Takeaways from the sixth installment of Craig Mod’s annual review of his “Special Projects” art/writing patronage program.
I love crossing guards.
Dangerous words: “I have a system.”
“Making a song in a specific time signature is kind of like having a baby with specific personality traits” —Bill Wurtz
I like when the moon is visible during the day.
”There’s something wrong with the wires.”
There is a restaurant in Los Angeles called Qin West Noodle. And in that restaurant there is a gigantic cauldron, filled to the brim, in which they cook noodles. And those noodles are delicious.
On repeat in my head: “Love Takes Miles.”
Hmmm.
Via Austin Kleon.
“Want Ads” by Honey Cone. How had I never heard this until last week?!
When I was making Mirror Sound, I met with Michael Azerrad and he told me, “When you don’t know where to start, start anywhere.”
Confession: I learned, yesterday, that ringworm isn’t a worm.
I love the plink sound of melt-salt falling on ice.
It’s merciful that cuts in our mouths heal so quickly.
I saw a Lays delivery truck driver pop open a bag of tortilla chips.
I wonder if Animal Collective’s “My Girls” is inspired at all by Jeezy’s “Thug Motivation 101”?
Always carry floss. You never know when you’ll eat a apple or some other tooth-stucky food.
And: I think “an apple” should be “a apple.” For reasons strictly related to fun and sound.
I’m haunted by the song in the Marriott Bonvoy ads.
I dislike hanging shit from doors! Doors should be easy to open and close, no signs or clothes or tags or bells or whistles or canes or ties getting in the way.
Matt McCreary’s unusual dance.
Again: I’m always shocked by the continuity of roads. I leave one city and end up at my own, touching all the way.
The chairs at Electrical Audio. Custom-made. They’re so beautiful.
I think I heard Adam Savage say it first: drawers conceal, they put all your tools and docs and whatever out of sight and out of mind. Over and over, I learn this lesson with to-dos: if I actually want to remember to do something, I can’t have a highly detailed filing system. I can’t break lists into categories and folders. They just get lost in there. It’s gotta be flat, obvious, easy to reach, like Adam’s tool carts. (Embodying reminders in the spaces where they’re relevant, with Post-Its or whatever, is useful, too.)
The best music discovery algorithm is a friend who likes good music.
(On Monday) In a weepy mood, listening to Keith Moon.
I once heard a sober person say they got high from drinking water.
I dreamed about a guitar that alternated rubber bass strings with normal steel strings.
Whatever you do with your life, you don’t want it to be associated with the word “regime.”
Unless, of course, you don’t care about being associated with the word “regime,” in which case you’re probably the type of person who does things that deserve being associated with the word “regime.”
Jason P. Woodbury’s interview with drummer Jerry Granelli about A Charlie Brown Christmas. I love.
The Israelis came to Lydda and forced us to flee. It is a picture that does not leave my mind … Thirty-thousand people walking, crying, screaming with terror … If you see such things your mind and heart alter … Humans must change the world, they must do something, they must kill if needs be. To kill, even if that means we in our turn become inhuman.
Even if it means we become inhuman.
That’s George Habash, founder of the PFLP, quoted in Yezid Sayigh’s Armed Struggle and the Search for State.
I’m not including it here because I agree with the sentiment or any particular use of force. I’m including it because he acknowledges that to resist or reprise violence robs oneself of one’s own humanity.
(On Dec 15) I was just thinking about Dick Van Dyke. Then I woke up to find he’s starred in a lovely new music video for… Coldplay.
In Brisbane on December 1, got caught in the rain, soaked to the bone, enjoyed splishing and splashing in the street puddles.
“It is vitally important for us to have a neutral language for our governance options that can be used by everyone to debate where to go from here.”
I’m not sure if I totally grasp the metaphors here, but I’m for new political language with less baggage.
Wow. Thank you, Aarik!
“It’s good, every once in a while, to get in a little over your head and be forced to ask every single person you know for a favor.” —Spencer Wright
Don’t forget to let people like weird stuff.
“Your music can never be more or less than you are as a human being.” —Quincy Jones
Land acknowledgments seem helpful when they’re posted signs and less helpful when they’re verbal announcements. The verbal announcements sometimes feel self-congratulatory or superficial. The posted signs are removed from personal reward, and they’re part of the environment, just like the land itself.
Well, duh, it’s music. But every time I hear Aphex Twin—in this case, “Avril 14th” on a Chicago college radio—I’m blown away by the meaningfulness of the intricacy in his arrangements. It’s not ideas for ideas’ sake. Everything is emotional, intuitive, and surprising.
Hm… Interesting framework.
