Art and Everything Else
I’ve written before about how poetry is a too-often overlooked literary form, so it was with NO END OF DELIGHT that I feasted my eyes on Trefology, which popped up in a completely unrelated web search.
And This Day in Music is one of those nice listy landing pages that sparks the feels.
I’m preparing to move everything I own and everything I am across the country. It’s only one state, but that first leg north is a big one. So, while changing homes may not be quite as stressful as pop psych has cracked it up to be, it does feel traumatic in some ways. I distract myself, which you probably already could tell.
Punch Brothers released a new album today, and I’m playing it right now. If you like Nickel Creek or bluegrass or Chris Thile, you’ll like this.
Rosie Leizrowice has a different way to tackle procrastination.
We talked about typewriters, stand-up comics, lots of music, and rural life on my podcast this week.
New Yorkers got a marvelous bonus this week when library card holders also gained free access to local museums, and they booked the hell out of them. Here’s hoping that success spreads to other cities.
Finally, wonderful work by Otobong Nkanga at the Chicago MCA
J. Mascis, the (usual) singer & guitarist for Dinosaur Jr., knocked out a karaoke version of Tom Petty’s “Don’t Do Me Like That” in Provincetown.
Here’s a gallery of some physical versions of art for Magic the Gathering cards.
And, since those are relatively brief, dig this wonderful archive of present-day objects repurposed as Star Trek props in various iterations of the franchise.
A few quick links below that I found intriguing to fascinating:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign has a really cool design scheme, contemporary and clean, knockout sections and monochromatic, but that makes it versatile, color-wise.
An amazing Keith Haring mural in Amsterdam that had been obscured by weatherboarding was uncovered 30 years later, and it’s typically stunning.
I’ve been inspired by and thinking about a few things the past day, and it seems appropriate to share.
First, the Falcon Heavy launch was thrilling, and the return of the boosters to perfect vertical ready positions on respective launchpads even more so. It’s constantly amazing what humans can do.
(Bonus nostalgia porn—one of the links from that video was to Nirvana’s 1992 acceptance speech for the MTV Video Music Awards’ Best New Artist.)
David Byrne has long been and will probably continue to be an inspiration for his thoughtful, daring approaches to art. I look to him as an artist who’s always searching for new sounds, new ideas, and new ways to put them together.
And further and further back, a discovery of possibly an ancient drawing tool. Art is baked into our humanity, and it’s part of what makes us who we are.
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-10-000-year-old-crayon-hold-clues-stone-age-creativity
Today was one of amazing things discovered and more work than I’d planned on coding lessons. Here are some things I was amazed by:
Marcus Aurelius’s classic Meditations. I’ve read bits of it, always surprised by its continued relevancy, but here’s an e-version.
Oprah Winfrey’s impassioned Golden Globes acceptance speech about womens’ empowerment and change.
If Smashing Pumpkins were Silversun Pickups, they’d be Big Jesus.
Images constructed to refocus machine-learned AI attention away from the thing they’re trying to recognize (a bit obscure phrase, I know, but the story explains).
Art comes from the stuff we take in: all nature, human interaction, and the creations of others.
