January 21sts

1/21/1999

Idea: song within a song–like they do in film using black and white, cheap film stock for a grainy quality.

Lyric idea:

Your graces, your traces
Find your corner of the world
And develop your gift
Your graces, your traces...

Scored 26 years later:

1/21/2000            

A friend thinks the web is overhyped. I think it’s underutilized and used for the wrong things. 

[1/21/2025: One technology that proved not to be hyped is cloud computing]. 

[1/21/2026: As a technology matures from its infancy or "pet trick" phase, flaws and defects begin to emerge--the first one that too many people are doing it and it makes it too unserious. The reason that art mediums are pronounced dead is for this reason. They are rather injured--not dead]     

1//21/2008

As more and more artists realize that our strength is in our solidarity, we can produce and publish our own recordings, and efficiently market them using the myriad tools now available on the internet. 
            
We should all be grateful that the music business gravy train is dead anyway, and we can move on with better ideas such as the fee-based model for music consumers. 

1/21/2013
            
Cold, Windy, 20 degrees. Still no snow on the ground. 
            
Inauguration ceremony. I took photos of the TV screen while sitting in the comfort of my living room. Through a camera, you feel you’re present in situ and capturing moods and contexts captured in a live video stream. Seneca, Stonewall, Selma. First time gay rights mentioned in a presidential speech. 
            
Malian musicians do a “We Are Mali” recording as a plea for peace. This is exactly what the Islamists are attempting to eliminate, so even though the music is non-threatening, it is patently offensive to them.
       
[The entire Obama second term is between these two entries, 2013-2017]
            
1/21/2017            

Warm for January, 60 degrees and sunny
            
Women’s March on Michigan Avenue north to Randolph. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Has Photoshop ruined art? Has ProTools ruined music? Other euphemisms have included “disruptive technologies”, which transform how we view older technologies as having a readiness for change, but “ruin” is hyperbolic. These ruminations come in the form of a rhetorical teaser, like on local weather forecasts before a commercial: Is there rain on the way in your area? I never wait around to catch on this ridiculous bait, and just get on with whatever I’m doing. Creative people (who actually don’t work as TV writers) usually avoid this kind of TV, as to avoid the rhetorical questions about certain genre deaths. TV itself is immortal in the same way plain creativity is. I love that people still want to write songs, when they were pronounced dead too many times before.

1/21/2024

Now that the album is done, I’ve devoted more time to mindfully playing instruments instead of creating a part on a recording. They are two different things: the former is a facet of production but the latter is just done for the sake of itself. Very often I have to continually remind myself to keep doing this kind of thing so I can integrate it into my playing. This will give me a new sound without using electronic effects. 
            
[1/21/2025: Making music as a product is a fairly new concept in human history having to do with making copies of some kind, whether they be printed hymnals in the 16th century or sound recording beginning in the early 20th. In primitive societies, music is only a function of ritual, not to produce a memento that can be replayed at a subsequent time. This probably promotes the idea of always being in the present moment. Recordings promote the idea of always replaying a past. An idea would be to make recordings and put them in a time capsule, playable in 50 or 100 years. This is essentially the idea of a “Golden Record” that by the time it’s played centuries or millennia in the future of Earth, someone on another planet would only be getting an old snapshot that doesn’t represent its present moment.]

1/21/2025

 

  

 

 

 

The passing of David Crosby made me think about vocal harmony. Years ago, an opera singer that I knew talked about “apartment singing”, or singing into pillows so as to not disturb the neighbors. “Apartment singing” is also the feeble and shameful pushing of air over the vocal chords, again, so as to not disturb something. I wonder how anyone that lives in apartments can develop a voice of any kind and consequently we become “phonophobic” in all parts of our lives. Group singing (even tracking multiple vocal parts in a studio) lets us take the pillow off as well.