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.
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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? Just discovered Jenni-Cam after hearing NPR interview. Interesting that now anyone can be their own TV show. There's something so compelling about that. Jenni-cam now is so common on the Net that it now has a secondary meaning.
*** Lyrics for Saddle Man: Once in the saddle he's a changed man Dreaming of the gold in the emerald land Packing all his bags full of wanderlust Riding down the mountain in a cloud of dust 4/15/2014
April snow. It is interesting to step back and see how daily reading routines can change over the course of a generation. Prior to the Internet you'd read the paper or a magazine and there wasn't the temptation or expectation of sharing everything you were reading. The only way to share was to photocopy something and either mail or fax it. Imagine doing all the sharing we do now, by snail mail. Each generation sloughs off technologies, such as fax machines in favor of things that are faster. In 20 years texting and tweeting will seem slow, or will be relegated to the same pile as fax machines. What does sharing do to the reading experience except interrupt it? It is the age of the Interruption. People should realize that they've probably been in people’s dreams doing things they wouldn’t dream of doing.
Being true to yourself shouldn't be an absolute, but rather something that is adapting to new information being presented to you in the flow of life and going with that. But you can’t always just go with the flow either because you will eventually become rudderless. Algorithms to a large extent make us rudderless and you have to be careful that the "you" that you knew is not swept away. Article in Reason magazine on "informal culture" (Cecil Balmond). It's important that someone decides to do something that mainstream culture will not endorse, and the Internet is the perfect medium for this type of art. It would be nice if the mainstream media could devote more of its energy and resources to this kind of work, because it means a lot more to culture as a whole—that someone is filling a void or exploring remote possibilities. (Like the scene in October Sky when the boy decides to explore space against the wishes of his father to work in the coal mine.) The world goes nowhere on mainstream ideas alone.
4/13/2009: 10 years later, the internet has had profound effects on who we are and what we do. We don't see the evolutionary changes taking place as it is moving inexorably slow. 4/13/2024: 25 years later, we understand this as essentially postmodernism, which was beginning to wane in the late 90s, yet the waning hasn't waned that much. We're still a postmodern culture more than ever, although now there's more of an interest in metamodernism. I'm always reminded of David Bowie, who in the late 90s, particularly around the Outside album, that time was running out on postmodernism. Today's Songday idea based on selected 4/11 entries. "We live in public" is a contrast with sequestration. We live in public We live on fame Ten o'clock footsteps on the stairs father, pale and nervous lights out, tiptoe upstairs we're expecting the police Get Back! Don't Let Me Down 4/11/1944 (Diary of Anne Frank) "...Ten o'clock, footsteps on the stairs. Father, pale and nervous, came inside, followed by Mr. van Daan. "Lights out, tiptoe upstairs, we're expecting the police!" There wasn't time to be scared. The lights were switched off, I grabbed a jacket, and we sat down upstairs. "What happened? Tell us quickly!" There was no one to tell us; the men had gone back downstairs. The four of them didn't come back up until ten past ten. Two of them kept watch at Peter's open window. The door to the landing was locked, the book- case shut. We draped a sweater over our night-light, and then they told us what had happened..." 4/11/1969, Friday (Beatles Studio Diary) "The first commercial output from the Get Back sessions: "Get Back" itself and "Don't Let Me Down", both recorded at Savile Row on 28 January and remixed on 7 April. Owing to the late remixing, copies of the single did not reach the stores until several days after this rather optimistic release date. But it nonetheless sailed straight to the top of the charts all over the world." 4/11/2010 Film: We Live In Public. A good example how unbounded freedom can quickly get out of hand......Harris has yet to make his point that we are moving towards a dystopia. ...he has always hated the internet and held the mirror up to show us how he feels. He is pointing the camera at us as saying "Look how pathetic we are". Apparently Harris is now living a 'noble' life in Ethiopia mentoring kids that were to be on the internet. 4/11/2020, Saturday
I have always kept notebooks and diaries so the ideas are accessible. I was such a nerd when I was younger and kept a folded index card (and pen) in my shirt pocket to jot down ideas. After a decade I had amassed a large repository of things to draw from. Back in the 80s I thought it would be great to have an electronic pocket card, and that's what we have now with software like Evernote. I have one huge Lyrics note and I go in and marry one idea to another. Hugely useful. 4/10/2020, Friday
Patti Smith diary: Photo of woven palm frond in Barcelona which represents Jesus' entrance into Jerusalem where the people similarly lay their own palms on the path before him. He knows what lies ahead and contemplates the future. 4/10/2021, Saturday Lockdown video: The guitar version of "Fjords". 4/10/2022 Music doesn't have an equivalent for "representational" because it doesn't represent anything in nature, as a portrait or landscape can. Music is almost entirely abstract, however, songs with lyrics are representational in the sense that they tell stories. Instrumental music is fundamentally abstract and conceptual, which is what makes it unique and interesting in its own right. 4/10/2023 "Truly original" tends to move towards the esoteric and eccentric, and copying, or being inspired by something traditional, makes it more viable. It still amazes me how much people still like very common chord progressions. |
AuthorLee Barry, Musician/Content Producer Archives
May 2024
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