Miles Davis & Prince, Sculpting Mount Rushmore, The Em Dash, etc.
In which the cakes should be both beautiful and inspiring.
📸 Winners of the 2025 Big Picture competition and International Aerial Photographers of the Year.
🪨 Ancient Greek technology was used to sculpt Mount Rushmore.
🏭 From a new book, the weirdest of architecture. Needs to be seen to be believed.
🎧 (28/50) The Velvet Underground and Nico: Fearless authenticity. From the hushed intimacy of “I’ll Be Your Mirror” to the fragile dawn of “Sunday Morning” and the beauty-by-defiance “The Black Angel’s Death Song,” it’s a collision of tenderness and dissonance. Achingly human, unpolished, and timeless.
🎺 Miles Davis once joined Prince on stage…
📽️ Trailer for Spinal Tap II: The End Continues.
🎬 Two ways to film the same scene: A look at the brilliant Wings of Desire and its American remake, City of Angels.
🧅 Discovering the site via a silly list of “funniest websites” in Entertainment Weekly in the late ‘90s, reading it religiously throughout high school, finding my first copy in the wild in Chicago, buying the books, The Onion was my graduation from Mad and I am excited to read this.
– The em dash responds to AI allegations. Writing a lot lately and I am beyond self-conscious about this.
📊 Digital life reduces us to metrics: likes, views, shares, all shaping opportunities and self-worth. “This data turns us all into numerical grist for the mathematical mill, allowing the powers that be to predict, optimize, and profit with unprecedented scale and success.” Numbers should serve humanity, not control it.
See also: more info = more anxiety.
🚲 There should be a guy “who every morning rides his bicycle down to the main street and sets up a small glass case of beautiful cakes he has made. He should sell the cakes at a reasonable price to whoever comes. The cakes should be both beautiful and inspiring. They should be sumptuously iced and decorated with fruits and sugared flowers which are not only lovely to behold but genuinely delicious. He should sit on a low half wall and read a newspaper folded into quarters until the cakes are all sold. As soon as the last one is sold he should tie the glass case to the back of his bike and cycle to the market to buy fresh eggs and flour, chocolate, fruit, all the things he needs to make cakes for tomorrow. And then he should ride his bicycle home, where he should kiss the top of the low door frame leading into his widower's cottage because it will always remind him of her. And then he makes the cakes for the next day. Now that's what should happen. It should be happening already, in towns all over the country. Hell, all over the world. If it's not then fuck it. Let the bombs fall. Let them turn the beaches to glass. Return us to hunter gatherers, cowering in caves. Miserable dirty people dying of cold when it rains for too long. Let us slowly work our way back up if we can't get even that part right when it should be so obvious. See if the next crop are smarter. And if they aren't then try again. As long as it takes. Let our distant descendents hide in the shadows of the brick walls we built. I don't think that's too extreme.”
✌️ If we can’t handle the most basic forms of beauty, kindness, and human connection, what’s the point? Keep the Hoping Machine running.
Love,
Luke
