January 15ths

1/15/2001            

King Day. Interesting: TV was the engine for the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1950s—a national “morality teleplay” they called it. Football was also very big on TV at the time. 

[Since there were only a few channels, flipping through them would have exposed you to that programming].

Article on the web about how much web design is about lies.

Excerpt Library (Technology) "Discuss how the internet made disinformation and misinformation more prevalent"

Musing on Music Mostly: "Discuss common errors designers make in information design"

1/15/2009

Bush farewell speech. Interesting how scripted speeches present the false Bush. In contrast with the final press conference, which was Bush “unplugged”, this was essentially another contrived speech by Michael Gerson

1/15/2010

Haiti Day 4. This is the first disaster that I recall that is so suffused in social media. With YouTube and blogs, you get to reflect longer. Interesting while watching the videos: people walking aimlessly, almost every structure damaged or destroyed, even those that are apparently well-constructed—corpses being scooped by heavy equipment into dump trucks and hauled to a so-called ‘mass grave’, but it’s just a trash dump or land-fill, with old appliances, furniture, and other trash, the bodies all anonymous and unaccounted for. (You watch the video, and you realize that the journalists there survive on denial or black humor). “Convening with the dead is what allows Haitians to link themselves, directly by bloodline, to a pre-slave past,” said Ira Lowenthal, an anthropologist who has lived in Haiti for 38 years. He added that with so many bodies denied rest in family burial plots, where many rituals take place, countless spiritual connections would be severed. “It is a violation of everything these people hold dear...” 

Chris Hondros/Getty Images: “A truck dumped rubble Saturday into a mass grave in Titanyen, a village on the outskirts of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince.” (Interesting: the caption reads ‘dumping rubble’. While there apparently is rubble there, you can see dead bodies. The caption was composed in deference to the dead. It could not be that as they carry away the debris they are not first removing the people!!) 

This is a jolt for everyone: it forces you to think of necessity, usefulness, common good.  

What were the political impacts of the Haiti earthquake in 2010?      

1/15/2023

Stopped at the CCC: Chicago Fire panoramas.

[Chicago is the prime example of how a city can rebuild after a fire. But there aren't many Burnhams around anymore. Anyone in that capacity is more of an F.T. Marinetti].

1/15/2024 

 On “art bravery”: In the future there will be artists who will want to go into the avant-garde and they will be using artificial intelligence, but does AI understand something being avant-garde? Artists are going to start to look pretty smart because they’ll be able to outsmart artificial intelligence as opposed to the narrow, mechanistic, left-hemisphere understanding. There will be people who will have a more wide-angle view, whereas other (most) people might not have the capability—either because they can’t or they won’t. In my observation of life in the 2020s, artists and musicians seem to be afraid to explore the avant-garde because it’s too woo-woo—even though postmodernism is still prevailing.

1/15/2025

Biden gives final speech from the Oval Office—a final speech by an American president as we knew them. They were all modernists throughout most of the 20th century. We now are in gear for pure postmodernist politics. 

On the rebuilding in the burned areas: density, multi-family, revisit Chris Alexander's A Pattern Language, fire berms/levees/ecotones which artists and architects can collaborate on. Very often there's good old ideas that were simply forgotten about.

1/15/2026

Twilight contrails