An online commonplace book
How important were lacrosse sticks with Onondaga traditions? Life and death.
Babies sleep beside their own wooden stick from the day they’re born. And players are buried with theirs when they die.
Alfie Jacques was one of the last traditional stick carvers alive. Alfie passed in June 2023. He was buried with his stick.
What happens when Wes Anderson visits one of the last video stores in Paris?
An extensive list. All titles mentioned below.
This one took ages. Enjoy!
1. Vengeance Is Mine, Shōhei Imamura (1979)
2. Drunken Angel – Akira Kurosawa (1948)
3. Simon of the Desert, Luis Buñuel (1965)
4. City Streets, Rouben Mamoulian (1931)
5. Love me Tonight, Rouben Mamoulian (1932)
6. Applause, Rouben Mamoulian (1929)
7. Queen Christina, Rouben Mamoulian (1933)
8. Silk Stockings, Rouben Mamoulian (1957)
9. We Live Again, Rouben Mamoulian (1934)
10. Becky Sharp, Rouben Mamoulian (1935)
11. The Mark of Zorro, Rouben Mamoulian (1940)
12. Blood and Sand, Rouben Mamoulian (1941)
13. The Pajama Game, George Abbott, Stanley Donen (1957)
14. Le Chant du Missouri, Vincente Minnelli (1944)
15. Sadie McKee, Clarence Brown (1934)
16. The Tall Target, Anthony Mann (1951)
17. T-Men, Anthony Mann (1947)
18. Raw Deal, Anthony Mann (1948)
19. Border Incident, Anthony Mann (1947)
20. Bad Day at Black Rock, John Sturges (1955)
21. Streetcar Named Desire, Elia Kazan (1952)
22. Little Lord Fauntleroy, John Cromwell (1936)
23. Marie-Antoinette, W.S. Van Dyke (1938)
24. The Fire Within, Louis Malle (1964)
25. The Big Risk, Claude Sautet, (1960)
26. Max et les ferrailleurs, Claude Sautet, (1971)
27. Mon Oncle, Jacques Tati (1958)
28. Vagabond, Agnes Varda (1985)
29. The Crime of Monsiuer Lange, Jean Renoir (1936)
30. La Grande Illusion, Jean Renoir (1937)
31. Rules of the Game, Jean Renoir (1939)
32. Toni, Jean Renoir (1935)
33. The Man Who Loved Women, François Truffaut (1977)
34. Contempt, Jean-Luc Godard (1963)
35. Birth, Jonathan Glazer (2004)
36. Fantastic Mr Fox, Wes Anderson (2010)
37. Bridge of Spies, Steven Spielberg (2015)
First Steven Spielberg, who is, if you make movies, if you direct movies, this is somebody who can help you. You look to his movie for solutions. He usually found a way to do it right. He’s one of my favorites.
– Wes Anderson
38. Drugstore Cowboy, Gus Van Sant (1990)
39. Barfly, Barbet Schroeder (1987)
40. Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Mel Stuart (1971)
41. Hollywood: A Celebration of the Silent American Film, Kevin Brownlow & David Gill (1980)
42. Witness, Peter Weir (1985)
43. Neon Genesis Evangelion, Hideaki Anno (1994-2013)
44. Only yesterday, Isao Takahata (1988)
45. Pompoko, Isao Takahata (1994)
Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli in general, that’s one of those great bodies of work that is something, you know, a treasure for cinema.
– Wes Anderson
What you also need to do is keep working on your judgment. Keep working on your judgment. That means—and this is something you do, but I’m not sure how many writers actually do it as rigorously as they should—that you have to read a lot. There’s no substitute for that. You have to read a lot. You have to read it with a critical mind. When you read a great piece, reverse engineer it. Read it again with that specific eye where you’re looking at the craft.
When you read a piece by someone you like but this particular piece hasn’t worked, do the same thing. Read it with a critical eye. Figure out why didn’t it work this time. What went wrong? Why did it feel off? You have to hone the reader in yourself, which will automatically make your judgment better, which will automatically lift your ability with it because then you’ll have to work that much harder to please the critic in you.
Rajagopalan, Shruti (2023, June 8). The Creator Economy (No. 81) Ideas of India. https://www.discoursemagazine.com/culture-and-society/2023/06/08/ideas-of-india-the-creator-economy/
Creative judgement. For those of us without editors, it’s an essential skill to hone.
Listen to Shruti’s interview with Amit in its entirety below:
JEAN JULLIEN: Can you remember when I first started to draw?
SYLVIE JULLIEN: As far as I’m concerned, you’ve always drawn. You’ve been doing it ever since you were able to pick up a pencil. You didn’t “learn”
BRUNO JULLIEN: You drew all the time, even on tablecloths when we were out at restaurants. It was your way of expressing yourself, of describing the tiniest routine events. You did this in sketchbooks that you would carry around with you, the ones we would offer you regularly. It was a ritual.
