June 25ths

6/25/1886

(Tom Sullivan Diary--AI-generated with edits)

We are no longer becoming. We have become.  The lesson of the flightless cormorant: Humans are also in the process of becoming something totally different. We lose abilities and gain others.

At the tavern O'Malley spoke of organizing again. "They can't kill an idea." [Source] 

6/25/1998

Chicago teacher/singer-songwriter uses songs to teach math. This is not a new concept; novelty songs and nursery rhymes have been used for ages as learning tools. Interesting thing about it is that it’s music used as a utility, stripped of its cultural function, which is useful in that it indicates that music is not just something we can just discard after we’ve “read” it. It’s nice that there is a use for music other than for entertainment or an emotional outlet.

[6/25/2025: Relates to my idea about a history class that was about learning history through writing songs] 

Interesting documentary on PBS on Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone. His writing was brilliant. Interesting that he didn’t rewrite. Jack Klugman, who acted in it, said that Sterling had a way of constructing dialogue that had lots of good words you could roll around in your mouth. There really is something to what kinds of words you can use and those you can’t. 

If jazz didn’t have such intricate harmonic rules, would it still sound like jazz?

6/25/2001

Possible situation for band: You are a composer in an authoritarian regime and can only write a state-sponsored type of music. In your spare time you stealthily search the web to listen to cutting-edge music from the free world, and beyond. Write/play the music that has inspired you. The year: 2199. 

[6/25/2025: Use for a prompt]    

6/25/2009

Michael Jackson dead at 50 (apparent cardiac arrest). They say the music transcends the notoriety, but how does it compare to the musical contributions of Mozart or Duke Ellington? Elvis was “The King”, was more of a performer/celebrity who happened to be musical, rather than a musician per se.    

[6/25/2025: If you happen to be musical, you could be a musician, but it’s better to be a celebrity, even though that would be uninteresting to you.]  

6/25/2019

Ever since the 50s, contemporary music has been simplifying elements and/or removing them: melodies became simpler and were repeated, harmony was reduced to 1-3 chords, and by the time Hip Hop emerged rhythms were replaced by beats, and melody and harmony were removed. The next phase of evolution has to be in AI, algorithms, and code because it’s already a popular thing. Music always gets left behind in the rush to do what everyone else is doing. If musicians were smart these days they’d be artfully introducing new ways of approaching pop music. In my opinion, the AI stuff being done is really uninteresting.

[6/25/2025: What a difference 6 years makes. Music is still being left behind in the sense that the craft is being left out. This is similar to Dada more than a century ago when painting as we knew it was pronounced dead. Postmodernism marches on. We’re better off perhaps thinking that music is a conceptual art. Even then, the craft is in the execution of the idea, which may involve fabrication. AI music generation is a type of fabrication. Imagine an art world where everything was fabricated and everyone is phoning in the plans. 6/25/2021: “...writing music that is through-composed helps you get into the logic of music. If you’re just stringing stuff together with samples and using data sets where is the language logic?] 

6/25/2020            
        
If film existed in 1800 would ambient music have also been used, given that ambient music is often the soundtrack of imaginary films? I’d say yes. If Satie was alive in the 1800s and cinema existed he’d be into ambient music because of its cinematic quality.  

6/25/2021            
          
If music and language are joined at the hip, how do you involve computers and data sets? So if language, music, and computers are all joined at the hip, they have to have some kind of common element. Computers seem to be an outlier because they are too new, whereas language and music have tens of thousands of years of history. I would think computers would corrupt that history.   

6/25/2022 

I was at Austin Gardens watching the local theater troupe erect the stage and they were playing Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies and it felt like 1973, just when Roe was decided.    

6/25/2024            
          
Songday: Reason To Paint (Reason II)based on Haring’s 6/25 entries. It’s an interesting juxtaposition on both the Game of Art and Art of the Game. We’ve always valued the artist archetype. But it was also always a game: once an artist is a Player, they become a different kind of artist. But not always—Picasso was primarily an Artist in the more pure sense of the word, but earned status as a Player inadvertently by the weaving in of other archetypes that made him a celebrity. Pop art made art more fun, and that you could get away with anything. Postmodernism changed the art game, and it is changing again now with AI art and NFTs, which will produce similar art stars.

 *** 

The Songdays are now the “Songday System”, which is essentially based on David Bowie’s theory about changing the underlying infrastructure of music creation, where it’s more a part of a larger System, not just individual songs as just another “canoe”. The songs are first produced in a prototype version as a short video, then released as video album, then a proper release, ideally on vinyl. The albums will be titled, Sum 2.1: Title, Sum 2.2: Title, Sum 2.3: Title, all with a different production vibe.  

Eventually landed as a Shortet: