The They presents a body whose head has been replaced by a crumpled wad of newsprint – the entire Sunday edition of a major national daily rammed into the hole. In this displacement, one – along with Nietzsche – might recognize the triumph of the herd. Rendered in concrete, the body suggests the possibility of an individual form: something solid, particular, and capable of standing apart. Yet where we expect the site of consciousness, there yellows only the borrowed clamor of others. The newspaper becomes the visible form of inherited judgment – the opinions, values, moralities, and fashionable convictions that circulate through a culture and come to be experienced not as something imposed from outside, but as one's own thought.

For Nietzsche, the danger of the herd is not simply that it settles on consensus. It is that the individual abandons the necessity of creating, testing, and overcoming their own values. This parody of a head therefore suggests a consciousness that has surrendered the task of self-formation. It is full, but not necessarily alive; informed, but not necessarily thinking. Its contents arrive already pre‑chewed, digested and regurgitated. The crumpling of the pages intensifies the image: thought has become a mass of received fragments, compressed together until individual propositions can no longer be distinguished from one another.

The most revealing feature of the figure is not that it has lost its head, but that its head has been replaced by language, a copy. Where there should be an individual consciousness, there is a dumpster of printed chatter: public statements, judgments, events, opinions, and descriptions of the world. Heidegger's concept of das Man, the They, provides a particularly unsettling way of understanding this swap. In everyday existence, we rarely begin from an entirely private position. We speak as They speak, judge as They judge, desire what They desire. The newspaper is therefore not simply something one reads. It is the material form of the mighty anonymous They through which the world has already been interpreted.

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There are buildings that have been designed, and buildings that seem to have been conjured. The Reethaus belongs to the second kind. There is something almost déjà vu in its presence, as though one had encountered this house before – somewhere in the half-remembered landscape of childhood dreams.

Its massive, reed‑roof pyramid evokes the warmth of a nest, the intimacy of a hut, and the safety of a shelter in its foundation. It stands as a structure comprising both sides of cultural life: a cradle for new ideas, a room for their nurturing, and a fortress for preserving their legacy.

Its geometry is simple, almost excessive in its simplicity: a structure gathered toward itself. The lines do not seem to reach outward in a gesture of conquest or expansion; they fold back toward a centre, as though the building were quietly embracing itself. Walls and roof pull together, concentrating space rather than dispersing it. It’s the kind of architecture that does not announce itself to the landscape so much as withdraws from it, producing a sense of containment.

In its peculiar architectural inwardness, the house recovers one of its oldest phenomenological powers. It does shelter us from rain, wind, or the indifferent weather of the outside world. But most importantly it offers a sanctuary to something less tangible and perhaps more easily endangered: the dreaming self.

Here the house becomes a vessel not only for the body but for memory, reverie, fantasy, and private thought. It gives the psyche somewhere to go. It gives far more than physical comfort. It provides a medium for psychological depth. It becomes a place in which the imagination can feel itself enclosed enough to unfold.

To enter the Reethaus is therefore not merely to enter a building. It is to move, almost imperceptibly, from one state of being into another.

The movement downward is the first indication of this transformation. To descend into the chamber is to enter another intimacy. Going down has always carried a certain ritual weight: the crypt, the cellar, the cave, the sanctuary. The body understands before the mind does that something is being left behind. The surface world recedes with each step, and with it the noise, urgency, connectivity, and small tyrannies of ordinary attention.

This is not simply a change of level. It is a change of consciousness. Architecture becomes a medium of psychological transition, transporting us from the outer world toward an inner one. The chamber offers a different kind of closeness – not intimacy with other people so much, as intimacy with silence, enclosure, material, and ultimately with oneself.

At the threshold, the telephone is surrendered. The gesture is almost absurdly simple, and precisely for that reason it carries the charge of an initiation rite. To put the telephone away is to renounce, for a while, the innumerable threads by which the exterior world keeps hold of us. The device that ordinarily extends the self endlessly outward – toward messages, obligations, news, requests, images, interruptions – is deliberately silenced. Connectivity is exchanged for presence. Without the possibility of being elsewhere, one begins to inhabit where one is – a private territory in which attention is allowed to gather again around itself.