JJ: Yes, you gave me my first sketchbook. When I was at school in Quimper (a city in northwest France), my teacher Jacques Vincent encouraged us to keep a journal. There wasn’t much in the way of rules; the idea was to get us to draw and draw and draw so that we developed a visual language. And what better way to do that than to look for inspiration in what is around you? I think that my practice of drawing every day and my interest in everyday life come from that exercise.
Jullien, Jean. Jean Jullien. New York: Phaidon Press Inc, 2022. (see page 35)
Having Jean Jullien’s parents share his drawing origin story is a wonderful approach. Our origin stories must look different to our parents, who if they were around, watched them manifest in real time.
The idea of keeping a drawing journal seems beneficial for developing your own visual language. Your own style.
Keep drawing.
From a 2013 designboom interview.
Read the interview in full here.
DB: what or who has had the biggest influence on your work?
ECA: my family certainly was a big influence on me. my father was a geologist and draftsman for a texas oil company in the early 60s, and I got my love of tiny, neat writing and labeling things from him, as well as an affinity for maps. my mother was a painter whose oil portraits were all around me growing up. of course both of my older brothers influenced the stories and kinds of imaginary experiences I was exposed to and liked.but my biggest influence as an illustrator and storyteller is walt disney. he is if anything in my book, an underrated storyteller/artist. to me, he’s focused completely on impact. all he cares about is how is this going to work on the viewer? his philosophy and mission is to be the stand-in for the viewer before a thing is made. so he’s focused on clarity and emotion and speed and pleasure and the whole symphonic experience of the story. as opposed to, say, making a totally faithful adaptation of kipling. this is what a storyteller should be like, a kind of advance team for the viewer/reader.
during the period in my early twenties when I was starting to do more writing (at the same time when I re-captured my love of maps in stories) I also started watching the movies I’d loved as a kid again. I’d sort of forgotten most of them. it was good timing, because I was finally out of the educational system, free from critique and judgment. I was just immersing myself in the works, free to embrace and love them on their own and to scrutinize what it was they were doing, how they were made, and why they worked. re-visiting the great works of your childhood is maybe a good thing for anyone to do who’s interested in stories and illustrating.
Design Boom. eric chase anderson interview. 11/5/2015: https://www.designboom.com/art/eric-chase-anderson-interview-11-05-2013/
Fascinating how Eric’s father was a geologist and draftsman, and his mother a painter of oil portraits.
Eric’s work appears to combine each of his parent’s professions. The colored pencils, the portraits, the maps, the neat small writing, the labeling. The influences are there from both sides.
MZS: How do you work out ideas for costumes before they’re sewn? Do you draw rough versions of them in a sketchbook and then have somebody do more elaborate illustrations when the ideas have settled a bit?
MC: On the other two movies I did with Wes, The Life Aquatic and the Darjeeling Limited, I applied traditional sketching methods to design the look of the characters. On this one, our illustrators used both Photoshop and traditional sketching to incorporate Wes’s and my own ideas. With Photoshop we could get very close to the actors’ likenesses, and then easily do variations and send them to Wes via e-mail. The actors were very pleased because they could relate easily to how their character would look. Having worked on two of Wes’s other movies, I had already worked with some of his “ensemble” actors and it was interesting to change them again to these other characters. Wes had decided that all the men in the movie would have moustaches or beards, save for Jopling and the nasty sergeant in the train. I loved this idea, and it is curios that hardly anyone notices this detail–but it gives a style to the men’s looks.
Zoller Seitz, Matt. The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel. New York: Abrams, 2015 (see page 89)
Costume design is an overlooked art form. When done well it’s hardly noticed, but adds to the world as a character. The 2017 American film Lady Bird is an excellent example. Anyone who grew up in 90s suburban America will recognize that movie and say yes! Yes! That’s exactly how a pre-teen leaving mass would dress 30 years ago.
From chapter four of Lawrence Weschler‘s book : And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?: A Biographical Memoir of Oliver Sacks.
Once inside, Oliver’s disposition brightens considerably. We head over—of course—to the hall of mollusks and stop before a case of squid, nautiluses, and octopuses. Oliver is by now positively chipper.
I ask him what he’d always so liked about them. For a moment, he stares at the case thoughtfully—the polymorphous, slightly goofy octopus, the sleek propulsive squid. “I mean,” he finally erupts, jocularly, “you can see what I liked about them.
“With octopuses,” he continues, “I suppose it was partly the face—that here, for the first time in evolution, appears a face, a distinct physiognomy, indeed a personality: It’s true that when you spend time with them, you begin to differentiate between them, and they seem to differentiate between you and other visitors.
“So there was that, this mutual sense of affection for the alien.
“And then there was their way of moving, which is jet propulsion.
“And their eyes, which are huge.
“Their birdlike beaks, which can give you a nasty nip.
