoying. If you could use AI to generate a 90-minute movie by typing “Create a Tom Hanks movie”, it would be one like this. In some ways it is like the diary juxtapositions in this diary, but a missed opportunity in this film. I think it should have been done more edgy, leaving out the cheesy prehistoric scenes. The scene where Hanks takes up painting again as a revived passion was particularly painful.  

The Songdays so far: