Here are a few frames from the Gene Deitch’s animated version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” The original Hans Christian Andersen story is essential reading for understanding our times, but, as I have noted before, you must pay close attention to the ending. I would also point out that in the Nunnally translation, the emperor’s new clothes are invisible to anyone “unfit for his position or inexcusably stupid.” (Show me a fairy tale more on-the-nose!)
I was listening to her song “No” and and tweeted this photo of Tor Maries’ (aka Billy Nomates) recording setup in her dad’s shed (found in SFJ’s most recent newsletter) and Maries tweeted back: “Holy shit. You wrote how to steal like an artist. your never gunna believe this. I’m desperately trying to find it but I cut out a quote from that book a year ago and stuck it on my wall.” She found it and tweeted it to me:
Love it. And I can never get enough of seeing home studio setups. Looking forward to Spencer Tweedy’s photo book, Mirror Sound, about musicians who self-record.
I have blogged before about my love for my paper dictionary, but a few days ago I posted this reminder to Instagram:
Someone yesterday seemed incredulous that I had a paper dictionary open on my desk. Let me tell you: it is the best $5 you will spend at Goodwill. Keep it open nearby, and look up words in it constantly. (This one is an American Heritage.) As you’re looking for a word, you will be distracted by other words. This is a feature, not a bug. If you don’t know what to write about, you can just turn to a random page and start reading and stealing words. Bonus points if you use a pencil to mark words you’ve looked up and why. I also keep one open in the living room and look up definitions with the kids when they want to know what a word means.
And just a few days later, I discovered that my kindergartner (although, are you really a kindergartener if you never actually go to kindergarten?) had got into my stamp pad and done this:
In David Lynch’s Catching The Big Fish he writes about how ideas are like catching fish, but this video contains a really beautiful collage of him speaking about ideas, not just as fish, but also as seeds:
Ideas are so beautiful and they’re so abstract. And they do exist someplace. I don’t know if there’s a name for it. And I think they exist, like fish. And I believe that if you sit quietly, like you’re fishing, you will catch ideas. The real, you know, beautiful, big ones swim kinda deep down there so you have to be very quiet, and you know, wait for them to come along. …
If you catch an idea, you know, any idea, it wasn’t there and then it’s there! It might just be a small fragment, of, like I say, a feature film or a song of a lyric or whatever, but you gotta write that idea down right away. And as you’re writing, sometimes it’s amazing how much comes out, you know, from that one flash…
So, you get an idea and it is like a seed. And in your mind the idea is seen and felt and it explodes like it’s got electricity and light connected to it. And it has all the images and the feeling. And it’s like in an instant you know the idea, in an instant…
Then, the thing is translating that to some medium. It could be a film idea or a painting idea or a furniture idea. It doesn’t matter. It wants to be something. It’s a seed for something. So, the whole thing is translating that idea to a medium. And in the case of film, it takes a long time and you always need to go back and stay true to that idea…
Lynch talks about ideas the way Lynda Barry talks about images and Nick Cave talks about songs — that they live somewhere else, that they’re not inside trying to get out, they’re outside trying to get in.
See also: “Look at your fish.”
(h/t Rob Walker)
Here is one of my prized possessions: a letter from the late, great writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks. He sent it to me in 2014, after seeing my drawing of his book, Musicophilia:
I was thinking this weekend about how much he would’ve liked the documentary My Octopus Teacher. (Note his letterhead above. He loved cephalopods and considered them kindred spirits — they’re smart and they surround themselves with ink! “They called me Inky as a boy,” he wrote in his memoir, On The Move, “and I still seem to get as ink stained as I did seventy years ago.”)
I also rewatched this wonderful video of him showing off his writing desk:
I want company, even if it’s inorganic…I think some of the happiest years of my life were between 10 and 14 when I had a passion for chemistry in general, and metals, in particular. And now, I’ve left my hometown, and my parents are dead, and my brothers are dead, and so much of the past is gone…this rather childlike, chemical bench-like desk appeals to me, gives me some comfort, and makes me feel at home.
I count myself extremely fortunate to possess a letter in his hand. His obituary noted that he received over 10,000 letters a year. He called it an “intercourse with the world,” and said, “I invariably reply to people under 10, over 90 or in prison.” I fit none of those criteria, and I still had the honor.
To my shame, I never wrote back. I had just moved studios and I couldn’t find the drawing and I didn’t want to write back to him until I found it. By the time I did find the drawing I read that he had terminal cancer and I didn’t want to bother him. Just one of my regrets…
Now all I can do is celebrate him by sharing his work and writing back as much as I can. (I look forward to the forthcoming documentary.)
Filed under: Oliver Sacks
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