Monthly Archives: October 2015

Lin Batsheva Kahn – Attach and Leap

I met Lin at a party in 1999. It was one of those moments where a kind of mini mind-meld took place. She, like me, isn’t much for small talk, and, we both share the ability to small talk our way into more fascinating conversations. We did so.

We’ve been in dialog ever since, nowadays speaking every few weeks over Facetime. We discuss together psychology, creativity, and (what I term) the exigencies of moral relations.

She’s a great, deeply humanist, adjunct professor of dance at DePaul University. In 2014, Lin was named Jewish Chicagoan of the Year. She founded and is the director of the Tikvah Company, her dance outfit in Chicago.

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Filed under art, artists, creative captures, psychology

Hey, I Felt That!

23 Emotions People Feel But Can't Explain

At first, I didn’t check out the origins of this list. It is, for me, a curious collection of folk psychological notions. It includes radically non-normative associations between a conjured term, and, several varieties of explanatory material. I looked up the last term and discovered the source, a literary project roosting on Tumblr.

The definitions include many that are aspirational, and this echoes Antonio Damasio below, when he says: “…exercising that prerogative” and goes on to describe the focal consciousness of concentrated human performance.

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Filed under adult learning, art, artists, folk psychology, psychology

Free Play Cluster

FreePlayOct25WILLDSC08183

WIll in the middle, showcasing the glow of a good game.

FreePlay-October

Sunday’s game featured a double strike out, an interference ‘collective call’ when a slow rolling grounder seemed to roll up a player’s leg, and, the piece d’ resistance, an eager runner moving to the passing lane between second and third, and passing the base runner ahead of him.

Another one run game was the result of these outliers and lots of excellent play.

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Filed under play

Today, You Called

the-way-of-zen-cats

zen_dogballf

Bumper sticker: DOGS HAVE MASTERS, CATS HAVE STAFF
https://youtu.be/nNZErjA8C-w

Alan Watts

KizzyOct2015

Kizzy, here she is.

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Filed under adult learning, zen

POMO Fast Food

I’ve been seeing mentions of the ‘world war’ between Apple, Google and Facebook with the goal of one of the companies taking over the internet. I suppose this means that when such hegemony is achieved the internet’s interface will remain slow, buggy, and expensive.

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Filed under cultural contradictions, humor

Eno On Cybernetics and Music Making

https://vimeo.com/55969912

This video is new to me and it provided a big wallop.

In my framing of fortuity, contingency and fragility, I have only roughed out some of the implications for music making. B.E. helps move this forward during a really essential 15 minutes.

He mentions Stafford Beer. (He, along with Ralph Stacey, Gordon Pask, and Gregory Bateson, probably did the most to extend cybernetics to human domains in the first wave of cybernetic thinking. Largely from Beer and Stacey we gain the concept of soft systems, and from Beer we gain the Viable Systems Model (Trevor Hilder’s presentation – pdf).)

What Is Cybernetics?

Leonod Ototsky’s fond archive and research on Mr. Beer is a terrific old style web site.

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Filed under creative captures, experiential learning, Gregory Bateson, music, my research, science, serendipity

Whales Under Northern Lights

bonus:

bonus 2:

https://vimeo.com/137529936

I would like someday to be a dolphin.

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Filed under nature, visual story

Free Play Follow Through

FreePlay-follow-through

The Free Play Softball League‘s man-boys of autumn Sunday games will parallel the big league’s playoffs, and, then, those playoffs are concluded by the World Series, whereas the Free Players keep playing! Our extended season is both test and testament. During my fourteen year tenure, we once played in December, and have taken the season past October a number of times!

This week the pick-up squads collaborated on one of the best played games of the season. It was a real gem highlighted by two double plays, both of which I (sadly) initiated from the batter’s box with grounders to the infield. There were stellar defensive plays, and these supported a tense, low scoring one run game.

Oct4-15

With the fall sun shining in the batter’s eyes, hitting becomes more challenging.

Free-Play-Oct-4

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Up And Down

cartoon

Our focus on the person is at once a great accomplishment and a significant risk. It is a great accomplishment because it signifies our recognition of every human being’s free participation in transcendent truth and goodness. Yet, it is also a risk because focusing so intensely on ourselves invites existential derailment in so many ways. We are likely to misunderstand ourselves. We might try to turn away from the insecurity or responsibility of personal existence. And prone as we are to self-love, is it prudent for us to articulate transcendent truth and goodness through a celebration of ourselves? The empirical evidence is not always encouraging. Surveying what has become of our articulation of the person, we cannot help but ask: is the modern turn to the subject a deepening of the Christian insight into the transcendent meaning of existence, or is it a Promethean revolt against God and the order of being? – Steven McGuire, Voeglin View

Is the modern turn to the subject a deepening of the Christian insight into the transcendent meaning of existence, or is it a Promethean revolt against God and the order of being?

Both, and moreover a revolt evoked from the flux of the order of being too; so: both/and.

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Filed under adult learning, cultural contradictions, philosophy, Religion, self-knowledge