This past month was full of change and inspiration. O and I moved a few blocks deeper into downtown, to a building with fewer views but a quieter atmosphere. I find moving to be a great opportunity to reassess what you value in the spaces you live in. I'm continually interested by my daily interactions with art, music, and literature, and there's no better place to start than in how I arrange these within my home.
On the theme of inspiration, I want to start with two documentaries that have impacted my own creative process. Though they focus on two completely different subjects—sake and songwriting—they both converge at the intersection of passion and commitment, following those who dedicate their lives to their chosen discipline.
The Birth of Sake follows a group of men who, for six months of the year, live and work at a traditional sake brewery. It's a slow, quiet film, filled with beautiful moments of connection and craft. On the other end of the spectrum, It All Begins With a Song details the lives and creative processes of Nashville songwriters. With measured doses of struggle and triumph, it's an encouraging watch throughout.
Lately, I've found a lot of creative inspiration from musicians who record longer, improvisational pieces for Youtube. This extended format allows you to sink into the atmosphere of the music, while the improvisational nature prevents it from feeling repetitive or predictable. This 29-minute classical guitar piece from Vraell is mesmerizingly good.
With the continually growing impact of AI, especially within creative fields, it's worth reflecting on the role of art in our lives and which elements are important (or not) to preserve. Celine Nguyen has a wonderful piece on her Substack, personal canon: good artists copy, ai artists ____. She explores the nature of art as an aesthetic experience, ending with 13 propositions for how to integrate AI into the future of creative work.
I've enjoyed slowly working through Stewart Brand's Maintenance: Of Everything, shared as "a book in progress", a kind of publicly shared draft, where readers can comment on the material throughout the writing process. I love the idea of watching great work form itself in front of your eyes and would love to see more projects in this vein.
The album Magnolia by Okonski has been on repeat for me all month. It's a slowly unfolding jazz trio, with a sparseness countered by rich melodic lines. There's this warm, intimate feel to the record that keeps bringing me back.
I think I first came across the idea 'the opposite of a truth is another truth' in an On Being podcast. This is explored at length in the essay: Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent?, which covers our differing perceptions, and enjoyment, of time. It's a warning against over-optimization, while acknowledging the varying contexts where speed is, and isn't, desirable.
I'll wrap up with a provoking piece: Quit Your Job. Full of many quotable ideas, this being one of my favorites: "To get the biggest and most interesting payoffs, you have to start by chasing merely interesting novelty in an open-ended way." I'm also working my way through this thorough article in Pitchfork exploring Max Richter's formative musical influences.