Reading Time: 3 minutes What is the purest form of Chopin s genius? There are a few levels. Level 1: Chopin improvising live Well, max-Chopin was surely to watch him improvise live, which he did with extraordinary style in among other places Parisian salons. It s said that after a great session he d hurry home to write down and preserve the [ ]
Reading Time: 4 minutes I first encountered the literary genre of the oral history at the same time I caught sight of probably its most masterful exponent, Studs Terkel. I was leafing around a book shop on the upper east side of NYC in Jaunary 2008, on my way to Obama s Inauguration. I was leafing around some forgotten section [ ]
Reading Time: 19 minutes This post is a birthday gift for Matt Mullenweg, who just turned 40, and modestly request blog posts as gifts. Matt cofounded WordPress, on which this blog is written; he s been a wonderful conversational partner on topics of consciousness over the years; and he is also one of the chief sponsors and enthusiasts for Sonic [ ]
Reading Time: 7 minutes I lately had the luck to return to San Francisco for the first time since the pandemic, and I was very keen to discover whether the place was back . There had much been much talk on tech Twitter in the intervening period on the collapse of San Francisco (and by extension) the Valley as the [ ]
Reading Time: 7 minutes I ve been so busy lately that I haven t had time to do a write up of our first prototype of Karl-Heinz StockHausen s Kugealauditorium, a project I described in a previous post. Anyhow- better late than never, so here s an update on KA2. Recap of the project For Kugelauditorium, our plan is to develop an open-source [ ]
Reading Time: 7 minutes Bitcoin is undoubtedly a magnificent crypto-asset, but how does it stack up to peak experiences in lived life, in its overall value? Does the moral choice to enjoy possession of bitcoin survive consideration of the alternative possibility of creating a spherical concert hall, for example? Though I m very long on bitcoin (which is already at [ ]
Reading Time: 13 minutes Burning Man is Going Online To many of those who co-create it every year, Burning Man isn t just the best party in the world, it s the best place in the world. For the sole purpose of the experience of doing so, seventy thousand people engage in the pleasurable inconvenience of conjuring an ephemeral city in a [ ]
Reading Time: 2 minutes It isn t just because our dreams are more interesting than our actual lives that they re so worth remembering. There s a further advantage: detailed dream-memory fosters the understanding that can enable us to recognize our dreams as they occur. If we can do that, then we can have the pleasure of taking control. And lucid dreaming, [ ]
Reading Time: 10 minutes Parties are at the heart of most of what is good in human life: love, friendship, fun, escape, spiritual exploration. It s obviously therefore of great importance that we continue partying despite any physical distancing. But how to host decent parties online? It s not like anyone was attending online parties before the lockdown. Last week, I [ ]
Reading Time: 25 minutes Parties are at the heart of most of what is good in human life: love, friendship, transcendence, escape, spiritual exploration, fun, desire, music, dance, open-mindedness. It s obviously therefore of great importance that we continue partying despite physical distancing. But how to host decent parties online? First-rate theoretical analysis has revealed that there are ten…