An Introduction, Another Film Festival, Unsolicited Advice, The Beatles, Chess, Lebron, etc.
In which I discuss an upcoming showing of The Dinner Parting, offer up links either from or on some insightful (albeit bossy) individuals, and other things I found interesting this week.
👻 Hello. My name is Luke and one day I’d like to speak fluent French and be better at playing tennis, chess, piano and also possibly the guitar. Oh, and I have a dog named Eleanor Rigby.
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Every week, I will be sending you updates about things I am working on, recommendations and curated links to interesting reads and videos on everything and everything, including film, music, literature, art, productivity and trying to be a better person. Delivered to your inbox Sunday mornings, free or charge. Enjoy, or unsubscribe. Just remember that I love you.
🕯 A better invitation, by Shel Silverstein. “Come in!”
🎟 The Dinner Parting will be playing at the Central Michigan International Film Festival Saturday, February 18th, at 4:30pm at the Broadway Theatre, with a Q&A following with yours truly. Everything Everywhere All At Once will be closing the evening; between the two films there were eleven Oscar nominations. Tickets on sale now for $5.
If you somehow missed it, The Dinner Parting is a very independent feature film I co-wrote and produced. FilmThreat had some very nice things to say about it. We also took home the audience award for Best Picture at last year’s SOO Film Festival. (Not literally. There was no actual award given, we were just told about it. Perhaps I will re-fashion one of the bowling trophies that make an appearance in the movie.) More news on the film to follow.
🚶🏻♀️I took two million steps last summer and subsequently wrote about walking, and the effect it can have on both creativity and productivity.
✍️ Years ago I read Woody Guthrie’s New Years resolutions and the list has stuck with me ever since, including one resolution that has since become my motto:
“Keep hoping machine running.”
🛑 More unsolicited advice: over at The Guardian, Sam Parker tells us to “set healthy boundaries – and stop letting anxiety and guilt get in the way of living your life.”
🙂 Ted Gioia offers a list of eight techniques for evaluating character. “See how they treat service workers.” “Watch how they handle unexpected problems.”
♞ On Ethan Hawke’s epistolary novel Rules for a Knight, which is filled with excellent advice and I absolutely recommend. On discipline, which I myself must hone: “Excellence lives in attention to detail. Give your all, all the time. Don’t save anything for the walk home.”
📚 I want to mention this Open Culture piece on the virtue of owning books you haven’t read, and not just because it justifies the library my own home has become. We must defy the human tendency to “overvalue the known and undervalue the unknown.” Adam Sternbergh has a few good thoughts on buying books, too:
“Books make the best souvenirs,” and…
“When critical consensus and your personal proclivities align, act.” I love that.
♟ Life advice from chess hustlers: “The one thing I tell my students is that when you get to a confrontation of any type, you have to remain calm. When you remain calm, you can see the board a lot clearer. You can see the person you’re playing or arguing with a lot more clearly, for who and what they are. So you don’t even have to entertain that shit. You understand?”
And also: “I’m stuck right now. I can’t give any life advice.”
🏀 As you likely know, Lebron James is now the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, surpassing a nearly 40-year-old record held by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The Ringer wrote an excellent article on King James and The Captain and their secrets to greatness.
The Captain himself also weighed in:
“Whenever a sports record is broken—including mine—it’s a time for celebration. It means someone has pushed the boundaries of what we thought was possible to a whole new level. And when one person climbs higher than the last person, we all feel like we are capable of being more.”
He had a lot of nice things to say about James and his presence off the court, but I think we need reminding of Kareem’s greatness, on and also off the court:
“Guided by the footsteps of Jackie Robinson and Bill Russell, Abdul-Jabbar pushed forward, stretching the limits of Black athlete identity. He was, among other qualities, brash and bookish, confident and shy, awkward, aggressive, graceful - and sometimes an immense pain to deal with. He could come off as simultaneously square and the smoothest, coolest cat in the room.
In other words, he was a complete human being, not just the go-along-to-get-along, one-dimensional Black athlete much of America would have preferred him to be.”
🎲 I was asked this week how to play a dice game my friend Adam and I picked up years ago in a bicycle shop in Brooklyn. Since I get asked for the rules all the time, here ya go.
📽 I don’t necessarily need a Knives Out/Muppets crossover, but after watching this faux-trailer for one, I at the very least would like a Muppet Murder Mystery, and am open to writing one should anyone from Disney see this.
🎞 What I don’t personally need is another murder documentary. We are living in the corporate age of the documentary: “Netflix and other streamers battled for market share, documentaries themselves began to change. The streamers had enough data to know what people liked — murders, celebrities, episodes that end with a cliffhanger — and by 2020, when Netflix was releasing a new documentary or docuseries every week, the streamers were competing less for awards than for the next true-crime hit.” Or, in which a medium/genre meant to inform has now become a gigantic commercial product. A look at what this might mean. “Did anybody murder your sister, and do you want to make a film about that?”
💰 If you have time for a really long read, this story on a $30 million dollar lottery scam from the Atlantic is insane. ‘Vitto checked the winning numbers and discovered that he’d won $10,000. “That’s freaking unbelievable!” he said. When he raced back to the office, Gjonaj confessed that he had 2,000 winning tickets. He had won $10 million. Vitto told me Gjonaj gave him $100,000, and asked for his help. They sat up all night drinking Red Bulls and stapling lottery tickets to forms. Their laughter echoed around the empty office: “We’re rich!” “We sat down and he said, ‘I want to show you what’s going on,’” Vitto recalled. Gjonaj drew out his grid and explained how he picked his numbers. Vitto knew it wasn’t possible to game the lottery like this, but he kept quiet. He was grateful for the money and a stable job. “Don’t try to wrap your head around it. He had no system,” Vitto told me.’
🎼 Since it is Sunday I will share this Spotify playlist, inspired by the old Breakfast with the Beatles format that has existed on Sundays since the 70s. Perhaps the most notable version being Chris Carter’s , whom I often interacted with during my music journalism days (all those years ago).
👎 Speaking of, The Beatles got shit on by critics more than you would guess. They did, however, win Album of the Year. Once.
☕️ If The Beatles aren’t your thing, maybe you’re into songs from late ‘80s Wendy’s training videos?
🪡 I’ve been reading up a lot on embroidery for work lately, and wow. Just wow.
🐸 A climate journalist by the name of Josh Gabbatiss, began writing “Josh’es (sic) Book of Animals” when he was a child. He completed it 21 years later. “For me it feels really special because I know that in many ways, I feel the same way as I did when I was nine about these things.”
🏖 I know it’s only February but let’s think about warmer days by reading this lovely little ode to the sea.
📓 Not sure if I entirely agree with this list of the 60 Most Beautiful Words in the English Language, but I did laugh thinking about people arguing about it on the Internet.
🎭 “Practice any art… no matter how well or badly, not to get money or fame, but to experience becoming. To find out what’s inside you. To make your soul grow… Do art for the rest of your lives.” -Kurt Vonnegut, as read by Sir Ian McKellan.
😘 That is all for the first edition of The Weekly Occurrence. If you made it this far and would somehow still like to follow me on other things like Instagram and Twitter, click here. And if you don’t, that’s OK, I will keep on loving you, anyway. Thank you for reading.
Happy Super Bowl day to those who observe. Have a great week, and remember to keep the Hoping Machine running.
Love,
Luke