Some things are worth sharing

Music

These are, without a doubt some of the best albums to be created (in my eyes) and I could not recommend them enough to anyone who hasn't checked them out.

Sun Kil Moon - Ghosts of the Great Highway. The best writing on any album ever; the best song on any album ever (Duk Koo Kim); Mark Kozelek really is just a generational talent. His ability to contrast the masculine and the feminine, life and death and love and hatred so succesfully is a feat that I don't know if anyone can best. It's the type of music you listen to and doubt everything you've ever written.

Bill Evans - You Must Believe in Spring. Evans is a jazz God. It just doesn't get any better - this is the pinnacle of piano playing; nothing has gotten close and nothing ever will get close again

David Bowie - Blackstar. This is probably the greatest final album to ever exist - everything I could say about it has been said a million times but no one other than Bowie could turn their impending death into an artistic statement. It is flawless.

Héctor Lavoe & Willie Colón - Vigilante. It doesn't take a genius to recognise the title track is probably one of the best songs ever made. It's got everything - solos galore, maximalist salsa arrangements, a metric ton of jazz influence. And somehow there are 3 other songs on here that are basically just as good.

Maurice Duruflé - Requiem. There is something very specific about this recording that makes it amazing. His requiem, which was built off of an organ suite of Gregorian chant. Later he finished it with a full orchestral version, whhich is just gorgeous. It's so grandiose in its climaxes, so soft in its contemplative moments - it is life affirming music.

Sachi Hayasaka - 2.26. Hayasaka is one of the greatest to do it. The sheer amount of jazz: the feel, the vibes, the interpretations, the musicianship; too many bangers for one album.

LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver. I mean it's Sound of Silver. It has All My Friends, it has Someone Great, it has Get Innocuous! How does an album even get this good?

Cameron Winter - Heavy Metal. I said that Mark Kozelek has the best writing of any album, but goddamnit this comes close. Cameron Winter's lyricism is impressionistic to the point of nonsense - I still don't know what he's talking about sometimes, but I feel every single line like it brings up some unexplainable memory or emotion. Also the arrangements are perfect.

Geordie Greep - The New Sound. Another 2020s album with great lyricism. But more than the lyricism perhaps, is Geordie's unique voice, incredible songwriting, lush arrangements and ability to make a collection of a fair few 6-12 minute songs feel like 3 or 4 minutes each.

Steve Reich - Music for 18 Musicians. This album fills me with life and hope and joy and so on. There's something about these arrangements, the rhythms, the constant nature of these songs, that keeps me both captivated and calmed. What a piece of music.

okgutta - GOD (B)LESS AMERICA. Greatest piece of proof that rap music is alive and breathing. This album is not an easy listen - moreso lyrically than it is musically hard to listen to. The beats are gorgeous but the lyricism is cold, cutting, full of hate, resentment, desperation. It's a great representation of the state of black youth culture in the US right now.

Willie Nelson - Phases and Stages. The king of country? Phases and Stages has (once again) amazing lyricism - one of the best bits of country music you could ask for. Very concise, very well written, great songs.

Common - Be. It's hard to really praise this album in the same way that it's hard to fault it. What else is there to say? Zero skips. All bangers. The first rap album I would recommend someone who is not into rap should listen to.

Sturgill Simpson - A Sailor's Guide to Earth. The prince of country? Sturgill Simpson was the artist that made me fall in love with country music and this album is perhaps the best exemplification of why. Psychedelic influence, great lyricism (as always), lots of musical variety, a Nirvana cover?? It's really once again a great skipless country record.

Rachmaninoff - Piano Concerto No. 2. I mean this is easily the greatest piano concerto ever written and Rachmaninoff isn't even close to being the best composer in my eyes (Ravel). I refuse to believe anyone can listen to this concerto and not get moved and/or cry.

ISIS - Panopticon. Unfortunately named band, crazy good album. The buildup to all of these songs works so well every time. Grinning Mouths in particular is probably the best metal song to ever exist. Nothing like the feeling I get when Aaron's vocals come in around the halfway point.

Art

I can only speak so much on art - I am by no means very educated by fine art generally, but here is some art that I love and why I love it.

