I spent a good chunk of the beginning of my book Ultra-Something talking about the movie Rocky, so of course when this CinemaStix video about it popped up in my YouTube feed, I of course watched it, and of course was not disappointed (although I did already know the bit of trivia about the skating rink scene). (video)
I am a big believer that you don’t have to have gone to film school to make films, and that you don’t have to go to art school to make art, and that you don’t have to have an MFA (or even a college degree) to be a writer, but it sure feels nice when someone smart says it, so here’s Linda Carroll’s piece “The magic of self-taught writers”
I did not know I needed to read this profile of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (although I am interested in his new movie, The Smashing Machine), but as Jason Kottke put it, “Sam Anderson” can write. I laughed out loud at this sentence, which is a master stroke in how to use punctuation to make a joke: I do not need to introduce you to Dwayne “Dwayne ‘the Rock’ Johnson” Johnson.
I got to meet with newsletter sponsor Precision Fuel & Hydration CEO Andy Blow and COO Jonny Tye last month, a few days before Jonny was to crew Dan Jones, who was running the UTMB. Afterward, I thought, “I should have asked Jonny if he’s ever kept track of all the food he eats while crewing,” because that (to me) would be really interesting. Fast-forward a few weeks to me reading the “Crewing 101: How to crew an endurance athlete” article on the PFH website, scrolling to the end, and found this chart comparing the nutrition intake of Chris Myers, who took 5th in the Western States Endurance Run, and Brad Williams, who helped crew Chris (it looks like Brad was a little under-nourished, in my opinion):
I clicked on this link, When Bruce Lee Trained With Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and was delighted to see it had been written by Jeff Chang, who wrote one of my favorite hip hop history books ever, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop. The article tells the story of the friendship between the two men, which started when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was a junior at UCLA, who had just won the college basketball championship. I didn’t realize until the end that the piece is actually an excerpt from Chang’s new book, Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America, which is also exciting (but is also going to cost me $35).
I have a vague memory of this thing happening when I was a kid playing Super Mario Bros on the original Nintendo, but had not idea it was a “glitch” that inspired many other secret glitchy features in video games for years afterward. (thanks, Ed)
I think Keith Haring’s art is still relevant, and if you don’t believe me, how about this bit that Jillian Hess dug up from Keith Haring’s Journals? “Money is the opposite of magic. Art is magic. The worlds of art and money are constantly intermingling. To survive this mixture the magic in art has to be applied in new ways. Magic must always triumph.”
I am writing this post a few hours before I go to the theater to see One Battle After Another, so all I can say about this long read about the film is that it made me even more excited to see it. I didn’t know that Paul Thomas Anderson walked out of film school at NYU because a professor snobbily dismissed Terminator 2: Judgment Day as an unserious movie, but that makes me like him. Also, this line: “It turns out that the answer to the thought experiment of whether a director already widely canonized for the consistent quality of his craft can handle the sort of massive budget more often handed over to hacks is—resoundingly—“yes.”
Marty Brodsky and I met maybe eight or nine years ago, I think at an event I did at the Boulder Bookstore, and I’ve been following his writing ever since (I have included several of his recent Substack essays in this newsletter). He reached out and asked for any advice I might have about self-publishing, since he’s starting to go down that road and self-publish a book, and I said, “Would you be up for a Substack Live conversation?” So we did that yesterday. Here’s a link to the recording.