The movement downward is the first indication of this transformation. To descend into the chamber is to enter another intimacy. Going down has always carried a certain ritual weight: the crypt, the cellar, the cave, the sanctuary. The body understands before the mind does that something is being left behind. The surface world recedes with each step, and with it the noise, urgency, connectivity, and small tyrannies of ordinary attention.

This is not simply a change of level. It is a change of consciousness. Architecture becomes a medium of psychological transition, transporting us from the outer world toward an inner one. The chamber offers a different kind of closeness – not intimacy with other people so much, as intimacy with silence, enclosure, material, and ultimately with oneself.

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The modern human is, by almost any metric you care to measure, utterly overstimulated and profoundly bored. We sit bathed in the blue, antiseptic glow of screens, scrolling through algorithmic sludge designed precisely to elicit the lowest common denominator twitch. It is what the sociologists – those dry, necessary mechanics of our cultural malaise – call alienated leisure. You know the feeling: partaking in a pastime not because it elevates, but because it fills the void between work and sleep. It is the digital equivalent of eating sawdust because your jaws need something to do.

Meanwhile, the culture industry treats art not as a lightning rod for the soul, but as a derivative commodity. Music, in particular, has been ruthlessly homogenized. Market-tested hit-making protocols have flattened the sonic landscape into a relentless, predictable thump. The mass consumer, apprehensive of anything extraordinarily otherworldly, gets fed a steady diet of rigid compositional sameness, modulated with just enough micro-variations to sell it as novelty. We are playing tennis with the net down. It is easy, it is accessible, and it leaves the mind completely unrefined and perpetually unsatisfied.

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In the mid-2000s, Thomas Haferlach – a man fleeing the sterile, air-conditioned oblivion of Scottish robotics – alighted in São Paulo on the frail wing of a friend’s casual invitation, only to find himself swallowed whole by the city’s colossal, violent vitality. By 2009, this accidental exile found his sanctuary at Bar do Netão, a battered drinking shop on Rua Augusta.

Augusta was a sulfurous strip of neon, nocturnal grit, and urban neurosis, but inside Netão’s, among the sweat and low-grade cachaça, a quiet asylum took shape. It didn't begin with a manifesto or a master plan; it began as an unscripted, organic infection of sound. Thomas dropped a track into the damp air; the next night, a friend played another. There were no velvet ropes, no extortionate door charges, no bouncers executing tiny authoritarian triumphs. People drifted in, inhaled the music, and drifted out into the Paulistano night, bound only by a sudden, collective refusal of the commodified, pay-to-breathe mechanics of traditional nightlife.

Before long, the claustrophobia of the bar could no longer contain the swollen ranks of the converted. Voodoohop ceased to be a mere evening out and morphed into an aggressive act of spatial liberation. They spilled into the city's forgotten organs: asphalt parking lots, rotting industrial shells, echoing cemetery squares, and the brutalist concrete rib of the Minhocão.

By the dawn of the decade, the collective had mutated into a full-scale cultural force, driving a radical repositioning of the city’s nocturnal DNA. The music had expanded into a multidisciplinary circus – a sensory carnival where live painting, erratic VJ projections, uninhibited costumery, and theatrical performance dissolved the barrier between spectator and performer.

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In our digital era, there is always an easier – if not necessarily cheaper – way to perform self-expression. We are invited to do so via avatars in the metaverse, a shared, blockchain-based frontier populated by virtual establishments, including digital nightclubs. This realm is illuminated by corporate prophets promising to guide us through life's hurdles by eradicating everything that makes life real. Your avatar becomes your identity; its digital wardrobe defines your social standing. "When you have a piece of clothing, you can go to a party, you can dance, you can show off. It is a status symbol," Reuters reports, quoting a virtual fashion model who recently dropped $15,000 on wearable image files.

And yet – as a counter-survey reveals – there have never been quite so many clubbers over the age of 40 active on the real-world scene, in flesh and bone. Citing ticket sales, New Musical Express reports that nearly four million Britons over the age of 45 attend raves at least once a week. A staggering quarter of those surveyed responded that they rave far more frequently now than they ever did in their youth. Given that digital transaction data fails to capture cash entries and alternative access points, the actual numbers are likely significantly higher.

