Cynthia Clifford

Think I up’d my cooking skills tonight! 🍝

Here is a gorgeous radio series on Miles Davis from NTS–Hours of curated jazz, put together to celebrate 100 years. Of course he was a Gemini. Happy (late) birthday, Miles Davis.

Just watched Backrooms and feel like this might be an entrance to one… Fort Greene, BK

Downtown Brooklyn

CS Lewis

Cobble Hill, BK

I am becoming more & more obsessed with radio. It started with NTS and lately has drove me into local Brooklyn stations and hunting down indie music that has been played on either on Bandcamp.

I’m very frustrated with the world of streaming platforms and the online slop that pushes 2% of artists 100% of the time. It upsets me that even “new” artists end up sounding the same, capped by tech companies chasing what they know will sell.

I put together a few thoughts about why radio stations, like Radio Free Brooklyn or NTS, have my support:

Actual human curation, not engagement optimization. Streaming narrows your taste over time!! Radio expands it. Every show is someone else’s music collection, not just a feedback loop of yours. EX: NTS has shows with Detroit rap from the 90s, baroque classical music from women composers, Ethiopian jazz, and so on… Algorithms are unable to appreciate taste and new sounds when they’re literally built to keep you near what you already like.

Archives and protects art scenes. NTS, Rinse, Refuge Worldwide, Resonance FM — these all document underground music in real time. Without them, entire genres go unrecorded. Even online pirate radio built jungle, grime, hyper-pop, UK garage. Spotify built none of those and can’t…

Place and community. Local radio is of somewhere!!

No AI slop. Radio doesn’t fill its schedule with fake AI artists or AI-generated mood vibe music. Every hour is a real person who chose every track. Deezer reported in early 2025: about 20,000 fully AI-generated tracks are uploaded per day that is 18% of daily uploads… Not to mention less than 20% of all recorded music ever made is on streaming platforms. We are losing so much access to music and discovery especially historical genres of music!

Free and open. Ugh this, there is no subscription, no bullshit ads, no data harvest. & it streams 24/7!

Resilience against enshittification. Spotify is a great target example for this. Spotify has hiked prices, drops grass-root playlist features, and is now flooding it’s algorithim with AI. It is an extractive model.

Music as culture, not for content. Radio treats songs as art worth talking about, with actual context and history. Streaming strips all that out and treats music as a means to an end. Art can’t flourish under these conditions.

Trains your attention. A 2-hour curated show is active listening that you can’t skip, or at least it’s hard to. Streaming playlists are designed to be ignorable, or skippable, causing you to use more time on their platform. The constant option to skip turns every track into a decision, this is a tiny friction that compounds into never sitting with anything unfamiliar. One makes you a listener, the other makes you a consumer.

Been thinking about truisms— partially prompted by Jenny Holzer’s Truisms at MoMA: www.moma.org/collectio…

A few that stuck with me:

A SINGLE EVENT CAN HAVE INFINITELY MANY INTERPRETATIONS
A RELAXED MAN IS NOT NECESSARILY A BETTER MAN
A LOT OF PROFESSIONALS ARE CRACKPOTS
ALL THINGS ARE DELICATELY INTERCONNECTED

ANY SURPLUS IS IMMORAL
AMBIVALENCE CAN RUIN YOUR LIFE
CHASING THE NEW IS DANGEROUS TO SOCIETY

DON’T PLACE TOO MUCH TRUST IN EXPERTS
DON’T RUN PEOPLE’S LIVES FOR THEM
ELABORATION IS A FORM OF POLLUTION

EXTREME BEHAVIOR HAS ITS BASIS IN PATHOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY
FEAR IS THE GREATEST INCAPACITATOR
HIDING YOUR MOTIVES IS DESPICABLE
GOING WITH THE FLOW IS SOOTHING BUT RISKY

Very happy that the company I work for, Nen Creative, was featured in The New York Times this week! I work with very creative people who are making wildly creative videos for all kinds of companies. Here is an article about our shoot with Daydream.

Love this:

“Customers occasionally ask if they can use A.I. to speed up production, which Mr. Zhu pushes back on because the technology can’t give him the quality he wants. But he’s not worried that artificial intelligence will completely replace his business, he said…“People want real stories to show real customers, and A.I. can’t do that,” he added.

