Hey friends and enemies! Welcome to my monthly (?) keepintouch!

I’ve gotten totally burnt out on social media brainrot and am also feeling somehow increasingly complicit in something Very Bad™ by continuing to use Meta products (you do you though—I totally understand and wish it wasn’t so evil!). I’m hoping to use this as a way to stay connected with people I like and who like me (please like me).

Feel free to stay as long as you want or to leave whenever you like. No hard feelings—you gotta live your life.

Also please reply to me if you like! I’m going to share some things I’ve been finding stimulating and fulfilling from month to month and I’d love to know if/how they resonate with you too.

Ok, first try, here we go.

It occurred to me recently that I’ve heard Arvo Part’s name a lot, but I know nothing about them. I don’t know their gender, their country of origin, or whether or not they’re currently living or maybe have been dead for 300 years. I have no idea. And don’t spoil it for me right now, kindly.

Last month I was listening to an episode of Josie Long’s excellent BBC radio show “Short Cuts”, and someone mentioned this album of Arvo Part’s work as being one of (in this person’s opinion) the most beautiful ever made. It was mentioned in the same sentence as Brian Eno and Harold Budd’s Ambient 2: The Plateau of Mirror, which is in my opinion one of the most beautiful albums ever made, so of course I immediately popped on Alina and was not disappointed.

I’ve been experiencing some intense moments of anxiety recently and this album has become my go-to soothing method. Maybe it can be that for you too. Or something else for you. Or maybe you’ll ignore it and move right along to:

Abstract is not something I discovered recently, but it is something that I’ve been coming back to over and over for many years. I can’t remember who originally told me about it but whoever it was—thank you. The show is a Netflix original series that has two seasons of mini documentaries, each profiling a designer in fields as wide ranging as automotive design, stage design, typeface design, and bio-architecture. They are thrilling and stimulating and beautifully produced (each with an original score by Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh!). There isn’t a single episode I don’t love, but if you want a recommended place to start, I have a particularly warm spot in my heart for Cas Holman’s episode, “Design for Play”. It’s in season 2.

You know how sometimes you find that you’re able to trace everything you love back to a single origin point? Erica Heilman is my audio-storytelling origin point. Many years ago Erica created a podcast called Rumble Strip, where she began telling the stories of Vermonters from all walks of life, in their own words. One week a schoolteacher-turned-poet, one week a snowplow dispatcher, one week a reclusive classical cellist, one week a sheep slaughterer, one week a woman who lost her child to suicide (and whose legacy brought a town together in unexpected ways). Erica’s relentless and candid curiosity, and her generosity and constant self-investigation make her work truly stand out in a landscape of podcasts that are often over-produced, self-important, and sometimes just plain unnecessary. Rumble Strip is necessary, if for no other reason than her fundamental interest in class, and how it divides and brings us together, and what we can learn from each other when we try to engage in that often taboo conversation. Erica is a class-consciousness champion, and I love her very much for that.

During COVID lockdown, my kids and I found an old computer monitor on the side of the road and brought it home. We wired the tube up to respond to an audio signal and made a rudimentary oscilloscope. We fiddled with the color knobs to create a variety of hues and watched the sound create various wave shapes. After they went to bed I hooked an electric guitar up to it and created this layered composition—Oscilloscope 1.

I knew I should have taken that contemporary composition degree at Bennington College.