September 14ths

9/14/2004            

Idea: a photo blog.    

9/14/2005 

The Katrina catastrophe also makes you think about the ultimate demise of modern civilization. This makes you believe we are heading inexorably towards it.

[9/14/2026: Perhaps humans are naturally wired for doom and gloom, The transhumanist David Pearce asserts that most of us have a bias towards being depressed, and is that way by design, so as to keep us on the hedonic treadmill. If we were optimistic all the time we wouldn't be vigilant].

9/14/2011            

It is seldom the case that ideas continue to belong to the progenitor. And why would we want them to? Beethoven might be considered a person whose ideas were epochal, but he was merely following the rule book or ‘Best Practices’ of composition, built on compositional methods blazed by Mozart and his elders. After Beethoven died, his music endured, and the supporting theories continue to be used to this day. What did die was the classical style. Similarly, the ideas behind Apple products may continue to exist in theory, but the new company may be as different as the Beethoven symphonies and the Beatles’ Abbey Road, similar in some musicological sense, but vastly different culturally. If music history is a guide, the core ideas engendered corporeally, will most likely not endure ethereally.            

[9/14/2024: The prime example of ideas that fade out are “Mom & Pop”, “Bricks & Mortar”, “_____& Sons”, “Five & Dime, “The A&P”. They become the “retronyms” of culture replaced like something or someone else. Beethoven’s signature phrase became the opening phrase of the 5th Symphony. Beethoven himself probably would not understand why that line would become how people knew his music, a style of which no one would now compose, except using AI perhaps. So counter to what I said, the ideas are “in the cloud” (ethereal), and can be used anonymously].     

9/14/2014 
            
Sevenths, 36” x 2.5” x .75” Acrylic on plywood

As a part of the Intervals series, a wall sculpture of abstract representations of the intervals of major and minor sevenths.             

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

9/14/2019
            
Richard Serra, Reading Cones. (Grant Park, by the Petrillo)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Caustic wave patterns.