Chamber Music for Lawn Mowers
This is, I think, my favorite thing I listened to in 2025, and overall maybe my favorite art I experienced in 2025. It is an experimental album by a project called S. Martens, a collaboration between artists M. Sage and Leiven Martens. M. Sage describes it, and its inception, much better than I can on his Substack here. I so rarely feel like conceptual art does what it claims to do (and I guess it doesn’t even really make sense to call this conceptual, because it’s not like it seems to be clearly concept driven and it is (to me at least) mostly good music that is genuinely pleasant to listen to), but when I read just today that he feels it contains some “big post-colonial and ecological ideas” I couldn’t help but think that this might be one of the rare cases when I believe that it just might actually have some of that stuff in it. Maybe it is just that I will allow anyone anything if the art makes me feel something.
Either way, I listened to it for most of last year without thinking about it on an idea or concept level at all and we highly recommend it.
The Sickness Unto Death by Soren Kierkegaard
It really shouldn’t be underestimated, it cannot be overestimated, how much I loved this book. The first paragraph makes it an incredibly hard sell and I know for a fact the book is not for everyone–I read it as part of a reading group where I was definitely the only one who loved it unreservedly, and I think very few people had much love for it at all. But I found Kierkegaard’s complex system of the self convincing, his psychological portraits sharp and believable, and his description of the risk of humiliation in faith moving. Highly recommend!
It was funny to be in a reading group for the first time since college, this one was full of serious San Francisco tech guys/various white-collar-job-havers. But, in general, I’m grateful for the structure to read something I certainly would not have finished otherwise and for the (at times too serious even for me) environment in which to discuss ideas. It is so hard to be talking at all about the same thing when you read and try to discuss philosophy together; it is I guess philosophy’s problem all the time, shared language and do we mean the same thing by history or the self or the mind as the other guys. By the end of seven weeks (2 hours a week, 7-9pm!, insane) we got a little better at this, but not much.
Yellow guavas
At the corner store near my house they have yellow guavas. They smell intense, like Kerns guava juice that my grandparents always had in the fridge. They taste like that but better and they have a custardy inside with hard seeds that will break your teeth. I usually bite down until my teeth hit the seed but do not try to go further and swallow them whole and we highly recommend.