Thursday – Sharing

02007-02-16 | Computer, Copyright, Musings, New Mexico, Reading, Recording, Santa Fe, Technology

More snow last night. About 2-3 inches. The sun is out and makes it all sparkle. As I turn around a corner I see the mountains, covered in fresh and blinding white snow.

More thoughts on sharing and DRM:
Sharing is a very important, maybe the most important way to create culture. You can share books by lending ones you really like to your friends. That’s how knowledge spreads. You find a book you love, one I have never heard of, or maybe one I have passed on because I don’t like the cover or the author or the theme, and you lend it to me and I read it because I want to see what it is you like about it… and maybe I’ll love it, too. Maybe I’ll buy another copy to give or lend to another friend.

We can do the same thing with music. Even before copying CDs became a possibility there was the exchange of CDs. I’ll borrow these two and lend you these.

I think it is typical of our present-day culture that we are trying to eliminate that most basic element of culture: sharing information, sharing beauty, sharing a different POV. By adding DRM to files – presently that means music, but movies are starting to be downloaded regularly and once there is a reader that doesn’t look and feel like crap books will be downloaded as well – we are eliminating sharing. You won’t lend me your reader, because then you would not be able to read other books, and I am not going to camp out in your house so I can use your reader when you don’t…

We need to educate: it is OK to copy a few songs, even a whole album for your friend, or several friends – but it is most certainly not OK to make that music album or book available to all on the internet. That is not sharing – that is indiscriminately giving something away and most certainly piracy. We need to teach people the difference between sharing culture, which is of supreme importance and adds value – and piracy, which subtracts value and affects the livelihood of the author.

In the afternoon Genpo Roshi asks me for a brief blurb for his upcoming book Big Mind/Big Heart: Finding Your Way. I suggest:

The new book by Genpo Roshi is the missing manual for human living. Every human should receive it at birth.

Without Walls

02007-01-31 | Nature, New Mexico, News, Santa Fe

Without Walls
Powell believes the increased abuse he’s seen is linked to the growing isolation people have from the natural world. “When people are so disconnected from the natural world, the ability to empathize with anything outside their own epidermis becomes very, very small,” he says. “For me, this raised a very red flag. It said that we are doing ourselves a great deal of harm”.

Great article in the Santa Fe Reporter on teaching kids outside, in Nature – the big classroom without walls. Also see Environmental Education Association of New Mexico.

Another quote from the article:

The stream and the pond were my childhood companions, they were a playground, they were books and television, they were the mirrors of a gangly and contemplative Narcissus. In the splashings of any pool there is whatever one will need to see: the dream of everything, the nightmare of nothing, clouds and stars, a self.
— Stanley Crawford, A Garlic Testament: Seasons on Small New Mexico Farm

Diablo Canyon

02005-01-15 | Guitar, New Mexico, Photos


Early, early morning in Diablo Canyon. A fire and a thrift shop guitar. One of a great series of photos by Ashkan Sahihi for the German magazine Die Zeit in 1995. This is how Ashkan and I met. I loved his work and later asked him to do the photography for Opium.

It was very strange to throw a guitar in the air for the Euphoria artwork and then burn a guitar for this photo. After knowing only to protecting guitars at all costs, it felt strange but also liberating to destroy a couple.