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Tacos with Chase Jarvis
I had tacos with Chase Jarvis earlier this year and he asked if he could record part of our chat on voice memos.
I’ve written more about a lot of the topics we chatted about and wanted to link to them here:
- “Comfort Work,” like “comfort food” and “comfort viewing,” comfort work is work that I do when I don’t know what else to do. It is actual work, but it is comforting.
- “Creative tension” — a lot of creative work is the result of being pulled between two poles, and finding energy in the tension of that pull. Think of a guitar string: if it’s too slack, the string buzzes and makes no music; if it’s too tight, it snaps.
- Friction, or “Resistance is necessary.” Artists need something to push against. Like when you’re riding a bike — too much or too little friction means you won’t go anywhere.
- Subtraction: This gets a whole chapter in Steal Like an Artist, but basically the idea is that when you subtract certain elements and put some constraints on yourself, it actually activates your creativity rather than squashing it.
You can listen to the whole chat here and check out our typewriter interview.
Everybody in the place
This afternoon I doodled while watching artist Jeremy Deller’s documentary Everybody In The Place: an Incomplete History of Britain 1984?–?1992.
Acid house is often portrayed as a movement that came out of the blue, inspired by little more than a handful of London-based DJs discovering ecstasy on a 1987 holiday to Ibiza. In truth, the explosion of acid house and rave in the UK was a reaction to a much wider and deeper set of fault lines in British culture, stretching from the heart of the city to the furthest reaches of the countryside, cutting across previously impregnable boundaries of class, identity, and geography.
At one point in the documentary he shows a bunch of students one of my favorite clips of all-time: a bunch of people in a club Detroit in 1981 dancing to Kraftwerk’s “Numbers.”
“I’m happy that I live on a planet where that happened once,” he says.
Same!
Room to think
This is how so many newsletters of mine begin: just a few doodled mind maps in a notebook.
These pages led to the latest Tuesday letter, “Room To Think,” which was an excuse to mash up an Elisa Gabbert essay with my recent daily reading of Montaigne’s essays.
Don’t let your dreams give up on you
The subject line of last Friday’s newsletter “Don’t let your dreams give up on you” was something I heard a fourth grader say a few weeks ago. I immediately knew I needed to make it into one of my lifted type collages and it’s become a mantra of mine ever since.
You can read the newsletter here.
Typewriter interview with Lynda Barry
Today’s newsletter might be my favorite I’ve ever sent out:
I figured a letter sent out on such a Tuesday better be full of delight. Luckily, today we have the marvelous Lynda Barry with us. To celebrate the release of the paperback edition of her masterpiece What It Is, she answered a batch of my questions via the United States Postal Service…
No artist has had a bigger impact on my work, so you can imagine what this meant to me!
You can read the whole interview here.
Filed under: typewriter interviews
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