A few more notes on the episode of Binchtopia I highlighted earlier today about the shittification of the world as we know it (but not our lives, per se).

After listening, I finally ditched my Amazon account and, as it was put, be slightly more inconvenienced for the price of community and being less of a puppet in this system.

“The price of community is inconvenience. Everyone wants to live in a village, but no one wants to be a villager.”

Here are some other notes & quotes

“Our days are spent trying to get through tasks in order to get them out of the way, with the result that we live mentally in the future. The spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency. Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. The day will never arrive when you have everything under control — when the flood of emails has been contained, when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer, when you’re meeting all obligations at work and in your home life, when no one’s angry at you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball. And when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn at long last to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat. None of that is ever going to happen. But you know what? That’s excellent news. True life is the moment. Life is where you are living right now. There is no such thing other than the present moment.”

• These hacks marketed as timesavers (AI, smart appliances, Amazon, big tech pitches, etc.) aren’t actually time savers
• The problem with “smart” appliances: we don’t need them, they’re made to break, and they undercut the human way of interacting with our tools and our ability to fix them. It pushes us further away from simplicity — instead, it ends up complicating our lives with all these features, updates, changes, connectedisms
• Everything is designed to be replaced with new technologies. There’s a larger socio-psychological piece here: the instinct to look for something new as the answer when something isn’t working
• Vibe-based pricing — price doesn’t mean quality to us anymore
  • Made me think of the quality of my socks, and how I never know what I’m getting even from the same brand anymore
• We’re bad at evaluating future values

“I’ve just offloaded the human experience — of thinking — to these landlords that I pay rent to.”

• We’re addicted to the idea of saving time
• The answer is simplicity and gratitude. Stay simple. Do things with all of you.

Pretty obsessed with this podcast, Binchtopia, lately. I got into it because I kept commenting on a friend’s nuanced takes on relationships and pop culture, and she kept referencing this podcast—so I finally gave it a listen and now I get it. Their breakdowns of modernity, relationships, and history feel thoughtful in a way I haven’t really come across in the current slump of the podcast world. They’re smart, well-read, and incredibly nuanced and open in how they approach things while being completely themselves. I’m especially drawn to how they incorporate spirituality in a way that feels both humorous, confident, and grounded in logic. I can’t seem to get enough of them.

I loved their recent episode on the New Yorker piece, The Age of Enshittification, and more so Cory Doctorow’s book, about how big tech platforms are literal monopolies and their products are degrading over time on purpose and things connected to such platforms are getting bad and about to get worse…

So many good episodes, but a couple standouts:

Enshitted on ’Em: starts with a drug trip story, then pivots into a sharp, unsettling deep dive into how harmful tech companies have become and The New Yorker piece from above. (This is why I have crawled back to Spotify like a desperate hand in the machine)

But Mama, He’s Mormon: more relationship-focused, with Julia Hava (who is a therapist) bringing really insightful and hilariously human takes on people’s problems

He’s wondering where my donut went. Gorgeous Monday in Santa Barbara, CA

A few from my Pentax 17

Finished reading: Waiting for God by Simone Weil 📚

“The beautiful is that which we desire without wishing to eat it. We desire that it should be.”

“Friendship is not to be sought, not to be dreamed, not to be desired; it is to be exercised. It is a virtue.”

“For a religion is known only from inside.”

“It is good to reflect on what forces us to come out of ourselves.”

“We want to get behind beauty, but we only find its surface.”

“It is because beauty has no end in view that it constitutes the only finality here below. For here below there are no ends. All things that we take for ends are means… It is more or less the same for all things that we call good.”

“Pain is the color of certain events.”

“There is no friendship where there is inequality.”

“When a human being is attached to another by a bond of affection which contains any degree of necessity, it is impossible that he should wish autonomy to be preserved both in himself and in the other… It is, however, made possible by the miraculous intervention of the supernatural. This miracle is friendship.”

Glad I didn’t go to a listening party for Drakes new album(s), it’s mostly him being sore and repeating Kendrick’s lines that probably keep him up at night and repeating his own lines and flows. Anyway. It’s Friday and here is a sweet poem by Emily Dickinson.

Excited for the new Drake album dropping tonight, just heard a leak and I am ready for his dramatic music – looking up nyc listening parties now 🫪

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