Consider the turtle

Friday, August 28, 2020

On this day 164 years ago, my ol’ pal Henry David Thoreau wrote about finding a tortoise nest with a new hatchling:

Think what is a summer to them! June, July, and August, — the livelong summer, — what are they with their heats and fevers but sufficient to hatch a tortoise in. Be not in haste; mind your private affairs. Consider the turtle. Perchance you have worried yourself, despaired of the world, meditated the end of life, and all things seemed rushing to destruction; but nature has steadily and serenely advanced with a turtle’s pace. Has not the tortoise also learned the true value of time?

I love reading Thoreau in late August. Even though my summer is much longer than his was, he helps me cool down, zoom out, and embrace the season.

I have spoken to Batman

Thursday, August 27, 2020

I made this one in 2016. (Draw a picture of Batman! Everyone can be Batman!)

This morning in the studio I’m blasting this wonderful field recording of surf and fog horns in San Francisco in 1987. (One of my favorite memories is sleeping in the Presidio and listening to the bridge horn blow all night, like some giant monster snoring out in the bay.)

As I was listening to the horns blow over and over, I realized they could be a track of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works, Volume II. I got my keyboard out and learned the notes of each horn:

The recording notes that there are four distinctive horns, but I only hear three notes: a low Bb, a higher Db, and an E in the middle, which raises up a half step at the end to an F.

Tonight I think I’ll lie in bed and read Ray Bradbury’s short story, “The Fog Horn,” in which one of the characters makes up this story:

“One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, “We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I’ll make one. I’ll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was; I’ll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I’ll make a sound that’s so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I’ll make me a sound and an apparatus and they’ll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life.”

Something to do

Thursday, August 20, 2020

I was feeling angry and despondent yesterday, and I drew these two cactus plants on our back porch and immediately felt a little bit better. (Drawing is part of a cure.)

In this video, John Green talks about drawing and productivity and thinking about time and why he’s attempting to draw 170,000 circles. My friend @craghead, one of my favorite drawers, had a great response:

I love that he talks about drawing as more than representing – as a process, as discovery, as a battery recharger…. My wife says to me – “Go draw something” and then I draw a leaf or a synth or something and I fell better. Even drawing Trump helps. We are so lucky to have drawing.

There’s an essay in Zadie Smith’s Intimations called “Something To Do,” in which she thinks about why she writes. She comes around to this very simple truth: “It’s something to do.”

Of the pandemic and lockdown, Smith writes, “The rest of us have been suddenly confronted with the perennial problem of artists: time, and what to do with it… There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do.”

On a recent episode of Call Your Girlfriend, however, Smith says she discovered that writing was more than a hobby — Can you imagine? Being Zadie Smith and still thinking of writing as a hobby? — it’s something she needs to do to stay alive.

I, too, am grateful to have something to do, whether it’s making a zine or drawing a cactus or writing this blog. Like Smith, I am not by my nature an activist, and so, as she puts it: “I just do the thing I can do.” The work in front of me.

Churchill’s free verse

Thursday, August 20, 2020

Winston Churchill’s speech in response to Germany’s invasion of Britain

Today I learned that Winston Churchill had his speeches typed up in what looks like free verse (or “Psalm form,” as his office called it) so that he could plan and rehearse the rhythm and the pauses. (More here.)

NPR:

Churchill wrote every word of his many speeches — he said he spent an hour working on every minute of a speech he made. At the Morgan Library are several drafts of a single speech from February 1941, when England stood alone against the Nazi onslaught and Churchill appealed to President Roosevelt for aid. The first draft looks like a normal typescript; the final draft, says Kiely, “looks like a draft of a poem.”

Here’s a draft of Churchill’s “Finest Hour” speech, compared with the final “Psalm form”:

Another thing I learned about Churchill: he took up painting at the age of 40 to battle his depression and wrote a book about it called, Painting as a Pastime:

Just to paint is great fun. The colours are lovely to look at and delicious to squeeze out. Matching them, however crudely, with what you see is fascinating and absolutely absorbing. Try it if you have not done so – before you die.

God bless the English and their penchant for hobbies!