Matthew Bizer > Recent Status Updates

“Music evokes dual emotional natures. It functions hedonically, creating pleasure, and it functions eudaemonically, for the pursuit of a higher state of being—personal growth, virtue, tolerance, acceptance, transcendence. We can find that higher ground listening to an honest voice. I doubt we will find it in Al-generated music.”

“Everyone looked so scrubbed and affluent. Our rebel fashions were cobbled together from the expensive stuff we'd seen in some New York Times story about grunge. […] The punk scene, once my inspiration, now looked like a bunch of future bankers and tech executives learning how to harass women.”

“But I no longer had time to myself where I didn't need to be anywhere or doing anything anymore. It was getting to the point that there was always something I could be doing to push the label forward, and if I was doing anything else, it was taking away from that. I needed to find balance.”

“Doing crazy shit for the thrill of it was exciting in the moment and often made for a great story afterward, but we were flirting with terrible consequences, and honestly, it was turning us into assholes. […] I didn't want to be that guy. I was twenty-four, no longer a kid, but I was acting like there were no repercussions, affecting people I was close to.”

“Eve-Marie noted that ‘although music is initially a social-emotional product created by the composer, a listener does not have to enter into a direct interpersonal interaction with the composer in order to appreciate the music.’ She concludes that emotion processing deficits in ASD are domain-specific, and are preserved in music.”

“In most cities, fans of punk music and fans of sports did not mix well, leaving a big gap between the two. […] That wasn't the case in Boston, where hardcore and punk bands have expressed support for the city's professional sports teams for years. Being a punk and liking sports here gets a pass.”

“Mickey, one of Matt's former assistants and now a longtime agent himself, tells me he grew up in the Bay Area and used to go to Shakedown Streets all the time. ‘It was not like this,’ he says. ‘Everyone was barefoot and on drugs, and the tents were a mess. None of the clothes were on racks. It was grungy.’ I can't quite tell if he's disparaging that old scene or lamenting its loss. Maybe both.”

There’s a 4-page long digression on Joni Mitchell’s 2015 stroke and recovery and the importance of music therapy in her progress, and it was beautifully written, and I cried a little afterward

“Besides, without leaving, she never would've met all the friends she'd made elsewhere. Perhaps the ache of homesickness was a fair price to pay for having so many good people in her life.”

“Loving music requires that we be receptive to it, that we make the mental space and time to allow ourselves to give into it, to be won over by it. If our defenses are up—as they can be in clinical, therapeutic environments—it may simply not work. Or it can catch us by surprise, evoking some of the deepest memories and deepest feelings of our lives, and in the process, help us through almost anything.”

“I never thought of fear as something that can go away. It just is. It reminds me that I want to stay alive. That doesn't strike me as a bad thing."

“If it's a hobby (as opposed to a business), you collect the stuff you want, the stuff that matters to you. If you collect stuff that doesn't matter to you... like, what are you doing?” - Mike Schur

“The memories reached out to Dr. Chef, trying to pull him away from his safe observation point. They tugged, begging for him to give in. But he would not. He was not a prisoner of those memories. He was their warden.”

"Just because you leave home doesn't mean you stop caring about it.”

"No good can come from a species at war with itself. Never has, never will."

“Fuck that. If I'm going to make changes to my body, they're going to be changes that were my idea."

“What can we ask of things like Star Wars, things that are explicitly made for children? Is it even fair to expect them to delight us as adults too? I think it's not. If something thrills us at one age, that should be enough. I can still access the feeling I had when I saw Empire for the first time and learned that Darth was Luke's father. That's plenty.” - Mike Schur

"There is so much focus now on what is the right move and what is the wrong move because of computers. But we are not computers. That is the heart of chess. We are human." - Grandmaster Levon Aronian

“The canary in the mine saves you from what killed the canary when you released it into the mine, but you also don't get to see the inside of the mine. That is the trade-off.”

“If we're going to do what I think we need to do, we need to do it now. If we wait until they close the noose on us again, we're finished.”

“You talk a lot about 'evolution' in The World in Six Songs, but maybe it would be more accurate to talk about humans as the products of devolution, of a relentless pursuit of perfection in stupidity and arrogance. Even religion today has lost its ability to pull us out—now it's all warrior gods. My song 'Strong in the Wrong' is a direct attack on these subversions of religion.” - Joni Mitchell

“Have you ever had one of those days when it becomes painfully apparent that the universe is deliberately screwing with you?”

“Knowledge is emotion. Some people say that science just is, that it is merely a collection of facts and measurements that exist outside of the realm of emotion and caring. But I disagree. Of the millions (perhaps infinity) of possible facts about the world we memorize, document, and pass on to others, we select those that we think are important, and this is an emotional judgment.“

“I'm realist enough to know my opinion won't carry the day, not in the US, not in China, and not in lots of other places. There's real harm that will come to real places and real people as we build out this new energy future. And so for me the question becomes how that harm compares with the ongoing harm of our present system.”

“You have some utilities, like in Mozambique or Madagascar, that see it as a threat, and are trying to claw it down. But the realization is, this [solar transition] is happening anyway, whether you like it or not. If you fight people, they'll just go clandestine and install it without letting you know." - Joel Nana, South African energy analyst

“Sorrow does have a physiological purpose and it may be an adaptive response, which is to help us conserve energy and reorient our priorities for the future after a traumatic event.“

“Our job is to flood the world as fast as possible with electrons from the sun and wind, confident that the very availability of clean, cheap power in bulk will drive the rest of the process. In the US alone, as The Economist pointed out, we have a terawatt of new solar capacity just waiting to be connected to the grid if regulators can get out of the way.”