Branches 🌿

Sort of like a dream?

Nicholas Crocker 🐘 — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 05:45:17 GMT

I had just turned seventeen when I finished school. In the year after graduation, I moved to France, to a town about 100 kilometres north of Bordeaux.

I arrived in the darkened cold of a European winter. Having grown up in Queensland’s endless summer, I couldn’t process the gloom.

But then, as the days got longer, I saw that gloom replaced with something equally foreign. A different kind of summer. A different kind of light. Different shades of green, and textures of grass, and everyone suddenly optimistic, and outward facing.

That was the summer Daft Punk’s ‘Discovery’ came out, and the memory of dancing at sunset to the sounds of ‘One More Time’ hasn’t ever left me.

Adèle dancing to Lykke Li's 'I Follow Rivers' in Blue Is The Warmest Colour - French film, Swedish song.

Ever since then, I’d longed to experience the Scandinavian version of this different summer - more intense, and emerging from a deeper dark. And so, twenty-five years on from that Discovery solstice, we spent this July in Denmark, and Sweden.

The Poppies - Johan Ericson

Mornings start with coffee, and bolle med ost (BMO) - sourdough buns with thick salted butter and a slice of cheese - a combination that is, inexplicably, an order of magnitude better than the sum of its parts.

The days are filled with cardamom, cinnamon and remonce pastries, and long walks in beech-wood forests to dive off jetties (badebro) that jut into the cool, clear Baltic sea.

Time doesn't so much pass as slowly unwind. Less like peak summer, and more like the quiet afternoons of autumn.

The operating unit of the season is the three-generation family - kids, parents, grandparents - moving in respectful groups. Never imposing themselves on anyone (att visa hänsyn) in return for not being disturbed (att inte störa).

You can see into the living room precisely because everyone knows you won’t.

“I believe that the very process of looking can make a thing beautiful.”
- David Hockney (1937-2026)

Warmly, I Urge You To Click On Each Of These Links

***

Have you ever said something to a stranger that’s become a vocal stem in their life?

Air France - Collapse At Your Doorstep (where the title of this edition originates).

Sheet hanging out of a window in Moscow in the wind set to classical music.

What it feels like to discover a bird thought to be extinct for 140 years.

Swimmer Waves Off Lifeguards With 6 Great White Sharks Nearby

The true story of the Nuggets’ iconic rainbow skyline uniforms

Jeremy Strong Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters

Drake x Rampa DJ Set — Live in Berlin at Uber Arena

How to properly dance to Radiohead (for beginners).

88 Prompts for Long-Term Thinking - Kevin Kelly

How to handle negative memories

The Path of Least Resistance

Same place, different time.

If punctuation could talk.

Fauré’s Élégie, Op. 24 🎻

Summer Sky - David Hockney

“No-one willingly wants to be indie. They may say they do.

But that’s not what Kylie is. Kylie is this force that is there to affect thousands and thousands and thousands of people.
It’s all outward. It’s all giving.
You have an enormous positive influence. These people that go along to their first pop concert. It’s a life-changing moment where they feel something that they’ve never known before.
The great beauty of pop music is that it is a joy machine.”
- Nick Cave

Kylie Minogue is the canonical example of Australian exceptionalism meeting cultural cringe: ridiculed at home, even as she conquered the world. The three-part documentary on Netflix gives her legacy the honest telling it deserves.

But Kylie herself - that ethereal, transcendent energy that captured people - is best described in Nick Cave’s eloquent monologue.

“I was an observer. And I just always liked her. Whenever I saw her on the TV, there was something about it that I liked. But, you know, I didn’t sit around and listen to her records or anything. I wasn’t like a “fan” fan.
But there was something that I recognised in her that I responded to.
There was a strange thing with Kylie because even though she had mass appeal, she had everything but credibility. And I looked at her because I had credibility but not much else.
…
We were waiting for her to come into the studio. I don’t think anyone had met Kylie before. And the Bad Seeds, we were a dark force. This group of weird fucked up broken men. A lot of drugs and a contemptuous, pessimistic view of the world.
But when she came into the studio, she was like this sort of beam of light. With this incredible positivity.
I don’t think we’d ever met anyone in our lives, really, that liked life.
Just this sort of bold brightness.
We were just staggered.”
- Nick Cave

Perell: What trade-offs have you had to make in order to be Kevin Kelly?

Kevin Kelly: You're not gonna like this answer. But to be Kevin Kelly, I couldn't be great.

Let me define great as somebody who might be remembered for a generation or two by people outside their family. In a generation or two, no one will remember my name or anything that I did.

To be me now, I surrendered that path towards greatness, because I just am not that extreme or fanatical or obsessive about a larger thing.

I am much more like a gadfly, with lots of little different things going around. And that doesn't cohere into the kind of extremity that you need to be great.

On our last trip to Denmark we visited Bagsværd Church, which Jorn Utzon designed to evoke sunlight breaking through the clouds.

This year, I learned that he’d also designed a water tower in Svaneke, on the island of Bornholm, where we were able to spent an enchanted week.

Utzon was just 33 when he designed the water tower, which became so iconic that it eventually made its way onto Denmark’s twenty kroner coin.

Five years later he sketched out the design that would win the competition to build the Sydney Opera House.

How you do anything is how you do everything.

The same care, vision, and genius Utzon embedded into a water tower in a tiny village on a remote Danish island reappeared soon after in the Opera House - modern architecture’s highest expression.

The Opera House project tortured Utzon for years. The pain of his forced exit from Australia, and the fact he never fully completed the interior work he first envisioned. The Svaneke water tower now sits largely forgotten in an untended field at the end of a narrow sti of nondescript homes.

Legacy and greatness both endure, and fade.

Between the click of the light

Nicholas Crocker 🐘 — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 07:09:42 GMT

Poem 070: Sentimental Moment or Why Did the Baguette Cross the Road?
Don’t fill up on bread
I say absent-mindedly
The servings here are huge

My son, whose hair may be
receding a bit, says
Did you really just
say that to me?

What he doesn’t know
is that when we’re walking
together, when we get
to the curb
I sometimes start to reach
for his hand
—Robert Hershon

Jamie xx - Gosh

There is a moment in Fred again.. & Thomas Bangalter’s USB002 set at London’s Alexandra Palace that I want to explain in detail.

The concept behind Fred again..’s USB tour was 10 shows, 10 cities, 10 weeks, a new track released every show (which becomes an album after the tour), and phones away at the door (but shows released online afterwards).

There has not been a run of live electronic shows that has matched Daft Punk’s ‘Alive’ Tour in 2006 - that was the zenith - still yet to be surpassed. The collaboration with Bangalter, one half of Daft Punk, speaks to that yearning in every electronic artist and fan to reach back to those heights. And Bangalter was the ultimate special guest, in a tour that had already seen Underworld, The Streets, Skrillex, Romy, and Skream & Benga join Fred onstage.

But back to the moment.

At 1:33:00 Fred drops ‘Can’t Do Without You’, the opening song from Caribou’s 2014 album ‘Our Love’. The album was a response to Caribou becoming a father in 2011. Fred calls out Caribou from the crowd, and he comes down onto the stage and they hug, and ostensibly, that’s what this moment is about.

But there’s a secondary layer unfolding that’s even more meaningful. At 1:33:27 you see Bangalter look over his right shoulder and smile.

27 seconds later, you see why.

Standing to Bangalter’s right is his son, Roxan, in a white t-shirt. Bangalter keeps looking back, and as ‘Can’t Do Without You’ plays, a second song - ‘Never The End’ mixes in - a song no-one in the crowd would ever have heard because it was written by Roxan when he was just 12 years old.

When he realises, he reaches his hand to his mouth, looks straight at his beaming father, and his eyes fill with tears.

“Smith landed upon a euphoric yet melancholic series of chords - Eb, Dm7 and Bb/D. This chordal motif was channeled through a chorus and reverb-soaked patch designed on Rick’s Waldorf Microwave, output via a delay in dotted 8ths. It resulted in an enormous sound.”

The story of Born Slippy, Underworld’s emotion-stirring dance classic

Artificial reef at Middleton Beach transforms Albany’s surf scene

CHEATING: A USER’S GUIDE TO THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

How to comfort someone for those who don’t know how

Jason Sudeikis explains the Ted Lasso origin story

The Walkmen - The Rat (Live on David Letterman)

Tyler The Creator discusses Timothee Chalamet

How Ben Sasse is Living Now That He Is Dying

90% of everything is sanding e.g. laundry

Honesty and the Human Body

Tony Soprano Driving Songs

25 years of iPod brain

How to earn a billion dollars

Why John Wilson can’t stop filming

Social Status: Down the Rabbit Hole

In Conversation with Nicholas Thompson

Demonstration of how easy it is to stop thinking

Mexican surrealist Alfredo Castañeda (1938-2010)

Youtube duet: Miles Davis improvising on LCD Soundsystem

Joan Didion’s resignation letter from Vogue magazine in 1964

Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process

Sidenote: When reading a draft of this edition, Jules asked me - should I click on all these links? My answer is yes. Every one of them. Open them all in their own new tab.

From the hundreds of links I’ve saved since the last edition of Branches, these are the ones I think you won’t have seen, and are worth your time.

“for a minute there I lost myself”
- Radiohead, ‘Karma Police’

Cameron Winter Live at First Unitarian Church | 03/07/2025

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in
- Leonard Cohen, ‘Anthem’

Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve is having a moment. A24’s Backrooms, in which she stars, is now A24's highest-grossing movie. Reinsve broke through internationally with the release of ‘The Worst Person In The World’ in 2021.

But it’s 2025’s Sentimental Value that I want to recommend here - a devastating film about many things, but above all the echoes of generational trauma.

Though Reinsve (as Nora) is the movie’s star, the most heartbreaking moments are those she shares with her younger sister, Agnes. The way they briefly hold as they move past each other in the kitchen. The depth of sadness in her answer when her husband asks about the feelings of worry she has for her sister. The way Agnes quietly starts cleaning Nora’s cluttered apartment without being asked.

And then, late on, this:

[Nora] Why didn’t our childhood ruin you?
[Agnes] It hasn’t always been easy for me.
[Nora] But you’ve managed to make a family. A home.
[Agnes] Yeah. There’s one major difference in the way we grew up. I had you.

“It is easier to say my tooth is aching than to say my heart is broken.”
- C.S. Lewis

Robert Caro has spent the last fifty years writing a five-volume history of Lyndon B Johnson. Turn Every Page is the story of Caro’s writing, and the alchemy of his creative collaboration with long-time editor Robert (Bob) Gottlieb.

Both men embody doing one’s life’s work. Caro, at the end, even says - I wish I had more lifetimes to keep doing this.

Gottlieb's daughter Lizzie shot the film over five years, and its most touching moment comes from a brief exchange as she attaches his mic before interviewing him.

Gottlieb starts singing the lines to Chet Baker’s ‘Do It The Hard Way’, and Lizzie finishes them.

Bob: Do it the hard way, and it's easy sailing… Do it the hard way, and it's hard to lose

Lizzie: Only the soft way has a chance of failing.. You have to choose
Bob: How do you know that?
Lizzie: Because when I went to school in Paris, every week you sent me a tape of jazz.
Bob: I was a good daddy.
Lizzie: You were.

GENER8ION - STORM starring Yung Lean

Names
She was Eliza for a few weeks
when she was a baby –
Eliza Lily. Soon it changed to Lil.

Later she was Miss Steward in the baker’s shop
And then ‘my love’, ‘my darling’, Mother.

Widowed at thirty, she went back to work
As Mrs Hand. Her daughter grew up,
Married and gave birth.

Now she was Nanna. ‘Everybody
Calls me Nanna,’ she would say to visitors.
And so they did – friends, tradesmen, the doctor.

In the geriatric ward
They used the patients’ Christian names.
‘Lil,’ we said, ‘or Nanna,’
But it wasn’t in her file
And for those last bewildered weeks
She was Eliza once again
- Wendy Cope

Don't want to close my eyes.

Nicholas Crocker 🐘 — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 02:47:03 GMT

“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia.
Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”

There are words in other languages that don’t have equivalents in English.

Words like mamihlapinatapai (a look shared by two people, each wishing that the other would initiate something that they both desire but which neither wants to begin) or gigil (the overwhelming urge to pinch or squeeze something because it is unbearably cute).

English is missing a word for the feeling of a trusted babysitter who loved your child moving on with their lives. In the time you have them, babysitters are a life raft, the thing that repeatedly saves you from drowning in the work, and the school pickups, and all the rest of it. And after ten years and two kids you have a handful of people who’ve come into your family as life rafts and loved your kids as well as a stranger can.

And then they inevitably they graduate or get a different job or move countries or become parents themselves and you still remember the sense of relief you felt every time they’d come to the house but they now have a new life and their own need for a babysitter and its a puzzle in your heart because even though it was meant to, the switch just turned off, and a light somewhere went out.

It was always going to end. So why does my heart feel so bad?

The English language is missing a word for that feeling.

“I know I will write until I’m old, so I’m not in a rush for any achievements. I think when we know we’re not passionate about something we have to be more in a rush because we need to get some payoff because we know we’ll eventually quit”

— Paul Millerd

If your algorithmic feeds are bad you have only yourself to blame. The algorithm gives you more of what you signal to it you need. And you have a choice in what you signal. If you don’t want more of it, don’t touch any of it. If you’ll let them, the signals can work for you.

Case in point, the Reels served me Cuchulain’s Top 10 albums of the year - and at #2 was Phil Cook’s 2025 album ‘Appalachia Borealis’.

Cook was in Justin Vernon’s original band (Deyarmond Edison), and Vernon himself produced the album saying “I'm excited every time someone gets to discover Phil’s genius—a thing I've had the good fortune of knowing all my life.”

Phil Cook - Appalachia Borealis [FULL FILM ]

WBUR: “I understand one of your inspirations for this album came when you were working on your previous album and you noticed birds singing. You actually recorded a mockingbird on your phone. How did that birdsong spark your creativity for this album?”

Cook: “I got to make a record downtown in Durham at this beautiful, tiny church that had a very tall nave, and it was a gorgeous 100-year-old piano. And there was a moment where I was playing a song called ‘Queen of Branches,’ and we listened back to the recording, and there was a bird singing just outside the church. And it really struck me how symbiotic the tone in the cadence and the pitch and the song this bird was hitting and duetting almost with the piano. It was a magical moment. It followed with me calling my childhood camp counselor, Alec Lindsay, who’s a teacher, professor of ornithology at the University of [Northern] Michigan. And I sent him the recording and said, ‘Please tell me, old friend, what, pray tell, is this bird?’

“He got back and said, ‘Well, that sounds to be a Northern mockingbird.” And it began a love affair with this particular bird and a fascination with songbirds in general. A mockingbird will live up to eight years in the wild. And they record up to 200 different variants–bird sounds, city sounds, anything that’s in their environment–and they recall them for their own use, for mating, for defense, for different things. But each one has their own unique reel. And wherever I am now, I tune in and always stop and I’ll listen to a mockingbird. And it’s branched out to others. But that’s like my main character. That’s been my main muse.”

LISTERS: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching

Have you noticed many more people enjoying birdwatching? Have you watched Listers yet? How many birds have you added to your Life List on Merlin? Which binoculars did you get? (I went for the CelestronNature DX 8x32). You know how some memories have an unexpected permanence?

Once, when I was a teenager, our family friends came to stay, and their youngest son Harry, who must have been 14 at the time, insisted we go birdwatching. Harry went on to write famous books about birds so we had someone with us who was holding the seeds to his life’s garden very early on.

Birdwatching, to me, sounded like punishment. But I tagged along out of courtesy, and I still remember how profound it felt to be still in a stand of Cooloola scribbly gums listening to something you’d noticed before but never truly heard.

“You must hear the bird’s song without attempting to render it into nouns and verbs…Cannot we let the morning be?”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wilson Inlet Sandbar Opening 2025 - Via The Department of Water and Environmental Regulation

Alone

The Old Kanye

Bounc | Buff Motion

specifics create dynamics

Frank Ocean - Provider (V4)

Boogity, Boogity, Boogity, Amen

How Did The World Get So Ugly?

Fleet Foxes - White Winter Hymnal

Are There Only Three Types of Mongers?

everything makes sense if you surf and hike

“How to Orchid” by Telepathic Instruments

planes during sunrise are a good example of this

Let Down- Radiohead (a capella, one voice, layered)

If ‘Everything In Its Right Place’ was written on a guitar

‘’Live a little’‘ | an award winning short film made with iPhone

Murray Finds Out About The Australian! - Flight of the Conchords

Fatboy Slim ‘The Rockafeller Skank’ | The Making Of A Dance Classic

Sidebar: Norman Cook’s description of ‘feverishly beavering’ was perfect.

Bon Iver - Blood Bank (Live at Barclays Center, Brooklyn, NY, USA, 2019)

Maria João Pires experiencing every musician’s worst nightmare during a concert

Michael Sheen breathes life into Dylan Thomas’s iconic ‘starless and bible-black’ opening of Under Milk Wood

D’Angelo - Full Concert [HD] | North Sea Jazz (2012)

I love the annual ritual of reading people’s years in review (Mike, Xav, Dan Wang, Zheng Dong Wang), and working through all the top-X-of-the-year lists. Even at a 10% hit-rate these posts can be substantive. Here’s a melange of my 2025.

Things That Were Very Good in 2025: Blairgowrie, season tickets to the WNBL Southside Flyers, travel insurance that worked, holding snakes at The Funky Farm in Hastings, Rory at The Masters, White Lotus, revisiting John Mayer and Coldplay after stopping listening to them in 2008, kind colleagues, an exceptional physiotherapist and personal trainer, siblings having babies, the whole East Coast of Australia (Lakes Entrance, Narooma, Tuncurry, Newcastle… throw a dart you’ll hit somewhere special), flying so little that I lost the meagre points status I had, making new friends (Will, Tim, Lukas, Nicklaus, Matt, Johnny, Karsten, Chris), solar power combined with a battery, Mum happy, the steroid injection of alone time, the depth of connection that builds (after) long stretches of parenting, Tan laps, blanket declining attendance at kids’ birthday parties (we can catch up another time that’s not at Timezone or Bounce House), Tasmania, great cafes (St Pauls, Core, Catalogue, Audrey), great babysitters, people you work closely with excelling, and sleeping with the sliding door open.

Even Though I Don’t Read A Ton of Books Any More, Here Is My Shortlist Of Books I’d Die On A Hill For: Stoner, Maus, Barbarian Days, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, True History of the Kelly Gang.

Albums I Listened To On Repeat: SABLE, fABLE, TO YOU, BY US (VOL. 1), BELOVED, SWAG, Son of Spergy, PATTERNS, All These Years, Night (caps lock titles were very predictive of my album listening volume this year).

Things That Weren’t Very Good: Noah getting his tonsils out (it was good eventually but not very good for a week), the anti-human culture of the medical profession (the specific subset of humans we ask to help get us human again), neurological dead ends, funerals for friends, the kids getting sick simultaneously in the precise weeks we absolutely did not need them to be sick (three times), the incredibly small amount of recourse you have if someone backs into your car in a parking lot.

Very Good Things I Bought This Year: The Yeti Camino, the Nike Vomero Plus (best running shoes I’ve ever worn), the Air Jordan 1 Low Gs, the LeBron TR 1s, Pine Coast Golf’s The Pine - Sunday Golf Bag, LMNT, Angus & Grace, Gumtree.

Songs I Thought Were Very Good: If Only I Could Wait - Bon Iver (refer back to What’s seldom, is wonderful on this one), Ooo - Skin on Skin, hard rain - Lykke Li, Yamaha - Dijon, Rain Down - Daniel Caesar, Apple - Charli xcx, this very thing - FELIVAND (caps lock music strikes again), Mali Spirit (Folamour Remix) - LAGOS IN PARIS, Techno Shinkansen - Underworld, Know It All - Matt Corby, MYSTERY - Turnstile, Morven’s playlists for eg. ALL DAY (caps again), My Old Ways - Tame Impala, i’ll wait all day (4 U) - Eli Escobar, With You, Friends (Long Drive) - Skrillex (thank you Yousuke), just forget it - sunflwr, Folded - Kehlani, shoreline - chloe moriondo, Dopamine - Robyn, Bridges - Tobias Jesso Jr, All-Boy All-Girl - Arthur Russell, BMF - SZA and finally - Sun Bleached Flies - Ethel Cain (wow). Here’s all those songs in a playlist. Montes Reef Resort was the playlist I made that had the most repeat plays.

Moments I Think I’ll Remember For A While Longer Yet: Noah learning to ride a bike, the boys catching fish off the reef in Edgecumbe Bay, kayaking across Canoe Bay with Oscar (after turning around the first time when we saw a shark), Julia passing all the exams, sunset drives from Cape Schanck, Seven Mile Beach to myself, Oscar’s first 18 at The Dunes, Oscar turning 10, the steam coming off Noah’s wet hair that morning at The Promised Land in Gleniffer, and the sprinklers coming on as my brother and I putted out at sunset on 18 at Barnbougle Dunes.

What’s a word you pronounced incorrectly one time and it still haunts you?

Sidebar: If you mispronounce a word that means you learnt it from reading.

You make my life so much bigger. I’m wondering if I do the same for you.

6174, known as Kaprekar’s Constant, is uniquely magical in base 10.

The Average Fourth Grader Is a Better Poet Than You (and Me Too)

Jon Bellion shows off the original demo for Ghost by Justin Bieber

everything you do, you do for yourself - and there isn’t one

When your father dies he takes your childhood with him

What’s the longest you have run your microwave for?

some parts of you only emerge for certain people

we just held their hands and looked after them

It felt like the whole ocean folded over me.

Justin Bieber - 2 Much (Live from Paris)

after all this time i’m still into you

Why does my heart feel so bad?

Friday Forgotten Bangers #34

Look at all the chat man do.

Sink or Skim (Full length)

Døds frozen in time. ⌛️

Friend For Life!

Keep going

“I think one component of mastery is creating language. You’re actually creating the words to describe phenomena that you’re seeing that are not as obvious to others. I think that’s what great investors are doing, what great founders are doing, what great leaders are doing. They’re noticing patterns and invisible phenomena and giving them a name. And once you have the name for it, it’s like you’re creating a new color in the spectrum. You can see it now. And you can talk about it with your team, and it becomes part of the collective awareness.
And so there’s a weird creativity component to investing or to founding companies or to leadership that’s not obvious because it’s not artistic in the way we normally think about creativity. But it is creative in that you’re giving language to phenomena that were invisible before.”

- Graham Duncan

Jamie xx - Gosh

I read ‘Stoner’ by John Edward Williams in two holiday bursts, one in September, and one in December, and it’s maybe the best book I’ve ever read.

I won’t try and explain it because doing that would make you less likely to read it. Per Goodreads - “Stoner is the life story of an unremarkable man and the consensus seems to be he did his best.” That’s an accurate description. But so is “a work of quiet perfection”, that’s “agonisingly wonderful,” and “art that makes you grateful to be alive.”

You might start Stoner and wonder where it’s going and the answer is nowhere fast.

But at some point you might stay with it, and then it will do the same with you.

“He closed his eyes again. “In the study. Remember? You used to sit with me when I worked. You were so still, and the light . . . the light . . .”
The light of the desk lamp (he could see it now) had been absorbed by her studious small face that bent in childish absorption over a book or a picture, so that the smooth flesh glowed against the shadows of the room.
He heard the small laughter echo in the distance. “Of course,” he said and looked upon the present face of that child. “Of course,” he said again, “you were always there.”

What's seldom, is wonderful.

Nicholas Crocker 🐘 — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 19:58:21 GMT

Taste is what you like.

Everyone has taste because everyone has things that they like.

But where it gets complicated is that there is social capital attached to being perceived as someone with taste - someone who likes things a lot of people like - and that creates a shadow where you can lose social capital for liking things other people don’t like, and then you end up in a spiral of pretending to like things because other people do too. And then you end up living in a world where you are surrounded by things, and none of them are really to your taste.

Being conscious of what you like allows you to find more things to like. And being surrounded by things you like is one of life’s joys.

Liking runs out. The movie ends, the TV series wraps, the book ends, the song stops making you feel, the coffee shop closes, the sun sets on the last day of the holiday, you move away… but then you get to find more things to like.

What matters isn’t liking things other people like and accruing social capital for it.

What matters is being good at finding things in life you like, so when they end, you can find more of them.

Justin Bieber - ‘Yukon’

In ‘next time is next time’, I wrote about ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U’s zeitgeist Tokyo Boiler Room set (the comments section is even better today than it was in Februrary when I first shared it):

“he’s the washing machine and we’re the laundry”

You can see how much ¥ØU$UK€ likes the music he plays. His ‘taste’ is undeniable.

In the Tokyo set, he played ‘Moaner’ by Underworld and when they played their recent Boiler Room set in London, look who was there.

That’s ¥ØU$UK€ over Karl’s shoulder, black jacket, left of the guy in the red t-shirt.

But even people who like things a lot of other people like sometimes like things they don’t.

¥ØU$UK€’s recent set at Portola had people leaving after 30 minutes.

And I think that’s what makes him so special. He was given a 60 minute slot for his recent The Lot set and he spent the first ten minutes playing Television’s ‘Marquee Moon’ unedited, and then played Anthony Naples for 5 of the remaining 11 songs.

But when he dropped Nicolas Jaar’s ‘Swim’ - the song I used to listen to when our firstborn wasn’t sleeping and I needed to push through another 13 minutes of bouncing him to sleep - that was a moment of such pure connection.

Taste is what you like.

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

- Charles Bukowski, ‘The Laughing Heart’

For the first time ever, Bon Iver followed the release of an album with an extensive press tour. Peeling back some of the layers of mystique, he talked openly about the struggles of being Bon Iver - about fighting the ‘boot on his chest’ for the past decade, about the difficulty of needing to share his pain with people for them to connect with his work (over and over - for what?), and above all his unrequited search for love.

You can revisit the interviews in Krista Tippet’s On Being:

And on the NY Times’ Popcast“:

There was one other snippet though which stuck with me - I saw it on a long lost Reel somewhere - and essentially, the interviewer just lit up at the fact that Bon Iver had somehow managed to get Mk.gee to feature on one of his songs… and you could see a pause in Vernon’s response - the realisation that the generation of kids who’d fallen in love with ‘For Emma, Forever Ago’ 18 years ago was older now, and that his relevance now stemmed more from his connection to an artist much more of the moment.

But by far the best interview Vernon did for the new Bon Iver record was this one on the BBC - with his co-writer Jim-E Stack. Specifically, there’s a section of this video where they isolate the strings, and some of the vocals from ‘If Only I Could Wait’.

If there’s one link you click today, make it this one - and wait and listen to the power of those instruments together.

Watch from 38:12, with the volume as loud as you can get it, and maybe your eyes closed too.

“As he worked on the room, and as it began slowly to take a shape, he realized that for many years, unknown to himself, he had had an image locked somewhere within him like a shamed secret, an image that was ostensibly of a place but which was actually of himself.
So it was himself that he was attempting to define as he worked on his study. As he sanded the old boards for his bookcases, and saw the surface roughnesses disappear, the gray weathering flake away to the essential wood and finally to a rich purity of grain and texture—as he repaired his furniture and arranged it in the room, it was himself that he was slowly shaping, it was himself that he was putting into a kind of order, it was himself that he was making possible.”
- Stoner, by John Williams

Branches is for sharing things I like, and I write it because I always appreciate it when people who really like things share them with me.

But one thing I like maybe disproportionately is words, and the way just a few of them in the right order can mean so much.

Like when I’m driving, and I pass the sign that says ‘only sleep cures fatigue’ - I just feel something every time. I have a place where I save meaningfully ordered words, and it’s full of hundreds I’ve found:

‘jammed / with soft white pearl-shell // a cascade of faces / down tiers and staircases / becoming a shatter’

‘everyone alive together’

‘one cannot stand far enough back to take it all in’

‘But is it only years away now? (Keep holding on)’

The words just sit there, and about the only time they surface is when I’m looking for a Branches title. But today I found a new phrase, and I’ll share with you how.

