Island time

10 things worth sharing this week

Scenes from paradise

Hey y’all,

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. I’m still recovering from a family trip to Hawaii. I survived a surf lesson and a tsunami! Watched a dozen sunsets. Built sand castles. Swam with sea turtles. Befriended lizards. Dodged roosters. Drank mai tais. Despite (or maybe because of) all that, I don’t think I had a single creative thought while I was out there, and my brains only came back to me once I returned the mainland. (I couldn’t help this trip but to think of Socrates, who was quoted by Seneca: “How can you wonder your travels do you no good, when you carry yourself with you? You are saddled with the very thing that drove you away.”)
   
   

2. New musical toy: I bought an Akai MPK Mini Play MK3 so we would have a portable keyboard and MIDI controller we could use for making music while we were away from home. Love this thing:
   

   

   
   

3. Bay Area art: I saw a bunch of good shows on a one-day layover in San Francisco on the way home. No surprise that the Ruth Asawa retrospective at SFMOMA is great, but I was impressed with the rest of the museum, especially Ragnar Kjartansson’s video installation The Visitors. I was a bit underwhelmed by the exhibition design of Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes From Art at the Legion of Honor — I think this video and the well-done catalog might make the case even better. (We did enjoy hearing Bach on The Spreckels Organ.) I missed his show at Gallery 16, but picked up a deluxe copy of Mostly Everything: The Art of Tucker Nichols. A more under-the-radar show that’s fantastic is Mary Blair: Mid-Century Magic at The Walt Disney Family Museum in the Presidio. (Don’t miss the multiplane camera on display in the gift shop.) Finally, some of the best art in the city is the SFO Museum’s public art on display at the airport!
   
   

4. “What’s your best travel tip?” Loved reading these. Kevin Kelly on logistics: “Laser out, meander back.” Nick Parker on getting your bearings: “Go on water, go up something high.” Malika Henderson’s Proustian suggestion to buy a local scented product and use it the whole trip: “After you're home, use that same product a month or a year later, and you'll be flooded with travel memories.”
   
   

5. Earworm memories: I made a sequel to last year’s Oahu mixtape based on a bunch of stuff we listened to while driving around in our rental car. You can listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.

   

   
   

6. There’s a funny scene in Zoolander when Owen Wilson’s character is listing his heroes and he says, “Sting…. The music he’s created over the years? I don’t really listen to it, but the fact that he’s making it? I respect that.” That’s sort of how I feel about Billy Joel, actually. I enjoy some of his hits, but I really enjoyed the 5-hour documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes. (Though, how is it not named Piano Man?) I admire Joel’s self-effacing spirit and the way he’s honest about his art and his limitations. (“Elton [John] would say to me, ‘Why don’t you put out more albums?’ I would say, ‘Why don’t you put out less albums?’”)
   
   

7. “So preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” While we were on Kauai, we listened to John Williams’ Jurassic Park soundtrack, I copied my 12-year-old and re-read Michael Crichton’s original novel (here’s the story of how Chip Kidd designed the cover), and we watched the Jurassic World trilogy, which starts okay, then gets progressively worse with each movie. (I think Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park is a popcorn masterpiece, and it’s one of my favorite movies to re-watch in black and white.)
   
   

8. While we’re on the subject of Spielberg, I thought I knew a lot about Jaws, but I learned all kinds of stuff from Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story, including this touching scene of Spielberg sneaking onto the Orca at Universal Studios and crying. (I also loved seeing Steven Soderbergh nerd out on the film — for more of that, see item #9 in my letter, “Summer Plans.”)
   
   

9. RIP Ozzy Osbourne. Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” is one of my favorite pieces of music. (I don’t consider it a coincidence that we were watching SpongeBob in a hotel room when I found out he died.) Here’s my favorite clip of Ozzy, from Penelope Spheeris’s The Decline of Western Civilization Part II. There are at least two very good books about Black Sabbath: John Darnielle’s Master of Reality and Geezer Butler’s memoir, Into The Void. (Yes, Ozzy peed on the Alamo. But Forget The Alamo!)
   
   

10. “I used to collect rocks… now all I want is time.” Don’t miss my typewriter interview with cartoonist Liana Finck.
    

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xoxo,

Austin