Today is David Lynch's 76th birthday, and in his honor, I'm sending you this brief bit about one of his several masterpieces, Twin Peaks. Happy birthday, Mr. Lynch!

[Portrait by Chris Mars.]

This being the first full year that I've done a newsletter, I'm doing a quick recap of 2021 in links and images. Between writing and drawing and publishing, I did a lot of stuff this year! You may have seen some of this, but chances are you haven’t seen all of it. Check it out!

Here we go:

• I had two poems in the April issue of Anti-Heroin Chic.

• My MF DOOM security-envelope collage (above) was featured in Shadows of Tomorrow: DRO CUP’s DARK SIDE OF THE DOOM Pink Floyd/DOOM Mash-up & Visual Album (MF DOOM Tribute) on The Witzard.

• I had a poem called "San Diego" in the inaugural issue of Sledghammer Lit.

• And an excerpt from my next book for punctum books, Escape Philosophy: Journeys Beyond the Human Body (see below), is available on the Malarkey Books site.

• I have a short story called “Hayseed, Inc.” in Cinnabar Moth’s anthology, A Cold Christmas and the Darkest of Winters.

• I did a fairly lengthy interview with Fifteen Questions.

• I also did a “Quick 9” interview with Fevers of the Mind.

• Todd L. Burns did an interview with me for his Music Journalism Insider newsletter.

"A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct," opens Frank Herbert’s 1965 science-fiction epic Dune. Herbert says of the novel’s beginnings, "It began with a concept: to do a long novel about the messianic convulsions which periodically inflict themselves on human societies. I had this idea that superheroes were disastrous for humans." The concept and its subsequent story, which took Herbert eight years to execute, won the Hugo Award, the first Nebula Award for Best Novel, and the minds of millions. In his 2001 book, The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made, chronicler of cinematic science-fiction follies David Hughes writes, "While literary fads have come and gone, Herbert’s legacy endures, placing him as the Tolkien of his genre and architect of the greatest science fiction saga ever written." Kyle MacLachlan, who played Paul Atreides in David Lynch's film adaptation, told OMNI Magazine in 1984, "This kind of story will survive forever."

Writers of all kinds are motivated by the search and pursuit of story. A newspaper reporter from the mid-to-late-1950s until 1969, Herbert employed his newspaper research methods to the anti-superhero idea. He gathered notes on scenes and characters and spent years researching the origins of religions and mythologies. Joseph Campbell, the mythologist with his finger closest to the pulse of the Universe, wrote in The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion (1986), "The life of mythology derives from the vitality of its symbols as metaphors delivering, not simply the idea, but a sense of actual participation in such a realization of transcendence, infinity, and abundance… Indeed, the first and most essential service of a mythology is this one, of opening the mind and heart to the utter wonder of all being." Dune is undeniably infused with the underlying assumptions of a powerful mythology, as are its film adaptations.

After labored but failed attempts by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Haskell Wexler, and Ridley Scott (the latter of whom offered the writing job to no less than Harlan Ellison) to adapt Dune to film, David Lynch signed on to do it in 1981. With The Elephant Man (1980) co-writers Eric Bergren and Christopher De Vore, Lynch started over from page one, ditching previous scripts by Jodorowsky, Rudolph Wurlitzer, and Frank Herbert himself, as well as conceptual art by H.R. Giger (who had designed the many elements of planet Giedi Prime, home of House Harkonnen), Jean Giraud, Dan O’Bannon, and Chris Foss. Originally 200 pages long, Lynch’s script went through five revisions before it was given the green light, which took another full year of rewriting. “There’s a lot of the book that’s isn’t in the film,” Lynch said at the time. “When people read the book, they remember certain things, and those things are definitely in the film. It’s tight, but it’s there.”

Todd L. Burns interviewed me about my writing for his excellent Music Journalism Insider newsletter, about which he writes,

The newsletter collects some of the best stuff I hear, read, and watch every week; highlights news about the industry; and features interviews with writers, scholars, and editors about their work. My goal is to share knowledge, celebrate great work, and expand the idea of what music journalism is—and where it happens.

I first pursued music journalism as a career path in the early 1990s, and though I've strayed, I still feel related to it at least tangentially. What follows are Todd's questions and my answers.

