With that said, here’s today’s exquisite corpse dump of inspiration images from around the internet. I don’t know who is responsible for a lot of these at this point, but I’m very grateful all these images exist and hang out with me when I’m at my computer. At the end, there’s a credit to everyone I can remember.

I love the poetry that gets created when looking at other people’s images out of context all at once. Enjoy. I’m calling this one:

Scratching the Surface

1. Amanda Charchian

2. Jesse Chamberlin

3. I don’t know

4. I don’t know

5. I don’t know

6. Carl Sagan on Cosmos

7. Chris Farley on SNL

8. a Mara Hoffman campaign photo

9. Alex Prager

10. Leslie Kirchhoff

11. I don’t know

12. I don’t know

13. Harley Wier (pretty sure)

14. I don’t know

If you know the other artists, lmk! Hope you enjoyed today’s inspiration exploration. Hope it created a beautiful story in your mind.

@jadeyyychen asks: Song to listen to when you’re feeling alone in the universe? 

I whipped up this graph to showcase by year when I’ve felt most alone in the universe. The year 2021 was a painfully difficult year for me where I lost my wife and mother within weeks of each other and I was left to be a single dad, raising a two-and-a-half-year-old. I wasn’t physically alone. I had a great community doing their best to support me every single day. But the fact was my favorite people were dead and I didn’t like my life anymore and spent a lot of time wishing I could leap out of my skin and land on a plane far away from here. The song I listened to the most that year, confirmed by Spotify in my 2021 year-end report was People, I’ve Been Sad by Christine and the Queens. An absolutely aptly named slow burn of a jammer.

The song lands in a genre I refer to as a Pool Jam. An ideal Pool Jam is a song that’s sad, but is also kind of sexy. That you can lay in the hot sun to and feel all the emo feelings you need to feel. In fact, it might be the ultimate pool jam.

There’s so much longing in the way Héloïse (Christine) sings, and the harmonizing vocals have so much nostalgia and feeling. It’s a song about being sad, but there’s a distinct optimism I feel in it. It’s not a call-to-action optimism that shakes you out of your funk and gets you out of bed. It’s an optimism that admits I’m feeling this way right now, but someday I plan to feel different. It shoots the optimism like an arrow into the future and stakes a claim at a later date to say, I’ll feel better then. 

When you feel the most alone in the universe, I think punting a sincere hope down the road is a beautiful and courageous thing to do. 

@meghanoretsky asks: When is your FILM poppin’ off?! 

I am assuming Meghan’s talking about my short film WHAT ON EARTH that I have posted about in my stories. Here’s a Polaroid from the set: 

The film stars Suzanna Son, who’s absolutely brilliant in Red Rocket and is going to also be in the new HBO show The Idol. 

The short is finished! We’re just waiting to hear back from film festivals now to find out where we’ll be premiering it. I’m so impatient with sharing things that are finished so it’s extremely difficult for me to not share this movie already. I’m so proud of it. It turned out so beautifully and all the performances are outstanding. Everyone who contributed did spectacularly. In the meantime, I can share the film’s poster! It’s not much, but it’s something! And soon I’ll be able to show the trailer! 

@ninamunk asks: What’s your favorite sleeping position?

I’m a side sleeper who favors my stomach. I like to straddle a pillow and sleep with my arms outstretched. I change which side of my face is on the pillow 2-4 times a night. I love to sleep.

@lautraralau asks: Why are vibrant colors so important to you? 

Since I was a teenager I always wanted to be a filmmaker. When it came time to go to college, I wound up studying creative writing and art history because I wanted to understand storytelling and I wanted to understand why we understand images the way we do.

I loved my art history classes, and in particular I loved early modernism. Something about the bold application of paint, the flattening of space, and the way the artists were using the medium to communicate the emotional arc of the piece rather than the explicit story really struck a chord with me. I can cite Henri Matisse specifically as a real genealogical source of inspiration. I remember seeing his painting The Dessert: Harmony in Red and thinking it was the most perfect painting I had ever seen.  

Harmony is the perfect word. It’s an homage to the color red. It’s the color red for dessert, for our consumption, for our hearts to face plant into the flatness with. 

Another example that I remember seeing as a teen and going, “Oh, that’s what I’m talking about” is Paul Gauguin’s Vision After the Sermon.

The dreaminess of this composition is outstanding with the foreground receding into the background creating that beautiful L of nuns. But that red floor is so excruciatingly evocative. It’s red solely to be an adjective of drama. It’s red just to go, “THE STAKES ARE HIGH, BABY!” 

About the same time I was being a nerd over these paintings I watched Tokyo Drifter by Seijun Suzuki and felt like all the dots got connected for using color as an adjective.  

I love to use color because it’s an instant mood creator. I use it because it reminds me of my heroes. I use it because I love the flatness it creates in the composition that makes the image draw attention to itself. I love to use color because it takes the moment out of reality and puts it in the realm of emotions and feelings. 

@shortyjeinberg asks: What’s your fave bagel in LA

++my favorite simple bagel: the sesame seed bagel and dill cream cheese at Courage Bagels.

++my favorite breakfast sandwich: the egg, cheese, and bacon at Belle’s.

++my favorite light bagel sandwich: the za’atar bagel with cucumbers and tomatoes at Maury’s.

Domaine de Montbourgeau: A white wine that could clean a penny. Perfect for the end of the meal when all you want to do is slink a little lower in the booth while letting your talking get a little quicker and your secrets a little easier to give away. Sip it like Muhammad Ali is boxing it into your mouth.

Disclaimer: First of all, I was anti-apple-infused wines because I think cider is disgusting and was expecting everything I love about the wine to be bullied into submission by the cider. But this bottle was a gift, and I opened it because the color was incredible and I didn’t read the back to see what it even was I was bout to drink. And I’m so glad I did. My review:

Flrx x Nuki Apple Grape Wine: One night when I was a teenager and there was no moon I went skinny dipping with my friends in a remote fjord in British Columbia. From the dock the water might have been 3,000 feet deep, and above us was an eternity of space broken up by more stars than I’ve ever seen in any sky since. My clothes were at my feet and there was nothing in my way of the dark sea but a few feet of cool, dark air. I plunged in headfirst and found myself in a wash of phosphorescence. Diving down as long as my lungs let me, it felt like I had finally reached the stars. We floated out there feeling a total collapse of up and down, where we could create light by just moving our limbs through the cold Canadian water. In that darkness, everything sparkled.

Most sparkling red wines feel like they’re faking it to me. But if I could go back in time and put a sparkling red wine on the dock for us all to share right out of the bottle that night, I would choose this one. Drink it cold. Drink it in the dark. Drink it with close friends and enjoy all the sparkling.