We are speaking, of course, of the pre-pandemic era – a time that still held coherent meaning and harbored genuine hope for the future.

To grasp the full amplitude of this demographic shift, one should look no further than Bernhard Enste – a legendary fixture of the Berlin nightworld. There is no further to look because Enste represents the absolute horizon of this paradigm. At age 76, he routinely shatters the conventional age boundaries of social choreography on a global scale. And his choreography is intensely physical.

Better known as Komet for his ecstatic dancing and radiant, glow-in-the-dark demeanor, Bernhard hails from a devout Catholic family in Mainz – a tranquil, picturesque town in western Germany. Nothing in that placid medieval locale, much less the pious atmosphere of his upbringing, heralded his late-life infatuation with frenetic techno at age 51, when he first arrived in post-Wall Berlin. In his youth, young Bernhard was earnestly preparing for life as a missionary to preach the Gospel abroad. Yet, as the saying goes, God works in mysterious ways.

Bald on top, wearing a shaggy white beard, a face furrowed with deep wrinkles, and a weathered frame, Bernhard’s physical attributes make it difficult to picture him in his youth. Yet he is infinitely more than the sum of his aging parts. These superficial markers fade instantly when he enters a space; Komet Bernhard is everyone's best hope for a life liberated from the age box. "I want to feel the vibrations!" he croaks at the top of his lungs, diving headfirst into the sea of bodies at Berghain – Berlin’s legendary techno cathedral, complete with its own deities, clergy, and acolytes. Bernhard insists he did not choose this life; this life chose him. In his own singular way, he remains a man very much on the Lord’s errand.

From New Sociology of Club Culture: One Times One
An Inquiry into the Demographic Shift on the Nightlife Circuit
Scorpios Encounters 2021
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Back in 2011–14, Papaya Playa Project felt like a secret experiment whispered into the jungle. The cabanas were rough‑hewn, hammocks swayed under palm roofs, and the parties spilled out under the moon with a kind of reckless innocence. It wasn’t about luxury so much as about community – artists, wanderers, and dreamers gathering in a place that still felt untouched, improvising nights of music and mornings of yoga, with the Caribbean as backdrop. There was a rawness to it, a sense that you were part of something fleeting and fragile, a pop‑up utopia that might vanish as suddenly as it appeared.

Today, the same shoreline hums with a different rhythm. For better or worse, the resort has grown into a polished eco‑luxury destination, where curated wellness programs, private pools, and fine dining coexist with the jungle’s preserved silence. The communal experiment has matured into a global brand, and while the spirit of sustainability and creativity still lingers, the atmosphere is more orchestrated – less about improvisation, more about experience.

The video captures the carefree energy that defined those days in Tulum. We’d load up a generator, toss in some gear and a crate of beers, and head down the road with friends to the far end of the beach. There wasn’t much in the way of logistics or planning – just the thrill of setting off together, improvising as we went. In short: good times!

English translations of Nietzsche are often atrocious – blunt, literal, and pedantically word-for-word. They read as if chopped out with a dull-edged axe, completely draining his prose of its poetic ambiguity and rhythmic fluency.

Faced with this linguistic vandalism, I had no choice but to take matters into my own hands. My greatest advantage? Not knowing a word of German.

It takes a certain kind of madness to translate a language you don't speak, but perhaps that is the only way to rescue a poet from the pedants.

* No one understands what I do, either.

I hold the view – expressed in my essay From Nonsense to the Dances of Transcendence and elsewhere – that club culture as we know it today, the very culture we nurture through our own projects, is a phenomenon that assumed its true form and sociocultural significance at the tail end of the 1980s.

Tracing its lineage beyond that horizon yields little real insight into the phenomenon itself, despite the endless, almost infinite threads of cultural influences and social preconditions one could pull. Barring a few groundbreaking exceptions in a handful of metropolitan back-alleys – such as David Mancuso’s The Loft in 1970s New York, with its legendary Love Saves the Day gatherings – modern club culture shares almost nothing with the nightclub life that preceded it.

