What are you doing, just manipulating notes? What are you doing this for? What is the basis of your aesthetics? What is your concept in terms of what the music means to you? What are you trying to do with music? What does art mean to you? Is there some spirituality going on here? Or just what is this?
—Henry Threadgill Unedited on why we play, why we improvise, why we create.
Scaring the kids is a fine and noble thing to do,” he says. “I’m happy to tell kids to prepare for a short life. But it works like this – you can take them through the dark forest, but you must bring them out into the light.
—Terry Pratchett: Sex, death and nature on writing honestly for children.
Turn our schools into LAUNCH PADS for kids’ minds and BE INVOLVED, you big nerd. You know you want to. The “fiscal cliff” is an appetizer — or really just an aperitif – in the cafeteria where we’ll fix our economic woes; education is the Thanksgiving dinner. So take a big bite, because you’re the boss.
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Dear Mr. President: Please junk Race to the Top - Salon.com
This has been lingering in my queue for awhile, but it is still relevant.
But I never saw it as a waste of time. I wasn’t doing it for a sense of belonging, I just loved discovering things and hoping they’d catch on and travel across the internet. At that time, the internet felt finite, but like it was on the edge of something infinite. I was addicted to watching it grow and change and didn’t care if there was anyone else like me on the internet or not.
—Know Your Internet History! A Chat With Jennifer Sharpe, Early Web Aggregator | The Awl
It’s really easy to lose track of when you are. Many of our interfaces are really just ways to try to repackage time so that it’s meaningful, so that we can do stuff with it. It’s not that there isn’t enough time but rather that there’s too much of it.
—10 Timeframes | Contents Magazine Paul Ford
The practice of jogging is tolerated to the degree that it does not annoy the walkers
—http://nyti.ms/Z8iGyi 9 European walks
We in the West have been fortunate enough to have amassed sufficient power and wealth in the past century to allow us until recently to largely insulate ourselves from the psychic impoverishment we have imposed on others. The Chinese, without this luxury, understood the true nature of our New World Order faster and better than any other nation. This is how China has become the site of the End of the World. This is not an “end” in the sense of termination or finishing point, but in the sense of realization, revelation, purpose. It is the manifestation of the unconscious dream of a capitalist system of social organization based entirely on the binary logic of financial growth.
And then she started smiling again, not a mocking smile, not as if she were enjoying herself, but a terminal smile, a knotted smile somewhere between a sensation of beauty and misery, though not beauty and misery per se, but Little Beauty and Little Misery, paradoxical dwarves, travelling and inapprehensible dwarves.
the blossoming field of neurogastroenterology will likely offer some new insight into the workings of the second brain—and its impact on the body and mind. One day, perhaps there will be well-known connections between diseases and lesions in the gut’s nervous system as some in the brain and spinal cord today indicate multiple sclerosis.
—Think Twice: How the Gut’s “Second Brain” Influences Mood and Well-Being: Scientific American