Tiptoe Tiger E51 🐯| Getting Sentimental Now
Edition #51 | Crocumentary, AllTimer artist, Annie's my favorite, Seeing the light, If a tree falls...
Hello,
Welcome back to Tiptoe Tiger. I really like this batch below. There’s just one more edition of your standard Tiptoe Tiger weekly(-ish) publication, so I’m glad we’re confidently striding towards the finish line. Get sentimental on me now, cry your eyes out!
This week:
Spend It All - Les Blank
Charles Rivard Tumblr
Annie Dillard
Visualizing Einstein’s Special Relativity
John Cassavetes & Bo Harwood - No One Around to Hear It
Spend It All - Les Blank
My friend Julian just showed me this fantastic documentary called “Spend It All” by the filmmaker Les Blank.
It was shot in 1971 and focuses on cajun culture in south east Louisiana. Pretty much everything about it is excellent from the subject matter to the execution.
You can stream it for free on Kanopy or, if you have a subscription, the Criterion Collection.
I’ve heard great things about his other films but have yet to see them myself.
Here’s the trailer for Spend It All:
Charles Rivard Tumblr
This is an item that I recalled recently from my skateboarding days, Charles Rivard’s Tumblr. Rivard, also known as ChuckMVP is one of the founders of the clothing and skate company, All Timers, which famously had hilarious marketing and graphics. Chuck was the mind behind most of that.
On his inactive private Tumblr, full of his hastily hand-drawn comics, you can get a read for his brilliant sense of humor.
https://www.tumblr.com/charlesrivard
Some of the comics, you’ll probably need a little knowledge of skateboarding to understand but others really transcend the genre.
Annie Dillard
I’ve waited this long to include my favorite author, Annie Dillard, in Tiptoe Tiger because I thought maybe eventually I could do her justice in writing about her.
Due to how highly I esteem her writing, however, that day won’t come.
Annie Dillard was 29 when she wrote her first book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won the general non-fiction Pulitzer Prize in 1975. Since then, she’s produced several bangers: The Writing Life, An American Childhood, For the Time Being, and Teaching a Stone to Talk are all some of my favorite books ever.
She writes mostly in an ethnographic memoir style with a wry wit and an incredibly sharp eye that draws the divine out of the mundane in a triumphant fashion. I also credit her as a major resource of discovery and education— one thing that becomes obvious while reading Dillard is that she herself is incredibly well read on the most obscure topics & is happy to enlighten the rest of us about them.
It’s impossible to me to recommend just one book of hers so I’ll list out the ones I mentioned earlier and if anyone is interested, you can decide for yourself where to start.
Teaching a Stone to Talk - This is a collection of her essays and is a great place to start or get a sample of her work. Many of her essays can be found online (search “Annie Dillard essays, of course".”
The Writing Life - Reflections on the process, art, and craft of writing from a lifer herself. My favorite chapter outlines the daily routines of many historically famous authors and contains the famous line, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our life.”
An American Childhood - This book is a memoir on Dillard’s childhood growing up in Pittsburgh Scotch/Irish/Polish suburbia. All-American with all the magic of childhood.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - Her first book is her account of living in the woods in rural Virginia. It’s a deep meditation on nature, existence, and the divine.
For the Time Being - Her last book. Also a deep meditation on existence and the divine except you can feel that her perspective has been sharpened and tempered by another few decades on the job & on the planet.
Visualizing Einstein’s Special Relativity
I have always wanted to understand physics better. I found this video to be fantastic, at least compared to any physics class I ever took.
I am only human, and didn’t fully grasp everything in the video, so a rewatch will be in-order sometime soon. Even though not every part clicked with me all the way, the number of times my mind was blown why watching this remains high.
John Cassavetes & Bo Harwood - No One Around to Heart It
A little gloomier than our (my) usual music recommendations but enjoy!
Thank You!
Rock and roll and all of that! Thanks for reading! I hope you are squeezing every last drop of enjoyment out of Tiptoe Tiger. I’ll see you next week.
And never in the history of the world will it have been so late,
Rob Hogan
Tiptoe Tiger’s Heat-seeking Missile