Shoot the crowd, not the fireworks
On my mom's secret past, photography, and how looking backwards reveals hidden humanity.
Where to begin? A: Begin anywhere. Just begin. It’s like Jarvis sang…
🎶 I took her to a supermarket
I don't know why but I had to start it somewhere
So it started there 🎶
-Pulp, “Common People”
Openers
🎯 Tattoos are like weddings. The younger you are when it happens, the more likely you are to wind up regretting it.
🎯 Packrat is a nice euphemism for hoarder. We should bring in animals to spin stuff more often: “I don’t have dementia, I’m just a forgettabear.”
🎯 Imagine being Ottoman or Venetian. Once you were known for your empire that ruled the world. Now you're known for comfy foot stools and blinds that close.
🎯 The greatest trick the surveillance state ever pulled was referring to hidden cameras, secret mics, and spy trackers as “doorbell cams,” “virtual assistants,” and “cookies.” It’s giving cute Gestapo.
🎯 Teenagers used to have summer jobs. Now, they're just summer digital nomads.
🎯 Civil war would mean leaving the couch. America won't go for that. If we really fight it out, it's prob just gonna be the north's AI dating concierges love bombing the south's.
🎯 The hidden hero of hawk tua:
🎯 Women will complain about all the false impressions men get from watching p0rn and then turn around and say stuff like, "You gotta spit on that thang." Rebuttal: Nah, please don’t.
🎯 Weird how being “supermax”ed means you’re either a NBA superstar signing a top dollar contract or you’re a felon locked up next to El Chapo under a mountain.
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🎯 Mark my words: Those Tiny Desk concerts are gonna wind up paying for the rest of NPR just like Wordle and Cooking bankroll the NY Times.
🎯 Handwriting is legit hard now. Someone gives you a pen and you’re like, “Uhhhhh, where’s the on button?”
🎯 Talking generations is just a variation on astrology: It's lumping a bunch of people together via vague umbrella terms and assigning everything about them to when they were born.
🎯 Dear men who hate on astrology, angels, and "Real Housewives": Crypto is astrology for men. Aliens are angels for men. And “First Take” is “Real Housewives” for men. Just sayin’.
🎯 My non-negotiables include never creating a list of non-negotiables. However, I’m willing to compromise on that.
Comedy
🃏 You can get jokes and quips on my social media: Instagram – TikTok – Threads – X – Substack.
🃏 Upcoming dates: July 20 in Boston and August 10 in Victoria (BC). Ticket info.
🃏 Watch my standup at YouTube.
🃏 My other newsletter is Funny How: Letters to a Young Comedian. It’s about the art and philosophy of doing standup but plenty of it applies to other creative pursuits too.
🃏 Listen to my podcast: Kind of a Lot with Matt Ruby.
Looking backwards
Whenever I’m watching fireworks, I try to take a moment and look behind me at everyone bathed in the glow of the explosions. Last week I was out east and captured this shot of beachgoers watching the 🎇:
It’s a lesson I learned from photographer Bruce Davidson who took this shot of a fireworks display decades ago:
There are sparks in humanity, too.
I’ve studied Davidson’s work closely because 1) he’s good and 2) my mom was married to him before my dad.
The thing is I never even knew about that until I graduated college. How I learned about Davidson’s existence: I came home from Chicago (I was 21 and had just moved there). My mom was at the kitchen table and we were talking about the Windy City...
mom: “is it really segregated there?”
me: “yeah, the black people live on the south side and the white people on the north side.”
mom: “yeah, it was like that when i lived there.”
me: “when did you live in chicago?”
mom: “when i was with bruce.”
me: “who’s bruce?”
mom: “oh, i never told you? (pause) i was married before i met your father.”
me: “um, no. you never told me that. i’m pretty sure i’d remember if you had.”
That kinda stuff happened a lot with my mom. She’d just randomly spill the beans on how, say, Allen Ginsberg once yelled at her for putting pot brownies out at a party. “You can’t give people drugs without telling them,” he yelled at her. Phew, imagine getting a moral lecture from that dude.
My mom and I wound up talking about Davidson more that day. About how she travelled in the south with him in the early 60’s when he was working on “Time of Change: Civil Rights Photographs.” (The fireworks shot is from that era.)
