Friday, May 3, 2024

Greetings Starfighters,

The enemy is at the gates, things have fallen apart. The center does not hold…

Yes, I’m being dramatic. The climax of Derby Week is here in Kentucky with the running of the Kentucky Oaks today and the 150th Kentucky Derby tomorrow. I’ll avoid downtown Louisville this weekend at all costs to leave the visitors to their frivolities and watch as they leave behind the memories of too many mint juleps and not enough gambling wins to make the journey worthwhile.

Also, I have some guidelines on how to prepare the best mint julep for your Derby parties. Pour a shot of bourbon, neat or on ice, however you prefer. Take all the other julep ingredients and throw them in the trash. Enjoy your bourbon.

Seriously. Mint juleps are gross. And I like mint.

I’m more focused on Star Wars Day and Free Comic Book Day. The universe conspired to have both events fall on the same day as the Derby, leaving alternative entertainment plans and celebrations for those not so enamored with seeing horses who’ve had too many beatings carry jockeys around an oval for two minutes, running so hard that they nearly die. Of course, if they get injured while running, the likelihood they will die increases. Sometimes, they euthanize the horse right on the track.

We’re going to catch The Phantom Menace in the theater today, and I’m taking my kiddo to our local comic shop on Saturday to grab a free comic (and pick up a copy of Space Ghost #1 if they have any left!).

But, I’ll still sit down for a few minutes, catch the Louisville Cardinal Marching Band play “My Old Kentucky Home” before the Derby, and sing along with a tear in my eye. As much as I don’t care for the Derby, there are some traditions I’ll happily participate in this weekend.

Quote of the Day

“Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation. Affectation itself, beginning with the need to define some sorts of writing as “good” and other sorts as “bad,” is fearful behavior. Good writing is also about making good choices when it comes to picking the tools you plan to work with.” (Stephen King, On Writing)

The core of what our dark leader, Stephen King, is getting at here is to become good at writing—or anything, really—you have to get past your own doubts and fears and just do it. Nothing gets done until something is done, and nothing changes until something changes.

To put it in scientific terms, “an object at rest tends to stay at rest, an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted on by an outside force.”

The outside force is you, or maybe your will. Regardless, until you do something, your fears will always win. They’re not going to go away (it’d be nice, but they won’t), so you may as well make peace with them and let them know who’s really in charge.

Musical Interlude

I love Debussy’s Clair de Lune. Love it. There’s something about the layers of rolling chords, the dynamic range from almost a whisper to a swelling roar. For me, it’s a perfect piece of music and sounds equally brilliant whether a master pianist delivers a solo or the full orchestra carries the musical load. Here’s a great interpretation (with great acoustics) to brighten your day.

Long Read of the Day

If you’ve ever wondered exactly why your favorite (or least favorite) celebrity gets to write a book, there’s a reason. The publishing industry mainly focuses on celebrity books and repeat bestsellers to make money. Most books sell very few copies, with only a small percentage achieving high sales numbers. Big advances for books don’t guarantee high sales, and backlist books contribute significantly to publishers’ revenues.

Elle Griffin explores the events of the failed Penguin Random House/Simon & Schuster merger detailed in the book The Trial and reveals some of the nasty bits about the publishing industry.

Video of the Day

I’m double-dipping here with another music video—god, why did MTV ever stop playing them—but this is excellent and I’m going to force all of you to appreciate classical music before I’m done (Mayhap not, but I’m still gonna try.)

Evan Goldfine has an excellent newsletter on listening to Bach, and yesterday, he released a “beginner’s guide” that provides several entry points for your Bach journey. Yo-Yo Ma and Chris Thile are personal favorites, so seeing them mentioned along with bassist Edgar Meyer was a treat. Here they are playing a rendition of Bach’s Trio Sonata No. 6 in G Major from their 2017 ‘Bach Trios’ release.

Final Thoughts

Enjoy the weekend, gang. Make time for coffee, reading, and maybe some pizza. And spend time with those you love because they’re all we’ve got when it all ends. The rest is just bonus points.

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Wednesday, May 1, 2024

Greetings Starfighters,

Among the treasures we discovered as we cleaned out my grandparents’ old home was a Hasselblad 500C/M camera. Some of you may know what that means, many of you likely don’t, just know that Ansel Adams used a Hasselblad 500 model at times in his career.

