Reading · It's Good to Be Here

David Hockney, in his later years, devoted himself to the subject of the arrival of spring. He captured it beautifully in Yorkshire when he was in his seventies, and later, in his eighties, he decided he needed to be Normandy to really see spring, so off he went. The result was a massive outpouring of paintings, drawings, sketches, iPad art, and videos—all about spring, and what it’s like to feel it coming on.

But I’d like to offer up this evidence concerning the arrival of fall:

I mean, come on. The trees start dropping these insane little previews of coming attractions, and they’re just scattered around on the sidewalk for anyone to pick up? That’s crazy.

Setting aside the fact that spring is the gateway to summer while fall is the gateway to a cold dark winter—honestly, which do you get more excited about, as a standalone event? Spring or fall?

I think I’m going to have to land on the side of fall, which seems to have a much better publicist these days.

I went looking for a nice lighthearted comedy last week and came up with Stranger than Fiction, a 2006 movie about a writer that I somehow missed at the time, which is crazy because I’ll watch any movie about a writer, the more inaccurate the better.

Did the main character write a book in February and go on book tour in March? Love it. Does the editor travel with the author to every book tour event and get drunk with him every night? Why not? Or is the author experiencing so much writer’s block that the publisher hired an “author’s assistant” —a completely non-existent job — and sent them to the author’s house to help them finish their manuscript? I’m here for it.

Stranger than Fiction stars Emma Thompson as the blocked novelist and Will Farrell as an IRS agent who realizes that he’s a character in her novel. No attempt is made to explain how such a thing might be possible, which in my opinion is the best possible way to handle any sort of supernatural element in a film. Just accept it and move on. Pass the popcorn.

Maggie Gyllenhaal is the manic pixie dream girl whose job it is to lift Will Farrell out of his stodgy old rut without getting much of anything out of it for herself. Doesn’t matter, I kind of miss manic pixie dream girls and I was delighted to see Maggie fill the role so beautifully.

Mostly, though, this is a comedy that is blissfully free of technology. A cell phone is mentioned once, but you never actually see one. No part of the plot is advanced via text messages that you have to crane your neck to read and inevitably miss. No one even googles anything: when Will Farrell wants to know how it’s possible that he could be a character in Emma Thompson’s novel, he finds a human to ask, a literature professor played by a very tweedy Dustin Hoffman. And Emma Thompson writes on a typewriter, for crying out loud. I never thought 2006 would look like simpler times, but here we are.

Cozy up and enjoy this one. I could watch twenty movies like this every year—why isn’t anyone making them anymore?

This is not where we’re going on our secret vacation.

It won’t be a secret a week from now, but it has to be a secret right now because it’s a surprise for my husband. He knows that we’re going somewhere, he just doesn’t know where. Surprise trips are much harder than they used to be, what with mobile boarding passes and email confirmations. Elaborate steps had to be taken to maintain the ruse. If he’s figured it out, he has, in a very sportsmanlike manner, not let on.

Anyway, you probably won’t hear from me for a few weeks, and this is why. Enjoy what’s left of summer, and the arrival of fall!

146. Painting in Public

Aug 10

This week, another building burned in Portland. This is one that I loved and had definitely drawn before.

Supporters get another email from me, one that is more focused on how to do all things sketchbook or notebook-related. Last week, I went out to paint the burned-out shell of yet another cool old building that burned, and I wrote about what it was like to paint in public during what basically turned out to be a day of mourning for this building.

Over the next few weeks, while I’m away, I’m sending out some new experiments in travel sketching. You can check out the full archive here, and get access to all of it for a few bucks a month.

Am I coming to a city near you? Check out my upcoming events right here

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