6/20/2026
[Oriental]
Posts
August 20ths
8/20/1823 Anne Lister’s journal quoting Rousseau: “I am an enigma even to myself and do excite my own curiosity” 8/20/1998 Interview with Milton Babbitt. He was talking about academics in music and how he hated it. [8/20/2025: As much as I use theory, I’m always wary of getting into jousting matches about it on social media. All domains have their theory and it’s nice shop-talk, but you don’t want to be a theoritician. I’m a parallel octaves scofflaw and who really cares when no one notices it as a listener? It was one of the reasons that I stopped writing songs in the 90s. I wanted it to have no theory, or as Eno says, “leave the music out”. I’ve been putting it back in lately. I might leave it out again in the future. One of the good things about knowing music theory is that you can leave it out for artistic effect, and do something postmodern. I think ambient music is a postmodern phenomenon]. 8/20/2016 Jazz seems to be more popula...
July 20ths
The other side of the year 7/20/1993 Saw Todd Rundgren walking down Wacker Drive. I wasn’t sure it was him but by the time I realized it was (because of the glasses), it was too late and didn’t want to chase him down. Went to drop off clothes for flood victims. On way back down Michigan Avenue, here comes Todd again. Saw him walk into 111 East Wacker and followed him in. Lost him. He was wearing a blue and white striped shirt. Every time I saw those stripes I thought it was him. [This was the No World Order tour promoting one of the first interactive CDs, even when few people had PCs at home]. 7/20/1997 I am at heart an instrumentalist, but it wasn’t until about ten years ago that I saw the importance of lyrics in good pop songs. Consequently, I spend lots of time writing them, trying to find interesting metaphors and rhymes. There is nothing more satisfying to me than to take an observation about life and turn i...
March 20ths
Antipode: September 20ths 3/20/2016 Film: My Beautiful Broken Brain . What better producer than David Lynch? When a brain changes it shows new “films” on the screen of consciousness. What this might suggest is that AIs that are anthropomorphized are by default “broken”, yet have recoveries and setbacks. They can be best described through the metaphor of film and will run on millions of little “film clips”. There is a common correlation between visual disturbances and film effects, some of it done in After Effects. 3/20/2021 I'm currently at Scoville Park. It's about 55 degrees, and obviously it's sunny with blue skies. About two blocks behind me is the Hemingway birth home. The boyhood home is a couple of blocks away on Iowa. The reason I brought it up is that I have started to sport this gray beard now, and in this particular pose, I'm sort of looking like him. And I wonder if I should shave my beard. *** In order to be a good musician, music has to be do...
February 20ths
2/20/1965 (Complete Beatles) ...’That Means A Lot’...was written for the new film and the Beatles had two separate attempts at recording it (this day and again on 30 March), neither successful, before they discarded the song and gave it instead to the day’s controversial singer P. J. Proby. Said John Lennon at the time, “The song is a ballad which Paul and I wrote for the film but we found we just couldn’t sing it. In fact, we made a hash of it, so we thought we’d better give it to someone who could do it well.” Proby recorded his version at Abbey Road on 7 April 1965, produced by Ron Richards. So what was wrong with the Beatles’ version? Actually, not a lot. If the Beatles were, as John Lennon indicated, unable to record the song correctly that may have been because it was an over-complex and somewhat unusually structured composition. [2/20/2026: A good example of something that happens as you write lots of material. Some of it starts to s...
January 20ths
1/20/2001 Bush inauguration. Watched a bit on TV. Interesting: At the moment of the oath, the first camera shot had water spots on the lens. (An omen?) 1/20/2007 Idea for photo shoot: Classroom, all students with ashes on their foreheads except one with a scared look on his face. [1/20/2026: An approximation with AI] Article in NYT about face recognition. Cognitive scientists have found that subliminally learning something too well interferes with perceptions of reality. (Learning patterns, e.g. “This pattern is a face”, is a type of exformation of reality, such that the brain doesn’t have to process the patterns every time we see it. [Essentially a General Adversarial Network] 1/20/2009 Obama inauguration. 2 million people make a pilgrimage to the National Mall to witness history. At this point, you are always reminded of the arc of the civil rights movement—from point A to this point B, but other milestones are approaching. 1/20/2011 50th Anniversary of Kenned...
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December 20ths
12/20/1997 Interesting interview with Harvard intelligence researcher Howard Gardner. He says that it’s time that prevents us from being adept at many things. If we had forever, then we could develop these areas.... [12/20/2024: AI will provide a “virtual immortality” (VI). Machine learning is essentially “fixing mistakes”.] This “VI” can also be seen as an extension of imagination, where machines are “imagining” and we will have essentially taken the magic and mystery out of it.] [12/20/2025: “But once we realize that people have very different kinds of minds, different kinds of strengths—some people are good in thinking spatially, some in thinking language, others are very logical, other people need to be hands-on and explore actively and try things out—then education, which treats everybody the same way, is actually the most unfair education.” [This is very true–especially to people who are musically inclined. If they haven’t discovered language abilities, they are proba...
October 20ths
10/20/1998 Interview on NPR with the heart surgeon, Dr. Oz who operated on guitarist Johnny Copland. He gets deeply involved with the care of his patients, even down to the music that’s played in the operating room. He said that the music should be a “healing” music, but not necessarily New Age. [10/20/2024: In Daniel Levitin’s recent book I Heard There Was A Secret Chord , he posits how AI would be used to select music based on various contexts, and will be a part of meds: “When you’re sick or recovering from injury, music will be similarly selected, just for you, in the hospital and the clinic, and your caregivers will send you home with it... ” [10/20/2025: What a difference 27 years makes in terms of Oz’s current views on Medicaid.] https://www.perplexity.ai/search/summarize-recent-news-involvin-mrVEYVh0RTy3zg_B6uq2qA#1 10/20/2019 ...
June 20ths
6/20/2004 Technology frees us from the physical, tactile senses, such that it is no longer necessary to play a musical instrument to make music. It also frees us from having to remember things, as they are relegated to stored data rather than encoded memory in the brain. Software will obviate our natural abilities and will devolve from the species. [6/20/2025: AI will certainly do this. 16-year-olds aren’t buying instruments because the fascination isn’t there. AI is the new rock ‘n’ roll]. 6/20/2014 Big data and music haven’t hooked up yet but they’ve been checking each other out. David Cope saw this coming in 1980. If music is essentially a binary phenomenon, then it can be treated like all other binary data. Just as an image can be condensed into 128 pixels and still be identifiable, perhaps it can work the same for music. It might be possible to break musical syntax into small chunks and reassemble them so that they sort of sound like the original. It’s like the p...
