The Secret Salon (more)

Especially with the recent economic downturn, music venues seem to have become more and more anxiety ridden. People feel obligated to buy expensive drinks that they can't afford, venues feel obligated to create bills that have nothing to do with music and everything to do with the head count. The net result is that venues become uncomfortable Karaoke Dens and culture seekers/makers stay home, save their pennies and find free culture online. What we lose in this chain reaction is enormous. We lose the direct exchange between artist and appreciator, the cross pollination of like minded artists, and the joy of experiencing one another without mediation as people in the flesh.

I decided to put together this Salon because I just wanted a chance to play and present music for people that want to listen to, experience and exchange music. I wanted to do it in a context that is unmediated by a business plan or non-intersecting artistic goals.

Here is the structure of the salon and we will look forward to seeing you there:

1. Once you RSVP you will be emailed the location 24 hours before the show. If for whatever reason you do not receive the email you can email thelisps @ gmail . com (fix the spaces)
2. You may bring drinks or food or nothing at all.
3. there are 3 bands each will play for about 45 minutes.
4. Entrance is $5. This covers the basic cost of using the space and pays the musicians.
5. You are highly encouraged to come by 9 and stay for the entire evening.
6. Doors open at 8. Performances are at 9, 10, and 11pm.
7. Fancy Dress is also encouraged.

Thanks for participating and we look forward to seeing you there.

RSVP at thelisps @ gmail . com (fix the spaces)

Sincerely,

César Alvarez
www.musicisfreenow.org

The Secret Salon

Saturday 1/30
rsvp to thelisps {at) gmail dot kom for location (you will recieve it the day before the show)

myspace.com/thelisps
myspace.com/mansonfamilypicnic
myspace.com/dinosaurfeathers

Mutant Sounds

If you aren't familiar with Mutant Sounds it is definitely worth a visit. It is a wonderful site dedicated to unearthing rare recordings and making them available to curious ears everywhere. I just downloaded this V.A. sounds compilation and I'm loving it.

Indie Music 2020

Anne Stewart who writes The Buzz for GigHive asked for my thoughts about the future of the Indie Music Scene.. The feature is here: Indie Music 2020

Here's what i wrote...

"One thing that really caught my attention in the last week is that Apple purchased lala.com, which says to me that the biggest online music retailer will be moving to a more subscription-based model and will start allowing and encouraging users to keep their music in the cloud. This probably means that an obsession over storage capacity will give way to prioritizing bandwidth and constant connectivity.

As an independent musician, I always champion the dissolution of music prisons (DRM, mainstream record stores, horded music collections) because they prevent the flow of media and subculture from reaching the listener. When everyone’s music is in the cloud it will hopefully be easier to exchange and access new streams, though maybe the opposite is true if iTunes wants to tell you how to manage your music.

Another thing that I’m pleased to see happening at Bandcamp.com is that they are offering high-resolution versions of their artists’ music. This is an exciting trend because for all the joys of the mp3 craze it has caused a real devaluing of the high-fidelity listening experience. Listening to 128 kbps is like injecting bit-rot into your brain.

That is all in the next 2 years. After that, it’s anyone’s game. A few ideas:

• Cell phones become a significant music production platform. They’ve already become home to demos and sketches for nearly everyone I know. I’m still waiting for the first #1 megahit produced on an iPhone.
• Auto-tune is going to start to sound really dated.
• I’m listening to how recording/producing is changing in indie music. Something that’s gone along with the loss of fidelity in the mp3 generation is that crisp and clean recordings aren’t so precious anymore. That used to be the signal of a professional studio but now a digital recording in a quiet apartment can be cleaner than an old studio recording with tape hiss (though now we have computer hum). So people are becoming more and more creative with how they are introducing noise and space into their recordings. Artists are getting more and more sophisticated with recording technology. I assume that most bands start recording themselves these days, so when they start working with a producer, they already have a developed idea of how they should sound recorded.
• I’m heartened that the indie music scene has seemed amenable to real sonic experimentation and I foresee that only developing further. There is still somewhat of a mandate for rhythm but on top of that you can do nearly anything and people will be interested. People are getting used to massive amounts of parallel input and maybe that opens up avenues for composers and songwriters.”

Singularity (a song)

After a few years of trying I finally got out a song about the technological singularity.

Here's the demo (Recorded and mixed on an iPhone): Singularity [mp3]
 

The Lisps will go into the studio with it in January if all goes well.

