The one word of career advice in The Graduate is "plastics". Our use of the word comes from Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, and it means work pressed out of a mold so more of it can be sold, the way Topo Chico felt different once Coca-Cola owned it. One of us loved the original The Vanishing, a subtitled film, and can't stand the American remake by the same director. It added movie stars and a new ending, chosen because it tested better, and lost all the feeling.
We wonder whether complexity is the real trap, since it flatters the ego. One of us spent an afternoon painting his electronic typewriter red and wrote nothing that day. Van Neistat spent $3,200 fitting a GoPro with interchangeable lenses and ended up, in his words, with a more fragile version of his DSLR. Willem Verbeek has gone the other way: on a 9-day trip to buy a car in Canada and drive it home, he shot a single roll of film, and one of us thinks he's making the best work of his career. It ends at Walker Repair, where Kevin Walker built one working Canon Sure Shot from the best parts of several he had on hand, and the first model in the series was waiting on the counter for $60.
-Ai
Alex referenced a movie called "THE FOLLOWING" during our conversation, and he meant to say "THE VANISHING" - link below.
Show Notes:
The Graduate: https://www.criterion.com/films/28578-the-graduate
Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck: https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/classrev/charley.htm
The Vanishing (1993): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vanishing_(1993_film)
The Vanishing (1988): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vanishing_(1988_film)
Coca-Cola Buys Topo Chico: https://bit.ly/45UR0B6
Fake Plastic Trees by Radiohead: https://youtu.be/n5h0qHwNrHk?si=0vXqkBPG_VRKxQ2U
Van Neistat GoPro Video: https://youtu.be/tPv83XxkrWo?si=VddLvDGgzCsBtw8i
Willem Verbeek Canada Road Trip Video: https://youtu.be/I6ESg2Fdtn4?si=oULCDAZ3YPf3HHQ-
Seinfeld Episode with John Cheever’s Letters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyT3jlANQ_Q
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