Music Journalism Insider Interview:

I don’t know any casual skateboarders. Everyone I know who’s ever done it has either an era of their lives or their entire essence defined by it—the rebellion, the aggression, the expression—inextricably bound up with their being. It’s the way you wear your hair and the way you wear your hat. It’s the kind of shoes you wear and which foot you put forward. It’s the crew you run with and the direction you go. There is something about rolling through the world on a skateboard that changes people forever.

The author at age 11 and the beginning of a very long road.

Ever since I first saw Wes Humpston’s Dogtown cross on the bottom of a friend’s skateboard in the sixth grade, I knew it was going to be a part of my world. I first stepped on a skateboard at the age of 11. There are scant few physical acts and objects that have had a larger impact on who I am and how I am. Through the wood, the wheels, and the graphics, skateboarding culture introduced me to music, art, and attitude. Riding a skateboard fundamentally changed the way I see the world. "Skateboarding is not a hobby,” says Ian MacKaye, “and it is not a sport. Skateboarding is a way of learning how to redefine the world around you.”

As much as I clearly see the problems with year-end lists, they're one of the things I look forward to in the waning days of the year. Whatever negative feelings you have about them, mine is meant as a celebration: These are the sounds that kept me going this year.

To be honest, I listened to Elder's Omens (Armageddon Label), which I missed last year, more than anything else this year, but the ten records below came close. There are a lot of favorites, old and new. And, as they have been for the past several years, all of the links below lead to the album's Bandcamp page where available. Today is also the last Bandcamp Friday of the year, during which the site waves all of its fees, so these artists will get all of the funds you send their way. No one has been able to tour properly for quite some time, so... Please spend recklessly.

I journal like a lovelorn kid in middle school. And I've been keeping one almost since I was a lovelorn kid in middle school. My senior year of high school, I met a girl. I started writing poems about her on receipts, handbills, and other various scraps of paper. My writing about her was so prolific, I decided to start keeping it all in a notebook. I've been keeping such a notebook ever since. Around the same time, I started keeping a day-to-day journal as an extension of the poems. I've kept some form of both off and on ever since.

For me, journals are like asides that begin and never end, parentheticals or paratexts, running on in the margins of other projects. Though the writing and thinking there ends up in other pieces that are crafted for consumption, the content of the journals themselves is for me only. Mine are full of drawings, diagrams, lists, and quotes from dreams, friends, films, and books.

In late 2000, during an especially impoverished period of my adult life, I was going to the Seattle Public Library almost every day. I was reading bits and pieces of so many books. I remember digging deeper into the work of Walter Benjamin, discovering Paul Virilio, and the row volumes I had lined up against the wall in an almost unfurnished apartment, their spines and call numbers pointed at the ceiling. Due dates and new arrivals kept the books rotating, and at some point, I started having a difficult time keeping up with where I'd read what. So, I started a research journal. I've kept three different analog journals ever since.

One of the many methods used in futures studies is what is called environmental scanning. "All futurists do environmental scanning,” write Theodore J. Gordon and Jerome C. Glenn, “some are more organized and systematic, all try to distinguish among what is constant, what changes, and what constantly changes.” The process, which includes several distant early warning techniques (e.g., expert panels, literature reviews, internet searches, conference monitoring, etc.), helps inform the pursuits of issues management and strategic planning. According to William Renfro, President of the Issues Management Association, issues management consists of four stages: identifying potential future issues, researching the background and potential impacts of these issues, evaluating issues competing for a corporation or nation’s operations, and developing appropriate strategies for these operations.

A little further afield, science fiction is another place we look to "see" the future. Citing Karl Marx’s reification and Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum, Adam Roberts writes, “Science as simulation is the reason why fictional science, or ‘SF’, is so much more fun to watch than real science…” Spaceships, robots, cyberspace, the metaverse: These all exist in some form in the real world, but the widespread perception of these contrivances come from science-fiction books and movies. "In the context of SF,” Roberts writes, “this reification works most potently on the interconnected levels of representation of technology and the technologies of reproduction.” At varying levels, we look to science fiction to show us the potential directions in which the technology of the future is going.

Derek Woodgate, founder of The Futures Lab, calls this method the “wide-angled lens” approach. Analyzing the work of William Gibson, Woodgate writes, “Here, in the various levels of connectivity, we need to study the patterns and signals suggested by the ‘lens’ and models. More important, we must be able to recognize the patterns and make connections between seemingly unrelated data in a way that will provide us with powerful and effective future leverage points." As much as Gibson denies being a predictor of any stripe, his work is invariably consulted as a map to the future of technology.

