Spring reverb

10 things worth sharing this week

A collage I made around a Warren Craghead postcard drawing

Hey y’all,

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

1. Spring has sprung in Austin, Texas. “The trees are coming into leaf / like something almost being said…” The mountain laurel are flowering and filling the air with grape soda perfume. Athena the Great Horned Owl has laid her first egg. Our Pisces baby is about to turn eleven. “Tender age in bloom.” While evil men do everything they can to destroy this planet, I’m thinking of David Hockney: “Spring cannot be canceled.” 
   
   

2. Galileo’s handwritten notes discovered in an ancient astronomy text.
   
   

3. A lost 19th century film by French filmmaker George Méliès discovered in The Library of Congress. (Have you checked out their National Screen Room of free motion pictures? it’s incredible. Watch, for example, this 1894 film of Japanese dancers. For fun, put it on a loop and play different bits of music over it.)
   
   

4. Levi Stahl on “Rainbow Connection,” film noir, and Four Quartets.
   
   

5. How yellow became Van Gogh’s most powerful color.

   

   
   

6. “She stuffed nearly all her notebooks with newspaper cuttings, scraps of notes, telegrams, letters, sometimes even a bird’s feather or a leaf.” Susan Sontag’s playground of ideas.
   
   

7. The two funniest things I watched this week: the first half of “Covercraft,” an episode of The Simpsons in which “Homer has a mid-life crisis, takes up bass guitar and forms a cover band with some of the other dads in town” (to quote my children: “Papa, they made a Simpsons about you!”) and this 12-second Arrested Development clip of David Cross as Mrs. Featherbottom which we all agreed is worth more laughs than the entire 2 hours and 4 minutes of Mrs. Doubtfire.
   
   

8. “The best things in life are free / but you can give them to the birds and bees…” Mason Currey writes about how to be a writer with a day job and Manjula Martin and friends bring back Scratch as “a weekly newsletter about how your favorite writers are surviving. (Or not.)”
   
   

9. “‘There’s life, death, and bad writing,’ he told his students. ‘Only one is avoidable.’” RIP engineer and producer Bob Power, who worked with artists like D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, and A Tribe Called Quest. (Here’s a list of 10 songs he engineered.) Power said: “Great music is made by people who either don’t care or don’t understand what is ‘normal,’ so they do something extraordinary.”
   
   

10. An assignment for next week: Send somebody something in the mail.
    

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xoxo,

Austin