Lombardi has a long relationship with Grantland (he’s been a guest on numerous podcasts with Bill Simmons), but this is the first time I’ve spoken with him. He’s a polarizing figure in Cleveland, solely because he’s worked there before (he was the director of player personnel with the team in the ’90s, right before it escaped to Baltimore). His name gets mentioned a lot on local talk radio, sometimes pejoratively (it’s endlessly noted that — while working as an analyst for the NFL Network in 2012 — Lombardi criticized the Browns’ first-round selection of 28-year-old Brandon Weeden, the man now positioned as the team’s starting QB). One gets the sense the Browns want to lower Lombardi’s public profile. This strikes me as a mistake. Lombardi is very good at talking. He’s a detail freak and a polymath, or at least a person successfully attempting to impersonate one. At one point, he engages me in a meticulous conversation about LBJ biographer Robert Caro, including what kind of typewriter Caro uses, his research methods, what clothing he wears while working, and the geographic location of Caro’s Manhattan office (I know almost nothing about Robert Caro, so the dialogue is pretty one-sided). He asks me what specific font I will use when I write this story. He nonchalantly talks about “the candle problem,” a hypothetical puzzle devised by Gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker. The takeaway from all this is the import of “divergent thinking,” a cognitive system that focuses on solving problems by exploring nontraditional modes of assessment. Before it became a cliché, people called this process “thinking outside the box.” It’s a hard philosophy to disagree with, because nobody likes the box. That said, drafting an edge rusher from LSU doesn’t exactly qualify as divergent thinking. That’s not outside the box. That’s inside the box. It might be the box itself. But when you’re 23rd in the league in yards allowed, the box is what you need.
For the Gallery Nucleus Star Wars Tribute show, opening this Saturday May the 4th (Be with You). I can never repay George Lucas for what Star Wars gave me. Star Wars is so close to my heart, I honestly couldn’t decide what image to make for this show, it was just all too important. So I just decided to draw everything… from memory.
So many classic ones here. I really prefer the ps3 controller to anything else I’ve used. N64 had a really interesting design though.
Earlier this week the web was abuzz with Apple’s latest clear strike against freedom: they refused the newest issue of the independent comic Saga to be distributed through ComiXology due to “postage-stamp sized” images of gay sex. Even though ComiXology is a third-party application, it uses…
A look at how the narrative of Apple controls the news and perceptions of the company, whether it is based in truth or not.
New Thundercat song…sounds better than anything on his last album. Good combo of R&B, jazz, and the spacey FlyLo style of instrumentals.
kfan:
OK by now you’ve seen this article in The Onion and been like UGH TOO REAL. Yes! It is too real. It is painful and we recognize ourselves and the choices we have made in this article.
But I think the reason this article is painful is because culturally we define success in such a weird and outdated way. There’s this idea that if you’re not doing what you’re most passionate about all the time, you’re a failure. If you aren’t make a living at it, you’re a failure. If you’re not Stephen King or Christina Aguilera, you’re a failure. And I think we grew up in this kind of 50-year pop culture bubble where we saw many people becoming huge megastars, actors and singers and writers and whatever else. And part of the disconnect we have now about what we should pay for music and books and movies, and how these things should be funded, are tied up with these questions about what we owe to ourselves, and what we feel society & culture owe to us, and the media value we assign to certain “professions”.
I was having dinner with Mary-Kim the other night and we talked a lot about how much more successful as writers we would feel if we didn’t give a shit about our families and lives. I might have gotten farther faster as a writer if that’s all I ever did or thought about, but like, so what? Is that a good model for how a person should live their life? It’s not that I love my day job all the time, but it’s a thing that someone needs to be doing, same as a lot of people’s jobs. And it’s not like me and my job and my writing are completely separate and siloed aspects of my self. My creativity is a thing that comes out in my writing on the internet, in my parenting, and in the rejection letters I send as part of my day job. That’s kind of a success, right? Albeit not one that sells magazines or drives clicks.
Maybe it’s not useful to define one person as the garbage collector and one person as the singer. Maybe everyone is a lot of things. Maybe the self-obsessed celebrity artist culture isn’t that helpful or useful. Maybe eventually we get to a place where we see that books and music and art are created by us, people who have school and day jobs and other shit we care about. And we’re not rich celebrities, and we are all always being pulled in different directions, but we’re present and engaged with the people in our lives? And we value what we contribute as much as what we create? And we create things because want to, and not because we have expectations for what it will get us, or how it will cause society to value us? And we don’t berate and hate ourselves for the very human failure of having a lot of complicated shit to juggle in our lives? That might be kind of cool?
