Finished reading: The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin 📚
A seminal work in anarchist theory. You simply can’t fault the heart and goodwill that imbues these pages. It is striking to me how strong the bond between hopefulness and revolution (as opposed to anger and rebellion) is prominent.
Much of the book, unfortunately is very dated. Predictions and commentary on many of the countries (and socialism in general) did not pan out well. However, I found the chapter on division of labor to be one of the best and most useful things I’ve read in a long time, reminding me why I am reading this genre in the first place. I feel armed and equipped with new insights that more than repay the price of reading. It is a necessary counteractive to the capitalist and commercial-driven education I get in my MBA.
💬 Spoken Poem: We Are The Last Poets
This wind you hear is the birth of memory. When the moment hatches in time’s womb, there will be no art talk. The only poem you will hear will be the spear point pivoted Into the punctured marrow of the villain, And the timeless native son dancing like crazy to retrieved rhythms of desire faded into memory. Therefore, we are The Last Poets of the world. And the question is not whether the world is ready for change, but rather are you n——?
Artists that were on the forefront of the civil rights movements and who some consider the first hip-hop group.
📸 More film photos I haven’t posted here before. Some recent, some less so.
💐 Things that deserve their flowers today:
- Long voice notes
- Doorstoppers
- How clothes smell after leaving a coffeeshop
- Changing minds
- Tall windows
- High Ceilings
- Penicillin
- Low budget films
- Dirty jokes
✍️
Love is bringing out the play in others. Play is the mode of one who is loved. When you create conditions for another person to express themselves playfully, you have loved them. When you have been safely carried into a state of playfulness, you have been loved. Play is how we exercise the freedom that love secures for us.
Put a lot of heart into my most recent post about the relationship between play and love. Not sure how intelligible it is, but it is the type of thinking I’d like to believe is somewhat rare. Please read the full thing and let me know your thoughts: bradley-andrews.com.
💸 This article alleges that the avg. stock pay for an OpenAI employee is $1.5 million. My initial reaction is great enthusiasm for those workers—what a windfall!
At the same time, the growing inequalities are hard to ignore. I wrote this dispatch a few weeks ago in part to understand things better.
🎶 Update: Can’t sleep. Album too good. I was definitely trying to play it cool in my last post. Like I said, no skips; and there is a different genre of hip-hop for all the fans. 😮💨
🎰🕺🪩🎤🎼
🎵 Just finished the livestream of Ca$ino by Baby Keem. Always dangerous to speak too soon, especially because I’m very biased, but gonna give broad thoughts. May talk about individual tracks after the album has time to breathe.
Baby Keem is a style-bender, which is why I love him. The Andre 3K, Kanye, and dare I say, Tyler the Creator, influences are so evident. None as palpable as Kendrick though, and I imagine the most critcism will be that he is so similar to Kenny.
I think it is a phenomenal album— more melodic and catchy than his last, but still energetic and absolutely hype. He gets into his singing bag for real. It is going to please hip-hop fans and causal listeners. Above all, there are NO skips.
Lyrically it’s not the strongest (but still leagues ahead of the zeitgeist), something Keem himself acknowledges in a song called “im not a lyricist”. The West Coast joints with producers like Too Short are my favs, I think— but maybe that’s the 909er in me. I’m feeling this one STRONG 🕺
Being 25 years old, I think he understands how to make a “meme”, or moments, that feel so perfect for online culture. There are a million of them sprinkled throughout the album. That being said, Keem also digs deep into some traumas and hardships. This stuff is real art.
Lastly, I think PgLang knows they knocked it out of the park with the rollout. The livestream listening party was sick, like everything they do. I need them to expand their projects ASAP. With two great albums, Keem has successfully cemented himself as a player to be reckoned with. However, if he is going to really ascend and take over for Dot, I’m not sure that pgLang can afford to be as insular as they’ve been. I understand that they want to keep it small and family, if only to keep out the bad culture. But playing nice with others is part of the game and the album could’ve beneffited from some other great features.
Conclusion: amazing album. Happy I pre-ordered the CD. As I predicted earlier this week, it is going to be on repeat for a long while.
Oh, and Kendrick’s features are frickin’ fire, funny, and PLAYFUL. My GOAT for real.
💬 From my current read, The Conquest of Bread:
We have all been bent on studying the dramatic side of revolutions so much, and the practical work of revolutions so little, that we are apt to see only the stage effects, so to speak, of these great movements: the fight of the first days; the barricades. But this fight, this first skirmish, is soon ended, and it is only after the breakdown of the old system that the real work of revolution can be said to begin.
🗞 A friend from my MBA program recently reached out with an idea about how entertainment follows the same life cycles as empires. Together, we wrote a paper that explores this pattern in depth, and made some predictions about what happens next. You can read the dispatch here: mercurysplaybook.com
💐 I’ve mentioned this before, but I am truly rooting for guys like iShowSpeed. His tour of Africa was such a fun showcase of nations, ethnicities, and culture. Watching him do interviews out of character always reminds me how polite, intelligent, and successful he is–at only 21 years old!
I’ve heard many arguments for why writers should not use AI. Yet, I have never heard someone voice my particular reason.
My particular reason is that I care deeply about the quality of my prose and my prose is far better than anything AI has produced. Should this change, my stance might also. In the meantime, I will be unapologetically penning my own thoughts.
✏️ New Word Learned:
Quaintrelle: a woman who emphasizes a life of passion expressed through personal style, leisurely pastimes, charm, and the cultivation of life’s pleasures; the female equivalent of a dandy.
Finished reading: Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte 📚
Rejection is an achievement of modern writing. It is an entirely contemporary work that still manages to be thoughtful, deep, and more than funny enough to leave you defenseless. That being said, it is also a deeply uncomfortable book, filled with characters that I know, that I hate, that I pity, and that I see myself in. It seems to me that most authors that try to tackle the consequences of terminal onliness fail by making the technology central. Tulathimutte keeps humanity at the core, even when traversing the strange, the cringe, the uncomfortable, the crude, and the perverse. I want to write a longer post about this book, but only after I talk about it with more people and process the experience that reading this book was. If you have read it, please hmu.
What I will say is this:
- The ending of this book is, perhaps, one of the most impressive endings I have ever read and far surpassed my expectations.
- More than usual, this book invited people to ask “what are you reading?” I am not sure if it’s the book cover, the title, or something unusual in how engaged I was in the book, but I noticed right away that people were curious about this one. It’s a good conversation starter, which makes me like it more.
“Money ain’t got no owners, only spenders.”
💬 Omar Little, The Wire
🎵 R&B recs for the week:
- Mad at Fire by Elmiene
- Just Like You by Adrian Marcel
- There Goes My Heart by Ella Mai
- Somebody by Jamie Foxx
- When Somebody Loves You Back by Teddy Pendergrass
Had to post because it’ll be nothing but Baby Keem after Thursday. 🔥
📷
As a child, I had an inexplicable love for the movie Secondhand Lions, starring the recently deceased Robert Duvall. It’s strange to see how it touches on so many themes that I still find myself pondering to this day: storytelling, virtue, masculinity, wonder, etc… While it is a very simple film, avoiding flourish both in special effects and in writing, it’s sincerity and wholesomeness is achingly absent in today’s media. Near the end of the film, Robert Duvall’s character gives a speech which left quite an impression on me as a child. I suspect that it will play a lot during the RIPs for Robert, but I felt like sharing it anyways:
Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love… true love never dies. You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in.
Yes, I had to look up the definition of “wuthering.”