Loving What You Do, What Gratitude and Kindness Look Like, Einstein's Advice to His Son, etc.

In which I continue to share advice, a lot of news about upcoming movie news (but not mine... yet) and other links about bugs, birds and dinosaurs.

👩‍💻 Ann Friedman is a journalist, author and essayist who has been running a newsletter similar to this for ten years. I just stumbled upon it this week, and found her reflections on writing for so long inspirational.

“This newsletter is one way I've made my road. It's kept me focused on the next step rather than a perceived destination in the distance. Showing up to write this for 505 weeks (I skipped a few in the early days, but not a single one since 2016) has allowed me to embrace imperfection. It's provided both pressure and release. It's helped me accept that I often say the wrong thing, I say too much, I don’t say enough. It's reassured me that there’s always next week. To try again. To do it better.”

❤️ Of course, to keep on doing anything, you really have to love your idea. This week, Austin Kleon shared this quote author Robert Greene: “You have to really love your idea. It has to be something from deep within. It has to be personal. It has to excite you on a deep level. Because you’re going to have to persevere for several years. There are going to be a lot of critics, a lot of mean-spirited people are gonna say, ‘You can never do that!’

When you create anything, the spirit you create it with, the energy, the excitement, is translated into the product itself. So when somebody writes a book just for money, you can kind of smell it. When you read the book, it kind of reeks. We can sense that. But when the writer is excited, it excites the reader. So the love and the desire you put into your project will translate.”

✍️ Einstein would have turned 144 this week. In honor, some fatherly advice he wrote to his son on the secret to learning anything: “That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes.”

✅ Motivation spewed on the Internet can get daunting. Annoying, even. Everyone needs to get taken down a peg now and then, haha.

📷 The NPR blog Goats & Soda asked photographers from around the world for pics from their archives that capture “gratitude and kindness” and the results are worth your time.

❓What happened to the Jello-O Pudding Pop? An in-depth report.

🍿 Quentin Tarantino’s supposed “last film” will apparently be shooting this fall. Set in the ‘70s, not much else has been said about what is called The Film Critic, but reading his recent book and listening to his new podcast, that Pauline Kael is the inspiration seems likely.

📽 If you’ve never seen Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense, it will be hitting theaters again soon. This teaser trailer has me unreasonably excited.

🍔 I’m sure some of you would be more happy to know that Good Burger 2 is coming to Paramount+.

🚫 I agree with A.O. Scott on the modern “fan.” The critic I’ve been reading for three decades is packing it in, in part to start writing about literature. This really got to me:

“I’m not a fan of modern fandom. This isn’t only because I’ve been swarmed on Twitter by angry devotees of Marvel and DC and (more recently) Top Gun: Maverick and Everything Everywhere All at Once. It’s more that the behavior of these social media hordes represents an anti-democratic, anti-intellectual mind-set that is harmful to the cause of art and antithetical to the spirit of movies. Fan culture is rooted in conformity, obedience, group identity and mob behavior, and its rise mirrors and models the spread of intolerant, authoritarian, aggressive tendencies in our politics and our communal life.”

Just some food for thought. Hope he does well in his next endeavor.

🖼 Filmmaker George Lucas is opening a museum. “The site will host exhibits dedicated to all forms of visual storytelling, including painting, photography, sculpture, illustration, comic art, performance, and video.” He has always had a strong opinion on what belongs in a museum.

🤖 Google, Siri, Alexa, have all been around for far too long to not dominate the AI market, yet here we are. How did three of the biggest companies of all time let this happen? One of the things that has surprised me is how often I see people using AI chats to answer what could be just as simple Google queries, something that should have been engrained in them over the last twenty years.

🩰 On the contradictions and discipline of ballet: “Ballet is full of contradictions. The dancer must take every effort to make everything look effortless. Repetition and ritual are, as Robb notes, the source of an extreme sense of escape and sense of control…The discipline required of ballet is more than just a source of tension or admiration. Discipline is productive. It quite literally creates the dancer.”

📜 Most ancient literature didn’t survive. “The Library of Alexandria could have contained between 532,800 and 700,000 volumes in scroll form, all of them lost by the time Julius Caesar burned it down in 48 B.C..” And papyrus wasn’t ideal, either: “Most papyri had to be recopied every century or so.”

🪫 In Nottingham, they are leveraging the power of used EV batteries: “City authorities have installed 40 two-way electric vehicle chargers that are connected to solar panels and a pioneering battery energy storage system, which will together power a number of on-site facilities and a fleet of 200 municipal vehicles while simultaneously helping to decarbonize the UK’s electrical grid.”

🦜 Maybe you need birds whistling Earth, Wind and Fire in your life.

🦕 The Mamenchisaurus, roamed East Asia 162 million years ago and had 50-foot-long neck, so says a new paper published this week.

🪲 I’ve been staring at these incredible photos of bugs for a bit too long this morning.

😘 End of the line this week, folks. I’ve got a productive afternoon ahead of me and hopefully a bar filled with friends to get to this evening for basketball. Go Green(!), and remember to keep the Hoping Machine running.

Love,

Luke