That is very true. For example, I had my doubts about chicken on waffles, but it was amazing.
This interests me. I recall that we’ve spoken about breath-based consciousness, “chunking down and chunking slow,” but also, the extreme displeasure of “watching paint dry.” Of course, anything could become interesting with enough single-pointed attention. Is the meta-crisis just one huge distraction? What about the actual crises, real and imagined, in our lives? What about our impending deaths?
I confess, I have grown weary with the genre of podcasts and YouTube interviews, even though I know the people who do them have very meaningful and interesting things to say. It all starts to sound the same after a while, though. What actually is being done? And what is the feeling being transmitted? I have always enjoyed the Cafés most when we’re weaving new thoughts and they feel like music.
Granted my taste in music is pretty electric and weird. I will listen to looping computer drones and experimental electronica, as much as rock, blues, folk, classical (from medieval to the minimalist, maximalist, and avant-garde), be-bop, hard-bop, post-bop and abstract-expressionist jazz. I don’t tend to like heavy metal or sappy, mindless, electronic dance, or country (with some exceptions). But I do like dance music, world rhythms, salsa, boleros… I’m also an occasional student of hop-hop beats and wordplay.
I like the cognitive music of the Café, when we have a good tempo and some deep reading to stimulate thought. I feel more awake, alive, and creative after a good conversation. It feeds my art. I don’t need us to get to an answer or a new theory, but I like the buzz of thinking, and I like to feel after the reading and the conversation that I understand something better—the topic or author or whatever was on my mind—and learned something new about the others in the conversation as individuals, and that the group has accomplished something, gone somewhere together in our consciousness, as well.