CURRENT MISSION

Mission: to create things constantly; to live gently and curiously.

ABOUT ME

I'm a musician interested in ethnomusicology and performing all sorts of music. I've been trained as a classical guitarist and I both work and study in that capacity. I value creativity, all the arts, gentleness, responsibility, honesty, and hard work. To that end, I try and pursue those qualities to the best of my abilities (and often, admittedly, fail to live up to my expectations). I hate wasting even a single moment of this short life and I like to spend it with like minded people.

PHILOSOPHY

I think life is absurd but absolutely worth living. I wouldn't want it any other way. I think that at the root of things, most things are extremely simple, but that they can be fun and profound to complicate. Deleuze is always welcome in my thoughts. I like ideas of not-knowing, rhizomes, interpenetrations, vertiginous paradoxes.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

I'm happy to host when possible, to do anything I can to show you around Lugano, to play music and make art with you, and to dispel the myth that ALL Americans are fat greedy pigs who like bad music/art, hating on minorities, and the republican party.

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

As a (poor) musician, I both have to travel a lot and to rely on the benevolence of friends old and new to accommodate me. Though I'm new to this website, I'm not new by any means to living out of a backpack and sleeping on people's floor.

Interests

I use the guitar as a portal into the human project: our collective histories, myths and existences. As such, I'm fascinated and absorbed by literature, art, anthropology, philology, philosophy, basically anything that's both full of information and deployed in a fascinating mode. I also love the outdoors and spend a lot of time hiking, climbing, kayaking, running, etc. These two strains of interest come together in traveling and I spend all of my extra money on plane and train fares.

• arts
• culture
• literature
• performing arts
• running
• partying
• traveling
• music
• guitar
• outdoor activities
• hiking
• backpacking
• kayaking
• rock climbing
• anthropology

Music, Movies, and Books

Movies: Teorema, 8 & 1/2, Les Triplettes de Belleville
Music: Early music, electronic music, spectral music, minimal music
Authors: Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Borges

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Randomly: watching the Bach Collegium perform the Mass in B Minor in New Haven with an almost all Japanese orchestra and conductor almost immediately after their devastating tsunami. One could feel the whole sold-out audience collectively break within the first 8 bars and I've never experienced such cathartic, thundering applause at the end. Also, staring down a black bear from 2 meters away 18 hours north of Seattle while on a 2 week long kayak tour. Or watching the sun flirt with setting in the middle of summer, middle of the night, on some small island of the West coast of Sweden. Maybe when I read the last Yes in Ulysses. Who knows?

Teach, Learn, Share

I can talk for days about music and how music and culture interact. I'm pretty good with American 20th/21st century fiction, critical theory, and climbing/hiking also.

I want to learn everything.

Countries I’ve Visited

Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, Mongolia, Portugal, Russian Federation, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States

Countries I’ve Lived In

Switzerland, United States