Show me how you do that trick

I'm so deeply enthusiastic about this week's shareables, I don't even want to waste your time with a prelude. They all held my heart or massaged my mind this past week (are those grotesque visuals or no?) and I want the same for you. So!

Here they be:

1. First up, here's a beautiful piece of writing from Kelly McMasters about life lessons and legacies, rhizomes and roots.
2. On the topic of growth, I learned this week about this tree in London—rather, a tree that grows all over London, damn near everywhere you look—keeping the city far cooler and less polluted than it would be otherwise. I mean, yes, most/all trees and plants eat carbon dioxide and provide shade and whatnot. This is a known fact; we call Central Park "the lungs of New York City" for a reason. But London plane trees, as they're called, self-exfoliate their bark when they get too full of pollution to breathe properly. They just... shake it off, rather literally, no big deal. They're very difficult to kill, though saltwater flooding from a hurricane can sometimes (but not always) do them in. They're in major cities all over the world, and they're actually not technically from London; they're a hybrid of two different trees from two different hemispheres. Anyway, they're punk as fvck, they stand for something, and I'll be looking for them everywhere I go from here on out.
3. Remember Flow, the little Latvian movie that won Best Animated Feature at the Oscars last year? Remember how it was made with free, open-source animation software anyone can use, and how it has zero dialogue, making it rather literally universal? In part, these decisions were financial—no words meant no need for expensive translations, dubs and redubs, and so on, while free software is... you know... free—but under those constraints, the result was far more accessible and, you might argue, better than it would have been with more resources at its makers' disposal. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that; you've heard the spiel before. Anyhow, I finally watched it last week, and it's now my favorite film of the last I don't even know how many years. If you haven't seen it yet, I invite you, I implore you: please do. (Stream on Apple, Fandango, HBO Max/Hulu, etc. or preorder your own copy via Criterion.)
4. Another good thing that held my attention last week was a snippet of an interview from (I'm presuming) the '90s with Irish poet David Whyte, who's maybe what you get when you mash Henry Rollins and Mary Oliver like claymation into just one person. He speaks for 10 minutes or so about things that are as relevant today as they were then, and his advice in the middle third is something I plan on returning to. I recommend it for anyone wishing to live an honest, interconnected life in a deeply troubled world, and for anyone who ever feels lost, especially now.
5. Staying with the '90s for a minute: the babies have been having a goth revival, y'all, and isn't that a glorious thing? On that note (in a minor chord on synths): I need you to know a new bar recently opened in Houston. I need you to know this because one of its co-owners also runs a pizza place called Betelgeuse Betelgeuse (meet you there), and the new spot is a tiki-themed goth bar (more specifically, its website calls it "goth tropical purgatory") called... Endless Bummer. ::ba-dum-ching::
6. Less into goth*, more into the traditions of stadium rock and/or classical music? Well, thanks to ClassicFM, I learned this week that the whoa-OH-oh-oh-ohhhh-oh bit in "Seven Nation Army" is an interpolation of a piece of classical music by Anton Bruckner, an 1800s Viennese composer Jack White loved as a kid. When he was a wee thing, he wondered what it might sound like as a rock & roll hook, and then he held onto that idea until it was time to launch The White Stripes into the stratosphere. #themoreyouknow
7. So it turns out visible mending, which made its way into this newsletter a few weeks back, is having a moment... or has been, or is about to, depending where you are and who you're hanging out with. This week, Charm School Vintage in Austin is hosting a Second Chance Soirée to give away free clothes in slight need of repair. The advert mentioned how ideal these pieces could be to practice visible mending techniques on. It got me thinking about the metaphor again: about how we can disentangle ourselves from the click-to-buy hamster wheel, about how we can contribute to circular economies by hand-stitching old garments back into rotation, about how we can dictate trends and say what's beautiful instead of being dictated to. About how we can gather ourselves and one another in the name of repair. Food for thought, a little snack to nibble on.

See you gothlings and goslings next week.

*for a great deep-dive into the genre/aesthetic's origins and references, Lol Tolhurst—one of The Cure's original members, and what an iconic name—wrote a wonderful book about it called, appropriately enough, Goth: A History.

"Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't."

—Bill Nye (the Science Guy)

13 July 2025

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