For the entire month of April the routine was do carve a song out of the diary entries, and would only be for one month. Routines are hard to break! I couldn't resist this one because it's a song whose lyrics come from song titles or lines from songs. I'm not sure if it's plagiaristic or clever parody, but I would argue it's the latter. They are "cameos", as well as an ironic juxtaposition between war and postwar.
Where would you go? You can't do that You better get better Or else you're gonna get worse Can't buy me love 5/1/1943, Saturday Anne Frank writes to Kitty: "...Tonight the guns have been banging away so much that I've already had to gather up my belongings four times. Today I packed a suitcase with the stuff I'd need in case we had to flee, but as mother correctly noted, "Where would you go?". All of Holland is being punished for the workers' strikes. Martial law has been declared..." 5/1/1964, Friday Beatles in the studio 6:30-9:30: taped eight numbers, including 'I Saw Her Standing There', 'You Cant Do That', 'Can't Buy Me Love'. 5/1/2012 May Day. Arab Spring of OWS protests. *** You better get better or else you're gonna get worse.—Loudon Wainwright (From the song "Daughter")
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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: 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. 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. 4/5/2012
Interesting synchronicity: I was watching a video on the Titanic and the "No Pope" serial number myth, then I switched to the NYT article on the film "We Have a Pope". Dream: I was in New York riding in a taxi. I could see the Statue of Liberty in the distance through the skyscrapers. I stopped in a park and Paul McCartney was seated before an easel. He was wearing a long tan-colored smock. I stopped at some type of tapas bar. It was a slightly portly black woman with glasses.
A diary of note, which I should investigate...
Amelanchier comes into blossom.
4/2/1980
Andy Warhol meets Pope John Paul II in St. Peter's Square. “They finally took us in to our seats with the rest of the 5,000 people and a nun screamed out, ‘You’re Andy Warhol! Can I have your autograph?’ . . . Then I had to sign five more autographs for other nuns. And I just get so nervous at church...And then the pope came out, he was on a gold car, he did the rounds, and then finally he got up and gave a speech against divorce in seven different languages...That took three hours.” 4/2/2005 Pope John Paul II dies. Massive pilgrimage to Rome. His death now eclipses the Terri Schiavo case. 4/2/2023, Sunday "New North" dream: I witnessed a plane crash into a body of water in a cold northern region, as it looked like a Fjord of some kind. The bearded pilot survived and swam to the shore. His doppelganger, who looked exactly like him, swam to save him. In another fragment a phone rang and I answered it and the person said, "New North". A TTS short based on this dream: 3/21/1817, Friday (Halifax)
Anne Lister diary: A cold frosty day. Played flute for a half hour. 3/21/2001 Piece on NPR about Paul Horn's new solo flute disc recorded in the Taj Mahal. 3/21/2014, Friday Frosty Lite: 3/14/2001
Reading Serious Play by Michael Schrage. It was cheap and ubiquitous spreadsheet software that led to the notion that you can play and model endlessly. 20 years later, we are drowning in those sentiments, i.e. too many options and not enough real life impact of any import. Amateur CAD signifies a growing democratization of design. "Design experiences" are more important than the actual design objects. I 3/14/2006 Article in New York Times about the "black hole" of digital art. If the object itself and its intended context (print, recording, installation) are not preserved, cataloged, and kept active in future generations [it is lost forever]. It also talked about the "3D" effect of art, i.e. its ability to be experienced beyond its digital nature. In the spirit of the diary remix idea, I ran an experiment where I used just the entries from March 4ths, created a lyric, and then created some music for it. I randomly selected words and phrases until I had a verse idea, then formulated a query in ChatGPT to flesh it out--most of which was cliche junk. For associated images I used an AI image generator with various queries drawn from the 3/4 text, e.g. "Anne Frank and Martha Stewart in 2046" and Frank Gehry buildings on Mars" which generated some interesting and funny images, which could be used as an album cover. But for the most part, it felt like a waste of time. Anything that involves sorting through infinite permutations feels inundating. Some of the images are creepy and scary. I'm not looking for creepy and scary. What I'm interested in are things on the periphery of the uncanny valley, where it's slightly skewed in compelling ways. That's difficult to find when you have to weed through hundreds of mostly unusable images. The March 4 diary entries one of which is one of the fictitious characters, Neone from my Reset short story. The red text is the lines from the ChatGPT generation--and became the title. 3/4/1943 (Diary of Anne Frank) "A veritable thunderstorm of words came crashing down on me again this morning. The air flashed with so many coarse expressions that my ears were ringing with "Anne's bad this" and "van Daans" good that." Fire and brimstone!" 3/4/2004 Martha Stewart convicted. She could do up to 20 years in prison. 3/4/2046 (Neone's Diary) Lunch with Ramona at Fahrenheit Cafe, but Ramona's on a fast for the Mars mission. She talks about it constantly, as well as trying to assuage my doubt about the immortality treatments. A thunderstorm of words Crashing down on me Lunch with Ramona at the Fahrenheit Cafe She's fasting for Mars and immortality Symphonic music in a spectacle space Designed by a starchitect Crafting futures with design Echoes of a diary's pages The artistry of home and creation Ripples through the ages AI-Generated Images
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AuthorLee Barry, Musician/Content Producer Archives
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