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Make time stop (an August mixtape)

Here’s August’s monthly mixtape I made from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents at End of an Ear. I tape over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I tape over the music and then I tape over the artwork.

I was going to save this summer fading fast vibes mix for September, but I’ve decided these days not to save things, to make them when they’re ready:

It was a short tape (only 30 mins) so it was a short mix:

SIDE A

– the first few seconds of Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog”
– waxahatchie w/ MJ Lenderman, “right back to it”
– big thief, “time escaping”
– durutti column, “sketch for summer”
– nick drake, “pink moon”

SIDE B

– the mamas and the papas, “got a feelin’”
– bob dylan, “went to see the gypsy”
– the feelies, “raised eyebrows” (faded out around 1:50)
– crooked fingers, “sleep all summer”
– thee oh sees, “golden phones” (faded out after about a minute to fill the tape)

A couple of these selections seemed a little obvious to me, but “Pink Moon” is the perfect song for filling 2 minutes at the end of a mixtape! (And it’s also a perfectly recorded song, no matter how many commercials you hear it in.)

It was a cheap tape that I hit a little too hard on the recording, so it runs a little hot.

I’m trying to extend the pool vibes from the “Firecracker” mixtape, so I don’t really plan on listening to this again until September, but you can listen to it any time here:

This is the 8th of these mixes I’ve made — if you’d like to listen to them all in one big batch, I made a 5-hour playlist out of them.

Filed under: mixtapes

Signed books

Here’s a photo of me at Bookpeople yesterday. A quick reminder that you can get all of my books signed and personalized and shipped anywhere from here in Austin, Texas. You can also order them and have them waiting for you if you plan on visiting soon. I usually go in on the first Friday of the month to do a big batch. Order here.

The finer things in life

Today’s newsletter began with this photo of Tacos Yo Soy on North Loop here in Austin, Texas. (Taken while riding my bike around.) It’s a dense Friday edition, full of good stuff. Read it here.

Anticipation and recall

I will often map out a Tuesday newsletter in my notebook, forget I made a map, and write it without my notes. Then when I go back flipping through my notebook, I discover everything I left out!

Today’s newsletter is about messing around with anticipation and recall to stretch out pleasant events and minimize unpleasant ones. 

On the unpleasant side, I left out one of my favorite parts of the section of Katherine Morgan Schafler’s The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control that inspired the letter:

We justify agreeing to get coffee with someone whom we don’t really want to see by saying something like, “It’ll just be half an hour and then I’ll leave.” No. It’ll be the anticipatory anxiety for the week leading up to that half hour, the half hour itself, and then the negative recall of how you felt annoyed and immediately resentful upon sitting down, didn’t want to be there, and couldn’t believe she said that, even though she always says stuff like that, and that’s why you don’t like hanging out with her in the first place….When it comes to agreeing to engage in events we don’t want to engage in, there’s nothing quick about quick catch-up drinks or quick calls or quick meetings.

This adds a layer to the question to ask yourself to avoid accepting invitations you’ll later regret: “Would I do it tomorrow?”

The time travel involved in this calculation is already tricky — who knows how I’ll feel about doing something five minutes from now, let alone five months from now? But if you think about the time leading up to the event and the time coming down from it, suddenly such obligations reveal their bloated shape. 

(“The job never kills anybody,” says John Taylor of Duran Duran. “It’s the fucking stuff you do in between.”)

On the pleasant side, I was reminded of how important it is to have something to look forward to, no matter how silly.

All of this, by the way, is a form of playing with your experience of time: by exploiting anticipation and recall, you’re trying to effectively slow down and speed up certain events, and using your memory to shape the story you want to tell about your experience. 

You can read the whole newsletter here. 

Writing is listening

An exercise from The Steal Like An Artist Journal

I don’t know how these Friday newsletters come together. Or maybe I do. They usually start with an image I want to put at the top, or a subject line. Today’s began with the subject line: “Listening is the whole deal.”

I came across that line when I was reading The Work of Art, and I knew I had 3 things I wanted to put in there — the Eno doc, Perfect Days, and the Four Tet interview — which were all somewhat related to listening. So once I had almost half the letter, I figured might as well make it a theme.

My favorite bit in the letter is item #9:

“The act of writing is to me to listen,” said Jon Fosse in his Nobel lecture. “When I write I never prepare, I don’t plan anything, I proceed by listening… At a certain point I always get a feeling that the text has already been written, is out there somewhere, not inside me, and that I just need to write it down before the text disappears.”

I don’t consider my newsletters fine literature or anything like that, but there’s something that happens when I’m out here in the studio at my desk, and I’m writing and just pushing things around, seeing how they bump up to each other — the arrangement presents itself, and the thing just comes into being.

At least, that is, when it’s going good.

Anyways: Happy Friday.

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