When you have kids you always find all this weird half-finished stuff lying around the house. (Half-finished drawings, half-finished bananas, etc.) I found this comic on the kitchen table, drawn by Owen at age 5. (“Julese” is his 3-year-old brother, Jules.) Drawn in a comic book notebook by The Unemployed Philsopher’s Guild.
“Tex-Mex — that’s one thing that I really really miss when I’m in New York. The thought of having to pay for chips and salsa is a crazy thing. You should just sit down, there should be a bottomless thing of chips and really good salsa and then your meal starts. This whole thing about sitting down and ordering chips and salsa and paying $5.00 for it is insane.”
—Annie Clark (aka St. Vincent)
If and when I leave Texas, this will be thing I miss the most. Not the brisket, no, but a plate of enchiladas, rice and beans, chips and salsa, and a cold Mexican beer. Done, as my former native co-workers would say, “Correct.” Served, with a towel or an oven mitt, and shout of, “Hot plate!”
There’s a reason ZZ Top used a Tex-Mex spread for the gatefold of their classic, Tres Hombres. (To quote Pusha T, “If you know, you know.”)
This might be the greatest album artwork of all-time. (The food came from a long-shuttered Houston restaurant called Leo’s. The back cover reads, “In the fine Texas tradition.”) In 2016, chef Tom Micklethwait recreated the meal, and ate it:
“Have mercy!”
A few years ago a neighbor a few streets down was giving away a bunch of stuff before he moved to another city, including a huge Hammond organ that he kept in the garage for his kids to noodle around on. I drove over there to pick it up. A bunch of other neighbors were standing around in his driveway, chatting and checking out the goods. “I’ve met so many nice people in the past couple of hours,” he said. “I’m starting to wish I’d given a bunch of stuff away when we first moved here!”
1) the full moon can be glorious, but it’s really the moon phasing in and out that is the most interesting to me
2) morning moons sometimes beat evening moons, especially when they hang big and low by the horizon and startle you when you turn a corner or come out from under the shade of a tree
Above: a happy kitchen table scene from a few weeks ago. Below: the guardian spirit for my new diary.
“A piece of paper can burn and you can still kind of get something from it. With a hard drive or a URL, when it’s gone, there is just zero recourse.”
“It’s resilient, it’s resourceful, it’s portable, it’s foldable, it’s strong if you want it to be strong.”
“I’m reminded of what we lose in this age of email, texting, and connecting through social media: The handwritten. The mailed by post. The jotted thoughts. The thank-you notes…”
Yes, paper is a wonderful technology. (See also: my “paper” file.)
“How pleasant to walk over beds of these fresh, crisp, and rustling fallen leaves…. How beautiful they go to their graves!”
—Thoreau, October 12, 1853
Thoreau, our great chronicler of the seasons, wrote a lot about the falling leaves in October, noting all the different colors and hues. Their colors aside, he thought, like many things in nature, they could teach us something about accepting our own internal seasons, and our mortality.
October 22, 1853:
Consider what a vast crop is thus annually shed upon the earth. This, more than any mere grain or seed, is the great harvest of the year. This annual decay and death, this dying by inches…. The year’s great crop. They teach us how to die.
October was a the time he thought about the end of life. On October 20th, 1857, he meets a poor old man who has gathered apples in his shoes. “This man’s cheeriness was worth a thousand of the church’s sacraments and memento mori’s.”
October — Harvest Time — was also a month for Thoreau to contemplate his “harvest of thought.”
October 14, 1857:
I take all these walks to every point of the compass, and it is always harvest-time with me. I am always gathering my crop from these woods and fields and waters, and no man is in my way or interferes with me. My crop is not their crop. I am not gathering beans or corn. Do they think there are no fruits but such as these? I am a reaper; I am not a gleaner.
And on October 24, he writes, “My eye is educated to discover anything on the ground…. It is probably wholesomer to look at the ground much than at the heavens.”
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[Update: 4PM: I had no idea that Thoreau actually collected his thoughts on fall in the 1862 essay, “Autumnal Tints.” See this piece, “Revisiting the Splendor of Thoreau’s ‘Autumnal Tints,’ 150 Years Later.” This is one of the amazing things about reading Thoreau’s journal before you read the published work — he pilfered so much from his daily writing that you know exactly where sentences and sections come from, and it’s fascinating to see how he changed them.]
I actually left the house last night to attend Edward Carey’s art show opening & book release for Little at the Central Library gallery. It was a special treat because after Edward read, he was interviewed by his wife, Elizabeth McCracken. (It was their first time onstage together.)
I’m inspired by how much pictures and words are fully integrated in Carey’s work. His stories often start with a drawing, and he’s drawing constantly while writing. (I wondered about how much his visual thinking makes it into his classroom work — he mentioned that in his courses at UT he talks to his students about maps and the importance of knowing the worlds of your characters.) If you read this blog regularly, you might remember his bit on productive procrastination:
The exhibit (up until January) is very well done, and organized by book. (The second great exhibit I’ve seen in the space — the first was Lance Letscher.) Here is original artwork for The Iremonger Trilogy:
And here’s a drawing from the new one:
Carey’s work is wonderfully dark, but with a good splash of humor. (It’s fitting that earlier in the day my 3-year-old was drawing pages out of Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies.)
There’s a lot to like in the show, but my favorite thing might’ve been this bowl of his pencil stubs — Tombow Bs, I think— which resembled an ashtray with cigarette butts. (Carey is a former chain smoker.)
I received an email this morning with the subject line: “Austin, you’re invited to re-live the mid-90s.” In 1996 I was 13, living in the middle of a cornfield in Ohio, and my parents were getting a divorce, so as crummy as everything is now, HARD PASS. (Above: my middle school notebook, circa ’96.)
I somehow missed that video of my 2018 SXSW interview with Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance from Superchunk is now online.
I asked them about their newest record, What A Time To Be Alive, running Merge Records, and how they’ve managed to stay creative for so long.
Here’s a picture of how I prepped for the interview (basically, blasting the record and re-reading Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records):
They are super sweet people and I was honored to speak with them.
