we got to sepia-tone this guy
bibliomancy forecast for the week of april 7
the king of pentacles, and an excerpt from The Actors’ Analects:
“If a piece of acting comes off successfully three times in a row,” he once said to his young pupils, “the actor loses his skill.” This would seem to mean that the actor would be unwilling to depart from the successful pattern, and the performance would lose its freshness.
the aleatory
Success is a form of failure if it is treated as a material thing. Or if material is treated as a fixed form.
Success is a door that opens to a door that opens to a door that opens. A successful actor can’t succeed three times in a row without attempting to turn his skill into a stable, predictable thing—which, ironically, destroys it.
You know someone is an artist because they are always looking for the next path.
There is no skill in certainty, only fear.
the forecast
Don’t be deceived by materiality. Go boil an ice cube. Go turn a Coca-Cola into pee. Look, it’s all transubstantiation. It’s ordinary. And like anything ordinary, it can be done with skill.
writing prompt
Hold an idea in the air by clenching your stomach. But put it down again before you write anything.
a chune
“No, No, No, I Won’t Come (Go) Down No More” by Mike Hurley
Man how real of a MFer do you have to be to get on a fucking folkways record in this day and age? Where people hear you and they’re like wow, we found this guy in a field, what the heck! He sounds like he might not know how to use a phone. Like he might listen to the phone upside-down, and talk into the listen dots. We got to sepia-tone this guy. Call the Smithsonian. Call the Libary of Congress. He’s an ancestor, yet he’s somehow alive. (Although, not anymore, RIP.) It makes me want to be the kind of feral where they call anything you do a field recording. An animal is the only kind of actor who can succeed over and over again.
credits: small spells tarot deck by Rachel Howe
The Actors’ Analects by Bunzo Torigoe and Charles L. Dunn
First Songs by Michael Hurley
dear diary, I’m working on a theory of art as an organizing impulse. That it brings some degree of entropy into a kind of coherence, with the understanding that entropy and coherence are on their own continuum. That style is kind of like a coefficient of the two factors. Making low coherence out of a low degree of entropy = convention, genre, slop, comfort. Making low coherence out of a complex degree of entropy = chilly, nihilist, cool-but-cold art. Making high coherence out of a complex degree of entropy = the real fucking thing. Autobiography of Red, Jesus’ Son, True Detective (season 1). Of course, there are differences of opinion in terms of coherence. I can make coherence out of picture of a helium balloon tied to a chair, it is sometimes a lonely skill to have. (And am secretly of the opinion that everything is already coherent, when it is being watched.) What do you think, am I onto something?
This newsletter, and every newsletter, is devoted to my sweetie, J, whose birthday it is. And who introduces me to so many of these chunes, like this one above. Here’s to you, Aries king. <3