October 15ths

 

10/15/1998

A meme is the most reliable recording medium because it never degrades and is never completely forgotten and continues to evolve. 

[10/15/2024: Little did we know that in a generation’s time, memes actually became a pernicious phenomenon. Being a fan of Dawkins’ Selfish Gene, I had been applying it to art and music. I think that’s why I alluded to a “recording medium”.]

10/15/2006

CBGB closes in New York! Such great bands came out of such a slimy dump : Patti Smith, The Sex Pistols....”

Patti Smith: “October 15, 2006 marks the closing of CBGB. My band, joined by Flea, gave the final performance, ending with a eulogy of our departed musicians and friends. The last flower is received were calla lilies, symbolizing innocent and rebirth.” 

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Dome City released. The Dome is seen as a protective shell, hermetically sealed from corruption and moral decay, but ultimately is transformed into a world where Utopian visions coexist with dystopian realities.

10/15/2011 
            
Rhythm By Addition released. 

10/15/2015            

Lecture on the topic of happiness. Someone in the audience posed the question of whether video games are Flow Experiences. Many think they are distracting, but perhaps they are precisely about Flow. Add another two related activities to the video game experience and that might be the perfect recipe for Flow. But you wouldn’t necessarily have to play video games to get into that brain state, but it would be interesting to follow the studies of brains of games, similar to brains on music.
            
[Does knowing how to play an instrument make you better at math and science (and video games)? It depends. I think music is its own island of experience.]

10/15/2016

Taken from the roof of 231 S. LaSalle--the "blue building", a "facadectomy" I didn't like it initially but it grew on me--a postmodern treatment to a 1920s building. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

10/15/2024

Music usually speaks for itself and we don’t necessarily have to tell people how it goes, except when you’re trying to show how it goes. Then we have to use language to describe it, usually with some kind of rap or scat. This is where music notation is useful. In the end, there should be no difference between the sound of something learned by ear and something sight-read. But there will be little errors made by the people who learn by rote, which can be more interesting.
            
Later in the day I heard an interesting variation on 10cc’s I’m Not In Love at the bookstore. At first I thought it was an actual choir on the outro with the chord cluster and thought it was interesting that someone would score and perform that. When I asked the clerk who it was she said it was a Remix and I was disappointed. Remix has become too easy and uninteresting and now a way to spin memes. She also said it was on the Halloween playlist on Spotify, and that it sounded spooky to her. Spooky? 

[10/15/2026: Pop recordings have always been about the sound because a recording studio is essentially a sound lab, and the music itself is less important. In the 80s and 90s artists started doing things "unplugged" in an attempt to strip it down to chords and melody]. "Discuss the history of multi-track recording, how it became an "instrument" and the "unplugged" era." [Excerpt Library: Music I]

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In my usual routine now of selecting text at random, I opened the book Constructing the Universe (now with yellowed edges) to a random page: “There’s little doubt that the final years of the 20th century are a time of rapid global, national, and individual transformation...we can learn to see nature as verbs, movies, “ongoing process”, and work with these to discover ways to prevent worsening conditions....”]