July 6ths

7/6/1998

Called about Joni Mitchell concert. Lots of seats left at $2,500 a pop. (Gone are the days of free concerts and free love)

7/6/1999

Reading Alan Lomax’s Folk Song Style and Culture. Fascinating chapter on how different cultures use text. The Navajo have very few concept categories, using mostly nonsense syllables. The function this has is to produce consensus. All the singing group agrees upon is that a certain series of verbal bits are pleasurable and/or appropriate. In this way any sense of conflict is kept out of the text.

[7/6/2025: “Folk music” is an interesting topic to explore in the AI age, when we can generate it with an LLM simply by selecting the genre in a drop-down. We’re using text in a different way as well as instructions. So a poem or lyric serves as those “instructions”. Gone are the days of the spirituality of a concert of folk music. But there’s always the possibility of actually performing the folk song you generated].

7/6/2003, Sunday            
        
Watched Koyaanisqatsi. I never knew about Godfrey Reggio before and I find him interesting. I love those IRE PSAs, They were made in 1974 and they talk about subjects that remain relevant: the media, surveillance, etc. Phil Glass was talking about there being no space between the image and music in commercials. They don’t want you to think or be skeptical. Commercials are about impulse, film about contemplation.

[7/6/2025: It's less likely that these kinds of long-durational contemplative/aesthetic  films will continue to be made in the same way. Who would have the attention span for a Glass repetitive minimalist work?]    

7/6/2019

Second of Summer–The American Carnival (Cover of Frontiers)

 

7/6/2025

A bunch of bass in 25 seconds:

Just Like That (20250706) by meta4s