The Art of Listening, Photos from the International Space Station, etc.

In which I share links on writing, listening, staying alert and more on this first Sunday of Spring.

🌹It’s Spring!

📖 Insightful interview with writer George Saunders. “I found early that, given my limited talent, one way I could reliably make drama was to manufacture some hardship for my character. In (sometimes) exaggerating that state (no sunlit days, at all, ever), the whole thing tips over into the comic and, in the process, the meaning seems to sharpen.”

🙉 The art of listening: “Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.”

☎️ Scam Alert: “For years, a common scam has involved getting a call from someone purporting to be an authority figure, like a police officer, urgently asking you to pay money to help get a friend or family member out of trouble. Now, federal regulators warn, such a call could come from someone who sounds just like that friend or family member — but is actually a scammer using a clone of their voice.”

🌏 Photos from the International Space Station, which orbits the Earth at about 17,150 miles per hour.

🤿 Scuba divers in New Guinea recently captured footage of a jellyfish so rare it’s only been known to have been seen one other time.

🐊 The World Nature Photography Awards recently announced their 2022 winners. I suppose if the Oscars can wait until March, anyone can.

🎞 Speaking of Oscars, this video highlighting its “Best Cinematography” winners since 1967 has some stunning work. I cannot understate how important a director of photography is to a film.

📍An interactive map of places in the United States with the same name, and what city each name is most commonly associated with.

🎡 The Seoul Metropolitan Government has announced the plans for Seoul Ring, a spokeless ferris wheel, which will also be the biggest in the world. “Once it's completed, the Seoul Ring will have 36 carriages, each of which can hold a maximum of 25 people. If it reaches full capacity, the Ferris wheel could accommodate as many as 11,792 people per day.”

🧠 How loneliness reshapes the brain. “Neuroscience suggests that loneliness doesn’t necessarily result from a lack of opportunity to meet others or a fear of social interactions. Instead, circuits in our brain and changes in our behavior can trap us in a catch-22 situation: While we desire connection with others, we view them as unreliable, judgmental and unfriendly. Consequently, we keep our distance, consciously or unconsciously spurning potential opportunities for connections.”

✍️ 9 Ways to Draw a Person is an animated short film about breaking the rules of drawing. “The film's unknown narrator prompts the audience with something odd, yet visually concrete, like ‘You can draw a person like a bird,’ but quickly veers into the incongruous ‘draw a person how a bird might draw them,’ before going full abstract with ‘draw a person how a bird would speak or how a bird chirps.’ Many of the ‘ways’ of drawing simply illustrate that there is no one or two or nine ways to draw, but that people in art can be constructed out of anything, in any way."

🎨 Leonardo da Vinci might be best known for the Mona Lisa, but he had a “monstrous side,” too. “We think of him painting the beautiful: Ginevra de’ Benci, Cecilia Gallerani and Salai glow with glossy hair and good bone structure. Yet alongside his fascination with youth and loveliness Leonardo was obsessed with irregular, diseased and aged faces whose “monstrous” distortions he drew with daunting precision.”

🪷 Today I learned about the Oakland Buddha, a statue installed by a disgruntled citizen in Oakland, California sick of the frequent illegal dumping in the median. Since he (illegally) placed the statue, it’s become a shrine and place of worship. Oakland Police estimated that by 2014, crime had decreased in the immediate area by 82%.

🎬 Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet has made a fun short using footage from his own Amélie. The titular character is now a spy for the KGB. Probably only for fans, but if you’ve never seen Amélie, do so. Subtitled yes, but also kind and just frankly delightful.

📺 The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is coming back. Season 5 begins April 15. Plenty of time to catch up. The B/C plots weren’t as interesting to me at first, but improve greatly as the show goes on. But it’s always the Midge and Susie show, just as it should be. And the stand-up is solid, something I rarely, rarely say about stand-up within shows or film.

⚽️ For the record, I don’t prefer Twitter threads, but if you are a Ted Lasso fan, here is a decent primer on the character’s history.

📚 Questlove is entering the publishing world, forming “his own book imprint within MCD Books, a publishing division at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where he will acquire an eclectic mix of fiction and nonfiction that ranges from memoir and books by social media stars to works about music history and business.” His first two books will be a memoir by Sly Stone and a history of the first fifty years of hip-hop. Can’t. Wait.

🎼 A Sumerian hymn, written 3,400 years ago, seems to be the oldest song in the world. Unearthed from a clay tablet in the 1950s, the piece “flies in the face of most musicologists’ views that ancient harmony was virtually non-existent (or even impossible) and the scale only about as old as the Ancient Greeks.”

🤘Carol Kaye, who just turned 88 a few days ago, is the most recorded bassist of all time. With over 10,000 sessions under her belt, she has worked on Pet Sounds, at least two awesome Nancy Sinatra songs and “Feelin’ Alright” by Joe Cocker.

😊 I will leave you with some thoughts on happiness I found via author Austin Kline. The first is the idea of putting some emphasis on what you don’t want: “I think the idea of gratitude for that which we don’t have and don’t want is both simple and profound.” The second, and I think it is related, is from an interview with author Helen Garner:

“It’s taken me 80 years to figure out that it’s not a tranquil, sunlit realm at the top of the ladder you’ve spent your whole life hauling yourself up, rung by rung. It’s more like the thing that Christians call grace: you can’t earn it, you can’t strive for it, it’s not a reward for virtue. It exists all right, it will be given to you, but it’s fluid, it’s evasive, it’s out of reach. It’s something you glimpse in the corner of your eye until one day you’re up to your neck in it. And before you’ve had time to take a big gasp and name it, it’s gone.

So I’m not going to spend what’s left of my life hanging round waiting for it. I’m going to settle for small, random stabs of extreme interestingness – moments of intense awareness of the things I’m about to lose, and of gladness that they exist. Things that remind me of other things. Tiny scenes. Words that people choose, their accidentally biblical turns of phrase. Hand-lettered signs, quotes from books, offhand remarks that make me think of dead people, or of living ones I can no longer stand the sight of. I plan to keep writing them down, praising them, arranging them like stepping stones into the dark. Maybe they’ll lead me somewhere good before I shrivel up and blow away.”

✌️ And with that, I bid you adieu. Have a great week, and remember to keep the Hoping Machine running.

Love,

Luke