Bird Mail 024
Hill of Life
Austin, TX
March 2020
Hello friends, welcome to your twenty-fourth issue of Bird Mail. I have been thinking about changing the cadence of Bird Mail to a weekly mailing—at least temporarily—but I’d like to know what y’all think. If you could kindly let me know here, or respond to this email, I would appreciate it. If you’re here by mistake and you don’t want to click a bunch of links about art, music, and bikes (spoiler alert for this issue), the unsubscribe link is at the bottom.
- Everyone needs to watch this supercut of movie dance scenes and Robyn. I’ve watched it at least four times since it came out last weekend. It’s a wonderful pick me up. If you need more dancing, check out the wobbly moves of Dytto—just try to ignore the guy badly pretending to play piano in the background (why is he even there?).
- One of the things I love about getting a wide range of email newsletters is how often I learn about something in one place only to have it reinforced a few days later from a completely different, entirely unrelated source. Case in point: the incredible short film Hermanas by Machines for Freedom which was followed a few days later by this look at all-female mariachi bands by Atlas Obscura.
- A roundup of museums and art exhibitions that you can visit from the comfort of your home. I high recommend doing this on as big a screen as you can. It’s delightful.
- Google’s Collections allow you to look at the art in some of the world’s most famous museums—and some of the less famous ones like my beloved MFA, Houston. You can even use Google street…er…museum view to wander the galleries.
- One of my favorite art installations of all time is Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away at The Broad in Los Angeles. Bird and I got to spend the mandatory, limited, ninety seconds in there in October of 2019 and it was an incredible experience. The Broad has released The Oval Window and it’s a lot longer than the time they allow you spend inside on your own. Paired with audio from LA-based Geneva Skeen, it’s a great a/v background to work to.
- The Broad also released video from an installation work using the museum skylights from before the building opened in 2015. Stillness highlights the massive third floor of The Broad in a way that you cannot see when you’re in the building. When I wandered around the top floor I failed to notice that the entire space—some 35,000 square feet—is not held up by a single column. It’s deceptive because I could see the walls holding the art and I’m sure I just kind of assumed that there were structural columns somewhere that I was wandering past.
- Continuing the architecture theme, the Richard Neutra-designed Taylor House is up for sale in the Verdugo Woodlands of California and the photos of it tug at my mid-century-modern-loving heartstrings. If you need more MCM in your life, I recommend Visual Acoustics, a documentary about Julius Schulman, the photographer who brought modern architecture into the American visual lexicon. I watched it years ago when it was on Netflix and I still think about the images and Shulman’s process and vision often. For more contemporary real estate, for a cool $5.2 million you could do all your social distancing from here.
- At the most recent Pop-Up Mag, Winter 2020 Esther Pearl Watson told a tale of her father’s strange obsession with building his own UFOs (yes there were multiple iterations) and the jeopardy it put her family in. When I came across Marc Thorpe’s newest project idea Citizens of Earth to be built outside Marfa, TX, I immediate thought of Watson’s father and his aspirational spacecraft. Unlike Watson’s ship, which was effectively the escapist dream of a slightly deranged man, Thorpe’s is a powerful political statement meant to be a symbol of our collective humanity.
- If you listened to the 99PI podcast episode Whomst Among Us Let The Dogs Out that I linked to a few issues back, you’ll know just how hard it can be to attribute and claim ownership of music. Two musicians (one of whom is a copyright attorney) built an algorithm that generated every possible melody and then released them to the world in an effort to prevent expensive and often ridiculous copyright lawsuits in the future. > Under copyright law, numbers are facts, and under copyright law, facts either have thin copyright, almost no copyright, or no copyright at all," Riehl explained in the talk. "So maybe if these numbers have existed since the beginning of time and we're just plucking them out, maybe melodies are just math, which is just facts, which is not copyrightable In a similar (ha!) vein, streaming services and lifestyle brands all look the same now. Bird and I often joke that we’ve been influenced when we see, or buy, something in matte packaging.
- Bird and I don’t really watch much television at home—I know, I know, we will get to Tiger King eventually—but we do put on YouTube to enjoy the Bon Appetit Cinematic Universe, Blogilates for those quarantine bootcamps, and lately State Bicycle Co.’s Riding Fixed, Up Mountains, With Pros. The interview questions can be a bit hit or miss but the climbs are beautiful and the brakeless descents are mind-boggling. It has been motivating to watch these riders climb mountains on one gear as Bird and I take to the—now emptier—roads and climb some of the bigger hills around Austin. As I’ve been slowly turning the pedals up some of the steeper climbs I’ve been thinking about this essay from Michael Lopp, Climbing is Not an Annoying Grueling Tax. One of the nerdy things I enjoy about riding bikes is what Lopp calls “the positive feedback of improvement.” Bird and I have put in more structured training time over the winter, indoors and out, and I can see it paying off on Strava as I set new PRs with almost every ride. I’m looking forward to going out and joining the faster group rides once we can all ride in a pack again.
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Your friend, Bruce
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