July 9ths

7/9/1886

(Thomas Sullivan Diary) 

Walked south to Roosevelt, then east to lake. Coal smoke and the distant sound of trains departing for territories I'll likely never see. We're all passengers on this journey, some heading west, others simply holding on.   

7/9/1887

(Anonymous Diary)

After arriving at Los Angeles and taking lunch in the station, we drove about the place. The houses are very scattered and the city covers a large area of ground. We stopped at the Washington Gardens where there are a few animals and we also drove to several different points where we had very good views of the city and surroundings.   

7/9/1998

Sitting by Adler Planetarium basking in the beautiful temperatures as I write this. Spent a few hours in Planetarium looking at exhibits. Haven’t been here in at least 10 years, and yet nothing has changed.

7/9/2005, Saturday

History overlays: Sunday (Austin Gardens--Oak Park) Over Saturday (Michigan Avenue) [Source photographs]

 

7/9/2010            

Interesting: I was listening to the Kunstlercast while walking down Jackson and right at the moment Jim made reference to the Monadnock, there I was at the corner of Jackson and Dearborn looking at the Monadnock.

7/9/2021

Yesterday I was listening to a really interesting interview with Johnny Marr of Smith’s fame. He brought up a term which I had heard before but it's been a while since I've heard it. It relates to everything that I do with ambient music–or at least in the Music For Places series. It's called “psychogeography”. He was talking about the psychogeography of Manchester England. Places can trigger memories. The latest pieces for Music For Photographs are set in Los Angeles: Bronson Tropics and Every Building On the Sunset Strip, named after the artist book by Ed Ruscha done in 1965 or 1966 in which he took photographs of buildings on each side of the street. I'm spatializing it with left and right channels and the street itself. The way the city looked at that time is drastically different now but the spirit of the place is probably still there. It’s the psychogeography. Music is very cinematic in that [it encodes memories]. #riff

7/9/2025

Not only do I wonder who the vocalists and guitar players are on AI-generated music, but I also wonder who the producers were. Nobody is there to have ideas and direct the process–other than to generate something interesting in context with the data sets. It collapses everything down to a mechanical process of making selections. This is actually how it's been since the advent of synthesizers. Synths are full of preset options. None of this is a new paradigm other than what the options pull from. With synths, it was oscillators, filters, and envelopes. Now it’s data sets.