CURRENT MISSION

infinite exploration and an attempt at benign wisdom

ABOUT ME

first-

i am a good person. and: i trust you.

but also-

a description.
*ehem*

i am a curious, growing sponge.

feed me friends, words, design, culture, ideas, show me a room with a view of some water; i'll be around.

i'm an insatiable cynic and an irreverent optimist.

duality defines me: it occurs to me that i am a shy alpha male; a rational idealist; a carbon-fibre neon dream-cloud: a pure mix-up.

if i did drugs or went to church i'd do them both, together.
still, i wash behind my ears and mind my Ps and Qs.

i read random books in parallel but i can spend hours drawing that *one* line, just there, just right. i'm working on my first built project for 2010, a triangular pavilion that looks round.

i dance like technoviking but want to dance like 'this is not an exit'.

so far i appear to be immortal.

and i have the wildest dreams for the future of us all.

lighthouses are magical & incredible. i can't explain why.

and then-

i couldn't live without-
- my love
- my memory
- the future

*

- words
- design & its theory
- avocado
- the ocean
- extended soirees with friends that melt into vast, mixed discussions filled with laughter and intellectual exploration, messy jokes and love
- one or two secrets

i deeply admire-
- the people i am growing up with

- gandhi
- darwin
- galileo

i think that-
- most people really try quite hard.
- people who make their own clothes are cool.
- the hunt for red october is great, and so is 8½. go figure.
- tempestuous weather is underrated.
- dr pangloss was right, as was dr strangelove. and dr house, mostly. we could go on.

- we really are all in this together.

i abide-
because The Dude is everyone's secret hero

PHILOSOPHY

----

Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.

-Horace

----

The world is a beautiful place, and worth fighting for: sometimes I agree, sometimes I only half agree.

----

To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to create life out of life.

-Joyce

----

There is the tale of the man who found a treasure map. It marked a dome, some way outside the gate. Sit upon the dome and face Mecca, it read. Sling an arrow; where it falls a treasure trove lies. The man went and let fly his arrows, but he found no treasure. The King heard of this and ordered his finest archers to the dome. They let fly their long-range arrows; still nothing was found. Finally the man appealed to his Holiness, who inspired him not to pull the bow-string. He set the arrow in the bow, and before him it fell.

(excuses to Shams Tabrizi for my adaptation)

----

I really *don't* care that there are unused icons on my desktop.

----

"...and I fly to meet you, hold you and remain with you in a perpetual embrace in the sight of the eternal."

-Goethe

----

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

Don't know yet. New here. Certainly would like to. This seems like an amazing idea, site, community. Bravo.

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

Amateur & mostly pretty random. But here and there. Care to expand?

Interests

i really really dig-

- architecture & bubbles
- fractals & evolution
- reading borges & ocean yacht racing
- prime numbers & experimental capoeira

- bonfires & my slowly growing library
- freediving & treasure maps
- 3d twister & metapolitics
- thunderstorms & duct tape
- gödel's incompleteness theorem & red wine under a dying sun
- figs & walnuts & olives & flash fried liver & lobster with cream

- really trashy films - 300 - that are awesome anyway
- lapsang souchong & husqvarna
- james bond & winnie the pooh
- international klein blue & the smell of cut grass
- oak trees & CERN

- philology & arabian thoroughbred horses
- playing with old landrovers & the sound of cracking ice
- parties in churches at night & salvadora persica
- my grandmother's recipes & pictures of deep space

- opposites

i would like to-
- invent the funniest joke ever. EVER.
- be able to cook really well.
- learn more massage techniques.
- have more conversations in the dark, with people i hardly know.
- build my own dream home, library and school of architecture. seriously.
- do what supermodels do: be gorgeous, have fun and organize world peace.

i prefer-
- scars to tattoos (they tell better stories)
- policies to politics (they get more stuff done)
- 24/7 to 9-2-5 (dream awake...)
- dogs to cats (it's a loyalty thing)
- nobel to oscar (what's in a name, eh?)
- my chocolate to be furiously dark & bitter & rich (like jokes should be).
- the future to the past (jingo!)

