four things #7

listen to spillage village, love death robots, waking up & mindfulness, roll with 'em

Music:

Spilligion by Spillage Village. This is the kind of hip-hop your cool uncle with a refined taste in eastern European pickles likes. This gem of an album comes from Atlanta. The production and music is quality. I can’t imagine they play this on any radio station, only because it’s too good. The wordplay is slick. You’d fit in listening to this with your aforementioned uncle just as you would with your teenaged son. Gap- bridging n’ stuff. Try it out. (Thanks to my pal Griffin for sharing it with me. She sometimes paints and sells art. Follow her here.).

Watch:

Love, Death, and Robots on Netflix. I enjoy nuance. This show is full of it. Nuance, that is. I don’t want things packed in a neat little box, vacuumed sealed and shrink wrapped for comfort and convenience. My tender heart wants to see both the highs and the lows, the dirty parts, the ache and the ecstasy. This show is a series of little vignettes based on sci-fi short stories. Interesting and imaginative with high-class animation. The more I watched, the more I wanted to watch. When I see stuff like this it makes me want to do a better job at writing, making music, and working.

App:

Waking Up. I became interested in meditation while I was stationed onboard the aircraft carrier USS Bush, about 12 years ago. As an air traffic controller with an already busy mind I was looking for a way to cultivate calm. I started reading books on mindfulness meditation and found out how it actually improved our cognitive function. After a few more years of consuming different books and trying out apps I fell upon Waking Up. The neuroscientist/ modern day philosopher/ author Sam Harris is the creator of the app and it’s the best I’ve found to-date. It’s more than just a guided meditation app. There are Q&A sessions, courses, thought-provoking essays. If you have ever thought about exploring mediation, I highly recommend it. I know meditation isn’t everyone’s thing, but it has most certainly worked for me. When you sign up it gives your first week free. App Store. Google Play.

Video:

There’s this video where jazz extraordinaire Herbie Hancock was talking about something that happened once while playing with Miles Davis. In the middle of one of Davis’s solos, the pianist accidentally played the wrong chord. Davis didn’t freak out. He paused for a moment. Then, he changed his own playing in order to blend the blemish into the fold and change the direction of the song. It made me think: So often we can try to control everything, and want to make it so perfect, and because of this we sometimes choke ourselves out. Maybe a better way is to remain open to possibility, to acknowledge we can’t possibly know and control everything, to take a long view, to know that a small mistake might lead to something different and better.. Maybe this is a better way.

Thanks for reading.

See ya next time.

-Tyler