Whenever somebody says something nice about the blackouts, I think, “Oh, maybe I should make some more of those.”) Marc was interested in the source material for the poem he shared, and I had to admit to him, “I don’t ‘read’ the article first when I make these — I try to think of them as a raw field of words, like a word search puzzle.” (Almost every blackout I make is from the Sunday print edition of The New York Times — the ones in this email are all from the August 28, 2022 issue.
Among the many revelations of Life of the Record’s interview with the Violent Femmes about their debut record, one of my favorites is “the tranceaphone” created by drummer Victor DeLorenzo, which consists of a metal bushel basket turned over on a tom, played with steel brushes:
You can see his setup really well in this video from 1983. (DeLorenzo put out an EP called Tranceaphone a couple of years ago.)
A really wonderful oral history of an album I played over and over as a teenager, but never really knew much about. More of my notes:
PS. While we’re on the subject of invented drums, dig this clip of a steel pan being made from an oil drum (from a longer behind-the-scenes of the documentary Sounds Like Steel):
“Tiny things take on significance when I’m away from home. I’m on the alert for omens. Odd things happen when you get out…”
—Charles Portis, The Dog of the South
Here are two images from this week’s walks. I think they neatly summarize our present moment: circuit boards and clowns.
“One of the few aspects of living in Austin that’s become less of a hassle over the last 15 years is riding a bicycle,” writes Kevin Curtin in his recent essay, “The Joy of Bicycling in Austin.”
Everyone wants to ride the best routes. The beautiful routes. The fewer cars the better. Sure, I do too. But what about these poor routes? Who will ride them? I almost feel a responsibility to ride them.
This ethos reminded me a bit of the skateboarders I’ve read about, who take the ugly or invisible parts of the city and turn them into a playground.
Aaron recently tipped me to this skate video, victims of boredom, by Igna, a local Austin skater and filmmaker who is still in high school. I found myself mesmerized by it, for at least two reasons: one, it just delights me that there are teenagers out there cutting it up like this and making trouble (I find the title ironic, as these kids seem like conquerers of boredom), and two, one of my favorite things about biking in Austin is that it gives me glimpses of a city I’ve never really seen. This video does the same.
Here’s a close-up on the owlets in our owl box from this morning. They’re getting so big and you can see that their feathers are starting to come in. They’re about 2 1/2 weeks old now, so we only have 1 1/2 to two weeks until they’ll be ready to think about leaving the box.
Owls in the birdbath are so funny. You know they love it, but they still have to maintain their crazy high levels of paranoia ? ? pic.twitter.com/sa2H34Y7Fh
Their mama leaves them to themselves in the box these days, so we rarely see the parents until nighttime when they do their doordashing. (Apart from last week’s sighting of Mr. Coconut, I haven’t been able to spot them in the yard during the day. They have a good hiding spot!)
One of my favorite thing these days is drawing them in my diary — these drawings are often accompanied with notes on my own two owlets, my two boys. Their progress is much slower and more cyclical and harder to track. But even so, they, too, are growing much faster than I would like them to.
