Much to my surprise, it took only a week and a bit for the fog of desperation to clear. I haven’t been so well rested in years, but i’m feeling a twitchiness coming. I’m not built to stay still for long. I want to do a bit of soul-searching before diving into job-searching, so i’ll have to find other ways to release that energy. A good long hike should do the trick.
Apps
How We Feel. I’m better at “feeling my feelings” and managing my anxiety, but i still need a check-in system to keep me grounded. Instead of relying on cursors or icons, How We Feel allows to drill down from four broad quadrants (high/low energy and pleasant/unpleasant feeling) to 36 specific emotions. It might seem like a lot, but each emotion is carefully described, which makes it easier to pinpoint. I’ve set up random notifications throughout the day as a throwback to Nicholas Felton’s lamented Reporter.
Books
Apple in China by Patrick McGee. It took me a month to read Apple in China and it’s not because i’ve been preoccupied. The first two-thirds of the book is filler content that has only a tangential relationship with the main topic, and half of what remains is a poorly substantiated proof of a fairly uncontroversial take on China. If you’ve ever read The Financial Times or The Economist in passing, nothing will surprise you in here, apart from the utterly distasteful and frankly misogynistic takedown of Isabel Ge Mahe, Apple’s managing director in Greater China. Apple has invested as much money in China as befits a company of its scale and ambition. China, in turn, has appropriated as much knowledge from Apple as it needed to become (and stay) the global hub of manufacturing. You only have to look at the automotive market to see where this ends, and until we shed the myopia of the Patrick McGees of the world, it will continue to end badly.
Music
The Life of a Showgirl by Taylor Swift. After the more creative Folklore and Evermore, Taylor Swift is back to autobiographical writing, even though her life has become entirely unrelatable (“i would trade the Cartier for someone to trust”). She has to fall back on good old sex to appear vaguely human, but she can’t even call a dick a dick (“Redwood tree. It ain’t hard to see. His love was the key. That opened my thighs.”). Max Martin and Shellback aren’t more inspired – they use each and every musical cliché, including the laziest forms of modulation, in each and every song. Sabrina Carpenter might be the best thing about this album, but her mere presence is a trope in itself. This is algorithmic pop, pure and simple, and it’s boring as hell.
Cream by Kassa Overall. The son of a saxophonist father and an ethnomusicologist mother, Kassa Overall has always played at the border between jazz and hip-hop, the two great forms of (Black) American music. Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz was a jazz record made in the fashion of a hip-hop record. Cream is the exact opposite: it’s a jazzy take on eight hip-hop classics by The Notorious B.I.G., Wu-Tang Clan, Dr. Dre, A Tribe Called Quest, OutKast, Digable Planets and Juvenile. The success of such projetcs often lies in the ability to reference the original without sounding like an ersatz. In this regard, Cream is a success, because you don’t even need to know the originals to enjoy it. But if you know, it’s a pure delight, because it reminds us how much 80s and 90s hip-hop owes to jazz.
Roulette by Alfa Mist. I listened to Roulette before reading the liner notes and enjoyed it immensely – “Reincarnation” features chiseled rap and smooth trumpet, the titular track switches time signatures like i switch WordPress themes, and “Black Snow”’s final solo made me pick up my bass guitar. But then i read the liner notes: “Alfa Mist’s albums have always tackled big themes. This time, however, he explores an imagined near-future in which reincarnation is discovered to be a potent tool linking dreams and past lives. But with this discovery comes consequences: ethical, moral and philosophical.” This all makes sense, somehow.