Brian Thomas Clark

My experience of creating music and writing songs is finding enormous strength through vulnerability. You’re being open to whatever happens, including failure and shame. There’s certainly a vulnerability to that, and an incredible freedom... To be truly vulnerable is to exist adjacent to collapse or obliteration. In that place we can feel... See more

The Beasties were the ultimate curators and culture merchants, although they never perverted their creative universe with gross buzzwords like that.

Between their genre-smashing albums, their iconic videos, their fashion exploits like X-Large, and their magazine Grand Royal , you could say that they were running a “lifestyle brand” of sorts.

The... See more

In their own way, that’s what Jeff Tweedy’s songs are usually trying to do, too. They can be beautiful but they’ve also got those holes, those scars, those gaping wrecking-ball dents, all of which speak to the immense difficulty but absolute necessity of trying to make anything beautiful at all. They let off firecracker blasts that illuminate the... See more

I’m fascinated with Coppola partly because she does different things very well, something I think we all strive for. But the way she presents herself and her work walks a perfect line between highbrow and approachable, never veering too far either way. She doesn’t deny her lineage or commercial success but maintains her artistic sensibility. Not... See more

The gift with the highest return: believing in someone before they believe in themselves.

Meaningful friendships develop when things are intense, and involve peril, beauty, jeopardy, drama and self-development

Social media encourages us to think of every thought we have as interesting; it makes everyone else feel accessible, and therefore disposable; it exposes us to endless bad actors, hardening our hearts and compelling us to suspect the worst; it rewards vulnerability, but also incentivizes defensiveness; and, most cogently for the purposes of this... See more

The ones and zeroes of the digital map tolerate no error or noise. It’s an auto-tuned reality where everything is on the note or it doesn’t exist. Never mind that James Brown reaching up to that note is where we find the soul of the music. In the world of digital figures, that expression of the human soul — that stuff between the official notes —... See more