Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance

Africa is not 4 o'clock in the morning

No thing is one thing.

If you get up at 4 o'clock in the morning, they can never get you

"I know a coded message when I see one."

For the love of words and mothers

"Love came to visit me, shy as a fawn, but finding me busy, she fled with the dawn..."



"My shame as a spur, I fled the abyss."

Just Once to be Heard

"Good storytelling is crafting a story that people want to listen to. Great story is the art of letting go."



"What scientists do when a paradigm fails, is they carry on as if nothing has ever happened."

There's No Such Thing

Isn't this the PC guy? Y'know, from the mac commercials?



"...the vastness of the universe and the searching we might do in it..."

What was I going to say next?

Apparently I'm coming back as a duck, so maybe I'll just quack.

"Nobody hugs the dictionary"

"Serendipity is when you find things you weren't looking for because finding what you are looking for is so damn difficult."



"The internet is made up of words and enthusiasm...So is lexicography."

Happiness is...in training (Matthieu Ricard)

Ethel

Two Percent

Philosophy! Humor! ohjoyohjoyohjoy!



"I like to think of what I do as a probability wave."

Flow from the Root of Happiness

"The Illusion of Separate Notes"

By modulating pitch and volume with proximity and without touch:



"You have to stay so still if you want to have the most control...It's kind of like a yoga instrument, because it makes you so aware of every little crazy thing your body is doing, or just aware of what you don't want it to be doing while you're playing."



Well, since Yahoo isn't cooperating, I'll see if embedding from howCast works here:



(Of course it does. Blogger pwnd Yahoo.)

Question Freedom (& Carseat Caveat)

"The secret to happiness is low expectations." Don't let doing better make you feel worse.


Uh, oh. He let the cat out of the bag about carseats. OK, sweetie, here's what he was referring to:

The Tendency Toward Spontaneous Order

Strength in Happiness

Quizzes! How happy are you? (Free, but requires registration.)

Eric Lewis Rattles Bones

I'm am impatient person. Hopefully it's my worst fault, but it is a bad'un, all the same. I don't usually enjoy music that requires patience to hear. I want punchy & melodic & rhythmic. My geometric, big-picture-seizing mind wants the structure up-front and elegant, with ornamentation just that, decoration on a solid architecture. Nevertheless, I enjoyed these from Eric Lewis:





Worth waiting through, I thought.

Inventing Bones

In one of my favoriate lines from Skinny Legs and All, Ellen Cherry is asked by Boomer Petway what art is, and she tells him it's making something you always wanted to see. My quote's not on that page linked above, but one that is & that I like & had forgotten goes:

Those people who recognize that imagination is reality's master, we call "sages", and those who act upon it, we call "artists".

"But really, if we're all going to be honest with ourselves, I have to admit that acheiving the end of the exercise was never the point of the exercise to begin with, was it?"

"Who are you? What do you do?"

The scientific approach to crazy wealth:



That whole fine line between genius and insanity thing? Don't you believe it. The trick seems to be to ignore such lines and cross over them freely and at will. (but it does have to be an act of will, or else you're helpless and screwed)

I mean, c'mon, dude has a tyrannosaurus rex in his living room...

"Devil in the pretty girl when she takes a notion"

And other notes of wisdom...



...about where music comes from.

"Good Things Come out of Incomprehension"

"How much truth do we tell? What story are we actually telling? How do we know when we are ourselves?"

Attention (deficit) to telling stories:



"I have enough. And that is utterly true. I happen to be alive. End of discussion."

Nakedness and Water

A friend of mine in high school liked this aquatic ape theory.



"What scientists do when a paradigm fails is -- guess what -- they carry on as if nothing had ever happened."

Don't Eat the Marshmallow...Yet

Adorable children:



...but the point is: "We are eating more marshmallows than we are producing."

Listening to Little Girls for Fun & Profit

Keeping Your Play in Mind & Your Mind in Play

Fiddle with it

Infuse Your Life with Play

"The opposite of play is depression."

Music, Mind, & Health

From Guitar Hero's Daddy:

Praise for the Instrument

But where does the instrument end and the (11-year-old) musician begin?



"Now I know why I'm here," she says.