January 5ths

1/5/1944

(Naples 44)

"The new sindacos, the mayors who have been appointed by AMG, the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory, to replace the old Fascist podestás, are stated in the main to be members of the criminal Camorra. It is common knowledge that these have been appointed through the influence of Vito Genovese, the American gangster who, having obtained employment as an interpreter, has now maneuvered himself into a position of unassailable power in the military government. Law and order depend on badly equipped and badly armed Carabinieri and Pubblica Sicurezza, who have two or three men apiece in each town-all of them under constant threat of attack by well-armed criminals. When I called yesterday on the Carabinieri at Acerra, I was shown round the town by a brigadiere who walked at my side with pistol drawn and cocked. Last week bandits raided the police station here, killing the NCO on duty, wounding another policeman and taking the few poor obsolete weapons they had. This leaves only two Carabinieri to carry on. In so far as anyone rules here at all, it is the Camorra. The Brigadiere gave the usual account of it as a secret and permanent resistance that had evolved over the centuries as a system of self-protection against the bullits and the tax collectors of a succession of foreign governments who had installed themselves in Naples. The people of the Zona di Camorra lived by their own secret laws, recognized only their own secret courts, which imposed only one sentence on the enemy from without or the betrayer from within — death. In the old days, said the Brigadiere, there had been some sort of moral authority, some sort of justice, but now nothing but outright criminality remained."

Book Excerpt Library: "Discuss corruption in Italy" 

1/5/1999            

Soundforge’s new Acid program looks interesting, but now we’ll have more wannabe musicians using computer tools as instruments. The true test of the musician is whether they can play something that’s not plugged in.

[1/5/2026: The DIY era probably started in the 1960s when music became a vehicle for other ulterior pursuits and goals other than for the art itself, and is essentially a postmodern phenomenon, which has no signs of stopping. The new true test is whether you can do anything creative that’s not generated with AI].

1/5/2005

On the news they showed Kofi Annan touring the tsunami-ravaged areas. “Where are the people...” 

[1/5/2025: It’s interesting that it’s easy to forget the past in the present, even though it’s hard for us to do individually. Coverage of the 20th commemoration lasted perhaps 36 hours and now it’s forgotten by most of the world again. It went on for weeks in 2005. The same thing has happened with commemorations of 9/11, Pearl Harbor, etc. Once something becomes old news it stays as bad news in the past, but nostalgia is different because it is an attempt to revive the old as a distraction from all the bad news in the now]. 

[1/6/2026: The US has become a colonialist in the year of its 250th anniversary of freeing itself from colonialists. While some view the capture and prosecution of Maduro as the equivalent to the removal of Saddam, it is wildly ironic that we have become like Iraq in the first Gulf War, militating against Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait over oil, but we are Saddam. The US invasion of Venezuela also has parallels to the military coup in Chile on 9/11/1973, where right-wing ideologies militate against left-wing socialism. They were all feckless tactics and strategies in the end]. 

1/5/2011

Interesting: Cameras used to watch everything you do. This is a new vanguard of an increasingly dystopian world....People will attempt to evade the system by adopting different alternate personas. It will be a big and lucrative business to create and sell identities.

[1/5/2025: Yesterday I revisited the Black Mirror series which came out in 2011. This was the world it depicted. But in 2011 it was still mostly a fiction. Now it’s the reality. Cinema and TV have warped our minds more than novels would ever do]. 

 

 

 

 

1/5/2023

Putin announces truce for Orthodox Christmas.

I was just reading an article on Roland’s 50th Anniversary piano that they created and its 4 speakers are mounted on drones. I’m really interested in that as I’ve always been interested in immersive sound. You could take that back to Thomas Wilfred’s Lumia, a chromatograph that was just a light bulb that shone through a rotating disc that had paintings on it. He custom-made them for people. 

***

Yesterday I was assessing what I’m going to do with this In Sum series. Some of them are now in their third and fourth editions. If they were printed, they would each be about 300 pages. Ebooks allow you to continue with them indefinitely, but should we and should content have limits? Now with people generating content with AI, we can’t consume that much information without some kind of structure. This is one of the ideas behind serializing by month. When I create new content, it’s usually through video transcripts, including this one. Obviously, you can generate a lot of text from dictation, and I think a lot of people are doing that these days. 

[1/5/2026: LLMs are very useful in this regard, where we can quickly summarize video transcripts] 

1/5/2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1/5/2026

You can suddenly feel you’re in the wrong century- like you’re not in Kansas anymore  

Curios track sequencing. By far, for how short these pieces are, this album is taking the longest. It's different from other albums in that each piece is a different ensemble. The Shortets were all string quartets, so the instrumentation wasn't changing. The goal here is 12 pieces that work conceptually as an EP, or a series of EPs ultimately.  

1/5/2048

(Anthony Townes Diary) 

Eben brought the Sony Mavica. It looked so precious and fragile like a delicate piece of crystal with tons of secondary meaning. Otherwise someone would see it as an old junked car. But it’s essentially the generator of the material with which the work is made. When everyone knows it was from 50 years ago, it’s “Hey, my Dad had one of those!” 

Poe: What was the fascination with old cameras in 2048?

The fascination with old cameras in 2048 was driven by the art exhibit "Equality of Vision" at Gallery Moire, which featured the work of photographist Nic Eben. Eben's latest work consisted of "pixel-by-pixel re-creations of digital images captured with late 20th century camera relics like the Sony Mavica, then re-photographed with multi-layer pixel matrix technologies" [4].

This exhibit highlighted a growing interest in the aesthetic qualities of outdated photographic technologies, even as newer digital imaging techniques became more advanced. The act of carefully reconstructing images from obsolete cameras spoke to a desire to preserve and celebrate the visual qualities of the past, even as technology rapidly evolved [4].

This artistic exploration of older camera formats was part of a broader cultural trend in the mid-21st century, where people were seeking meaningful connections to the past amidst the rapid pace of technological change [doc_3, doc_6]. The exhibit at Gallery Moire tapped into this nostalgia and fascination with analog photography, reflecting the ways in which established artistic forms were being reinterpreted through new digital lenses.