The first time I heard a compact disc was in middle school. My best friend’s dad had just replaced his entire collection of LPs with CDs. They sat in stacks beside the apparatus that played them. They were like extra-terrestrial objects, something from the science fiction we were into at the time. They were also off limits. We were not allowed to touch them.

One day my friend’s dad sat me down on the couch in the middle of their den. The angled sunlight of autumn streaked through the limbs and leaves of the trees in their small front yard. Four large brown cabinet speakers, sitting one each in the corners of the room, were all pointing directly at me. He put on “Owner of a Lonely Heart” from Yes’s then-new record, , loud enough for all the neighbors to hear. The opening samples stumbled around the room before the lead guitar took hold. That first horn stab, a sample from "Kool is Back" by Funk, Inc. (which is a cover of “Kool’s Back Again” by Kool and The Gang) leftover from Trevor Horn’s sessions with Malcolm McLaren, sounded like a laser shot from space. I remember being able to feel Chris Squire’s bass thumping through the floor as Trevor Rabin’s guitar swirled and the samples bounced around the room and my skull to dizzying effect. That day the CD earned and maintained its otherworldly reputation in the history of recording formats, supplanting the raggedy cassette and the woefully outmoded vinyl record.

Due to global supply-chain issues, our edited essay collection, Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism, has been pushed back until early next year, but it’s already available for pre-order! If you're interested in owning a copy, you can help the book immensely by preordering it. If you're unsure, here's a bit about how it came together, a look at the cover, the blurbs, the table of contents, and an early review from The Wire magazine. Read on!

Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism

Over the past few years, I gathered up some friends, and we’ve been working on an edited collection, sort of a companion to my book, Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future (Repeater Books, 2019). Time was one of the aspects of both hip-hop and science fiction that I didn’t get to talk about much in that book, so I started asking around. I found many other writers, scholars, theorists, DJs, and emcees, as interested in the intersection of hip-hop and time as I was. As I continued contacting people and collecting essays, I got more and more excited about the book. Now, the mighty Strange Attractor Press is putting it out. Check out the cover by Edwin Pouncey a.k.a. Savage Pencil!

Why does the world now look more like a William Gibson novel than one by Arthur C. Clarke? Gibson’s friend and cyberpunk peer Bruce Sterling explains:

Because he was looking at things that Clarke wasn’t looking at. Clarke was spending all his time with Wernher von Braun, and Gibson was spending all his time listening to Velvet Underground albums and haunting junk stores in Vancouver. And, you know, it’s just a question of you are what you eat. And the guy had a different diet than science fiction writers that preceded him.

In Doug Pray’s 2001 DJ documentary , which featuresinterviews with many prominent turntablists, one of the questions was, “What made you want to be a DJ?” A large majority of the interviewees named Herbie Hancock’s 1983 hit “Rockit” as the defining impetus for their becoming DJs. This struck me as odd since the main thing that people remember about that song is the video’s disturbing robotic mannequins.

We’ve all been at a dinner party where the dynamic seemed to sour as the night progressed. One person is being uncooperative, the conversation turns to uncomfortable subjects, or the personalities assembled just don't quite sync up. What if the dynamic not only went bad but also splintered into multiple realities? James Ward Byrkit’s 2013 film, Coherence, chronicles just such a gathering.

Filmed over five nights in his own house, Coherence documents a dinner party gone astray as a comet flies by setting off all sorts of quantum weirdness. The story is small enough to tell among friends over dinner but big enough to disrupt their beliefs about reality. The film is . After working on big-budget movies (e.g., , the  series, etc.), Byrkit wanted to strip the process down to as few pieces as possible. Instead of a traditional screenplay, he spent a year writing a 12-page treatment. With the dialog unscripted, the film unfolds like a game. Each actor was fed notecards with short paragraphs about their character’s moves and motivations. Like a version of  written by Erwin Schrödinger,  works because of its limited initial conditions, not in spite of them.

Released in 1979, Douglas Hofstadter's first book, the Pulitzer-Prize winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, is an expansive volume that explores how living things come to be from nonliving things. It's about self-reference and emergence and creation and lots of other things. It's well worth checking out.

