I have a voracious appetite for stories and spend a lot of time musing as a creative at heart who also gets stuff done in organisations. The content I consume all contributes to my personal library of examples for analogous thinking and is a beautiful reminder of the deep interconnection between everything. As Thich Nhat Hanh explains “The flower does not consider garbage as an enemy or panic when becoming garbage, nor does the garbage become depressed and view the flower as an enemy. They realise the nature of interbeing.” Highbrow or lowbrow, I don’t care what state of refinement the art is in, if it helps me to “understand something about the odd experience of being alive” (Sam Green, 32 Sounds), sign me up! And I hope you too might also want to join me and share your thoughts on content that struck a chord…
Here’s what has fed me this week:
- Smithereens (1982) [Film] It’s the energy of Wren in her frenzy to escape 80s New Jersey and to carve her spot into the New York punk scene that hit me. It’s akin to a drowning person climbing on top of their rescuer. The current Wikipedia page calls it narcissism.
- Bob the Drag Queen [Stand-Up Comedy Australian Tour] The standup set included reminiscing about changing CDs in the car. The intense pressure of changing an album at a red light unleashed some core memories. I was also struck by how the Melbourne LGBTIQA+ crowd still dressed in so much black – you do you Melbourne!
- This is Important, Ep 209 [Podcast] The dudes from Workaholics have a podcast?! I’ve been sleeping on it and am only getting on the train at Ep 209?! Ok, I’m just going to have to grieve that & move on. If you don’t know Workaholics, heads up on the crass factor. I love listening in on men in creative relationships and how they navigate around their masculinity while needing to be deeply attuned to their emotions in order to make anything that connects to an audience. It’s a fascinating high-wire act.
- Free-Game [Website] Virgil Abloh put this site together as a resource to support fashion brands just starting out. So fascinating to learn that most fashion brands start from printing on ‘blanks’. The legacy Abloh left behind as a man who made his way to being artistic director of Louis Vuitton, then oversight for the whole dang LVMH shebang, while never taking his eye off mentoring and championing others – wow. He sadly passed at 41 years old in 2021.
- Dependency [Image] Thank you Reddit Sysadmin forum for sharing this nugget of gold (above) from XKCD while Crowdstrike was knocking out global systems. It is the perfect depiction of what happens when systems grow too big too fast and are held together by ‘chewing gum & string’. Hilarious and haunting if you’ve ever been that quiet achiever keeping it all together!
- Oblique Strategies Deck [Resource] I came across this in the New York Times’ article on Brian Eno. You can get the deck in an app and it is full of prompts to break you out of creative stalemates. The original deck was part of the creative process when Eno collaborated on David Bowie’s Heroes. Iconic!
The scene in Perks of Being a Wallflower with Heroes as the soundtrack is forever etched in my mind, plus the line “you accept the love you think you deserve.”
Accept only the real real, good good, love this week my friends.
Sarah
