mlarson:

A selection from How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll.

“Reading through the histories of both jazz and rock, I am struck again and again by the fact that although women and girls were the primary consumers of popular styles, the critics were consistently male—and, more specifically, that they tended to be the sort of men who collected and discussed music rather than dancing to it. Again, that is not necessarily a bad thing (some of my best friends…), but it is relevant when one is trying to understand why they loved the music they loved and hated the music they hated.”

Terrific interview with my favorite writer, Lynda Barry:

On folk-dancing:

I think these old folk dances have something very big in them. The kind of movement they contain is transformative and restorative. You know, when country line dancing was starting to be a big thing, I’d hear people put it down. Cool people hated country line dancing. But I was so excited by it. It meant that anyone in the room could get up there and move around to the Boot Scootin’ Boogie. They could be all different shapes and sizes. Even that crazy chicken dance makes me happy. The Electric Slide makes me happy. Cool people are wrong about so many things.

On the computer vs. your hands:

Well, I love and adore my computer. Very much. I also love and adore reality shows, bratwurst, celebrity gossip and drinking straight whisky. I love YouTube fads like “Keyboard Cat”. But I only love these things because I have something else. It would not be hard for me to give up my computer if had to chose between it and my hands.

There is something about making a thing with ones hands in the physical world, which is a world without a delete key or a “step backward” option, that allows for an image to be awkward or seemingly wrong. It allows the things we are unsure about to exist anyway because we have no choice. We can’t push a button to make them disappear. And for me it’s been the awkward, wrong, seemingly small things that always turn out to be the entry point into the image. On a computer those things don’t have long to live. And they disappear completely. Where do they go?

Also, writing by hand is an exercise in spatial relationships as you write. You fit the letters together, an ‘O’ next to another “O” will be written differently than and ‘O’ next to an ‘I’ and all of it will fit on the line you’re working on. We just know how to do this at a certain point, and I believe that these small physical things that we’re doing at the same time we’re making an image have some bearing on the image itself.

At one point she also calls a piece of paper a “tiny dance floor” for a pen.