Welcome!
I’m a New York Times bestselling author, keynote speaker, and writer who draws. To stay in touch, subscribe to my newsletter.
Maybe any great state is unpredictable
My Friday newsletter began:
Molly Ivins called Texas “the laboratory for bad government,” and that’s been the case my entire adult life. I was a 17-year-old in Ohio during the 2000 election, and since I couldn’t vote, I went around waving a copy of Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush at my family members, warning them that the whole country could become Texas. (Whenever other Americans joke that they wish Texas would go ahead and secede, I reply, “But then you’d lose your early warning system!”) 19 summers ago, Meg and I moved to Austin so she could go to grad school. We stayed. She gave birth to a couple of native Texans during the Obama administration (I was able to become a full-time writer thanks to the Affordable Care Act), and since then we’ve been raising them in a sunny city full of friendly people and great food, all the while knowing that just five miles down the road, some of the most corrupt men in the world do their best to wreck the place. So you can imagine how it felt on Tuesday night, when a good number of those creeps were sent packing by our fellow Texans. The vibe around here is: jubilant.
Filed under: Texas
Cognitive distortion pedals
I wrote about art, therapy, and cognitive distortion pedals.
Typewriter interview with Edward Steed
The latest typewriter interview is with cartoonist Edward Steed.
This is how we do it (a mixtape)
A few summers ago, I started one of my mixtapes with a very specific, silly concept: a pair of elder millennial parents have a few drinks after dinner and start playing their kids the rap and hip-hop of their youth, but the songs get increasingly filthy and inappropriate, until the kids flee in terror and the parents are left grinding on each other in the kitchen:
A good number of these songs surfaced while listening to Confucius and Fresh bring more hip-hop stuff to their turns on “Old School Dance Party” or from watching the Vevo 90s channel on TV and drinking too much during the pandemic.
At some point in 2021, we realized that the channel was basically on a loop and that Marky Mark came on at about 10 P.M. every night. We became obsessed with the bullying nature of the way Marky Mark tells you to feel the vibrations, like he’s a trainer at the gym shouting at you. “Come on, feel it, FEEL IT!” (Compared to the way, say, Sam Cooke tells you to “Don’t fight it, baby, feel it.”)
We decided the key to understanding the “Good Vibrations” video is insecurity. Marky Mark has looked around at the cool people in the video and he suspects that it is he who cannot truly feel the vibrations. Marky Mark appears to be yelling at you to feel the vibrations, but he is really yelling at himself.
It’s a raunchy batch of music, but also a jubilant one, and perfect, I think, for post-election partying.
You can listen to the mixtape on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.
Filed under: mixtapes
P S Y C H O ! (a mixtape)
This mix began as a Halloween party mix (complete with “Monster Mash”) and then morphed into something weirder and scarier, I think: a mix of songs (mostly) about being crazy — maybe even psychotically! — in love. (The more you listen to love songs the more you realize, “Man, this person is not well!”)
These mixes usually begin with what I call “seed songs” — a song that you kind of want to build a whole mix around. In this case it was the Sonics’ “Psycho” and Girls’ “Lust for Life,” which I couldn’t get out of my head for weeks. I also found that picture of Frankenstein’s monster with the little girl by the lake and these lyrics became more relevant: “I wish I had a father / And maybe then I would’ve turned out right / But now I’m just crazy / I’m totally mad…”
Another thing I learned from this mix: I really build theses mixes based on vibe, so if I have a band that captures the vibe I’m going for, I can use their influences to build up variety in the mix. For example, The Cramps’ “psychobilly” thing is what I wanted for the first side, so I simply searched “cramps influences” and got this Apple playlist that had more of the sort of stuff I was going for. Having the original versions of songs the Cramps covered (like Charlie Feathers’ “Can’t Hardly Stand It”) just thickens the stew, so to speak. (Same for searching for “Creedence covers” — this playlist popped up.)
I filled the tiny gaps on each side with Uncle Monty’s “I mean to have you, even if it must be burglary!” monologue from Withnail & I and a snippet of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Love is Not All.”
You can listen to the mix on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.
Filed under: mixtapes
- 1
- 2
- 3
- …
- 656
- Older posts→