zemrudian

30/3/21

Is doing anything artistic a lifestyle business?

Money: I find it hard to talk about, and feel bad for wanting more of it

2/4/21

Listening to James Stuber and Michael Ashcroft talking Alexander Technique https://overcast.fm/+lslkLBipY : when things are flowing you forget what went right: could be useful to know for improv, conducting etc

5/4/21

Reading Will Buckingham - The Secret of Creativity is not suffering, it is pleasure

6/4/21

Twitter threads about meditation, sutra/tantra, mahayana

https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1356656150918225920

https://twitter.com/_awbery_/status/1368236700200148998

20/3/21

Alignment is a foundation (can you have more than one foundation?)

23/3/21

Reading Lucy Keer/Drossbucket speedrun on sensemaking. Surfaced for me through the Emerge podcast, and spiritually inclined socially aware folks, links to Integral theory.

Reading Stratechery, Sovereign Writers and Substack - interesting idea that trad news org journalism departments will suffer if star writers all get unbundled

Listening/reading Simon Reynolds space time breakbeat timewarps ' "the quickening" always seemed poetic to me, a word for those electric moments or phase-shifts in one's life, when your mind or heart wakes up to an awareness of whole other dimensions of existence'

28/3/21

I keep getting conflict issues running this note between mobile and desktop evernote...hmm

2/3/21

Reading Erik Davis' Burning Shore ($) https://www.burningshore.com/p/ask-dr-d-4, threads to follow up on Keith Critchlow's work on Islamic architecture, and Michael Taussig's 'What Color is the Sacred'.

Listening to Musing Mind with Oshan Jarrow, guest Erik Hoel; fiction as good venue for investigating consciousness because it allows for ‘intrinsic view’ of multiple psychological perspectives

TIL that Baja California is a state within Mexico

6/3/21

Reading Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman, quite innocuous until the Los Alamos stuff comes in. After the bomb goes off he always imagines new buildings as just waiting to be destroyed. Also a lot of stuff about safe cracking.

7/3/21

Feynman p.237 if you learn a language you might accidentally add a twist to it that people enjoy hearing. Reminds me of idea that those who have to work very hard to become competent at something others do automatically might overshoot and become experts.

Reading about impact of coronavirus in Newham https://www.ft.com/content/0e63541a-8b6d-4bec-8b59-b391bf44a492

13/3/21

Reading Venkatesh on Demiurgical Businesses. Some fun provocative quotes:

" The only reason to have a stable identity is if you want to acquire something through it, whether it is through participation in family, community, the market, or politics."

"In fact, flipping things around, the things usually called “real problems” are in fact the most “unreal” of all. The fact that they exist as persistent, named conditions that seem to defy solution, and demand really virtuous behavior of humans suggests that there is a misframing going on somewhere. A problem that requires humans to be saints to drive solutions is not a problem. It is virtue blindness."

Reading David MacIver on Pandemic Moods, Reading and Writing - vibing with all of that, especially end-of-pandemic depression

Listening to this mix by Pearsall and wondering if now is the time to get into DnB

Reading the brilliant LAYC Almanac: STAY AWAKE thinking of the energy that meditation unlocks and how much I hate being too tired to do stuff

15/3/21

Listening to TSV podcast with Jason Snyder and Joe Norman on the new localism, considering the benefits of making more of your economic activity happen locally. How could this play out in London’s ‘villages’?

19/3/21

22/2/21

Reading  All We Can Save, chapter 6 - Feel.  Similarities with the fervour of 60s counter-culture in climate activism, leads to burnout and then accommodation to dominant culture.

25/2/21

Reading Venkatesh on Harmon vs McKee, intuition vs craft - could also apply to music scenes? Some can dissolve/reinvent, others are stuck following formulas and occasionally arriving at greatness.

26/2/21

Reading The Scholar's Stage on public intellectuals having a short shelf life - interesting stuff on when creativity peaks in various disciplines.

"Neuroscientists estimate that the average adult loses around 150,000 brain cells a day; in the fifty years that follow the end of brain maturation (ca. years 25-75), the average brain will lose somewhere between 5-10% of its neurons" 😟

27/2/21

15/2/21

Scorpio season on Initial Conditions - how much has bullshit admin proliferated in our lives? What can we do about it? https://overcast.fm/+ZJ1aL2qKc

16/2/21

Reading Tess Knighton on early twentieth century revival of Tomas Luis de Victoria's music in England https://www.jstor.org/stable/24245870

17/2/21

Reading PKD Valis; physician who ends the age of iron = Buddha? P. 198: “FISH CANNOT CARRY GUNS!”

Heraclitus - time is a child at play, cf. Erik Davis on David Crosby’s ‘Laughing’, figure of the happy child in the 60s

20/2/21

Finished Valis ‘the symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum’

11/2/21

Reading Lucy Keer on Ong. Pre-literate societies don't think of the 'word' as a standalone unit https://bucketoverflow.substack.com/p/august-2020-the-technologizing-of

12/2/21

Venkatesh on writing - will my joints give out sooner?https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2021/02/11/mjd-59256/

Potential clouds idea, defrosting, something something winter sadness

Watching ‘can’t get you out of my head’ Adam Curtis - para/pronoia

13/2/21

Venkatesh on Parent-Adult-Child split, and how child mentality more useful for current great weirding situation. Your 'parent' is out of touch, your 'adult's' processes don't work, only a child is used to being a stranger in a strange land. https://artofgig.substack.com/p/transactional-enchantment

Lucy Keer on Philip Pullman on how the idea of daemons unfolded https://drossbucket.com/newsletters/october-2019-making-it-up-and-writing-it-down/

Started reading Alex Ross Wagnerism

14/2/21

How long is now?