Last Friday I didn’t have a top image or a subject line for the newsletter, so I said, “You know what? I’ll give myself an hour to play and see what happens.” I pulled a half-finished blackout poem out of the drawer and came up with “New dumpsters, old fires.”
I love it when people visit me in the studio. For years, I’ve been dreaming of getting a “walk-ins welcome” sign like you see in barber shops to hang in my window. (See #44 on this list.)
After watching Dean Peterson learn sign painting via his @deanpainterson Instagram account, I thought, “Why not just hire Dean to make me one?”
Boy, did he deliver!
Read more: “Walk-ins welcome.”
I somehow got photographer Sally Mann to do a typewriter interview. It’s great. You can read it here.
Here’s another new monthly mixtape made from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents. I tape over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I tape over the music and then I tape over the artwork.
This one gave me some technical difficulties. I actually destroyed two cassettes trying to record it, so I wound up with a cassette that was longer than I thought it’d be, so I had a little Side A / Side B fun and made Side A (mostly) songs that my dad likes and Side B songs from my dad’s era that I like.
Dad was born in 1954, so his peak nostalgia zone — the music he heard as a tween/teen in the mid to late 60s — just happens to be some of the best music ever recorded. (A few of his favorites didn’t make it here: The Byrds’ “Tambourine Man,” Creedence’s “Suzie Q,” Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale,” etc.)
I’d had the idea for the tape for a while, but Walter Martin’s organ episode gave me the final push to make it. Putting it together made me realize how much I really genuinely love Boomer music — I can’t help it!
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.
Filed under: mixtapes
I have been drawing succulents. As I explain in my letter, “For no good reason”:
I continue to wear down my new Caran d’Ache pastels. Right now I’m drawing succulents that I see on my morning walks onto old sheet music and pages from thrifted books. I’m not sure what I’m doing or why I’m doing it or what I’m going to do with these drawings. “It’s a good way to do stuff,” Ralph Steadman says. “For no good reason.”
Not included in that letter is my attempt at a much larger drawing:
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