First, a word about my grandfather. The man was obsessed with gadgets, just like I am. He shelled out over $1200 for an early VCR, had every form of home video recording equipment, and even bought a light that was allegedly the same model used on the Space Shuttle to better stage our family Christmas movies. So, having a Hasselblad just sitting in the top of a closet collecting dust isn’t necessarily a surprise.

I’m playing around with it and hope to take some shots with it soon. I was a little surprised that you can still purchase film and even get it developed but I’m also watching some videos and looking for tools to develop at home if I need to.

Once more, the Internet proves that, with a little effort, you can find and learn how to do just about anything.

Quote of the Day

Without memory, it’s impossible to build the future. – Umberto Eco, A Library of the World

Musical Interlude

A number of years ago, Daryl Hall of Hall & Oates fame began a show recorded at his home studio with various guests. “Live from Daryl’s House” has had several homes over the years, but it seems they are uploading more and more to Daryl’s YouTube channel.

Here’s the episode with Lisa Loeb, including a great version of her classic, “Stay.”

Long Read of the Day

“In 1303 CE, a monstrous earthquake ripped through the Eastern Mediterranean. The trauma shook glittering casing stones loose from the Great Pyramid at Giza in Egypt—the most ancient of our Seven Wonders—and brought the remains of the youngest, the towering Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria, crashing to the ground. The Great Pyramid embodied enormous effort for the sake of one, virtually omnipotent man. Alexandria’s Pharos Lighthouse had been a public beacon to keep travelers from four continents safe, and to announce a repository of all the knowledge that was possible for humankind to know.

But across that complex arc of experience, spanning nearly 4,000 years, from the vision of a single, almighty human to a network of human minds, no human-made Wonder could prove a match for the might of Mother Earth.”

What Makes a Wonder? On the Human Need to Map Out Monumental Greatness

Video of the Day

Final Thoughts

May 1 means that it’s very nearly Star Wars Day. If you haven’t heard, The Phantom Menace is returning to theatres this weekend. My kid and I have watched it I don’t know how many times here at home. Friday afternoon, we’ll catch it on the big screen. I was in the crowd on opening night 25 years ago, and I think I’m just as excited now as I was back then.

A bit of techno typing

What happens when you give kids support and an open playground?

Austin Kleon’s son, Owen, dropped his latest SoundCloud album.

He’s 11.

My favorite track, Typing, is embedded here. It’s a banger of creativity. And heavily influenced by Kraftwerk and Daft Punk, just like I am.

Oh, the possibilities.

NASA, Voyager, and long-term project-based learning

The premise for the first Star Trek film featuring the original series cast proposes that a probe from Earth, Voyager 6, traveled so far and accumulated so much information as it traveled the cosmos that it achieved sentience. And when it did, it wanted to return to “The Creator” and deliver all that information.

Trust me, that first Star Trek movie is the most “sci-fi” of the entire series, except maybe Star Trek: Beyond.

While no probe named Voyager 6 ever launched, the idea of a probe transmitting data back home after traveling billions of miles is still very much a reality and not science fiction.

However, you may have heard that Voyager 1, launched nearly 50 years ago, began transmitting gibberish back to NASA a few months ago. Many feared the worst. Voyager kept transmitting data, signifying it was alive, but something happened to the data transmissions.

After five months of work, the Voyager team worked some coding magic to restore the code and restart regular transmissions.

“When the time came to get the signal, we could clearly see all of a sudden, boom, we had data, and there were tears and smiles and high fives… Everyone was very happy and very excited to see that, hey, we’re back in communication again with Voyager 1. We’re going to see the status of the spacecraft, the health of the spacecraft, for the first time in five months.”
Linda Spilker, project scientist for NASA’s two Voyager spacecraft at JPL

Talk about project-based learning at work…

Perhaps there’s no better example of the importance of project-based learning in schools than a story like this. When has anyone tried to change the code on an object over 15 billion miles from the Earth?

Never. There’s no guidebook for a project like this, no curriculum to refer to, no content standards. Just a group of experts trying everything they know to solve a problem.

And this project has been going for nearly 50 years. Share that with your students when they think they’ve been working on a project for too long.

The Meta-Diaries of Marion Milner: Prescribing Creativity

MARION MILNER, SUMMER BEECHES. — **MARION MILNER,** *SUMMER BEECHES*.

