4/27/1943 (Diary of Anne Frank)
"Our German visitors were back last Saturday. They stayed until six. We all sat upstairs, not daring to move an inch. If there's no one else working in the building or in the neighborhood, you can hear every single step in the private office. I've got ants in my pants again from having to sit still so long...." 4/27/1995 (Brian Eno Diary) "I called Mum and talked to her a bit about her time in Germany. She told me that a farmer used to slip an egg through the fence of the camp for her." A possible Songday song based on the entries:
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In my SciFi story Reset 2046, one of the main characters is Tony Townes. He writes on 4/26/2037: "Centennial of the Guernica massacre, an event which made Picasso a political artist."
Picasso started the painting on 5/11/1937, done with matte house paint. It was also inspired by Dora Maar's black and white photograms.
The 2046 album was the "score" for the story:
4/25/1987, Saturday
(Keith Haring Journal) "Drive to Netherlands to see museum with Hans. Possible place to show the big sculptures. Great sculpture garden, incredible Van Gogh collections all hanging salon style, side by side, packed together because main building was being repainted or other construction. Funny situation. It made them all look like cheap invitations (sic) because of how they were hung, Manet and Renoir and Mondrians all mixed up, side by side and only inches apart. Funny how important space is. When their importance is reduced they are forced to compete with each other they are not so grand anymore. Only the great ones withstand the test. Great lesson in art history and reality. Drive back to Dusseldorf at 110 miles an hour in Hans' BMW convertible just in time to change and shower to go to dinner at Krupp's house." [The corollary in 2024 is the effect of the internet and social media, which algorithmically curates what we see, with money influencing what the algorithm does. We're essentially "bribing" the gallerist to show our work, and when it's displayed cheek-by-jowl with unrelated work, it has the effect of canceling one or both of them. ] 4/24/1997
Ordered 56K modem. Will increase surfing speed x4. [This was a major increase in modem speed. The computer was a Dell Pentium 90, with 8MB of RAM and a 14.4K modem. (Could we go back to using a "dial-up" connection when no one's dialing?) You might want a slow lane that costs more to prevent spending too much time on the internet. We think it's social media that's addictive, but it's actually the internet.)] 4/24/2022 Music started dying beginning in the 1980s because of MTV, that shifted the focus from music to image, and that music needed packaging and marketing—which holds true to this day with social media and into the future with whatever comes after it, such as the Metaverse. The other inflection point was the PC which diffused attention in myriad directions. It's ironic that even if music dies, sound doesn't, and we can appreciate it (and create it) at that level. *** Using the hypothetical that the music of the 2040s is a repeat of the 1960s, then the music of the 2070s will be like the music of the aughts. People that will remember that period in their youth will be in their 80s, and perhaps not be nostalgic for it. You'd have to get in the headspace of those born in the 2060s, which is difficult to project. Then again we could go full retro and use music from 100 years prior, Ziggy Stardust, with futuristic "upgrades". Most people will still be familiar with David Bowie in the 2070s and there will be celebrations of his birth in the 2040s and the 50th anniversary of his death in 2066. (You can't go wrong with folk roots, or just roots music in general or any music that has withstood the test of time). *** As to how people now respond to social media, I saw shifts around 2000 when the internet was being used more for "internetty" things (memes) rather than an information resource. Prior to that, I recall that the Web was seen as utopian, although even in 1995 people were cynical, expressed in books like Silicon Snake Oil. It's interesting how some young people have a fascination with the 80s, pre-internet and pre-computer. This is not to suggest it was a Utopia then: we were at the leading edge of culture wars, coupled with the advent of the PC and the internet, both liberating beyond our ability to realize the stresses it could put on democracy in the future. 4/23/1999
Interesting program on WBEZ ("Odyssey") about how recordings changed our perception of music. It's sort of ironic that recordings were first used only to archive music. The double irony is that we return to the original idea and now we use the archive to make works of art that we replicate in the archive. Steve Albini made the interesting point that digital sound will degrade over time, unlike vinyl recordings which last much longer. He liked the idea of having the recording as a physical object rather than having just the data on some drive somewhere. This way we keep a time capsule. But it's also an interesting idea that we let culture mutate on its own through cyberspace—anathema to the idea that things are preserved. In such an atmosphere, archived copies can only be relics. He made the interesting point that digital sound will degrade over time, unlike vinyl recordings which last much longer. He liked the idea of having the recording as a physical object rather than having just the data on a hard drive, as a type of 'time capsule'. It is also an interesting idea that we let culture mutate on its own in cyberspace—anathema to the idea that things are preserved [in a fixed form]. In this scenario, archived copies become relics. *** April 23, 2009: Digital media is already degrading and precipitously disappearing. The only thing perpetuating it is the fact that it is collaged into other works. *** April 23, 2024 AI and the Blockchain are now in the loop of digital preservation. If a digital instantiation is "tokenized" (made into a building block) it can be endlessly "modded". In music, it has been called a "cell" for hundreds of years. Classical composers like Beethoven, Haydn, and Mozart all worked modularly. But I think it's an interesting possibility to scale that out to the internet. In music you can create a one-bar phrase, a 2-bar phrase, or 4-bar phrase that repeats, then share that out. Some are selling them as NFTs of loops or samples where they indicate what the tempo is and what the key is and that would be the building blocks. You could extrapolate that further by making the modules the section of the song: verses, choruses, the bridge, outro, etc. and ideally, you could string those together in some way. I think it's an interesting idea but I don't know how that's going to scale or work in a musical fashion. 4/22/1906, Stanford, San Francisco, Sunday (6 days after the earthquake)
(William James Correspondence) To Miss Frances R. Morse: "...Well, when I lay in bed at about half-past five that morning, wide-awake, and the room began to sway, my first thought was, "Here's Bakewell's earthquake, after all"; and when it went crescendo and reached fortissimo in less than half a minute, and the room was shaken like a rat by a terrier, with the most vicious expression you can possibly imagine, it was to my mind absolutely an entity that had been waiting all this time holding back its activity, but at last saying, "Now, go it!" and it was impossible not to conceive it as animated by a will, so vicious was the temper displayed—everything down, in the room, that could go down, bureaus, etc., etc., and the shaking so rapid and vehement. All the while no fear, only admiration for the way a wooden house could prove its elasticity, and glee over the vividness of the manner in which such an "abstract idea" as "earthquake" could verify itself into sensible reality. In a couple of minutes everybody was in the street, and then we saw, what I hadn't suspected in my room, the extent of the damage. Wooden houses almost all intact, but every chimney down but one or two, and the higher University buildings largely piles of ruins. Gabble and babble, till at last automobiles brought the dreadful news from San Francisco. I boarded the only train that went to the City, and got out in the evening on the only train that left. I shouldn't have done it, but that our co-habitant here, Miss Martin, became obsessed by the idea that she must see what had become of her sister, and I had to stand by her. Was very glad I did; for the spectacle was memorable, of a whole population in the streets with what baggage they could rescue from their houses about to burn, while the flames and the explosions were steadily advancing and making everyone move farther. The fires most beautiful in the effulgent sunshine. Every vacant space was occupied by trunks and furniture and people, and thousands have been sitting by them now for four nights and will have to longer. The fire seems now controlled, but the city is practically wiped out (thank Heaven, as to much of its architecture!). The order has been wonderful, even the criminals struck solemn by the disaster, and the military has done great service...." 4/22/2010 40th Anniversary of Earth Day. Unfortunately this has become 'traditional', meaning it has lost its essence, commodified like Christmas. 6.2-magnitude earthquake has hit the Samoa Islands region. 7 large earthquakes since January, plus one volcanic eruption. More frequent activity or just more reported events? 