Are you that somebody?
“If you’re the sort of person who fucking whines about being motivated, like some of the art students I lecture, then just fucking stop. I’m not interested in speaking to anyone who wonders how to motivate themselves. If you need to talk about how to get motivated, then go get a normal job in the normal scheme of the world and just do art as a hobby so you still love it. Stop clogging up the field for the people who need this like a drug,” says artist and journalist, Molly Crabapple in one of the excellent longform interviews over at The Great Discontent. Also worth checking out the interview with Roxane Gay, whose book of essays Bad Feminist, I devoured in two days.
When I’m reading Murakami, strange serendipitous things start happening in my life (when my boyfriend is reading him at the same time, the weirdness doubles). This Buzzfeed essay sums up his addictive brand of magic.
I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to stumble on Ann Friedman’s essay on Patti Smith for This Recording. For me, Smith’s Horses is the urgent, musical sum of endless Saturday nights in Melbourne with my best friends and the hazy glow of mornings after.
Miranda July’s new app Somebody turns to the power of hashtags to forge connections between strangers.
I loved Rachel Hill’s story on how millennials are embracing the #girlboss philosophy on The Daily Beast.
Last week, I saw The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum speak at the Opera House for the Festival of Dangerous Ideas and she reminded me about why Sex and the City and Buffy the Vampire Slayer are two of my all-time favourite shows.
“I was a boy haunted by questions: Why do the lilies close at night? Why does my father always say, “I can dig it”? And who really killed the dinosaurs? And why is my life so unlike everything I see on TV? That feeling—the not knowing, the longing for knowing, and the eventual answer—is love and youth to me. And I have always preferred libraries to classrooms because the wide open library is the ultimate venue for this theater.” – Ta-Nehisi Coates has new writing up at The Atlantic.
I find FKA Twig’s blend of art, persona and ethereal, trip-hop laced electronica fascinating. Her music is like a modern-day tribute to the old, scratched Aaliyah CDs I used to have on repeat in my suburban bedroom in the nineties.