This weekend brings the end of daylight saving time — or as my friend Leigh calls it, “License to hunker.” May you hunker in the most glorious fashion possible.
On this week’s list:
1. Rosabelle, believe
2. Color stories
3. Make your life bigger
4. Return of the iPod
5. Back-seat rock
6. Blow bubbles from anywhere
Before the escape artist Harry Houdini died on Halloween in 1926, he and his wife, Bess, agreed that when he would try to communicate with her from the afterlife, he’d use the phrase “Rosabelle, believe” so she’d know it was really him. (“Rosabelle” was a song from Bess’ act at the time they met as performers at Coney Island.) For 10 years after Harry’s death, Bess performed annual seances in an attempt to contact him.
At the 1928 event, there were strong signs, according to a report in The Times:
The widow has seen many vague faces outlined in light, has heard many sepulchral voices booming “This is Harry,” has seen manuscript messages, which indicated that he had been sent to business college in his new habitat and trained in a copperplate.
Copperplate was a penmanship technique. Houdini himself was a skeptic, and devoted the final years of his life to debunking the work of Spiritualist mediums. But if there’s any chance of contact, the centennial Halloween feels like an auspicious one. There are seances planned around the country for this Saturday. If you do happen to make contact with Houdini, be sure to ask for a sample of his handwriting.
2.
Color stories
The paint color Baker-Miller Pink, also known as “drunk tank pink,” was mixed at a military prison in the 1970s to calm inmates. Viridian is the green that Monet used for some of his waterlily leaves. Kakishibu is an orange dye that comes from the juice of unripe persimmons.
These are among the hundreds of specimens on Storied Colors, a repository of pigments and their back stories. It was created by a guy who was working in tech and wanted to find his way back to the painting he loved as a kid. Search by hue, search by time period, search by source (e.g., mineral, insect). Or just browse and discover, as I can’t seem to stop doing: Bistre is a transparent brown wash used by Rembrandt that came from beechwood fires. Scheele’s Green was made with arsenic and may have contributed to the death of the chemist who created it. Much more interesting than the staid numbers of Pantone paint chips.
3.
Make your life bigger
A few years ago, my friend Lori told me she was asking herself one question when making decisions: “Does this make my life bigger?” I’ve used this as a guiding principle ever since. It’s useful when choosing between two paths, but also when you find yourself defaulting to certain behaviors or ways of thinking.
The question is premised on the assumption that you want to lead a “bigger” life, which is, of course, subjective. For me, a bigger life is one of more adventure, more connection with other people, more joy, more awe. These are lofty ideas, but the litmus test works for minor decisions too. This past weekend, I was tempted to cancel my evening plans — it was so cozy in the house, couldn’t I just stay here in my sweatpants reading a book? — but Lori’s question persisted. It’s not far off from Marie Kondo’s decluttering maxim, “Does this spark joy?”
While I was contemplating how useful this framework has been for me, another friend texted that she was trying to do more things solo as a way to “increase her surface area.” That seemed like another way to make one’s life bigger: Expose more of yourself to more things.
4.
Return of the iPod
It’s hard, in this age of streaming services and their algorithms, to really remember how exciting the iPod was in its infancy. All those songs in your pocket, a nonstop mixtape that you never had to swap out. I remember sitting on the New York City subway and looking around at everyone with their matching white earbuds, feeling uncool for still rocking a Discman with its undistinguished black headphones. Looking back, it seems quaint that everyone was listening to music, but not staring at the screen. Only one sense was engaged; people were still relatively present.
The iPod turns 25 this month, and Apple has hidden an Easter egg to honor it. Instead of a 404 error when you go to a nonexistent page on Apple Music’s website, you’ll see a facsimile of the first iPod, an operable device with the old scroll wheel and black-and-white screen. You can listen to clips of songs from the era, like “Survivor” by Destiny’s Child. Or go to the About page and hold the center button for five seconds to launch the old game Brick.
On the iPod, a sort of muscle memory sets in and one knows exactly the correct amount of pressure to exert to turn up the volume. The click sounds activate something in me, an excitement at the way they speed up as my finger does. It may be a stunt, but revisiting the old iPod does serve as a reminder of how miraculous streaming media once seemed, and how, a quarter-century later, the miraculous becomes part of the scenery.
5.
Back-seat rock
There are certain songs from the 1970s that I think of as “back-seat rock” because I first listened to them in the back seat of my parents’ car on road trips. My dad’s arm is stretched across the back of the bench seat as he drives, tapping his hand along to “Heartache Tonight” by the Eagles or “Lido Shuffle” by Boz Scaggs. The notes and lyrics are inscribed in me as the Music of Going Somewhere, highway music that makes the whole family sit back and sing along.
A cornerstone of back-seat rock, “Night Moves,” by the raspy-voiced Bob Seger, turned 50 last week. The critic Alex McLevy makes a convincing call for the album’s reappraisal in Paste Magazine. How did Seger, whose success once rivaled Bruce Springsteen’s, come to be associated with “an antiquated era of music that removed him from anything resembling contemporary relevance”? McLevy attributes it to shifting tastes away from guitar-heavy blues-rock as well as the long-running Chevrolet truck ads featuring Seger’s “Like a Rock.”
“Night Moves” is one of those albums I listen to a little bashfully now, embarrassed by its sentimentality but caught in its thrall nonetheless. When Seger sings about teenagers fumbling around in the dark, “young and restless and bored,” building from acoustic guitar to full-band instrumentation, my heart soars. I’m imbued with nostalgia for an idealized past, his as well as my own, for those uncomplicated adolescent days when I was just a passenger in the family car, nodding along to songs I didn’t yet understand.
6.
Blow bubbles from anywhere
For Halloween in 2000, a couple in Florida set up a bubble machine in their backyard to bewitch trick-or-treaters. A few months later, they rigged up their machine to a computer and camera so people could operate it from the internet. Incredibly, more than two decades later, you can still go online, hit a button, and send a stream of bubbles blowing. The yard is decorated with witches on brooms who appear to be whirling and flying through the intermittent bubble bombardments.
One more thing: Malcolm Flynn, a reader from Philadelphia, gets inspiration from an album that The Times called “ethereally and lustrously beautiful”:
It’s around the 10-year anniversary of Bon Iver’s “22, A Million.” And the opening line of this album, repeated in a digital falsetto, cannot be forgotten: “It might be over soon.” It is a reminder for all things and all times. Is the “it” bad? Fear not — it’ll be over soon. Is the “it” good? Savor it — it might be over soon!
Justin Vernon’s lyrics are often so impressionistic as to be inscrutable, hidden as they are in an ocean of electronic production. But here and there, his voice surfaces to remind you that he is one of the great poets of our time: It might be over soon!
What decisions have you made that make your life bigger? Share them in the comments, or email me. If you want to get The Good List in your inbox, sign up here. And you can check out past editions of The Good List anytime. — Melissa
The editor of The Good List is Jodi Rudoren. Eli Cohen handles the photos.
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