I was walking down the 10th fairway at The National’s Gunnamatta Course, which is a place that makes you believe what the legendary Mike Keiser said, that: “A great golf course is “nature perfected.” It is neither wholly natural nor can it be wholly unnatural or manufactured. . . As visually appealing as the purely natural can be, the sublime splendour of a carefully wrought string of fairways at daybreak is even more compelling.”

To make the point, and centre the story, this is a photo my friend Will took of Gunnamatta’s 8th hole.

As I’m walking down the fairway, with the wind coming from behind me, a ball sails past, a metre to my left. I was almost 300 metres off the tee, a safe distance, and so the only way the ball could have come so close is that the person who hit it did so in an almost perfect way.

At the next tee, as we waited, that same person approached us apologetically, admitting he’d never hit the ball so far. He was Irish, and as he left, he said a short phrase, that started with the word ‘seldom’.

It was beautiful. And I kept repeating it to myself for the minutes that followed, hoping to remember. Inexplicably, by the time the round finished I’d forgotten it.

But it wouldn’t let me go.

My brain kept yearning to fill the imprint the words left behind.

To find the thing it liked.

So after the round, I went back to the clubhouse, and got the guy’s number and sent him this:

18 minutes later, I got a reply.

“You’re all good.
Yes. It’s an expression my Mum would say to us as kids.
What’s seldom is wonderful.”

What’s seldom, is wonderful.

next time is next time

Nicholas Crocker 🐘 — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 01:59:46 GMT

Brett Whiteley, ‘Self Portrait’

Many summers ago we completed a 1,000 piece puzzle of Brett Whiteley’s ‘Self-Portrait’. Spending that much time with the painting, observing it in 1,000 tiny ways made us appreciate it even more.

Kottke’s incredible summary shows how Katsushika Hokusai spent his life building up to ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’.

At 37, he produced his first wave, in the background of a simple print. Then, at 43, the wave appeared again.

Then again when he was 45.

And then again 26 years later, when he was 71. Over three decades, Hokusai’s Great Wave evolved to find its iconic, timeless form. Like Miles Davis said, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.

Katsushika Hokusai, ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’

Inspired, the kids and I did the 1,810 piece LEGO version of The Great Wave.

Until I had to place them piece by piece, I had never noticed the people in the boats.

It was always the wave that captured me.

Perfect Days: The Power of No Mind

¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U’s Tokyo Boiler Room set is best summarised by the (current) 17th most upvoted comment in the comments section:

“This moment cannot be experienced again and this moment cannot be repeated again. I am far away and I regret it.”

While working a job in construction, ¥UK1MAT$U was diagnosed with brain cancer. He used the diagnosis as a trigger to dedicate himself full-time to music, and then ultimately beat his disease.

His past sets steer far into the esoteric but this one just hits from the opening seconds when that incredible 100 gecs guitar line drops at 00:54.

From there it’s Underworld into Prodigy, Romy, Overmono, and the Chemical Brothers into the Chemical Brothers and then finally Skrillex (who at this point I think it’s clear to say we underestimated).

Sometimes you are just ready for the zeitgeist.

Bob Dylan’s 60 Minutes interview with Ed Bradley in 2004 is fascinating.

Bradley: Do you ever look back at the music that you’ve written and look back at it and say
“Wow! That surprises me!”?

Dylan: I used to. I don’t do that anymore. I don’t know how I got to write those songs.

Bradley: What do you mean you don’t know how?

Dylan: All those early songs were almost magically written. Ah… “Darkness at the break of
noon, shadows even the silver spoon, a handmade blade, the child’s balloon…” Well, try to sit down and write something like that. There’s a magic to that, and it’s not Siegfried and Roy kind of magic, you know? It’s a different kind of a penetrating magic. And, you know, I did it. I did it at one time.

Bradley: Do you think you can do it again today?

Dylan: Uh-uh.

Bradley: Does that disappoint you, or…?

Dylan: Well, you can’t do something forever. I did it once, and I can do other things now. But, I can’t do that.

Always Go To The Funeral.

My father and his tennis court.

Living life on ‘pinch me’ mode.

The 7 most satisfying things in life.

Learning to Measure Time in Love and Loss.

Asking New Yorkers what it’s like being beautiful.

Why I wear a Rolex, a lesson from my father.

Thread of crazy painting details.

Joe Montana Was Here

These Precious Days

Tasmanian Devil.

Just before Elizabeth Fraser recorded the vocals for Massive Attack’s ‘Teardrop’, she found out that Jeff Buckley, her former partner, had died while swimming in the Mississippi River.

Love, love is a verb
Love is a doing word
Fearless on my breath

The vocals take on extra weight when you know the place they were coming from.

No love, however brief, is wasted.

One way to strengthen a memory is to attach it to a sense.

When you go on a holiday, you pick one album (ideally one you don’t know yet) and you listen to it on repeat. That way, any time you want to relive the feelings of the holiday, you can shortcut back to them via the music.

I accidentally discovered this technique on a trip to San Francisco two years ago when I was listening constantly to The 1975. And I did it again purposefully on last year’s SF trip with Mk.Gee’s ‘Two Star & the Dream Police’.

"Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim."
- When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, by Walt Whitman

I took my eldest son to Copenhagen for two weeks in September, but couldn’t find a new album I loved enough to listen to on repeat… so I tried instead to attach my memories to scent.

Long story short, my friend Fraser introduced me to Marc Antoine-Barrois’ 'Encelade’ which smells so good it’s hard to put into words. I found some at this tiny store in one of Copenhagen’s oldest streets and bought some as a gift for my brother … At the counter, the store’s owner gave me a sample of Stéphane Humbert Lucas 777’s ‘God of Fire’, and I wore it every day I was there, and now when I put it on I am transported back to those early autumn Denmark days.

Heartbreaking piano performance made audience cry

“The world is a museum of obsessions. It’s Steve Jobs’ iPhone, glossy and thin, Miyazaki’s hand-drawn animations, Tarkovsky’s despairing films, Gates’ personal computers, Da Vinci's flying machines, Coco Chanel’s fashion empire, John Quinn and Alfred Barr’s Picasso exhibitions in an America that shunned European artists.
What we take for granted as just merely existing was once a fledgling idea, borne in a world that rejected it or wasn’t ready. Whether it died or lived hinged upon who dreamt it up, and how long they were willing to work and sometimes suffer greatly for it. Indeed, some dreams make for feverish dreaming.”
- obsessive

Sympathy For The Devil [4K Clip] - In the Beginning

Right before Christmas, I played St Andrews Beach with two great photographers: Will from Contours, and Karsten from Gumtree Golf & Nature Club.

Karsten captured the day on his Fuji camera and I was inspired enough by his photos to buy myself the Fuji X100 V1 for Christmas. I’ve been trying to learn it (and its recipes) since.

I got back to St Andrews Beach again recently. The morning light didn’t let me down.

COWEN: There’s some evidence that students learn better when they take notes of what’s being said. Do you feel there’s something for some people with memory a bit similar, that until they have memorized it, it’s less real for them? I don’t just mean that they remember it more, but the initial impact somehow is created or defined by the later act of memorization. People who take trips and until they photograph something, they don’t feel they’ve seen it.
NIELSEN: Yes. They very likely didn’t see it.
COWEN: Perhaps, yes.
NIELSEN: Certainly, it’s part of the reason why I take photos. I will look more closely. It’s part of the reason I will take notes. It is part of the reason why I do spaced repetition. It provides me with another way of paying attention to the world.
COWEN: But at some margins —
NIELSEN: Those things are very valuable, right? Any general-purpose strategy you have which will cause you to pay attention to the world is incredibly valuable, so I collect things like that. Why did I say yes to coming on the podcast? A huge part of it is because I know it’s going to make me pay attention in different ways.
- Michael Nielsen on Collaboration, Quantum Computing, and Civilization's Fragility

While in Copenhagen, we visited Bagsværd Church, designed by one of my heroes Jorn Utzon.

Having laid out the design for the Sydney Opera House, Utzon left Australia heartbroken - his vision for the interior of the building never came to life, his relationship with the NSW government broke down, and he was forced to resign.

Shortly after all of this, while lying on Lanikai Beach in Oahu, he observed the way the light broke through the clouds, and sketched out his vision for a church.

On the morning we visited Bagsværd, we sat inside for some time.

Eventually we were alone, the space entirely ours.

The sky outside was overcast. But the light still broke through.

If we loved one another less

Nicholas Crocker 🐘 — Sat, 17 Aug 2024 20:40:42 GMT

“A tree always grows in two directions at the same time. We only see what is above ground, but the root system is just as extensive and intricate. Trees are both gravitropic and phototropic, growing in the direction of gravity and the direction of light. A seed must first grow into the ground and toward resistance, where it’s dark and damp, before it can grow upward in the sunlight.

This is a metaphor for people. We don’t see all the work that took place in the dark, enabling growth in the light. Everyone wants the nice visible part, but few are willing to do the work of developing the root system.”

No. 10 Stephen Crichton (Centre, Bulldogs) | NRL Top 10 Players 2023

Stephen Crichton, centre, and captain for the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs came into this year as the 10th best player in the NRL.

I think there’s a case that, 23 weeks into the season, he’s now the best, and building into being the defining player of his generation.

Sport is just stories.

You do not need to understand the intricacies of weightlifting to get emotional watching German weightlifter Matthias Steiner win gold in Beijing. The win fulfilled a promise he’d made to his wife before her tragic death just months beforehand. Two people were lifting that day.

Matthias Steiner wins an emotional gold at Beijing 2008 | Epic Olympic Moments

So, let’s consider Stephen Crichton’s story. At just 23 years of age, he has already:

made it to four Grand Finals, scoring a try in each, and winning three of them.
captained both his club side, and his country, leading the Samoan team to the Final of the 2021 World Cup, defeating England in the semi-final by scoring two tries, and kicking a game-winning field goal.

It’s all the more remarkable that Crichton has had this impact as a centre. In rugby league, games are most often determined by the ‘spine’, a team’s fullback, five-eighth, halfback, and hooker. Centres are often only touching the ball as the third, or fourth option in a passage of play, and their impact is determined by the lines run, and passes thrown of the spine before them.

But Crichton is winning games from centre by being the best defender at his position, and by finding his way to the try-line. Just look at the individual brilliance of his two tries week, against Canberra.

Stephen Crichton's 2023 try-scoring season

The best sporting stories have historical, and cultural overlays - think of how much better LeBron’s story is for the fact he was drafted to his long-suffering hometown of Cleveland, bringing them their first NBA title. If he’d been drafted a Laker, a Spur or a Celtic, the tears of victory would not have streamed so unbidden.

For Stephen Crichton, that overlay comes from his upbringing. Born in Apia, Samoa, Crichton moved to Mt Druitt in Western Sydney. He recalls: “Mum and Dad raised six kids when they first landed in Oz, then eight of us all together, in a three-bedroom house,” Crichton said. “I’ll always look after them because they looked after me.”

Mt Druitt came into Australia’s national lexicon in 2015 when the ABC aired a documentary - Struggle Street - that shared stories of the people living there in public housing. Spanian’s recent walk-through gives you a perspective on Mt Druitt today.

Inside Sydney’s MOST Dangerous Suburb - Mt DRUITT Walk Through - Into The Hood

But what’s emerged from this community, 43kms west of Sydney’s CBD is a seam of extraordinary rugby league talent: Critta (Stephen Crichton), Bizza (Brian To’o), Leni (Spencer Leniu), and Romy (Jarome Luai). Four childhood friends, who went on to form the core of the dynastic, Grand Final-winning Penrith Panthers sides, the current NSW side, and the Samoan national team.

Before we go deeper, it’s worth just connecting with what representing Samoa means to these players.

The moving national anthems, electrifying war cry and Haka: Kiwis v Samoa

If you didn’t want watch the full eight minutes, just skip here, and watch the tears roll down as an entire stadium sings Sāmoa Tulaʻi.

To’o said in the lead-up to the 2021 Grand Final: “It’s the best to represent the area. That’s something we’re proud of. Mount Druitt gets a bad rap, but I feel like we’ve changed that a bit. Showing that positivity. It’s our happy place.”

There were 337,000 people of Pacific heritage in Australia at the time of the 2021 census, twice as many as in 2006. And the Pasifika share of Australia’s total population is growing more than twice as fast as the total Australian population. More than just population, the cultural impact in Australia of those Pacific heritage is arguably as high as it’s ever been.

Crichton mission is the same as To’o: “When I was younger, nothing positive came out of Mt Druitt… ever since we started playing footy… we made the promise that we want to be that light coming out of Mt Druitt, showing these young kids that violence isn’t the only thing there. You don’t always have to fall back on violence because that’s what Mt Druitt looks like. You don’t have to be that.

Ever since starting, me, Bizza, Romy, Spenny - that was our core group from the start - we’re going to stick together, and we’re going to be the light for the younger generations.”

Stephen Crichton might be rugby league’s best player. But he’s also an idol to a generation of young fans, and a totemic representation of the changing face of Australian sport and culture.

In his new series ‘I Was Actually There’, Kirk Docker lets people who were actually there, tell the stories of their experiences at events like the Port Arthur massacre, the Boxing Day tsunami, and the Beaconsfield mine disaster.

The series is masterful. Docker’s brilliance is his ability to create the safety for people to be their true selves. Every episode is good, but the episode I’ll recommend is Nicky Winmar’s. It’s a moment most Australian sports fans will think they understand but the detail is remarkable.

“When you’re favored by God, you’re also favored by the devil. He's coming for you, too.

Whose side you gonna go on? He's gonna give you power, too.”
- Mike Tyson, speaking to Francis Ngannou

Generally, Branches editions anchor on a single thing: The Bear, Letterboxd, Bonnie Raitt’s ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me’ (sidenote: I recently found a Fred Again cover of this song buried here in his Lockdown Live 002 | Rinse FM set), the Matildas’ 2023 World Cup penalty shoot-out against France, Jerrod Carmichael’s HBO comedy special ‘Rothaniel’, or Fleishman Is In Trouble…

I want to anchor this edition for the first time on a podcast episode: Jim Loehr’s recent conversation on Farnam Street:

I don’t know what else to say except that if you only set aside time for one thing in this email, make it this episode.

