I don’t know how these Friday newsletters come together. Or maybe I do. They usually start with an image I want to put at the top, or a subject line. Today’s began with the subject line: “Listening is the whole deal.” I came across that line when I was reading The Work of Art, and ..read more

Adam Moss in the afterword to The Work of Art: THERE IS A PHRASE, variations of which many of the subjects of this book ended up uttering at some point. As they were describing why they did this or that, they would say they “listened” to the work, or the work would “tell” them what ..read more

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 ..read more

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 ..read more

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 ..read more

Here’s another monthly mixtape I made from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents at End of an Ear. I tape over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I tape over the music and then I tape over the artwork. This one started out a little differently than the others: I asked my 11-year-old son and composer Owen (check out his album TECH) to trade tracks with me in a collaborative playlist. See if you can tell whose tracks are whose:  This was enormously fun — we had a little iMessage window going and our Spotify windows open and could see our changes in real time. Some o ..read more

Today’s newsletter begins: Like many book nerds, I got sucked into the NYTimes list of 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. I am with Paul Ford that “Why Wasn’t I Consulted?” is the fundamental question of the internet, and so a list like this one is bound to get big clicks… One thing that struck me is that only two (great) comics made the list — Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis(2004). I thought it might be fun for me to list a few more books from this century that have pictures and words that have made a big impact on me in the past 24 years… No paywall ..read more

A page from Sara Bader’s quote collection Art is the Highest Form of Hope So many people had good replies to my letter “Working Titles” that I felt like I had to write a followup letter, “Title Matters,” which attempts to catalog some of the different methods for titling work: combining and rearranging key words, outright theft, bibliomancy, random chance, etc.  I’m having trouble coming up with a good title for my next book, so I’m taking heart today that Eric Carle’s classic The Very Hungry Caterpillar started out as: Lots of digging and scratching. Read the newsletter here ..read more

“Fine art,” said John Ruskin (1819-1900), is “that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.” Many people like to quote St. Francis (1181-1226) as saying something like, “A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.” The problem is, he never said that. The trail lawyer and artist Louis Nizer did, in 1948, in his book, Between You and Me. So I only quoted Ruskin in my letter, “Head, heart, hands ..read more

Last Friday’s newsletter began with a beautiful thought I had while riding my bike:  It’s not that riding my bike makes me feel like I’m 10 years old again — it’s that riding my bike makes me feel the way I wanted to feel when I was 10 years old. You can read the rest here ..read more