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  • My attitude towards my time as a musician, is that I really wanted to completely reinvent myself and not be one of these people who, twenty, thirty years later, is trying to recreate something that happened. I'm glad that Neil Young still makes records, but I don't know that everybody needs to be frozen in time forever. I think it's good that pop music is ephemeral.

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My attitude towards my time as a musician, is that I really wanted to completely reinvent myself and not be one of these people who, twenty, thirty years later, is trying to recreate something that happened. I'm glad that Neil Young still makes records, but I don't know that everybody needs to be frozen in time forever. I think it's good that pop music is ephemeral.

Expression is never considered a given, and it is in fact maybe not what's most interesting about making art. Making art, since 1960 or something, is many things: it's a way of doing philosophy, it's a way of opening a dialogue, it's a way of putting a fact or a question out into the world, or a way of drawing people into new relationships, or a way of interrogating history. It's all these other sorts of strategies or techniques or processes that are really interesting and really valuable.
We can have intellectual individualism and the rich cultural diversities that we owe to exceptional minds only at the price of occasional eccentricity and abnormal attitudes. When they are so harmless to others or to the State as those we deal with here, the prices is not too great. But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.
The Zen meditative approach has a simple, unstated premise: moods and attitudes shape—determine—what we think and perceive. If we feel happy, we tend to develop certain trains of thought. If we feel sad or angry, still others. But suppose, with training, we become nonattached to distractions and learn to dampen these wild, emotional swings on either side of equanimity. Then we can enter that serene awareness which is the natural soil for positive, spontaneous personal growth, often called spiritual growth.

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