Jules (who only sometimes takes me up on my recommendations) listened to this episode just once and was immediately able to articulate her life’s purpose.

I’m not saying you’ll be able to do the same, but I’m saying there’s a chance.

Frances Ha (2013) - 'What I Want' Monologue

“Last night, I ate dinner with my friend Jenny. In real life, on a warm London evening, forking up aubergine from the same plate. We laughed, shared family news, told each other the things we’d been worrying over.
At home, alone in my study, they’d felt insurmountable, a sign that something was irredeemably wrong with me. Under the gentle scrutiny of my friend, they diminished to a normal size: just the grit of everyday traffic with other humans. I walked home feeling buoyant, nearly invincible. I need my friends. I bet you need yours.”
- Loneliness: coping with the gap where friends used to be

I love you dude. Let it rip.

Nicholas Crocker 🐘 — Sun, 21 Apr 2024 02:37:45 GMT

The Bear’s first two seasons peaked in the final episode of series one (Carmy’s seven minute monologue is really something else), and in the ‘Forks’ episode which just destroyed me.

I’ve loved rabbit-holing into the clothes the cast wore (see for example this Esquire interview with the Bear’s costume designer Courtney Wheeler), and learning about the unique loop wheel construction of Carmy’s Merz B Schwanen t-shirts.

Related: SuccessionFashion on Instagram.

The Bear’s soundtracks are also spectacular, especially for those of us vivified by the Pearl Jam (Live in Chicago), Wilco (‘Via Chicago’), Sufjan Stevens (‘Chicago’) alt-continuum.

Great art surprises in the ways it connects - and I was shocked at how engrossed my four year old became in the show. It felt a little profane for the eight year old, but for the four year old, I think it was the Chicago, and Copenhagen cityscapes, and the food shots that sucked him in.

Greta Gerwig’s Official Barbie Watchlist

The first person I followed on Letterboxd was The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri.

And Letterboxd is the first piece of software I’ve encountered in years that made me just feel a profound sense of gratitude to its creators. The kind of gratitude where you instantly search for a way to pay for a premium subscription, not because you need it, but just because you want to say thank you.

The four best movies I’ve watched this year: Close (devastating), Everything Everywhere All At Once, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and Anatomy of a Fall.

Letterboxd is famous for asking actors and directors what their four favourite films are. Favourite films are the art form least predictive of friendship. Liking similar music is very predictive - generally you’ll feel like you’re already friends with the people who attend the concerts of your very favourite artists. But movies tell you almost nothing. With that, here’s my top four:

“You have so many relationships in this life
Only one or two will last
You go through all the pain and strife
Then you turn your back and they're gone so fast
So hold on the ones who really care
In the end they'll be the only ones there
And when you get old and start losing your hair
Can you tell me who will still care?
Can you tell me who will still care?”
- Hanson ‘Mmmbop’ (is a sadder song than you remember)

“We don't take drugs to come up with the ideas, we take drugs to stop them.”

I’m a big fan of Victorian YouTuber Beau Miles - Run The Line, and A weekend away after the hardest year of my life are two of my favourites.

In a similar vein is Tasmanian YouTuber Angus Thornett who nonchalantly walks around Hobart with his small dog explaining the city’s remarkable history.

North Hobart Laid Out

It’s always a sign of a great technology experience when you remember your first time experiencing it for a long time after. Before Groupon founder launched his podcast editing platform Descript, in 2016 he launched Detour - a walking tour app that let you experience a series of narrated walks around San Francisco.

It sounds basic - walking tours?? - but it was transformative. I’ve never forgotten it, and never looked at cities the same way.

Every city is a thousand stories, layered on top of one another, with only the most recent one visible.

There is something powerful in revealing the stories that lies beneath. Like the two statues of a boy and a girl installed at St John's Park Newtown, north of Hobart. For the reveal, I’ll let Angus Thornett take you there.

“I think one of the best things a person can be in this world is a father – a father who is present, loving, devoted just may be the greatest gift a child could ask for in our society. And I have a damn good one. My father believed in me more than anyone. He believed in me and my brother. And whenever my own insecurities would arise or self doubt would come in, he would stifle them with the warm embrace of belief, unwavering love and belief.”

- Jason Kelce’s 'Retirement Speech’

⬇️

Related: “One of the things you’ve got to understand about your kids - this is really worth knowing - your kids want to have the best relationship with you that they possibly could have. They are 100% on board with that idea. Way more than anyone you’ve ever met in your life. And that means you could have the best relationship with your children that you’ve ever had with anyone.”

Coldplay - ‘Yellow’

Boiler Room sets are a cultural juggernaut. As with The Bear, part of it is the main event but part of it is also the rabbit-holing.

Boiler Room set YouTube comments are the best, especially the diligent tracklisting that enables you to find the source material of the set’s best moments (like Dam Swindle’s ‘That’s Right’ from Folamour’s recent Boiler Room / Sugar Mountain set).

Related: DJ Heartstring’s Boiler Room x AVA Festival 2023 set has been my absolute go-to for getting work done this year. The Ciara ‘1, 2 Step’ drop is a thing of beauty.

The people dancing in the background of Boiler Room sets are now becoming a main event all of their own. From the guy in the yellow Tommy Hilfiger t-shirt who brought Fred Again’s set to a halt with his happy dancing, to the infamous Kaytranada Boiler room dancing girl.

A new entrant to the Mt Rushmore of people dancing in the background of Boiler Room sets has been chiselled into the mountain … best introduced by the current 16th comment on the Chase & Status | Boiler Room: London Set.

“46:50 "The ENERGYYYY of this fkin nutterrr on the right. I didnt get hyped like that in a looong time! The combination of the buildup, the drop and him turning tf up is just out of this world.”

Aspirational, inspirational.

Pedestrian stranded on a bench at the corner of Elizabeth and Bourke Streets, Melbourne, during a flash flood in February 1972.

“Moon, a hole of light
Through the big top tent up high
Here before and after me
Shinin' down on me
Moon, tell me if I could
Send up my heart to you?
So, when I die, which I must do
Could it shine down here with you?”

- ‘My Love Mine All Mine’ Mitski

What’s Your Go-to Comfort Media? “Most of us have certain books, movies, TV shows, music, podcasts, and other media that we turn to when we need some comfort. These are things we’ve seen, read, or heard before — often many times — and know exactly what we’re going to get from them.” What’s yours?

Fred Again covering ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me’ in the middle of his underrated Lockdown Live set. I documented my obsession with this song in Instantly, I Knew.

Taking out a mortgage for a surf break (the story of how a Dad built his own surf reef in Bundaberg… and the profound impact it had on his daughter).

Niksen: The art of doing nothing: have the Dutch found the answer to burnout culture?

Nintendo’s design guru Shigeru Miyamoto: ‘I wanted to make something weird’

‘I didn’t realise I was so loved’: the people hosting their own ‘living funerals’

Her Sculptures Were Ignored for 33 Years. Then She Got a New Roommate.

Personal Renewal - Delivered to McKinsey & Company, November 10, 1990.

How Asking 5 Questions Allowed Me to Eat Dinner With My Kids

"Seinfeld: I'm never not working on material. Every second of my existence, I'm thinking, could I do something with that?

Howard Stern: That, to me, sounds torturous.

Seinfeld: Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you're comfortable with."

- Jerry Seinfeld on Howard Stern

Make Your Life Better by Saying Thank You in These 7 Situations

Life punishes the vague wish and rewards the specific ask.

An F1 lap, as seen by a drone travelling the same speed.

Bring Back More Low-Stakes Social Gatherings

Inside the Glorious Afterlife of Roger Federer

Past Lives (2023) | The Definitive Explanation

Brian Cox On The Craziest Universe Fact 😨

Self Reliance - Ralph Waldo Emerson

It was the Patriot Way, until it wasn't

What Garry Winogrand Saw in Color

Can Bradley Cooper really conduct?

I'm so glad we had that talk.

Weird proxies for wellbeing.

How to be more agentic.

Why we say ‘OK’.

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
―Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

Keith Jarrett’s ‘Koln Concert’ seems to get mentioned in Branches ad infinitum but there’s good reason - it’s likely the most enduring, impactful piece of art in my life.

A record that my father played before I was born, after I was born, and something I still play regularly today.

Just two weeks after ‘The Koln Concert’ was recorded, Jarrett played another show in Bremen… and it captures much of the spirit of his Koln effort. Somehow, despite spelunking the Jarrett archives for years now, I only discovered ‘The Bremen Concert’ this week while deep in the Keith Jarret subreddit .

Keith Jarrett Solo 1975 "The Bremen Concert" Complete & unedited.

“At its best, this album is the flow state on wax, an auditory expression of how it feels to be deep in the zone, where one’s relationship to time shifts or dissolves altogether.”
- Pitchfork, giving a 9.2 to Jarrett’s ‘Solo Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne’ (which is also good but not as good as Koln).

I still have my Dad’s original vinyl copy of ‘Koln Concert’.

Inside the cover, he cut out and saved an article about Jarrett from the Sydney Morning Herald in 1982. It’s still in there today.

As affecting as holding the orginal copy is, it’s the clipping that moves me more.

The record is the record.

But the enduring act of having saved that clipping, and it still being there today just hits me in the heart, every time.

“Mmmbop, ba duba dop
Ba du bop, ba duba dop
Ba du bop, ba duba dop
Ba du, oh yeah”

- Hanson ‘Mmmbop’

The bird and the branch

Nicholas Crocker 🐘 — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 02:49:42 GMT

The Song of the Lark | The Art Institute of Chicago

For a long time, I have been wanting to share this press conference clip of Bill Murray where he talked about what art means to him, and just never found the right place.

The Monuments Men Press Conference - Bill Murray 'How Art Saved my Life'

What follows is an end-of-year clean-out of the Branches backlog. A list of things I’ve liked, but haven’t found a way to share yet… enjoy.

“I remember always thinking that life itself doesn’t actually exist, because if no one tells it as a story or turns it into a narrative, life is merely something that happens, nothing more.

To understand life, you have to tell it, even if only to yourself. This doesn’t mean that a story can make life comprehensible, because there are always gaps in any narrative, whatever sutures or remedies you might try to apply.

That is why a narrative only restores life in fragmentary form.”
— Enrique Vila-Matas

Dani DaOrtiz at Fool US 2022 (the act that Penn and Teller didn’t even try to figure out.)

“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and do try to love the question themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. The point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
– Rainer Maria Rilke

Dreams - The Cranberries, 1993

“Write with a specific person in mind. When writing Berkshire Hathaway’s annual report, I pretend that I’m talking to my sisters.

For more than forty years, I’ve studied the documents that companies file. Too often, I’ve been unable to decipher just what is being said or, worse yet, had to conclude that nothing was being said.

The most common problem is that a well-intentioned and writer simply fails to get the message across. Stilted jargon and complex constructions are usually the villains.

Though highly intelligent, they are not experts in accounting or finance. They will understand plain English, but jargon may puzzle them. My goal is simply to give them the information I would wish them to supply me if our positions were reversed.
To succeed, I don’t need to be Shakespeare; I must, though, have a sincere desire to inform.
- Warren Buffett

Aphex Twin - Stone In Focus

"The everyday human gesture is always a heartbeat away from the miraculous.

Remember that ultimately we make things happen through our actions, way beyond our understanding or intention; that our seemingly small ordinary human acts have untold consequences; that what we do in this world means something; that we are not nothing; and that our most quotidian human actions by their nature burst the seams of our intent and spill meaningfully and radically through time and space, changing everything.

Our deeds, no matter how insignificant they may feel, are replete with meaning, and of vast consequence, and that they constantly impact upon the unfolding story of the world, whether we know it or not."
- Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files, Issue #216

Every Monday Night – a short film about ball & life

Morning, Interior - Maximilien Luce, 1890

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days."
- Annie Dillard

nothing, except everything.

Sam Fender & Holly Humberstone - Seventeen Going Under (Acoustic)

boygenius - You're Still The One (Shania Twain Cover).

no one else can stand
in exactly the spot where
I’m standing, and
it’s taken three decades’ walking
to say I love you
to the inevitability of my solitude.
- TWO POEMS by Irène Mathieu

Instantly, I knew

Nicholas Crocker 🐘 — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 04:56:00 GMT

“I'll close my eyes, then I won't see
The love you don't feel when you're holding me
Morning will come and I'll do what's right
Just give me till then to give up this fight
And I will give up this fight”

Bonnie Raitt’s ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me’ is a perfect song.

Just ask Phil Collins. Or Missy Higgins. Or Charlie Puth, who calls it “the Grandaddy song of them all”.

Charlie Puth Covers Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me” Live on the Stern Show

Howard Stern: What is it about this Bonnie Rait song? Why are you doing this cover out of all the covers you … could possibly do?
Charlie Puth: I think I just wanted to play the grandaddy song of them all. The most beautiful, tormented but still … you don’t know what you want your heart to feel when you hear this because it’s so beautiful musically but it’s such a painful message to hear that you can’t make somebody love you. And I just don’t know if there will ever be a song that’s written like this. I think this song took the slot. And it’s, it’s just, it’s just a song that I wish that I wrote.

Bon Iver - I Can't Make You Love Me / Nick of Time

I’ve gone searching for ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me’s’ best covers (Joy Oladokun’s, with Jason Isbell on guitar is a great example), but still, Bon Iver’s remains the zenith.

‘I Can’t Make You Love Me’ was written by Nashville writers Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin who said: “we'd worked on this song for more than six months. One day, [Mike'] said, 'Come up to the living room,' where his piano was. He sat down and started playing this melody, and it was one of the most moving pieces of music I'd heard. I mean, it hit me in a hard way ...”

“Instantly, I knew it was the best thing I'd ever been a part of."

Inside a Magical Home with Breathtaking Views of the Coastal Landscape

On the original recording of ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me’, Bruce Hornsby played keys.

You already know Bruce Hornsby because you’ve heard his song ‘The Way It Is’ sampled on the Tupac’s song ‘Changes’.

Here is Hornsby and Bon Iver, live, covering ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me’.

Hornsby, and specifically his song ‘Barren Ground’ provided the inspiration for ‘Beth/Rest’, arguably one of Bon Iver’s best songs.