Marion Milner’s unique approach to self-discovery involved using her creative explorations in literature and art as a therapeutic project. Through her meta-diaries, she abandoned preconceived goals and embraced free writing to uncover hidden thoughts and dark instincts. Milner’s focus on creativity influenced her self-discovery and guided her therapeutic practice with patients like Simon, emphasizing the importance of creative expression for maintaining a sense of the future.

Since 1926, Milner had been writing diaries in which she recorded her impressions of life in ways that seem ordinary enough. She would, for example, note seeing “a little boy in a sailor suit dancing and skipping by himself on his way to look at the sea lions,” or reflect, “I realized how untrustworthy I am in personal relationships … always agreeing with the person present.” But in the thirties Milner turned her diaries, as a sort of raw material, into her first books, which were published as essayistic reflections about her diaries: A Life of One’s Own (1934) and An Experiment in Leisure (1937). In them she invented something new and a genre of her own: a diary about a diary, or what the critic Hugh Haughton has called a “meta-diary.” Contemporaries like W. H. Auden responded with enthusiasm.

20 Minutes of Charles Schulz Drawing Peanuts Comics

Pardon me as I date myself, but I have loved and always will love the Peanuts comic strips. The cartoons were staples of my childhood, and I have no plans to stop watching them anytime soon.

I love to see creators create, so this 20-minute video of Charles Schulz creating his famous characters is a delight.

If you need more inspiration, here’s a video of Chuck Jones demonstrating how to draw Bugs Bunny and other characters.

There is no audience

empty seat — Photo by Tuur Tisseghem on Pexels.com

Stop worrying about what you think other people think of you and what you do. They don’t care. They’re too busy worrying about themselves.

Years ago, when I was in my 20s, a bold and artistically daring older friend who has since passed on gave me what I often think was the best advice I have ever gotten. I was worrying what 'people would think' of a decision I had made, and she said, "Amanda, There is no audience."
— Amanda Fortini (@amandafortini) March 18, 2024

Teachers and students, this is your call to get busy doing your own thing, and don’t worry about what anyone thinks.

Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris – Real Live Roadrunning

In my estimation, Mark Knopfler doesn’t get the widespread acclaim he should as one of our most talented guitarists making music over the last few decades.

And Emmylou Harris is also an underappreciated gem.

Sit back, relax, and enjoy these two masters performing together in this concert from 2006.

On finding time to be creative

This semester, I’m in a class called “Leadership for Creative Problem Solving,” with the ever-impressive Mary John O’Hair leading our group. We’ve talked a lot about what it means to be creative, specifically in the land of educational leadership, but my conversations always come back around to finding ways to be creative and flexing those muscles.

In my attempts to follow Austin Kleon’s advice and show my work, in our final discussion board post–something else I’ve tried to spice up this semester because oh my god can discussion boards be an absolute pain in the you know what and I wouldn’t wish them on my worst enemy but understand why we have to do them–we were asked to share an article or video we found in our studies on creativity and leadership.

Like the good oversharer and curator that I am, I linked to this blog, specifically to my tags on creativity, leadership, and creative leadership.

It’s not a great usage case for setting up your own public commonplace book, but it works.

One of my peers, an excellent educator and union leader, made a comment about not knowing how I do it all.

I don’t know either, I just do it. And I think that’s the key.

Creativity is an act of repetition and drudgery. Rarely, if ever, do the clouds of your mind part, allowing rays of glorious creative inspiration to bombard your brain with ideas. Nor is there an “idea factory” in Schenectady, NY, offering a subscription idea service–but that never stopped Harlan Ellison from telling people there was.

No, creativity is backbreaking, mind-numbing, and difficult. It should be difficult. It should be work. It should take something out of you and make you pause multiple times throughout the act of creating. It should make you think and it should make you question your life choices.

But, creating is what we were born to do. And everyone has something different to create, something different to express their unique gifts.

And being creative is something we must do often. Daily, as a matter of fact. Stephen King talks about writing 2,000 words a day, no matter what. Ryan Holiday says to “two crappy pages a day” to progress toward your goal.

One of the best rules I’ve heard as a writer is that the way to write a book is by producing “two crappy pages a day.”

It’s by carving out a small win each and every day—getting words on the page—that a book is created.
— Ryan Holiday (@RyanHoliday) October 7, 2022

It isn’t all going to be pretty–trust me, it’s not–and you’re going to get frustrated. Teachers, you’ll always be improving lessons. Students, you’ll always be thinking about how you can improve that last bit of work.

Each of us has a gift and someone is waiting for us to share that gift with the world.

Let’s do this.