Episode #4: Essay as Mix-Tape

      Allow me a moment of very recent nostalgia. 

      If only we could return to a simpler time, when stocks were high and our hearts were worn on our sleeves. Back to a time when we sat around the tape deck like it was a warm microwave and wrote out our dreams in teeny-tiny lettering on a super flimsy card-stock. 

      I want to return for another look at the mix-tape, because I having this inkling that mix-tapes are pretty much the perfect essay—cut and paste fragments of our lives stuffed hastily into a too-short spool of tape. This month we'll travel deep into the heart of Mix-Tape County, first to the Soundfix Lounge in Willamsburg, where there's a regular meeting of mix-kids who share music according to a monthly theme. And then it's back to Storyville, where we'd like to offer you a mix tape of our very own. Side A is Tomahawk Rock, in which Josh Garrett-Davis, boy from the plains, reveals the strange history of Native Americans in country, rock, and pop. And side B is Rough Transitions, in which Brook Wilensky-Lanford, girl from the north, traces her own awkward adolescence through the secret mix-tapes she kept as teen diaries.