Brian's Notebook

Ergonomics are not important and very important. I think Ergonomics effects what you make but certainly does not determine your ability to create. I can’t stand people who complain that they can’t create because they don’t have this or this is not like that or If I only had this or things were like this… blah blah blah. Just make stuff with what you got where you got it!

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Workspace and Environment: The Dillinger Escape Plan | Trash_Audio

The creative process, for the most part is, 90% me and whatever drummer we have sitting in a room with coffee and pizza for months just fucking hashing away and paying attention to every detail and putting all our energy and excitement into what we’re doing.

That actually sounds like a pretty good lifestyle to me — or top 5 lifestyles, at least.

The Dillinger Escape Plan’s Ben Weinman – “Drugs Are Not Part Of Our Creative Process”

The point, he insisted, was not to argue with those in power. It was not even primarily to tell the truth, though in a regime based on lies this was important. The only thing that made sense in the circumstances of the time, he wrote, was to ‘live in truth.’ All else was compromise—’The very act of forming a political grouping forces one to start playing a power game, instead of giving truth priority.’

Vaclav Havel, then working as a marginal playwright and poet in a society and state that truly merited the title of Absurd, realised that “resistance” in its original insurgent and militant sense was impossible in the central Europe of the day. He therefore proposed living “as if” he were a citizen of a free society, “as if” lying and cowardice were not mandatory patriotic duties, “as if” his government had signed (which it actually had) the various treaties and agreements that enshrine universal human rights. He called this tactic the “power of the powerless” because, even when disagreement is almost forbidden, a state that insists on actually compelling assent can be relatively easily made to look stupid.

Christopher Hitchens — excerpt from Letters to a Young Contrarian

Read the whole excerpt (if you don’t have time for the whole book).