Robinson Jeffers, standing beside Tor House and Hawk Tower, his handmade stone outpost on the Pacific Ocean. (Image source)

“I am building a thick stone pillar upon this shore, the very turn of the world, the long migration’s / End” (Jeffers, “The Torch-Bearers’ Race”)

The IRS will require you to use ID.me to access your taxes online. Last year, ID.me was locking people out of their unemployment benefits due to facial recognition failures. I had to set up an ID.me account to opt out of the child tax credit advance payments and it was indeed a cumbersome, annoying process. What really bothered me, though, was giving so much critical information to a third party contractor.

Chilly hike at Spring Mill State Park today

Worth watching. I didn’t know anything about her previously. Colette

Rob Sheffield says the CD revival is here. I’m going to stick with collecting records for now, but this makes a good argument for the CD. “Look, CDs will never be as sexy as vinyl albums. I get that. … Really, there’s only one thing CDs have ever done right, which is make music. They get the job done, which is why they’re still around.”

I’ve set up a page for a zine I recently completed. It’s a collection of some of my poetry from the last few years and it was a lot of fun to create. Lots of hunting for public domain images and futzing around with my copier. My favorite part was creating the winter haiku page. I had already written the haiku so I googled phrases so that I could print the text and then cut it up ransom note style. In any case, head over there for a pdf download and subscription information.

In response to a recent post I wrote mentioning zines, @lewism pointed me to an episode of Rolf Potts’ podcast in which he discusses mixtapes, those homebrews of (chiefly) the eighties. I made a few mixtapes myself in the old days but, being a fundamentalist child, they were mainly of southern gospel quartets, that is to say, lame in the extreme.

(Explaining all this to our daughter Darcy, who was born after we left fundamentalism, I went down a quartet music rabbit hole on YouTube. Eventually she fled the living room. I’m sure our YouTube recommendation algorithms are thoroughly confused and will take some time to recover.)

I also watched the documentary discussed by Rolf Potts, Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape.

The documentary outlines the history of the cassette and the revolutionary impact it had. For the first time, it was possible to record at home: songs from the radio or other cassettes, found sound, and - crucially - your own music. And, as you can see in the documentary, this homebrew tradition continues into the present day.

Among young aficionados of cassettes, the attraction is surely the ability to record music at very low cost, together with the hipster weirdness of using obsolete technologies. Among older cassette lovers, there is likely the additional factor of nostalgia. I’ve seen a similar dynamic in myself as I’ve been listening to records since Christmas. Records - especially older ones - definitely don’t have the clean sound of digital music. There are flaws that cause them to skip and hiss. As a physical medium, a record carries time within itself. On the other hand, each time digital music is played it is an experience ex nihilo, as if you stand with the angels at the moment of creation. That is not nothing - and is definitely an argument in favor of digital music.

Nevertheless, records and cassettes have an element of wabi-sabi to them. (Important caveat: I have no expertise on this subject and it is not from my culture. Whatever I say here should be seen as provisional and open to correction.) Some attempts at a definition of wabi-sabi:

• The honoring of “imperfection, brokenness, and decay.” The belief that “a thing gets more beautiful as it gets scarred from use and imbibed with its own story.” (David Duchemin, Start Ugly)
• The “acceptance of transience, nature and melancholy, favouring the imperfect and incomplete in everything” (Lilly Crossley-Baxter, “Japan’s unusual way to view the world”)

Sculpture by Kazunori Hamana; photo by Lily Crossley-Baxter

• The “beauty in the imperfections found as all things, in a constant state of flux, evolve from nothing and devolve back to nothing.” (Andrew Juniper, Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence)
• “The beauty of the withered, weathered, tarnished, scarred, intimate, coarse, earthly, evanescent, tentative, ephemeral.” (Crispin Sartwell, Six Names of Beauty)

Over time, physical mediums for music acquire imperfections and scars that speak of their history - even if we don’t know that history ourselves. When I am listening to an old record, I imagine previous owners sitting in their living rooms, laying in their bedrooms, doing any number of things while listening to this very record. What was going on in the life of that person when they first pulled the record from its sleeve? Was this piece of vinyl important to them?

I am not saying anything as simplistic as “physical good, digital bad.” What I am saying is that perhaps a digital self, a digital life, experience mediated by digital technology, is too thin to be fully satisfactory. Perhaps we have over-emphasized experience via the mind, forgetting that we are bodies and that human life is intimately connected to the wear and tear of physicality.

Other links:

• There are a lot of good links on that Rolf Potts podcast page. Next up for me is to watch High Fidelity.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Japanese aesthetics
• “Japanese Aesthetics, Wabi-Sabi, and the Tea Ceremony” (pdf) by Nancy Walkup

🎵 Now spinning. I first heard Robert Finley on the Colbert show a few days ago and fell in love with his wonderful voice and grandpa dancing. Bonus: this album was produced by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, so that’s a shot of extra confidence in its quality.

Austin Kleon’s latest (subscriber-only) newsletter issue is about the creative seasons. Two things:

1. It contains a pdf version of a zine he wrote on the subject. I know some people around micro.blog have recently been talking about zines and other ideas for analog delivery of writing. This is an interesting way of doing that: digitally delivering a pdf of something meant to be printed and folded.
2. I am definitely a person who goes through creative seasons. In the past, late-winter and early-spring are when I’ve started more creative projects. This latest round has been a bit of an anomaly since it started in early winter - but I think that was driven in large part by my attempt to resist Big Tech and seeking out other ways of communicating.

A Russian farm has given its dairy cows virtual reality headsets in a bid to reduce their anxiety. All comparisons to Zuckerberg’s metaverse aspirations should be avoided in order to keep the herd calm.