Quick note: My new interview anthology, Follow for Now, Vol. 2: More Interviews with Friends and Heroes, is More details and table of contents below.

With two new books out there (see below) and a few more in various stages of the publishing process, I've been feeling buried, writing and editing different things every day. In the meantime, I found a few fun things I wanted to share.

First, my friend and collaborator Tim Saccenti sent me these pictures the other night. The first is with the hands from the cover of ' third album, , which Tim shot.

One of my major struggles as a professor was always getting students to read. It's difficult to relate to the attitude since I became a reader myself, but I remember the resistance as an undergraduate. There were too many other things I wanted to be doing, and I didn't even have TikTok or Instagram to suck up the rare gaps in my days.

(A collaborative drawing from HEADTUBE zine by me and Sean Walling.)

During a particularly dark period in my adult life, I decided I wanted to learn how to write screenplays. I’d gone through a horrible breakup, moved back home, and was working part-time at a chain record store. I was floundering around, unsure of what to do next.

One night I watched Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001) for the second time, but I saw it for the first. It struck something in me, in that time, and I wanted to figure out how to write a movie. I got the script and started studying what you put on the page to make things happen on the screen.

I’ve been writing poetry since before I could write. I would shout them out in alliterative, repetitive, rhyming couplets, and my mom would take dictation. Once I started writing, I wrote poems, short stories, comic books, fake newspapers.

In high school, I took to making zines publicly and writing poems privately. Everyone I looked up to was a poet of some fashion. From the smart sense of Danny Elfman and David Byrne to the gothic verse of Robert Smith and Andrew Eldritch, from the street knowledge of Ice-T and KRS-One to the hardcore chants of Kevin Seconds and Ian MacKaye, poetry was the process, the worded frame for the world. So, I started writing my own again, stilted little stanzas of teen longing and angst, mostly designed to make me seem deep to my friends and interesting to girls.

Last spring, when the lockdown started, I found it difficult to focus on the larger projects I had in progress. In the months before, I’d started writing silly little poems about odd memories I had, tiny stories that didn’t fit anywhere else. I went back to those when I couldn’t think any larger. I eventually moved on to short stories and finally back to book-length writing, but not before I amassed a small collection of fitful misfit verse.

Gene Simmons might be one of the most polarizing personalities on the planet. He co-founded one of the most controversial bands of the 1970s, has allegedly had his way with thousands of women, has run magazines, written books, hosted talk and reality shows, and has revolutionized music marketing and merchandising. I’ve always had a soft spot for The God of Thunder, but I’m never surprised when I find someone who hates him. For better or worse, he’s one of the reasons I’m a music nerd.

In Edgar Wright’s 2017 movie Baby Driver, the main character, Baby (played by Ansel Elgort), is a music nerd himself. He has tinnitus from a car accident he suffered as a child. The accident also killed his parents, more importantly, his mother. She was a singer and instilled in the young Baby a love of music. Since acquiring the “hum in the drum,” he listens to music constantly. With various components of stereo equipment, he also makes his own: glitchy, analog collages made from recordings of conversations, various samples, and beats banged out on keyboards and other music machines. Never without his earbuds, Baby sings and plays along, mimicking the instruments on tables or steering wheels.

When discussing a song with her name, Debora (Lily James), Baby says the song is by “Trex.” Here is where Baby’s nerdom and mine diverge. As everyone knows, the band’s name is “T. Rex,” not “Trex,” but Baby’s mispronouncing of the name illustrates that he’s more interested in the music itself and not the bands or information surrounding them. The kind of nerd I am couldn’t tell you the key a song is in or how to play the first note, but we know the name of the band. Not only that, but we also know that the song “Debora” was recorded back before Marc Bolan had shortened his band’s name from Tyrannosaurus Rex to T. Rex and helped spread the glam through rock on a global scale.

After a two-year absence, it's the return of the Summer Reading List! This year we have reading recommendations from newcomers Carla Nappi, Maria Abrams, John Morrison, and Drew Burk, and from SRL veterans Lance Strate, Steven Shaviro, Ashley Crawford, Alex Burns, Joseph Nechvatal, Peter Lunenfeld, Paul Levinson, Howard Rheingold, and myself. We picked out a big pile of great books to take with you back out into the world.

Read on!

[Note: All book titles link to the book on where you can order it online or find it at your local bookstore.]

