One of the diary-like joys of the Friday newsletter is getting to sit down after a week and figure out if the things in my life have been speaking to each other in any particular way.
Usually, the week is a miscellany — if not cacophony — but often a theme appears.
That theme this week is “collective creativity,” brought about by reading about Prince, jazz, and the work of being in a band. It’s a dense one, and good, I think.
Today’s newsletter was about my shelves of diaries in the studio and my practice of keeping a stack of “on this day” diaries I can re-read when I have a spare minute: “Same but different.”
In today’s newsletter, I write about spending half of a flight to Honolulu drawing a comic while freeze-framing Tim Burton’s Batman:
Planes are excellent places to work, but they’re also excellent places to zone out and to play or do “comfort work” — what I’m calling the creative work we return to when we don’t know what else to do.
Drawing Batman, it turns out, is a great comfort to me!
A reader commented that they’d love to sit across from me on a plane, and it suddenly occurred to me that I left out a huge inspiration from the newsletter: I was sitting on the plane diagonally from a kid drawing, which is what made me get out my diary in the first place!
Here are a few blind contour drawings I made of the kid:
And what I wrote in my diary underneath:
there’s a little kid across the aisle from me who has the most chaotic little marker box and I love it. just scribbling little drawings w/ what looks like EXPO markers and crayons and all kinds of random stuff…
Since the letter takes a turn into kids and the aliveness in the lines that they draw, I can’t believe I left out this detail. But that’s what’s so great about putting work in front of people — the minute you do, you remember everything you left out.
Read the whole letter here: “The comfort of drawing Batman”
I will often map out a Tuesday newsletter in my notebook, forget I made a map, and write it without my notes. Then when I go back flipping through my notebook, I discover everything I left out!
Today’s newsletter is about messing around with anticipation and recall to stretch out pleasant events and minimize unpleasant ones.
On the unpleasant side, I left out one of my favorite parts of the section of Katherine Morgan Schafler’s The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control that inspired the letter:
We justify agreeing to get coffee with someone whom we don’t really want to see by saying something like, “It’ll just be half an hour and then I’ll leave.” No. It’ll be the anticipatory anxiety for the week leading up to that half hour, the half hour itself, and then the negative recall of how you felt annoyed and immediately resentful upon sitting down, didn’t want to be there, and couldn’t believe she said that, even though she always says stuff like that, and that’s why you don’t like hanging out with her in the first place….When it comes to agreeing to engage in events we don’t want to engage in, there’s nothing quick about quick catch-up drinks or quick calls or quick meetings.
This adds a layer to the question to ask yourself to avoid accepting invitations you’ll later regret: “Would I do it tomorrow?”
The time travel involved in this calculation is already tricky — who knows how I’ll feel about doing something five minutes from now, let alone five months from now? But if you think about the time leading up to the event and the time coming down from it, suddenly such obligations reveal their bloated shape.
(“The job never kills anybody,” says John Taylor of Duran Duran. “It’s the fucking stuff you do in between.”)
On the pleasant side, I was reminded of how important it is to have something to look forward to, no matter how silly.
All of this, by the way, is a form of playing with your experience of time: by exploiting anticipation and recall, you’re trying to effectively slow down and speed up certain events, and using your memory to shape the story you want to tell about your experience.
You can read the whole newsletter here.
Yesterday’s newsletter, “Drawing Eno,” was inspired by seeing Gary Hustwit’s new film Eno and how I’ve been drawing Brian Eno lectures and interviews for over 15 years. Here’s a drawing I made from the generated version of the movie I saw:
You can read the rest of the newsletter here.
Friday’s newsletter was inspired by our recent trip to New Mexico.
It ended on this note about travel:
I am a big believer that travel doesn’t relieve your problems, it throws them into relief. You see your life in a new light and new shadows. The desert light can be good for this. At its peak, it is harsh and unforgiving, but at dusk and dawn it softens, becomes more mysterious. Every trip has its challenges, but I returned home, as I often do, with a sense of perspective and a clarity about what I want to do next. What more could one ask for? (“Go away so you can come back.”)
What I liked most about New Mexico was being in the forests and the deserts outside of town.
In Benjamin Labatut’s The Maniac, a fictional Richard Feynman says:
Los Alamos was high up on a mesa with tall cliffs carved in dark red earth, lots of trees and shrubs all around. The landscape was breathtaking, the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. Coming from New York, I’d never traveled out to the West before, so I really felt like I was in another world. In Mars or something. It had the strange energy of a sacred space, a haven far away from the civilized world, away from prying eyes, farther than God could see. The perfect spot to do the unimaginable.
Read more in “The Land of Enchantment.”
Four Tet’s Three is one of my favorite albums of the year, so I was delighted to come across an interview with Kieran Hebden on the Tape Notes podcast discussing its making. He rarely gives interviews, so before listening, I really knew nothing about him or how he works. It was a delight to hear about the making of a record I’ve spent so much time with.
Four Tet’s music is extra special to me because my 11-year-old composer and I both love it — I put “Loved” on my February mixtape and Owen put “Lush” on the mixtape we collaborated on this month. It was wild to me to hear Hebden describe how he works in Ableton, drawing the notes on the piano roll instead of playing them on the keyboard. (Something I see Owen do a ton when he’s composing.)
I really loved Hebden’s attitude towards making music after many decades. He says that if he can stay excited about listening to music and enjoy the making of it while also avoiding the trappings of success and the bog of the industry, that it actually makes the work more successful. Just a wonderful listen.
When he was asked about his most important piece of equipment, he said his hi-fi system because it’s what helps him listen to music in a level of detail that helps him really explore and hear sounds. (Check out the gigantic ongoing Spotify playlist of what he’s listening to.)
This emphasis on listening came up over and over again in the interview, and I wanted to copy down his advice to other musicians: Listen to more music.
“Listening to a lot of music and really exploring it and doing that level of investigation of really understanding where things have come from.”
He then describes swimming upstream:
If you listen to a current record now that samples an old nineties record, and then you check out the old nineties record, find out that sample’s like an old soul record for the drum break or whatever.
And then you go listen to the old soul record and then you find out who the drummer was who played that drum break. And it’s like, oh, it’s Bernard Purdy or whatever.
And then you look on Wikipedia and check out all the other records he made. And then you’re like, oh, he worked with this producer a lot and you check out what that producer did.
To listen to music in that way and explore it and study it, I think is hugely valuable in terms of learning how to be a good arranger, a good producer, a good musician. The more you take in of understanding the sort of like great music that’s out there and the things that came before, it’s so powerful.
Everything’s there, all the information’s there. And then if you take everything you learn from that and then combine it with your own ideas and your own emotions and stuff, then you sort of set up to sort of push things forward. I think that’s much more useful than spending all your time being like, I’m just gonna be learning what every single thing in Ableton does now for the next few months…
You’ve got to love records so much, he says, that you want to make something that can sit on a shelf alongside the records you love.
It’s a lesson that is true for all creative people: Your output depends on your input.
If you want to be a great musician, you need to listen to more great music. If you want to write great books, you need to read more great books. If you want to make great films…
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