Recently

These photos are from a drive down the coast that I did for no reason, a few days after Thanksgiving. I bought a tree on the trip, saw a few beaches, drank a coffee at Downtown Local in Pescadero. As I usually do on solo aimless trips, I initially felt weird seeing other folks on the beaches. But the more people I saw, the more it seemed that they were doing just the same thing - being in a place to be there.

Reading

• Susan Sontag’s Death Kit.
• The housing monster by Prole is a critique of capitalism through the lens of housing. I buy it. It makes coverage like The Great American Single-Family Home Problem seem tame in comparison, but also describes the problem as so all-encompassing that there’s no route to redemption without revolution.
• The Californian Ideology
• You Don’t Have to Talk seems right. Others think the opposite. With the collapse of ‘allies’ and the diminishing ability for anyone to talk about anything on the internet, the only winning move is not to play and instead be a better person in real life.

Listening

St. Vincent’s New York, off of her new album, MassEducation. I’ve always loved St. Vincent’s non-title tracks and covers a bit more than her hits. Her take on These Days has so much feeling - her Dig a Pony is raw. I first fell in love with her song Now Now, and then her epic solo on the live version of Just The Same But Brand New (3:40).

New York is my favorite track yet.

Photay appeared for a few seconds in the soundtrack of the new Broad City. His album has a few other hits, like The Everyday Push.

Xiu Xiu’s cover of Sharp Dressed Man.

Everything Daniel Johnston, and his cultural influence, the Wilco cover and Beach House cover.

Watching

I’m trying, again, to wean myself off of video media, or at least to replace mindless entertainment with something more educational.

That something this month has been the HeavyBit Library. I was lucky enough to score an invite to their conference about pricing and was really impressed with the calibre of the speakers and the rigor of their thinking. Some that have caught my attention in particular:

• From Seed to Series B - actual typical numbers on VC expectations through the lifecycle of a company
• What it was like to run a company during the financial crisis

I never expected to be watching videos about Business in my free time, but here we are.