April Thirds

 

 4/3/2005

Interesting: The ramifications of the short attention span and long-term contexts. People tend to forget (even their own transgressions)  and then find themselves flummoxed by events in the future. If it’s anything that prevents rapid progress, it is the short attention span, but as in Nørretranders' User Illusion,  it’s the “exformative”  process that causes the simplification of the attention span. 

 

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4/3/2002

Spent almost the whole day digitizing old videotapes to archive them. Then I watched the videos and they looked so  much better than the tiny, pixelated QuickTime movies.

A few hours later, I pick up an issue of Chicago Social magazine, with essay by Steve Albini. He says vinyl is the best  medium: if you leave a record and its sleeve and take it out in 100 years, it will still play. But if you leave a CD in its  case, and take it out in 20 years, it probably won’t play because the imaging film would have oxidized. Even if vinyl  is scratched, it will still play. If the CD is damaged, most of the CD won’t play. With vinyl, you get 45 minutes and  an “intermission”. (I want to convert everything I owned to vinyl!—”Vinylize”)

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4/3/1999

Summery, 75 degrees. 

PL stopped by and we did editing on his 'Etude' piece. I told him about my Ambient Jukebox idea. He suggested I look into the work of Robert Monroe--he said he's known for his work on how sounds affect the brain. In studio for work on 'Barstow' Dinner and movie with S. ('Analyze This') Lots of good Woodyallensque humor, but sort of formulaic with the obligatory chase scene/shoot out at the end. 

"The best generals realize that even with the most carefully drawn plans, logic ends once the fighting begins." "War is composed of nothing but accidents." - Napoleon "Know when to throw away the script." "Tactics are what you do when you have something to do. Strategizing is what you do when there's nothing to do."

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 4/3/1998

Browsed interesting book, Internet Dreams, and the thought came to mind that brain structures and neural  networks are really shaped by the environment. The fact that we have fast communication and access to lots of  information is a product of how brains have developed, which sets the stage of how they will continue to develop.  The brains of the ancient Egyptians had an evolution that allowed them to do what they did, then lost when the  civilization perished. That's why we can't completely solve the mystery of that

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4/3/1906 (Paris)

(Harry Kessler diary)

Antiquity is the first mask. There were two tendencies in the Renaissance, one toward truth, a direct continuation of  the last centuries of the Middle Ages, the other toward the mask, the “rediscovery” of antiquity. The second trend  came to the fore in the first centuries after 1400. The modern, on the other hand, represents the dominance of the  former, actually more traditional, tendency. The return to word antiquity is perhaps instinctive, representing a  self-protective reflex in the moment where the most progressive realize that they cannot live in the world they are  busy constructing.   

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