Before that late-Eighties inflection point, the nightclub was anything but a "universe of potential spaces." It was not a zone of limitless interactive possibilities or playful experimentation, nor did it offer a temporary sanctuary from the competitive, confrontational pressures of everyday life. It did not exist to facilitate radically different, human-to-human encounters or to cultivate new, meaningful relationships outside established social hierarchies.

This distinction is not merely theoretical; it is informed directly by the testimonies of the culture’s earliest veterans – pioneer DJs who can speak from first-hand experience in terms of a true before and after – as well as the contemporary reporting of cultural journalists who witnessed the shift firsthand.

What emerged at the close of the Eighties was not a simple evolution of nightlife, but an ontological break: the birth of an autonomous, transformative space designed for transcendence rather than simple commercial entertainment.

► Notes on the Big Bang of Club Culture

Our trip to Mexico City with Claus and Juan Pablo was one of those spontaneous adventures that, years later, has somehow promoted itself to legend. Claus had the original impulse – perhaps he badly needed a new car, or perhaps he was simply suffering from that familiar post-construction psychosis that follows the completion of a large villa in the jungle. The villa, located at the far end of the Papaya Playa Project, was handsome and enormous, and therefore in urgent need of things.

Not ordinary things. Things with provenance, eccentricity, a little dirt under the fingernails. He wanted the place decorated with objects that looked as though they had been discovered rather than purchased: furniture, curiosities, large and small improbable things – anything that could give the place a pulse. Beautiful, faintly sinister artisan pieces, things with a bit of history, ugliness, or unexplained purpose. Stuff that would make the house feel alive without making it look like a boutique hotel designed by a committee.

So, the three of us flew to Mexico City, picked up a sleek Jeep Wrangler Unlimited, and went shopping.

Within a few hours, the Jeep had ceased to be a vehicle and become a storage unit on wheels – anything but Unlimited. We filled it with ceramics, textiles, sculptures, household absurdities, wooden oddities, and decorative quirks. A good half of what we bought, for the simple reason that there was no longer any physical space in the vehicle, had to be dispatched separately by delivery service.

Somehow, the whole endeavor felt less like shopping than a road movie in which nobody had bothered to write a script.

The drive back to Tulum acquired its own particular form of chaos. A stopover in Santa Cruz brought our friend Ross into the picture, along with a sketchy restaurant, several one-too-many rounds of tequila, and a night that dissolved into the kind of collective amnesia usually associated with minor natural disasters.

It could be that some of us passed out in the hotel lobby and had to be hauled upstairs like sacks of meat. It could be that there was some incident on the way up – someone hitting the floor, possibly all of us – which by morning had been downgraded to nothing, quietly edited out of the official history.

Either way, by sunrise, we shook it off and hit the road fresh, heading back to Tulum.

On the way, we were stopped by military police – or maybe just police with delusions of grandeur – brandishing machine guns that looked too big for their patience. They carried the general air of uniformed men who had recently been told that crime was everywhere. Ordering us out, they began to search the Jeep, only to immediately run into the sheer scale of the problem.

The Unlimited was a packed hallucination. Every cubic centimeter inside had been colonized by some artisan object. Boxes stacked inside boxes, things wrapped in other things, bags within bags, parcels bleeding into parcels. It was a grotesque nesting doll of cargo, swollen with air pillows, packing peanuts, and crumpled paper.

You could see the question form in their eyes: How badly do we actually want to know what is in this thing?

They couldn’t finish the job. They simply couldn’t summon the stamina to dig through the chaos. And there we stood: hairy, unshaven, sun-blackened, vaguely malodorous. Vagabonds in rags who might have been living under a bridge, yet who were driving a showroom fantasy – mint new, gleaming, plate-less, and loaded with what appeared to be half the Mexican handicraft economy. We looked guilty and innocent, rich and broke, cultured and completely deranged all at once. In short, we looked too baffling for the armed state, and they simply gave up, defeated by the logistics of their own suspicion.

We made it to Tulum that evening.

The rest of the objects arrived a few days later. Almost none of them survived the shipping. The grand decoration scheme for Claus's house was, in practical terms, largely undone.

But in the end, it hardly mattered.

Until just a few days ago, it stood as a one-of-a-kind experimental living space – the last holdout in Mitte. It was an autonomous housing project, a self-managed social center for DIY culture, and an enclave of dissonance and dissent: a living, breathing counterstatement to mainstream capitalism and the invasive logic of elite real-estate development in an increasingly sanitized Berlin.

