Life imitates comedy
Life imitates comedy
10 things worth sharing this week
Happy Friday the 13th. I couldn’t resist starting off with this scene I discovered after getting back from dropping my kids off at school. Life imitates comedy.
Here are 10 other things I thought were worth sharing this week:
How to write a book. (I printed this out for my motivation corner.)
Iggy Pop on his mother’s love. (Compare with the father of 1/2 of Daft Punk.)
Reading: I’m slowly making my way through Tree Abraham’s Cyclettes, which reads to me like a mashup of the numbered structure of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and the vibe of Keri Smith’s The Wander Society. (Sold to me by the author’s mood board — the power of showing your work!)
A few years ago, I wrote about reading more than one book at a time and letting them talk to each other. Someone asked me what that actually looks like in practice, so I wrote about a few times when two or more books led to a new piece of writing.
The hottest Gen Z Gadget is a 20-year-old digital camera. (I’m enjoying this strain of “the kids are alright” from the NYTimes. See also: “Luddite teens.”)
Music: Billy Nomates’ Cacti is out today. At the time of writing this, I haven’t listened to it — I’m going out to the actual record store to buy a copy! (I wrote about her in “A shed of one’s own.”)
Movies: I once took my pregnant wife to get a cheeseburger at an acclaimed restaurant in Austin and they wouldn’t serve us ketchup because “tomatoes aren’t in season,” so yeah, the horror/satire The Menu was definitely my cup of tea. (For pizza night with the kids: we liked Matilda (1996) directed by Danny DeVito and shot by cinematographer Stefan Czapsky, who also did a bunch of Tim Burton movies, like Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, and Batman Returns.)
I didn’t watch the Golden Globes, but I caught the heartwarming acceptance speeches of Ke Huy Quan and Jennifer Coolidge, both of which are about resilience and luck and and just keeping going.
RIP poet Charles Simic. I wrote about his friendship with the artist Saul Steinberg.
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xoxo,
Austin
“Not because it’s lucrative, but because I’m invested in the discovery of this. What I learn about myself. How it makes me feel alive.” Haven’t read a better reason why writing is purely human -- imitated yet never equalled by a digital algorithm. And it makes me happy 😊 Thanks (again), Austin.
I have a small Polaroid camera I take everywhere. I got tired of iPhone pictures and trying to change the moment by changing the filter. In the 80s, the pictures you took were the pictures you got. Period. And while at the time you wanted to toss them all in the trash after picking them up from the pharmacy, when you look back at them now, those are more than pictures, they’re memories. You had no filter option to make yourself look better. Actually, you looked pretty good at the time. That’s what a Polaroid does, it captures a memory. No filter. No retake. I tell my twenty-something kids, ‘You may not like the photos I take with my Polaroid now, but you will someday. You’ll remember the moment. Not how a filter made you look.’ They think I’m crazy. I know I’m not. And all those Polaroids land in my journals. With words that add to the memory. Like writing a book. Words and pictures. And you don’t have to know how to read to understand the story...