Some November 8ths (Good Way To Go)

11/8/1964

(Eva Hesse Diary)

Tom [Doyle] and I went to Folkwang Museum in Essen. Photograph show and Arshile Gorky drawings—great.

[I agree. Love Gorky...]

11/8/2005

On strategies: If you set the constraint "duration 3 minutes or less", and tell a musician their song will not be played even if it's 3:01, invariably what you'll get are songs 2;30, 2:45. Then you'll get an iconoclast that will write one 6:00, and start a whole new style. (The moral: sometimes taking a risk to break a rule can really pay off).

[11/8/2024: Interesting: The idea of "rule drift: It's probably best that we use rule drift because you don't want to get too locked into rules. At some level being locked into rules as a stricture is probably a good idea if you're trying to do something that's minimal, for example, using only three colors, or in music using certain note values. When I was studying composition with jazz arranger Bill Russo in the 80s, one of his rules was that you couldn't use dots or ties in your rhythms. It was frustratingly restrictive but at some level that's probably a good idea because if you don't have any rules, or if you're always drifting the rules. then you might as well not have any rules at all.]

11/8/2000

Bush wins. Gore got popular vote. Race very close. It might take weeks to sort out. One of the most interesting days in US history.

11/8/2017

We're all spiritual; We just don't know it. A sense of spirituality is an embedded attribute of jazz, even if it doesn't show it. The spirituality really comes from improvisation, where you surf on serendipity. It sings its own praise, even without thinking about it (although Coltrane did start to think about it when he started to compose)...

11/8/2021

Finished Niall Ferguson's Doom. I love all his books and admire his scholarliness—to want to sit in dark libraries for weeks—something most of us wouldn't think of doing. But that's what makes good readings of history in the end. This connects nicely with my theme/theory that fascination with disaster is a fixture of the human condition...

[From a review of the book: "He is not exactly forgiving of Donald Trump (“manifestly idiotic” is the verdict on one episode of maladministration), but the former president is treated more as a pathetic accessory to the disaster than a motor of it."]

11/8/2022

Election Day to save democracy. I never thought I'd be typing this in all the decades I've been keeping this diary.

11/8/2024

Stop 'n' go

To Art Institute for a soul refresh. Nice to be in physical proximity to work, and not have look at AI-generated crap. Wanted to start the "Just The Black" series, but too difficult to get proper exposure for low-light black. 

As much as I revere Old Master work, I tire of it, and find my way back to 20th century work. TIL: Corbu's early painting from a century ago: Still Life Filled With Space (1924), Takashi Murakami, "Mr. Pointy" ("superflat" work, juxtaposing high and low, combining religious and spiritual pre-Columbian work with the contemporary. Chilling to look at the Max Beckman self-portrait right before he fled Germany, going from most-honored to being called degenerate, all the while thinking it might be happening in the US.

Brancusi Family