Lyrics:

Singularity

I’ll live to see a million things That men were never meant to see

My senses and my faculties are super-computing factories

Auditory mesmerizers Touch and taste olfactory

Digitized into data streams that register but will not delete

They’ll store it up on carbon atoms lined up into nano-diamonds

Priced just right for maximizing special year end price surprises

Every piece of food you taste and every thought you cogitate

Every sound that you can hear and sight you see for years and years

All stored up so conveniently on peta-bytes of memory

So you can always reference them in case you forget anything

Now once all that experience can fit into an easy grid

existence is no longer something mentally projected

The wires that you have inside are very easily realized

Through artificial imaging you duplicate 10 at a time

Your consciousness can be enjoyed by anyone forever more

And you live in whatever state that you or anyone creates

You could be Giant Squirrel, a statue or a talking cat

The Goodyear blimp, an etch a sketch, An octopus or a yoga mat

You’d have each and every memory and feeling to the one

And now you can commence your life as an uploaded extropian

My mother is so horrified by this post-human fantasy

She says you’d lose that special thing that makes us human beings be

But I don’t know I’m not so sure if humans are so good and pure

Perhaps we’d be much better off if we took these violent bodies off

Once everyone is in the cloud we’ll move beyond this earthly ground

Expanding into outer space as an informational signal race

Matter in the solar system converts into computing mass

And the sun becomes a central orb of a brain that grows into the vast

Expanse of space and emptiness for light years and light centuries

It replicates exponentially like a Russian doll in a cosmic dream

When every spot of the universe is filled up it will promptly burst

Eradicating finally the experiment that we grew from earth

As it explodes the brain will breathe into the dark impossibly

and anti-matter all around will collapse the universe back down

and right away what you would see if you were a fly in the vacancy

All the light and color in the universe is collapsing

Time would stop

From a tiny pinhead point a massive bang erupts into space

And trillions of new particles fly away at a photonic pace

And once again the clock would start to tick and tock and tick and tock

Years would pass, billions or more before the tiny proteins locked

And once again in the boiling seas of a miniscule blue anomaly

A planet floating helplessly around a tiny ball so fiery

an unextraordinary corner of the universe would cradle it

The flicker of intelligence that led us here and brought us this...

Instruments

Instruments is a series of 20 instrumental cut-ups which explore the finest grains of sound from a variety of sources. The work is best appreciated by a continuous 40 minute listening. (Full download below)

Track List:

1       Acoustic Guitar

2       Banjo                

3       Cello                

4       Clarinet              

5       Cuatro                

6       Electric Bass        

7       Electric Guitar      

8       Flute                

9       Harmonica            

10     Horn                  

11     Mbira                

12     Melodica              

13     Piano                

14     Reed Organ            

15     Saxophone            

16     Slide Whistle        

17     Theremin              

18     Tiny Keyboard

19     Toy Piano            

20     Wooden Flute      

Download Entire Album HERE

Laura Goldhamer – Banjo
Lily Gottlieb-McHale – Cello
Jeremy Hoevenaar – Electric Bass
Jessica Feldman – Flute
Marylea Madiman - Horn

All other instruments played by César Alvarez

44 Considerations for Young Composers

1. Stop listening to what everything/everyone seems to be saying.

2. Then start listening again whenever.

3. Spend lots of time doing whatever you like doing.

4. Forget about everything you learned sometimes.

5. Make music that only your cat likes.

6. Music can be the wrong place to look sometimes.

7. You are very powerful.

8. You are very tiny.

9. You are perfect.

10. You are making a difference.

11. As an experiment stop trying to do the thing that you've been expecting yourself to do.

12. If you aren't doing anything you are still a composer.

13. Don't write a score for a piece that doesn't have a score just because the grant application says you have to have a score. (You might suggest that they read Varese's "The Liberation of Sound" 1936)

14. Don't take the rhythm out of your piece because "contemporary music isn't supposed to have rhythm."

15. Don't put a pulse in your piece because you think no one will listen to it otherwise.

16. Whatever your parents think about your music is fine.

17. If your significant other won't listen to your piece all the way through it doesn't mean that he/she is not right for you.

18. Read "Noise" by Jaques Attali

19. Read "The Rest is Noise" by Alex Ross

20. Music bloggers have a disturbing appetite for live and recorded music, and you shouldn't feel like you have to keep up. In fact, just don't read them unless you really like the feeling it gives you.