Like Deadheads swapping cassette tapes, there is a devout community of Bon Iver aficionados, sharing best versions of live songs. Indeed, even poorly recorded, live Bon Iver transcends the recorded experience. This is the best version of Beth/Rest.

And here is Hornsby himself, playing ‘Beth/Rest’ live with Bon Iver. Just listen to those keys, especially from around 3:30. Unmistakeable.

“This is a song that came from all my Bruce listening over the decades.”

Beth/Rest Bon Iver with Bruce Hornsby

“Our love is a star
Sure some hazardry
For the light before
and after most indefinitely”

Four years ago, Bon Iver’s founder Justin Vernon shared that after a period of musical burnout, the four CERCLE shows they played at the Opera House in 2016 were: “one of THE highlights of any of our lives as artists”.

Of the Opera House itself, he said: “The building has power. You know, you walk and you see it for the first time, and it’s … stunning. It does something, you know what I mean? And that art, that architecture, that true vision plays in this world and is more important than we give it credit for.”

Bon Iver 2016 | CERCLE back in time with us | House Vault | Ep 3

Some of the songs those CERCLE shows have since been released, most notably this breathtaking acapella version of ‘Heavenly Father’.

I like to think that Vernon’s yelp at 2:06 is the exact moment he rediscovered his connection to playing the music live.

“That’s how this should feel. That’s us at our best.”

Bon Iver - "Heavenly Father" (Acapella) | Live at Sydney Opera House

Paul Keating’s description of the Opera House, applies equally to Bonnie Raitt’s ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me’: “like all great art, [it] never weakens. No matter how often you see it or from what angle you look at it or in what light it is cast, it always hits you in the heart because it is simply so good.”

No matter how often you hear it
it always hits you in the heart
because it is simply so good.

Bonnie Raitt & Bruce Hornsby - I Can't Make You Love Me

“Cause I can't make you love me if you don't
You can't make your heart feel something it won't
Here in the dark, in these final hours
I will lay down my heart and I'll feel the power
But you won't, no you won't
Cause I can't make you love me, if you don't”

Nothing ever goes away

Nicholas Crocker 🐘 — Sun, 29 Oct 2023 02:34:49 GMT

I wrote the first edition of Branches (or Excellent Things, as I called it back then) on New Year’s Day 2016, nearly eight years ago.

“If you were trying to live an excellent life, you’d limit the content you consumed to only the best…

…For some reason, it’s difficult to keep that up. You keep clicking on things you shouldn’t.
One of the best things about the internet is that it gives you unlimited chances for content redemption.

Every time you sink into the morass, the internet gives you a new day, a new chance to get back to the excellent.”

Each edition of Branches is an attempt to distill something excellent from the nearly infinite amount of content out there.

I call it ‘an attempt’ because I don’t always get it right. There are things I recommended then that I wouldn’t, or couldn’t now. Things that haven’t passed the test of time - Making a Murderer, my favourite Fitzroy North cafe (now closed), Snapchat’s Spectacles.

Eight years is a long time, and a lot of content.

I’ve gone back and reread every edition, and surfaced up a list of the things I still love now.

I have an eight year old son, so you will find in the list an absence of books and movies. Things that fit better into the long breaks that haven’t really existed since he was born.

This is not an objective list. I’m not sorry for including seven links to live recordings of Bon Iver songs.

I am still grateful to the people who introduced me to excellent things along the way.

My high school friend Josh who introduced me to Pitchfork.com in 1999. Kanyi for introducing me to Nicolas Jaar’s Essential Mix as we sat in Adirondack chairs, our feet in a shallow river in Big Sur. This Paul Graham tweet for causing me to read Barbarian Days.

I’m forty today.

These won’t all stick with you, but if one does, then all of this will have been worthwhile.

A Murder Foretold 📝
A Practical Guide to Executive Presence 📝
All Too Well 🎶
ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE 🎥
Aphex Twin’s Avril 14 on pedal steel 🎥 🎶
Barbarian Days 📖
Before I Go 📝
Being Known Is Being Loved 📝
Bon Iver - ____45_____ / Saal 1 / PEOPLE Festival 16 🎥 🎶
Bon Iver - Blood Bank (Live at Barclays Center, Brooklyn, NY, USA, 2019) 🎥 🎶
Bon Iver - 715 - CR∑∑KS - Paris Philharmonie 2016 🎥 🎶
Bon Iver - 715 - CR∑∑KS, TD Garden Boston (10/15/19) 🎥 🎶
Bon Iver - "Heavenly Father" (Acapella) | Live at Sydney Opera House 🎥 🎶
Bon Iver - I Can’t Make You Love Me 🎥 🎶
Bon Iver - Woods - Live in Seoul 2016 🎥 🎶
Bright Eyes - First Day of My Life 🎥 🎶
Counting Crows - Anna Begins (@ MTV Most Wanted).mpg 🎥 🎶
Daniel Johns covers 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' 🎥 🎶
Dear April 🎶
Dan Wang’s 2019 Letter 📝
David August Boiler Room Berlin Live Set 🎥 🎶
Fast response times signal social connection in conversation 📝
Fleet Foxes - Tiger Mountain Peasant Song (Cover) 🎥 🎶
Frank Ocean - I Miss You (Live At The Bowery Ballroom In New York City!) 🎥 🎶
From 100th St to Ground Zero 📝
Gerd Janson’s Boiler Room x Sugar Mountain 2018 DJ Set 🎥 🎶
Good 🎥
Gorecki: Symphony No. 3 🎶
Havoc 📝
Hania Rani - @arteconcert's Piano Day 🎥 🎶
How to Know If You Talk Too Much 📝
In & Of Itself 📺
It Was Just a Kayaking Trip. Until It Upended Our Lives 📝
It’s worse than you think 📝
J’ai Dormi Sous L’Eau 🎶
Jamie XX - Gosh 🎥 🎶
Japanese Maple 📝
Joe Montana Was Here 📝
John Butler - Ocean 🎥 🎶
Just Be Thankful (Tokyo Edition) 🎶
K-Strass the Yo-Yo Guy Super Compilation 🎥
Kanye West Sunday Service - Easy On Me (for Virgil Abloh’s funeral) 🎶
Keith Jarrett - Sapporo, November 18, 1976 (Part I) 🎶
Keith Jarrett - The Koln Concert 🎶
Letter From A Region In My Mind 📝
Look for me in the trees. I will be there in the trees. 📝
Meditation is preparation for the worst day of your life. 🎥
Miserere Mei 🎶
Missy Higgins - ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me’ 🎥 🎶
Mouse of Silver 📺
Music Is Not Sport: Nils Frahm's Favourite Albums 📝
My 8 Best Techniques for Evaluating Character 📝
My Criticism Is the Highest Compliment I Can Pay You 📝
Narrative Distillation 📝
Nicolas Jaar’s Essential Mix 🎶
Nils Frahm’s Piano Day Playlist 🎶
Now Matters 🎧
Omens of exceptional talent 📝
on being known 📝
On Father’s Day 2015 📝
Once More To The Lake 📝
One Day In America 📺
People underestimate how enjoyable and engaging just waiting is. 📝
Playboy Interview: Steven Jobs 📝
Perfect, Briefly 📝
Politics & The English Language 📝
Reality has a surprising amount of detail 📝
Richard Hammond explains what he experienced during his coma 🎥
Saying Yes More Slowly Will Allow You to Say No More Often 📝
Alone: Series 7 📺
Speak to yourself the way you would speak to a friend. 🎥
Something New Is Fucked Up In My World Every Day 📝
Stranger In The Village 📝
The 1972 Olympics 800m Final 🎥
The best quote from The Office 🎥
The breeding process of Siamese Fighting Fish 🎥
The Bureau 📺
The Bystander 📝
The Chemical Brothers - Star Guitar 🎥 🎶
The Colonel 📝
The Cost of Leadership 🎥
The Drones: Shark Fin Blues 🎥 🎶
The Fair Play Deck: A Couple's Conversation Deck for Prioritizing What's Important 🃏
The Fun Scale 📝
The Happiness Activity Chart 📝
The high-return activity of raising others’ aspirations 📝
The present moment becomes good enough. 🎥
The Rule of Thirds 🎥
The Swimming Chair 📝
The Tail End 📝
The Unthinkable Has Happened 📝
These Precious Days 📝
Trump Solo 📝
To Run My Best Marathon at Age 44, I Had to Outrun My Past 📝
Whales' Bubble Net Fishing | Nature's Great Events 🎥
What I Want For My Son 📝
Why She Broke 📝
You Can Only Maintain So Many Close Friendships 📝
Your Life in Weeks 📝
Your real biological clock is that you’re going to die. 📝

“I remember that time that you told me,
you said “Love is touching souls”
Surely you touched mine ’cause
Part of you pours out of me
In these lines from time to time.”

— Joni Mitchell, ‘A Case of You’

This is the kind of love

Nicholas Crocker 🐘 — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 11:15:24 GMT

There are rare moments where entire nations come together, for good. Those moments don’t happen often, so it’s worth cherishing them when they do.

The Matildas’ 2023 World Cup run was one such extended moment but if you had to narrow down the whole journey, it was really that penalty shoot-out against France.

It was the longest penalty shootout in World Cup history, men's or women's.

Apparently 7 million of us watched the shoot-out, and more than 11 million of us tuned in a few days later to see the loss to England, the sadness offset by a brief flash of Sam Kerr brilliance.

Just two moments in Australian sporting history come close to the Matildas’ run - the 1983 America’s Cup win, and Cathy Freeman’s gold medal at the Sydney Olympics.

On that timeline, it might be another twenty years before we share a moment like it again.

Related: For a fascinating deep-dive into the Matildas’ World Cup build-up, Disney’s 6-part documentary series has you covered.

Cathy Freeman's race as commentated by American network NBC.

When it comes to timeless Australian cultural moments, John Farnham’s ‘You’re The Voice’ has held up remarkably well.

Here he is, singing that ‘Australian National Anthem’ alongside Coldplay.

Coldplay- You're The Voice (with John Farnham) Sound Relief Concert

John Farnham: Finding the Voice tells Farnham’s story in fascinating detail. From his early rise on the back of his ‘Sadie the Cleaning Lady’ fame, to long years of irrelevance, to his improbable return in 1986 with the release of ‘Whispering Jack’.

My favourite snippet from the whole documentary: after they had finished recording, they decided ‘You’re The Voice’ needing something extra. Farnham suggested bagpipes. The only problem: the song was in F, and the bagpipes can only be played in F Sharp. Undeterred, they redid the entire song in F Sharp.

Like Keith Jarrett’s half piano in ‘The Koln Concert’: “Sometimes the limitation of the instrument is the very thing you need to make something great.”

The wonders of Farnham’s voice are best captured in this live rendition of The Beatles’ ‘Help’, alongside the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

John Farnham - Help (LIVE with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra)

“People disappeared into their own lives and conflicts, and in doing so they lost perspective, not only on where they were, but also on who they were, and who they had been or could become.”

—Karl Ove Knausgård, The Morning Star

A weekend away after the hardest year of my life

Mystery Clicks…

1… 2… 3… 4…

"The thrill of winning is in direct proportion to the effort I put in before."

-Rafael Nadal

The Most Beautiful 2 Minutes of Music | Keith Jarrett

Ryuichi Sakamoto is a Japanese composer, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2014, and died in March of this year.

On his album, ‘12’ you can hear him breathing throughout the recording. Most noticeably perhaps on ‘20211201’, which opens with a single breath… it’s deeply affecting.

The minimalism of the album’s synth and piano lines gain existential weight as you realise those breaths were some of his last.

This bear was carved out of a single block of amber 3,500 years ago.

I want you to feel as comfortable as I hope to be.

Nicholas Crocker 🐘 — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 20:35:55 GMT

Right at the beginning of ‘Rothaniel’, Jerrod Carmichael’s HBO comedy special, Carmichael speaks straight to the audience:

“I’m happy you’re here. I’m happy all of you are here. I have so much to tell you. You’re comfortable? You can talk back to me. I want you guys to feel that. This only works if we feel like family. I know the camera’s here and it’s a whole thing. It’s a big night, it’s a lot of pressure. That kinda thing, you know?

I want you guys to feel as comfortable as I hope to be.”

“As comfortable as I hope to be.” That line doesn’t make sense until near the end, where the crowd suddenly becomes a crucial part of the show, engaging Carmichael directly in conversation. Asking him the hardest questions.

“Do you wish you didn’t tell her?”

Recorded at New York’s Blue Note Jazz Club, where Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, and Dizzy Gillespie all recorded live shows, there is jazz in Carmichael’s performance. I loved this take: where Dave Chappelle is Miles Davis, Carmichael is more Coltrane.

It was Davis who said: “The real music is the silence and all the notes are only framing the silence,” and in Carmichael’s silences you’ll find one of the most moving comedy shows you will ever see.

John Coltrane - In A Sentimental Mood

In ‘Rothaniel’, Carmichael wears a Rolex Day-Date with a gold dial, Roman Numerals, fluted bezel and a gold President style bracelet.

Until recently, none of this would have meant anything to me. But I’ve recently fallen into a YouTube watch sinkhole from which the algorithms will not let me escape.

It all started when a friend, recently married, remarked that he had always been terrible at marking occasions with gifts. Which got me to thinking, that watches, despite all the advances in digital technologies, remain one of the few timeless ways to transcend the decades in physical form.

What other physical object, art aside, could you buy today and gift to your child two decades from now, with some confidence that it will still work, still hold its purpose, and even moreso, accrue value and depth of meaning through that time?

Appraisal: 1960 GMT Master Model Rolex with Box & Papers

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”

- Carl Sagan, Cosmos

The most feared song in jazz, explained

I am obsessed with questions… and how even a single word or a slight rephrasing can elicit diametric responses.

One question that doesn’t tend to work is asking: “What is one thing you believe that no-one else does?” With disappointing regularity, people tend to respond with banal, highly believable responses.

But I recently found not a response, but a life rule, that elicits shock from people every time I say it.

It’s this: I don’t take Ubers unless the driver’s rating is 4.95 or above.

