Branko Mataja It’s musicians like this that make me so grateful that reissue labels like Numero Group exist. Mataja’s approach to the guitar would be novel and exciting if he realeased it today, let alone fifty years ago. It’s not as if he’s going to be topping billboard charts anytime soon, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who never would have heard of him without a reissue. Really phenomenal stuff...
Kevin Kelly is a national treasure It’s true. For those who don’t know, here are some of his projects: The Technium is his main blog. Cool Tools is what it says it is. Reviews of cool tools of all sorts. Excellent Advice for Living is his latest book, which seems basically like a set of more intelligible and practical koans encapsulating his vision. These (and tons of other stuff he makes) are cool and all, but it’s not exactly the specifics of what he’s done / made that inspire me, but more his approach and attitude towards life and living....
Music The more I listen, the more I like Kevin Morby’s new album, This is a Photograph. The prayer / toast toward the end is especially wonderful: to free the flame from burning up inside to thunder like a motorcycle headed down the line to eat to weep to lay me down so sweet to sow to reap oh to let our glasses clink to time to time to time to time to time to time to time to time...
The world is a musem of passion projects Music This Ted Gioia newsletter on how TikTok is changing the incentives of the record business, shifting power away from record labels and into the hands of musicians who are able to find success on the platform. I would love to see this blow up into something. Covid fallout I’ve been seeing and reading more about the social and economic effects of Covid and pandemic related actions....
Articles Nadia Eghbal’s new work sounds really interesting. Hannah and I have been talking recently about a mutual desire to do more “giving”. I don’t think either of use really knows what that means to us. This is a really interesting frame for what giving is. Philanthropy, then, can be understood as a form of self-expression. It is complementary, not competitive, to government: citizens have the right to use their private assets to experiment with new ideas, and government has the size and longevity to scale and maintain them....
Podcasts This Conversations with Tyler episode with Chuck Klosterman was great. There are a lot of really interesting sections! At the end, Tyler breaks his Very Serious Interviewer mode and they just chat for a while. It’s still super interesting and fun to hear something a bit more conversational than ususal. I still love his standard no-nonsense approach though and wouldn’t want him to change as there is much less of that out there than there is just people chatting about stuff....
Twitter Tweets on underrated ideas by Ethan Mollick and Derek Thompson. Makes me want to think about the ideas that have had the biggest influence on my recent thinking/doing. The first ones that comes to mind are: Small, consistent effort is much more impactful than major, intermittent effort in the long run. Sunk cost fallacy. I’m not a huge fan of the simplistic version of this (never make decisions based on past investments), but find that it can be quite useful to deemphasize the past when making decisions about the future....
Happy V-day, lovers. Podcasts Season Two, Episode Two of What had happened was has a gem of a section that could easily be turned into a 5,000 word think piece on art, ephemerality and the responsibility we have (or don’t) when it comes to preserving art that may just fade into nonexistence under current legal and economic conditions. It’s this section where I realized that El-P is seeing the whole chessboard....
Podcasts Open Mike Eagle’s What had happened was is a gift to humanity. It’s the history of weirdo, independent hip hop from the horse’s mouth. Season One with Prince Paul (producer for De la Soul, Stetsasonic, MF Doom, Paul Barman, etc. etc.) was easily one of my favorite podcasts of 2020. I’m late to the Season 2 party with El-P (Company Flow, Run the Jewels, etc.), but it’s sounding good so far....
2021-06-29 Articles “Smoke a fuckin’ fatty, ya fuckin’ Nazi” What is nostalgia like, under such historical conditions? I fear any attempt at answering such a question, today, will necessarily come up short. Today this is how we experience nostalgia: we become anchored to an era, and when it dies, when it is subducted under the ground of time, and we are reminded of that every day in the way other people around us are now dressing and talking and being themselves, in some important sense we die too, and live out our days as ghosts....