10 great music movies I saw this year

Tuesday, December 7, 2021

A wrote about some of my favorite feature-length flicks about bands and songwriting in today’s newsletter.

My chat with David Epstein

Thursday, December 2, 2021

Here’s video of my chat with David Epstein, author of Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Our conversation, as we had hoped, ranged all over the place. Of particular interest to me:

1. He told me he reads a lot of fiction to try to pick up interesting approaches to structure. He credited his experience helping a film editor friend who had a hand injury — literally sitting there all day and clicking the mouse for him — as hugely instructive. (This didn’t surprise me, as I learned a ton about writing from film editor Walter Murch’s book, In the Blink of an Eye.) He also said that he’s taken fiction classes.

2. As for his reading diet, he said he reads The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and New Scientist to sort of get leads on what to read next.

3. He keeps “a book of small experiments,” where he forces himself, if he gets in “a rut of competence,” to try out and learn new things.

Here are my prep notes:

Thanks, David! Check out his newsletter, Range Widely.

Catching a wave

Tuesday, November 30, 2021

In today’s newsletter is a zine about The Beatles, surfing, and the creative process.

Street art

Thursday, November 25, 2021

Walks around my neighborhood have been extra-good lately. After declaring it art, I decided this Budweiser can needed its own museum label:

The text is from Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium:

My method has entailed, more often than not, the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight from human figures, from celestial bodies, from cities. Above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of the story and from language….

When the human realm seems doomed to heaviness, I feel the need to fly like Perseus into some other space. I am not talking about escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I feel the need to change my approach, to look at the world from a different angle, with different logic, different methods of knowing and proving.

Calvino is talking about writing and reading, but he could also talk about my approach to walking.

If I go for a walk, the day never feels like a waste. Each walk is a little adventure with a beginning, middle, and end. On your walk, you never know what you’ll find or who you’ll bump into. This week I met Cindy Schiffgens, who was on the sidewalk painting one of my favorite houses: