- Bob Livingston provided an all-around fantastic read and first-hand insight to the creation of an iconic Texas album. If you have any interest at all in Texas Music, you should read it.
So, we played it a second time and the audience knew what was coming. You think “Redneck Mother” had a great crowd reaction? Well, when we got to the last choruses of “London Homesick Blues” that night, we just kept singing over and over “I want to go home with the Armadillos …” Everyone, singing along, over and over. Maybe 15 choruses, I don’t remember. The crowd wouldn’t let us stop. When “London Homesick” ended, the roar and urgency from the crowd was otherworldly and I wanted everyone, including whoever might be listening to the record later, to know that my friend, Gary Nunn, had sung it. So I screamed, “That was Gary P. Nunn!”
- If you have any interest at all in writing, you should read William Zinnser’s talk on the subject and follow his four principles of writing good English: Clarity, Simplicity, Brevity, and Humanity.
Remember: how you write is how you define yourself to people who meet you only through your writing. If your writing is pretentious, that’s how you’ll be perceived. The reader has no choice.
Notes of Interest: Texas Music and Active Verbs
“Siri, remind me to start the crockpot at 9:30.” Marital harmony must be maintained.
Notes of Interest: The Get Off Your Ass and Do Something Volume
- Interesting thoughts from a report published by brand consultants Wolff Olins:
[...] products aren’t finite and they might never actually be finished. In fact, the product is less important than an experience of dealing with a company. Companies are only valuable if they prove themselves useful, time and again.
Just might be the inspiration you need to push your product out the door.
- Do things. Tell people.
[...] make something that you can talk about. Make something cool. Something interesting. Spend time on it. Go crazy. Even if it’s the least useful thing you’ve ever made, if you can talk about it, make it.
- Stop talking. Start making. I enjoyed the brevity of the videos and the simple call to action.
- I sense a theme here. Do you sense a theme? There’s definitely a theme.
- Chase Happiness.
If you don’t wake up most mornings pumped to be alive, you’re doing it wrong.
“Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.”
- From music theorist John Cage’s list of ten rules and one hint.
Notes of Interest: Volume 002
- My kind of photography. Majestic seems appropriate.
- Gridmaster Mark Boulton tweets on the limitations of mobile: “Columnar grids are used to create *horizontal* connections between content. On 300-odd pixels, there isn’t enough horizontal.”
- I was happy to see a number of friends from The 9513, and writers from other blogs in general, included in Nashville Scene‘s 12th Annual Country Music Critics’ Poll.
- Top five regrets of the dying.
- Having read On Writing Well, I’m aware of William Zinsser, but it somehow escaped me that he’d been writing a Friday column for the past two years. Now that it’s caught my attention, he’s signed off. Don’t let anyone tell you life is fair.
Earlier this fall, if asked my age, I could say that I was just as old as the number of keys on a piano [88]. Then, on October 7, I wasn’t. I had outlived the standard Western keyboard and the largest piano. But then I was told that Bösendorfer, the Austrian manufacturer of sumptuous concert grands, makes a 9-foot, 6-inch model that has nine extra keys at the low end of the scale. I was saved! I had entered the Bösendorfer years.
I did Instapaper each of his past columns, so expect to see more citations from those.
“I’ve never eaten Mexican food in Chicago. And, no disrespect, but it can’t be that good if a guy named Bayless is cooking it.”
- Lyle Lovett waxes philosophical in the February/March 2012 issue of Garden & Gun
Notes of Interest: Volume 001
- “Solitude and Leadership.” A lecture delivered at West Point in 2009 by William Deresiewicz.
Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.
I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.
A fascinating read on the loss of leadership in America, a trend the author ties to an absence of solitude. (via Mike Industries)
- Thoughts on solitude always bring to mind the following, from the John Graves masterpiece Goodbye to a River, published back in 1960:
We don’t know much about solitude these days, nor do we want to. A crowded world thinks that aloneness is always loneliness, and that to seek it is perversion. Maybe so. Man is a colonial creature and owes most of his good fortune to his ability to stand his fellows’ feet on his corns and the musk of their armpits in his nostrils. Company comforts him; those around him share his dreams and bear the slings and arrows with him….
But there have always been some of the others, the willful loners. And out alone for a time yourself, you have some illusion of knowing why they are as they are. You hear the big inhuman pulse they listen for, by themselves, and you know their shy nausea around men and the relief of escape. Or you think you do….
- Somewhat related to the first bullet: to-do lists don’t work.
- Singer/songwriter Darrell Scott is better than macaroni and cheese. His newest release, Long Ride Home, isn’t due out ’til next Tuesday, but an early stream is available over at Folk Alley.
- This SlatGrill went on the wishlist, but the presentation photos with the butcher block table in the woods gave me a chuckle.
- An annual review of typefaces. Lots of good stuff here. A2 Beckett, Detroit, Dane, and Abril all caught my eye upon first glance.
Framing Battlefield Texas
Speaking of iPhone, I used mine to snap a few process photos of a frame I built over the past couple of weekends. I already had the wood cut, assembled, and sanded before I thought about capturing any pictures, so these are mostly the complete frame laying around to dry. Most of my time is spent assembling pixels on a screen, so it’s nice to build something more tactile every now and then.
The framed poster is a print of artist Christopher Alan Smith’s “Battlefield Texas: Republic of Texas Map” (buy your own here).
Materials:
Wood: Reclaimed longleaf pine
Stain: Early American
Step aside 3D, the world was meant to be seen @2x. — That’s code for “I got an iPhone 4S”
How Doctors DieIf I had my druthers I’d go out like Clint Eastwood at the end of Gran Torino, but I’d say doctors have things pretty well figured out, too.
[...] they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.