I bit into an orange-infused peanut butter bar that tasted just like the baby aspirin + peanut butter combo I had to take daily for a year after my Kawasaki Disease treatment. Spat it out, unpleasant memory.
Three days after this article was published, Trump picked Mike Huckabee, a Christian evangelical, to be the US Ambassador to Israel.
An easy way to keep track of your sleep manually: take a screenshot of your phone lock screen right before you fall asleep. Check the screenshot timestamp when you wake up. Write it down along with your wake-up time. Do it daily, see whether you’re really sleeping enough.
Whoa. (Thanks, Crystal.)
“Record-breaking tie-in.” A phrase that popped into my head as I was falling asleep.
I can’t tell if this helped or hurt my understanding of quantum mechanics.
I appreciate this reminder to stick by your values even when they seem to have “failed” in the public sphere.
When I throw a ballot seven thousand miles “home,” when I chuck it in the belly of a metal bird and burn a bit of oil to get it back in a timely way, to be present on that fetid ledger of nightmares, I’m doing so in a vote for [this train hobbyist] — for giving as many people the chance to commit their life to amplifying something positive, however goddamned nutty that thing may be. … Does it dent the universe constructively? Is it additive? Does it, uh, “spark joy” and leave people feeling elevated? Does it erase paranoia and suspicion and insidious stupidity? Does it upend gelded stasis? Does it negate pathological tendencies useful 20,000 years ago when we were resource constrained and living in caves and would die from stubbing a toe? Yes? Then go. Go all in. Do it. Anything that shows us the weird, beautiful, fractal depths of that which we’re capable when we commit to play.
On tour the day after the election, the Manny’s Deli pickles we brought from Chicago to Detroit kept me from full mood deterioration in the green room.
Did you know: From February 3, 1961, until July 24, 1990, the US Air Force kept a backup command post in the sky 24 hours a day, just in case?
Tigers Blood was nominated for a Grammy :-)
You kinda need to harness the “fuck it, there is no future, there’s nothing else, spend it all, spend everything” impulse for every take in the studio. It’s a dark impulse… but here it’s constructive?
It seems, surely, like we’re not done evolving the spine. This is some beta ass shit.
You gotta read slower to read faster.
Interesting work: Creative Advisory.
Afraid that my douchey Ivy League vampire Halloween costume could have damaged my real-life friendships.
“An economic theory that people in poverty have to buy cheap and subpar products that need to be replaced repeatedly, proving more expensive in the long run than more expensive items.”
I love Wheelie Yellow.
The way the puppets at the Sugar Hole hang out at the counter, waiting in between customers, is soooo sweet.
Casey and I bought a vintage bar counter from an elder metalhead with very few teeth, a long ponytail, and a super friendly attitude.
When Basil—normally ravenous, insatiable, impatient—saves a treat to eat until Casey and I, his proven food sources, have gotten back home, I feel like crying.
[My Israeli companions] were raised under the story that the Jewish people were the ultimate victims of history. But they had been confronted with an incredible truth—that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing.
Plenty to debate with regard to Coates’s new book. I haven’t read it yet. But I think the above is a message we could all take to heart.
“Don’t cry, Sohmor,” Safieddine said. “You can’t have dignity without young blood.”
(Since this article was published, Israel killed Safieddine. He was the presumed successor to Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah.)
Wall Street Journal:
The Beirut strike replicated one key aspect of the war in Gaza: Israel’s willingness to use large bombs to achieve its military aims including the targeting of senior leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, even in urban areas where those strikes risk killing many civilians. …
Israel takes on a far higher risk of civilian casualties than in comparable American attacks on high-value targets, said former U.S. military officials. For example, raids that killed Osama bin Laden and the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, were carried out by teams of special forces on the ground paired with close air support, rather than airstrikes.
“They have a high tolerance for extreme amounts of civilian casualties, especially when it comes to high-value targets like the Hezbollah leadership or the Hamas leadership,” said Wes Bryant, a retired master sergeant and special operations joint terminal attack controller in the U.S. Air Force.
This is the Wall Street Journal, folks. Not a dovish rag.
“Jian G. is an employee of a Chinese secret service. He has been working for a German Member of the European Parliament since 2019,” the prosecutor’s office statement said. …
German media quickly identified [far-right Maximilian] Krah as the lawmaker who employed the suspect. … The far-right AfD party has nine seats in the European Parliament, and is competing alongside Germany’s traditional parties in the European elections in June. Krah is the party’s top candidate in those elections.
The Oasis doc (Supersonic) has me fussing with my hair.
