November 25ths

November 25ths Podcast 

11/25/1974

(From the article, "Bowie Meets Springsteen", published in The Drummer magazine)

We arrived at Sigma Sound a little after eight. Producer Tony Visconti was arched over a mammoth soundboard, pressing buttons, being generally pleasant to the half-dozen engineers and musicians in the control room, and peering into the large windowed studio directly in front.

The album was practically finished. The first rough mix had been accomplished since Bowie recorded the basic tracks some weeks ago, and this week had been devoted to clean-ups and overdubs. This was the final night in the studio for the album; the final touches would now be made.

"I'm Only Dancing (She turns me on)" [subsequently released as "Hang On To Yourself"] was being played back....

"You know Barry Goldwater is resigning from politics to become President of a UFO organization... he's not really resigning from politics, he just realizes they can't keep it all secret much longer and he wants to be at the top when it breaks. It will break soon." [More]

[11/25/2025: Even things we think are permanent and invincible always eventually break. Goldwater was also an interesting photographer. Typically it's the artist who makes a foray into politics, but after politics, it's back to the art. Also, Goldwater believed in UFOs and became the president of  the Mutual UFO Network. It's all that looking at the sky and horizon].

11/25/1995

(From the article, The Artful Codger, New Musical Express)

"I ask him did he watch that documentary on the telly last night about The Small Faces and isn't it weird how they used to be such skinny, shaggable pretty things and now they're all chubby and creased and old, but you, Mr. Dorian Gray, still look cool and thin and sexy..."

 

11/25/2005            

Watched Eno’s “Thursday Afternoon” video, now released on DVD. Back in the 1960s when video first came out, the avant-garde explored the unique possibilities for making art with it, and circa 1975, these possibilities have already matured into what Eno was doing. It always takes about 10 to 15 years for new procedures to become a viable product.

Excerpt Libraries:

"Discuss Brian Eno's Thursday Afternoon" 

"Discuss the use of video in the 1960s"

11/25/2018
            
Marquee poetry:

Greenbook Grinch
Ralph Bre  aks

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

11/25/2021

It’s the quadrennial of Thanksgiving, double what it was in the nation’s bicentennial in 1976. But in many ways the quadrennial is more meaningful than the bicentennial. 1776 was already 150 years after Plymouth Rock, and the initial ideologies were already set in stone. 

What was particularly notable to me is the painting by Jennie Augusta Brownscombe, initially painted in 1914, then revised in 1925 to remove the headdresses of the Native Americans, apparently because it wasn’t historically accurate, or the more cynical explanation that the person who commissioned it or asked to buy it, requested that it be “redacted”. Only history knows but it makes the point that sometimes absent proof, people can make up all kinds of narratives. There is a similar expurgation in Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s painting At The Moulin Rouge which had the right side of the painting cut off because one of the owners thought the green face of the dancer was too strange.            

In terms of the music that might have been made there, I’m assuming it would have been percussion instruments and voices. If there were stringed instruments used it would have been a violin, wood flutes probably easily survived the sea journey, and perhaps a pump organ of some kind. It would have been devotional in nature, certainly not pagan, and a continuation of the music that would have been made on the ship. 

11/25/2024

If you look under the hood of anything generated with AI, there isn’t much humanity there. The idea of “replication” is interesting in that generated art can’t be perfectly replicated any more than a song can sound exactly the same each time it is performed. Recordings are mostly illusions, and the emotions we feel or the memories we have come from us. You can select a “mood” when you’re generating a song. But what’s under the hood of that “mood”? It’s no one’s mood. I’m also skeptical of the idea that some of the emotions that were felt at the time of the original idea remain throughout time. Famous songs like Yesterday have a well-known story about their creation, but like a re-called dream they can easily become fictions that everyone knows as fact.

***

I predict that AI Music will be "enshitified", if not already. Cory Doctorow: “When your service is on the brink of being shut down by its investors, who demand that you compromise on privacy, or integrity, or quality, in some relatively small way, are you really going to stand on principle? What about all the users who won’t be harmed by the compromise, but will have their communities and online lives shattered if you shut down the company? 
            
AI is postmodernist because it does what it wants—anything goes, without any deference to what a human might want or need. It rides roughshod over humans.

[11/25/2025: It’s not postmodernist in the sense that you can’t do anything you want. Very often the use of AI as a medium is ineffective in producing the results that you want. Anything (doesn’t) go because it can’t do everything. The more you use it you realize this]