June 7ths

Antipode: December 7ths

6/7/1886 (Chicago)

(Thomas Sullivan)

Attended trial proceedings. Spies, Parsons, and others—accused men who look ordinary enough in daylight. Prosecutor: “foreign anarchism”, defense–workers’ rights. Truth lies somewhere between rhetoric. 

Murphy caught reading a labor pamphlet during lunch break. Dismissed on the spot. Reading becomes subversive.

Barber on State Street: shares neighborhood gossip—which families receive “radical” newspapers, who attends suspicious meetings. 

The city is a “nervous system” of informants and suspicions. Everyone watching everyone else. 

6/7/1989

(Keith Haring Journal)

“Had lunch with Yoko and Sam Havadtoy and then went shopping for a vase for her performance tonight....We went to see an incredible installation by Nam Jun Paik at the MoMA of Paris. It's amazing what images he gets out of a TV screen and the speed with which they change. This is what television as an art form is all about....” 

[From the advent of computers, while artists are using cathode ray tubes and a material. It's interesting how screens themselves have now lost their ability to be sufficiently ironic to be used as a medium. The current satire and irony is now all in what AI can churn].

6/7/1995 

(Eno Diary) 

“...why is it so hard to pay attention to anything on a screen?). I feel no difficulty whatsoever in ignoring most of it. Worked with my new super-fast computer on Photoshop.”  

6/7/2005

Story idea: World where humans have devolved, such that they have lost abilities, traits, emotions, empathy because they have atrophied through non-use.

[6/7/2025: The story is now reality with the use of AI, but AI will produce abilities and skill as well. Ability and skill are shape-shifters]. 

[6/7/2026: Skills can rust, but they never really fade at the individual level. You can always revive some of it. At the collective level they do fade, especially those that require years or decades to hone. With AI, the only skill is prompt-writing and curation, which anyone can do without much effort].

6/7/2010

Now that I have been doing more field recording I’ve noticed that my attention is drawn to sonic events rather than things that I see that might be pictorial for a photograph or painting.

[6/7/2025: The collective focus is now AI. I have been vigilant of this effect by continuing to maintain and develop older skills like orchestration. AI will eventually be able to generate orchestrations, but it’s not a skill. Just because I was doing field recording in 2010 didn’t obviate or obsolesce other parts of music I liked].

6/7/2021

Ideally, what you want in music as a player and as a composer is something that’s “high context”—where things are tacitly implied and you don’t have to specify everything. You should be able to give a chord chart to the guitar player and then they’ll work it out. You don’t have to specify anything else. It is exformation.    

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Playing music manually is in lots of ways like barefoot running which I understand is very natural once you learn how to do it. When I first started playing it was "barefoot" on an acoustic guitar with no amp or electronics, with the guitar mostly out of tune. Musical instrument manufacturers create the "padding" to prevent the pain involved in the vulnerability of performance.

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6/7/2023

I do my most rigorous work in music. I’m more of an outsider in visual art and work mostly from ideas (like a Bruce Nauman). I like to play with concepts as I do in music but the skill isn’t there. I’m at the point where I’m not interested in going back and learning how to make portraits and landscapes as they would not inform the things that I’m doing now and would be a waste of time and wouldn’t be that interesting. The corollary in music is that there are musicians who don’t want to do that either—they’d rather just dive in and make things. I think that’s a valid way of working. But over the years I’ve become more of a traditionalist: I see the value of having a wider range of skills that I can draw from and use different strategies on the axis between traditional and purely conceptual work.

6/7/2025

Reading Todd Rundgren’s The Individualist--a “stop and think” book for artists (An interesting self-portrait of a life well-lived--with caveats). Page 98: “People are convinced they know themselves, when what they’ve actually done is about their image of themselves. But we really know little of ourselves. What we do know is that we’d all stop learning or striving if people would just accept us. That allows us to accept ourselves as we are, not as we would secretly like to be, then we can justify giving up the struggle to be something more like our ideals, like we hope all of us would be.” At first this sounds profound, and probably somewhat didactic for our own lives, but it’s very vague, maybe intentionally so. This was his philosophy after taking psychedelics. People often report that they lose their ego while under the influence.