To me, this no ride below 4.95 is non-controversial. Driving is the most dangerous thing we do. Wrapped up in those 4.95 ratings isn’t just good chat, and a clean car. There’s also safety.

As a side-effect of this rule, I am exposed on a regular basis to one of the most extraordinary cohorts of people in society. Think about the kind of patient, caring person you have to be to maintain that rating. We should study these people, and learn more about what makes them the way they are.

They are the best of us.

Margot Robbie Is Magic, I'm Just Doing Tricks

Someone who would definitely be a 5.0 after 10,000 rides is Ronald Gladden, star of the mockumentary ‘Jury Duty’.

The premise, and this isn’t a spoiler, is that Ronald thinks he’s doing jury duty and being filmed for a documentary about the experience. What he doesn’t know is that every other person - the judge, the other jury members, the security that lets him in to the courthouse every day - they’re all actors.

It’s a short series, a warm sugar hit, punctuated with some acutely funny moments (like the paper crane scene). I was left uplifted by it, and Ronald gave me a brief but full restoration of my faith in humanity.

Jayda G | Boiler Room: London… worth it all just for the drop into ‘Both of Us’ around 28:00.

‘Jury Duty’ won’t ever make it to my Mt Rushmore of TV shows but Succession just did.

The show peaked for me at Logan’s funeral. To have those eulogies hold up in a way that was believable… was just pure TV perfection.

When Shiv said, “goodbye my dear, dear world of a father”, I gasped. The perfect line to end a staggering scene.

It is no small pride that in real life Shiv is Sarah Snook, an Australian NIDA graduate. Another podium finish for Australian exceptionalism 🇦🇺🥇

"And there wasn't a room, from the grandest state room where his advice was sought to the lowest house where his news played, where he couldn't walk and wasn't comfortable.
He was comfortable with this world.
And he knew it.
He knew it and he liked it.
And I say amen to that."

- Kendall Roy

Keep one eye on the horizon, you best not blink.

Nicholas Crocker 🐘 — Sun, 16 Apr 2023 02:27:05 GMT

There’s a scene towards the end of ‘Fleishman Is In Trouble’ (the show, not the book) where the narrator Libby Epstein (played memorably by Lizzy Caplan) resolves her character arc:

“And what were you going to do with the fact that time was going to march on anyway? What were you going to do with the fact that you couldn’t win this fight?
That was the problem.
You were not ever going to be young again. You were only at risk for remembering that this was as good as it would get in every single moment.
That you are right now as young as you will ever be again.
And now. And now. And now…”

And she keeps repeating that phrase ‘and now’ over and over again as a montage of all her memories flood back - from playing Uno in bed with the kids, to angry silent family car trips, to flashbacks of overseas exchange as a student, to brief moments of laughter in friendship… I found the whole thing so affecting.

The Roches - ‘Hammond Song (Live)’

If you’re in your late thirties, and doing the impossible professional couple ambition juggle with kids you want to be with all the time, and occasionally have brief fantasies about burying your phone under a tree in the forest… then you might find moments of yourself in this one.

Iam Tongi Makes The Judges Cry With His Emotional Story And Song - American Idol 2023

I have always loved trance. I’m not saying it’s my defining musical genre. But in the puzzle of my music taste, it’s worthy of a few pieces.

Robert Miles ‘Children’, Tiesto ‘Adagio for Strings’, Faithless ‘Insomnia’, Chicane ‘Don’t Give Up’, that key hook in ATB ‘9PM (Till I Come)… .

The Story of Sandstorm by Darude

I think the borderline eurotrashycheesiness has put people off for most of the last 20 years. But that’s changing. Via one of my favourite Substacks - First Floor - I discovered Montreal-based TDJ who is at the vanguard of a trance resurgence.

“When I started TDJ, the world was so dark, I felt like everybody needed some light. Trance is the perfect music to just project yourself and dream for a minute, to let yourself go.”

As Pitchfork itself noted recently, Trance Is Back—and It’s No Joke.

SPF INFINI 2: TDJ GOES TO TULUM

a cascade of faces

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 23:03:18 GMT

Under the leadership of CEO Toto Wolff, and with Lewis Hamilton at the wheel, Mercedes won eight consecutive F1 constructors' titles between 2014 and 2021.

It was a period of extraordinary dominance that came to an end in controversial circumstances when Max Verstappen, and Red Bull, won the 2021 title on the last lap of the final race of the year in Abu Dhabi. As the controversy unfolded, Wolff could be heard yelling at the (now fired) race director: “No Michael no, that is so not right.”

Mercedes followed that final lap loss in 2021 with a relatively disastrous 2022 season, plagued by issues they couldn’t solve quickly enough.

F1 Legend Toto Wolff on Winning, Losing, and Leading Through Both

Fascinatingly, Wolff and his team have leant in to the pain and been very public in their dissection of the failure.

All of which made this New Yorker profile even more fascinating: Toto Wolff, the Compulsive Perfectionist Behind Mercedes’s Formula 1 Team.

U2 - I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For (Official Music Video)

I used the lazy afternoons of the Christmas → New Year break to catch up on every edition of the New Yorker in 2022. Some favourite finds:

The Haves and the Have-Yachts: Luxury ships attract outrage and political scrutiny. The ultra-rich are buying them in record numbers.
Solomun, the D.J. Who Keeps Ibiza Dancing: He leads a manic, exhausting life—but when he’s guiding clubbers through one of his marathon sets it feels like time has been suspended.
The Surreal Case of a C.I.A. Hacker’s Revenge: A hot-headed coder is accused of exposing the agency’s hacking arsenal. Did he betray his country because he was pissed off at his colleagues?
The Beautiful, Brutal World of Bonsai: An American undergoes a gruelling apprenticeship to a Japanese master.
My Dad and Kurt Cobain: When my father moved to Taiwan, a fax machine and a shared love of music bridged an ocean.

That’s the river.

Nicholas Crocker 🐘 — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 20:55:03 GMT

It’s a rare star that can outshine LeBron James’. But on a recent episode of ‘The Shop,’ actor Daniel Kaluuya did just that.

His description here of how he got into the zone to shoot the speech scene in Judas and the Black Messiah is mesmerising.

Kaluuya narrated the most recent series of All Or Nothing - Arsenal, a look back on Arsenal’s 2021-22 season.

Mikel Arteta's Emotional Dressing Room Team Talk | All or Nothing: Arsenal

This is the third instalment of an extraordinary coaching triptych, giving viewers an insight into the coaching styles of Arsenal’s Mikel Arteta, Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola, and Jose Mourinho during his stint at Tottenham.

You really have to pinch yourself as a sports fan to get this kind of access.

Pep v Jose's Team Talk Styles! | Who Comes Out on Top?

I know nothing about video games but our seven year old got a Nintendo Switch for his birthday, and now he and I are making our way through Zelda Breath of the Wild and it, is, amazing.

We are both relatively low on skill, and so we play to each others’ strengths - he’s does the hand-to-hand combat, I shoot arrows and throw bombs, and each Shrine is a shared effort of ~skill and logic.

We’re still early (currently at the beginning of Chapter 2 – Dueling Peaks) but we’re going to spend maybe 100 hours getting to the end of the game together and my mind is just blown at the whole experience.

I know “Zelda is a good video game” is not a super original take. But I don’t think either of us will ever forget the weeks of of immersion in Zelda’s epic Bierstadt scenery.

Rocky Mountain Landscape - Albert Bierstadt, 1870

If you watch just one thing after reading this edition of Branches - make it Derek Delgaudio’s ‘In & Of Itself’. Breathtaking.

And if you listen to just one thing, Fred Again… just dropped an all-time Boiler Room mix.

Fred again… | Boiler Room: London

I was going down the rabbit-hole of this clickbait-y article: ‘No one is safe from Melbourne’s brutally honest and fearless meme-makers’, when I came across Ocray44 the brand behind Melbourne’s ubiquitous bleached floral caps.

The YouTube algo must have been listening intently as it served me up a Boiler Room set in Belfast with the thumbnail showing a DJ (who turned out to be Skin on Skin from Melbourne) in one of said caps… thus introducing me his relentless Boiler Room set at the AVA Festival.

It’s a set that will be too hard for most, except if you’re trying to hit a deadlift PB.

Life is a game of little windows.

Nicholas Crocker 🐘 — Sun, 26 Jun 2022 00:14:52 GMT

"Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It's not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it's a day you've had everything to do and you've done it."

- Margaret Thatcher

Up - Married Life

I found this experiment so moving.

Two strangers sit back to back having never met, and just talk.

Strangers Meet Without Seeing Each Other - Pure Impressions Episode 4

Two things jump out: the first is that removing the visual element - how someone looks - and only cueing off their voice makes the connection almost instant.

Second, the subtle changes in the wording of the questions change the quality of the responses.

They don’t ask each other - how are you? They ask - how are you, really?

What’s something I wouldn’t believe about you?
Tell me about your first love, and why you fell in love with them?
What is your biggest insecurity?
What is a song that reminds you of someone you love?

Kanye West Sunday Service - Easy On Me (for Virgil Abloh’s funeral)

I love good questions, and in Tyler Cowen’s new book Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World (reviewed well here) he and co-author Daniel Gross suggest a set of better questions to ask when identifying talent:

How did you spend your morning today?
What’s the farthest you’ve ever been from another human?
What’s something weird or unusual you did early on in life?
What’s a story one of your references might tell me when I call them?
How do you feel you are different from the people at your current company?
What views do you hold religiously, almost irrationally?”
How did you prepare for this interview?
What is something esoteric you do?
Did you feel appreciated at your last job? What was the biggest way in which you did not feel appreciated?”
What is one mainstream or consensus view that you wholeheartedly agree with?
How successful do you want to be
When have you experienced great regret in the workplace and why? How much were you at fault in that interaction?”

Related: In previous editions of Branches I’ve covered Cowen and Gross in depth here and here.

As you can see in the Post Malone clip above, Howard Stern is one of the best question askers in the world. He manages to take people to uncomfortable places by making them feel safe going there. He’s at his best when he’s talking with musicians, I think, because he admires them so much.

It is rare to discover new heroes late in life. But I discovered one last year - Jorn Utzon. Utzon is the architect of the Sydney Opera House, arguably the world’s most recognisable building, and inarguably a masterpiece.

Jorn Utzon: The Man and the Architect

Every time I visit Sydney, I find a way to get to the Opera House, and this past few months, I’ve had it all to myself on a torrentially rainy morning, seen Nils Frahm play there twice, seen it lit up with colour for the Vivid Festival, and spent the day there at TDM’s People & Culture conference.

I was even lucky enough to have lunch in the Utzon Room, the wall emblazoned with a 14 metre long, floor-to-ceiling, woollen tapestry that Utzon designed.

Every visit to the Opera House reveals some new perspective on the place.

Like Paul Keating said:

“Utzon’s building, like all great art, never weakens. No matter how often you see it or from what angle you look at it or in what light it is cast, it always hits you in the heart because it is simply so good.”

You are a mist that appears for a little while

Nicholas Crocker 🐘 — Sun, 24 Apr 2022 22:16:12 GMT

I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall–
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.
- I Go Down to the Shore, ‘Mary Oliver’

An Architect's Own House Situated on a Remote Beach (House Tour)

We’re still in a golden age of television… and one show I loved recently was ‘How To With John Wilson’. Ostensibly, it’s about John Wilson, the show’s creator, learning to do new things, like make risotto (yes, that’s a whole heartwarming, amazing episode). But it’s also about New York specifically and all the tiny moments that make it such a special city, and about humanity generally, and all the strange pauses that make us human.

How To With John Wilson | Official Trailer

Three movies I watched recently that stayed with me…

The Rescue, which tells the story of a group of amateur cave divers banding together to save a junior Thai football team from drowning in an underwater cave. The film shares a director (Jimmy Chin) with Free Solo, and it’s an equally epic story. The banding together of an informal, global network of the world’s best cave divers is astonishing.

Mystify is the life story of INXS frontman Michael Hutchence. I was too young to grasp the global impact of INXS. Ultimately, the darkness that drove him to greatness, also contributed to his undoing, and in that sense his story is profoundly human.

jeen-yuhs, a four and a half hour Netflix documentary chronicling Kanye West’s early days establishing himself as a producer, and rapper. The scene that stuck with me most was the one where Kanye walks the halls of the Roc-A-Fella offices rapping to a demo of All Falls Down, and no-one reacts. Arguably the most influential artist of this century, wrote the album that would launch his career, and upon first listen, the people at his label barely blinked. What you’re left with is a morality tale on the necessity of self-belief.

jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy | Kanye Raps In The Roc-A-Fella Offices

Well, you're in your little room
And you're working on something good
But if it's really good
You're gonna need a bigger room
And when you're in the bigger room
You might not know what to do
You might have to think of how you got started
Sitting in your little room
- The White Stripes ‘Little Room’

That’s not a wrong note, you just lack confidence

“In the first 20 seconds of talking, your light is green: your listener is liking you, as long as your statement is relevant to the conversation and hopefully in service of the other person. But unless you are an extremely gifted raconteur, people who talk for more than roughly half minute at a time are boring and often perceived as too chatty. So the light turns yellow for the next 20 seconds— now the risk is increasing that the other person is beginning to lose interest or think you’re long-winded. At the 40-second mark, your light is red. Yes, there’s an occasional time you want to run that red light and keep talking, but the vast majority of the time, you’d better stop or you’re in danger.”
How to Know If You Talk Too Much | Harvard Business Review

Crispy Egg Toast Recipe : It's so delicious and so simple

“The lie that society tells us is that our friends can be our family. That’s the premise of TV shows like Friends, Seinfeld, and How I Met Your Mother. We can all leave our hometowns behind and have exciting adventures in the big city with people that we meet. And those people will love us and take care of us and be there for us.
But life is more like what happened to the actual actors on Friends. Their TV reunion was the first time all six had been together in years. They still cared about each other to a degree, but they had grown apart. They were living in different cities and working different jobs and had a million different things happen to them that they didn’t share as a group. It couldn’t be the same as it was when they were all single and working on the same TV set.”
Does My Son Know You | The Ringer

You Can Only Maintain So Many Close Friendships | The Atlantic

“This is … how most friendships die … not in pyrotechnics, but a quiet, gray dissolve. It’s not that anything happens to either of you; it’s just that things stop happening between you. And so you drift.”
It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart | The Atlantic

Fred again.. - Studio Live 2 (London, 21 October 2021)

I’m back running. Going sub-23:00 with zero fitness base at 5k Parkruns in Lorne, and Casuarina earlier this year gave me a taste, and on a nudge from Anthony, I set myself the goal of sub-21:00 by Easter. I got in to the 21s… but only just - 21:53.

