The Little (Big) Things: February
Good music. Good documentaries. Good articles. Good podcasts. Great meals!
These are the things that fill the gaps between the ebb and flow of life.
These are the little things that are actually the big things a lot of the time.
The documentary that kept you up way too late, the song you discovered on an idle Sunday, the article you skim-read at lunchtime that you couldn’t stop thinking about for days after.
In an effort to write more, I recently decided to put together an email/blog post at the end of every month, with a quick list of the little (big) things that defined and added colour to the outgoing few weeks.
It’s an entirely selfish act, to be honest. My hope is that others (like you!) will do likewise and hit me up with some new gems that’ll come to enrich future months.
Totally influenced by Tim Ferriss’ weekly ‘5-Bullet Friday’ email, here are a few quick links to the things I dug in February.
Anderson .Paak / Kanye West
I try to listen to five new albums every month. By “new”, I mean albums that are new to me. Chronically prone to decision paralysis in the world of ubiquitous on-demand music, my discovery stuttered badly. So now I’m way more structured about that type of thing.
My favourite tracks from the month are Anderson Paak’s ‘Silicon Valley’ and ‘Prime Time’. I can already say that his album will take some shifting as my favourite of the year. Somewhere between D’Angelo’s ‘Black Messiah’ and Kendrick Lamar’s ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’, it’s outrageously good.
Special mention for Kanye West’s ‘Ultralight Beam’ too. If you can remove the Kanye from it (not an easy task, I know), you’ll hear the work of a one-time underdog producer who still shows the odd glimpse of his truly special ability to layer apparently disparate pieces of music in a way that shouldn’t work and yet, somehow does. And does very beautifully on ‘Ultralight Beam’.
The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
I don’t watch nearly enough documentaries but did manage to make it through ‘The Internet’s Own Boy’.
It’s about Aaron Swartz and it’s great.
I didn’t know too much about Swartz beyond his Reddit and SOPA work, but the documentary adds a lot of context to what was a pretty amazing and all-too-short life. His dad is a good soul too.
Requiem for a Dream / The Obama Theory of Trump
On the back of watching ‘The Internet’s Own Boy’, I dug into a good bit of supplementary Swartz reading.
In 2013, the New Yorker did a fantastic analysis of Swartz and the deep-rooted drivers that motivated him to do the things he did.
He once spent a month hanging around his apartment, doing nothing but reading. He said it was the happiest month of his life. When asked why he didn’t do more things like this that made him happy, he replied….”I don’t care about being happy”. Yeah.
David Axelrod wrote a good piece in the New York Times called ‘The Obama Theory of Trump’ at the end of January. It gives a good take on why, in terms of historical political patterns, Trump is proving so popular in the US right now.
Whistlestop: The Dean Scream
Whistlestop is one of my favourite podcasts. John Dickerson’s combo of dad jokes and childlike enthusiasm for all things US politics is damn charming.
I listened to a great episode about Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign, which was ultimately doomed by a single moment of adrenaline-fuelled yelping in the wake of his third-place finish in the Iowa caucus. It made people think that he was, maybe, you know, kind of crazy.
Points for comic value, but also for how politically interesting Dean’s campaign was. In some ways, he laid the ground-work for Obama four years later.
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If you made it all the way to here and end up checking out any of the links, please let me know! And if you feel like it, please send on some recommendations of your own.
I think it’d be really cool if we got an open group together, sharing music, films and other good stuff with eachother every month.