“And their sexual habits—the male, you see, donates an entire sperm-filled leg to the female . . .
“That, and their ancientness . . . and their simultaneous adventurousness, how they threw off the repressive shell and moved out, to float free.
Weschler, Lawrence. And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?: A Biographical Memoir of Oliver Sacks. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, pg 51
The chapter title A Visit to the American Museum of Natural History in New York and Lunch at a Japanese Restaurant would lure in any curious skim reader. The American Museum of Natural History is known world wide for their dinosaur collection. But the museum is far more than dinosaurs. It’s mollusks, squids, nautiluses, and octopuses too.
Author and biographer (and commonplace book keeper) Lawrence Weshchler describes Oliver Sacks turning “chipper” upon approaching the hall of mollusks, much in the same way a five year old would be approaching the hall of dinosaurs.
A few Oliver Sacks inspired octopus ideas:
Facial recognition:
Sacks claims that after time, you can differentiate between octopuses, and they can differentiate you from other visitors. Their faces and personalities intertwine. A “friendly” or “mango” face isn’t limited to human beings.
The evolutionary journey of the octopus face:
Is this true? A face would include a forehead and a chin. The common octopus as we know it today looks to have appeared during the Middle Jurassic. By the Middle Jurassic plenty of creatures would possess faces, namely the dinosaurs. Is Sack’s referring to cephalopods as a whole here? Who appeared during the Cambrian era 500 million years ago?
Octopuses’ alien qualities:
The birdlike beaks. The large eyes. The shells they left behind. The movement by jet propulsion. All traits of a creature from a sci-fi tale, no?
From The Art of Manliness podcast:
The founding fathers had a general physician. His name? Benjamin Rush. The name sounded familiar, but truth is I knew nothing about him. But after an introduction from Brett McKay and Stephen Fried, I wasn’t surprised to learn he kept a commonplace book.
Brett McKay: Even the founding fathers did it. Something that really… You really hit home. And it really impressed me about Rush. Ever since he was a child, very curious, this self-starter, and something that he did that a lot of young upstarts did back in 17th century, 18th century, is he had a common place book and the guy just wrote down everything. How did that mental habit shape him for the rest of his life?
Stephen Fried: He did. And you know, what’s interesting, I found… I had the same question you had, and then I looked into it and I saw that even then there’s apparently a debate about how memory works. Of course, we’re still debating that, and the debate was, do you take notes and that makes you remember, or do you listen and not take notes, and that makes you remember? Most of Rush’s teachers thought you shouldn’t take notes, but Rush took notes. And so, what’s wonderful was after a certain point, we have them. I mean, a lot of things that Rush wrote are gone, I’m still hoping they will bubble up somewhere, but his commonplace books are wonderful. And part of the value of them is, of course, he did it when he was a kid, he did it when he was a student, and then when he was in the Continental Congress, he kept them about what it was like to be in the Continental Congress.
He would write little sketches about what he thought about the people in the Continental Congress, no holds bar. So he just… He wrote a lot, and so we have a lot of it, and we’re missing a lot of it, but everything we have is… What’s really nice about it also is that he wasn’t a formal writer. So he wrote in a style that we would today think of as almost like magazine writing. And it’s part of the reason that he was such an accessible intellectual and such an accessible writer is because, his writing style and of course, his penmanship were really readable, and when you read them today, they seem quite contemporary.
The AOM Podcast #813: The Fascinating Life of America’s Forgotten Founding Father. Brett McKay and Stephen Fried
Listen to the interview in its entirety below:
Cities, on the other hand, are marked with specific architecture from specific dates, and this architecture, built by long-vanished others for their own uses, is the shell that we, like hermit crabs, climb into.
Cole, Teju. Known and Strange Things. A Conversation with Aleksandar Hemon, pg 86.
I’ve never read Steward Brand‘s book “How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built“, but it’s all I could think of after reading this passage.
COWEN: Your brother aside, who is the best rapper of all time?
GREENE: [laughs] The best rapper of all time. Well, it depends on if we’re talking about lyrics or something else. But I’ll go with Black Thought, who my brother would say as well, who’s the lead rapper for the Roots.
COWEN: What makes him especially interesting?
GREENE: He’s prolific. He’s extremely productive. He’s very smart. He’s not lazy in the way in which he constructs his lyrics, and he manages to be both musical and a poet. This is something that my brother has struggled with early in his career. He’s a poet. He’s not a musician, and he had to learn to be a musician. Trying to combine those things is a rare gift.
Jamal Green on Conversations with Tyler Ep.151
It’s not that Jamal Green believes Black Thought is the best rapper, it’s his argument for why:
“he manages to be both musical and a poet“
It’s not a compliment paid to many rappers. The criteria is typically, lyrics, street cred, records sold, etc.
Time to revisit Black Thought and the Roots.
Watch the interview in full:
Floodlights and Goalposts 