Even the moon’s frightened

10 things worth sharing this week

The Invisible Man (1933) a recent pizza night hit

Hey y’all,

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

1. “Gatherings are the creation of a temporary alternative world.” Priya Parker and I had a nice chat about the creative power of Halloween, gathering, jokes, pranks, and other creative mischief. (Don’t miss my notes underneath the video — they’re more intelligent, probably, than anything I said.)
   
   

2. “Cheever’s is an autumnal world, all burning leaves and dying roses, rain-wet stones, house lights, ‘beards of gold-green weed.’” I’ve been switching back and forth between reading The Journals of John Cheever and The Stories of John Cheever, which contains one banger after another: “Goodbye, My Brother,” “The Enormous Radio,” “The Country Husband,” and especially “The Swimmer,” which I read around this time every year. (I love to listen to Anne Enright read it in her Irish accent.)
   
   

3. After one week, the scariest thing about having a teenager in the house is getting emails from tech companies essentially announcing, “Congratulations on your 13-year-old — HE’S OURS NOW.” (Bo Burnham: “They’re coming for every minute of your life.”) Also: I get annoyed by people who are annoyed by teenagers, so I scribbled this note to myself on the steering wheel of my car after school drop-off:

   

4. Two video games with horror elements my kids and I like to play: Limbo and Inside, both developed by the indie studio Playdead.
   
   

5. In my ongoing quest to be a Curious Elder™️ I dove deep into one of my 10-year-old’s current passions: analog horror. The glitchy VHS vibes reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from Brian Eno’s diary, A Year with Swollen Appendices:

   Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.

   Speaking of cherished old mediums, here is some dad lecturing I will tolerate: Henry Rollins teaching you how to handle your vinyl records.

   
   

6. Geese’s 3D Country was one of my favorite things last year, but it took me a minute to warm up to their latest album, Getting Killed. I’m all in now: I even snagged a secondhand ticket to their sold-out show in Austin next month. Something I hear in this band that I detect in my own Gen Z kid: they are unabashed about their influences. They don’t seem to have the same musical hangups that I do and they put things together that I wouldn’t put together. It’s thrilling to watch. They’re also a real band, pushing and pulling against the grid. Maybe the punkiest thing about them is that they seem to choose their most abrasive songs for the lead-off tracks on their albums, effectively thinning the herd of who’s willing to keep listening. Their track twos, on the other hand, are downright groovy. (A more welcoming entry point for all might be lead singer Cameron Winter’s solo album, Heavy Metal.)
   
   

7. If you’re a Kraftwerk fan like I am, your jaw will drop while browsing The Florian Schneider Collection. (I named Computer World as one of my favorite records in this fun interview with Jacqui Devaney’s newsletter Dinner Music.)
   
   

8. “Everyone in Leeds was into doom-laden stuff, but we wanted to do something more uplifting.” RIP Dave Ball of Soft Cell. (Might throw on Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret next week — good Dance in the Ruins music.)
   
   

9. October always goes by too fast. One thing I like to do to slow it down at the very end, after the kids sugar crash and go to bed, is watch Leonard Cohen on Austin City Limits, recorded on Halloween night here in Austin, Texas in 1988. Cohen is perfect November music, and November is a perfect month for a 30-day “practice and suck less” challenge:
   

   

   

   Practice Suck Less Challenge

   549KB ∙ PDF file

   Download

   Download

   
   

10. Your assignment this week comes from Gary Shteyngart: “Frivolity and absurdity are kryptonite to authoritarians who project the stern-father archetype to their followers. Once the pants are lowered and the undies of the despot are glimpsed, there is no point of return…. What is happening to us is as serious as a guillotine. We must harness our best creative, humorous and frivolous selves in order to keep it from falling.”

Thanks for reading. Have fun tonight and stay safe. Watch out for those blue jays.

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xoxo,

Austin