30 Days Has November
Or how I forgot to write a Substack post for a whole month...
How I forgot to write a Substack post for a whole month:
A good portion of last month was spent listening to The Complete Hank Williams which is exactly what it sounds like: about 10 hours of everything Hank Williams ever recorded. It always feels like listening to an ur-text of American songwriting. Contained within those 225 songs are building blocks of my craft. It’s like building a house and going to the nail factory.
One thing I think about sometimes is the nail in the pre-industrial world. Before mass-production, nails were notoriously hard to make, requiring intensely specialized craftsmanship. They were a prized commodity in every sense. The Icelandic sagas tell of shipwrecks being scavenged for their nails and bolts. The Roman military would bury hoards of nails before abandoning forts both to save them for future use and prevent them from falling into enemy hands. Most vernacular architecture of the frontier is strikingly devoid of nails: log cabins, stone walls, sod houses. Nails are heavy, expensive. They necessitate supply chains, mass-industry. Today, most nails are made of steel which must be mined and moved and milled and moved and smithed and moved and etc. The point is that even though Hank Williams is the nail factory, his work was equally one of collation as invention.
“Cold, Cold Heart” is such an amazing song. Holy hell, Hank.
Reason 2:
Cutting bamboo. Imagine trying to cut hair with hedge trimmers…or trying to mow your lawn with a nail-clipper. Cutting bamboo is the world’s deft combination of those two impossible tasks. Many of the young stalks that are slowly taking over my backyard are nearly a foot in diameter and the old stalks, though thinner, have hundreds of branching tendrils that intertwine such that there is no reliable way of telling where any originates. A few times a year, I don protective clothing (for the thousands of tiny spikes that protect the young stalks), and begin a Captain Ahab style descent into madness trying to fight those baneful plants. If you’re wondering why I don’t pull them out of the ground…last time I tried it involved a jackhammer. Don’t mess with bamboo, and please don’t plant it. Looks great, but is not worth it. November marked the start of the most recent “bamboo season.”
Reason 3:
Specific Northwest! This is the most important by far. Those of you who have been following us on instagram (@SpecificNorthwest) know what’s going on… We have some really exciting new releases coming in January, some new friends, some old friends. I can’t wait to share them all with you.
To the future!
Austin