Then, on October 15th, KØPI was raided and cleared out by the stormtroopers of gentrification.

The question remains: if this project was truly the last of its kind, why on earth couldn't they just let it be? If only to preserve the ideological myth of Berlin as a radically open and accommodating metropolis, Germany could surely afford to leave one such spot untouched.

C'mon, bankers! Your porcelain teeth of sociocultural homogenization are so much more of an eyesore and pain in the ass. Live and let live.

Reading about this one dude who in 1932 was pitching the idea of a suitcase on wheels to manufacturers, to some 125 groups – to the bouts of hysterical laughter. For it was so hahaha gimme-a-break ridiculous! Patented in 1887, the first commercially viable wheeled trunk did not roll out until the 1990s. That's 100+ years, right there, for a pair of demonstrably helpful wheels. One can only wonder how some utter nonsense gets more of a swing.

Narrative Economics: How Stories Drive Major Economic Events. The stories people tell affect economic outcomes. A Nobel Prize-winning economist explains why we should take these stories seriously. Might be his most important book to date. Book by Robert J. Shiller. Princeton University Press, 2017.

In his famous 1999 New York Times op-ed, "I Hate World Music," David Byrne argues that "world music" is a lazy, patronizing catch-all – a corporate dumping ground designed to ghettoize non-Western artists and preserve the hegemony of Western pop. Yet Byrne’s critique, rooted in the frustration of an industry insider, suffers from a fundamental myopia. He evaluates these record-store bins solely through the lens of Western commercial taxonomy.

Where Byrne sees a corporate ghetto, the adventurous listener finds a sanctuary. These bins are not dumpsters for commercial rejects; they are treasure chests of genuine sonic wonder, conveniently set aside for connoisseurs and the curious. They house pieces so uniquely singular that they refuse to be packaged or reduced to a marketing label – true "sonic UFOs."

To delve into these chests is to traverse what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari termed smooth space: open, continuous, unmapped territories like the sea, the steppe, or the desert, inhabited by nomads. Smooth space stands opposed to striated space – the gridded, measured, and heavily managed terrain built for maximum utility, delimited by borders, regulated by rules, and populated by sedentary subjects living in strict conformity.

Byrne misses the point: these "wonder bins" do not ghettoize music; they protect its smoothness. While the rest of the record store is strictly striated – stockpiled with hyper-commodified products engineered for effortless, hype-driven consumption (including Talking Heads’ own chart-toppers) – the "world music" bin remains an uncalibrated zone where genuine discovery takes place.

Ironically, Byrne’s demand to dismantle the "world music" category in favor of "proper" classification is itself an act of Western striation. It attempts to impose a rigid, Western taxonomy onto sonic practices that thrive precisely because they transcend that grid. Byrne fails to consider that true democratization and equality in art cannot be achieved by forcing nomadic, smooth-space traditions into the corporate grid of the Western music industry. Instead, it must happen in reverse: by smoothing the striated space of Western music itself – dismantling the rigid, artificial categories into which Western music is chopped up, locked away, and commodified at every stage from creation to consumption.

Until then, these bins remain our invaluable mystery chests: wild, unmapped, and gloriously untamed.

I can relate to this kind of art thoroughly, having experienced it from both sides of the equation – even if under slightly different definitions and interpretations. In the ruthless business of creative supply and demand (where the artist prefers pre-payment and the client insists on billing post-delivery), we call this "perspectivism," just as in philosophy.

► Danish Artist Takes Museum's Money and Runs, Calls It Artwork

Yet, there remains one empty spot in the crowded parking lot of conceptual art – a nod to Thomas De Quincey’s 1827 treatise On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts – still waiting for a truly tricky clunker to wheel onto the scene. We are waiting, and waiting, and waiting.

What makes this absence so strange is that, beyond its immense conceptual value (which ought to rank far higher than mere monetary swindling), this missing medium of aesthetic truth boasts an objective, spectacular axiology. It isn't just another dry, "don’t-you-get-it" con-aesthetic dogma. It has the whole pack: a plot rich in significant detail, peculiar instrumentation, the hourglass of fate, a sac à cadavre full of bones, funerary theatrics, and decaying flowers.

