writing
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Resonant Thoughts: Cory Doctorow’s “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI” (2026)
“Art is what happens when an artist has a big, numinous, irreducibly complex feeling in their mind, which they infuse into some artistic medium—a book, a song, a dance, a painting, a photograph, and such—in the hopes of making a facsimile of that big, numinous, irreducibly complex feeling materialize in the minds of people who… Continue reading
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Arrows Of Attention: Musical Prompting
You’re a soloist who specializes in 19th-century Romantic music. You have no sheet music in front of you and don’t consider yourself an improviser, yet at your instrument you’re able to remember fragments of themes, chord progressions, and melodies from dozens of different composers whose works you’ve practiced and performed. Use this partial knowledge to… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Paul Morley’s “A Sound Mind: How I Fell in Love with Classical Music (and Decided to Rewrite Its Entire History)” (2020)
“Do we lose that sense of the greater purpose of music – once it is set inside the flat, if relentless and very helpful, music services – as this other language, this alien presence taking on the unknown, defending us against all kinds of threats, danger and tension? Will this near-monstrous availability of music, the… Continue reading
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Music Without A Body
In Times Square the guys hawking their hip hop CDs and the guys hawking their fake Buddhist bracelets are of a piece, both unaware that art, as a commodity, has no value. But the hawkers know something about symbolic value and that the way of imbuing their wares with magic is through their person. The… Continue reading
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Music’s Complex Problem
Édouard Vuillard, Morning Concert (1937-38) Why do we turn to music when there are so many other artistic, physical, social, trivial, and spiritual pursuits claiming our attention? One reason is that music is a multimodal experience that is already meaningfully integrated into our lives. Music is everywhere as a tacit shared language, a perpetual underscore… Continue reading
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