December 16ths

12/16/1998

US bombs Baghdad. Never underestimate a troubled president. Do we really need to do this now?

New chat room: “Reality Check”. This is the antithesis of usual chat rooms where everyone has similar interests and viewpoints. It’s where everyone decides to have a “friendly” war but on all kinds of topics.
            
[12/16/2024: Perhaps the first iteration of social media. It still exists.] 

12/16/2001
            
If America was attacked at the time the Bill of Rights was drafted we would never have had the rights we’ve enjoyed for the past 225 years. 

12/16/2010

The title is always the last layer of color—Robert Rauschenberg

 

 

 

 

 

 

12/11/2016

Book: The Righteous Mind. Its primary theme is that there is an inherent cultural cohesion across human history, bound by simple rules. I resonated with this as a musician, as I know that certain "spiritual" dimensions can be achieved both in performance and composition. It's a dimension we all have available, religious or secular. Composers don't write in "teams", but ultimately they write for them, which is my personal takeaway.

12/16/2022

Younger generations always get the “lo-res black-and-white” version of the pop culture of previous generations. Think of the sound of 78 recordings of orchestras and big bands compared to hearing them live. We can of course still perform and record them, but it’s only a simulacrum of the original experience. I began to like 50s BeBop in the 1980s and had only a narrow perspective compared to the people who thought it was a zeitgeist. Many people didn’t think it was at the time and thought it was decadent. In retrospect, I have the “color” experience of the 70s and 80s, and it is a fond memory. For some people, it was still “color” but perhaps something they wanted to forget. We can “colorize” the past but the people who were alive when it was in black and white have a real color memory and don’t need the fake colorization. Current 80s revivals have this effect on me.
            
[12/16/2024: Younger generations now get the “live big band” effect that I lacked in the 1980s, i.e. video is now all in color and doesn’t have other issues with frame rates and aspect ratios. Standardization is one of the best technologies you can have because it creates technological universals that can be useful for decades. At some point 4K will be like a scratchy 78 in 100 years. AI will also make standardizations easier] 

12/16/2023

Steel Trees

12/16/2024

Apparently 100,000 songs are uploaded to streaming services every day. If you think about it in terms of the “average” of them, or the exformation that is distilled, you would come away with music that essentially is in categories (or catalogues). So it’s not so much the number of songs that are getting added, it’s the number of songs that might get in rotation based on the genres that they are in. AI music has gotten so good you sometimes can’t tell them apart. The reason for this is that AI music uses all the existing songs that are still in rotation and is making derivative works out of them. It stands to reason that they would sound similar. We want music that’s similar, because similarity relies on finding those things that fit in the pattern of the things that we like, which is essentially what algorithms are doing. Given the potential fungibility of music, algorithms are essentially a way to make it more manageable, but in managing it we lose something as well. We can’t be our own DJ. #riff

[12/16/2025: Using a corollary from the art world, we are more our gallerist/curator who will decide which works to exhibit].

Photographs For Music (Holloman UFO Sighting), using “Complex City” track from Music For Places II. Also, two places for this music: Nevada and New Mexico. (I actually think this is just a cloud, but it has a mysteriousness about it that makes it more emotionally engaging—even if you don’t agree with its premise) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

12/16/2025

AI allows us to take even more efficient shortcuts to give us what we want. In music, we want the shortcuts that will get people to admire us without putting in much effort. I had heard an anecdote where an AI was given the challenge to win a boat race by devising navigation strategies, but what it eventually did to get the most points was to keeping going in circles. It's this kind of thing that people admire because it makes it a game that can be "gamed". Warhol "gamed" art and people liked the moxie.