I’ve been busy writing, and I’ve been thinking a lot about paraphrasing and its ugly sibling, plagiarism. While endemic to hip-hop, the practice of interpolation also hotly debated. In writing practice, riffing on the work of another is not widely accepted but can be quite helpful.

While some still consider the interpolation of rap lyrics an act of biting, others see such a move as metaphorical and central to the art form and indeed historical African oral traditions. In the use of allusive appropriation in hip-hop, a practitioner must make something new while still adhering to the traditions of hip-hop. In this way, lyrical allusions can be viewed a lot like the musical samples over which they’re spoken. The tension between biting and innovating has been around since the beginning of recorded rap. The lyrics to the Sugarhill Gang’s 1979 hit, “Rapper’s Delight,” were lifted straight from the streets. The fact that those verses belonged originally to Grandmaster Caz and the Cold Crush Brothers is the oldest bit of rap lore. David Drake writes, “Hip-hop, an art poised in the balance between repetition and novelty, is really an oral tradition. The purpose of rhymes are to freeze that which is temporal and ephemeral, creating patterns and imprinting them in the cultural memory.” One person’s clever quip is another’s cliché. Novelty is as cognitive as it is cultural.

As we head back out into the world on and in various vehicles, I thought I’d bring this little list back out. It’s about staying safe on the streets, but each rule is an allegory that applies to many things.

I was walking to the UT campus in Austin one day, and I was almost mowed down by a guy on a bicycle. I was crossing a street, in the crosswalk, where I clearly had the right of way, but he rang his bell and blew by right in front of me, running the stop sign on the corner. I’d already been conceiving this post in my head and that was the last close call. Being a frequent rider of bikes on the streets of many cities, as well as a frequent pedestrian, I have come to realize that people aren’t just inconsiderate, a vast majority of us — whether on foot, behind the wheel, or in the saddle — simply do not know what to do when confronted with each other on the road. So, I hereby give you The Rules of the Road.

I was digging through an old notebook today, looking for some notes on my book-in-progress, The Medium Picture. Instead I found this Year-End Top-Ten List of ideas from 2003. I’d been thinking about a few core concepts that I always seem to return to, and I thought more of them were on here. I felt like I had a second imprinting between the end of my 20s and my mid-30s, but perhaps it wasn’t as tenacious as I thought.

Substack is wack, so we’re trying a new platform.

For our test run of this new newsletter, I thought I’d round up all of the stuff I’ve published on various websites the last month or so. I’ve managed to get a few poems, short stories, a book excerpt, and even a collage published recently. You may have seen some of this, but chances are you haven’t seen all of it.

Sixteen years ago today, we lost one of the funniest voices and best visionaries humanity has ever given us. The odd-angled comedy of Mitch Hedberg remains unparalleled.

There’s no way to do him justice, but years ago I attempted to pay tribute to the man. This piece originally appeared on Vulture (née ) in 2013.

First up, a new online literature journal called Sledgehammer Lit launched today, and I have a poem up there! It’s called “San Diego,” and it will also be in my collection of poems coming out in July in Close to the Bone’s . .

This week marks the two-year anniversary of the publication of my book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future from Repeater Books! In celebration, here are some pictures from the book’s release, the Preface from the text, and some information on a related forthcoming project. Enjoy!

This time around I’m offering a short story.

Maybe you can relate to this: When the lockdown started a year ago, I found it difficult to focus on anything very big. All of my writing projects seemed both intractable and pointless. My attention was reduced to writing poems, flash fiction, and book reviews. Slowly, the pieces I was able to concentrate on grew to something almost normal.

The following is one of the pieces I’ve written in the past year. It’s several short articles about and interviews with a fictional band, compiled to accompany a boxset of their discography. While Bad Flag doesn’t exist, they are very real. Maybe you’ll recognize them.

This story is dedicated to the memory of Sam Jayne.

On December 18, 1996, I started my first online job. I remember the date because one year and one day later, the company closed its doors.

We sold software online. It sounds quaint now, but we were the first company to do it. This was back when the attitude was apocalyptic about using your credit card online. The internet was a dark, dismal place. No one out here was to be trusted. It was also when people expected software to come in a box with shiny discs and glossy instruction manuals. Customers routinely asked when they would receive these. The idea that you could download a program over the phone-lines, then install and run it on your computer without a disc was still foreign to most.

