One of the blogs I read regularly is the one by Scott Young. Scott got some fame by arranging his university degree online, for a few thousand dollars. Especially in the US, where the costs for a college degree has gone totally out of hand, this was unheard of.
Scott has been writing his blog for a very long time now, and/but keeps coming with interesting thoughts on learning and other things.
Scott also wrote the book Ultralearning about effective learing.
This response from Nick Cave to a question form a reader of his blog is so beautiful.
Somewhere on the great Interweb I found a review of Kim Gordon. I did not know the book. It had disappointed this reader. Nevertheless I purchased the book, being a long term lover of Sonic Youth and curious about Kim Gordon’s life.
I found the book very good. Nice details describing Kim’s environment, household things, stuff, music. Written in a loose style. The edition of the book I have – the pocket edition with the orange cover – is a bit grungy. A nice fit with the black and white pictures in the book.
Kim Gordon sketches an entertaining and informative image of punk-rock life in the 80s, 90s and 00s. There seems to be no end to the progress of Sonic Youth, until Thurston Moore falls into an affair with fortune hunter Eva Prinz (the name is not in the book, but it required little research to find out).
The tone turns from melancholic, in the description of het schizophrenic brother, to disillusioned in her marriage with Thurston Moore.
Beautiful book and woman, strange.
The Art of Doing by Camille Sweeney & Josh Gosfield was recommended here and there, so I put it on my list. The book turned out to be different than what I expected—not in a negative way. I had expected a self-help book with chapter-by-chapter advice. Instead, every chapter shares 10 learning points from the achievements of high-flyers in a wide variety of professions. The list of these people goes from author Stephen Dubner to tennis champion Martina Navratinova to soprano Anna Netrebko.
A few common threads emerge among these people. All have a vision, persevere through bad times, and are collaborative. None of them are psychotic “leaders” you typically find in large bureaucratic organizations or egomaniac attention-seeking media addicts. All are driven by a why. All are hardworking and humble.
My highlights:
Martina Navratilova: don’t specialize, dream big, practice and exercise (do the work).
Simon Doonan (I didn’t know who he was before reading the book – Simon is a world-famous window dresser): Go Niche, be the best at something.
Tony Hsieh: discover your values (first).
Mark Frauenfelder (by far the best entry in the book!): Make the blog that doesn’t exist, Be original, get an attitude, Don’t bullshit (don’t waste people’s time), mix things, find unexpected things.
The past couple of years we have heard that a blog was something of 2000’s. The rise of Youtube and more recently, the popularity of podcasts, were supposedly make blogs a thing of the past.
But the debatable recommendation and influencing practices of Youtube, and other advertisement-backed social media drive people away from these platforms. At the same time there is a increasing number of people being driven away from tradiditional media, finding the “breaking news” tactics distracting and misguiding.
As a replacement for these, the blog seems on it’s way back, as is the newsletter (via email!) informing the readers of blog updates. Blogs are not found through google searches or Facebook recommendations, but through recommendations by real people. Thus providing a source of manually curated web content by like-minded people.
One of these treasures I found today is Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files blog.
https://www.theredhandfiles.com/
Kim Gordon published a wonderful “artist’s scrapbook” called No Icon. As a somewhat shy artist she hesitated to create a book about herself, but it has become a beautiful authentic document.
An unnerving video by Die Antwoord “I Fink U Freeky”, directed by Roger Ballen.
You probably know Ed Ruscha’s Sunset project, in which he photography all the houses along Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. He published this project in the book simply called Every Building on the Sunset Strip.
Getty has created a beautiful website – a piece of art on itself – that allows you to explore the project.
https://12sunsets.getty.edu/map/narrative?d=0.42006&mode=no-map
Record density wisdom/word ratio in Seth Godin’s free ebook Graceful.
Download from Seth’s site here.
