Collective creativity

10 things worth sharing this week

The guardian spirit images in the front of my current diary

Hey y’all,

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. The best thing I read all week was Sasha Weiss’s “The Prince We Never Knew,” about a 9-hour (!!!) Prince documentary that we’ll probably never get to see. It’s a terrific piece of reporting and ekphrasis. It’s also a cautionary tale about the cost and the loneliness of genius and the way artists can have their visions held up or destroyed by moneyed interests and corporate reshuffling. (If you haven’t seen the filmmaker Ezra Edelman’s O.J.: Made in America, it’s great.)
   
   

2. Two weekends ago, in a single afternoon by the pool, I gobbled up Nick Hornby’s short book, Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius. Hornby and I are both fans of Duane Tudahl’s record of Prince’s daily musical life, Prince and the Purple Rain Era Studio Sessions: 1983 and 1984. (Have I mentioned I’m a huge Prince fan? A current favorite in the studio is Parade.)
   
   

3. Tapedeck.org is a digital archive that features hundreds of cassette tape designs. (I’ve been amassing a hoard of cassettes recently for making mixtapes.)
   
   

4. Stationerdery: Wirecutter investigates why Ralph Nader’s favorite pens dry out more quickly than they used to. (When it comes to felt tip pens, I like the Paper Mate Flair, but I love the Pentel Sign Pen.)
   
   

5. Reading with a pencil: I’m using a Musgrave 600 News to mark up Franz Nicolay’s new book Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music in preparation for our discussion at the Austin Public Library this Saturday. The book is full of creative tensions, the biggest one being the role of the individual vs. the collective in musical creativity, or, as Brian Eno puts it, genius vs. scenius.
   
   

6. Bebop: I can’t get enough of Jazz at Massey Hall, a 1953 recording of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach. In my quest to learn more about jazz, I returned to Ted Gioia’s How to Listen to Jazz. So much good stuff in there. The main thing I’ve learned is that you have to pay attention to the players on a jazz recording, and follow their trails. (If you like Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, for example, you might want to look into the work of pianist Bill Evans.)
   
   

7. If you want to be a better student of any art form, you have to pay attention to the credits! If you love an album, read the liner notes, notice the personnel involved in the recording, and seek out more of their work. (Reading the liner notes is increasingly impossible, as people do so much listening via streaming. Personally, I rely a lot on AllMusic.com or Discogs.) If you like the way a movie looks, watch the credits or check IMDB to find out more about the cinematographer. (Again, increasingly harder — Netflix skips credits by default these days, so you have to scramble for the remote at the end of a movie.) If you like the way a book is designed, check the acknowledgements or copyright page for the designer, the imprint, and the other personnel involved. This is one of the easiest ways to find more of what you like and discover what you don’t know you like yet.
   
   

8. “What has served me best, I hope, is that I learned about the music not from books but from the people who created it.” RIP jazz journalist Dan Morgenstern, who was just one of the many members of the worldwide musical scenius we lost this week. RIP bassist Herbie Flowers, who played on over 20,000 sessions, and came up with bass lines for some of my favorite songs, like Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” and Harry Nilsson’s “Jump Into The Fire.” RIP Brazilian icon Sérgio Mendes. RIP R&B star Frankie Beverly, frontman of Maze. (“Before I Let Go” is a jam, and I love the lo-fi drum machine on “Joy & Pain.”)

   
   

9. “I am still a stutterer, by the way. I don’t say I was cured. I’m still a stutterer. I just work with it.” RIP actor James Earl Jones. In his memoir, Voices and Silences, he wrote about how poetry helped him find his voice as a person who stutters. My kids know him from Star Wars, Lion King, and The Sandlot, but I also showed them the top ten segment in these Letterman appearances. (I spotted Ode to Grapefruit: How James Earl Jones Found His Voice on a waiting room table during a recent visit to the Blank Center for Stuttering here in Austin, TX. If you have a person who stutters in your life, I cannot speak highly enough of the work they are doing!)
   
   

10. Your assignment this week: read about how memorizing poetry can expand your life, and pick a poem to memorize. “A memorized poem,” writes my friend Clive Thompson, “becomes part of the fabric of your thought, a tool that your mind constantly uses to make sense of the world.” (So I have a good answer when people ask me about “work/life balance,” I plan on finally memorizing Kenneth Koch’s “You Want A Social Life, With Friends.”)
    

Thank you for reading. This newsletter is the product of collective creativity: It’s written by me, edited by Meghan, and kept going by all y’all who read it and share it, send me good stuff, leave comments, buy my books, hire me to speak, and become paid subscribers:

xoxo,

Austin

PS. Just got word that Steal Like an Artist is in its 30th printing! Amazing.