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He’s the gardener (a May mixtape)
I was running out of month so I made another monthly mixtape from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents. I tape over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I tape over the music and then I tape over the artwork.
This one turned out weirder and sadder than I thought it would? The title wasn’t planned — I just saw the headline in a magazine and switched around a few words to suit the vibe.
I used a bunch of snippets of songs from Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee faded in and out to bookend it, so it can’t really be replicated on a streaming service, but you can listen to an approximation on YouTube.
SIDE A
– cindy lee, “dracula” (snippet)
– grandaddy, “hewlitt’s daughter”
– cate le bon, “sad nudes”
– james brown, “i don’t mind”
– king geedorah, “fazers”
– lee moses, “hey Joe”
– cindy lee, “dracula” (snippet)
SIDE B
– cindy lee, “always dreaming”
– yukihiro takahashi, “flashback”
– stevie nicks, “bella donna” (demo)
– yeahyeahyeahs, “y control’
– judy mowatt, “the gardener”
– the zombies, “tell her no”
– ketty lester, “love letters”
– cindy lee, “stone faces”
I’ve made these mixes five months in a row now, so I guess I’m going to keep going for the rest of the year…
Some kinds of monsters
In the latest newsletter I wrote:
Feeling sorry for myself after a rough morning of writing, I put on the 2003 Metallica documentary Some Kind of Monster and half-watched while making collages out of kids’ drawings. I felt what Amanda Petrusich wrote in her 9,000 word profile of the band: “When I first saw the movie, I was twenty-four and found the incongruity of it—some guy in a sweater asking Metallica to talk about feelings—funny; now, at forty-two, I find it unbelievably poignant.” (The band members were all my age or younger when the cameras were rolling.)
Something I don’t think everybody notices is that I put little easter egg links in the “hey y’all” and “xoxo” greeting/signoff that appears in every Friday letter. (I stole this from Laura Olin.)
The “xoxo” this week was this sign that their coach Phil Towle tapes to the studio door (which drummer Lars Ulrich makes fun of):
A museum of technology
Here’s a photo of my kiddos’ dresser from a few years ago, when I realized it was basically a museum of technology. I almost typed “obsolete technology,” but these things all still work — the Casio and the Sony Dream Machine were both possessions from our own childhoods. I wrote about these items in a recent newsletter about the objects we love and live with.
Success means you get to do it again tomorrow
A word from Steve Albini for the “you don’t need a vision” file:
I’ve lived my whole life without having goals, and I think that’s very valuable, because then I never am in a state of anxiety or dissatisfaction. I never feel I haven’t achieved something. I never feel there is something yet to be accomplished. I feel like goals are quite counterproductive. They give you a target, and until the moment you reach that target, you are stressed and unsatisfied, and at the moment you reach that specific target you are aimless and have lost the lodestar of your existence. I’ve always tried to see everything as a process. I want to do things in a certain way that I can be proud of that is sustainable and is fair and equitable to everybody that I interact with. If I can do that, then that’s a success, and success means that I get to do it again tomorrow.
Read more in last Friday’s newsletter.
Likeness and likeability
The past two newsletters have been about likability and likeness. Last week I wrote about Courtney Love and how freeing it is to shed the desire to be liked:
“Being liked was never my thing,” Love says. At the same time, her ambition was enormous: She wanted to be a rock star in a big way. This capacity, this lack of desire to people please, like all energies, has enormous creative and destructive potential. (This fits in with some of the perfectionist stuff we talked about last week.) To be able to shed the desire to be liked and to be likable sets you free in your work.
It is never lost on me that the collages I fuss over are one thing, but the ones like the collage above, which are made by just sticking random tape scraps on my desk to the page, seem to have something much wilder and free in them. The more I listened to Love, the more the collages seemed to loosen up. (I have a beloved Wayne White painting in my house that says “UNFOLLOW,” but in the studio I have a tiny framed piece that says ”UNLIKE.”)
Last week I wrote about how looking at Ralph Steadman’s drawings of the Kentucky Derby made me want to draw my own and, again, how liberating it is not needing your drawings to be likable to their subjects:
While paging through Steadman’s drawings, I got the urge to draw. So I started to make some blind contour drawings of the TV without looking down at my pen and paper. I drew the bugler, the jockeys, the owners, and even a few horses. The whole time I was thinking about Steadman’s monstrous drawings, how liberating it is to be unafraid of flattering the subject of your drawing. A likeness is not what you’re going for, in fact, you’re going for a kind of unlikeness.
One of the reasons I didn’t connect with writer Nicholson Baker’s recent book about learning to draw, Finding a Likeness, is that he couldn’t seem to enjoy the process of drawing unless the drawing resulted in what he felt was visual accuracy. I remember watching him learn to draw on Twitter and Instagram and noticing a point at which he seemed to get much better, and saying so. Upon reading the book, I realized that point was when he started tracing photographs to begin his drawings. In the book, Baker draws like a kind of anti-Steadman — he gets photos of couples off of Reddit threads and tries to do right by them in his portraits — to find a likable likeness.
We have been living through a “please like me” era — “like us on Facebook!” — but I wonder if the tide will turn soon, and artists will find power in being unlikable again…
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