Substack MixTape, Vol 2
A love letter to our past, present, and future
I started writing here on Substack just over two months ago, when a chance invite to be a beta tester for the new Notes feature inspired me to start curating and sharing my favorite writing—the kind of writing that takes me out of my head, connects me to a stranger through their words, and makes me feel more whole.
I didn’t exactly have a plan for this Substack, but I had a rough outline—read a bunch of Substack posts, take some notes, and compile those into a weekly recommendation email. That outline morphed a bit last month when I decided to create what I called the Substack MixTape—a monthly review of some of my favorite writing from the previous month, accompanied by a suggested playlist.
Creating the first Substack MixTape was incredibly fun and I got a lot of positive feedback from readers. And with the month of May now wrapped up, it is time for the Substack MixTape, Volume 2!
Volume 1 was all about connection and transformation.
Volume 2 is about the past, present, and future.
On Side A of the Substack MixTape, Volume 2 we’ll explore the past and present with essays about being a teenage dirtbag, moving to China with no plan, encountering soulmates, baking macarons, and listening to The National.
On Side B, we jump from present to future with writing that takes us to a mononymous L.A. coffee shop, gives two different takes on what it means to be a person, provides a poetry interlude, and finishes with an enchanting musical warmup posted via video here on Substack.
Side A
Track 1: I’m still just a teenage dirtbag, baby by
Every mixtape has to start with a banger. This month, that banger is an essay by Charlene Storey called I’m still just a teenage dirtbag, baby. There are many reasons why I’m starting the mix with this essay, but the main one is that this mix is for my incredible partner,
, who writes a Substack called . I’m still just a teenage dirtbag, baby is all about nostalgia, and about owning the things that defined us during our teenage years, no matter how old we are.Reading this essay crystalized an idea that I’m calling involuntary joy, which popped into my head as I read Charlene describe the involuntary squeaks that we make when we get a gift that hits particularly hard. I immediately thought of the involuntary squeak of delight that emanated from Heather Marie when I recently surprised her with a Funko Pop of the wrestler Rhea Ripley. I wish I had a video of the reaction—it was such a perfect expression of involuntary joy.
Like the days of our youth, this piece “felt long but it was fleeting” (in the very best way).
Reading time: 4 minutes
Required musical accompaniment:
Track 2: Do the weirdest thing that feels right by
The first track in our mixtape is all about being true to our teenage selves, to recognize that, even in the hubris of our youth, we still manage to get a lot of things right. The second track builds on that idea, bringing the idea of trusting your intuitions into the present.
In an insightful essay Charlie Becker gives us a simple but powerful heuristic to gut-check our decisions:
Do the weirdest thing that feels right.
Charlie arrives at this mantra after examining his writing wins and losses and then expanding his aperture to see that:
My life is one long chain of times where I did something that I thought was weird and it went great, and times when I tried not to be weird and it went awful.
Charlie’s mantra is powerful enough to warrant inclusion in this mixtape, but the real joy of this essay comes when he explores how he ended up with the mantra in the first place—a lovely journey that involves Doordashing two dozen raw oysters and moving to China with no job or knowledge of the language.
Doing the weirdest thing that feels right takes bravery. And the real reason that I’m including this as the second track is that this mixtape is for my partner. As I said to her the other day, she is so incredibly brave—having packed up a good life near friends and family to pursue an extremely competitive career, achieving her career goals, and then deciding to open a new chapter by pursuing her dream of performing comedy.
Reading time: 6 minutes
Suggested musical accompaniment:
Track 3: Soulmates by
We just talked about doing the weirdest thing that feels right and this next track takes weird to its limit. It is discordant. It makes me uneasy, confused, thrilled, and connected. At first glance, this essay is a series of incomprehensible sentences, strung together with the panache of an extremely cerebral six year old who has just eaten a Baskin Robbins ice cream birthday cake made especially for the quinceañera party of the Jolly Green Giant’s quadruplets. But as the essay unfurls these sentences started to hit my emotional center—ever insistent in their specificity, yet persistent in their opacity.
This concoction of beautiful sludge comes from the mind of Heather Havrilesky and it is called Soulmates. This Substack MixTape is for my soulmate, and so it is fitting to have an essay with this title in the mix. And there are beautiful parts here; but there are ugly parts as well. To describe this essay is to describe a lone horse, grazing in the tall grass of Assateague Island. Sure, you have words—it is a horse, it is brown, it is alone and therefore it is likely a male, it looks beautiful, powerful, regal; but also you are 1,000 yards away and your eyes are not made for this task. Also, those are just words. And this is a horse.
