Currently Enjoying
April 2025
How quickly life fills with distractions and delights.
The seeds of greatness are repetition and consistency.
These two phrases have been bouncing through my head the entire month. It's been a whirlwind four weeks of camping, jam-packed weekends, and hosting friends and family. It's also been a month plagued by a lack of creative consistency and substantial professional distractions. The balance between accepting the natural course of things and fighting to carve out the necessary time to work and create is something I'm still trying to get a grasp on. But until then, all we can do is strive, and strive again.
First, a couple pieces building on the above idea of repetition and consistency.
Giorgio Morandi was an early 20th century Italian painter, known for his sparse still lifes. Over the course of 40 years, he painted over 1000 pieces, largely of the same general subject matter, bottles on a table. The bulk of the bottle paintings are muted, nearly monochromatic, and it's fascinating to see both the progression, and uniformity, across such a large body of work. In a creative world saturated with gear and technique and novelty, Morandi has been a great reset for considering what is actually worth focusing on.
Continuing with consistency, Evan Goldfine has spent a year publishing a weekly series exploring the complete works of Bach. After 200 hours of listening and writing, he published this list of 37 takeaways that explores ideas beyond just the narrow confines of his yearlong project. If you're looking for a good entry into Bach, I've spent the most cumulative listening time with The Art of the Fugue .
Anonymous Club is a documentary that follows the musician Courtney Barnett over the course of three years of international touring and recording. It's an intimate look into the mind of an artist, beautifully conveying the constant oscillation between confidence and doubt that is so common to the creative process. I wasn't familiar with her work, but that didn't detract from the overall impact of the film.
"When culture does not offer new visions, and when society is not able to provide a positive outlook of the future, then people look backward."
It was easy to get exhausted by the flood of images and resulting commentary from the recent Ghiblificiation trend online. What was striking was how thoroughly it took over the online discourse, and for those few days it felt almost impossible to escape its collective pull. So needless to say, I was hesitant to read another piece retreading the same doomer narrative. But Jonah Primiano's framing on cultural stagnation and how the intensity of fandoms leads to the flattening of our creative output was well worth the read.
Two of my favorite musicians right now, multi-instrumentalist FKJ and drummer Yussef Dayes pair up for a funky, improvisational live performance. On top of the quality of the music, it's beautifully shot. If you only have a few minutes, jump in at the 8-minute mark.
Another live performance worth checking out is saxophonist and bandleader Nubya Garcia's great set on NPR's Tiny Desk.
What do we lose when we chase over-optimization and numbers above all else? If you're a baseball fan, maybe the answer is the kind of drama and excitement that makes history. Professional sports have always been about maximizing any possible competitive advantage, which when taken to the extreme means prioritizing analytics over the spirit of the game itself. This NYT piece looks into how the usage of pitchers has changed as teams rely more and more on statistics to drive their decision-making. How do you weigh the downstream effects on training, player durability, and fan engagement while maintaining the goal of winning the most games?
It's not often you see someone with such a strong vision and set of values that they are willing to turn down work if it doesn't align with their ideal. In 1992, producer Steve Albini wrote a letter (skip down halfway through the article) to Nirvana, laying out his methodology and philosophy for making an album. He's unabashedly frank with his opinions and direction, almost asking Nirvana to turn him down. But that level of conviction speaks volumes for the quality and passion he would bring to a project, which led to the recording of the gritty In Utero.
While it isn't an essay per se, Robin Sloan's March Newsletter shares a few of his goals that feel prescient to the shift in direction for the creative economy. This idea of working more with physical items (in his case print), and sharing directly with an audience through non-social media channels will be a key distinction for notable work of the future. I'm constantly looking for how I can align my projects in a similar direction.
I spend a lot of time on Spotify, and through it I've easily listened to dozens of artists and albums I would have otherwise never discovered. Having said that, there's certainly an argument to be made for supporting businesses and platforms that are more beneficial to the musicians themselves. This how-to guide for dumping spotify is worth the read, even if just to reconsider your consumption habits and encourage you to engage with artists more directly.
Slowly, then suddenly,
Ron