January 1sts

1/1/1898

(William James Correspondence)

To F. W. H. Myers:

“...Well, our countries will soon be soaked in each other’s gore. You will be disemboweling me, and Hodgson cleaving Lodge’s skull. It will be a war of extermination when it comes, for neither side can tell when it is beaten, and the last man will bury the penultimate one, and then die himself....Both will unite against the Germans, and no one can foretell the end....Everyone goes about now saying war is not to be. But with these volcanic forces who can tell? I suppose that the offices of Germany or Italy might in any case, however, save us from what would be the worst disaster to civilization that our time could bring forth.”   

[Interesting: If social media existed in 1898, this would not be UN-contemporaneous].

 

1/1/1998            

Excellent performance of Joe Jackson’s Seven Deadly Sins on Sessions at West 54th. I should do an extended orchestrated piece like this. I like the unique combinations of orchestral and rock instrumentation. It eludes any attempt to label the music as strictly classical or strictly rock.

[1/1/2026: I’m doing this with the Curios series–with an eye towards how the “seeds” and “seedlings” I’ve been cultivating can be generative with machines in the loop]. 

1/1/2005

Tribute to Shirley Horne on PBS. Interesting: the singing voice and regular speech have the same cadence, spaces between the words, the boundary between having a conversation and performing a song is transparent. Jimmy Scott is like this as well but he also straddles the boundary of male and female. 

1/1/2006

Wildfires in Texas, floods in California.

 

 1/1/2010          
 
Second City theme this year: ‘Studs Terkel - Not Working’ (ETC stage). Funnier than last year, although it was interesting to see lots of people there solo, looking lonely and sad, futzing with iPhones, seeking laugh therapy. It was nice to see how a culture can rise above the vagaries of life through the arts.

1/1/2022, Saturday
            
On my walk I was thinking how it didn’t feel like a Saturday and didn’t feel like it was a holiday because it was a Saturday. 2022 feels different—like a year in a dystopian novel. Large numbers get scarier as one ages.

[1/1/2026: 2026 feels different--less dystopian and more hopeful--perhaps "cool" in a "synesthetic" way--as one "feels" a color. That's my "System 1" hunch. We'll revisit this next year].

1/1/2023

As I said last year, the numbers are starting to look like Sci-Fi. 2022 looked different than 2021 in terms of its dystopian feel. For younger people, it probably doesn’t look as Sci-Fi as 2064, but from my perspective, I think they’re living in a Sci-Fi world. In the 1980s I didn’t see it as being Sci-Fi but perhaps for somebody older, 1984 was that world. As the numbers get larger relative to your age they start to become more unnerving. It’s probably been that way through human history that years have a certain feel to them.

1/1/2024

January 1st 2024—it’s just a continuation of yesterday in terms of creativity. I’m always working on something that goes across the boundaries of days, months, and years. What’s happening now as a kind of threshold is the second part of Nostalgia, which ideally will be a song for certain days, but there are other things in the mix—videos that go along with them. I’m also revisiting old songs, like a 2010 song “Star On Your Own” which I’m going to cannibalize. There’s a Robert Frost poem that fits in with it. It originally reminded me of something John Lennon would write circa the White Album, with a fast tremolo on the guitar and the vocals going through the same effect. The lyric is loosely about how we are stardust of the stars of our own little universe. 

1/1/2025

First song idea of the year:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 1/1/2026

Watched lecture by Richard Susskind re: his book How To think About AI. Someone asked a question about how we'll handle copyright with AI now firmly in the loop. I think they should make everything a patent--so you could patent your unique "seed" and perhaps put it on a blockchain.