March 2025

A new musical comedy album, a Duolingo milestone, and more online teaching

The Kev’s album 4 is set to be released on all platforms. I have already given a handful of interviews about it and will announce a time and date for the launch soon. This past month, like most, has been filled with both paid work and personal passion projects.

Output

I have performed at multiple open mics, averaging over one a week. Usually I am highly tentative about debuting new material, but when it came to introducing the song ‘The FVSDA’, I was certain audiences would love it.

As for the Kevin McGeary Guitar YouTube channel, pretty soon I will make updates less frequent than once a week, so I can spend more time on each video. But for now, I still upload every Wednesday. New videos this month include a classical guitar rendition of Mozart’s ‘Pastorale’.

On the subject of high culture, on this Substack I published an essay about the ten most important non-fiction books I have ever read. It would have been a bit cliché to include ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’, which I read at age 14, so all inclusions are from between ages 16 and 30, a period during which lives tend to hinge.

Activities

As part of my campus job, on Thursday afternoons I attend a three-hour lecture on the subject of Genocide. Topics covered include the current genocide in Gaza and ecocide. The latter is a reminder of how complicit we all are in destruction, and how any sense of our own importance should be tempered with thoughts of how much harm we may be causing just by being here.

I have made several media appearances, including one on Hannah’s Bookshelf, which can be found at about 1:28:00 here. In it, I discuss ‘Old Soul’ by Susan Barker, which I also reviewed in Asian Cha Journal.

Other media mentions include a review of ‘The FVSDA’ in Indie Band Guru, and an interview in Underground Nation.

This month’s Mandarin lesson is on Chinese humour:

I also reached a three-year streak on language-learning app Duolingo, as well as finishing first in the Diamond league (probably the hardest achievement on the app) for the ninth time. It is just a glorified computer game, but my spoken Spanish and Arabic reading really are coming along.

Wider World

Gene Hackman, who starred in some of the greatest Hollywood movies of the twentieth century, including ‘Bonnie and Clyde’, ‘The Conversation’, and ‘Unforgiven’, died last month. It is quite something when a 95 year-old international celebrity dies in mysterious circumstances and lies undiscovered for several days.

His children were not named in his will, but his multi-million dollar fortune may default to them under succession laws. Their relationship with him presumably not stellar.

Technology has revolutionised every area of human life, so death could very well be the next thing it transforms. Aeon published a 5000-word essay on chatbots of the dead, how people’s ideas and personalities can be preserved, and what this entails.

Standout quotes from the piece include: ‘Instead of offering new spiritual resources, our technocultures seem to provide us with a vast array of ingenious instruments to help us turn away from death: we have medicine to postpone, entertainment to soothe, drugs to stupefy, and other technologies to help us avoid and ignore.’

And

‘(Chatbots) cannot and will not capture a deceased person fully. They do not delude users into behaving as if the dead are still alive or believing that they are talking to a real person. On the contrary, they underscore absence in the real world by engaging the memory of the dead in imagined spaces.’

As a creative, I understand the desire to want to live on beyond one’s flesh-and-blood, but these things should be approached with extreme caution. As the piece also notes, corporations could use this to try to monetise people’s grief, which is all kinds of ghoulish.

Whatever happens, the way global geopolitics are going, there are set to be plenty of dead people to try to chat with.