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The best way to think about the future is to invent it. Most people don't like to think about the future because they're not sure they can control it, but if you invent it, then you've already thought about it.

Alan Kay, Various interviews and speeches
23h ago

I do not have to win in order to know my dreams are valid, I only have to believe in a process of which I am a part. My work kept me alive this past year, my work and the love of women. They are inseparable from each other. In the recognition of the existence of love lies the answer to despair. Work is that recognition given voice and name.

3d ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Creative Parent Edition

Unlike my children, my books are cruelly unforgiving of my weaknesses, failings, and flaws of character. Most of all, my books, unlike my children, do not love me back.

4d ago

Such an evocative and weird lyric. Beautifully empathetic and sad. I tried to do an acoustic version, where I don't really scream it, but it just doesn't communicate. So I had to stand up and sing full-throated.

1w ago

Everything of beauty and substance that we make — every poem, every painting, every friendship — is an outstretched hand reaching out from one loneliness to another, reaching into the mute mouth of forever for the vowels of a common language to howl our requiem for the evanescent now.

1w ago

part of the magic of how kids learn is that they have less knowledge of what they're going to experience and fewer expectations about what's going to be relevant. They don't have that adult filter of strategically extracting things from their experience, and so they retain a lot of unexpected details that adults would find irrelevant. That allows them to be creative in ways that adults are not creative.

1w ago

If you're a jazz fan, see how many of the nicknames in the poem below you can identify. And even if you're not a jazz fan, keep reading—you will still enjoy this.

1w ago

To know the world one must construct it. One does not go for a walk in order to walk but to construct the world at each step.

1w ago

The mind of a thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bazaar encumbered with rich but cumbersome and never to be used articles.

2w ago

Its power, like that of Bach's series of variations, accumulates slowly, moment by moment. By the end, as the original theme returns, you are left with the feeling of having experienced a great arc, a fully realized idea explored in all its possibilities and permutations.

2w ago

Life is best understood and practiced as an art, the way that art is understood and practiced. We rely on inspiration, feeling for materials, knowledge of how to put things together well, patience, physical strength and awareness that we are part of a process which we don't know much about yet but which we live within and are sustained by.

2w ago

The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past, all the future, all the possibilities of existence.

3w ago

Often I think that however much I draw or paint, or however well, I am not an artist as art is generally understood. The abstract is meaningless to me save as a fragment of the whole, which is life itself… It is the ultimate which concerns me, and all physical, all material things are but an expression of it… We are part and parcel of the big plan of things. We are simply instruments recording in different measure our particular portion of the infinite.

3w ago

The task, then, is not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what nobody has yet thought about that which everybody sees.

3w ago

China is a deeply repressive nation, with universal surveillance, fine-grained media and speech control, and ubiquitous censorship. That's the kind of society where only anodyne, cautious artistry can flourish, except in tiny subcultural pockets too small for the government to worry about.

3w ago

The poet only asks to get his head into the world, but the world always strikes back and prevents him from seeing anything.

3w ago

The natural object is always the adequate symbol. I naturally dress my thoughts in pictures.

4w ago

Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so. It is an easy task, because people who are intellectually lazy are convinced that this miserable terror is "the truth", that this terror is knowledge of the "extra-mental" world. This is an easy way out, resulting in a banal explanation of the world as terrifying.

4w ago

I'm filled with gratitude to have had this experience and to get to play this amount of music with my children, and friends who I've known since they were little kids, too. It's been an incredible thrill and a great thing for my family and me to get to spend that amount of time together.

1mo ago

An exploration is a traversal of the unknown, of landscapes you didn't even know existed, with all the courage and vulnerability and openness to experience that demands; its payoff is discovery — of unimagined wonders, of yourself in the face of the unimagined.

1mo ago

Why it's necessary to create work that might feel embarrassing The simple mindset shift that stops stalling and gets you to just start How to reframe scorn as a positive signal The thought process that can help you move out of a state of rumination How to treat failed ideas as seeds for future breakthroughs

1mo ago

The last time I invited readers to talk about their work, I got a thousand comments in just the first 24 hours. I spent days sampling some of the projects, and was impressed by the quality—we have a very talented group of readers here.

1mo ago

The poet only asks to get his head into the world, but the world always strikes a poet down. It may be very hard in the world to live with the poet; but imagine how hard it must be to live with the poet in oneself and to be bound by him in chains.

1mo ago

as an artist, as a lover, as a person who lived with extraordinary vulnerability, extraordinary courage, and the precocious awareness that the conversation between the two is the measure of a life.

1mo ago

Fiction to expand one's creativity and empathy. To experience emotions and other perspectives that would otherwise be unknown.

1mo ago

That inaugural Big Ears—scattered across a clutch of theaters and strange little rooms in a sliver of the then-sleepy city—was a continual revelation for 25-year-old me, instantly expanding my sense of what was possible.

1mo ago

There are lyrics in it that distill something a lot of people spend their entire lives writing songs to try and say, like: I see what I see I don't see what I can't

1mo ago

Most of them are hidden from view in the stagnant mainstream culture of our time, where tired formulas and AI slop prevail. These are the real deal, and give me reason for optimism about the future of our music culture.

1mo ago

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.

1mo ago

Singing that felt a little bit like communicating with a much younger version of me who was concerned with being able to get better, being legitimate, and wanting to not feel shame about making mistakes. I feel like that song was written to me today, and I felt like I could answer back to that person, "Yeah, you were right to want this and want to try harder."

1mo ago

I love how it views creativity as something spiritual that works best when it just flows. That is something I need to remind myself of at times because it's so easy to fall into the trappings of constraining your imagination to fit within the mandates that buyers want or the expectations that audiences have rather than the freedom of where a thought takes you.

1mo ago

I realized those sounds were actually more interesting to me than some super pure note I could play really well had I been practicing a lot. These were things I'd never pay attention to or something I shouldn't even be playing when I was studying classical music. It's such a different mindset of approaching music. Instead of 'I've got to get it right,' it's more like, 'What can happen?'

1mo ago
longreads.com
The Docteur Is In

His legacy lives chiefly in the sound of his instrument and its place in the music he pioneered, both of which seemed to allow a nation brutalized by colonial domination to access a richer and more joyous emotional life.

1mo ago

Being in familiar surroundings with adequate control over my time and space is a necessary condition for immersing myself fully in reading, writing, and taking pictures—activities that nourish me and give me space for creativity.

2mo ago

The poets make all the words, and therefore language is the indelible record of mankind's being.

2mo ago

The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.

2mo ago

It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunnings achievements of science. The divorce of the two produces politicians without ideas and scientists without conscience.

2mo ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

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