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What seems pointless
From today’s newsletter:
On Instagram, a reader asked me in response to my collages: “How do you balance making fun stuff with doing business? Do you allocate time to simpl[y] make ‘pointless’ things?” I scribbled the image above into my notebook in response, and then I got so worked up thinking about the topic that I scribbled this followup, which I’ve edited slightly:
Read more: Five things on my mind (and in my notebook)
Love zine
Today’s newsletter comes with a free zine and other love-adjacent items: “Love is not a gadget.”
Read like an Artist zine
I reformatted my Read like an Artist zine as a one-pager that you can download, print, and make for yourself or your bookclub, classroom, etc. Download here.
Soup lessons
Last Friday I wrote a newsletter called “In The Soup”:
It’s still soup season. Last month I tweeted, “Soup has a few lessons to teach us. One is: Sometimes things get better tomorrow.” A few days ago The Soup Peddler here in Austin, Texas posted an elegant edit: “Soup teaches us some things get better tomorrow.” (Note: some things, not all things.)
I got to wondering what the other lessons of soup would be, so I made a zine called Soup Lessons:
I’ve been thinking a lot about this back-and-forth chain-smoking process, how you throw out one thing, see how people react, throw out another thing based on that, and just keep doing this until you get somewhere interesting.
It’s really obvious, but: The way you keep this process going is you… do stuff. You do one thing, and one thing leads to another.
Love is not a gadget
This is the first mixtape I’ve made with my brand-new Tascam deck, which was not cheap, but is pretty wonderful after a year’s worth of mixtapes on a somewhat shoddy deck whose record function was quickly deteriorating. (I made the last mix on my old Sony boombox.)
I forgot how nice it is to have a counter that works and be able to punch in and out tightly on the tape and really control the levels. (Not that y’all will hear the actual tape — but it sounds really good!)
I made it from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents at the record store. I taped over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I taped over the music and then I taped over the artwork.
I’ve started really playing with Side 1/Side 2 constraint of tapes. Some of my favorite records sort of front load all the pop stuff on the first side and the second side is all the weird stuff that I really love and never get tired of. (See: Pixies’ Doolittle, for example.) Other records split a sound in two, like Dylan’s Bringin’ It All Back Home, whose first side is more electric, and the second side is all acoustic. (And side two was recorded in a single day?!? And the whole record was recorded in 3?!?)
Anyways, you’ll get the picture here:
SIDE ONE (LONELY)
- Lou Reed & John Cale, “Nobody But You”
- Purple Mountains, “Darkness and Cold”
- Brooks & Dunn, “Neon Moon”
- Little Anthony & The Imperials, “Tears on my Pillow”
- Bobby Womack, “If You Think You’re Lonely Now”
- Serge Gainsbourg, “Je suis venu te dire que je m’en vais”
- (Bill Murray reciting French nonsense poetry from Groundhog Day)
SIDE B (LOVERS)
- Sade, “The Sweetest Taboo”
- Prince & The Revolution, “New Position”
- Ginuwine, “Pony”
- Michael McDonald, “I Keep Forgettin (Every Time You’re Near)”
- East of Underground, “I Love You”
- Frank Ocean, “Pilot Jones”
- Georgettes, ”Would You Rather”
- Zadie Smith reading Frank O’Hara’s “Animals” to an answering machine
Again, this funny thing often happens where I pick a song just for vibes and then it winds up having lyrics that mean something to me. It’s such an odd process.
You can listen to the mix on Spotify or Apple or Youtube.
I also added it to a big 11+ hour playlist of all the mixes I’ve made so far.
Can’t get enough? Listen to all my mixtapes.
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