It’s now clear to me that the #1 priority for any aspiring creator is to be hyper-intentional on structuring your milieu.

Unlike the word culture, as anthropologists invoke it when they talk about “French culture” or “Balinese culture”, a milieu is not a monolithic thing. Your milieu is not the same as your sister’s. It is an ever-shifting, individual configuration of information flows.

Your influences only have to make sense to you, but you have to be ruthless about who gets access to your subconscious.

This graph below is a map that has been a WIP in my apple notes for a while now. These are the thinkers who have fundamentally recalibrated my perspective in the past year.

Just as Frusciante was able to bridge the gap between Jeff Beck and Kurt Cobain, my goal is to better understand the overlap I know exists within my milieu.

I got to a point where I was realizing that what was happening in my playing was that I was trying to bridge a kind of a gap between someone like Jeff Beck, who has a lot of very interesting techniques that are very lyrical and expressive—making the guitar sound almost like it's a singer or something—it seemed like I was bridging a gap between that and someone like Kurt Cobain, who, especially in his improvisational playing, is not so much about techniques per se; it's about putting a lot of energy into the instrument and playing in a way that has reckless abandon.

I’m not sure exactly what output ends up working for me but I’m getting started with daily blogging on here. The goal is to eventually form a well oiled machine between my inputs, processing, and outputs.