21. Go to the library sometimes.

22. Listen to the city.

23. Take a walk.

24. Eat local vegetables.

25. Consider the semiotics/social impact/evolution/formal structures/psychological effects of recording technology.

26.Try to imagine that sonic art (music) is the non-linguistic expression (explanation) of an infinitude of things that happened, are happening, and that will happen.

27. Grant yourself permission to write the future of humanity's organizational efforts in all areas.

28. Work with the assumption that your music has a massive capacity to achieve transformative results.

29. Consider quantity over quality.

30. Allow yourself to keep everything and forget everything.

31. If you want to say "I hate music and I'm going to do something else" just say it.

32. If you went to a conservatory it doesn't mean that you are letting someone down if you:
a. Don't notate your music.
b. Do something different entirely
c. Put down the instrument you practiced for your entire life and only play an instrument you barely know how to play.
d. Never practice.
e. Have a healthy skepticism (disrespect) for all the crap you learned in conservatory.

33. If you didn't go to a conservatory you don't need to "go back to school" and refer to 9.

34. If you are currently in a conservatory don't take yourself so seriously, remember that you are learning inside a specific institutional dynamic (point of view), and refer to 9.

35. Specify failure. Generalize success.

36. All rejected applications are valuable gifts, the summed value of which will purchase tremendous acceptance in the future.

37. When you don't get the grant you will doubt yourself. When you get the grant you will be proud of yourself and then doubt yourself. All of that is fine.

38. Be wary of out dated and newly minted sonic and musical moralities.

39. Be wary of composers and teachers trash talking "Pop Music" if they aren't referring to specific artists or musical currents. It's entirely possible that they don't know what they are talking about.

40. Be wary of the cult of the "new."

41. Be cautious fixating on new technologies just because they are new. Consider letting your musical imagination guide you to the technology that will aid in the realization of the imagined sounds.

42. Think about what caveman music might have sounded like, and what purpose it might have served.

43. Send your music to your middle school music teacher. I bet he/she will be really happy you did.

44. Make more music. We need it.


I wrote this piece in response to Annie Gosfield's Article for the New York Times website entitled "Advice for Young Composers."

Digital Artifact




My Proposals for the Future of Sounds were published in Digital Artifact Magazine Issue 3: We Made This For You Out Of Nothing.

The proposals were originally posted on the blog HERE.

Artichoke Perfume

So I labored all summer producing Zoe Boekbinder's debut solo album. It was really an interesting journey and ultimately a really great time. Zoe is a very talented individual and has a formidable career ahead of her. I was sufficiently happy to get my fingerprints all over her first solo effort. I contributed lyrics some of the songs and Typewriter Girl is a song I wrote for Zoe in 2007.

Here are a couple mp3s:
Paralyzing [mp3]
Typewriter Girl [mp3]

Order/Download the album HERE.

Artichoke Perfume by Zoe Boekbinder

All Songs written by Zoe Boekbinder with César Alvarez
except December, Mean, and Going Home written by Zoe Boekbinder
and Typewriter Girl written by César Alvarez

Produced, Engineered, and Mixed by César Alvarez
Mastered by Myles Boisen
Assistant Mixing Engineer - Mike Williams

Peter Evans - Trumpet
Sam Kulik - Trombone
Kyle Forester - Organ, Piano and Keyboards, Acoustic Guitar on Skeletons
Elias Orling - Bass
Eric Farber - Drumset and Objects
Kim Boekbinder - Background Vocals on Inexorably
César Alvarez- Tambourine (December, Typewriter Girl), Guitar (Adventures of Turtle and Seahorse), Organ (Typewriter Girl), Background Vocals (Inexorably)

Tasks

Why not re-structure and more closely examine various philosophical and linguistic approaches to sound. Below are a set of incomplete tasks and unanswered questions that might arise in relation to that re-structuring:

