• a focaccia bread recipe (small pdf)

• a recipe for tofu in coconut sauce (small pdf)

• Sting talks on music & silence at his Berklee School of Music commencement address

• Brian Eno & The Long Now Foundation - lectures on long-term planning: 10.000 years & beyond

• 500 Years of Women in Western Art and here is an animated version of the same images.

• Osho on the art of listening

• Pat Metheny: an interview in Berklee Today

• Songwriter's quotes

• The smile and vibrato of the human singing voice

• Music quotations

• Edward Burtynsky's photographic works are outstanding. His photographs of quarries are particularly interesting. Burtynsky went to Carrara in Italy, the quarry where the marble for Michelangelo's David came from. These places have a deep history.

• Cellist Jacqueline Du Pré in action (photos) + a documentary of her life (youtube video)

• We are addicted to stuff. See Annie Leonard's creative video The Story of Stuff. Also see: The Story of Cap and Trade.

• Storm Thorgerson, designer of the Pink Floyd album covers

• CD Baby founder Derek Silvers' address at the Berklee College of Music

• String Fever - 4 men playing the Bolero, on one cello (youtube video)

• Steve Jobs' Stanford commencement address where he speaks on being fired from the company he founded (Apple), and on love and death

• The Paradox of our Age - a quote by the 14th Dalai Lama

• Marilyn Manson quotes

• Interview with Ma Yoga Vivek (profound)

• How to Peel Hard-boiled Eggs w/o Peeling (short youtube video)

• Homer Simpson tries to vote for Obama in the '08 election...

• The enlightened mystic J. Krishnamurti talks with children in 1984. He says: "Find your talent and stick with it" and, amongst many things, talks about the source of corruption. Many wonderful interactions with these children, who ask him questions to which he responds with great strength and tenderness.(youtube)

• Osho talks about "The Compulsion to Reach Power and Prestige" (youtube)

• The Zen Garden - A demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS-based web design.

• Obama can dance (youtube)

• Bretton Woods - a global economic summit held in July 1944 to reverse some of the painful trade and foreign exchange policies enacted in the wake of the Great Depression. (Wikipedia)

• Social Objects and Malinowski's "Kula".

• Swami Deva Amrito (Jan Foudraine) comments on the ten commandments in a newspaper article in 'De Trouw': "There's only one commandment: Awake!" (article is in Dutch)

• Dutch psychiatrist and Osho disciple Deva Amrito (Jan Foudraine) talks about his life and work and the aftermath of his best-selling book 'Not Made of Wood' in this keynote to the University of Sheffield, U.K.

• Biomimicry: 12 sustainable design ideas from nature by Janine Benyus (youtube)

• Building a home for the Clock of the Long Now - Stewart Brand (TED talk)

• Biotech / GMO: pro vs con: Drew Endy vs Jim Thomas - Synthetic Biology Debate
"Endy asked Thomas if it’s okay to make anything in a bioreactor vat? Thomas said, “Yes, beer.”

• Women & Meditation - True Feminine Power by Ambu

• Amrit Sadhana's blog, sharing her articles published in varous major newspapers of India. These articles are based on the OSHO vision.

• Cello maker Douglas Cox in conversation with Eugen Friesen.

• A Bill of Musical Rights - More musical power to the people! Playing music in the parlour is coming back!

• The Sister Project - "Don't you have something to say to your sister?"
A network of blogs about the many facets of the word sister, and the concept of sisterhood.

• Vote for music! Music and arts are fundamental to the wiring of the human brain.

• Amanda Palmer: "A perfect song, to me, is a captured moment of inspiration barely touched. When a good idea hits, it's as if I've thrown a set of colored juggling balls in the air and taken a blurred (yet beautiful) photograph."
"...creativity isn't necessarily an obstacle to meditation but, rather, its fruit." more

• I love the World of Wearable Art, extraordinarily creative garments.

• From an interview with cellist David Darling:

Darling is quick to emphasize, especially to classically trained musicians, that they don't have to become jazz players in order to improvise.

