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It is cold down here in Texas. Here are 10 things worth sharing that warmed up my brain this week:
Due to popular demand, I reformatted my Read Like an Artist zine into a free one-page zine you can download:
Download Here’s a quick video to show you how to make one:
Please feel free to make as many as you like and share them far and wide. I’ve heard from several teachers who’ve shared them with their students and some bookshops like Paperbacks in Saigon who have started including the zine in their online orders. (If you’d just like to read the 10 tips, you can do that here.)
The best thing I saw this week was Flow, an animated, wordless feature film about a cat surviving a great flood in what seems to be a post-human world. The director Gints Zilbalodis is sharing some wonderful #showyourwork behind-the-scenes stuff online, like how the character design was inspired by Scott McCloud’s classic Understanding Comics, why they kept in quieter moments, how they animated the whole thing in Blender, and why they chose a capybara as a main character.
Dance to the music: Questlove is 3/3 with Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius), his documentary about Sly and the Family Stone. I do wish there’d been a little push against the very notion of genius — it seems to me that Sly existed in a very rich musical scenius that he helped build for himself, and when that family disintegrated, so did the music. (Stay away from angel dust and cocaine and all hard drugs, kids.) Questlove not only wrote the forward to Sly’s memoir, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), he also chose the book as the first title for his publishing imprint, AUWA Books.
More Sly: There’s a soundtrack release for Sly Lives!, but really, the best and easiest way to get into Sly and the Family Stone is to just throw on their classic Greatest Hits, which is maybe one of the great party records. My personal favorite in Sly’s discography is probably There’s A Riot Goin’ On, which has a crazy story behind it and is one of the first pop records to feature a drum machine. The 33 1/3 entry on the album is pretty uneven, but it did point me upstream to Joel Selvin’s Sly & The Family Stone: An Oral History — which is much wilder than anything in the Questlove doc — and got me to re-read the Sly Stone chapter in Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train. (I made a killer little playlist called “Post-Riot” based on one paragraph in that book.)
Writing tip: Buried in my 5 things on my mind (and in my notebook) letter on Tuesday was this little Google Docs trick for exporting an .epub file for your e-reader: File menu > Download > EPUB Publication. (I think this is going to really change the way I self-edit.)
TV: The White Lotus is back for its third season. We love the show so much we’re re-watching the first two seasons. There’s a good profile of creator Mike White in The New Yorker, but what I really love is this 10-year-old video of him talking about his creative process, how it’s half an “open” mode that doesn’t look like he’s doing much, and half a “closed” mode where he’s deep in work on a project. (I have a feeling he borrowed those modes from John Cleese’s excellent lecture on creativity, which he later spun into his book, Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide.)
Travel anti-White Lotus style with Kevin Kelly’s 50 Years of Travel Tips. (I’m too chicken or midwestern or whatever I am to do a bunch of these, but I was really intrigued by his “Laser out, meander back” approach highlighted by Mark.)
A swingin’ mixtape: I made “Red Sauce” with a bunch of classic Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and Louis Prima tracks for Meghan to play on spaghetti night when she’s making the meatballs. (I’m particularly proud of the cover art for this one.) While I was putting it together, I came across the Ultra-Lounge series of compilation CDs that Capitol Records started putting out during the 1990s swing revival. They are fantastic. (Here’s a gigantic Spotify playlist of them all.)
A good reminder: Uncertainty is the only thing that makes life possible. (And as I wrote in Keep Going, it is the very thing that creativity runs on.)