January 20ths

1/20/2001

Bush inauguration. Watched a bit on TV. Interesting: At the moment of the oath, the first camera shot had water spots on the lens. (An omen?) 

1/20/2007

Idea for photo shoot: Classroom, all students with ashes on their foreheads except one with a scared look on his face.

[1/20/2026: An approximation with AI]
 

Article in NYT about face recognition. Cognitive scientists have found that subliminally learning something too well interferes with perceptions of reality. (Learning patterns, e.g. “This pattern is a face”, is a type of exformation of reality, such that the brain doesn’t have to process the patterns every time we see it.

[Essentially a General Adversarial Network] 

They do this thing on MySpace where you invite people to “add your page” then they send a “thanks for adding”. That’s all people seem to be doing these days: “adding” “friends” to lists.

1/20/2009 

Obama inauguration. 2 million people make a pilgrimage to the National Mall to witness history. At this point, you are always reminded of the arc of the civil rights movement—from point A to this point B, but other milestones are approaching.

1/20/2011

50th Anniversary of Kennedy Inauguration.

1/20/2013, Sunday

Obama Inauguration “Eve”, Second Term. Falls on a Sunday, so swearing in a quiet ritual.

1/20/2023 
            
What’s interesting about the evolution of the internet to the present day is that there’s so much information on people who have passed away compared to 20 or 40 years ago. If someone passed away there might have been just a few articles written about them and perhaps someone would make a documentary. But these days on YouTube there are thousands and thousands of videos that are being made in tribute to rock musicians who have passed away. 

[1/20/2025: I’ve been binging on David Lynch films and interviews, as I did after the passing of David Bowie. I can’t imagine how I’ll react when McCartney passes]. 

1/20/2024

I consider myself a musician first and foremost but I’m sort of like an architect as well. Some architects are writers—like Rem Koolhaas. I noticed that a lot of musicians are starting to write now. They used to be pejoratively called dilettantes. But I think it’s a good thing for people to skip around. Anybody that’s a doer wants to do everything. No one wants the same thing for dinner every day for months or years. 

1/20/2025

A line from MLK speech for possible Songday:

 

 

 

 

 

 Became a Shortet:

I always thought that jazz was the sound of the future because it’s a “cubist” idea, like cubism in painting redefined the notion of “representational linearity” or a logic of how a painting should be made or how music should sound as tradition or convention as a collective idea. Jazz is a going outside–or a continuum of inside-outside as tension and release. To me, this is where jazz is unique. Jazz is mostly inert now, but there could be possibilities in AI improvisations that humans interact with as human-in-the-loop, or the other way around, with machines in the loop following what’s going on in the music, and controlled at the mixing board. 

1/20/2046 

(Tony Townes Diary) 

Gates Park with Neone. The new centre is very cool. The ground is completely illuminated. Also very cool the way the illuminated taxis zip around on the lighted inner park roads. Neone said that these are remote-controlled from Las Vegas.   

What are some of the events that took place in Gates Park?