A Blistering Tina Turner Performance, Bowie's Art Collection, the History of the Baseball Cap, etc.
In which we should all be outside right now.
🇺🇸 Happy Memorial Day!
🤘Rest in peace, Tina Turner, one of the greats. Do yourself a favor and watch her murder “Proud Mary” on Italian television.
🪦 This week we also lost Spike’s Lee’s father, Bill Lee. He did some lovely score work for various Spike Lee joints, and also played on a classic Dylan record.
🥳 Speaking of, Dylan turned 82 this week. This Peanuts strip was written 50 years ago.
🥛Apparently a new interest of mine is Japanese milk boxes.
🍱 One of my goals is to get better at taking photos of food (and I will not apologize for taking and posting food photos, not now, not ever).
🧢 “You could be forgiven for thinking the baseball cap was always there, perched upon humanity’s head from the very first day we walked on the Earth, as eternal as the tallest trees or the deepest ocean. But, of course, that’s not true.” From Knickerbockers in straw hats to what we see today, the history of the baseball cap.
📺 Seinfeld ended 25 years ago and in ways still feels revelatory. “Despite the nihilism suggested by its ‘no hugging, no learning’ motto (and by much of the characters’ behavior), Seinfeld did exhibit a worldview and priorities that were refreshing and, for me, far more aspirational and inspirational. Not despite the fact that these were flawed people uninterested in perfection, but because of it. Even with their abundant neuroses, they lived in the present, sought fun and were loyal to the tightknit, pretense-free friendships at the show’s heart, the kind where your people know your bad parts and love you anyway.”
🤣 Succession ended last night, and absolutely stuck the landing. The idea that it’s Arrested Development as a drama isn’t that far from the mark. (See also: the best finales of all time.)
🎞 It doesn’t say so, but I hope this means the single-film cut of Kill Bill will see the light of day.
🖼 David Bowie’s art collection. “He put out his debut album when he was twenty years old, in 1967, and didn’t hesitate to create a ‘rock star’ lifestyle as soon as possible thereafter. As the world now knows, however, rock stardom meant something different to Bowie than it did to the average mansion-hopping, hotel room-trashing Concorde habitué. When he bought art, he did so not primarily as a financial investment, nor as a bid for high-society respectability, but as a way of constructing his personal aesthetic and intellectual reality.”
👩🎨 Let’s bring it back to the man. Dylan on sacrifice, the unconscious mind, and how to cultivate the perfect environment for creative work. “People have a hard time accepting anything that overwhelms them.”
❤️ Read this later. Enjoy this extra day off. Enjoy this weather. Keep the Hoping Machine running.
Love,
Luke