Walking in Nashville yesterday, heard a high school drum corps rehearsing in the distance and saw a guillotine on an otherwise Halloween-decoration-free porch.
You’re supposed to be really humble, where you don’t have a “favorite time” that someone is going through a tragedy. Unfortunately, I’m arrogant. I think I’m the shit! So absolute shit shows are my favorite calls. Absolute shit shows! If I get to the scene of a shooting, and there’s six people shot, and everyone’s panicking and running—that’s my favorite call. Because I perform best at that. My least favorite is when you have to comfort the family, when someone doesn’t make it.
The olive trees:
In Deir Mimas, farmers said their olive groves had been scorched by incendiary munitions fired by Israel, destroying trees that were hundreds of years old.
With hit men it has hired in the criminal underworld, Iran has commissioned plots against a former Iranian military officer living under an assumed identity in Maryland, an exiled Iranian American journalist in Brooklyn, a women’s rights activist in Switzerland, LGBTQ+ activists in Germany and at least five journalists at Iran International, as well as dissidents and regime critics in a half dozen other countries, according to interviews and records. … The incongruous partnership between an Islamic theocracy and a notorious biker gang was driven in part by necessity, officials said, given the resources U.S. security agencies devote to preventing Iran from deploying operatives to the United States.
One time we were playing in Milwaukee, and we came to “Then Comes Dudley” on the set list. I don’t know why or what, but I just completely blanked. I could not remember what the words were. So, I was just going, “Yeah, Dudley!” the whole time. But sometimes it’s my decision whether to keep it right or not.
Just… putting this here. Via bandmate Colin Croom.
Super sweet. Kottke says:
It reminds me of the palimpsest (layered communication) that the aliens use to communicate with Earth in Carl Sagan’s ~Contact~ (and the ~1997 movie~). Not only because of the in-game message left for Royalty but for the way that there turned out to be many ways to “play” or “beat” OMCB.
Warning: supes dupes nerdy.
If none of the counter-intuitive stuff lands right, I think the main thesis is still agreeable: remember what’s actually important to you—whatever you’re doing automatically, or out of fear, or out of a will to please someone, might not serve what’s really important.
No one really owns anything.
Thanks, Aunt Debbie, for reminding me!
There are people who believe the Levant is exclusively and divinely ordained for Palestinians, and there are people who believe it is so for Jews.
Both of those groups are detached from reality, detached from history, and detached from anything resembling a humanistic value of justice. Both of them are in power.
The task laid out for all of us in the Jewish diaspora is to diminish the power of the extremists in our communities.
And here Alkhatib suggests that you can also diminish the power of extremists in the Palestinian community by lifting up other voices, multitudinous voices, voices like his.
You’re not wrong to fear extremists. But it is wrong to let your fear of extremists silence reasonable people, to silence an entire community desperately demanding basic decency and repair from Israel and beyond.
Alkhatib is not to blame for racists who lump him in with violent theocrats. Yet he’s right to call out the violent theocrats who damage the movement for justice.
I take his words to heart as those of one person.
The pipes periodically flushing in my hotel room wall sound exactly like a sleeping person breathing.
On tour in Asheville in the spring, I saw the “Brasstown Banger,” a rudimentary early synthesizer that Bob Moog (and collaborators?) made, at the Moog Museum. It was inspiring as hell, to see the totally chaotic, handmade beginnings of a company that ended up mass-producing (still by hand!) such gorgeous products. No photos of the instrument seem to exist online.
“Rangers spent 20 minutes cleaning up the mess and removing foreign molds from the cave.”
Learned a new word: akrasia.
Michelle:
There is a strong possibility that Barack will pursue a political career, although it’s unclear. There is a little tension with that. I’m very wary of politics. I think he’s too much of a good guy for the kind of brutality, the skepticism.
And Barack:
We represent two strands of family life in this country—the strand that is very stable and solid, and then the strand that is breaking out of the constraints of traditional families, travelling, separated, mobile. I think there was that strand in me of imagining what it would be like to have a stable, solid, secure family life. …
And there are times when we are lying in bed and I look over and sort of have a start. Because I realize here is this other person who is separate and different and has different memories and backgrounds and thoughts and feelings. It’s that tension between familiarity and mystery that makes for something strong, because, even as you build a life of trust and comfort and mutual support, you retain some sense of surprise or wonder about the other person.
Wow.
To the stranger who gave me earplugs when they saw me watching JPEGMAFIA at Hopscotch Festival last night with my fingers jammed into my ears, an hour before our own show: thank you.
