So what?

10 things worth sharing this week

“Unquestionably affairs had developed a certain menacing trend…”
—P.G. Wodehouse, Joy in the Morning

Hey y’all,

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

1. Wednesday was the Lunar New Year (this is the Year of the Snake) and tomorrow is February. The shortest month is 28 days, a clean four weeks, so it’s a good time to attempt a 28-day Practice and Suck Less challenge. Here’s a PDF you can download and print out to keep you on track:
   
   

   

   Practice Suck Less 28 Days

   467KB ∙ PDF file

   Download

   Download

   
   

2. Boy, oh boy, did I need to read “The 70% Rule”: “If you’re roughly 70% happy with a piece of writing you’ve produced, you should publish it.” (That Oliver Burkeman is a clever fellow — you might enjoy our 2022 conversation about his book Four Thousand Weeks.)

   
   

3. “Glue sticks are my Xanax.” The benefits of junk journaling.
   
   

4. “We just came on and did a show that we wanted to see.” That’s how Lorne Michaels puts it in Questlove’s excellent documentary Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music. Even if you don’t watch the whole documentary, check out the first 7 minutes which are a wild mashup of Saturday Night Live performances from over the years. Really great. (If you like that, watch Questlove’s Summer of Soul. I can’t wait for his documentary about Sly & The Family Stone.)
   
   

5. “The magic was in the first years, when we didn’t know what we were doing, when we were willing to try anything.” Alex Van Halen’s memoir Brothers is the 3rd good book I’ve read about Van Halen. (The other two are Crazy From The Heat and Van Halen Rising.) Forget Bob Dylan — who I love, btw — I want a biopic about the little immigrant Van Halen brothers coming over on a boat and playing piano for the captain, landing in sunny Pasadena without speaking English, and becoming the biggest rock band in the world.
   
   

6. I shared a batch of 7 questions I ask myself when I don’t know what to do next and y’all had so many great responses and questions of your own! Some of my favorites: “What advice would you give to a friend with this problem?” “Really?” “Who are you when no one is watching?” “What would this look like if it were easy?” “What if this was fun?” “So what?”
   
   

7. Pedal steel: I’ve been listening to Buddy Emmons’ Emmons Guitar Inc., a.k.a The Black Album, a rare demonstration record Emmons cut in 1971. (My Morning Jacket sampled piano from the excellent “Blue Jade” for their song, “Time Waited.”) Emmons played on one of my all-time favorite country records — Ray Price’s Night Life. I ended my last mixtape with one of his tracks. (If you love pedal steel, check out Art Levy’s beautiful, long essay about the instrument, “Steel Dreams.”)
   
   

8. Robin Sloan on how you can’t cut your way to success and visualizing the federal budget on your hand.
   
   

9. “We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little.” That’s from Charlie Chaplin’s final speech in The Great Dictator, quoted in Damon Krukowski’s “Thinking Under Fascism.”

   
   

10. Sunday is Groundhog Day, but for the artist every day is Groundhog Day.

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xoxo,

Austin

PS. Here’s one of the 7 questions I ask myself when I don’t know what to write in my diary: