November 6ths

11/6/2000

Show on TV about town in Japan where its residents often live to be 100 years old, and they can't quite figure out why. This shows that context is so important—that a certain constellation of factors creates a particular outcome. Sometimes you don't really know which star in the constellation is the dominant one.

11/6/2010

To Navy Pier for SOFA show. Photos, low-angle November sun setting: 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photographs For Music: Departure. Music: The Scandal (Music For Places IV). 

11/6/2020

The idea of using AI for production (side-stepping human creativity) still makes no sense to me. Multi-track recording, and to some extent MIDI, are fully-matured tools that can be refined by extension. AI has a long way to go to get to that level. Andy Clark touched on this in the (somewhat wonkish) book Surfing Uncertainty.

[11/6/2025: What a difference 5 years makes, but people who started using it 3 years ago see it as the only way of working. Already there is an intellectual sophistication of using AI. On Reddit the other day someone posted A Critical Defense of Human Authorship in AI-Generated Music. To non-musicians it is easy to place a philosophical position before craft. I am of two minds about it since I am a trained musician, as well as an untrained visual artist. Everything I do in art is essentially postmodernist, and I love working in this way. But I tend to get homesick for both: if I've left craft for a while I tend to miss it. I see the possibility of a happy medium using both as hybrids]

11/6/2022

I recall Bowie saying in an interview that the door was closing on postmodernism and that we should seize the day. What used to be cool is still cool but has a different patina. Like Steve Lacy’s performance on SNL last night: I saw it as 70s-retro redolent of 1976 top-40 which perhaps he picked up in a kind of morphic resonance. What people might be doing is ushering in the end of postmodernism with nostalgia trips to places they’ve never been to so as to experience the same nostalgias of older generations in order to find the postmodernist cool in it before it runs out, as Bowie prognosticated, or to dismiss postmodernism altogether.

From a musical standpoint as a composer, revisiting ways of working from 30 years ago is exciting in its own way because it is deeply personal rather than a collective re-interpretation or simply a continuation of it. You also get to repeat entire cycles rather than just being nostalgic for one point in the cycle, e.g.. going back to only 1992. In each cycle you see new things on the repeats, but it’s just slightly new. 

Postmodernism suggests revolutionary upheavals, but it’s never the end of any history. It’s never the end of any. 

"Discuss the end of postmodernism"