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10 things worth sharing this week

The bulletin board in my studio

Hey y’all,

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

1. It’s back to school season here in Austin. We dropped our youngest off at fourth grade this week and walked our firstborn to middle school. How is this possible? I’ve been keeping my mind off the inexorable passage of time by putting the finishing touches on a book proposal and carving stamps from Pink Pearl erasers. (I have always loved shopping for school supplies. If you need a little retail therapy, here’s a list of the gear I use in the studio.)
   
   

2. I like thinking about all the artists and writers who use simple school and office supplies to make their work. Gay Talese writes using scissors and glue. Nabokov, Annie Dillard, Stephen Colbert, Rebecca Skloot, Phyllis Diller, and Joan Rivers use(d) index cards. Laurence Weschler plays with blocks. John Waters, Jerry Seinfeld, Oliver Sacks, and Lynda Barry use(d) legal pads. Twyla Tharp starts every new project with a fresh banker’s box. Keith Haring, Michael Bierut, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Paul Thek use(d) plain ol' composition books. 
   
   

3. Drummer Spencer Tweedy shares the stationery stores he visited on tour. (He’s back on the road with Waxahatchee, who started off my “Make Time Stop” mix.)
   
   

4. Pool reading: I picked up Carl Hiassen’s Bad Monkey after catching two episodes of the new Apple TV series starring Vince Vaughn. Hiassen is perfect for this time of year, when your brains are half-melted and you just want to sink into a trashy good time. (Like in many of his novels, Florida is a main character. “When I was born there were only about 5 million people in the state,” Hiassen says. “Now there’s 22 million. The trauma that comes with that big of a stampede of humanity… if you’re a writer, the material is great, and it’s rich and it’s bizarre on a day-to-day basis. But it’s also psychotherapy. And making people laugh, which is the only way you can cope.”)
   
   

5. A question that’s been helping me in the studio lately: “What would it mean to be done for the day?”
   
   

6. Crazy from the heat: I knew old synthesizers would go flat or sharp depending on the temperature of the room (thanks to a review by Mark Richardson of Harold Grosskopf’s excellent album Synthesist) but I didn’t know the same was true for old drum machines! “The clock inside the LM-1 used a crystal, and as it heated up, the tempos would speed up a little.” That factoid came from this excellent look at Prince’s “When Doves Cry” from Ethan Hein. (He writes about new stuff, too: here’s one of his columns on Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!”)
   
   

7. Collé is a weekly email exploring the world of contemporary collage.
   
   

8. Moony mix: I made a mixtape called “OAHU” to try to stay on island time. That makes two mixtapes for August? In trying to figure out how this extra one fits in with the other monthly mixes, I remembered there was a blue moon this week, so I thought, “Oh, well, I’ve just been making a mixtape for each full moon! I’ll keep doing that.” But it turns out the term “blue moon” has come to refer to two different events: “In one usage of the phrase, a blue moon refers to the second full moon in a calendar month… But the older and more traditional definition of blue moon refers to the third out of four full moons in a season.” This week’s blue moon was the latter. Oh well! (Paul McCartney’s studio noodling on “Blue Moon” ended February’s mix.)
   
   

9. Drawing together: I wrote about the comfort of drawing Batman and the magic of the brush pen.
   
   

10. Some valedictory words from Eileen Myles: “I hope there’s mystery and poetry in your life—not even poems, but patterns. I hope you can see them. Often these patterns will wake you up, and you will know that you are alive, again and again.”

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xoxo,

Austin

PS. Thanks to Shea for sending me this photo of her kitty on Steal Like an Artist — I cannot resist a pet + book shot!