consumption

Everything But The Girl - Walking Wounded

2024-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

I started listening to Everything But The Girl sometime back in 2012 or 2013 in New York. That might seems somewhat unlikely given how prissy the music can be, but there is some continuity between my teenage love of Steely Dan and the genre-spanning jazz rock that EBTG put out over decades.

The first album of theirs I listened through many times was The Language of Life, which has some great tunes on it. But I eventually cycled through their whole catalogue and all of it is good, Eden probably being the one I’ve come back to most frequently.

The specific memory that hit me recently was when I moved to Chicago for a few months in the dead of winter. That was my apartment, above. I remember driving to Microcenter through the ice and snow covered city, playing Mirrorball and Big Deal a bunch.

I loved Chicago, and especially that apartment. It was dirt cheap at $1600/mo. - for two bedrooms no less! Those few months were a sequence in my life that I wish had gotten more time.

Everything But The Girl is worth spending some time with. Tracy Thorn’s biography, Bedsit Disco Queen, was also a fun read. And Walking Wounded is a particularly good album that reminds me of snowy midwestern streets and empty electronics stores.

Hidden Forces: Episode 9 - The Fed and Greenspan

2020-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

Archived here

Hidden Forces has probably been my favorite podcast for the last year. Dimitri Kofinas may be the best, most thorough interviewer working today.

In this episode, he talks to the author of a biography about Alan Greenspan. They touch on many aspects of the Fed’s history and some of the Chairman involved.

Maybe most interesting about this story is Greenspan’s incongruence: he was raised a devotee of objectivism and seemed well aware of the pitfalls of asset inflation, and yet presided over a regime change in the Fed that enabled two huge asset bubbles under his watch. He preemptively cut interest rates during the Asia crisis of 1998, and seemed to relish in politics. It seems he traded a large degree of integrity for political success.

The episode contains a good discussion of this incongruence as well as looming issues caused by the behavior of central banks (which boils down to: encouraging higher and higher levels of debt by enabling carry trades that rely on low rates of interest).

Jordan Peterson: set your house in order

2019-12-26T00:00:00+00:00

The Jordan Peterson podcast: S2 E33 set your house in order

When I first heard of Jordan Peterson I regarded him somewhat suspiciously. Based on the way he was talked about, I figured that he was some kind of alt-right neo-nazi dog whistle – which is an odd stance for me to take given my disdain for leftism. Nonetheless that’s what I implicitly expected of him.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Peterson constantly impresses me with his even, objective view of the world which is astounding partially because it’s so deep. I have yet to be disappointed with one of his lectures.

I caught this lecture on an 11 hour drive from New York to Ohio - I think I was somewhere in Pennsylvania at the time.

If you’re new to him, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend starting with this lecture since it’s one of the darkest he’s done. He discusses where evil comes from in human nature and uses, among other things, the story of Adam & Eve and Cain & Abel as proxies. One of the things that I love about Peterson is that though he doesn’t claim himself to be a Christian, he uses Biblical stories to great effect and manages to make them very engaging - and I’m saying this as someone who is staunchly agnostic.

Listening to Peterson’s stuff always picks me up, takes me to the well for motivation. Along with Taleb and Csikszentmihalyi (the Flow guy) he’s one of the only modern philosophers I can think of who are worth listening to.

Metropolitan

2019-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

Metropolitan is a holiday comedy of manners released in 1990, and is the first movie in Whit Stillman’s “Doomed-Bourgeois-in-Love” series. It feels like an upscale John Hughes-does-Clerks in New York kind of thing. The dialogue is snappy and the pacing of the movie is perfect; never a down moment but somehow the film feels atmospheric.

The script makes the characters, preppy first year college students, endearingly precocious and insightful but equally snobbish-but-well-meaning and inexperienced in a way that’s entertaining and funny. The romantic angle of the movie is novel and the lead girl, Audrey Rouget, is near perfect.

I’m amazed that more people haven’t heard of this movie.

The sort-of sequel, The Last Days of Disco comes recommended. I’ve watched the second in the series, Barcelona, but it didn’t really leave an impression.

Bernie Sanders on Joe Rogan

2019-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O-iLk1G_ng

Listened to Bernie Sanders give his spiel to Joe Rogan for about an hour. It dawned on me that hell would be listening to Rogan do ad reads for anything over 10 minutes.

The conversation made me realize how doomed the US is - Bernie’s puerile understanding of healthcare, drug markets, minimum wage, etc. probably sound completely compelling and sensible to someone who hasn’t spent more a decent amount of time thinking about microecon. I can totally see what he’s saying resonate with most of the country.

No surprise anywhere here, just figured I’d indulge a little masochism and check in with dem politics.

Nikita (1990)

2019-08-07T14:56:13+00:00

Directed by Luc Besson. Made in 1990 and couldn’t have been from anytime else. Gritty French action with big charm. Dig the soundtrack which seems to have been a clear influence on Air.