I used this 2016 blackout poem for last Friday’s newsletter, “The year is too young to be this long.” A few people commented that they couldn’t believe it was made 10 years ago. This is the thing about making art and writing in a diary: you keep the receipts.
In desperate need of distraction and something to look forward to, I’ve been having a blast writing my new “Tuesday Trio” series for the Tuesday newsletter. In each letter, I recommend one book, one record, and one movie around a theme. The first three: “Radioactivity,” “Problematic Gifts,” and “Sherlock Holmes.”
Here’s the first mixtape of 2026! Made from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents. I taped over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I taped over the music and then I taped over the artwork.
This one gave me a little trouble. Back in December I texted a friend, “I’ve been building a whole December/January mixtape around the [Destroyer] song “kaputt” — real icy shjt like Cocteau twins, Roxy, cate le bon — will send it to you when it’s done.”
I had Cate Le Bon’s song “Love Unrehearsed” as the leadoff track, but then Walter Martin played “About Time” at the end of one of his shows and I decided to switch. Then I got to thinking about winter and how much I wanted to smoke a cigarette out in the snow and decided to put Mac Demarco on there.
One thing leads to another. Every time I try to make these mixes more conceptual or abstract (“icy pop songs with chilly fender guitars through chorus pedals”) I freeze up. But if I just start with a good leadoff track and think to myself, “What do I want to hear after this?” the mix just sort of makes itself.
I’m convinced this is also true of writing: if you start with big, conceptual, abstract ideas about what you want the piece to be, it’s easy to freeze. But if you just start with a good sentence and ask yourself, “What comes next?” the thing builds itself.
SIDE A
– cate le bon, “about time”
– mac demarco, “ode to viceroy”
– peter tosh, “legalize it”
– diana ross & the supremes, “reflections”
– tubeway army, “are friends electric?”
– king tubby, “straight dub”
SIDE B
– cocteau twins, “cherry-coloured funk”
– wye oak, “the tower”
– destroyer, “kaputt”
– the smile, “the smoke”
– rolling stones, “waiting on a friend”
You can listen to the mix on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.
This is the 27th mixtape I’ve made in the past few years. The big 2024-2026 playlist list is over 20 hours long!
Filed under: mixtapes
In today’s newsletter, I wrote about the best way to read the internet.
I’ve been having fun posting lines from whatever Montaigne essay I happen to be reading. The latest:
“Perhaps we really do live in a time which begets nothing but the mediocre.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
I like posting quotes like this without context or commentary, because people read into it all sorts of things, like, I quote, “bro living in the midst of the actual Renaissance.”
The major jolt I get from reading Montaigne is that over and over again this guy from 400 years ago has thoughts that I could be having right now.
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” wrote James Baldwin, “but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
This is one of the great appeals of breaking bread with the dead.
And what is more comforting than realizing the feeling you’re having was had by someone so alien in space or remote in time?
My favorite example is from the afterword to Steal Like an Artist:
I’ve always wondered if Abraham Lincoln actually said, “Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.”
Here’s a little snippet from a 1924 — public domain! — book called Wit and Humor of Abraham Lincoln: Gathered from Authentic Sources (something about that subtitle makes me more suspicious, not less!)
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