a place we've never been before

Adrianne Lenker in the airport, The Use of Sidewalks, and Kenny Shopsin's musings

Oct 18, 2024

the palm trees near the Santa Barbara wharf

Greetings, earthlings.

Here are three things I loved this week:

1. Big Thief’s Change + sitting in an airport terminal

I didn’t send a newsletter last Friday because I had a 12-hour travel day to a celebration of life for my beloved Great Aunt Sweetie in Ojai, California (if you love reading obituaries like I do, here it is).

Before the trip, I impulse-purchased noise-cancelling AirPods (sidenote: I have never been so immediately satisfied by an expensive impulse purchase; noise-canceling technology is sanity-saving in noisy planes and when you’re sharing a hotel room with your father who must have a television literally at all hours, including in the middle of the night)

Anyway, during one of my layovers, I put on Big Thief’s Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You.

This was a near-transcendent experience: My headphones blotted out the din of the airport and Adrianne Lenker’s beautiful raspy voice backed the beauty and agony of humanity in the liminal space of an airport terminal: people crying, hugging, smiling, stressed, joyful, tired, eating, sprinting, laughing, holding hands, lost to their screens, looking deeply into one another’s eyes, looking deeply at the people around them… Adrianne singing:

Would you live forever, never die
While everything around passes?
Would you smile forever, never cry
While everything you know passes?

Death, like a door
To a place we've never been before
Death, like space
The deep sea, a suitcase

2. Jane Jacob’s The Use of Sidewalks

Urban writer and activist Jane Jacobs is on my shortlist of Powerful Women I Adore.

A friend studying public planning at Tufts sent The Use of Sidewalks, in regards to being a crossing guard.

TLDR: sidewalks give us life! “The point of… the social life of city sidewalks is precisely that they are public. They bring together people who do not know each other in an intimate, private social fashion and in most cases do not care to know each other in that fashion.”

And:

“The social structure of sidewalk life hangs partly on what can be called self-appointed public characters. A public character is anyone who is in frequent contact with a wide circle of people and who is suficiently interested to make himself a public character. A public character need have no special talents or wisdom to fulfill his function–although he often does. He just needs to be present, and there need to be enough of his counterparts. His main qualification is that he is public, that he talks to lots of different people. In this way, news travels that is of sidewalk interest.”

3. I Like Killing Flies

Sometimes when I talk about my philosophy around being a person in the world, I explain that I think I’m a piece of shit.

This usually inspires protest or confused looks (mostly from woo-woo hippie types and people who grew up in stable homes), so I try to explain that this idea came from the documentary, I Like Killing Flies (I can’t believe we can watch the whole thing on YouTube, what a gift), which follows the acerbic New York restaurant owner Kenny Shopsin around as he cooks and shares his cutting wisdom on food, humanity, and society:

Mosaic Vermont asked me to make some illustrations inspired by quotes from favorite writers and thinkers, bell hooks and Yumi Sakugawa. These illustrations are getting printed on merch and being sold to support Mosaic’s work ending sexual violence and supporting victims.