Miscellany – Page 250

Card games

Sunday, March 4, 2018

Yesterday I had tacos with The Dead Milkmen and I was asking them how they worked. I mentioned how boring I found “jamming” when I was in bands, and Dean quoted a friend of his: “I don’t mind jamming… as long as everything’s worked out beforehand!”

Then I remembered a little card game I came up with to make jam sessions more interesting:

Have each band member list 10 musical acts they’d like to play in
Write each musical act on an index card
Shuffle the cards, and, without revealing the cars, deal one to each band member. Keep the cards secret — the game is no fun if you can see the cards before you play.
Just like any other jam session, it helps to pick a key and start with the rhythm. Everyone has to pretend like they’re playing in the act written on their card.
Jam until it gets boring.
At the end, everybody gets to guess which card each person was dealt.
Repeat until you’re out of cards

The cards were inspired by Jessa Crispin’s The Creative Tarot and, of course, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s famous Oblique Strategies. Here’s the original deck, as seen in Eno’s Visual Music:

I’d forgotten all about it until I started writing this blog post, but a couple of years ago, I was inspired by the Oblique Strategies to try making my own deck of “Steal Strategies,” using prompts from my books. (I really need to update the deck — there’s only 16 cards!)

As an experiment with Tumblr’s shuffle feature, I turned it into a little mini site which serves up a random card when you click the deck:

Here’s the card I got when I clicked today, which is funny, because my wife and I had already planned a trip to the library with the boys…

Mood

Saturday, March 3, 2018

Drawing by my 5-year-old.

Fancy zines

Thursday, March 1, 2018

I think of all my books as fancy zines.

Whatcha Mean, What’s a Zine? I’ll let Wikipedia handle this:

A zine (/zi?n/ZEEN; short for magazine or fanzine) is most commonly a small-circulation self-published work of original or appropriated texts and images, usually reproduced via photocopier. Usually zines are the product of a person, or of a very small group.

When I’m working on a book, sure, I flip through my bookshelves, looking for stuff to steal, but what I really love to do is head over to my zine drawer (see above) and flip through zines.

Even though my books are printed in mass quantities overseas and are shipped all over the world, I want my books to feel handmade, like they’ve just come off the photocopier.

Back in December, I wondered in my diary if I should just go ahead and do a real zine, and work my way up to a book:

Maybe next time. Or maybe the country will collapse and this tweet will come true:

There’s something really special about zines. “Zines Had It Right All Along.” “The Internet Didn’t Kill Zines.” Even though “The Blissfully Slow World of Newsletters” can feel close to the spirit of zine culture, nothing digital seems to fully replace them. “A blog is not a zine.”

Whenever I do a workshop with students, zines are the perfect thing to make together: We make a bunch of blackout poems, each choose our favorites, and then we sequence them, everybody getting their own page. Then we run them on the photocopier, fold ’em, staple ’em, and everybody gets to take one home:

If you want to learn more about zines, check out this book and hit up your public library — several libraries actually have zine collections now! The new Austin Public Library has a whole section next to the comics:

15% completed

Tuesday, February 27, 2018

One of my favorite little Twitter bots is @year_progress, which tweets every 3.65 days when 1% of the year goes by:

I have my own analog version on the edges of my page-a-day logbook. One of the first things I do at the beginning of the year is make a little index system for the months. I like having another visual of how the year is progressing. (Here’s the notebook I use, and a similar index system.)

Don’t say it’s easy, don’t say it’s hard

Thursday, February 22, 2018

Almost every morning, the 5-year-old asks me to transcribe a Kraftwerk song for him to play on the piano. This morning it was “The Telephone Call,” off Techno Pop. It’s a little complicated, but it’s no harder than “Tour de France,” which he memorized in a day, even though it has a B flat to remember and goes up and down the staff. But as I was going through the notes with him, I said, just to be encouraging, “Oh, this is easy, you’ll have it whipped in no time.”

He attempted the melody several times. I tried to show him a few things. Then he broke down in frustration, totally flipping out on me, screaming, “Papa, it is easy for YOU! It is NOT EASY for me!”

I had inadvertently doomed the endeavor from the start.

I have learned with kids to only give help when it is needed. Every day, I’m learning when to hold my tongue.

Don’t say it’s easy, don’t say it’s hard, don’t say a word about how you think it will go…