Earth Days

 

 

4/22/1817, Halifax (Anne Lister Diary)

Bought Droiiet's flute piece God Save The King. Apparently the composer made 20 guineas a week playing around London.

4/22/1906, Stanford, San Francisco, Sunday (6 days after the earthquake)

(William James Correspondence)

To Miss Frances R. Morse:

"...Well, when I lay in bed at about half-past five that morning, wide-awake, and the room began to sway, my first thought was, "Here's Bakewell's earthquake, after all"; and when it went crescendo and reached fortissimo in less than half a minute, and the room was shaken like a rat by a terrier, with the most vicious expression you can possibly imagine, it was to my mind absolutely an entity that had been waiting all this time holding back its activity, but at last saying, "Now, go it!" and it was impossible not to conceive it as animated by a will, so vicious was the temper displayed—everything down, in the room, that could go down, bureaus, etc., etc., and the shaking so rapid and vehement. All the while no fear, only admiration for the way a wooden house could prove its elasticity, and glee over the vividness of the manner in which such an "abstract idea" as "earthquake" could verify itself into sensible reality. In a couple of minutes everybody was in the street, and then we saw, what I hadn't suspected in my room, the extent of the damage. Wooden houses almost all intact, but every chimney down but one or two, and the higher University buildings largely piles of ruins. Gabble and babble, till at last automobiles brought the dreadful news from San Francisco.

I boarded the only train that went to the City, and got out in the evening on the only train that left. I shouldn't have done it, but that our co-habitant here, Miss Martin, became obsessed by the idea that she must see what had become of her sister, and I had to stand by her. Was very glad I did; for the spectacle was memorable, of a whole population in the streets with what baggage they could rescue from their houses about to burn, while the flames and the explosions were steadily advancing and making everyone move farther. The fires most beautiful in the effulgent sunshine. Every vacant space was occupied by trunks and furniture and people, and thousands have been sitting by them now for four nights and will have to longer. The fire seems now controlled, but the city is practically wiped out (thank Heaven, as to much of its architecture!). The order has been wonderful, even the criminals struck solemn by the disaster, and the military has done great service...."  

4/22/1997

Interesting program on PBS, Mysteries of Deep Space. The more we understand the cosmos, the closer we get to understanding life in general. It is also this profound mystery that can unify the earth. But at the same time, there is a sense of insignificance, that we are only a tiny by-product of exploding stars.

A. did vocal on Hot New Earth (on Earth Day!) 

4/22/2000, Saturday

Early morning raid to rescue Elian Gonzales. AP photographer takes "famous photo" of Elian and uncle hunkered in a closet with the Marshall pointing gun directly at them. Show of force or use of force? 

[In April 2001 the photographer that took the photo, the late Alan Diaz, won the Pulitzer Prize. He said that the photo accurately captured the emotion of the moment. This was one of the photos that was in the running for Music For Photographs but it didn't make the cut. There wasn't any "place" in it.]

4/22/2005, Friday

Earth Day, but not one article in the paper about it. The political climate has indeed affected the earth's climate.

A music education doesn't necessarily have to include written music. Classical Indian music is taught directly by the guru to the disciple rather than by the notation method used in the West. In the modern world, the metaphor of "the guru" is "digital media" and "the disciple" is the rabid fan with a fast internet connection, an iPod, and a cell phone. (At this point, we didn't know they would all merge in two years time).

Prediction: the term "cell phone" will be obsolete in 5 years. (Note to April 2010: Is it?) 

4/22/2010

40th Anniversary of Earth Day. Unfortunately this has become 'traditional', meaning it has lost its essence, commodified like Christmas.

6.2-magnitude earthquake has hit the Samoa Islands region. 7 large earthquakes since January, plus one volcanic eruption. More frequent activity or just more reported events?

And now financial reform... 

4/22/2011, Friday

Earth Day, Good Friday

Most active tornado season in centuries—swarms of them. "We've had nothing but tornadoes," she said. "I feel like I'm living in the Land of Oz." It is interesting to compare tornado destruction with tsunamis. A tsunami is essentially a water tornado. 

4/22/2020

Patti Smith: "Supplication to nature: If we be blind, if we turn away from nature, garden of the soul, she will turn on us. In place of songbird, the shrill cry of the locusts, devouring the harvest, the terrible crackling of the blazing rainforest, the peatlands smoldering, the seas rising, cathedrals, flooding, the Arctic shelf melting, the Siberian woodburning, the barrier reef bleached as the bones of forgotten saints. If we be blind, falling in our supplication to nature, species will die, the bee and the butterfly driven to extinction. All of nature, nothing more than an empty husk, the unholy ghost of an abandoned hive." 

4/22/2022, Friday

Earth Day. Spotify becomes a video platform. On the internet and after the merging of previous media within it, anything can become anything or it just devours everything, like Elon Musk.

Reading some of Man Ray's writings. He was quite prolific. I like No. 31: "I am Interested In making pictures, which are purely optical, producing effects through the eye and not by "back thought". This was when talkies were just coming out and he's making the point that he's not interested in the new stuff...he wants to make pictures and remove all the unnecessary things like people talking and should be no longer than 20 minutes. This was a foreshadowing of the idea of "shorts" or "exformed" media in TikTok content.

He's saying that other aspects of film (sound) are taking us away from aesthetics. Even in his 20s in 1929 he's already pushing back against technology. Things "hurting our eyes" was something that was said when 3D films came out and will probably be similarly expressed when people are wearing goggles and headsets all the time. Even people in their 20s are pushing back against the new technologies that are being used in the art world like NFTs.

It's also a very interesting book in terms of "exformation" and the issue of duration and the artistic "nutrition" within that duration. He thought that a lot of stuff in films was unnecessary—people coming and going, ins and outs and cut shots and so on just weren't necessary. In most cases, three quarters of a movie are irrelevant to function purely as an aesthetic experience. He thought films were much too long to justify their length. (Eno said that most paintings were too big...)

As it relates to the passage of time in general, and how it works in film time, you're paying more attention to the quality of the time. If the quality of the time isn't good or if you're bored by it, can create a kind of anxiety. If everything is "exformed", we can digest it in its entirety and we don't have to have to devote lots of time to film-watching. But there are films that nicely correspond to real time, such as Satantango. People sat in the theater for seven hours to watch it but weren't bored with it. It gives you time to engage with memories both in reel time and real time. #riffs

4/22/2023, Saturday

Snow Day!

Earth Day. Now my routine is to look back in the diary to see what I wrote about it.

Earth Day should be expanded to Earth Awareness Month, but later I thought the idea was naive: we’ve had Earth Awareness Decades and nothing has changed.

Browsed at bookstore. Apparently, Patti Smith has a calendrical book like this one, Book of Days.

***

From Rick Rubin's book The Creative Act:

"If you're picking colors based on a Pantone book, you're limited to a certain number of choices. If you step out in nature, the palette is infinite. Each rock has such a variation of color within it, we could never find a can of paint to mimic the exact same shade."