To avoid the classic fitspo trap of being jazzed to run, then overdoing it, then getting injured, I signed up with Pulse Running and am heading into my 8th week of a structured running program, with a remote coach.

So far, so simple = run easy Tuesday (5:45/klm), run hard Thursday (fartleks, or 4x1klms), run long Sunday (12+ ks at ~6:00/klm).

I’m alternating the ASICS Novablasts, and the Nike Zoom X Invincibles, but I look forward most to runs in the Invincibles - like running on a high-jump mat (in a good way). Spongy, cloudy, but still surprisingly responsive. Just as well I have that extra cushion… running when you’re heavy really adds up, thousands of steps multiplied by the extra downforce of every sneaky kilo I’ve added every year since my twenties.

Slowly, I can feel the fitness coming back - and you can see it in my resting heart rate dropping. The Mona Fartlek is my favourite hard run session. And YouTube is a wonderland of running inspiration if ever the motivation wanes.

Running 13:06 for 5k

Recommended Reading:

Narrative Distillation

The Skill of Org Design

The Power of Positive People

Accelerated Expertise

Your Board of Directors is Probably Going to Fire You

Dan Wang’s 2021 Letter. See also his letters from 2020, 2019, and 2018.

“There's a mythology that exists in people's heads when they join an organization that tells them it was built by smarter, better people in the past. To that, I say, “Are you kidding me? You're way fucking smarter than the first ten people we hired.” One of the first ten people we hired walked in off the street and we asked, “Hey, dude, can you write Java?” There was no coding test, there was no interview; it was like, “Dude, have a go. See if it works.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes | The Observer Effect

“Where was I? Dights Falls, right, quick yet, and yet intact, austral spring, hot-brick night, shaking ourselves off,
shaking off the long-short winter – felt like forever, blinked away years – taking full in this new kind of blue.
(It’s only time. So much time. Only so much time.)
Watching, in the dim, our children’s bodies do the forgetful work of joy.
…
Everyone’s missed you. Everyone’s asking about you, worried about you, wondering how you’ve been.”
- Nam Le, ‘Abbotsford’

Best Moment: Rolex Oyster Cosmograph & Documentation, ca. 1971 | ANTIQUES ROADSHOW

“Before they moved into their house, Shirley had found and carefully replanted a 300-year-old olive tree to shade the front door. It was a project he never understood. Now, whenever he passes it, she’s with him.
“Life has dramatically changed for me, for the worse,” he says. “I am now a widower and a very sad one at that. After 67 years of being with her, now being without her is the most difficult task of my life. I don’t quite know how to handle it. I don’t quite know how to be.”
- Frank Lowy’s life in Israel at 90

Riley’s Memories | Inside Out

I have been thinking a lot about core memories (which aren’t a real thing, just a moving idea from Inside Out). Probably because I have two young kids forming them all the time right in front of me.

It’s too late to form core memories in your thirties (I assume from the Inside Out scene) but I am fascinated by the concept of timelessness. Not just of memories but of music, and art, and architecture, and business… it is so rare to build something that outlasts a decade.

“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and do try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. The point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
– Rainer Maria Rilke

Some of Steve Irwin’s back catalogue has been preserved intact on YouTube, and it’s aged well. Watching my six year old, transfixed as Steve drives the troop carrier all around his state, scrambling underneath old Queenslanders, identical to the one I grew up in, looking for poisonous snakes… the surprising cinematography, Steve’s energy, his love for the animals… there’s some timelessness to it.

Highly recommended.

Steve Irwin Finds Australia's Deadliest Snakes

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
- Mary Oliver, ‘The Summer Day’

I can't wait to see your face again

Nicholas Crocker 🐘 — Fri, 15 Oct 2021 22:33:03 GMT

Watching someone display mastery is mesmerising.

Danny Carey | "Pneuma" by Tool (LIVE IN CONCERT)

Don’t let the idea that you don’t like Tool stop you from watching Danny Carey’s drumming mastery on Pneuma. I have found myself coming back to this clip over and over lately. Something about it is calming, and complete, in a similar way to the visual loops on IFYOUHIGH.

The more I’ve watched it, the more I’ve tried to work out how he’s doing what he’s doing. Like actually trying to move my arms and legs in a way that would make that drum sound. And I’ve got nowhere. Until I found this video from Austin Burcham.

Danny Carey Pneuma Polymeter | Study The Greats

Burcham’s breakdown confirms the mastery… and makes it almost mathematical. I particularly enjoyed the explanation of how Carey shortens his orchestration cycles from 5 to 2 towards the end of the song to build tension.

Live Performance Dave Grohl and 11-year old Nandi Bushell at The Forum LA jamming Everlong with Foo Fighters

“At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind. It costs you relatively little to do this, but the benefit to them, and to the broader world, may be enormous.
This is in fact one of the most valuable things you can do with your time and with your life.”
- Tyler Cowen

This transcript of Ezra Klein interviewing Tyler Cowen is a must-read.

There are so many ideas contained within - GDP as the best metric for measuring growth, cracking cultural codes, mRNA vaccines, cryptocurrencies, and AI as signals that the great stagnation of the past 10 years might be over - but the one I want to focus on is the one in the quote above. The outsized impact of small amounts of belief and capital early in people’s journeys.

“Supplying people, especially younger people, visions of what they could be, is greatly undersupplied... In some of the grants I’ve given out through Emergent Ventures to younger people, I’ve also tried to give them a sense of what I think they could be and I suspect that’s more important in some cases than the grant. In a way it’s complemented by the grant. In a way you’re giving the grant so you can package it with this vision…and the grant makes the vision more vivid or more focal, like they believe the vision because you spent real dollars on them.”
- Tyler Cowen

Related: On Medici and Thiel

Blackbird is a Pledge 1% member and through the Blackbird Foundation, we provide grants to unleash creativity in young people. The Protostars, as we call grant recipients, go through a fellowship program, and are doing amazing things.

Tash Atkins is an opera singer exploring algorithmic electronic music called Algorave.

Joanne Amarisa is creating a course that introduces women to data visualisation and creative code.

Sam Johnson is making a real-physics-solar-simulator in which players can create stars, planets and moons based on elements from the periodic table.

Bridget Kelly is an artist with minimal speech and Down Syndrome. She's creating a short film showcasing her work.

Ginger-Rose Harrington is translating an ancient text from an Egyptian Solar Cult.

If you ever needed a reason to feel optimistic about the future, the Protostars are it.

Imogen Heap - Hide and Seek - Brass Choir Cover

Circling back to Tyler Cowen, in Tyler Cowen is the best curator of talent in the world, investor Tony Kulesa wrote: “Everyone in the business of building and managing organizations should study Tyler’s performance and process. For entrepreneurs in today’s environment, talent, not capital, is the limiting factor in company building. Finding and recruiting talent is also the core task of venture capital investing, building a research lab, or managing a university.”

One of Cowen’s most inspiring initiatives is Emergent Ventures, a program that supports brilliant minds with highly scalable, “zero to one” ideas for meaningfully improving society.

Australia has produced one Emergent Ventures fellow so far, Tony Morley, who is writing a children’s book (that you can help fund) called Human Progress for Beginners.

Another of the Emergent fellows, Alexey Guzey, (whose ‘Best of Twitter’ Substack is must-read) has launched New Science, which aims to build new institutions of basic science, starting with the life sciences.

Guzey has brought on board the team from Slime Time Mold who do what they call ‘Mad Science Blogging’ to join him.

You can get a sense of their work from this insane set of posts on the mysteries of obesity, starting with A Chemical Hunger: “The first mystery is the obesity epidemic itself. It’s hard for a modern person to appreciate just how thin we all were for most of human history. A century ago, the average man in the US weighed around 155 lbs. Today, he weighs about 195 lbs. About 1% of the population was obese back then. Now it’s about 36%.”

The Strokes - Reptilia (BST Hyde Park 2015)

Amazingly, we may finally have a prescription for obesity.

In June, the FDA approved Wegovy for chronic weight management in obese or overweight adults with at least one weight-related condition (such as high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, or high cholesterol). In the 68-week clinical trial, participants lost an average of 12.4% of their initial body weight.

The opportunity is well summarised in this post: the future of weight loss.

“Our recent experience treating patients with obesity,” says David Macklin, MD, “is similar to the experience physicians have when they provide blood pressure drugs to patients with high blood pressure or asthma medications to patients with asthma. We finally have a drug that effectively treats the condition.” Macklin, an 18-year veteran of obesity medicine and coauthor of the Canadian Adult Obesity Clinical Practice Guidelines, is referring to his two years of experience treating over a thousand people with obesity using the relatively new drug semaglutide.”

jazz friday (trust me, just watch)

One of the best things I’ve read this year is Kevin Kwok’s ‘Narrative Distillation’. Its ostensibly about the power of founder storytelling but it perfectly captures this moment in time in technology and startups.

“Historically, capital was the scarcest resource. Venture capital as an industry was built and structured around capital scarcity as the most important blocker on company success.
But increasingly it isn’t scarce anymore. And it certainly isn’t the main blocker for many of the top companies. Talk to top tech companies today and raising capital is ironically one of the easier aspects of building and derisking the company. Hiring and retaining a talented team is far harder. Acquiring and retaining customers is harder. Understanding and getting the team coordinated on what to build is harder. Oh, and did I mention that hiring and retaining a talented team is far harder?”

Some Longreads:

Eric B. & Rakim - I Ain't No Joke (Official Music Video)

An album I’ve been going deep on recently is Fred Again’s ‘Actual Life’.

Fred Again started life as a producer, mentored by Brian Eno, and working on Eno • Hyde, the collaboration between Eno and Underworld's Karl Hyde. He then moved to artists like The XX, Stormzy, and Ed Sheeran (proof here), before releasing his own record earlier this year.

The songs perfectly capture this moment, the heaviness of a world beneath the COVID shadow, mixed with the optimism of it being almost through, and the sun coming in. The energy in the music recalls that first wave of big beat when the Chemical Brothers, and Fatboy Slim were ascendant.

Fatboy Slim - Praise You

I liked this description: “It’s that emotional connection people feel from Fred again..’s music that makes them optimistic: it’s not a joyous feeling of elation, it’s feeling seen and feeling together.”

Fred Again - Julia (Deep Diving)

Each song on the album contains a spoken word vocal sample, often just Fred recording a friend or stranger on the street with his phone. The sample will capture the ethos of the song “we’ve lost dancing”, “we gon make it through”, “I found you”, but the song will build to an entirely different place, often euphoric, but never completely letting go of the melancholy.

Fred Again explains: “I was in Atlanta, and this guy called Carlos rolled up to me, and he was kind of beautiful. I was just having gags with him, and I started filming bits on my phone as I do on nights out, and he had this beautiful, beautiful energy. When I woke up in the morning hungover as hell, I was flicking through my phone and creasing at everything from the previous night. In the clips, he was saying, “We gon’ make it through, man!” I put that into Logic and started messing around with it, and I immediately loved it.”

Carlos (Make It Thru)

You should watch Series 7 of Alone. Here’s the concept: ten survivalists are dropped on the shores of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories of Canada, and told they’ll win a million dollars if they can survive for 100 days, with just 10 items of their choice. You can see below what contestant Roland takes in with him.

Alone: Roland's 10 Survival Items (Season 7) | Exclusive | History

It is amazing. Not just the skills of these people, but the human study of what kind of psychology can withstand cold, and loneliness, and dark for the longest time.

How I Wrote Fight Club

Finally, I’m going to end with a recommendation you watch 9/11: One Day In America. It might be the most stunning documentary series I’ve ever seen. It’s 9.4 IMDB rating is not a mistake.

Unlike Netflix’s ‘Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror’ which is much more politically focussed, One Day In America focuses on the individual stories of those who were there on the day - the firefighter in charge, the man trapped in the rubble, the Marine who came and saved him, and the woman stuck in the stairwell.

Much of the footage, raw, and from the site itself, comes from two French documentary filmmakers who happened to be making a documentary about New York firefighters on the day the planes struck. As they investigate a gas leak in Lower Manhattan, American Airlines Flight 11 flies right over them, and the filmmakers catch the moment the plane flies directly into the North Tower.

The whole series is profoundly moving.

I won’t spoil it, but the moment shared between the brothers in the series’ final scene will stick with me forever.

Her the Heron, Hurried Away

Nicholas Crocker 🐘 — Wed, 11 Aug 2021 21:30:28 GMT

“You look like a movie. You sound like a song. My God, this reminds me. Of when we were young.” - Adele

White Lotus. 5 episodes in. So good. What a soundtrack. Who is in the coffin getting loaded on to the plane in the first scene? Why did the birth scene happen at the beginning, and not get mentioned since?

Hateful is the dark-blue sky,
Vaulted o’er the dark-blue sea.
Death is the end of life; ah, why
Should life all labour be?
- Alfred Lord Tennyson: The Lotos-Eaters

In 2021, it’s rare for an app to make its way straight to the iPhone home screen. And even rarer that you sign up for a $150 annual subscription straight after first use. But that’s what I did with SwingVision.

SwingVision is Strava for tennis. Early backers include Andy Roddick, and Tennis Australia’s venture fund.

SwingVision lets you track your match, your shot data, and then watch the key moments back to gain insight on how you play. In the match I’ve gif’d above for example, I hit 30% slice forehands. As a tennis coach friend texted me when I shared that stat: “Crikey. Were you playing squash?”

If you want to try it, there’s one hurdle which is that you need something to mount your phone on. I use this $27 flexible tripod and it works well.

How different composers experience Gustav Mahler’s Symphony 2 Final Resurrection

5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Symphonies

Oliver Burkeman's last column: the eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life

24 Hours

There was a night I carried my son to bed for the last time but I don’t remember it. I’m sure he was tired since he fell asleep on the couch. I lifted him up, placed him in his bed and kissed him goodnight. I would pay any amount of money to relive it.