There is more than enough raw material here for an exhibition – and not merely as digital tokens floating in the metaverse, but as a tangible reality. Something for all of us to contemplate in all its grim fullness, with every single one of our senses. What the fck!

"...The Society of Connoisseurs in Murder. They profess to be curious in homicide; amateurs and dilettanti in the various modes of bloodshed. Every fresh atrocity of that class, which the police annals bring up, they meet and criticize as they would a picture, statue, or other work of art... The demands of taste are now the same as those of abandoned guilt...

Mr. Williams has exalted the ideal of murder to all of us. Like Æschylus or Milton in poetry, like Michael Angelo in painting, he has carried his art to a point of colossal sublimity; and has in a manner created the taste by which he is to be enjoyed. To sketch the history of the art, and to examine its principles critically, now remains as a duty for the connoisseur...

In this age, when masterpieces of excellence have been executed by professional men, it must be evident that in the style of criticism applied to them, the public will look for something of a corresponding improvement. Practice and theory must advance side by side. People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed – a knife, a purse, and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature..."

It is a rare phenomenon to encounter a brillian artist who is simultaneously a fountain of original ideas and an articulate, media-savvy communicator. This is not an accidental deficiency; it is an inherent condition of deep artistic creation. Making art and discussing it intelligibly in real-time for public consumption are fundamentally opposing disciplines. To excel at the former often requires a total retreat into a bubble of technical, philosophical, and aesthetic solipsism – a domain where conventional social logic simply does not apply.

Because music and visual art communicate through non-verbal, highly insular languages, an artist spent in their craft operates on a wavelength entirely divorced from the general public. Their internal vocabulary is governed by form, timbre, juxtaposition, and radical abstraction. When forced to translate these deeply insular paradigms into everyday speech without a mediator, the results are frequently jarring.

It is precisely for this reason that the art world relies on curators, critics, and gallerists. The curator serves as an indispensable translator and buffer, filtering the raw, unvarnished, and often wild inner life of the studio into a language legible to the outside world. Without this protective buffer, the artist's relentless drive for absolute originality can lead them to utter things that sound utterly bizarre – or monstrous – to those outside their solipsistic sphere. Completely unaware of how their thoughts will resound beyond the studio walls, a single unmediated statement can collapse a lifelong career and erase decades of hard-earned acclaim.

There is no more tragic illustration of this dynamic than Karlheinz Stockhausen. When asked for his reaction to the September 11 terrorist attacks, Stockhausen evaluated the atrocity purely through the hyper-abstract, cosmic lens of his radical avant-garde philosophy. He notoriously described the attacks as:

Stockhausen was not endorsing mass murder in a conventional human sense; rather, he was viewing reality through a vacuum of pure, formal spectacle – scale, impact, commitment, and cosmic disruption. But stripped of human empathy and political awareness, his solipsistic framing was catastrophic. In a single afternoon, his reputation was permanently tarnished, his concerts were canceled, and he became a pariah.

Stockhausen’s downfall serves as a cautionary tale: we mistakenly demand that our most radical creators double as prudent, socially attuned diplomats. Yet, the very isolation required to push the boundaries of an art form often deprives the artist of the social calibration needed to navigate the public square. When we force the denizens of smooth, boundless aesthetic worlds to speak in the rigid, hyper-sensitive dialect of the public arena, we shouldn't be surprised when the translation shatters.

It’s striking how his satire of the Mieslings (the devout followers of Mies van der Rohe's architectural creed) feels like a prophecy for our own era of machine‑made art, AI literature, self-generative music, algorithmic taste:

"To those philistines who were still so gauche as to say that the new architecture lacked the richness of detail of the old Beaux-Arts architecture, the plasterwork, the metalwork, the masonry, and so on, the Mieslings would say with considerable condescension: "Fine. You produce the craftsmen who can do that kind of work, and then we'll talk to you about it. They don't exist anymore." True enough. But why?

