He wasn’t just a great composer; he was a one-man cultural institution. At age 20 in 1829 he conducted the first performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion since Bach’s death, basically rescuing that name from obscurity and kicking off the Bach revival that defines to this day how we hear German classical composers. He alone, taking personal risk, championed other composers to make them more popular. He founded the Leipzig Conservatory. And his sister would have been world renowned as well, except for the misogyny. Europe’s leaders enjoyed her as a musical star while refusing to credit her. All of this, the entire authentic German history of classical music, then brutally was destroyed by that shithead antisemitic Wagner and even worse Orff.
Pfitzner, Egk, Müller all refused the Nazi commission to erase Mendelssohn; Richard Strauss had disdain for the project, and even the Nazi critic Fritz Stege wrote that Mendelssohn’s music belongs and it honors no arranger to touch it. Orff took it anyway. He was worse than any Nazi fanatic, the opportunist who took Hitler’s erasure commission when even all the committed Nazis wouldn’t touch it.
“I’m on Mythos” reminds me of the proud Google Wave announcements.
There is no “inside” to Internet protocols such as SMTP
People who love how a velvet rope now runs around their sense of self, are stumbling towards an old philosophical landmine.
Since at least the 1700s, thanks to Hume, humans contemplated when a mirror has no source image it will reflect whatever stands in front of it. The aspiration of an empty person operates as a mirror, such that to stand in front of a VC-fueled speculative software velvet rope makes a user proud to reflect that rope as their existence.
Anthropic built Mythos as Rousseau built Sophie, to be valued through the eyes of others, and called it education. Wollstonecraft turned that education into a verdict against the source:
Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
Now that Wave failed, has Mythos become your prison yet for adornment?
One of America’s “leading contemporary poets” passed away in 1941 on May 19. Her name was Lola Ridge.
When you tell mama
You are going to do something great
She looks at you
As though you were a window
She were trying to see through,
And say she hopes you will be good
Instead of great.
I haven’t laughed so hard in ages. A message just appeared that said Anthropic is having an “Ottenheimer” moment, when they thought that they were supposed to be having their “Oppenheimer” moment. ROFL. Sorry, sorry. Didn’t mean to be the wrong guy, and throw cold water on your hot march towards global annihilation.
“I am become depth, the destroyer of words“.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