The Big Bang: What We Know and How We Know It

The ‘untranslatable’ Japanese phrase that predicts love

A First-time Skydiving Experience, a Fall to Earth and a Terrible Accident

Luke Aikins No Parachute 25,000 Feet Airplane Jump Complete Video

“No truth is without some mixture of error, and no error so false but that it possesses no element of truth."
- Wilbur Wright

I have been back down the rabbit hole on Bon Iver’s ‘Creeks’ lately. Deep diving in subreddits for lyrics interpretations, and making my way through every recording that exists on YouTube of the song being played live (I’ve found 74, not including the ones that appear within the full concert uploads). The album version does not come close to the live experience.

And love at second glance, it is not something that we'll need
Honey, understand that I have been left here in the reeds
But all I'm trying to do is get my feet out from the crease

On a view count basis, people seem to love the NPR version of Creeks (I think it’s too vanilla) and the Paris Philharmonie version (which charmingly starts with the Prismizer malfunctioning).

If you haven’t ever gone deep on the Prismizer, it’s quite fascinating, and not the same effect as used by Cher (autotune) or California Love (vocoder).

Related: This is Pop’s autotune episode was awesome.

If you’ve ever heard ‘Creeks’ live, you’ll know that the low end of the Prismizer makes it hard to breathe while Vernon’s singing. And that the silences that appear as seconds in these live videos feel like minutes when shared with thousands of other souls.

For a deep cut of Creeks ( just ~7k views), I like TD Garden, Boston from 2019.

It’s been a big few weeks of basketball.

Delly announced he’s coming home to Melbourne United. Josh Giddey got drafted at #6. Luc Longley finally told his side of the Last Dance story (Part 1, Part 2).

And, Giannis won his first title and gave us a mental model for the ages.

When you focus on the past, that's your ego.

But the highest high came from the Boomers’ bronze medal at the Tokyo Olympics. Surely no bronze medal has ever brought more Australian sports fans to tears… at four Olympics, across four decades, the Boomers have played for a bronze medal and lost. We lost in the final seconds to Spain in Rio 2016, then to Spain again (in double overtime) in the 2019 World Champs.

If you were born in the 80s, and grew up through basketball’s early 90s golden era, the bronze medal was the culmination of a mountain of childhood memories - Shane Heal chest bumping Charles Barkley and hitting six threes as he stood up to the bully, Anstey, Bradtke, Gaze and Heal all dipping their toes into short-term NBA contracts, Luc Longley anchoring the GOAT Jordan Bulls squad, Andrew Bogut going #1 to the Bucks, the AIS kids coming of age (Bogut, Delly, Ingles, Mills), the St Mary’s wellspring, Bogut anchoring, and winning rings with the GOAT Warriors teams, Patty Mills’ winning rings with the Spurs as he dropped 3s on LeBron’s Heat, Delly going on a drip after chasing Steph Curry through endless NBA Finals screens (which I got to see live), Kyrie, Dante at #5, Ben Simmons at #1, the Boomers win over the Dreamteam at Marvel Stadium (which I got to see live), Matthise suddenly materialising, Patty tearfully carrying the flag for the team at Tokyo 2020, and then refusing to do anything but win in the bronze medal game, dropping and unfathomable 42 and 9 to beat a Luka-led Slovenian team…

As Ingles, and Exum dropped those threes late in the fourth quarter I jumped around the lounge room punching the air like a lunatic.

And then Andrew Gaze summed it up for all of us, linking his father Lindsay’s early efforts when there were 200 people in the whole country who played the game of basketball… to this moment of pure, generational elation. Bravo.

@AndrewGaze10 captures the mood of a nation 😭\n\n#Tokyo2020 | #7Olympics ","username":"7olympics","name":"7Olympics","profile_image_url":"","date":"Sat Aug 07 13:34:45 +0000 2021","photos":[{"img_url":"https://cdn.substack.com/image/upload/w_728,c_limit/l_twitter_play_button_rvaygk,w_120/niozvjbkjyobvkasxpns","link_url":"https://t.co/rREgY9w7ky","alt_text":null}],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":667,"like_count":3764,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"video_preview_media_key":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM">

To be a good chef all you’ve got to do is lots of little things well.

Life at Blackbird has had lots of moments to (briefly) celebrate lately: Eucalyptus’ Series B (podcast deep-dive here), Culture Amp’s Series F, Dovetail’s Series A, Fable’s Heston burgers hitting the Grill’d menu, and the nura true wireless launch (I am listening to mine now).

We’re hiring a Head of Investor relations, and a Community Lead in Aotearoa if you’d like to join us.

And we’re making $1,000 grants to young, passionate Wild Hearts working on creative projects across Australia and New Zealand.

How Dave Grohl’s drums on Nevermind were inspired by disco

I am not good at constructing major pieces of work. I have a short concentration span. I can work only in small, intense bursts. I don’t seem to work consciously. I write to unburden myself, to amuse myself, to arrange in order the things that bulge in my head, to make myself notice things.
- Jerzy Kosinński

Very few podcast episodes still retain their essentialism beyond a few days after they are published. Irish poet John O'Donohue’s discussion with Krista Tippett from 2008 on The Inner Landscape of Beauty is different.

O'Donohue died unexpectedly in his sleep, at 52, shortly after this podcast was recorded.

The dawn goes up, and the twilight comes, even in the roughest inner-city place. And I think that connecting to the elemental can be a way of coming into rhythm with the universe. And I do think that there is a way in which the outer presence, even through memory or imagination, can be brought inward as a sustaining thing.
It’s the question of beauty — as we are speaking, there are individuals holding out on frontlines, holding the humane tissue alive in areas of ultimate barbarity, where things are visible that the human eye should never see. And they’re able to sustain it, because there is, in them, some kind of sense of beauty that knows the horizon that we are really called to in some way. I love Pascal’s phrase, that you should always keep something beautiful in your mind. And I have often — in times when it’s been really difficult for me, if you can keep some kind of little contour that you can glimpse sideways at, now and again, you can endure great bleakness.
- John O'Donohue

Since I left you, I found the world so new.

Nicholas Crocker 🐘 — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 23:41:51 GMT

It started with The Avalanches latest album - ‘We Will Always Love You’ - and it crescendoed with the 20 year anniversary of - ‘Since I Left You’ - and the release of a three-part podcast about the album’s creation (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).

What struck me in learning more about Since I Left You was how the magical elements of the record came from what seemed like barriers at the time:

In the late 90s, people had all but ditched their vinyl, transitioning to CD collections. Second-hand stores were flooded with classic records selling for dirt cheap. The Avalanches, young, and with no moneyspent their weekends taking trams across Melbourne, hopping from opshop to opshop, loading up on records.

The technology of the late 90s constrained the number of samples The Avalanches could save at any one time. As with Keith Jarrett having to play The Koln Concert on just 1/3 of his piano, that limitation served to make the record better than it otherwise would have been. One reason the The Avalanches follow-up record took so long was the fact that the technology allowed them to use infinite samples. The paradox of choice.
Because they were completely unknown at the time, the Avalanches sampled everything from Madonna to , never imagining the nightmare that would come from clearing those samples, or the copyright implications. Had they known, or cared, about those legal restraints, Since I Left You would never have been as imaginative as it was.
Robbie Chater, one of the band’s central members, experienced his most intense periods of creativity in making the record after coming out of hospital having been treated for alcoholism. The lyrics: “Where's Dexter?, Get a drink, have a good time now, Welcome to paradise, Since I left you, I found the world so new” take on a new meaning in that context. The album finds some of its effervescence in Chater’s post-recovery euphoria, seeing the world so new.

No money, an oversupply of cheap, second-hand vinyl, extreme technological limitations, the total creative freedom that comes with anonymity, and the newfound love for life of a recovering alcoholic.

Imagine that being the recipe for creating a masterpiece.

The Avalanches - Since I Left You

PS. Here’s your next month of music sorted: 24 (and counting) of The Avalanches' mixtapes, live sets, and DJ sets. I recommend Big Tent Set Live @ Splendour (2006) which I got to see live. Changed the way I thought about Bon Jovi forever.

If you were curious as to why Abba’s ‘Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight) is getting played at every wedding, and birthday you go to, you have Folamour to thank (skip to 31:00 in his set if you want to hear the build up).

“The CDC had lots of great people, but it was at heart a massive university. “A peacetime institution in a wartime environment,” Carter called it. Its people were good at figuring out precisely what had happened, but by the time they’d done it, the fighting was over.”

Michael Lewis’ ‘The Premonition: A Pandemic Story’ should be required reading for everyone.

“I always felt a bit like a child in all this but having the eyes of a child and a sense of awe and no firmly held perspective to begin with was how I could help in some small way. I never had anything to unlearn.”

I can’t wait to find out who plays Charity Dean, Carter Mecher, and Joe DeRisi in the inevitable movie.

“I have found that there is an order of magnitude difference between bearing the ultimate responsibility for decision-making and being either an advisor or student of the process,” he wrote. “It’s one thing to experience an orgasm or an arrow between your ribs and it’s another thing to read about it.”

Steve Jobs on Consulting

With the news that One Medical acquired Iora Health for $2.1B, I took the chance to revisit this classic New Yorker article from 2010 that profiled Iora Health’s founder:

“Fernandopulle, who was born in Sri Lanka and raised in Baltimore, doesn’t seem like a radical when you meet him. He’s short and round-faced, smiles a lot, and displays two cute rabbit teeth as he tells you how ridiculous the health-care system is and how he plans to change it all.”

Related: Malay Gandhi had a sharp summary of this deal on the Second Opinion substack.

Man bijt hond - Het dorp

If you’re at all interested about what’s happening in the world of finance right now, you’ll love this piece: Ape Armies and Investor Relations

“Traders call themselves the Ape Army. This led to a donation push back in March by the r/WSB folks to adopt a number of gorillas. In six days they raised over $350k for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund (Note 1).
On that May earnings call, Aron announced AMC’s Charity Cares and Aron personally would be donating 100k total to that same exact fund. He went full meme. Not only did he acknowledge the new majority ownership of retail investors, he paid full homage to the memes, and he did it in the language of the meme.
He told the Ape Army that he respects them and understands them. It wasn’t done in some cheesy corporate how do you do fellow kids way either. It was the perfect insider-y reference that seems absurd or irrelevant to an outsider. It was perfect memespeak.”

Fitness Frauds Sued For Pranking Morning News

After watching Vice’s story about the fitness frauds being sued for pranking the morning news, I went back and watched the original videos, and… well, Kenny "K-Strass" Strasser made me laugh harder than I have in a while.

"I don't have a girlfriend, don't want one. My parents, they live in Denver, they just got divorced. My dad is now in Oshkosh. . . . I have a brother in Portland who I don't get along with very well because of his wife."

K-Strass the Yo-Yo Guy Super Compilation

Some Longreads:

Kevin Durant and (Possibly) the Greatest Basketball Team of All Time (New York Times)
A Shooter In The Hills (New Yorker)
Building Products At Stripe (Ken Norton)
On Sneakers (Paris Review)
‘I’d Never Been Involved in Anything as Secret as This’ (Politico)

Michael and Dwight Rock Up to the Party Early - The Office US

One of the people I’ve learned the most from when it comes to mindset is Matt De Boer, current GWS Giant, and founder of Athletic Ventures (who I wrote about in Something immortal has just entered the world).

De Boer went on Dyl & Friends recently and shared his story, and his mental approach, and it captured so much of what I’ve learned from him. His Player A/Player B analogy alone makes the whole thing worthy of a listen.

Dyl & Friends - #96 Matt de Boer - Player A, Player B

Now matters.

I’ve had this simple idea reverberating in my mind for weeks.

My friend Anthony is a fitness coach, and now cancer survivor.

A little over a year ago he was diagnosed with Stage 4 bowel cancer. When they found it, the cancer had spread so far that the surgeons refused to operate. With the help and support of family, and in particular his wife Clair, Anthony refused to accept those first opinions, found a surgeon willing to operate, and with a combination of surgical intervention (including having most of his liver removed), and intensive chemotherapy, he managed to survive, to the point of being cancer-free.

It was the most heroic thing I’ve seen.

Anthony shared his story with Lach & Robbie on the Funny Business podcast. Anthony is humble, and incredibly honest about the last few years.

His message that now matters resonates so deeply when he says it.

Branches 🌿

Sort of like a dream?

The Poppies - Johan Ericson

Warmly, I Urge You To Click On Each Of These Links

Summer Sky - David Hockney

Between the click of the light

Don't want to close my eyes.

What's seldom, is wonderful.

That’s ¥ØU$UK€ over Karl’s shoulder, black jacket, left of the guy in the red t-shirt.

Watch from 38:12, with the volume as loud as you can get it, and maybe your eyes closed too.

Recommended

To make the point, and centre the story, this is a photo my friend Will took of Gunnamatta’s 8th hole.

next time is next time

Brett Whiteley, ‘Self Portrait’

Katsushika Hokusai, ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’

If we loved one another less

Recommended

I love you dude. Let it rip.

Pedestrian stranded on a bench at the corner of Elizabeth and Bourke Streets, Melbourne, during a flash flood in February 1972.

Recommended

The bird and the branch

The Song of the Lark | The Art Institute of Chicago

Morning, Interior - Maximilien Luce, 1890

Instantly, I knew

Nothing ever goes away

This is the kind of love

This bear was carved out of a single block of amber 3,500 years ago.

Recommended Reading

I want you to feel as comfortable as I hope to be.

Jayda G | Boiler Room: London… worth it all just for the drop into ‘Both of Us’ around 28:00.

Recommended Reading

Keep one eye on the horizon, you best not blink.

Recommended Reading

Recommended Reading Pt. 2

a cascade of faces

Recommended Reading:

Recommended Reading / Watching / Listening:

That’s the river.

Rocky Mountain Landscape - Albert Bierstadt, 1870

Recommended Reading:

Recommended Reading Pt. II:

A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt Rosalie - Albert Bierstadt, 1866

Life is a game of little windows.

Recommended Reading:

You are a mist that appears for a little while

I can't wait to see your face again