Overheard on the Titanic

10 things worth sharing this week

“Overheard on the Titanic,” newspaper + marker, 2008 (also the opening page of my book, Keep Going)

Hey y’all,

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

1. RIP R&B legend D’Angelo. If you are somehow new to his music, you have such a beautiful feast in store for you. I would start with his classic, Voodoo (2000), then listen to my personal favorite, Black Messiah (2014), and swing back to his debut, Brown Sugar (2005). Or, watch his live performances: “Chicken Grease” on The Chris Rock Show in 1999, a full set at Afropunk Fest in 2014, “Really Love” on SNL in 2015, and a cover of Prince’s “Sometimes It Snows in April” in 2016. He was tapped into the spirit, and I love what he said of what he learned from singing in church: “Don’t be up here trying to be cute, you know? Because we don’t care about all that. We just want to feel what you… what the spirit is moving through you…. So you shut yourself down and you let whatever’s coming come through you.”
   
   

2. “I kept telling myself that I was an artist. The awful truth was, no matter how hard I tried, I was an actress.” RIP Diane Keaton. She not only starred in classics like The Godfather and Annie Hall, she also directed, took photographs and loved to make collages: “I’m just a person who cuts out paper, throws it up on the wall.”
   
   

3. “As a kid, I was a ceaseless daydreamer, making doodles and odd idiosyncratic drawings while I was supposed to be paying attention in school. They were wildly elaborate and the nuns took to referring to these leaves of absence as going to ‘Tony World.’ I’d make constant, ever-evolving drawings on my school papers; snakes, choppy arrow shapes, blood drops and networks of circles and airplanes and skulls– just whatever and it would make my teachers nuts.” RIP artist Tony Fitzpatrick. He made collages I was nuts about and wrote beautifully about them on his blog. He also acted and had a real #showyourwork ethos he passed on to younger artists: “If you work hard, you’re consistent, you share your work, good things will happen.”
   
   

4. RIP movie poster artist Drew Struzan. I had several of his posters up in my childhood bedroom — my favorite was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. (The other morning I drove past a man jogging with a headlamp on and he looked just like The Thing.)
   
   

5. “One of the beautiful things about art is the way that our practice can allow us to lift out of our normal, habitual selves and into someone better/more interesting.” George Saunders being sane about “problematic” art. See also my chart from Keep Going:

   

6. I think even non-fiction writers could glean something from this advice about how to write a novel with the kitchen sink thrown in. (I’m a big fan of multiple notebooks and bulletin boards.)
   
   

7. “Songs, unlike people, have remarkable patience as they wait for someone to hear what they’re saying.” I read Warren Zanes’ Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska and listened to the album for the first time (!!!) in anticipation of the biopic and Walter Martin’s Springsteen Season. (The stuff that Springsteen was into while he was making Nebraska could almost fill a newsletter: Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop,” Hank Mizell’s “Jungle Rock,” Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People,” Hank Williams’s “A Mansion on the Hill,” and Robert Frank’s The Americans.)
   
   

8. “Every instrument has a story. And every musician is ready to tell it.” Damon Krukowski shares an excerpt from his new book, Why Sound Matters.
   
   

9. “What we’re seeing here is the end of Western civilization as we know it.” If you’re looking for a cozy autumnal movie, it’s hard to beat 1998’s You’ve Got Mail. Our 10-year-old couldn’t hang in, but our almost-13-year-old did. It’s great — the weirdest part is how nostalgic the characters are in the movie, and how nostalgic I am, now, for the time they’re in.

   
   

10. “Creativity IS magic.” Don’t miss my typewriter interview with Pam Grossman.

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xoxo,

Austin