Jack Kerouac on Kindness, Paper Towns, Art in the Simpsons, etc.
In which I share a lot about (mostly) the arts, but also myself in the process.
😃 “Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now.” -Jack Kerouac
🏛 Having an art museum designed by the world-renowned Zaha Hadid just down the street from my office is something I take for granted. Here is an excellent introduction on the late architect’s brilliant career.
💐 Azuma Makoto designs temporary sculptures using hundreds of frozen flowers on a snow-coated lake on a peninsula in Japan. “Arranged on a scaffold and surrounded by a field of snow, bunches of flowers and foliage in a range of colors and textures are doused with water before they solidify into thousands of icicles. The artist and a team of assistants worked through the night, waiting until temperatures were at their lowest so that the ice would form quickly. The following morning, the sun revealed the finished composition, and by design, ultimately melted it.”
🎄 Sometimes nature is just as artistic.
🖼 A Twitter thread of art references in The Simpsons.
📺 Succession will end after season four. Absolutely recommend this very dark dramedy and commend them for quitting while they’re ahead. I personally think most shows go on too long past their expiration date.
🍿 I’m not into “lists” too much these days and I don’t agree with the results, but props to Steven Hyden for watching and ranking every Steven Speilberg film. Spielberg was the president and CEO of my childhood (E.T., Jurassic Park, Jaws, Indiana Jones, etc.), not only for what he directed, but also produced (the latter including Gremlins, Back to the Future and The Goonies) His output is frankly staggering; in 1993 he released Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List.
🌟 When the stars align, well, I just have to post about that, especially when its these stars…
🎥 Darth Vader, as voiced by Frank Costanza.
📍 I never knew about “paper towns” until this week. “In the 1930s, Otto G. Lindberg, director of the General Drafting Co. (GDC), and his assistant, Ernest Alpers, were charged with creating a New York state map, and they plotted the fictional town of Agloe — an anagram of their initials — on a dirt road between Beaverkill and Rockland. What they created is known as a ‘trap’ or ‘paper town,’ a device used as a type of copyright protection.”
🚴♀️ “There were two types of kids in the 1970s and 1980s, those who were on the bike doing a jump, and those who were lying on the ground being jumped over.”
🛹 Dan Sinker, founder of Punk Planet (RIP), on skating and waiting. “To skateboard is to see the world as a challenge, a series of obstacles to overcome, a new terrain to master. You fall and you get up and you fall again, an endless loop of pain and frustration until, finally, elation.” That says a lot right there. Reminded me of this video of filmmaker Werner Herzog on skating. “I’m not familiar with the scene of skateboarding. At the same time, I had the feeling, yes, that’s kind of my people… You have to accept trial and error…”
🎞 And speaking of Herzog, his rules for filmmakers can be applied to many facets of life. “Send out all your dogs and one might return with prey.” “Learn to live with your mistakes.” “Ask for forgiveness, not permission.”
👻 Hope in the Dark: “Ancient and medieval European ghost stories do not meet the expectations of modern tales of supernatural horror… yet these tales are rewarding resources for teaching students about classical antiquity and the Western Middle Ages because they provide us with the opportunity to ask probing questions about how people in the past imagined the relationship between the living and the dead.”
🤖 I’m no AI alarmist (not even sure most use the term correctly) but I did find this was interesting: so far, a sci-fi publication has gotten over 350 submissions this month generated from AI, out of the thousand or so total submissions. It’s double how many they got last month.
😷 The FDA has authorized the first at-home test for both COVID-19 and the flu.
📔 Speaking of publications, a design blog I stumbled on while working has scans of some wonderful old periodicals, including habitat catalogs from the 1980s, a crepe/pancake instruction manual from the 1970s, and a granite catalog from 1898.
👨💻 Here’s a new thing: thanks to working remotely, we are seeing people take multiple full-time jobs.
🎧 Bandcamp users can now build playlists within the app. “In order to add a song to a playlist, it has to appear in a user’s collection of purchased music. Songs can be added from a track or album’s context menu or via one long press on a track. Playlists can also be downloaded for offline listening. The company has promised that more playlist features are being developed.”
🎼 Ten-year-old Olive Wallace composed a song and her mother shared the penciled piece of paper on TikTok. “I need to know… if it makes any sense.” The Internet answered.
📚 A look at what we can learn by Barnes and Nobles’ surprising turnaround. “Here’s the surprise: the company has been a failure at digital media, and has succeeded by embracing the most antiquated technology of them all: the printed book.”
📖 Speaking of books, a new publisher is editing Roald Dahl, and arguably not for the best. “Sensitivity reading, yes, but not for old books.” Looks like Penguin has taken note.
🐻 A bear in Colorado took about 400 photos of itself using a wildlife camera.
🐰 Back to the positive side of publishing. This week I discovered Battle Bunny Written by Mac Barnett and drawn by Jon Scieszka (The Stinky Cheese Man! The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs!). The premise is simple: a kid has drawn all over a kids’ book, essentially making his own:
“Combine a traditional, super-sweet children's book with some whimsical doomsday over-text and hand-drawn illustrations of a rabbit on a rampage, throw in a few poison snakes, turtle attacks and forest animals doing somersault-kick-whomp wrestling moves, and you have the ‘Battle Bunny,’ formerly known as ‘Birthday Bunny.’”
The New York Times ran a piece with photos when it was released. I love it, but it should be noted Strongbad beat Barnett and Scieszka to the punch.
✌️That is all for today. Have a great week, and remember to keep the Hoping Machine running.
Love,
Luke
