9/14/2001
Fast and Slow
Posts
October 14ths
10/14/2003 Is there such a thing as a certified diarist? A registry? (Diary Registry) 10/14/2013 Martha Beck, “ 10 Life Lessons You Should Unlearn”: “If you've abandoned yourself in the effort to keep anyone or anything else, unlearn that pattern.” [10/14/2025: 3311. Very often, we break ourselves in order to fix ourselves [Dynaxiom 3311-3320] 10/14/2023 Video 45 of Blue Star Eclipse. [10/14/2025: Ambient music doesn't work well as shorts. They exist in different worlds] Cloud Deck:
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...
0814
The Groove. Interesting happy accident with the shaker getting mapped as a cuica. Sacrifice (August 14) by meta4s
August 14ths
8/14/2005 Still from Sacrifice film shoot at Rosehill Cemetery. [8/14/2024: Cemeteries have many uses, obviously as film locations and for taking photographs, as well as for the showing of films. Rosehill in Chicago is a popular cemetery for photographers, as is Graceland Cemetery, which I have been to many times, both by myself and with photo groups. It’s not a macabre activity at all, although superstition could color the moment at some point in the future if for example something happened the following day, or on other August 14ths. Of course there is Helen Sclair, the “cemetery lady”]. 8/14/2017 What will 2020’s music sound like? Popular technologies will drive it, and most likely will be shaped with AI, as that seems to now be the cool “guitar” everyone wants. In 1964, this same question was probably asked, and by the end of the 60s, music was vastly different, primarily because of advanc...
July 14ths
January 14ths 7/14/2019 Using loops and samples in music is a small aspect of music composition. You are a musician (musicist) in the sense that you are constructing logical sequences within temporal structures. Proceeding in that fashion could make you a composer and is no different than a child’s first explorations at the piano, that are essentially “drag and drop”, i.e. playing by ear. Being a true musician always entails the development of knowledge and skill, which you wouldn’t attain by playing around with software. [7/14/2024: I was watching a video about an 8 year-old boy who was writing songs in a home studio as if he was 28, playing all the instruments and using DAWs and other software. He had knowledge and skill with all of it in only a few years. But even people who are 28 can attain similar skills in the same amount of time, 3-4 years. This seems to suggest that high levels of knowledge and skill can start in the first decade of life for everyone at some level. The qu...
February 14ths
2/14/1998 Film: Ma Vie En Rose . Excellent art film by Belgian filmmaker about a boy who wants to be a girl and throws the entire neighborhood into disarray. Psychologist in film suggested that perhaps the parents' wish to have a girl influenced the outcome. As usual lots of crazy people riding the Subway on Saturday night. and it seemed as though everyone was an actor playing a role in a movie, such as the crazy trumpet player (Chet Baker) Nancy (Sid and Nancy), and a guy wearing a plaid shawl who looked like he’d be perfect for a film about immigrants, coming in through Ellis Island. 2/14/2023 Was reading This Is What It Sounds Like, a book by the former record producer for Prince, and she made an interesting point about liking something versus wanting something: You can like a piece of music but you could like it so much that you’d want to learn how to play and or write it. That was my situation back in the 1970s when I liked a lot of music, and then I wanted the records. Then...
December 14ths
12/14/1996 (From the article in Telegraph Magazine, A Star Comes Back To Earth ): “Bowie wants to play me some of the tracks from his forthcoming album, Earthling - a title that plays none too subtly to Bowie’s new persona as an ordinary, affable, if somewhat arty, bloke. In the studio an engineer cranks out the songs at full volume. It is always a potentially awkward moment, listening to a performer’s work when he is sitting beside you - how do you compose your face into a rictus of approval if the songs are awful? In fact, they sound like the strongest he has recorded in years: densely textured - “industrial rock”, says Bowie - yet rich with the sort of commercial hooks that have been absent from his more recent work. Bowie was always clever at appropriating musical styles and stamping them with his own signature— - the “white boy” soul music of Young Americans; the ambient electronic atmospheres of Low.” [12/14/2024: In my view, the 2 mid-90s albums Outside and Earthling comprise on...
9/14/2024
Caustic wave patterns at Belmont Harbor, reminding me of the surrealist work of Yves Tanguy
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.
4/14/2024
Based on the Beatles studio diary for 4/14/1966: “There had for some time been puzzlement at Abbey Road as to why records cut in America sounded so much better than British cuts. The bass content in particular was greatly diminished on British records.... But on ‘Paperback Writer’ all that changed. In fact, the bass is the most striking feature of the record. “’Paperback Writer’ was the first time the bass sound had been heard in all its excitement,” says Geoff Emerick. “For a start, Paul played a different bass, a Rickenbacker. Then we boosted it further by using a loudspeaker as a microphone. We positioned it directly in front of the bass speaker and the moving diaphragm of the second speaker made the electric current.”
5/14/2019
Words Face the Wall , 16.25 x 22.25, acrylic on paper. It was inspired by this sign on a scanner at the library. In some ways this is frivolous, or even "cartoonish".
