In this week’s list of 10 newsletter:
- my message to graduates
- the album cover for Alice Cooper’s School’s Out
- the joy of pinning words to the wall
And more! Read it here.
In this week’s list of 10 newsletter:
And more! Read it here.
“I am capable of learning nothing from almost any experience, no matter how profound.”
—Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing
100 days ago, I announced I was easing up on blogging and fun daily projects like my blind contour drawings, mini zines, and collage houses, to star work in earnest on a new book.
The first 30 days went pretty well. I spent a lot of time with my index cards and worked on “The Unschooled Artists” piece that ran in the NYTimes.
50 days in, I had a pretty great book proposal worked up that just needed a table of contents to be ready to pitch.
64 days in, I decided to stuff the whole book proposal in the drawer and postpone it indefinitely. (Oops!)
72 days in, I finished up the #perfect31 project, and remembered how good it was to blog every day.
Then I recorded the audiobook trilogy.
And for the past 4 weeks, I’ve been keeping busy with reading and writing and taking care of a bunch of behind-the-scenes business stuff.
So where am I now? I don’t know! Not sure I even care.
In the past 200 days, I feel like I haven’t learned a single surprising thing about myself or changed my mind about much of anything.
If the pandemic has taught me anything, it’s that it probably isn’t going to teach me anything that I didn’t already know before the pandemic began.
Everything that was true before seems even truer now, and here is what was true before the pandemic:
Anyways, there went those 100 days. I’ll make a note to check in on January 7th and see how these next 100 went…
“Summer gets to be an old story.”
—Henry David Thoreau
T.S. Eliot called April the cruelest month, but in Austin, Texas, it’s September. Summer is winter here, and summer isn’t even officially over until September 22. The cursed sun pays no heed to anything official. You’re not out of the A/C until Halloween at the earliest. September here is just a cruel joke. When Northern Instagram fills with scarves and pumpkin spice lattes, your only solace is shorts in February. (Awful in its own way.) “Hot and sunny every day,” Bill Hicks mocked. “What are you, a fucking lizard? Only reptiles feel that way about this kind of weather.” It’s nothing right or natural. Nothing to be celebrated. Only endured.
A diary collage made out of a guidebook from The Whitney
I love this 1931 photo of Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, and Mary Reynolds lounging around on the French Riviera. Calvin Tompkins, in Duchamp: A Biography, gives us the context: “For several years [Duchamp and Reynolds] spent the month of August in a villa that Mary rented in Villefranche-sur-Mer, on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean. Brancusi came to stay with them there in 1931; he set up his big camera on the terrace and took the photograph…”
In 2014, Damon Krukowski (do check out his podcast, Ways of Hearing, and his book, The New Analog) wrote “Back to Mono,” on why summer and mono listening go hand in hand:
The transistor radio sounds right to me in summer. Monaural AM radio reception changes with the weather, the temperature, the time of day, and just as we expose our bodies to the elements more in summer, it makes sense to me that audio should do the same. Plus, mono suits summer broadcasts so well: baseball games, violent storm warnings, the local oldies station (which plays mostly mono records anyway). How would stereo improve any of these?
I saw The Beatles in Mono box set at the library last week and checked it out. Not sure how many people know, but The Beatles saw stereo as a fad, and spent almost all of their time mixing their records in mono, leaving it to the engineers to make the stereo mixes. Brian Wilson mixed Pet Sounds in mono partially because he was deaf in one ear — he literally couldn’t make sense of stereo. (Mono also gave him control over what listeners would hear.) Later, Bruce Springsteen would mix Born To Run in a way that emulated that mono Phil Spector “Wall of Sound” style.
Related: Have you ever noticed how wonderful music from the first half of the 60s and earlier sounds on your tiny iPhone speakers?
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