December 29ths

12/29/1966

"Interviewed in November 1965 Paul McCartney mentioned that he’d been toying with the idea of writing a song called “Penny Lane” because he liked the poetry of the name. Penny Lane was, and still is, the name of the road in this suburb immediately to the south of Liverpool city centre, close to where the Beatles grew up. It took another year for Paul to actually write the song but with its description of the shops and the people and the “blue suburban skies” his Penny Lane was a fine counterpoint to John’s “Strawberry Fields Forever”"

[12/29/2024: 1966 has always been my pet year. (Everyone might have one where they plant a flag on it), but it seems to be pivotal and culminating, the result of the “lag of the seasons” in a cultural sense. GenX thinks it’s 1974 or 1975. For older millennials it might be 1984]. See: The Threshold of 1966:

Excerpt Library: "Discuss how the year 1966 was a pivotal year in world culture" 

12/29/1999

A friend asked me what I thought the world would be like in the year 3000. This question was probably asked a thousand years ago. By 3000 there will be new terms that will redefine nature. By 3000, many will be still waiting for the end of the world. Story idea set in 3000, with facts derived from life in 1000. Panel of experts talking on TV about the potential Y2K problems with US and Russian nuclear arsenals. Some looked extremely worried. (A call to release 7500 nuclear bombs would be made in just 3 minutes after a false reading). I feel excited about this new age, but trepidatious feelings now winning. 

[12/29/2024: Fear is both timeless and contemporary, and can even become a relic of the past, defused of its anxiety. Y2K has become a fashion vibe, when at the time I recall everyone felt like the end of the world was 3 days away] 

[An excellent film that captures this mood is Strange Days, released in 1995, just when people were getting anxious about 2000.  Films depict imagination, and so we imagined our current world. If you remade the film it would seem like Reality TV--or would be shot in a way that looked like the genre.]

12/29/2022

The reason most players plateau and get bored is that their view of music is narrowed by only playing an instrument. Be a total musician: Do something you wouldn’t normally do, like follow along with an orchestral score as you’re listening to it. Open a music dictionary and investigate a topic at random. Take some music theory classes and do the exercises. Or you can go outside of music and investigate something, then come back to music.

[12/19/2024: This is how I see music AI: a way of “going to an extreme and retreating to a more practical position". After watching the recent documentary about Ennio Morricone: there was always some level of experimentation, but he always came back to being essentially a melodist].

12/29/2023

When you work in systems, particularly creative systems, they can continue indefinitely. The way I work, especially in art is to create a series, e.g. my Intervals and Macrophage series. The problem with New Year’s resolutions is that they don’t really rely on systems—it starts over again at the beginning of a calendar year and isn’t connected to any serial framework. If you work in systems you don’t have to be concerned with the year number changing. Other corollaries are political and geographical boundaries. 500 years ago there were few established country boundaries per se. It’s the whole idea of metageography, so a year can create a boundary as well—like 1966 was for me. Every year we’re on the threshold of something undefined but is a boundary nonetheless. Once we step over it there’s a new way of thinking. But you could just as well have a new way of thinking without thresholds or boundaries as a scaffold.
            
12/29/2024

Songday Diary:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 I stole Morricone's line and used it as a lyric: "When I write for myself, I am someone else".
 

12/29/2025

I've always been interested in non-linearity because sequences aren't fixed. You can move the pieces around and they start to create forms that you find interesting yourself. They are simply abstractions that can have a range of possible meanings within a frame of ambiguity. In lyric writing, I start with a seed idea, then consult my running list of lines, couplets, and quatrains. If they fit with the rhythmic schema, I'll use them regardless of what they mean for the entire song. Once it starts to take shape and fits well with the music, I'll attempt a narrative or meaning as a confabulation--not unlike recalling a dream. What I like are "trigger points" where I know a line or couplet will affect listeners because of the universality of certain themes. People get the metaphor of trains for example, where people get off and on in your life. I find this more interesting than A-Z structures, where it's "Then I did this, then I did that..." In fact, the editing of text and film can move things around so much that it doesn't have anything to do with your original idea. Making something is always the process of "fixing" things to make them work. Once they work as an entity, then you can supply a possible narrative. You told a story without the "once upon a time" thing.