It’s a necessity to confront your curiosity, confront the idea of mystery. When you throw yourself into making something that has never existed before and certainly in your own mind. It takes so long, especially the older you get, to breach your habits … You try to breach them to get to that mystery spot where things actually happen and you come out on the other side … and you might have as many questions about it as anybody else does, but it has become what it is. To me as an artist, that’s your job. Whether it’s a song, a sculpture, drawing, whatever it is.
Yeah!
The last thing in the world I ever thought I would be interested in doing is making bronze sculpture. And I got an opportunity to do a piece in LA called Poets Walk and I happened to meet a guy here who had a foundry who had asked me if I ever wanted to come in and work with him. I had no idea that I would ever take him up on it, but I did and literally went to school at that foundry on my own trying to learn how to do that, working with clay, making the mold and casting, really getting interested in it.
I feel that way about so many mediums and ideas: yuck, I would never want to spend time on that. But from Allen and others we know that sometimes those are the streets most worth stumbling down… You’re allowed to change your mind, or at least to test out whether your repulsion is really so repulsive.
My first car had this white Naugahyde in between the seats. I would start thinking of songs and have a ballpoint or pencil, trying to write stuff down while I was driving. I had it written all over the Naugahyde. It comes from boredom, the motion of tires, the rhythm of it. It’s always been conducive to lyrics starting to happen and rhythms, melodies.
I would love to see that car.
To be a master of delusion and magical thinking is practically a requirement for world-class athletes. They have to convince themselves that they can win any match or game against anyone in the world on any day. Roddick could do that — and then he couldn’t.
Whoa.
Walking around Durham at night, saw a municipal utility box. Rainwater standing on its lid. Machinery vibrating inside. Cymatic patterns forming in the water.
When I sit on a commemorative bench I like to read the dedication, to know whose bereaved are supporting my ass.
I love Dan Sinker’s chronicles of the late great magazine Punk Planet, which he’s memorializing on the project’s thirtieth anniversary.
In New York today:
Panic is kinda like a Charley Horse of the mind………
From where I sat on stage at Carnegie Music Hall in Pittsburgh tonight, I saw a curious professor dressed in 19th-century clothes watching us through the auditorium doors. I stared at him between songs for half an hour before I realized he was a painting.
The photos.
I think there are at least three nasty fallacies of logic in this essay, but this resonates anyway:
Although Israel fails in obvious ways to fit the model of settler colonialism1, it has become the standard reference point because it offers theorists and activists something that the United States does not: a plausible target. It is hard to imagine America or Canada being truly decolonized, with the descendants of the original settlers returning to the countries from which they came and Native peoples reclaiming the land. But armed struggle against Israel has been ongoing since it was founded, and Hamas and its allies still hope to abolish the Jewish state “between the river and the sea.” In the contemporary world, only in Israel can the fight against settler colonialism move from theory to practice.
Many American Jews have observed this tendency for ten months if not longer.
It feels as though some of our peers afford grace to white Americans for having been born on blood-soaked land, but they don’t afford that to ordinary Israeli people. By thinking that Jews should simply leave Israel, or that Hamas and Hezbollah should succeed in their current and repeated vows to expel Jews, some Americans prescribe a remedy for colonialism that they wouldn’t adhere to themselves, or that they wouldn’t prescribe to their next-door neighbor.
It gives the impression that Israel and Palestine are a far-away sandbox in which Americans’ aspirations for justice or revenge can be embodied. It gives the impression that the lives of distant Jews are expendable or imaginary, just as so many members of my own Jewish community think that Palestinian lives are expendable or imaginary—a ghoulish way of thinking that has cost tens of thousands of lives.
The disconnect and irresponsibility of the “Jews should just leave” perspective is disturbing in light of the fact, also, that any Jew, regardless of whether their skin is white, brown, or black, has greater ethnic and cultural ties to the land in question than European Americans have to Turtle Island.
The desire to remedy colonialism is good. And the need to stop Israel’s conquest of Gaza and the West Bank is extremely dire. In our efforts to those ends we shouldn’t ask distant populations to undertake sacrifices we wouldn’t make ourselves. And we shouldn’t play into the hands of people who believe in the exclusive, divine rule of the Levant—whether by Arabs or by Jews. We should spend our precious energy building democracies under the noses of those rulers.
1. For the record, some founding Zionists considered Jewish repatriation to be a colonial project and used colonial terms (and racism) to woo European patrons and politicians. And there is no shortage of present-day extremists who would be happy to see a colonial-scale decimation of Palestinians. ↩
Chicago, home to 2.7 million people, including me, is 234 square miles.
Even with all the concrete, all the destruction. There are so many trees. Not enough, but so many.
This is the wire.
What’s Latin for “acknowledging your crime does not make it not so”?