We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.
Fanfarlo - Fire Escape (from Reservoir)
Fanfarlo are an indie pop band which formed in 2006 in London, England. The band consists of Simon Balthazar (vocals, guitar, clarinet), Cathy Lucas (vocals, mandolin, violin, keyboards), Leon Beckenham (keyboards, trumpet), Justin Finch (bass, vocals) and Amos Memon (drums). Mark West (guitar, keyboards) left the band in 2008. The band’s name is a reference to Charles Baudelaire’s novella, “La Fanfarlo.”
I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.
Brian Eno - Signals (from Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks)
Brian Eno is a British self proclaimed ‘non-musician’, who has made contributions to the music community as an instrumentalist, composer, record producer, music theorist and singer. He’s commonly regarded as the father of ambient music, although he has worked in many genres and fields of music throughout his career. Eno studied at Colchester Institute art school in Essex, England, taking inspiration from minimalist painting. During his time on the art course at the Institute, he also gained experience in playing and making music through teaching sessions held in the adjacent music school. Eno is frequently referred to as one of popular music’s most influential artists.A critic at Allmusic argues that Eno “forever altered the ways in which music is approached, composed, performed, and perceived, and everything from punk to techno to new age bears his unmistakable influence.” He has spread his techniques and theories primarily through his production; his distinctive style affected a number of projects he’s been involved in, including Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy (helping to popularize minimalism) and the albums he produced for Talking Heads (incorporating African music and polyrhythms on Eno’s advice), Devo, and other groups. Eno’s first collaboration with David Byrne, 1981’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, pioneered sampling techniques and broke ground by incorporating world music.Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies have been utilized by many bands, and Eno’s production style has proven influential in several general respects: “his recording techniques have helped change the way that modern musicians – particularly electronic musicians – view the studio. No longer is it just a passive medium through which they communicate their ideas but itself a new instrument with seemingly endless possibilities.”
Christopher Hitchens: In Defense of Richard Dawkins
If you haven’t read it, you will almost certainly have seen it: the critique of Professor Richard Dawkins that arraigns him for being too “strident” in his confrontations with his critics. According to this line of attack, Dawkins has no business stepping outside the academy to become a “public intellectual” and even less right to raise his voice when he chooses to do so. Implied in this rather hypocritical attack is the no less hypocritical hint that Dawkins might be better received if he were more polite and attract a better class of audience if he used more of the blessed restraint and reserve that is every Englishman’s birthright and which he obviously possesses in such heaping measure.
I think that Dawkins would be quite right to refuse the oily invitation that is contained in this offer, and I hope that he continues to do so. I say this while having actually found his manners to be quite unusually polite and even quiet, especially when one considers the context of this discussion. I, for example, am a self-taught amateur writer who quite enjoys getting a bit scruffy in debates with those who think that Earth was designed with them in mind. Dawkins, on the other hand, has spent decades of his life refining and deepening the teaching of evolutionary biology—a revolutionary subject that is only just beginning to disclose its still-more revolutionary, and healing and educational, properties and aspects. Why should he sit still and see a valued and precious discipline being insulted, even threatened with not being taught? It’s no exaggeration to say that in some parts of the modern world, real efforts are being made to stifle evolutionary biology and to impose the teaching—under various disguises of differing ingenuity—of creationism. In which case the real question ought to be: Where are the other professors? Why is the academy being so cowardly in failing to stick up for the teaching and the free inquiry on which it lives? I don’t think that Professor Dawkins should be left to do this important work all by himself.
In doing so at all, of course, he comes from a potentially great tradition. In the famous nineteenth-century debate with Bishop Wilberforce, or “Soapy Sam,” in which the theory of evolution was tried and found sound in the Oxford school, it was Thomas Huxley who emerged as “Darwin’s bulldog.” It wasn’t to be expected that the mild and retiring Charles Darwin would or could appear each time to defend evolution by natural selection, but at least there was someone upon whom he could rely, and the evidence is that Huxley was very happy to undertake the task. My view now would be that that was all very well for the nineteenth century, when the struggle was to expand and deepen the circle of scientific knowledge. But now that the discipline is clearly established, it should not require a full professor to justify his right to be teaching it! Instead, he and others should be getting on with important projects. Yet just today I spoke to some biologists who work closely with the National Institutes of Health and are regularly forced to waste time in red-herring discussions about the ethics of using existing stem cells. Alas, in testimony before Congress, they are forced to be polite and understated, lest they meet with the wrath of God.
But that’s all the more reason for severity. His intellectual eminence carries with it corresponding moral responsibilities. The greater a man’s talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better that one should suffer than that many should be corrupted. Consider the matter dispassionately, Mr. Foster, and you will see that no offence is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behaviour. Murder kills only the individual—and, after all, what is an individual?” With a sweeping gesture he indicated the rows of microscopes, the test-tubes, the incubators. “We can make a new one with the greatest ease—as many as we like. Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself.
Pink Floyd - The Great Gig In The Sky (from The Dark Side of the Moon)
The Dark Side of the Moon is a concept album by the British rock band Pink Floyd. It was released on March 17, 1973 in the U.S. and March 24, 1973 in the UK. The Dark Side of the Moon builds upon previous experimentation Pink Floyd had done, especially on their album Meddle. Its themes include old age, conflict and insanity; the latter possibly inspired by the deteriorating mental state of their former band leader Syd Barrett. The album is notable for its use of special effects and conceptual, philosophical lyrics, as found in much of Pink Floyd’s work. The band’s most successful release, The Dark Side of the Moon spent 741 consecutive weeks (14 years) on the USA-based Billboard 200 album chart, the longest duration of any album in history. It is one of three albums tied for the claim of second highest selling album globally of all time, selling forty million or more units. In addition to its commercial success, The Dark Side of the Moon is often considered to be the group’s defining work, and is still frequently ranked by music critics as one of the greatest and most influential albums of all time.
In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.
Muse - Megalomania (from Origin of Symmetry)
Origin of Symmetry is the second studio album by English alternative rock band Muse, released on 17 July 2001 by Taste Records. In the UK it reached #3 and was certified platinum. The title for the album comes from a concept put forward by Michio Kaku in his book Hyperspace. On Origin of Symmetry, the band experimented instrumentally throughout the album. Dominic Howard (drums) augmented the standard rock drum kit with various other items of his own, and Matthew Bellamy uses a pipe organ at St Mary the Virgin’s Church, Bathwick on “Megalomania”. Because of the requirement of a pipe organ, this song is rarely played live by Muse, perhaps the most notable occasions being at Muse’s charity gig at the Royal Albert Hall and during the Hullabaloo concert in Paris.
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.
Christopher Hitchens: Trial of the Will
Reviewing familiar principles and maxims in the face of mortal illness, Christopher Hitchens has found one of them increasingly ridiculous: “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” Oh, really? Take the case of the philosopher to whom that line is usually attributed, Friedrich Nietzsche, who lost his mind to what was probably syphilis. Or America’s homegrown philosopher Sidney Hook, who survived a stroke and wished he hadn’t. Or, indeed, the author, viciously weakened by the very medicine that is keeping him alive.
I do remember lying there and looking down at my naked torso, which was covered almost from throat to navel by a vivid red radiation rash. This was the product of a month-long bombardment with protons which had burned away all of the cancer in my clavicular and paratracheal nodes, as well as the original tumor in the esophagus. This put me in a rare class of patients who could claim to have received the highly advanced expertise uniquely available at the stellar Zip Code of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. To say that the rash hurt would be pointless. The struggle is to convey the way that it hurt on the inside. I lay for days on end, trying in vain to postpone the moment when I would have to swallow. Every time I did swallow, a hellish tide of pain would flow up my throat, culminating in what felt like a mule kick in the small of my back. I wondered if things looked as red and inflamed within as they did without. And then I had an unprompted rogue thought: If I had been told about all this in advance, would I have opted for the treatment? There were several moments as I bucked and writhed and gasped and cursed when I seriously doubted it.
It’s probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory. It’s also impossible to warn against. If my proton doctors had tried to tell me up front, they might perhaps have spoken of “grave discomfort” or perhaps of a burning sensation. I only know that nothing at all could have readied or steadied me for this thing that seemed to scorn painkillers and to attack me in my core. I now seem to have run out of radiation options in those spots (35 straight days being considered as much as anyone can take), and while this isn’t in any way good news, it spares me from having to wonder if I would willingly endure the same course of treatment again.
But mercifully, too, I now can’t summon the memory of how I felt during those lacerating days and nights. And I’ve since had some intervals of relative robustness. So as a rational actor, taking the radiation together with the reaction and the recovery, I have to agree that if I had declined the first stage, thus avoiding the second and the third, I would already be dead. And this has no appeal.
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion… Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat’s meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.
Currently Reading: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Huxley’s vision of the future in his astonishing 1931 novel Brave New World — a world of tomorrow in which capitalist civilization has been reconstituted through the most efficient scientific and psychological engineering, where the people are genetically designed to be passive, consistently useful to the ruling class.
Plaid - Rakimou (From Not For Threes)
Plaid is a London-based British electronic music duo comprising Andy Turner and Ed Handley. British music rag NME once dubbed Black Dog “the most revered techno outfit since Kraftwerk.” After Ed Handley and Andy Turner disbanded Black Dog in 1995, they began recording under the name Plaid. Plaid have had a celebrated past with electronica. This release, Not for Threes, is a consistently re-firmation that Plaid have been consistently making superb albums for sometime now, that are an amalgamation of trip-hop, electro-techno, IDM, Experimental and ambient electronic, that remain tightly woven across the tracks on their albums and retain a cerebral yet hypnotic sound.
Hello. I'm Kevin. I'm French and I currently live in Montreal where I study Business and Environmental Science at Concordia University. You'll find here some of the things that I read and find interesting. 
