Themes this week: Art and influence
____________________________________
Imitation is the sincerest form of show business.
-Roseanne Barr, “And I should know,” NY Magazine, 5/15
____________________________________
Think about NOT waiting your turn. Instead, think about getting together with friends that you admire, or envy. Think about entrepeneuring. Think about NOT waiting for a company to call you up. Think about not giving your heart to a bunch of adults you don’t know. Think about horizontal loyalty. Think about turning to people you already know, who are your friends, or friends of their friends and making something that makes sense to you together, that is as beautiful or as true as you can make it. … You will build a body of work, but you will also build a body of affection, with the people you’ve helped who’ve helped you back.
-Radiolab host Robert Krulwich, commencement speech to Berkeley Journalism School’s Class of 2011, 5/7.
____________________________________
Like Malcolm Gladwell or Michael Lewis or Michael Pollan, Brooke somehow takes a subject most of us don’t give a damn about and makes it completely entertaining.
-Ira Glass, cover quote for Brooke Gladstone’s The Influence Machine, due out 5/23
____________________________________
An artist’s childhood is his birthright, the stuff of his dreams and nightmares. Sure, there’s always an endless supply of material to fuel painting, poetry, performance-fucking-art, but sometimes there’s one “big” work waiting to be made, the one “right” way to make it.
-Nathan Ihara, “Hitting Harmony,” from No Near Exit, a selection of works from Post Road Magazine, 2011.
____________________________________
Carlin and Sally Wade
I saw a therapist yesterday and she said, “Well, what stage of grief are you in?” And I’m thinking: “Writing?” is that a stage?
-Sally Wade, long-time companion to George Carlin, WTFPodcast with Marc Maron, on her new book The George Carlin Letters: The Permanent Courtship of Sally Wade, 5/12.
____________________________________
Why the fuck would a journalism school do that?
-Jeff Jarvis on why his CUNY j grad students are breaking the editorial wall and trying to create a blog ad network to support local journalism, Brooklyn Blogfest at the Bell House, 5/12.
____________________________________
Inverted Soapbox 
Roseanne Barr is fantastic. Little-known fact: Without her, there would be no Judd Apatow.
Or Joss Whedon. Or … George Clooney? That anecdote in the story about her and Clooney smashing a giant chocolate No. 1 with a baseball bat and sending a picture of it to ABC makes me happy.