June 12ths

6/12/1886

(Sullivan Diary)

Police patrol in pairs. Workers gather in smaller groups. Fear reshapes the geometry of our streets. Haymarket: Justice or theater?

Immigrants still arrive daily seeking the democracy of opportunity. Do they find it, or does Chicago find them first? 

6/12/1927

(Weston Daybooks) 

So many gray days which breaks the shells period, but not through lack of desire.

Songday Treatment:  

 6/12/2010

Soundwalks: Union Station, Chicago Loop Walk, Post Office 

6/12/2021

Perhaps it’s already been done, but what would be interesting is a history class that was based on songs written through the ages, which would correspond to actual history. The history of the recordings would be studied as well and perhaps people would write songs as class assignments and perform and record them.         

6/12/2022

Why does any kind of music have a “reputation”? I never thought it did. I found it interesting harmonically vis-a-vis traditional classical harmony. As I recall, jazz started its mid-life crisis in the 1990s when the jazz community was pondering what future jazz would be like. A commonly shared idea was that it would be future-focused, i.e. inculcating whatever technology was in development. I think the idea that jazz is a “music of the future” still holds true, and that any music created in the future that is sonically audacious will be a “jazz”.    

***

There are interesting common elements in the history of rock ‘n’ roll over the past couple generations. But elementally, rock ‘n’ roll is baked in the cake—it’s the idea of rebellion. Punk in the mid-70s was in a lot of ways a 1773 Tea Party moment. As I’ve written now ad nauseam, it’s the Fourth Turning phenomenon that rebellion would create sweeping change. It’s like that now with AI music, but it’s not railing against just the establishment, it seeks to eat itself (creativity) alive for no apparent reason except just to do it. We see this deranged cultural cannibalism everywhere these days.    

***

There was a podcast I was listening to the other day—I think it was with Chris Blackwell of Island Records—about when they first started staging concerts in Jamaica. They’d bring in huge PAs and people would be there all day and even sleep on them when they were at full volume. It is kind of comforting to think all we need to do is just turn it up and do more of something without any real substance behind it. Then we’re disabused of having to really think about what to do.    

6/12/2023

When you re-consider the cross-influence of Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper you realize it was the recording medium itself that made them both probable, and there really wasn’t anything mystical happening beyond what was in the air generally in the 1960s. You probably won’t find that kind of techno-mysticism these days, but I don’t know. You have to be in your 20s, born ~2000. 

***

Is there a connection between the music of the spheres and psychology? Music has more of a connection with mysticism than psychology (theosophy, sacred geometry, numerology, the enneagram, astrology, Kaballah, the occult in general). Playing music, and to some degree composition, has a psychological effect on me—at least temporarily. Rhythmic patterns can be very trance-inducing. It can have mystical implications, perhaps based on the music of the spheres. 

6/12/2025

As good as artificial intelligence is now, it still doesn't have good knowledge. It has an increasing context window, but it still doesn't have the knowledge or wisdom that humans have–particularly in music, where questions about theory have to do with the actual doing of exercises to gain knowledge, and artificial intelligence isn't doing that through its context window. It may know a lot about jazz just by going out to the internet and doing its own research, but it has no intimate knowledge of humans playing music or practicing music, or applying fundamentals.

***

The challenge in writing with collected fragments is follow-through. We can be divergent indefinitely, hoarding ideas, but at some point well-focused convergence must begin. 

June 12ths, summarized and reduced to bullet-points with Google's LLM: