Ahead on Differential

This is the Ahead on Differential Daily Dispatch, issue #3.

I.

I love going to the mall. Any mall. Even shitty ones. There’s a dying mall a short walk from my home. Passing through its doors is like stepping into a portal back to 1994. You can buy Turkish rugs in bulk there if you so desire. If deadstock Levi’s and dollar store candy is more your speed, brother, you’re in luck. There’s a maze of corridors in the rear or the building that houses various offices, clinics, and practices. Each hallway has a street name, but the address numbers ascend and descend willy-nilly, so they’re not much help in terms of navigation. Imagine the Backrooms with nurses and lawyers instead of monsters and apparitions and you’re getting close. There’s a bar on the premises but I shudder to think who drinks there.

II.

Here’s my dirty little secret: everything I write on this blog can, in some way, shape, or form, be traced back to two people: Jason Kottke and Austin Kleon. I’m not saying that I jack material wholesale from these fellas; that would be uncool. What I am trying to jack is their spirit of curiosity and curation. Most of the cool shit I bump into is through those two guys, and this blog is my small way of returning the favour. Kleon talks about a sending a “daily dispatch” in his book Show Your Work. This very series, this flurry of activity, was spurred by an anecdote from David Bayles and Ted Orland’s Art & Fear, which Kleon included in his new book, Don’t Call It Art. The story contrasts two groups of ceramics students, one graded on the quantity of their output, and the other on the quality. This series is just me trying to generate a bunch of pots.

III.

I had a snippet of a Pheobe Bridgers tune stuck in my head wile taking a shower. That’s all it takes to start writing: some image or some cluster of words will stay lodged in your brain, and you develop more images and clusters of words from there. It’s very nonlinear in that you rarely ever start at the beginning or the end; the first thing that comes to you is the middle. Anyways, the working title for this thing is “An Interactive 3D Hologram of Sandra Hüller:”

Computer, wake up and listen to me: run sandrah.exe

I’ve had this dream before I’m at the movies being lulled to sleep by screen after screen of logos for European production companies

then Sandra Hüller, illuminated by the key light of the gods, says  “I can’t help you  ‘cause I don’t know you  and anything I say  is something you’re already thinking anyway”

IV.

Part of the magic of browsing used CDs is that you can’t set off with a plan. Since the stock is always changing, you never know what’s going to be available for purchase (except for that stack of like 14 copies of Achtung Baby that never seems to shrink). As you’re making your way through the stacks, you’ll find albums you recognize, sure, maybe even a couple you put in your mental “maybe” pile. But every now and again, you’ll run into an album that stuns you to a stop, like you’ve rediscovered an old friend’s photograph you thought long lost. The best three bucks I spent this week was on a used copy of Now Here Is Nowhere, the debut album of Dallas space-rock band Secret Machines. I read about this album in Blender magazine in 2004 and have loved it ever since despite never owning a copy. Now I do. I fucking love this album. Of course I do, it’s a sci-fi concept album. It sounds huge. Josh Garza is on some John Bonham shit here. Brandon Curtis is patient zero for my love of the fuzzy, mid-neck, high-in-the-mix bass attack. RIP to the one, the only Benjamin Curtis on various guitar-shaped noises.

#dd