Quotes

A long time ago I used Delicious to bookmark webpages. It felt like a great way to share internet discoveries with people.

Well, how different this landscape looks to me now. Anything “social” and “free” will be used to create a dossier on a user that can then be sold to the highest bidder in corporate advertising – Delicious is no different than Google, Facebook, Twitter and so on…

At first I switched to Yojimbo, which I used for Bookmarking and logins and collecting just about anything, including images and quotes and so on. I love Yojimbo, but since there is no iOS app or syncing the information remains stuck on my laptop… then I discovered Evernote, which I currently use to gather stuff…

I did not verify any of these quotes, but they speak for themselves no matter who came up with them:

It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.
– Aldous Huxley, Island

That’s why they call it the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.
– George Carlin

In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.
– Ram Dass

The nature of our motivation determines the character of our work.
– Dalai Lama

Without inner peace, outer peace is impossible.
– Kelsang Gyatso

The difficulty of always feeling that you ought to be doing something is that you tend to undervalue the times when you’re apparently doing nothing, and those are very important times. It’s the equivalent of the dream time, in your daily life, times when things get sorted out and reshuffled. If you’re constantly awake work-wise you don’t allow that to happen. One of the reasons I have to take distinct breaks when I work is to allow the momentum of a particular direction to run down, so that another one can establish itself.
– Brian Eno, cited by Eric Tamm in Brian Eno: His Music and The Vertical Sound Of Color

An intelligent person does not need the promise of heaven to see the merit of good deeds.
— Unknown

The only people who ever get anyplace interesting are the people who get lost.
– Henry David Thoreau

The world is a wonderfully weird place, consensual reality is significantly flawed, no institution can be trusted, certainty is a mirage, security is a delusion, and the tyranny of the dull mind forever threatens. But our lives are not as limited as we think they are. All things are possible, laughter is holier than piety, freedom is sweeter than fame, and in the end it’s love and love alone that really matters.
-Tom Robbins

Alice: How long is forever?
White Rabbit: Sometimes, just one second.

– Lewis Carrol

When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages – a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
– Banksy. Make art, not ads.

Rising

A Luca Marenzio moment

The famous opening of this madrigal — a setting of Petrarch’s “Solo e pensoso” (“Alone and pensive”) — has the top voice rising by chromatic steps, over the span of a major ninth; the summit is reached at 0:50. The effect is wonderfully vertiginous, evoking the poet’s solitary wanderings. But the really ecstatic, spine-tingling event occurs at 1:08, when (in the transposition on this recording) the harmony slips eerily from E minor to G minor and then cadences in D major. The reason it sounds like pure Romanticism for a moment is that on the third beat of the G-minor bar (around 1:10) the alto rises from D to E-natural and holds the E into the next bar while the other voices go to D major. The ache of that suspension is universal. Something quite similar happens as Isolde breathes her last (listen for the suspension in the high winds):


(Via Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise)

Scanning Dreams

Brain scans let computer reconstruct movie scenes
It sounds like science fiction: While volunteers watched movie clips, a scanner watched their brains. And from their brain activity, a computer made rough reconstructions of what they viewed.

Scientists reported that result Thursday and speculated such an approach might be able to reveal dreams and hallucinations someday.

Frightening and exciting possibilities: could be used as a self-discovery tool, and by psychoanalysts to unlock dreams, by the military to discover secrets, to establish guilt or innocence in courts of law…

And I am sure plenty of idiots will upload their dreams to Facebook, which in turn will enable advertisers to custom tailor commercials…

Spotify Fail

Can you sign up for Spotify without Facebook?
There seems to be nowhere on Spotify’s website that lets you sign up for Spotify without a Facebook account. The sign up links ask to to log in to Facebook or create a new Facebook account.

Is there a hidden link anywhere on the website that lets you sign up without linking it to a Facebook account?

You can read many ineresting comments here.

As an early adopter I was able to get a Premium account before Spotify put all of their chips on Facebook this week, but I smell a rat. Having done this I don’t feel I can trust them anymore. It’s an epic fail.

Spotify Premium is about $120/year. That equals iCloud at $25/year PLUS the purchase of about 10 CDs. And CDs still sound quite a bit better than Spotify.

I cancelled my account this morning.

Mending Bowls + Amber

I would love to learn how to do kintsugi and have a couple of very nice bowls that need repair.

Blake Gopnik – ‘Golden Seams: The Japanese Art of Mending Ceramics’ at Freer
It’s not often that an exhibition makes you want to run home and smash your best china. But that could be the result of a visit to “Golden Seams: The Japanese Art of Mending Ceramics,” a tiny gem of a show at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery. Of course, before you start smashing, you’ll want to make sure you have access to a master of kintsugi.<

Gold repair, Kintsugi | Nanban ceramic
Videos

Horaizons: The Broken Tea Bowl
Kato Kiyomasa and the Broken Tea Bowl

And:

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
– Kurt Vonnegut