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A big pile of imperfect things
The title of today’s newsletter was taken from cartoonist Sarah Leavitt’s talk on joyful persistence:
What if you make a big pile of imperfect things?
What if your job is experimentation, exploring, repeating, failing, learning,
continuing?For those of you who’ve taken my classes, you know that I am always encouraging you to waste paper. You will not be the reason that our forests disappear. Take up the whole page with your drawing. Write everything, don’t worry about who will like it, stop editing in advance! Write every day! Draw every day! Worry less about each individual word or picture. Identify the things you want to get better at and do them over and over.
The finished pieces that we share – they’re dependent on these messy piles of imperfection…
You can read the rest of the newsletter here.
He’s the gardener (a May mixtape)
I was running out of month so I made another monthly mixtape 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 turned out weirder and sadder than I thought it would? The title wasn’t planned — I just saw the headline in a magazine and switched around a few words to suit the vibe.
I used a bunch of snippets of songs from Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee faded in and out to bookend it, so it can’t really be replicated on a streaming service, but you can listen to an approximation on YouTube.
SIDE A
– cindy lee, “dracula” (snippet)
– grandaddy, “hewlitt’s daughter”
– cate le bon, “sad nudes”
– james brown, “i don’t mind”
– king geedorah, “fazers”
– lee moses, “hey Joe”
– cindy lee, “dracula” (snippet)
SIDE B
– cindy lee, “always dreaming”
– yukihiro takahashi, “flashback”
– stevie nicks, “bella donna” (demo)
– yeahyeahyeahs, “y control’
– judy mowatt, “the gardener”
– the zombies, “tell her no”
– ketty lester, “love letters”
– cindy lee, “stone faces”
I’ve made these mixes five months in a row now, so I guess I’m going to keep going for the rest of the year…
Some kinds of monsters
In the latest newsletter I wrote:
Feeling sorry for myself after a rough morning of writing, I put on the 2003 Metallica documentary Some Kind of Monster and half-watched while making collages out of kids’ drawings. I felt what Amanda Petrusich wrote in her 9,000 word profile of the band: “When I first saw the movie, I was twenty-four and found the incongruity of it—some guy in a sweater asking Metallica to talk about feelings—funny; now, at forty-two, I find it unbelievably poignant.” (The band members were all my age or younger when the cameras were rolling.)
Something I don’t think everybody notices is that I put little easter egg links in the “hey y’all” and “xoxo” greeting/signoff that appears in every Friday letter. (I stole this from Laura Olin.)
The “xoxo” this week was this sign that their coach Phil Towle tapes to the studio door (which drummer Lars Ulrich makes fun of):
A museum of technology
Here’s a photo of my kiddos’ dresser from a few years ago, when I realized it was basically a museum of technology. I almost typed “obsolete technology,” but these things all still work — the Casio and the Sony Dream Machine were both possessions from our own childhoods. I wrote about these items in a recent newsletter about the objects we love and live with.
Success means you get to do it again tomorrow
A word from Steve Albini for the “you don’t need a vision” file:
I’ve lived my whole life without having goals, and I think that’s very valuable, because then I never am in a state of anxiety or dissatisfaction. I never feel I haven’t achieved something. I never feel there is something yet to be accomplished. I feel like goals are quite counterproductive. They give you a target, and until the moment you reach that target, you are stressed and unsatisfied, and at the moment you reach that specific target you are aimless and have lost the lodestar of your existence. I’ve always tried to see everything as a process. I want to do things in a certain way that I can be proud of that is sustainable and is fair and equitable to everybody that I interact with. If I can do that, then that’s a success, and success means that I get to do it again tomorrow.
Read more in last Friday’s newsletter.
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