i don't understand-
- astrology
- proust
- equity derivatives
- deeply possessive people
- why everyone likes 'amelie' so much. or dan brown. or mozart, for that matter.
- cold potato salad
- people who go to the same caravan park for the same two weeks of the same month year after year, complain about the weather, the neighbours, the local food and each other - yet come home declaring it was wonderful and they can't wait to get back next year, and *still* call it a holiday
- paris hilton. or anna wintour.

i'd rather the world was without-
- mosquitoes
- television
- football

- credit default swaps
- ikea
- voicemail
- ska, reggaeton & schlager
- the writings of paulo coelho

- cancer

***

i vehemently object to-
- fanatical(ly) organised religion
- people who substitute violence - of any kind - for reason, empathy, consideration, diplomacy or, this is the tricky one, humility

• culture
• books
• architecture
• design
• dancing
• capoeira
• dining
• cooking
• recipes
• chocolate
• wine
• red wine
• flying
• yachting
• clothing
• politics
• movies
• reading
• cartography
• religion
• fractals
• ducttape

Music, Movies, and Books

Hmm, this could take a while.

Let me try and bring some order to this mess.

word people-
abbott, achebe, bacon, BORGES, burgess, calvino, camus, carroll, cortazar, dahl, dostoyevsky, ELIOT, fowles, garcia marquez, greene, heinlein, hermans, huxley, ishiguro, izzard (cake or death!), JOYCE, kundera, lessing, milne, mitchell, mulisch, NABOKOV, nietzsche, pirandello, pynchon, russell, schopenhauer, st. augustine, stendhal, thurber, twain, updike, vargas llosa, vonnegut, wilde, winterson, woolf, yeats, zamyatin, zola

sound people-
archive, AUTECHRE, bach, BEETHOVEN, bowie, brahms, coltrane, the cure, dead can dance, MILES DAVIS, deus, eluvium, eno, faith no more, fuck buttons, gorecki, interpol, jaga jazzist, james, m83, madredeus, murcof, pärt, penderecki, radiohead, sibelius, nina simone, tool, velvet underground, venetian snares, verdi

design people-
ando, bearth & deplazes, chapman, le corbusier, diller, scofidio & renfro, fujimoto, hermann & valentiny, holl, lampens, liang, quickborner team, testa, da vinci, voysey, zumthor

visual people-
almodovar, aronofsky, bacon, bonnard, brancusi, carravaggio, chandor, constable, eisenstein, fellini, giacometti, gilliam, greenaway, hitchcock, jarman, klee, kubrick, kurokawa, lem, leone, malgorne, manet, medem, mendes, mireilles, peckinpah, picasso, the brothers quay, svankmajer, turner, velazquez

number people-
cantor, erdôs, euclid, euler, feigenbaum, gauss, gödel, hausdorff, lebesgue, ramanujan, riemann, ulam, weierstraß

general respect-
averroës, brahe, copernicus, curie, downey jr, eglash, faraday, fry richardson (time tester), gandhi, grotius, kardashev, laar, (papa) lazarou, leibniz, lovelock, middlebrook, muybridge, parks, pevensey, plesman, rivendra, rossellini, rzeppa, strindberg, tesla, vico (the discoverer of time), yeager (the true time-traveller), you - for reading all this ... and whoever invented bread

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Loved and been loved. Corny but true. Oh, and that's two things. *Sorry*

Teach, Learn, Share

I like Big Ideas, and people who have them...

People tell me I know lots of things, but I keep on finding there's always more... and more. Give and take, eh?

A proverb, from Egypt:
"If you don't learn while teaching, don't teach."

What I Can Share with Hosts

Sarcasm.
Knowledge.
Terrible, terrible jokes.
A pining for true wisdom.
The shadow of dry wit.
An understanding of maps.

Countries I’ve Visited

San Marino

Countries I’ve Lived In

Netherlands, United Kingdom, United States