November 11ths

11/11/1914

Wittgenstein: Letter to David Hume, who he thinks a lot about and wonders if it's mutual. Cannon fire heard from the workshop. 

This could be a score to this “scene”:

11/11/1999

Japanese blues pianist on TV: "I didn't know what I was singing about, but I liked the sound." (a testament that American pop music is primarily about sound). 

[11/11/2024. Back in January I riffed on whether sound is a song. Recently, I generated some music with AI based on some of my lyrics, and sent it to a friend. He liked the sound of it immediately but missed the point of the lyrics. Pop music, as opposed to classical, is all about tone and timbre, which is all about production. If you transcribed it into notation, it would be almost nothing. You probably couldn’t play it unplugged. It is nowhere near how the Beatles wrote songs. AI music is a music that comes from a speaker, having never been touched by a human. In this sense, in a strange way, is an “immaculate” music.] 

11/11/2004

Yassar Arafat died. Middle East conflict now even more dicey. The new Palestinian leader will make Palestine "Hamastine".

The camera lies, or the camera finds the truth hiding behind the lies, sometimes the camera see better than the eye because it slows it down. In the end, will the camera lie or will the camera tell the truth? 

  

11/11/2021 

An Illuminated Riff: 

11/11/2022

Kind of a "VU Day": Ukranian troops swoop into Kherson. Zelensky sees it as a major victory. 

[11/11/2024: From a book I was reading yesterday, The Story Is In Our Bones. Indeed it is, and I can't imagine the trauma inflicted on immigrants now, and the ending of the war in Ukraine, stripping people of the indigenous dignity of their homelands. There's this idea in the US (and perhaps globally) where people can be abruptly canceled, but the stories remain. I like the story that my grandparents immigrated from Italy, and the would denounce everything that's now happening in the US. This is how I want to speak for their story].

"Finding the story filaments of my own rooted heritage is an ongoing odyssey still far from complete, with threadbare parts, given suppression and conquests. I am an American with three grandparents from Ukraine, one grandfather from Poland. All my grandparents from Ukraine departed as toddlers, their parents fleeing the Russian-instigated anti-Jewish pogroms in the early 1900s. They carried many sorrows and traumas with them as they sailed away from their homelands, their other family members, friends, languages, and communities, forced by antisemitism to seek refuge in a new land. This is how my family found themselves among yet another wave of settlers and immigrants, in what we call the United States of America and Canada, and what my Indigenous friends have taught me to call Turtle Island. My great-grandparents immigrated to Canada and the US in fear for their lives, and to seek safety for themselves and their young children"

11/11/2046, Sunday

(Tony Townes Diary) 

Lounged at Gates Park. Working on "Echosystem" lyric. 

Echosystem
Can we trust them?
Is it the "I", or is it the "Me"?
Or is it the "Them"?"
Can it trust Them?