Impressionist art - paintings by Pissarro and Monet. The impressionist movement is by far one of my favorites that has come out of art generally in the last two hundred years. I really love the ethos and of course the paintings themselves are absolutely beautiful. Pissarro has been my favorite artist for a while - I love his use of light, his paintings of landscapes and I would love to visit Éragny some day to soak in the beauty of the area that he lived in. Monet's Water Lilies Series is also one of my favorites and the first selection of art that I got into, along with Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo.

Ukyio-e art - woodblock prints by Hiroshige and Kuniyoshi. Speaking of One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, another art movement I found early on and really resonated with is the Japanese ukiyo-e movement. There is something about the art that feels distinctly Japanese - simultaneously earthly and unearthly in a way that is very hard to explain. I find myself captivated by these prints a lot, wishing I was there in whatever world they come from. There is something very serene about them.

Abstract Expressionism - paintings by Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. Almost in opposition to the last two movements is abstract expressionism - whether it was an American psyop as some cultural facet of the cold war or not, the art itself is amazing. You can so easily get lost in these, especially Pollock's drip paintings, that feel like infinite alternate dimensions. That being said, too long looking at them becomes very unsettling very quickly.

Books

If it wasn't already clear, I am a big fan of philosophy. Here are my book recommendations!

Roland Barthes - A Lover's Discourse. What I love so much about this book is less what he DOES do, and moreso what he DOESN'T do. To call it the 'best book of all time' feels wrong, although somehow, while attempting to create a universalisable experience of love and failing because well.. how could you.. he manages to write some of the most beautiful, gut-wrenching prose about love and his experience of it as a clearly troubled gay man in France. There are times you read something from here and it really resonates with you, sometimes you think "what is even going on in his brain", sometimes you end up confused, but no matter what there is always something you can take from this book, gay and French or not.

John Steinbeck - The Pearl. What Steinbeck does best is package big and meaningful messages in relatively concise books and this may be the epitome of that. It's a story you can read to your kids at night, a story you can read as an adult, a story you can read on your death bed. And not only is it a story that everyone can benefit from reading, it's a damn good story at that.

Laozi - Tao Te Ching. Getting into Taoism changed my life - understanding how to let things go, actually reading the scripts and trying not to replicate the white girl gets into Buddhism experience is one of the most life affirming things I have ever done. Most of the time I read this book I end up confused. But sometimes I read it and a passage, or a chapter, or even just a word clicks into place - there is something inexplicably beautiful about that.

Pablo Neruda - Love Poems. I got this as a gift for Christmas years ago. I don't return to it often, but when I do, I'm hit with some of the most beautiful poetry I've ever read. It's nice to open this every now and then and realise how beautiful love and life and everything those encompass is.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - The Sorrows of Young Werther. Famous for the amount of death that this book caused, aka the Werther Effect, the thing that really caught my eye is how much Barthes seems to compare himself to Werther in A Lover's Discourse. Upon reading and reading again, I realise why. Werther is an amazingly written character - jealous, whiny, desperate, outright horrible at times. But he is a man in love and he will do anything it takes to get his Charlotte. Also the ending still makes me cry.

Friedrich Hölderlin - Hyperion. This book is mega gay - no one will convince me that Hyperion and Alabanda weren't at least a little bit gay for eachother. It also happens to be a philosophical statement on love, nature, beauty and life. Hölderlin's philosophy is vaguely Spinozan, although feels very distinct in the way he chooses his messaging. It's a super accessible read too and a great entry into pre-existentalist philosophy that has the same validating, appreciative, loving nature.

Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I grew up with this book and even to do this day it's a super fun, quirky, albeit absurdist read. Also one of the biggest inspirations for Radiohead's Ok Computer.

Roland Barthes - Mythologies. If you can't tell, I like Roland Barthes. This book in particular I think is amazing. Barthes' concept of myth is very fun to play around with, widely applicable to every day life and is a great tool for analysis. As far as post-structuralism goes, this is also on the lighter end, both in terms of accessibility (as opposed to Deleuze & Guattari's works) and optimism / pessimism (as opposed to Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, which is also a great book)

Percy Bysshe Shelley - Poems. I often find myself reading this late at night, usually during a night of insomnia. Shelley was the pinnacle of English Romanticism - there is something about his words that is very aesthetically pleasing to me, not to mention the fact that his poems are conceptually incredibly well crafted works of genius.