Above: a page of map symbols of topography from a world atlas. Below: Saul Steinberg’s “Country Noises.”
And in today’s mail: Brian Dillon’s latest, Affinities.
“The world keeps showing me these pictures.”
Filed under: convergences
Above: a page of map symbols of topography from a world atlas. Below: Saul Steinberg’s “Country Noises.”
And in today’s mail: Brian Dillon’s latest, Affinities.
“The world keeps showing me these pictures.”
Filed under: convergences
I was texting with a friend yesterday and he asked me if I had any public speaking tips, and this is (a lightly edited) version of what I dashed off:
1. Talk slower than you think you need to. Take your time. Don’t be afraid of a little silence. If you’re lucky enough to land a joke, let the laughs die down before you start back up.
2. If you can open with a funny story or a joke — especially something local or specific to the group — you can get the audience engaged and on your side.
3. Don’t be afraid to be brief. Nobody ever said, “Gosh, I wish he went on longer,” and if they ever did, that’s a big win, to leave them wanting more. As James Brown said, “Kill ’em and leave.”
That’s just 3 off the top of my head. There’s a ton more, and a ton of writing on the subject.
The best way to learn is to steal like an artist.
“Pay attention to other speakers,” says Ted Gioia in his list of 10. “Steal all their best techniques.”
(I like to watch stand-up comedy and pay attention to pacing, audience work, delivery, structure, etc. The “callback,” for example, is helpful outside a comedic context.)
If you need a speaker, hire me.
From Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man (2005):
If it is your destiny to be this laborer called a writer, you know that you’ve got to go to work every day, but you also know that you’re not gonna get it every day. You have to be prepared, but you really don’t command the enterprise.
Sometimes when you no longer see yourself as the hero of your own drama, you know, expecting victory after victory, and you understand deeply that this is not paradise — we somehow embrace the notion that this vale of tears, that it’s perfectable — you’re not gonna get it all straight.
I found that things got a lot easier when I no longer expected to win….
You understand that, you abandon your masterpiece, and you sink into the real masterpiece…
And also: “You have to write down what you’re going to abandon.”
You could write a long essay unpacking the many implied layers of this phrase, “easily perfect all of your memories,” but I really want to bring up something that my friend the photographer Clayton Cubitt taught me: whatever you think is boring or ugly in your photograph today might quite possibly be the most interesting thing about the photograph in the future.
Knowing this, I am inclined to go the other direction and do my best to imperfect my memories: leave in all the things I’m supposed to crop out. (This is why I leave in all the dumb, mundane crap I do every day in my logbook: what I have for lunch, meetings, what I watched on TV, etc.)
I try to remember that I have no idea today exactly what I’ll want to remember about today in the future.
“Imagine…a world…where time drifts slowly…”
For laughs, I pulled this copy of Pure Moods out of the free box while record shopping at End of an Ear.
The minute I saw the cover, I remembered that “Return to Innocence” song blasting during the infomercials:
I didn’t even bother looking at the tracklist until I got home — sure, there was Enya and Kenny G, but also Morricone, Vangelis, Badalamenti and Brian Eno?!? This thing is wild:
I wanted to know more about this crazy artifact from 1994. Luckily, Mina Tavakoli wrote a great review for Pitchfork a few years ago that delves into its weird history:
These were tracks and artists never designed to be played alongside one another, tracks and artists, for all intents and purposes, mostly foreign to one another except in essence. Their clunky but satisfying cohesion can be attributed to the cataloguing done by the Virgin heads, who arranged the piece on a lark, “stumbling into the project” as an experiment to determine if an album could be successfully telemarketed and sold far before its release date. The model, deemed “a huge buzz” after selling more than 2 million copies prior to its formal drop, would be replicated five times over with a tetralogy of sequels in the releases of Pure Moods II-IV.
“But what mood?” Meg asked me after I played her a few tracks.
“Pure moods,” I said. “Plural! There is no one mood, but they’re all Pure.”
I thought it would be hilarious to play my 10-year-old the album after pizza night. He got really into it, especially the infomercial.
“This is so cringe,” he said. “My classmates would love it.”
We started reciting some of the lines around the house. “Direct from Europe…”
He even went so far as to make a parody of the compilation called Cringe Moods:
Masterful parody of PURE MOODS from the 10-year-old ? pic.twitter.com/L7AJcjClwO
— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) February 23, 2023
And this is why you shop at your local record store.
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