1. Examine the ways of hearing.
2. Discover rhythm (and secondarily melody) as sources of mimetic/empathetic experience. These musical elements engage the most primal ways of learning and interacting: imitation.
3. Take responsibility for the implications of performance. What is worth rejecting and protecting about a concert experience? Is musical performance necessarily indoctrination?
4. Admit to persona. Decide on (create) its meaning.
5. In musical contexts, explore the distinguishing qualities of prose, dialogue, narration, poetry, and lyrics.
6. Re-examine the word “experimental.” What status quo does it imply? What status quo can the idea of “experimentation” engender?
7. To what extent has inherited (evolved) neural “wiring” pre-determined a relationship to sound? In music, does the familiar only validate or does it create space for transformation?
8. In what ways do the digital music “revolution” de- and re-commodify music? How is the composer implicated? How does the role of composer transform?
9. Where does unamplified acoustic sound stand in relation to:

• Networked culture
• Simulated (virtual) experience
• Cellular and video communication
• mp3 (musical) culture
• Nano-technology
• Space travel

10. Examine the “processing” that happens to sound through every channel:

• amplification
• pirating
• distribution
• documentation
• studio production
• mixing
• mastering
• sharing
• marketing
• performance
• verbal/written critique
• repeated listening
• podcasts/radio/downloads
• co-opting
• sampling
• scoring/transcribing/arranging

A Machine That Creates Peace


Dear Friends,

The run of FUTURITY that is ending this weekend has been a really major development for my band and for me as an artist. The experience of collaborating with so many wonderful performers, designers, directors, and talented people has been an unbelievable blessing that has brought forth a really original piece of performance.

I came up with the idea for a musical about a a Civil War soldier that wants to be a science fiction writer almost two years ago. The piece started out as a goofy idea for The Lisps and has turned into a 70 minute play with 15 songs and a Cast & Crew of 18 people.

FUTURITY, at is core, is a piece about war and imagination. It's about the simultaneous human drive towards both destruction and phenomenal acts of creativity. FUTURITY is about the malleability of the past and the future. It's about the way in which a feverish drive towards innovation is what keeps us alive and what can aid in our self-destruction

I've thought for a long time that music is the opposite of war. Though I realize that music is so often used to promote war, the origins of music are in the human attempt to organize chaos (noise). Music is one of the earliest forms of civilization, and it possesses within it all the same potential for chaos and disharmony that society does.

I've tried to create a piece that speaks to the way in which I've learned to understand my life as an artist. Being a musician may sometimes feel like an exercise in futility but I know that at a fundamental level we are creating a proposal for society. A proposal for the way in which things might be organized with an eye towards community, compassion and creativity. I like to think of music as a form of Utopianism. For me, Music is science fiction.

I hope that you'll come see this piece not because you feel obligated but because we have put forth so much effort to create a piece that speaks to these ideals. We are telling the story of creativity and conflict in a time that needs so much of the former and has so much of the latter.

I hope to see you there.

Love, César

FUTURITY: A Musical by The Lisps
2 More Shows at Joe's Pub
Friday May 22 8pm
Sunday May 24th 7:30pm

www.futuritythemusical.com

Buy Tickets Here

FUTURITY
A Musical by The Lisps

4 shows at Joe's Pub in May
May 9, 16, 22, 24, 2009

Buy your tickets HERE
and visit www.futuritythemusical.com

Part of an Essay by Ada Lovelace

Tuesday, 5 January 1841

...What is Imagination? We talk much of Imagination. We talk of Imagination of Poets, the Imagination of Artists &c; I am inclined to think that in general we don't know very exactly what we are talking about. Imagination I think especially two fold.

First: it is the Combining Faculty. It brings together things, facts, ideas, conceptions, in new, original, endless, ever varying, Combinations. It seizes points in common, between subjects having no very apparent connexion, & hence seldom or never brought into juxtaposition.

Secondly: It conceives & brings into mental presences that which is far away, or invisible, or which in short does not exist within our physical & conscious cognizance. Hence is it especially the religious faculty; the ground-work of Faith. It is a God-like, a noble faculty. It renders earth tolerable (at least should do so); it teaches us to live, in the tone of the eternal.

Imagination is the Discovering Faculty, pre-eminently. It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science. It is that which feels & discovers what is, the real which we see not, which exists not for our senses. Those who have learned to walk on the threshold of the unknown worlds, by means of what are commonly termed par excellence the exact sciences, may then with the fair white wings of Imagination hope to soar further into the unexplored amidst which we live.


Mathematical Science shows what is. It is the language of the unseen relations between things. But to use & apply that language we must be able fully to appreciate, o feel, to seize, the unseen, the unconscious. Imagination too shows what is, the is that is beyond the senses. Hence she is or should be especially cultivated by the truly Scientific, -those who wish to enter into the worlds around us!