"At all my concerts, I play a rhapsody for cello, and it's always made up on the spot. But it has the textures and timbres of Bloch's Schelomo and the Dvorak Cello Concerto, and Sain-Saens, Shostakovich, and Bartok."

Darling says one of his tasks is to help classical musicians overcome their skepticism and believe that they can play music that's not printed,

"...to have the guts to walk onstage wih nothing prepared. It's just amazing to me that you have someone who's trained themselves for years and years, they have scales down, they have thirds down, they know 13 modes, and if you ask them to play something, they say 'no, I can't, I didn't bring any music.' Well that's just absurd. Music should be something that isn't served just by the notes, it should be somethig that's about the human condition of expressing oneself through notes."

-- Reprinted from Strings #34, by Joshua Rosebaum

• Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the book 'Eat, Pray, Love', talks about the creative spark and the pitfalls of creative success.
In Greek and Roman times artists were visited by a genius - their artistic achievements were largely attibuted to a force outside themselves. Only during the renaisance, when the artist's ego moved to center stage, were artists referred to as geniuses (as apposed to 'being visited by a genius').
Watch Elizabeth's inspired TED video (20 minutes).

• I love the Buzz Feiten Intonation Sysytem on my Martin guitar, explained here.

• Guitarists: cool way to tune a guitar by ear.

• New age master musician Deuter in the studio.

• Frank J. Sulloway talks about his book "Born to Rebel" about the impact of birth order and family niches on personality and by extension on history.
He's a science historian who has applied Charles Darwin's evolutionary principles to the research of personality development, through a statistical research project that took 26 years to complete. His website here and his wikipedia page here.
A Time Magazine article on birth order here.

Frank J. Sulloway talks to Charlie Rose.

• Atlas Obscura -The world is an amazing place. A crowd-sourced, yet curated collection of the world's most wondrous treasures.

• Margot Anand talks about her most powerful teacher (Osho) and common misconceptions surrounding Tantra - an in-depth interview.

• The most important thing in a piece of music is to seduce people to the point where they start searching.
If the music doesn't do that, it doesn't do anything. If it just presents itself and just sits there, if it either declares itself too clearly or is too obscure to even appear to be saying anything, then it seems to me to have failed.
Sitting on that line is very interesting.

Brian Eno

• “Lyrics are best when they’re mysterious - like listening in to someone else’s phone conversation when the telephone wires have crossed. You don’t know the history or context. You don’t understand the references. So it draws you in even deeper, trying to understand.

If you’re too obvious and explain everything in your lyrics, you don’t get that mystery. So what I do is this:
Write out everything I’m thinking, everything I want to say, but then cross out every other line, and write the song using only what’s left, even though it doesn’t make total sense.”

Keith Richards

• Jokes

• Database of tonewoods for guitar building.

• Clay Shirky on the changing media landscape.
Excerpt: "When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to."
There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie. "

• Einstein Letter: Belief In God "Childish," Jews Not Chosen People.

• Hugh MacLeod's "How To Be Creative - Ignore Everybody".

• Emily in Japan. This movie is about ace aboriginal painter Emily Kame Kngwarreye's exhibition in Tokyo & Osaka.
Emily's art is a total expression of human depth and soul.
Pablo Picasso said: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child”
You can see a few shots of Emily holding the brush, painting with complete flow, with confident AND innocence.
The Japanese recognize her mastery and are able to place it in the light of their own art of calligraphy and of effortless effort.
It's wonderful to see three cultures, Aboriginal, Australian / European and Japanese collaborating on this exhibition.
In the movie the Japanese curator says something like: 'We will never be able to understand the aboriginal culture, but we can enjoy it's expression'. Released by Rodin Films.

• Quotes by Albert Einstein. "I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity".

• "The reason art excists is to stop time, the reason music exists is to charge moments with so much emotional and aesthetic content that you have to notice them." - David Gelernter.