Sometime in 1997 we were purchased by another software retailer. They made their money through mail-order catalog sales and were curious about potential sales online. They bought us as a placeholder just in case this internet thing took off. When we didn’t show the returns they expected in the time they expected, they shut us down.

It sounds as weird now as downloading software did then, but this kind of turnover was normal in the dot-com era. My coworkers seemed to be split between the glib, who’d seen it all before, and the crushed, who’d harbored dreams of online fortune. We were so far ahead of other companies, many of their jobs didn’t exist anywhere else yet. As one of my friends there said, despondent after being unable to find similar work elsewhere, “I love what I do.”

In the first chapter of his 1992 book, Turn Signals are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles (Addison-Wesley), Donald Norman describes going to see a sixth-grade play in a relatively small auditorium. “If there had been only fifty parents present, it would have been crowded,” he writes. “But in addition to the parents, we had the video cameras.” Written some thirty years ago, this anecdote is well before the camera shrunk and merged with the mobile phone. Video cameras were cumbersome, and many didn’t yet run on batteries, hence his long-since gone concerns about space. He continues,

Ah yes, once upon a time there was an age in which people went to enjoy themselves, unencumbered by technology, with the memory of the event retained within their own heads. Today [1992] we use our artifacts to record the event, and the act of recording becomes the event.

I distinctly remember the only issue of Blender Magazine that I ever read had Dave Chappelle on the cover (August 2004). The mid-00s were the magazine format’s last peak, and there were so many of them, newsstands stretching down grocery-store aisles, colorful covers like cereal boxes. I don’t remember what prompted my purchase of this particular issue, but I read the Chappelle piece with intense interest. I’d seen some of Chappelle’s stand-up and seen him in movies here and there. I’d never seen Chappelle’s Show proper, though I’d watched clips from it online. I had friends who were huge fans though, the kind who couldn’t describe a sketch without devolving into uncontrollable laughter.

At the height of my fandom of Richard Kelly’s first movie, Donnie Darko (2001), I attended a midnight screening of the director’s cut at The Egyptian Theatre in Seattle. During the trivia contest that preceded the movie, I was asked to sit out due to my long string of correct answers. The movie struck something in me at a time when I needed to be struck. As Kelly himself put it, “I think you are challenged by things that are slightly beyond your grasp.” It is those things obscured that make a movie like this so engaging, endearing, and enduring.

A few years ago, I was having lunch at a bar in Chicago when an Archers of Loaf song came on over the speakers. Excited, I told my partner what a big fan I am, about the first time I saw them at the Crocodile Café in Seattle, and that I saw them a dozen or so times during their first run in the 1990s, once even traveling up to Vancouver to see them play with Treepeople and Spoon. I told her how, fancying myself an indie-rock mogul, I had plans to put together a compilation of Chapel Hill bands, and they were the first to agree to contribute a song. And how I’d gotten to be pretty good friends with their bass player, Matt Gentling, how he’s also a rock climber, and we’ve stayed in touch over the years.

When I was in the sixth grade, I was in a Vic-20 user’s group. I had a revved-up Commodore Vic-20 with an 8k-expansion cartridge and an external tape drive. Though floppy discs were available, we traded games and software via cassette tapes. There was this device at every meeting called “The Octopus.” It was a port replicator, and when we all plugged in our tape drives for copying multiple programs at once, it looked like a giant, electronic octopus.

On his spoken-word album Bomb the Womb (Gang of Seven) from 30 years ago, Hugh Brown Shü does a great bit about it being 1992, and . “What has been will be again,” reads Ecclesiastes 1:9. “What has been done will be done again; there is .” That old familiar feeling has been around longer than we’d like to admit, but how do make sense of things that seem familiar but really aren’t?

After a successful run of movies in the 1980s, Spike Lee used to say “Make Black Film” like a mantra. We saw it in the 1990s with Matty Rich, the Hughes Brothers, John Singleton, and Lee himself. It looks as though it’s back in effect with boundary-bombing work by Ava DuVernay, Ryan Coogler, Arthur Jafa, Donald Glover, Jordan Peele, Terence Nance, Daveed Diggs, and Boots Riley. The latter’s Sorry to Bother You (2018) is not just one of the best movies of the past few years, it’s a statement, a stance, and a hopeful catalyst for change.

