🌌🧠 Action Potential (from Galaxy Brain) #6
Hello! This is the email newsletter for Galaxy Brain, a creative studio, small press, and Risograph printer in North Beach, San Francisco. Action Potential tends to contain a lot of “here’s what it’s like to run a tiny artistic business” along with a touch of “here’s what we’ve done lately”. It’s published whenever we have something to say, at most biweekly. If that sounds good, then wonderful, because you’re already subscribed.
In San Francisco, at this very moment, the afternoon sun is cresting the white-painted roofs of the apartment buildings, turning all of our homes (sealed shut against the wildfire smoke) into little greenhouses. The confinement lasts through the daytime, until the sun goes down and the wind clears the air. My neighbors open their windows and stand on balconies and fire escapes as the sky goes from pink, to dark blue, to streetlight-orange.
I find myself looking for and more and better windows to look through. More newsletters, more books, more off-kilter online events. Fewer feeds, fewer tweets, fewer takes, hot or otherwise. More things that have been edited, arranged, planned. More action, less reaction. Being cooped up lends our homes a sense of placelessness that can be hard to bear, but maybe it also makes it easier to be transported by sounds, sights, and words. We'll bring you some recommendations at the end of the newsletter for places we've loved seeing into lately.
But for now, here's a few of the windows into the world we have to offer you:
What's New
- Every two weeks we produce Oliver Blank's The One Who Got Away with Oliver Blank on Twitch, a livestreamed compilation of voicemails and realtime phonecalls responding to the question, "what would you say to the one who got away?" We're live tonight at 7PM PST on Twitch, and again on Saturday, September 19th at 7PM PST.
- The last few episodes of Thought & A Chaser, our semi-educational podcast, have been certified bangers. We're getting into a rhythm of research that leads us to jovial delirium; like Bacchanalia but for ideas and facts and stories. Some recent episodes have covered Alexander the Great's place in Dionysian myth, the story of illegal homebrewing begetting modern craft beer, and an investigation of prohibition's lasting impact on U.S. politics. A new episode will be out on Friday September 12th, but Patreon supporters will get it a little earlier.
- To paraphrase Fiona Apple, we're gonna make a mistake / we're gonna do it on purpose. Towards the end of this month, we're going to bring you Thought & A Chaser Makes a Mistake. We'll be hosting a live show (which is a mistake) during which we'll be drinking celebrity wine (a big mistake), taking live call-ins from you about your own libation-related mistakes, and intermingling this all with
researchmistakespodcast segments that are too short for our regular show, but too fun to throw away. If you remember our Hootenanny last year, consider this the closest equivalent for these troubled times. We're going to do our very best to make this feel like a digital party, and remind ourselves that the best mistake is the friends we made along the way.
Windows We're Peering Through
As promised, here are some recommendations for places to put your ears and eyes.
- The Purposeful Object, a technology, art, and culture newsletter by Navneet Alang. Navneet occasionally provides pairings for Netflix programs and wines. It is painfully up our alley.
- Garbage Day, an essential newsletter about what's good and weird on the internet by Ryan Broderick.
- Godforsaken Grapes, a book by Jason Wilson about little-known wine grapes and the history of fine wine edging out (but not extinguishing!) local flavors.
- The Prepared, a weekly newsletter nominally covering the manufacturing industry which, given the industrial world we live in, ends up being a little bit about everything.
- Wine Wars: The Curse of the Blue Nun, the Miracle of Two Buck Chuck, and the Revenge of the Terroirists I was honestly not prepared for the places this book would go. If you like our podcast, you'll love this book, and never look at your supermarket wine wall the same way again.
Thanks for reading this edition of Action Potential. We hope you're finding ways to be engaged and enriched right now, and we hope that some of the work we're doing can help provide that for you—we'd especially love to hear from you at Thought & A Chaser Makes a Mistake.
If your apartment is also a greenhouse right now, then we're sorry, and we sweat in solidarity, and we hope that the heat and light helps your vines grow long and your juices grow flavorful.
Galaxy Brain