jam with Rafael

This Tuesday, I had an excellent jam session with Rafael.
He played guitar, cavaquinho (small Portuguese 4-steel-strings guitar, precursor of the ukulele in Hawaii), and flute. His brother played electric guitar and bass.

I showed him my best of bluegrass CD, and he seems to have caught on to my banjo aesthetic of impressionistic, arpeggiated melodies.

We jammed a little bit of bluegrass with his cavaquinho... it was funny because he used funny samba chords, with 7ths, and all that stuff.

Then we had dinner, and focused away from music for a little bit.
He has a lot of good memes, such as cybernetics, anarchy, and "non-practicing atheism", but he dislikes money (though it's not clear whether it's an anti-capitalist feeling). I think there's a reasonable chance I'll talk him into my political philosophy.

Then we jammed jazz.
He sang me the melodies to a couple of tunes by Charlie Parker and Miles Davis (separately), and I learned them rightaway. They worked really well on the violin. We played lots of improvised solos: I was truly smokin'!
At the end of the night, I improvised on choro, as the other two backed me up.

This was probably the best jam session ever, in terms of my performance. I just hope he's not too disappointed when I play like my regular self in the future.

"Ideal Worlds" or "The Tao of Faré"

Hanging with Faré after the London Libertarian Conference in October 2002, I was intrigued by how his anarcho-capitalist philosophy would apply to today's world, so I asked him, in a serious tone: "what would you do if you were the absolute ruler of the world?"
He answered, in an equally serious tone: "I would have lots of sex with beautiful women."

I think there's a lesson to be learned here:
My interpretation is:
Faré is thinking a meta-level higher than most libertarians:
while most libertarians believe we should strive for a state with libertarian policies, Faré believes that the government can never be trusted, that hoping for a libertarian state is like hoping for a prosperous communism: it can't happen in the real world.