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 everything seeming familiar. “What has been will be again,” reads Ecclesiastes 1:9. “What has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” 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?

The first time I heard “The Pursuit of Happiness” by Kid Cudi (2009), I felt like something was a bit off about it. I felt like it had originally be sung by a woman, and he’d just jacked the chorus for the hook. I distinctly remembered the vocals being sung by a woman but also that they were mechanically looped, sampled, or manipulated in some way.

Upon further investigation I found that the song was indeed originally Kid Cudi’s, but that Lissie had done a cover version of it. Her version is featured in the Girl/Chocolate skateboard video Pretty Sweet (2012), which I have watched many times. Even further digging found the true cause of my confusion: A sample of the Lissie version forms the hook of ScHoolboy Q’s song with A$AP Rocky, “Hands on the Wheel.” This last was the version I had in my head and the source of my confusion.

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.