Excerpted from Ada: The Enchantress of Numbers by Betty Alexandra Toole

FUTURITY
A Musical by The Lisps

January 9th and 10th at the Zipper Factory in Manhattan.



Buy TIX
FUTURITYTHEMUSICAL.COM

The Lisps on Myspace
The Lisps on Facebook
The Lisps dot Com

Dear Sarah Palin,

Thanks for reigniting a culture war. Thanks for turning this presidential contest into a spiraling race to the bottom. Thanks for lying to the American people over and over and over. Thanks for showing us that you don't care if it's a lie as long as it serves your purpose. Thanks for being demeaning and sarcastic, and setting a new tone of vindictiveness. Thanks for refusing to take questions from the media or voters for nearly two weeks after your nomination. Thanks for lying about your record on energy. Thanks for lying 27 times (and counting) about your record on the "Bridge to Nowhere." Thanks for lying about your record on earmarks. Thanks for putting out a press release about your daughter's pregnancy and then calling the press sexist when they cover the release. Thanks for degrading community organizers who are some of the hardest working and most selfless people in our country. Thanks for degrading Habeus Corpus, which is one of the most sacred pillars of our democracy. Thanks for completely ignoring and effectively denouncing the idea of the separation of Church and State, which is another pillar of our democracy. Thanks for opportunistically praising Hillary Clinton while cynically denouncing nearly everything she has spent her life working for. Thanks for claiming that "God" wanted you to build a gas pipeline. Thanks for saying that the war in Iraq is "God's work," and invoking the specter of religious violence and holy war. Thanks for plunging Wasilla into millions of dollars of debt and raising the sales tax (which is one of the most regressive taxes there is). Thanks for firing people that don't agree with you and abusing your power as Governor. Thanks for going along with a whole slew of smears and attack ads (many of which are filled with blatant lies). Thanks for lying about selling your state's plane on Ebay and then billing the state for $93,000 in airfare during 2007 for you and your family to fly. Thanks for billing the State for your travel per diem while you were at home in Wasilla more than 30 times. Thanks for lying about Obama's authorship of legislation. Thanks for opposing major legislation for health care, education, and seniors. Thanks for slashing funding for Passage House, which is a transitional home for teenage mothers.

Thanks for offering to change Washington, but I think that what you're offering looks much worse than what George W. Bush has already done.

Thanks, but no thanks.

If we want change in America we'll build it ourselves.

Sincerely, César

Donate to Barack Obama and Vote on November 4th!
Please Forward.

Dog Under Porch


Dog Under Porch is an anthology of work from members and friends of the Bard College MFA community. It was published by Little Socks Press 2008

Download it HERE.

It features work by:

Dorothy Albertini
Cesar Alvarez
Alisa Baremboym
Sylvie Baumgartel
Anselm Berrigan
Linh Dinh
Cecilia Dougherty
Amit Dwibedy
Corrine Fitzpatrick
Marley Freeman
Lucas Geronimas
Jeremy Hoevenaar
David Horvitz
Julia Klein
Ann Lauterbach
Jeanne Liotta
Joshua Lovelace
Alfredo Marin
Anna Moschovakis
Laura Neuman
Brett Price
George Raggett
Isabel Sobral
Chris Stackhouse
Ann Stephenson
David Levi Strauss
Deirtra Thompson
Stephan Westfall
Matveii Yankelevich


Untitled by Alfredo Marin



One Small Step for a Man by Jeanne Liotta


No title. No author.

Dystopia Watch



The remote stun bracelets in this gizmodo post are exactly like what Octavia Butler describes in her book Parable of the Talents. In the novel "collars" are used to enable modern day slavers to subjugate their victims. The slavers are able to remotely "lash" their victims and inflict brutal pain. Very creepy.

Audio Surveillance
and the Phono-Centric Fabulousness of Tom Levin

photo cred

1. "Audio-Surveillance in Narrative Film manifests as a narrative excess"
Which as I understand it means that the depiction of surveillance in film, creates a network of possibilities for the viewer/characters. The collection, storing, manipulation, use, misuse, and erasure of the collected data becomes an undepicted but revlevant "excess."

2. Listening as Menace.

3. The sound of rewinding = "The materiality of the signifier"

4. Though the representation of digital is not phenomenally accessible (we can't perceive the media with our senses) , "I insist on the materiality of the digital" ( and it's nearly impossible to get rid of).