Here is an edited excerpt from my book-in-progress, The Medium Picture. It’s from an almost-finished chapter with the working title “Time of the Signs.”

We’re all home for the holidays. Looking around the living room at my parents and siblings, I notice that most of them are clicking on their laptops, two are also wearing headphones, one is pecking away at her smartphone. The television is on, but no one’s watching it. Each of us is engrossed in his or her own solipsistic experience, be it a game, a TV show, or some social medium.

I started teaching college as a graduate student in 2002. In the relatively short time since, I have watched as various devices infiltrated the classroom: from no computers or phones, to special rooms with computers called “smart rooms,” and finally to every classroom fully equipped with computers and screens and every student with their own laptop, tablet, phone, and other various gadgets. “Computers aren’t the thing,” says tech executive Joe MacMillan (played by Lee Pace) in the TV show Halt and Catch Fire. “They’re the thing that gets us to the thing.” Well, if that's the case, we have failed to get to the thing in the classroom.

This year might have been like living in the longest, most boring bottle episode ever, but it was a good time for reading. Whether you were catching up on the TBR pile or staying up on new releases, there was plenty of time for both.

I quit social media last summer (except for Twitter, which probably should’ve been the first to go—a topic for a different piece), and I started keeping a list of books I read in the meantime. I don’t know if it was the keeping of the list or if I read more, but it seems like I read more books this year than in the recent few.

If you’re looking for last-minute gifts or if you have those gift cards and Christmas money ready, here are 15 of the best ones, new and kinda new.

All of the titles here are linked to  so you can buy them locally.

In the creative process, constraints are often seen as burdens. Budgets are too small, locations inaccessible, resources unavailable. Sometimes, though, the opposite is true. Sometimes, a multiplicity of options can be the burden.

“In my experience,” writes Brian Eno, “the instruments and tools that endure… have limited options.” Working with less forces us to find better, more creative ways to accomplish our goals. As sprawling and sometimes unwieldy as movies can be, low-budget and purposefully limited projects provide excellent examples of doing more with less.

Like many of us, the filmmakers James Wan and Leigh Whannell started off with no money. The two recent film-school graduates wrote their Saw (2004) script to take place mostly in one room. Inspired by the simplicity of The Blair Witch Project (1999), the pair set out not to write the torture-porn the Saw franchise is known for, but a mystery thriller, a one-room puzzle box. Interestingly, like concentric circles, the seven subsequent movies all revolve around the events that happen in that first room. They’re less a sequence and more ripples right from that first rock. And let’s not forget that the original Saw is still one of the most profitable horror movies of all time, bettered by the twig-thin budget of The Blair Witch Project and the house-bound Paranormal Activity (2007), two further studies in constraint.

In a year where live shows were impossible, there were plenty of great recordings to annoy your shut-in neighbors with. I’m posting this early because today is the last Bandcamp day of 2020. All of the links below go to the artists’ Bandcamp pages, except in the rare case where they haven’t wised up. Today, all of the money we spend on the site goes directly to the artists, none of whom could get paid on tour this year. Keep them creating.

The next newsletter is my year-end book list, so if you prefer those to records, sit tight.

We’re exhausted, yet we’re craving something. Whether it’s the endless chatter of Twitter, the infinity pool of Instagram, or the uncomfortable family dinner of Facebook, we’re tired, and we’re hungry. It’s like opening the refrigerator door for the third time, expecting there to be something new to snack on. It’s like taking a shower when you’re thirsty.

There have been ephemeral nodes in invisible networks that held us together for a while. They used to be regional, but those heavily curated spaces are less and less influential. In my little music-fan world, it was local record stores, press, labels, radio, and venues that created a community and a sound unfettered or influenced by outside forces.

These places have existed online as well. Message boards had the goods for a while. There was that brief time when blogs were vital and vibrant. Social media was even fun for a while. Before all of that, email was more akin to letter writing. Now we don’t need to email because we’re friends on Facebook. We don’t need to email because we follow each other on Twitter. It’s the illusion of connection.

I’m not claiming to have an answer. I’m just trying to justify this email.

I ditched all of my social media last year for what I hope are obvious reasons if you’re reading this, and I thought I’d try a newsletter. I have a lot of projects in various stages of completion, but emails will be infrequent and always with purpose, so subscribe with confidence that I won’t bug you about every little thing.