This is one of my favorite new podcasts. If the conceit isn't enough to pull you in, you're not hooked up right.

It's called Didn't See It Don't Need To [Overcast link] and it's hosted by Sarah Miller who is a very funny writer and another person (Joshua Clover) with whom I am not familiar but whose voice is very nice.

Here's the show description:

This is a free podcast from The Real Sarah Miller in which Joshua Clover and I do not see movies and then discuss not having seen them. So many people are out there seeing movies that aren’t worth seeing and discussing them when they could just go swimming or pet an animal or check how many Twitter followers Zendaya’s dad has. We have disrupted this nonsense by NOT SEEING movies and discussing anyway, very briefly.

I recommend starting with the episode on Dune, which is only 16 minutes long and very funny.

See also: My other podcast recommendations.

Maybe I'm just a nostalgic old fuddy-duddy, but I say personal music recommendations are better than algorithms. I used to get music recommendations exclusively from humans (ie friends and blogs), and I think they're more likely to expose you to stuff you wouldn't otherwise listen to. Open your horizons a bit.

Not sure what happened to my friends. And I guess blogs are still a thing, but who has time to read things from other humans when you can just press play on "My new music mix" on Apple Music or whatever?‍

Here are three sources I consistently use to find new music from a wide range of sources that are still maintained by humans.

"Song of the day" podcasts

These are podcasts that post a new song every day. No talk, just an mp3. Super easy way to give new music a chance.

The Current Song of the Day

KCRW: Today's Top Tune

KEXP: Song of the Day

Hype Machine Stacks

Hype Machine started out as a way to see what independent music blogs were posting the most. It still does that, I guess. But they also have "stacks" which are curated mixes. They're really good! Check it out.

All Songs Considered podcast

I call this the music nerd podcast. It's produced by NPR. There are a bunch of standing hosts plus a bunch of rotating folks they talk to. It's good. Listen here.

See also: Other times I've written about music here.

The podcast is called Smartless and it is funny. In each episode, one of the hosts Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, or Will Arnett seem to actually(?) suprise the other hosts with a celebrity guest. Meaning, one of them books the guest, but the other 2 don't know about it.

They get some questions in, some jokes, some ribbing. It's good.

I'm working my way through the archives but one of my faves so far is Fred Armisen.

This recent story about a 65,000+ page diary of a now-deceased publisher/printer/professor named Claude Fredericks, goes some unexpected directions.

This is one of my favorite passages... about the author's feelings after reading many parts of the journals:

This experience generated a profound dissonance. For all the effort that Fredericks put into completing his journal project—and promoting it to others—an essential element is missing: he was not a good writer. He did not instinctively make judicious choices on the page, whether recounting a dramatic episode or offering a lengthy evocation of the pleasures of gardening in Vermont at the height of summer. His prose rarely displays the ingrained sense of control that true writers have even when jotting off a postcard.

At the end, the author ultimately deremines that, after devoting several years of his life to the reading of the journals... that he "sometimes wonder[s] if it would have been better had the vaults never been open."

Either way - this article is worth opening.

The Most Ambitious Diary in History by Benjamin Anastas in The New Yorker.

I don't know if there's a more accurate name for this type of art, besides "conceptual art" – but the my favorite kind of art is when the artist makes stuff with giant bits of typography.

This post will introduce two of my favorites.

Artist #1: Lawrence Weiner

This is the first artist I came across that makes this kind of art. As this gallery says, Weiner "is among the trailblazers of the 1960s to present art as language."

Here's an awesome 5-minute video with him from 2008.

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I first heard about him from the design matters podcast back in 2008. the website for the episode is still online but the CSS seems to be stripped from the site, leaving the typography in the default 12-point Times New Roman which kinda works for this guy.

Here's another one of his works:

Other resources: wikipedia / this art gallery

Artist #2: Robert Montgomery

This guy is British and has been making art more recently than Weiner. Here's a bit from his biography:

Robert Montgomery follows a tradition of conceptual art and stands out by bringing a poetic voice to the discourse of text art. Montgomery creates billboard poems, light pieces, fire poems, woodcuts and watercolors.

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Here are some examples of his work:

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and this one:

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Check out more on his site.

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I like this kind of art for a bunch of reasons.

let's make a list since this is a blog post.

• It's unexpected when you see it in person - giant letters in places you don't normally see them
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• The only other time you see big words in the world is on billboards and signs and stuff. When someone's trying to sell you something. This isn't.
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• I always wonder how people come up with stuff to write about. Like the actual topics. giant typography art makes that question have even more interesting, since someone is committing to make those words as big as possible.
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• One can't really own the art. I guess you could own the building it's on, but the whole point is that the public can see it.
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• It's just delightful! 

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Oh yeah Stefan Sagmeister does stuff like this too but everyone knows about him already.