honest-broker.com

The NY Times Asked Me to Pick the Greatest Living American Songwriters

The first half dozen names came easily enough, but then it got harder. After I reached number nine, I wanted to stop.

3quarksdaily.com

Dancing in New York: Variations on a Theme

Its power, like that of Bach's series of variations, accumulates slowly, moment by moment. By the end, as the original theme returns, you are left with the feeling of having experienced a great arc, a fully realized idea explored in all its possibilities and permutations.

themarginalian.org

The Force and the Flower: Poet and Potter M.C. Richards on Creativity

Life is best understood and practiced as an art, the way that art is understood and practiced. We rely on inspiration, feeling for materials, knowledge of how to put things together well, patience, physical strength and awareness that we are part of a process which we don't know much about yet but which we live within and are sustained by.

themarginalian.org

Wilderness, Solitude, and Creativity: Artist and Philosopher Rockwell Kent’s Century-Old Meditations on Art and Life During Seven Months on a Small Alaskan Island

Often I think that however much I draw or paint, or however well, I am not an artist as art is generally understood. The abstract is meaningless to me save as a fragment of the whole, which is life itself… It is the ultimate which concerns me, and all physical, all material things are but an expression of it… We are part and parcel of the big plan of things. We are simply instruments recording in different measure our particular portion of the infinite.

noahpinion.blog

Is China's soft power really rising, or is America's just crumbling?

China is a deeply repressive nation, with universal surveillance, fine-grained media and speech control, and ubiquitous censorship. That's the kind of society where only anodyne, cautious artistry can flourish, except in tiny subcultural pockets too small for the government to worry about.

themarginalian.org

Enchantment and the Courage of Joy: René Magritte on the Antidote to the Banality of Pessimism

Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so. It is an easy task, because people who are intellectually lazy are convinced that this miserable terror is "the truth", that this terror is knowledge of the "extra-mental" world. This is an easy way out, resulting in a banal explanation of the world as terrifying.

themarginalian.org

Flowers for Things I Don’t Know How to Say: A Tender Painted Lexicon of Consolation and Connection

We need flowers for the same reason we need poems, or paintings, or songs — because what we can feel will always be infinitely vaster and more complex than what we can name, because words will always break under the weight of the immensities we task them with carrying, will never fully answer the soul's cry for connection, for consolation, for mercy.

jefftweedy

Lotta Love (Neil Young cover)

I'm filled with gratitude to have had this experience and to get to play this amount of music with my children, and friends who I've known since they were little kids, too. It's been an incredible thrill and a great thing for my family and me to get to spend that amount of time together.

themarginalian.org

How to Be a Good Explorer on the Lifelong Expedition to Yourself

An exploration is a traversal of the unknown, of landscapes you didn't even know existed, with all the courage and vulnerability and openness to experience that demands; its payoff is discovery — of unimagined wonders, of yourself in the face of the unimagined.

lennysnewsletter.com

Listen: A visual guide to getting out of a creative slump

Why it's necessary to create work that might feel embarrassing The simple mindset shift that stops stalling and gets you to just start How to reframe scorn as a positive signal The thought process that can help you move out of a state of rumination How to treat failed ideas as seeds for future breakthroughs

honest-broker.com

Tells Us What You're Doing

The last time I invited readers to talk about their work, I got a thousand comments in just the first 24 hours. I spent days sampling some of the projects, and was impressed by the quality—we have a very talented group of readers here.

3quarksdaily.com

Teenage Frida Kahlo’s Moving Letters

as an artist, as a lover, as a person who lived with extraordinary vulnerability, extraordinary courage, and the precocious awareness that the conversation between the two is the measure of a life.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Hannah Park

Fiction to expand one's creativity and empathy. To experience emotions and other perspectives that would otherwise be unknown.

themarginalian.org

Diseases of the Will: Neuroscience Founding Father Santiago Ramón y Cajal on the Six Psychological Flaws That Keep the Gifted from Living Up to Their Gift

No one would deny the fact that he who knows and acts is the one who counts, not he who knows and falls asleep. We render a tribute of respect to those who add original work to a library, and withhold it from those who carry a library around in their head.

currincy

You Should Absolutely Be Going to Big Ears, Too

That inaugural Big Ears—scattered across a clutch of theaters and strange little rooms in a sliver of the then-sleepy city—was a continual revelation for 25-year-old me, instantly expanding my sense of what was possible.