Reading time: 7 minutes
Suggested musical accompaniment:
Track 4: Le macaron by
I think we’ve reached peak weirdness here in the middle of Side A. So I’m going to throw in a little palate cleanser of a track now via an essay that ends with a cookie recipe.
Our palate cleanser is an essay, entitled Le macaron, by Jamie Schler. I found Jamie’s Substack,
, when someone on Notes1 recommended the second in a two part series of essays about the history of the macaron. Part two led me back to part one, which is what I’m including in the MixTape, primarily because the macaron style, which thanks to Jamie’s fun and informative essay I now know is called le macaron Parisien, is one of my partner’s favorite desserts.Before getting back to the essay I have two confessions: I don’t have much of a sweet tooth and I am a terrible baker. My first job in high school was at the Great American Cookie Company in Cordova Mall, where I spent two years using the back of my hand like a rolling pin, turning clumps of chocolate chip cookie dough into pizza sized cookie cakes. I didn’t actually mind the job, except for the rare occasions when I had to decorate one of the cakes. I cannot draw to save my life, and yet I was expected to use piped icing to draw a scene of Ariel lounging on an island in the middle of the ocean. I tried my best, but the disappointed look of Becky, a seven year old Little Mermaid super fan excited to get a custom cookie cake for her birthday, confirmed what I knew—I was doing a terrible job.
Back to Le macaron. I loved this essay because, like the macaron itself, it turns simple ingredients into “a luxury and a bit of a mystery.” Sit down for a fun ride through French pastry history and get your oven (and arms) ready to attempt the perfect macaron Parisien.
Reading time: 9 minutes
Suggested musical accompaniment:
Track 5: the adults in the room by
Our last track on Side A brings us back to where we started—examining the nostalgia of the things we loved in our youth, embracing them as we age, even as we grapple with embracing ourselves.
In the adults in the room, Helena Fitzgerald takes a different approach when examining an old love, in this case the band The National. My mixtape philosophy is to come in hot, with something fun and high energy, and to end side A with something deep, something that makes you want to pause for a walk before you flip over to the B side.
And, well, Helena does that right off the bat. The first four paragraph of this essay are beautiful—craftsmanship of the highest quality, each word obviously chosen with care and intention, yet vibrant and not at all stilted. Honestly, just take a break from this mixtape, go read those paragraphs (which will probably make you read the whole essay) and then come back here.
The rest of the essay is a review of The National’s new album. I know that The National are popular, but I have never listened to their music. And if I’m being honest I started listening to their album after reading this essay, but, well, I just found the essay way more interesting than the music, so I went back and re-read the essay.
Above all, I’m wrapping up Side A with the adults in the room because it is a love letter about a love so strong that it compels you to refract yourself through the thing you love, examine the raw bits of self, repurpose them into a new form, and share those bits of self with the world.
Reading time: 18 minutes
Suggested musical accompaniment2:
Side B
Track 6: killing time in a coffee shop that may also be heaven by
I scream, you scream, we all scream for laughcream!
Laughter, that’s the vibe for our first track on Side B. Killing time at a coffee shop that may also be heaven by Alex Dobrenko is a house of laughs built on a foundation of self-reflection. I’m starting Side B with this track because, well, it is funny and my partner is a comedian. But also, because Alex achieves something incredibly noteworthy in this piece—making an essay both funny and poignant.
I like to think that I am a funny person. I perform in a musical improv group called Heavy Rotation and frequently find myself singing about odd things that make strangers laugh. And I sometimes write funny lines here or there in my Substack. But, honestly, being funny in this format is hard.3
Instead of picking my favorite lines from this piece and presenting them with a tiny bit of context, how about we all take a break and read this piece together. I want to know if the little bow that Alex wraps this piece up in brings the same warm smile to your face that it brought to mine.
Reading time: 10 minutes
Suggested musical accompaniment:
Track 7: Where Beauty and Geometry Kiss by
I’m switching us to a contemplative mood for the next two tracks, which, in different ways, speak to the idea of what it means to be a person and what that means for our present and future.
