Earlier this month I had the pleasure of getting to chat about Don’t Call It Art with art coach Beth Pickens. I started off the conversation by describing the dream I had after seeing Bob Dylan live:
You can watch the whole thing here.
Typewriter interview with Mark Haddon
My most recent typewriter interview — a big hit with readers! — is with author and illustrator Mark Haddon, who said it was the most enjoyable interview he’s ever done and bestowed upon me my new title, “Prince of Analogue.”
What happens when a character says the title of the movie
There is something absurd about hearing a character in a movie utter the title of the movie they’re in out loud. It’s a moment that can be played for laughs, but it’s just as hard not to smirk when a film that takes itself seriously calls itself by its own name. Many filmmakers will go out of their way to avoid this moment of clunky announcement. You never hear, for example, Daniel Day-Lewis snarl, “Welp, there will be blood,” or Leonardo DiCaprio mutter, “You know, man, it’s always just one battle after another.”
That last sentence reminded me of an old Fresh Air interview with the director of those two movies, Paul Thomas Anderson:
Terry Gross: I kept waiting in the movie for somebody to say, “There will be blood!”
PTA: I had a friend, Terry, that any time he would go to see a film, and the title of the film was said onscreen, he would scream out, in the audience, this horrible obnoxious noise. He’d say, “Buc-KAW!” Really loud. So I just always remember… god, if I ever… my friend would scream from the back of the audience!
I told my kids that story years ago and from that point on whenever it happens in a movie we watch they’ll let out a loud “Buc-KAW!”
It just happened last night, in fact, when we watched What About Bob? and Julie Hagerty shouts, several times, “What about Bob?!?” They also did it last week when Richard Attenborough said, “Welcome… to Jurassic Park!” And come to think of it, it would be funny to note which pizza night movies get a “Buc-KAW!” or not. (Psycho, for example, has no “Buc-Kaw!” moment.)
A shortage of fun
I found this diary comic from (checks notes) five years ago.
In last Friday’s newsletter, I wrote:
In the “Who’s having fun?” section of Don’t Call It Art, I quote Ed Emberley saying, “I am determined to have fun doing my work… if I’m enjoying myself then that feeling is passed on to the reader.” Somebody who seems like she’s having a lot of fun right now is cookbook author Julia Turshen, who recently published a romance novel. (“I feel more relaxed about this than I’ve felt about anything in my career,” she says. “This just feels really fun.”) I recommend looking around you, especially in your field, and seeing who seems to be having fun right now. (And figure out if they have something you can steal!)
A reader then sent me a Slate post with the subhead, “Erling Haaland is having fun. Remember fun?”
And a headline from Bloomberg a few days ago: “The Great American Fun Shortage of 2026.”
(Then again, Iggy Pop was singing about having “no fun” in 1969.)
It’s very difficult to be very lazy
“It’s very difficult to be very lazy. It takes a lot of imagination to do nothing and you have to be sufficiently self-confident not to have a bad conscience. You have to have a taste for life, so that every minute is complete in itself and so you don’t have to keep saying ‘I’ve done this or that.’ You need strong nerves to do nothing. Being lazy also means that other people’s opinions don’t matter. Nor does the idea of always having to prove yourself.”
—Françoise Sagan“I’m a really lazy bitch, but I have a punitive superego. The two go together.”
—Colson Whitehead“I’m pretty lazy, but I’m very disciplined.”
—Hanif Abdurraqib“Self employment, for me at least, is a never-ending contest between the world’s worst manager and the world’s laziest employee.”
—Daniel Akst“Nobody really cares whether you do it or not. You have to make yourself do it. I’m very lazy and I suffer as a result. Of course, when it’s going well there’s nothing in the world like it. But it’s also very lonely. If you do something you’re really pleased with, you’re in the crazy position of being exhilarated all by yourself.”
—Robert Stone“Now relieved of the financial need to write a line for 10 years, I may discover abysses of laziness within myself and do just that.”
—John Updike, letter“To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself. The book-learning gradually dribbles away; problems melt and dissolve; ties are gently severed; thinking, when you deign to indulge in it, becomes very primitive; the body becomes a new and wonderful instrument; you look at plants or stones or fish with different eyes; you wonder what people are struggling to accomplish by their frenzied activities; you know there is a war on but you haven’t the faintest idea what it’s about or why people should enjoy killing one another!”
—Henry Miller
Happy Friday. Let’s get lazy.
- ← Newer posts
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- …
- 652
- Older posts→