November 12ths

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11/12/1997

Just as the earth has tectonics creating its own natural boundaries, the Net will have similar divisions, which will comprise yet another overlay to the world. Man is territorial in nature and the idea of a global village with no boundaries is inconceivable. Hence, the vast internet will eventually be [partitioned] based on similar patterns of division.    

[11/12/2026: The Blue Wave may have paused the “coup”, which we can now put in quotes. Mississippi elected its first black senator since 1874, so gerrymanders do nothing to corral revolts and revolutions. Power is a function of how boundaries are drawn, but they are still abstractions. Geographical boundaries are actually more powerful because they can cause wars that go on for centuries. So far, state boundaries haven’t been re-drawn, but secessions could possibly happen in the future, where red districts splinter off and are renamed with cardinal names: north, south, east and west.]

11/12/2009            

Lecture by John Adams. He talked about Proust and how different senses and mediums are “windows” that can be richly expressed in literature. 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

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.

[2026: That didn't happen; a Barnes &Noble is now in that space. A book store in a town will usually make it more "blue". How people build out a town could determine what the color of the state is, or the color of the state will color how people should form collective identities. Oak Park was built around churches (and train stations). There are 4 churches within 2-3 blocks, including Unity Temple, a contemporary non-denominational church, an early 20th century "blue" shift, albeit more libertarian in nature, not necessarily liberal because "liberal" was gradually being redefined. Frank Lloyd Wright was not a liberal, but he took on that color).

11/12/2022 

Quora: “Why can’t I change anyone’s mind?” Regardless of how good your arguments might be, it’s not going to make people divest their opinions or beliefs, especially if they have been held for a long time. Neil de Grasse Tyson’s opinions are based on what many know are facts, but many will never see it that way because it requires divestment. The reason why may be because of the sunk cost of beliefs. It’s one of the reasons we can’t end wars. Someone has to surrender, and it is difficult for the other side to make that easier. It is inconceivable that there will be no claimed victor.


 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

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]. 

The Songdays so far:

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