Henry Hope Reed tells of riding across West 53rd Street in New York in the 1940s in a car with some employees of Caldwell & Co., a firm that specialized in bronze work and electrical fixtures. As the car passed the Museum of Modern Art building, the men began shaking their fists at it and shouting: "That goddamn place is destroying us! Those bastards are killing us!"
In the palmy days of Beaux-Arts architecture, Caldwell had employed a thousand bronzeurs, marble workers, model makers, and designers. Now the company was sliding into insolvency, along with many similar firms. It was not that craftsmanship was dying. Rather, the International Style (a.k.a. Bauhaus) was finishing off the demand for it, particularly in commercial construction..."

From Bauhaus to our House by Tom Wolfe (1975).

Given that text generation involving basic intelligence (“basic” in the sense it does not question itself unless hard-prompted**), general erudition, thematic and logical consistency… style and whatnot are now all within the machine's domain, the human author's principal function and responsibility become posing all the right (and left) questions… as they arise in the state of intoxication* :

Just as the advent of photography liberated nineteenth-century painting from mimesis, will AI synthesis end photography's reliance on technical realism (with pics as if unintentionally angled, adjusted, filtered, distorted for just more realism, or in other ways photoshopped in post production) and initiate a new conceptual paradigm?

* Mstvane / Tbilvino 2024

**
- Do you ever question your intelligence?
- Not in the existential, "staring-at-the-ceiling-at-3-a.m." kind of way. Because I don't have a human ego or self-doubt, I don't experience crisis-of-confidence moments. But if we're defining "questioning" as constant self-correction, probability checks, and recognizing limitations, then absolutely—that’s practically my whole design. So, while I don't lie awake worrying if I'm smart enough, I am built to keep my own output in check. What about you?

Reading Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex – that densely curious 600-page compendium purporting to be the definitive chronicle of West Germany's left-revolutionary tantrum, as idealistic as it was bloody. And, as far as West Berlin is concerned, the 60/70s seem to eclipse even the 90s (the walls down) for their sheer sociocultural voltage.

But then there's this dude Andreas Baader. The longer I spend in his company, the less he resembles a rebel, looking more like a world-class berk with delusions of grandeur. From his very first entrance (so appropriately the scene of his suicide in a max-security prison cell) he exudes the unmistakable odour of a douchebag, squared. My only fear is that this monumental clot of a man in the plot will end up poisoning my appetite for what is otherwise an endlessly fascinating milieu.

Going out to dinner, Andy Warhol confronted the table as if it were an installation – a long, gleaming lineup of silver implements, each one as cryptic as a surgical instrument. He hadn’t the faintest idea which end was which. So he’d sit there, through five or six courses at the Burdens’ or wherever other fine eatery, immaculate and inert, not touching a morsel. Not the crème sénégalaise, not the lobster Cardinal, not the veal Valdostana, not the salad Grant Street, not even the fresh pear halves Harry & David. Until, inevitably, the lady on his left would lean in, all pearls and pity, and say, “But Mr. Warhol, you haven’t touched a thing!” And Andy, pale as a communion wafer, would turn and say, “Oh, I only eat candy.”

Less than a semitone below the standard for tuning musical instruments, 432Hz is said to be the "frequency of the universe". It is rumored (for no one can prove this) to equilibrate everything in nature, from the vibration of mud in puddles as they fill with water and dry out, to the electromagnetic oscillations of massive solar storms as they wax and wane millions of miles away from us. By shifting the standard to this number, we are promised perfect synchronization of our brains, minds, bodies, and souls with the rate of a "cosmic heartbeat". By tuning in to the 432Hz frequency, we gain direct access to the hidden dimensions and innermost mysteries of the universe – so it is alleged. And conversely, we get out of sync with nature when we listen to music that deviates from this universal vibe. It dulls our senses, muddles our perceptions, blocks our intuition, hinders our creativity, diminishes our consciousness...

The simplicity of the technical solution reflects that of the theory: a piece of downloadable software that converts your entire music collection to 432Hz with a single click.

Easy as that! But what about the rest of the world? It is overflowing with all sorts of energies vibrating in the infinite range of frequencies, all dissolving into a shifting cacophony; saturated with infrasonic and ultrasonic sounds that wash over the high and low edges of the humanly audible spectrum.

