I’ve just read choreographer Twyla Tharp’s excellent book “The Creative Habit”. She lives in Manhattan and gets a taxi every morning at 7am to the gym where she works out for two hours. The two hour gym routine was a daunting habit to build, so she just trained herself to get out of bed and hail a cab every morning.
Mothers
Happy Mothers’ Day to all the mothers and children of mothers out there.
Listening to this song, I couldn’t help but hear it as an early dialog between the Donald and his mother, Mary Anne MacLeod.
Levis
In April 1960, Eddie Cochrane was traveling in a taxi near Chippenham, England with his girlfriend Sharon Sheeley and Gene Vincent when a tire blew out. Cochrane threw himself over his girlfriend. He died, she lived to 62.
Robbery
I discovered this week that on May 2nd 1990, in London, a man brandishing a knife robbed a courier of £292 million in what is the second largest mugging ever.
The largest of course was perpetrated by the band Oasis on everyone who bought albums they made after 1995.
Tradeoffs
Thanksgiving marks the start of the season of awkward conversational lulls at the dinner table. To get the conversation flowing, here are a few of the dilemmas posed by my son Harry at bedtime.
George
Prince George it is, then. I had always assumed that William and Kate’s nephew would take that name – George, Harry’s son.
Details
I was driving with Alex, my son, the other day and we passed a Tesla. He told me that, when you lock the car, the door handles disappear into the body of the car. The handles come back out again when you approach it.
Bells
I associate two of the great pieces of showmanship in popular culture with this song.
Trevor Hoffman of the San Diego Padres was one of the great closing pitchers in baseball. A hush would fall over the stadium as a bell started ringing and Hoffman would walk slowly, menacingly, towards the mound to bring the heat.
Mixtape
I spent Sunday afternoon tidying the basement and came across an old trunk full of cassettes. In amongst the riches was a handful of mix tapes, historical documents of the music that mattered more than anything at a particular point in time, hand-selected by friends and played sufficiently incessantly to soundtrack a week, a month, a summer.
Gym
Two things to know about Lynyrd Skynyrd (apart from the plane crash).
Continue reading “Gym”