Hatchlings into fledglings

10 things worth sharing this week

Hey y’all,

Loved your comments and seeing your typewriters in the chat about Tuesday’s letter, “Not writing, but typing!” (If you want to get the Tuesday letters and join one of the coolest creative communities on the internet, become a paid subscriber!)

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

1. The writer is the composer and the reader is the musician.
   
   

2. RIP cartoonist Al Jaffee, who lived to 102. I didn’t grow up with Mad magazine, but I became a huge fan of his fold-ins about fifteen years ago when I was deep into making Newspaper Blackout. (It’s worth noting he started at Mad as a writer, and the text below the fold-ins is just as interesting as the images.) I highly recommend this studio tour he gave at age 95.
   
   

3. Reading: I enjoyed Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Skin in the Game, and now I’m reading Antifragile.
   
   

4. For Succession fans: I started listening to actor Brian Cox’s memoir read by him on audiobook. If you want to see more of his performances, some of my favorites are Rushmore, Adaptation, the third season of Deadwood, and his OG performance as Hannibal Lector in Michael Mann’s Manhunter.
   
   

5. I’m looking at: Janet Malcolm’s collages. I get to add her to my file of writers who collage. (A few more: Mark Strand, JG Ballard, John Ashbery, and Gay Talese. Feel free to send me others you can think of!) If you’re looking for collage material, the Smithsonian’s collection of public domain images is now over 4.5 million objects.
   
   

6. R.E.M.’s Murmur turned 40 years old. I was struck by this observation by guitarist Peter Buck: “If, on the way to the first day of recording Murmur, we had chanced upon a radio rebroadcast from exactly forty years previous, we would have heard speeches from Franklin Roosevelt, news about World War II, and the swinging sounds of Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller. Forty years is a looong time.”
   
   

7. Spencer Tweedy shared his interview with synth pioneer Suzanne Ciani from his book Mirror Sound: The People and Processes Behind Self-Recorded Music.
   
   

8. Our son Jules wants to go to Japan for his 10th birthday, so I was delighted by artist Carson Ellis’s newsletter travelogues from visiting Japan with her 10-year-old: part one, part two, and the epilogue.
   
   

9. Movies: My kids love “The Wilhelm Scream,” a stock sound effect that became famous after it was used in Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Whenever we hear it in a movie we shout, “Wilhelm!” At the end of this post about preserving a sound effects library, you can hear the original recording session for the scream.
   
   

10. Ladies and gentlemen, we have OWL BABIES!

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xoxo,

Austin