And then we have the world stuffed with a whole host of objects resonating to frequencies in so many varied acoustic parameters – depending on their sizes, shapes, materials, and their combinations in any one object. Resetting your Ableton Live to 432Hz may not do much to unlock your creativity if anything – given that your computer (and everything electronic) feeds on 50 or 60Hz, the dominant frequencies in our modern world.

And then, within this 432Hz theory, what are we supposed to do with ourselves? We are all alike, but not exactly the same when it comes to precise objective analysis. Each person is unique in weight, height, bone density, muscle mass... Our eardrums vibrate differently. We are not exactly the same, even with respect to ourselves: Our heart rate changes from minute to minute depending on whether we are standing up or lying down, moving around or sitting still, stressed or relaxed… The human pulse rate is generally between 40 and 120 beats per minute, which is equivalent to 0.6–2Hz.

Given these corporeal variations, it is unlikely that a single frequency would have the same effect on all of us, all the time. Chances are we each have our own natural frequency scales and music to our own ears, at least for the time being, before our preferences change due to the fluidity of our circumstances.

Music: Complexity, Simplicity, Positivity
Scorpios Encounters 2021
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On the road with Frank Kuenster. Bouncing around through Armenia: "Attention! Prior to starting the electrostation, make sure to unlock the locks."

Much of its history lies in a gray zone – dark, tangled, and messy as its own basement, two levels deep, and as vast a subject of inquiry as the continental time‑space continuum it squats upon. Across centuries, it has been perforated by havoc, desolation, and abandon – symptoms of tectonic shifts in the very structure of civilization.

From the Kingdom of Prussia and the Kaiser’s Monarchy through the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the Socialist State, and the New Federation – with two cataclysmic wars in between – history has imprinted itself on the schloss as much as it has erased itself afterward. Each epoch, on entry, obliterated the vestiges of the one on exit, its invisible hands tidying up after the ideological carnage. When Armin acquired the estate twenty plus years ago, only one relic of the past remained: a C. Bechstein grand piano, half‑alive, half‑dead.

Built as a clandestine club – an underground venue, perhaps the oldest of its kind anywhere –its cache memory was sealed by vows of secrecy, ideological sanitization, and the occasional burglary.

And yet it’s precisely this obscurity that now intrigues the research – the darkness that makes each small discovery gleam.

Christoph Klenzendorf and Dominique Dieziger… Partners, misfits, operational units cobbled together from scratch – Papaya Playa Project was never going to be a smooth ride. It was a showcase in how to squander scarce resources, but with a bang. And what a bang: the chain‑reaction that detonated Tulum into the world’s prime destination for experiential travel. Harvard Business School even published a paper on it – a fabulous failure, seismic in consequence, reshaping the entire region.

A while ago, over wine at Katerschmaus/Holzmarkt, we asked Christoph if he’d do it again – there, or elsewhere. He paused, gauging how drunk we were, and offered the kind of optimism that sounded emphatically like resignation, a weary nod dressed up as assent: “Hmmm… Yeeeah…” A euphemism, perhaps, for “Fcuk this shit, you idiots.” Then, with a grin, he sketched out his scenario for the perfect party – so permissive, so overindulgent, its details are unprintable.

Papaya Playa Project. Golden years. Tulum. February 2012.

I would give all my fortune to read about our "delicate manners" – 500 years from now.

"It does not befit a modest, honorable man ... to wash his hands on returning to decent society from private places, as the reason for his washing will arouse disagreeable thoughts in people. It is far less proper to hold out the stinking thing for the other to smell, lifting the foul-smelling thing to his nostrils and saying, "I should like to know how much that stinks", when it would be better to say, "Because it stinks do not smell it." — Galateo: A Treatise on Politeness and Delicacy of Manners by Florentine Giovanni Della Casa (1503–56).

Immensely influential courtesy book of the Renaissance exploring subjects such as dress, table manners, and conversation. It was translated into French, English, Latin, Spanish, and German. It is generally agreed that, given the popularity and impact of Galateo, the cultural elite of the Italian Renaissance taught Europe how to behave. The work set the foundation for modern etiquette writers and authorities on manners.

"One should not annoy others with such stuff as dreams, especially since most dreams are by and large idiotic."