She explained the marriage didn’t last long. She told me she wanted to escape her home and New York City after her sister had died (schizophrenia/Thanksgiving/jumped or fell out a window) and that marriage felt like the only way out back then. Eventually the facade crumbled, though. It all seemed very first season of Mad Men. She didn’t talk much about him again after that conversation.
Fast forward to 2016 and a night I happened to be visiting the New York Public Library to see an exhibit by graphic designer Michael Bierut. Upon entering, I peeped a sign that read, “Bruce Davidson & Matt Dillon.”
Whoa, random. I did a run-through of the Bierut exhibition and went to the Davidson Q&A.
It was an interesting talk about his work photographing Brooklyn gangs in the 50s, civil rights stuff in the south in the 60s, Harlem in the 60s, the NYC subway in the 80s, and more.
Matt Dillon interviewed him because he’d been a lifelong fan. It started when he discovered the Brooklyn gang photos Davidson took, photocopied them, and put them on his walls to help him get into character when he was preparing for his role in Drugstore Cowboy. Some of Davidson’s comments that night:
On his subjects: “I didn’t try to judge them. I tried to get close to them.” He talked about “the sex appeal of poverty and a building falling apart.” (Sounds a lot like “Common People,” actually.) Why he likes to work solo: “I like to be alone. When you have someone else there, there’s a tension.” His advice to photographers: “Always come back. Don’t just take one picture and leave.”
When it ended, I approached to say hello. Davidson was in his 70s, remarried, and had a couple of kids. I mentioned my mom’s maiden name and he seemed taken aback. I told him I was her son and he said, “You have a sister too, right?” I do. She met Davidson at a book signing in DC previously.
I was trying to fill in some blanks so I asked him what years he was with my mom. He had to pause to figure it out. “1962 and 1963. Because I took her with me to the South.”
Not sure what question to ask next, I asked him if my mom was crazy. “No. Not then, anyway. I do remember her showing up years later when I was giving a lecture at ICP. She wore a red dress. I thought it was odd that she would just show up like that.”
I didn’t think it was odd at all. But then again, I grew up with her. Odd is normal when it’s all you know.
As I walked back to the subway, I remembered my mom taking me to a café in the city to get ice cream one day when I was a kid. On the way, she explained the meaning of the place’s name to me. It clearly was a word that was important to her. The name: Serendipity.
5-Spotted
🗯️ The problem with business plans, 10 year plans, game plans, morning routines, and every other kind of plan: They don't allow for change. Gil Reyes, Andre Agassi's trainer explains in Andre’s autobiography “Open”:
If somebody can write down your [workout] routine on a piece of paper, it isn’t worth the piece of paper it’s written on. You’re asking me to put you through a workout here that leaves no room for where you are, how you’re feeling, what you need to focus on. It doesn’t allow for change.
🗯️ How Short Is Too Short for a Skirt?
If you are constantly worrying that your skirts are too short, they probably are, not because of any immutable rule but because thinking about what other people think is occupying too much of your brain. If refusing to kowtow to old mores makes you feel more powerful — sort of like a display of plumage before battle — great. The choice is yours.
Lesson: Worrying about what others think is a waste of brain bandwidth.
🗯️ Commercial music keeps getting simpler and simpler according to
.You can see the end result on the Billboard chart, if you dare look. Four chord vamps repeat endlessly. Melodies lose their chromaticism, and even bent notes are as rare as working phone booths. Syncopation disappears, and everything sounds like it is programmed dead center in the middle of the beat. Lyrics get simpler and more repetitive.
🗯️ John Mulaney on summer blockbusters:
I love movies, though. I'm kinda—It's funny to me over the summer when these big Blockbuster Action movies come out, and you read about one movie, one of these movies, and it'll say that it cost something like 100 million dollars, because whenever I read that, I think like, "Yeah, you didn't need to make a movie with that money. I would have bought a ticket just to see 100 million dollars." Like, I am at a point in my life where I would wait on a line just to look at that much cash. Like you could just stack it up in a motel room and line us up down the hall. You put some guy out front in a straw hat that's like, "It is 8 dollars to see the 100 million, or 10 dollars to have your money added to the 100 million." Ooh, very luxurious!
When I was growing up, when a psychiatrist said “you have this mental illness,” we were like “f*ck off, you’re not a real doctor.” Now it’s like “oh my God thank you so much, now everything makes perfect sense.” What happened?
Thanks for reading.
-Matt
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