Est. Read Time: 6 minutes. Read Time brought to you once again by the Ashburton Energy + Hair Logistics Group, in association with the Bradley Hills Bureau of Corrections + Housing.
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SHOWS:
Julian Stern Keeps Trying. Thursday, July 27 @ 9PM, The Yard Theatre. THIS WILL BE A PARTY. A SHOW, BUT WITH PARTY VIBES.
Julian Stern Keeps Trying @ Edinburgh Fringe! August 4-13!
Sam Salem @ Flappers. September 28th. My friend the hilarious and famous Sam Salem is doing a one night only big honkin’ set at Burbank’s finest club, and I’m one of the supporting acts. Shall be a party.
Garden Comedy! September 8th. Tickets to come!
Picture Day Show. September 20th. tickets to come!
Sternal Journalists!
We’re back to the old style of SternJourns where I’ve had a few drinks while making dinner and am just banging out an e-mail to loved ones. You are the loved ones, whether we’ve met or not. Here are a short thought and a long(er) thought.
***
I swear I read somewhere that the guy who invented the punctuation that denotes the end of a magazine or newspaper article put that exact punctuation on his tombstone. This is cool if true. I thought the punctuation was an ellipsis using three asterisks (as is left-justified above), but I cannot find any information on that anywhere, despite googling "end punctuation article journalism magazine tombstone inventor".”
So I guess we’ll never know.
***
Today, I went to an open mic and then went to the “B-Boy B-Girl Summit” downtown. This Davos of breaking was very cool because it made me feel uncreative.
I love to feel uncreative. There is strength and power in being a goober. I spend far too much of my time being locked in to creativity and creative processes and assessment of creative processes. I spend far too much of my time, to be briefer, in the thick of it.
This is not to toot my own horn or comment at all on whether I think my time spent on creativity is effective or useful. I’m just saying that much of my time is spent “interfacing with creativity” in some way, and much of that time is inherently about feeling locked in to creativity as a lifestyle and/or existence.
But at the Davos of Breaking (as I really enjoyed calling it, even though people probably didn’t love that), I was amongst hundreds of people who were participating in and/or enjoying a creative process (dance) which I know very little about.
My friend who brought me to this event—we’ll call him Lenny—does not identify as a dancer, but is way more of a dancer than I am. As we watched the battles and showcases, Lenny whisper-shouted, “Poppin’! … lockin’! … Lockin’! … Poppin’!” because he had just told me that “popping & locking” is not one thing like “Celino & Barnes” but rather two very connected things like “Rizzoli & Isles.”
It was very fun to approach an art form without criticism or baggage, and just enjoy the curiosity around it.
Speaking of which, I mentioned that I went to this good time-fun time after going to an open mic. The open mic was also a good time-fun time, but when another one of my friends at the B-Boy Summit asked “wow, you went to an open mic already today? How was it?” I was reminded that “How was it?” is never the question I’m interested in, even though I get why other are.
I go to these things almost daily and they are often at most, on the whole, as interesting as any individual track or cross-country practice I had in high school. Which is to say: they are semi-social experiences that are much more about boring maintenance than eventful gains. They can suck, they can be fun. But overall, they are pieces of a puzzle that are fairly meaningless in a vacuum.
THAT BEING SAID, there is a decent amount of the time something crazy that happens, even it might be quiet. And today, I was sitting there in a dark room of about 9 people when behind me I heard a fart.
It wasn't a comical fart. I felt that this person had accidentally let that fart out. It was sort of in between laughs, so it wasn’t totally clear whether anyone heard it. But I had, and I guessed—as someone who has farted in public by accident—that the farter had heard it as well and was not feeling great about that having just happened.
Silly me.
I looked back a couple minutes later, and said Farter was somehow lying with his back on a chair and both feet chillin’ up on two separate chairs in the row in front of him, which was the row exactly behind me. There is no way this was a comfortable position. But it was an effective position if you wanted to aim your fart directly at the stranger who was sitting in front of you.
And sparing you the details, Sternal Journalist, I will say that based on his subsequent set, I have no doubt in my mind that the positioning and timing were completely intentional.
This is why I think it’s nice to every now and then, no matter how artsy or creative you feel, find a way to experience art as an outsider. It might be the only way to get out of the line of fart-fire.
Recommendations!
The Divine Comedy of Roman Emperors’ Last Words. Article. This New Yorker article was a very fun romp of trivia and the slapstick verité of Roman emperor deaths and burials.
The Idol. Television Show. Look, I just gave it a shot. I’m only two episodes in. I know there’s discourse around it, and I haven’t delved deep into what it is. But so far, I can at least say that the opening 20 minutes of the pilot portray the closest thing to my experience of “Hollywood photo shoots” I’ve ever seen in media.
Joy Ride. Movie. This. Movie. Is. Fun. It was very fun to laugh at in a theater.
Flash Book Clubbing. Activity. After watching Joy Ride, I went with my friend Chris to Barnes & Noble on a lark. We thought about each getting a copy of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, but then found a much cheaper, poppier book that we promised to read one chapter a day of. We went straight to a bar and read the book side-by-side, with sassy comments and fun chuckles and beers. This was a great idea. I cannot recommend it enough. Here is a picture:
Okay, that’s all for this week! Be an outsider! And if you have to fart at someone, don’t make it obvious!
Much love!
Julian
P.S. I spend anywhere between two and twelve hours a week on the Sternal Journal. If you enjoy receiving it (and are RICH) consider becoming a paying subscriber. For just a few bucks a month, you can provide me with a bit more time to come up with fun topics, poems, and interviews; and you with probably fewer typos.