Currently Enjoying
July 2025
These last few months have been a whirlwind of change and delight, simultaneously laying roots for the future while also upending my previous routine. Top of the list was getting engaged at a small observatory in the mountains of Utah. It was a beautiful day where everything clicked into place, and I couldn't be happier to enjoy this next chapter with O. I also started a new position leading a multi-disciplinary art studio, with a mission to transform the business into a cultural institution. Needless to say, I feel incredibly lucky across the board.
With the change in work, and the resulting increase in time and responsibility, I haven't quite figured out where my writing and music output will settle. The goal is to continue with some kind of regular cadence, and to keep working on my larger Utah project throughout the rest of the year.
Now on to some recommendations, slightly shortened for the sake of finally getting this published.
The book that had the biggest impact on me over the past couple months was Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, an ongoing conversation and biography of the minimalist installation artist Robert Irwin. In many of the art books I've read, there's an inherent difficulty in explaining the work through text, and often the descriptions and resulting material feel too surface-level to really enjoy. But in this book, the author Lawrence Weschler spends more time talking to Irwin than trying to present his art. Through this, you develop a sense of Irwin's evolving process, with all the motivations and difficulties he encountered, which in turn provides a rich understanding of his work. I was completely unfamiliar with Robert Irwin beforehand, but if you have any interest in art, creating a lifelong body of work, or the struggles of pushing the boundaries of acceptability, you'll enjoy the read.
"History tells us that significant ideas rarely come from the center. They begin at the margins, where ideas are allowed to be incomplete, even incorrect. Places where success is not the goal, but learning is."
As our lives crash and coalesce around these evolving AI tools, I continue to find it helpful to read perspectives that force me to zoom out a bit. Not necessarily to think bigger, but to change the way I am framing my assumptions and questions. This short piece published by Collab Fund was a thoughtful push in that direction.
Ryan Holiday is an expert at weaving together historical narratives to present clear perspectives on life's most common struggles. His questions often center around a theme of who is the person you want to be, and how can your decisions compound to create that outcome. He recently published a blog post: You Are What You Won’t Do For Money, an active reminder on the importance of having goals and principles that you can stand behind in the face of tempting financial opportunities.
How do you trust the accuracy and quality of information in an environment flooded with content? In Rebooting the Attention Machine the Cosmos Institute is attempting to map John Stuart Mill's reasons for free speech onto the future code that will build, and constrain, the systems we inhabit. I find it interesting to take big-picture essays like this and try to distill down the ideas to how they may become relevant in my day-to-day living. Some of the strings I pulled on after reading this: How do you filter what you consume? Does the body of your work have a structural arc? What kind of environment do I want to present my own work in (and what kind of environment will hold the resulting interactions with peers and readers)?
Great art resonates. In a crowded world, with more quality and distraction than we could ever hope to peruse, what stands out is work that makes you feel something. But before you can make someone feel something, what you create has to have feeling. So where do you start with that vague and ambitious goal? Spencer Chang explores these ideas in his piece, field notes on being a creative (02).
Slowly, then suddenly,
Ron