The first of these two tracks is an essay called Where Beauty and Geometry Kiss by a mononymous writer named Peco. I don’t really know anything about Peco or remember how I came to find Peco’s Substack,
.Where Beauty and Geometry Kiss is both an affirmation of humanity and a criticism of the ways that technology changes us as humans. I have to admit that I went back and forth on whether or not to include this essay—it comes from a particular spiritual worldview that is alien to me and I’m not really sure that my partner (the inspiration for this mixtape) would actually like it.4
But I find value engaging with and trying to understand different traditions and ways of making sense of the world, and so I’m including Where Beauty and Geometry Kiss because it made me think about all of the ways that we are connected, how we all try to make our way through the world, and how different our answers can be to the fundamental question of how to live a good life.
Reading time: 12 minutes
Suggested musical accompaniment:
Track 8: Becoming a Person by
Our next track, Becoming a Person by Alistair Kitchen, is not exactly an answer to the previous track—there is no real argument between them, though in my mind there is a conversation, where both writers are asking the question of what it means to be a person.
Alistair begins exploring this question by turning the mirror on himself and examining his life choices. His writing is clear and immediately drew me in, as if I was listening to an old friend. Alistair’s examination leads to a new mantra, of sorts:
The point of all of this is to become a person.
But what does it mean to become a person? Alistair answers in a clear and compelling way, in a way that I agree with so strongly that, for a second, I doubted the strength of my own agreement. In short, a person is “a human who is free.”
Freedom looks different for different people. I presume that Peco, for instance, would have a different definition of free. And, of course, I’m being deliberately vague here, as the goal of this endeavor is to get you, dear reader, to read Alistair for yourself. After you do, then tell me: are you becoming a person?
Reading time: 12 minutes
Suggested musical accompaniment:
Track 9: Interlude by
After intensely turning over the idea of what it means to be a person, we need an interlude. Thankfully Caroline Ross can provide that with a post that is, in fact, entitled Interlude.
Interlude mixes together poetry, drawings, personal reflection, and even ends with a recommendation. Although I enjoy reading poetry, I’ve never really been one to apply my analytical skills to the craft. Instead, I try to enjoy poetry first on an embodied level—to see how my body changes as I take in the words—and then to turn around the abstractions in my head and see what rings true.
The second of the three poems in Interlude, which is titled Haem, made my back straighten a bit, shoulders pulling back as I narrowed my focus to the screen. I was listening to the song Oya by Ibeyi, which ends with a chant in Yoruba, and as I got to the end of Haem I felt my neck tingle with warmth. I then went out to the nearest wooded trail and hiked until my thoughts stopped swirling and I returned to the earth.
Reading time: 6 minutes
Suggested musical accompaniment:
Track 10: Warming up for Queen Beebalm by
This May Substack MixTape has been a journey, and I want to take us out with a short video posted on Substack by the musician Wu Fei.
This is a simple 1 minute and 18 second finger warmup exercise on an instrument called the guzheng. I must confess my ignorance: before encountering this video I had never heard of the guzheng, which has a history spanning more than 2,000 years.
This warmup exercise video transfixed me. I listened on repeat for almost 30 minutes straight, unable to tell where the cascading sounds begin and where they end.
Listening time: 1 minute and 18 seconds
So the CD-R’s that I used to record mixtapes as a teenager had a max run time of 74 minutes. At 84 minutes of total run time, the May 2023 Substack MixTape won’t fit on a single CD-R, but I just couldn’t trim this down anymore.
I had a blast putting this together and if you give this mixtape a spin I think you’ll leave feeling a little more connected to strangers on the internet and a little more okay with your past, present, and future selves.
Sorry, I don’t remember who :/
I know that I should pick a song by The National here, that picking their music in an essay about their new album is the only logical choice for a combination reading/music mixtape; but I cannot bring myself to do the thing I should do. Maybe one day I will take the time to really listen to The National, to give them the time that this essay demands of me. But today I can’t. Today I can only think about the album that I’ve had on repeat since it came out some months ago. And so I’m picking my favorite song from that album. I guess I can cheat and say that Phoebe Bridgers is in boygenius and also plays on two tracks of The National’s new album. Or I can just say, “I don’t know why I am / the way I am.”
Exhibit A: I scream, you scream, we all scream for laughcream.
I was raised Jewish before taking the common path of many American Jews into atheism, only to find myself now exploring the spiritual world in earnest for the first time.
This was a lot of fun! Excellently curated MixTape!
Spencer, you continue to amaze me! The way you combine music and writing, weaving in your past and present life, is masterful!