Mental 📸: Someday is Today, Phillip Lopate, Dark, The Cruise

A snapshot of inside my mind would go some weird directions today. I woke up this morning and spontaneously thought of this bizarre 1990s documentary of a NYC bus tour guide. I probably saw it in 1998 or 1999 after getting it from Mad Mike’s Video in Wallingford, CT (RIP; that place was incredible). Apparently, it’s the same director who later went on to do Capote with Philip Seymour Hoffman. Amazingly, they have the whole thing on YouTube: The Cruise.

I can only imagine the tours this guy gave. It must have been a very unique way to experience NYC:

“When I went in for my arraignment, the judge said that the problem is that this guy, this current person we’re judging, ran from the police for a month.

Of course, if I could have spoken, I wasn’t allowed to speak, but I would have said: ‘It’s been a lot more than a month. I’ve been running from you people all my life. And I’m going to keep running…and it made me think that, in some ways, from the perspective of molecular biology, we have the same infrastructure as plants.’”   

📚Someday is Today

I feel like I’ve slipped into full productivity-nut terrain. I’ve covered quite a bit of ground in that space, so I try to prevent my focus on productivity strategies from crowding out my actual productivity. Still, I like to incorporate a productivity book into my reading diet every few months. It provides a nice tune-up. I’d heard Someday is Today was good, and I really liked Dicks’s book on story, so I figured I’d check it out.

There are a lot of connections with my personal life--Dicks is a full-time teacher in my home state of CT, and one of the key anecdotes in his origin story is his experience of being robbed while working at a McDonald’s in Brockton, MA, twenty-five or so years ago. I did my first year of service with AmeriCorps in 2007, so I know a little about the town.

The writing style and humor didn’t always resonate with me—in some places, the voice veers into “high school valedictory address” territory that isn’t quite my cup of tea. Still, even from the perspective of a time-optimized guy, Dicks’s level of time optimization and productivity is insane. Sometimes I agree, sometimes I don’t, but it’s hard not to admire his level of achievement and commitment to living the most meaningful life he can.

Some of his stories were inspiring; some tips were useful: per his suggestion, I’ve started standing on one leg while flossing to take the extra opportunity to strengthen my core/balance. This makes me feel completely absurd and “eccentric” in a bad way, but I think it’s helping.

Questionable flossing habits aside, I felt like I took a lot from his advice to be a “criminal.” His point is that many rules are pointless or more flexible than they appear. Often not following relatively superficial rules can save a lot of time and energy that can be put into more substantial undertakings. More concretely, he recommends carrying what he calls a “burglar bag” of useful materials that you can draw upon to steal back your time when it’s being wasted.

I’m something of a recovering rule-follower. I wasn’t much of a rule-follower as a kid, but I became one as an adult for reasons likely related to some guilt complex or other I only vaguely understand. More recently, I feel like I’ve started to see the wisdom of being a micro-petty criminal of the caliber Dicks suggests. So, I guess I’ll start to pack my productivity burglar bag.

📚The Golden Age of the American Essay: 1945-1970, edited by Phillip Lopate

Lopate is a fantastic essayist in his own right, and I adore the treasure troves that are his essay collections. I’ve worked through nearly all of The Personal Essay, as well as selections from most of his other edited volumes.

However, this is my first time looking at The Golden Age. Paul Goodman’s essay “The Universal Trap” stood out to me. I previously only knew of him as a somewhat forgotten 1960s figure, but his essay on schooling ended up being more nuanced and better written than I’d expected. Richard Hofstadter’s “Paranoid Style” is in there, which is a delight to read and left me sufficiently inspired to pick up Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, which I’ll probably start later this week. Clement Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting” was illuminating, particularly in its reflections on Modernism’s awareness of the essence of painting being the two-dimensional art form. The dimensionality of art (2D vs. 3D) has been on my radar since reading Michael Clune’s Gamelife, which has a completely fascinating discussion of the aesthetic and philosophical implications of 2D vs. 3D art.

🍿 Dark

The German Stranger Things. What it lacks in style vis-à-vis ST it makes up for in depth. The painterly quality of its visual aesthetic stands out. A lot of cool interweaving plotlines—I feel like I need a whiteboard to keep track of the relations between the characters as we follow them across various historical periods. Allusions to Nietzsche, Freud, and the heavy metal band Kreator stand out.