The Original Soul Sister, Three Demons of Creativity, Where Great Ideas Come From, etc.

In which sometimes you just gotta get out of your own way.

🍿 Proud to announce my screen printing company, RetroDuck, is once again sponsoring the Capital City Film Festival, which will take place April 2-12. Also, I will be a judge at this year’s Fortnight Film Competition. To quote Siskel and Ebert, I’ll see you at the movies.

💌 Now thru the rest of March, an annual subscription is only $25, 58% cheaper than subscribing monthly. This newsletter will always remain free, but if you would like to support, please click here.

(10/50) Prince, 1999: Masterpiece. “Delirious,” “All the Critics Love U in New York,” “Little Red Corvette” and a title track that warns of impending doom—“Mommy, why does everybody have a bomb?”—yet urges listeners to dance and enjoy life while they can. I concur.

🎸 A few days ago would have been Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s 110th birthday. Read about the original soul sister and Godmother of Rock ‘n Roll and watch her shred.

🪐 Astronomers have identified 128 new moons orbiting Saturn, increasing its total to 274, “almost twice as many as all the other planets combined.”

📕 Resketch upcycles unused paper—like maps, diagrams, and sheet music—into unique notebooks. Founded by artist Shawn Smith, the company partners with U.S. schools, businesses, and creatives to repurpose high-quality paper that would otherwise enter the waste stream prematurely.

🧥 There’s Letterboxd, and now there’s Columboxd, a site to track what episodes of Columbo you’ve seen. No, really.

🪩 Dead and Co. are back at the Sphere. “This time around, every moment on the 240-foot-tall curved display served an aesthetic purpose beyond what any other concert venue can even attempt to provide.”

💭 David Lynch on where great ideas come from. “A lot of artists think that suffering is necessary. But in reality, any kind of suffering cramps the flow of creativity.”

✍️ How to Get Out of Your Own Way: Poet John Berryman identified three primary impediments to creative work: laziness, vanity, and the inability to handle criticism. He considered the third as his greatest challenge. In response to a student's question, Berryman offered advice on this issue, which the student, who later became a renowned writer, immortalized in a poem that serves as a valuable guide for maintaining sanity as an artist:

you can never be sure

you die without knowing

whether anything you wrote was any good

if you have to be sure don’t write.

📖 Reading Susan Morrison’s biography of Lorne Michaels, and stumbled into this old Shelley Berman joke that seems pessimistic, but I chose to read as inspirational:

“Before my grandfather came to America, he was told that the streets were paved with gold. And when he got to America he found out three things. One, that the streets were not paved with gold. Two, that the streets were not paved. Three, that he was gonna be the guy paving them.”

✌️ Until next week, make sure to keep that Hoping Machine running.

Love,

Luke