5. Error conditions specific to transcriptions are harnessed to signify specificity of new media. (We have such a bright future of errors and artifacts)

6. "A sign is any thing that can be used to lie." - Umberto Eco

7. Tom views himself a working for the "Production of surveillant literacy"

8. Shape Your Data Shadow

9. I'm watched therefore I am.

10. A short history of voicemail.

Notes for a Talk on Technological Singularity

1. On Wikipedia: "The technological singularity is a theoretical point in the future of unprecedented technological progress, caused in part by the ability of machines to improve themselves using artificial intelligence."

"Statistician I. J. Good first wrote of an 'intelligence explosion', suggesting that if machines could even slightly surpass human intellect, they could improve their own designs in ways unseen by their designers, and thus recursively augment themselves into far greater intelligences. The first such improvements might be small, but as the machine became more intelligent it would become better at becoming more intelligent, which could lead to an exponential and quite sudden growth in intelligence."

2. If you are unfamiliar with the idea of technological singularity check out this video on ted.com by Ray Kurzweil. And this series of articles at IEEE Spectrum for a more mediated set of views.

3. Inventor, Scientist, Dietary Supplement fanatic Ray Kurzweil is the tech singularity's most feverish advocate. He works to extend his own life in order that he might live to the days of medical immortality (probably before 2040 in his view). And he's got a cryogenic account lined up if that doesn't work out.

4. While learning about The Singularity from Kurzweil is a little like learning about Jesus from an Evangelist, (maybe it's the eternal life fixation) he seriously knows his stuff. He has spent a lot of his resources trying to prove his idea of the exponential technological evolution/growth that has been happening since we were solitary proteins floating in a primordial goo.

5. The main criticism for "Singulatarians" as they call themselves seems to be that they are unabashed techno-optimists. And that they don't focus on the dangers of what they propose, but only the virtual and cybernetic joys. Also that it ignores the complexity of nature's engineering feat. V.S. Ramachandran says “God is a hacker, not an engineer," and you can't reverse engineer a hacker. Also there is the unresolved question of consciousness. The most cited rebuttal to the idea of a Tech Singularity is Jaron Lanier's One Half Manifesto from Wired Magazine, though it's 8 years old now. This is how he articulates framework, which is in his view all wrong, of the Singulatarians who he calls "Cyber-Totalists":

a. Cybernetic patterns of information provide the ultimate and best way to understand reality.
b. People are no more than cybernetic patterns.
c. Subjective experience either doesn't exist, or is unimportant because it is some sort of ambient or peripheral effect.
d. What Darwin described in biology, or something like it, is in fact also the singular, superior description of all creativity and culture.
e. Qualitative as well as quantitative aspects of information systems will be inexorably accelerated by Moore's law.

6. Nano Technology is key. Cybernetics. Turing test. Dumb Software. Wetware?

7. Man this gets confusing.

8. I have a hard time not seeing Kurzweil's point. And though a million science fiction authors have warned us about the possibility of self-replicating, self-improving, and self-aware AI Kurzweil seems to have a very pure optimism.

9. One thing is for sure though, nobody is going to stop the exponential pace of technological advancement, and AI is going to be at the center of the great ethical debate of the 21st century.
According to Kurzweil's pretty compelling speculation robots will be as smart as humans AND self-replicating before I get the senior citizen discount at the movies.

10. What is the relationship between the development of AI and human evolution? I think in a twisted way they are fundamentally the same. Humans took evolution into our own hands with the first rock we used to crack a nut. Not to mention when we started fires and made wheels, invented languages, writing, and machines. All of these are clearly an external evolution that has been exponentially advancing since the beginning.

11. I find the difference between an iPhone and a computer installed in your body or clothing very minuscule.

12. I have to admit I'm guiltily looking forward to full-immersion brain-based virtual reality.

13. Uploaded skills, language and consciousness will be handy.

14. It's when they air around us becomes materialized intelligence that starts expanding out into the universe, colonizing space. That's when my understanding breaks down. My friends say the air already is intelligence. Ok, but this is going to be different.

15. Reminds me of the dictum from Octavia Butler's Parable of the Talent's: "And the Destiny of Earthseed, Is to take root among the stars."

16. We may not be long for this world but not in the way Al Gore thinks.