October 17ths

10/17/2001

Piece on radio about Russian folk revival. Communism squelched indigenous music so that even shepherds’ flute music was banned. With the fall of communism, you now have a torrent of options from the West, the Russians glom on to Western pop. But 10 years later they are discovering their own “world music”. When you have freedom you have diversity and variety, (sometimes a glut of it). When you have oppression you have high real estate values, monolithic tastes, although it’s ironic that even in the US many people resort to common tastes imposed by peer pressure. (Folk ideas always prevail) The more joyful you are, the more esoteric you could be.

[10/17/2024: I’ve gotten so much from exploration of world music, but it’s always been an esoteric genre. With the use of AI by younger musicians, I can’t imagine that world music (or folk for that matter) will be an “influence” because there’s nothing being “inhaled”. The word “influence” has now been redefined, as well as “folk ideas” in the form of various memes and slogans as if it was 1934].

10/17/2010

Benoit Mandelbrot died at 85. “If you take the beginning and the end, I have had a conventional career,” he said, referring to his prestigious appointments in Paris and at Yale. “But it was not a straight line between the beginning and the end. It was a very crooked line.” (A fractal line in fact) 

10/17/2011, Sunday

What I really like about October is the subtle fragrance of prairie grass.

10/17/2020

In 2010, Patti Smith joined Pete Seeger to benefit ALBA, an organization preserving the history of those who volunteered in the 1930s to fight fascism in Spain. Seeger was 91, filled with activist energy. His trusty banjo, set by the stage, was tattooed with the words “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.” (Photo Seeger’s banjo)

10/17/2021, Sunday

Bike ride, Taylor Park, lovely day. 

On loneliness and isolation: William Shatner expressed this a few days ago when he was talking about the “ugliness” of space—the absence of life, but in a spiritual sense, there’s life in dark matter, or we want to have spiritual experiences through psychedelics and space travel or combination of the two. Manned Mars missions probably will require long periods of meditation, but how could they when always at the ready of controlling the spacecraft? This is why psychedelics and short trips to the edge of the atmosphere keep a sense of play in it without the thought of the imminence of death at the razor edge of risk.

Razor's Edge (10-17-2021) by meta4s