taste

But that eternal present is a lie, an illusion, a fabrication of the digital interfaces. And this not only destroys our sense of the past but also undermines our ability to think about the future.

In an environment without past or future, all we have is stasis.

So it’s no coincidence that culture has stagnated in this eternal digital now . The same... See more

Is Mid-20th Century American Culture Getting Erased?

Ok, here goes: I realized that the quality I value among the most highly—if not the most hightly—in an artistic collaborator is conviction. A lot of words are thrown around when it comes to creative work: trust, community, "gift" in the Lewis Hyde sense, sincerity, etc. But conviction is different—it's belief in what you are doing, being driven to... See more

Weekend Epiphany

Joanne McNeil All My Stars Oct 11, 2022 newsletter

Taste isn't some mysterious gift bestowed at birth—it's simply what happens when you pay close attention to what moves you.

Sari Azout • What Matters in the Age of AI Is Taste

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

Chris Black • Article

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

The Beastie Boys Edition

Cole Smith: “ And my third recommendation is just the idea of sampling yourself . Sampling yourself is so fun to me, because you might make a song, and it sucks, but instead of throwing it in the trash, you chop it up and use it as a sample. I highly recommend it.”

Blackbird Spyplane: It’s interesting to think about how to apply that idea outside... See more

Bringing a kid into our declining world is terrifying

On a recent episode of Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem was talking about reading Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence early on and how unconcerned he is now with being new or original. He recalled a speech he heard by Brian Eno about his early ambient work:

It’s hard to explain, but it was very easy to be new at that

Article

We celebrate the fact that most artists today have a huge portion of humankind’s output at their fingertips at any given moment, but we rarely think about the fact that exposure and abundance can also become a paralytic. Eno said he wanted to hear a certain kind of music, so he had to invent it for himself. Who feels the need to make new music, when you can almost always call up music that is completely new to your ears?

Sometimes when I watch my 8-year-old making music, I note how unencumbered he is by musical history and how free he is of any need to be original. He is happy, for now, to make music that is a parody of what he’s heard, and in the parodying, he comes up with his own thing. It’s new to him and that’s what’s important.

In fact, this is the great gift of children: everything is new to them, and so it can become new to you, if you let it.

Also what I mean by a good reader is not like a good student of literature but more like a good listener. They read/listen for why something is on the page. They come to each work without a checklist of how to do something well, or what makes something a success or a failure. Their taste is unique and continually expanding with the work they turn... See more

Joanne McNeil • where do my legs go

Where I care about this stuff is, well, I wish there would be more good readers. That more people would turn to work with a sense of expansiveness rather than moral accounting. Art is created with work but our enjoyment and appreciation of it isn’t work. Well, it doesn’t have to be.

Joanne McNeil

By contrast, when “everything is at our fingertips” — when art is compressed into the same omnipresent and infinite digital non-time as every random piece of internet garbage — I think that we’re left feeling incomplete on some basic human level, like we’re the practitioners of a vibey old religion whose rituals were all but erased, and whose... See more

Streaming is an affront to God

And so, when people valorize these kinds of outmoded media, and outmoded acts of endurance and devotion, I don’t think it’s just about empty nostalgia. Because these are touchstones and processes — precisely in their inefficiency — by which people can open themselves up to transformative experience, and honor the depth and fullness of what art means to us.