jefftweedy

Human (Molly Sarlé cover)

There are lyrics in it that distill something a lot of people spend their entire lives writing songs to try and say, like: I see what I see I don't see what I can't

honest-broker.com

I'm Recommending 14 New Albums

Most of them are hidden from view in the stagnant mainstream culture of our time, where tired formulas and AI slop prevail. These are the real deal, and give me reason for optimism about the future of our music culture.

themarginalian.org

The Courage to Be Yourself: Virginia Woolf on How to Hear Your Soul

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.

jefftweedy

The Long Cut (solo acoustic)

Singing that felt a little bit like communicating with a much younger version of me who was concerned with being able to get better, being legitimate, and wanting to not feel shame about making mistakes. I feel like that song was written to me today, and I felt like I could answer back to that person, "Yeah, you were right to want this and want to try harder."

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Jev Valles

I love how it views creativity as something spiritual that works best when it just flows. That is something I need to remind myself of at times because it's so easy to fall into the trappings of constraining your imagination to fit within the mandates that buyers want or the expectations that audiences have rather than the freedom of where a thought takes you.

themarginalian.org

The Music of Trees: Improvisation, Iteration, and the Science of Immortality

Every tree is a jazz player, in just this way, although where a long Coltrane piece might last a quarter hour, a tree's performance may go on for half a millennium or more.

currincy

Listen Hear #2: How a Violist Quit Classical Music but Made a Sublime Strings Record, Anyway

I realized those sounds were actually more interesting to me than some super pure note I could play really well had I been practicing a lot. These were things I'd never pay attention to or something I shouldn't even be playing when I was studying classical music. It's such a different mindset of approaching music. Instead of 'I've got to get it right,' it's more like, 'What can happen?'

themarginalian.org

The Continuous Creative Act of Holding on and Letting Go: 10 Beautiful Minds on the Art of Growing Older

to grow old is not a punishment but a privilege — that of having survived the loneliness of childhood, the brash insecurity of youth, the turmoil of middle age, in order to begin the continuous creative act of holding on while letting go.

3quarksdaily.com

Cherish Your Comfort Zone

Being in familiar surroundings with adequate control over my time and space is a necessary condition for immersing myself fully in reading, writing, and taking pictures—activities that nourish me and give me space for creativity.

currincy

Musical Freezers, Metalcore Endurance, & Cam Winter Covers: 14 Sounds I Loved in February

This is the blissful opposite—ordinary folks walking into an ordinary setting, making something so casually extraordinary that others smile with wonder.

wired.com

Toss Your Not-Quite-Clean Clothes on Simone Giertz’s Laundry Chair

Inventor and YouTuber Simone Giertz built an elegant chair that holds your half-dirty clothes while still functioning as a seat.

themarginalian.org

What Birds Dream About: How Evolution Invented REM in the Avian Brain So We May Practice the Possible in Our Sleep

It may be that in REM, this gloaming between waking consciousness and the unconscious, we practice the possible into the real. It may be that we evolved to dream ourselves into reality — a laboratory of consciousness that began in the bird brain.

lennysnewsletter.com

Mastering Midjourney: How to create consistent, beautiful brand imagery without complex prompts

Rather than relying on complex prompts, Jamey shows how visual references and strategic shortcuts can produce better results with less effort.

jefftweedy

Year of the Horse

I want to feel what it feels like to make that song go. I think that's taught me to recognize when a song of my own feels right.

3quarksdaily.com

Review of “Nonesuch” by Francis Spufford

If you aren't bent gigglingly over your manuscript, like a stock photo model alone with her salad, then what's the point of any of it?

jefftweedy

Year of the Horse

Since then, when I hear a song that I really love, if I have the aptitude to try and learn it, I usually do. And it's because of the same impulse. I want to feel what it feels like to make that song go.

jefftweedy

Year of the Horse

I want to feel what it feels like to make that song go. I think that's taught me to recognize when a song of my own feels right. The same excitement I feel about someone else's song, the desire to be moved, is intact when I'm trying to write my own.

currincy

How E Street Keyboard Giant Roy Bittan Played on David Bowie’s “Station to Station”

So many of my interviews these days feel like jousting with someone's soul, trying to get to the personal core of what makes them an artist.