4/22/2011, Friday Earth Day, Good Friday Most active tornado season in centuries—swarms of them. "We've had nothing but tornadoes," she said. "I feel like I'm living in the Land of Oz." It is interesting to compare tornado destruction with tsunamis. A tsunami is essentially a water tornado. 4/22/2020 Patti Smith: "Supplication to nature: If we be blind, if we turn away from nature, garden of the soul, she will turn on us. In place of songbird, the shrill cry of the locusts, devouring the harvest, the terrible crackling of the blazing rainforest, the peatlands smoldering, the seas rising, cathedrals, flooding, the Arctic shelf melting, the Siberian woodburning, the barrier reef bleached as the bones of forgotten saints. If we be blind, falling in our supplication to nature, species will die, the bee and the butterfly driven to extinction. All of nature, nothing more than an empty husk, the unholy ghost of an abandoned hive." 4/22/2023, Saturday Snow Day! Earth Day. Now my routine is to look back in the diary to see what I wrote about it. Earth Day should be expanded to Earth Awareness Month, but later I thought the idea was naive: we’ve had Earth Awareness Decades and nothing has changed. Browsed at bookstore. Apparently, Patti Smith has a calendrical book like this one, Book of Days. More and more, diary revisitations are becoming a cozy nostalgia, including books I read back in the 90s when I first began the diaries, one in particular, the book The Vernacular Landscape, which incidentally became the title of one of the songdays. I took it out the library again. What a great book a la Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language. The theme of the book is in fact about the patterns of language and how they shape our understanding of them. There are landscapes in all kinds of things if you want to see them as metaphors, such as the landscape of relationships, reshaped by the shifting tectonic plates by the "magma" of technology. Using that metaphor, social media is the volcano or earthquake. It changes the landscape such that rifts form and they become so wide you can't easily navigate them. Also, I realized how books have changed. Now it's difficult to find a book I can give 5 stars to and put it on my Top-150 list, which Vernacular Landscape is. It also brings me back to my roots as a would-be architect. (I'm grateful I've lived in Chicago and Oak Park, architectural Meccas). The other interesting thing was that the book was written in the early 8os, even before computers, and 15 years before I read the book in 1997, just when computers were coming online.
A poem from abstractions of today pulled from the Beatles' Studio Diary and other snips from 4/21. What I'm realizing is that this whole process of using an existing "data set" is finding signal in the "noise", not unlike seeing a dalmatian in a random array of spots. (A new title for the series might be Abstractions Of Today instead of Songdays). Also, working from prose to poetry to lyric ultimately requires radical reductions, which brings in more musical signal while keeping the central idea--which is the idea of a "hidden track", most recently used in CDs, but back in 1960s, they would put them in the concentric space on the vinyl disc.
The Hidden Track If there was a silence after the final chord Or noise in the concentric The sound of clattering iron... David Whyte once said, "Hiding is the radical independence necessary for our emergence into the light of a proper human future." It's a Field Guide for getting lost in the blue of distance. We fill in the blanks in the novels we haven't read... *** 4/21/1967, Friday "How does an artist know when or how to apply the final brush stroke to a masterpiece? With 'A Day In The Life', Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was already set to end with that tremendous, crashing piano chord lasting more than 40 seconds. But as no silence had been left between each song it would be a pity, the Beatles thought, if there was silence after the final chord. Why not put something in the concentric run-out groove? People with automatic players would hear a quick burst of it before their pick-up arm returned to base, people without such luxurious equipment would find the noise in the concentric playing on and on ad infinitum, or at least until the arm was manually lifted off." 4/21/2012, Saturday The sound of clattering iron road plates on Harlem. How can I use this as ambience in a piece of music?
The new print edition with entries in the original ascending order is now available on Amazon.
Additionally, I have begun to make video shorts on selected entries. Here's the playlist: |
AuthorLee Barry, Musician/Content Producer Archives
April 2024
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