Some November 10ths

11/10/1898 (Berlin)

 (Count Harry Kessler Diary)

France today, with its society falling apart is the land with the most intellectually valuable individuals. Quite apart from the question of the inner cohesion of an anarchistic people, the Fashoda humiliation demonstrates how it cannot defend itself in the present configuration of states. In the collision of an organized state and an unorganized, or weakly organized, people, the latter must lose. Perhaps that is the gravest sacrifice that the existence of certain states imposes on the human spirit: the impossibility of
moral, that is, antisocial or socially indifferent, freedom so long as there is just one state. On the other hand the experiment has not yet been made to see if an anarchistic people is continually able to produce only great individuals.

67 years later in London, a group of "anarchistic" plebeian artists Kessler would have bemoaned are in a "recording studio" recording ditties:

[New technology is always inconceivable. Things will exist in the flow of life 67 years from now that are now inconceivable. But there are people currently who can envision new technologies as da Vinci did. But you need a Renaissance for that, and we are going into the opposite of it].

11/10/1965

(Beatles Recording Sessions)

Morning stereo remixing, night-time recording. The rhythm track of 'I'm Looking Through You', for the third time of asking, was finally made in a way that pleased everybody. The vocals were superimposed the next day, 11 November. The album sleeve credits Ringo as playing Hammond organ on this song but it cannot be heard on the recording, nor is the instrument detailed on the tape box.

11/10/2001

Continued warm, 65 degrees.

Film: The Man Who Wasn't There. Scenes are too long and didn't amplify the story. I went to see a silvery black and white film, but it was blurry and washed out. However interesting black and white can be, color can have other layers of meaning. You might say the absence of color is a color in itself.

11/10/2005

Watched Kennedy assassination documentary. (A perennial showing in November). I love the look of the black and white footage with the "black halos" on the blow-outs. (How can I get this effect artificially?) 

11/10/2007

If there was one iconic symbol of American culture, discovered 2000 years from now, it would be an electric guitar—a Fender Strat.

11/10/2010

Afghanistan Is A Lost Cause: "Has the surge in Afghanistan failed, and is it time for the U.S. to admit defeat and start pulling our troops out? Nine years in, what have we accomplished in Afghanistan? 

[11/10/2024: I never supported Bush’s “war on terror” from the get-go. I saw 9/11 as karma for the US, and that wars do nothing to centuries-old ideas and ideologies. My motto was more: “Don’t just do something, stand there”. And yet, a majority of Americans supported the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. People flock to the ideas of majorities, whatever their own philosophies might be, and we see that playing out with Trump in 2024. Perhaps if Bush had a criminal record in 2000 and got elected anyway, you would think that someone of that character could not be effective, and what kind of majorities could they have? What if Marianne Williamson was president at the time? It wouldn’t matter because whatever the popular ideas were that people flocked to would inform the response. We don’t think well collectively. Sometimes a Sting lyric says a lot: “Men go crazy in congregations they only get better one by one.” What if that was a political slogan? Anything can become a slogan that people rally around, then later think it wasn’t that profound or very didactic. I believe this line is from Jung. I don’t know if he phrased it that way, but it was about the process of individuation, which is something no one seems to be interested in at the moment. I predict there’s going to be a psychological reckoning at some point at the collective level. Jung is always good to revisit in these moments].

11/10/2024

Computers have in many ways made us less sympathetic. There is really something to avoiding computers sometimes. When I go back and look at writings from the past, I realize what I have now forgotten how to do was pretty good technology, and why are we changing it so rapidly? In the process, we have forgotten how to do other things that the old technologies made possible. And the process of forgetting continues on. In 100 years, writing text messages will seem quaint.

[11/10/2024: Every day revisit an old way of doing something when you were in your 20s, or something a relative might have been doing when they were in their 20s.]

11/10/2023

As an experiment, I used a text randomizer on all the November 10 diary entries. It's just a melange of words and makes absolutely no sense, but I found two usable rhythms and mapped various words over them and a song idea emerged. (It's interesting what you can do with just a little bit of algorithm that you can make yourself).

I titled the song result 30,000 Years because that was one of the generated text phrases. (I'm not quite sure where that particular phrase came from but it was usable as a chorus idea).

The final track on Human In The Loop:

11/2024

What people want are good inputs so that they can perform well. But in the US, or just generally, most people are set up to fail. Probably because a minority is succeeding at the expense of a majority wanting to succeed. Whatever the leadership is, it’s always plastic forks and knives. You can get the best kitchenware, but it really won’t empower you like you might think, and could be counterproductive and paralyzing. People have to be excited by something truly meaning something at the individual level.

 For outro, bass and celeste: