How are you? What are you working on, artistically or otherwise? Who or what has shaped who you are? What inspires you? What do you love? Send a letter to luke@retroduck.com and let me know. These letters inspire me. I hope they inspire you, too.
I have often said, “Sundays are for worship and Netflix.” An old friend, Josh Ramirez, writes in about a different and unique way to relax and enjoy the movies on your weekend day.
Dear Luke,
Thank you for your interest in my unusual hobby. I did my first swap in October of 2019, although, I’d been thinking about it for a few months previous. I like to post pictures of my swaps on Instagram, where I get inspiration and encouragement. I decided to make a goal for myself to post a new swap every Sunday for the 2020 year (maybe beyond?). I try to coincide the swaps with events, holidays and the like (although sometimes I get ideas a bit too late). So far, I’ve been keeping up with that goal and I feel like I’m getting better at it.
As far back as I can remember, I have always loved movies. The first movie I saw at the theatre was Ghostbusters. I was a toddler at the time and was terrified yet intrigued. It is, to this day, my favorite movie. As an adult who grew up in the ’80s, I am fascinated with the technological changes in the industry. I can’t help but obsess over analog technology, though. I’ve collected music on cassette and vinyl for many years. I’ve amassed an enormous collection of VHS cassettes as well. If I had to guess, I currently own around 700 cassettes. Obviously, VHS tapes are no longer mass produced so thrift stores are my main source. Vintage horror is particularly hard to find, so I scoop that stuff up every chance I get. Ebay is a decent source if you are willing to pay. Spoiler alert: I am.
Spoolswapping is basically the swapping out of the actual VHS film spools and putting them into a new colored cassette case that better personifies the film itself. I also like to swap to cassettes that match the cover art of the sleeve. Swapping spools is a pretty simple process. Really, you only need a small screwdriver, a heat source (heat gun or hairdryer) and a glue stick. There are five tiny screws that need to be removes from the back of the cassette. You have to be careful removing the the spools and keeping the tiny components together. You don’t want to wrinkle the film or the movie might get choppy when you play it. Do the same with the other tape and swap those bad boys out!
Once you screw the cassette back together, you gotta get the label on. I use a hairdryer to heat up the label as this will make it easy to peel it off. This should be done extremely carefully as to preserve the integrity of the label. All that’s left is using a glue stick to apply the label on the new tape and you’re good to go.
In this age of streaming services, I believe that it’s important to preserve analog technology for nostalgic purposes. Also, there have been countless times where I want to watch a film, and I can’t find it on any streaming platform. When you own hard copies, you can watch whenever you please. Furthermore, it’s pretty sweet to have an aesthetically pleasing copy of said movie. That’s about it. I’m about six months in and I won’t be slowing down any time soon! I look forward to making custom VHS cassettes of newer films that were never able to see the glory of VHS. I’m excited to see what I can do going forward.
How are you? What are you working on, artistically or otherwise? Who or what has shaped who you are? What inspires you? What do you love? Send a letter to luke@retroduck.com and let me know.These letters inspire me. I hope they inspire you, too.
William Sterling is a podcast editor by day, and aspiring (and talented!) actor and writer by night. Here he is on the pressures of productivity during the pandemic. Stills from The Dinner Parting, which we shot last December.
Hi.
I’ve been working on a book. As such, my prose might seem stilted. Or there might be long run on sentences where I’m endeavoring to, like Hemingway, bring more thoughts together than deserve to be brought together and I will use more “ands” than any writer should ever use and you’ll understand it’s all because I have so many important things to say and these words will spread this brilliance and everyone will cheer and there will be roses and I will sleep well.
Or, at least, that may be my inner dialogue.
I suppose I struggle with this actor’s/writer’s need for recognition. And by this, I mean my own. Please pardon the disjointed cocktail of the actor and the writer like Jekyll and Hyde. Quarantine does not do well for my state of my mind. Instagram helps. I haven’t been able to bring myself to brave the world of Tik Tok considering I feel like only yesterday I was twenty-one.
I have had a lot of thoughts recently about the pressure of productivity. About how much I think I should be creating and how much I am creating. I do believe there is such a thing as too many voices. Too many pressures outside the pressure cooker of the self. Because we really are too hard on ourselves.
Prior to this version of the end of the world, my personal world ended a few months ago when I lost my dog. My best friend. The sometimes-uncontrollable fate of cancer consumed him, and I was crushed. But this was early November. Just before my thirty second birthday. And before I traveled to Michigan to star in a feature film co-written and produced by none other than Mr. Luke Allen Hackney. There I met so many souls and felt so much love and stretched so many creative muscles it felt like, finally, I was swaying in that hammock of doing the thing I had been destined to do.
But much to, hopefully all, of our woes, we had to wrap and go our separate ways. And then there was Christmas. And then the New Year. And I told myself 2020 would be the year of me. Because I had spent so many years at the beck and call of my day job. Answering the midnight calls of any pseudo-celebrity that needed an edit or a way to make them look better. But no, this year was going to be mine. I was going to learn the power of now. I was going to push back a little. I was going to set some healthy boundaries. I was going to make the others, not just see but, feel my presence and ability.
And it seemed to work for a few weeks.
But then the sickness came, and everyone forgot. And I can’t blame them. There are a lot of things I have forgotten or foregone or ignored because of the stress of this event. An event everyone is likely tired of hearing about or reading about or thinking about. But from this pressure I have also felt the core of my creativity push back.
For the first two weeks I pretended like every hour was the happy one. For the third, I wandered the wasteland of the mind wondering what it was all for. The fourth, I found productivity. The fifth I found tequila. And by this, as of now, end of the sixth I have completed what, by word count goal, will be one quarter of a book. One I began while filming in Michigan.
But I also dragged my ass through a vomit draft of a screenplay with my writing partner. And I’ve taped monologues and done scenes with my roommate and read books and newspapers and caught up on old New York Times magazines and watched some television and spent quality time with my girlfriend and become pretty good pals with her cat; monster. (Remember the “ands?”)
Needless to say, I think what I’ve discovered most in my process of writing this book and being way too hard on myself, upon forcing myself to reflect I realize I have accomplished quite a great deal. And if you’re willing to look at it from the outside in, you have too. That when push comes to shove and we’re not going into work and we’re left to our own devices, eventually the depression will dry out and the self-doubt will come up short and we’ll realize; we’re doing just fine. Because at the end of panic is peace. If we are willing to give ourselves grace, at the depth of that dramatic self-reflection is a determination that even nature cannot diminish.
I am, therefore I create. Not the other way around. And you are too.
It has been a blessing to be reminded by the clay that my hands have molded, even if I were left with nothing at the end of this; I would still be someone. I would still be me. And that me had enough to say to dig my way out of the holes that misfortune has created. And I take confidence in knowing that we can do this together. Because I’m still just a boy with a dream. Still an unpublished writer. Still an actor who hasn’t broken through to the other side of having no day job.
The truth is, at the end of it all, all the work in the world is only part time. And we all know that part time on this earth is borrowed, still. So why not listen to the call of the wild? The beat of the heart that continues, despite our desire to give up. Art is never ending. And just like you and I, it pulsates and pounds in the temples, and it cannot be stopped. During times of doubt, do not lean into disbelief. Remember that, even at the end of it all, all this, ourselves included, may only be temporary. But our art is not. The only positive thing to come from a pandemic is passion. And that is permanent.
How are you? What are you working on, artistically or otherwise? Who or what has shaped who you are? What inspires you? What do you love? Send a letter to luke@retroduck.com and let me know.Here is one from my friendAmber on willing your heart to find a way to rise anew, an excellent Easter Sunday sentiment.Photos found at Dangerous Minds.
It’s springtime, and I’ve been looking out the window, thinking about chaos and physics and the joys of muscle memory. And the unique fizzy bliss of riding a motorcycle in and out of a turn. ::grin::
If you haven’t ridden, a moving motorcycle is affected by gyroscopic forces that are unique to two-wheeled machines–on a bike, you’re both part of the external forces and the self-correcting mechanism.
When you go around a corner, you as a rider apply force via leaning, and gyroscopic forces will Drift Your Bike around said corner until you stop leaning. Those same gyroscopic forces will then correct your bike back upright and into a straight line.
I think in bike class, I heard ‘cornering bike is a collection of competing forces that are nine-tenths crashed’ and the “whoa important!” last-tenth is the balanced gyroscopic forces that you eventually learn without thinking, like breathing.
As you become more proficient, your body becomes a wiser machine, your core and legs and arms coiling in unison with your brain. It purrs somewhere, maybe in your lizard brain(?), and hums its way throughout. The chaos and the order and the science and adrenaline of it all make me swoon just writing about it.
When I started to learn this in my body, not just reading about it–and for fuckle’s sake not sitting behind someone on a bike–I was so excited. I grinned with such uncool obvious goony glee: publicly, goofily, unmistakably joyful in that early mastery. I love that feeling–beginning to viscerally know something challenging that took an investment and a measure of discomfort and bravery.
Like knowing without looking where D and G and C are on your ukulele. (Or anything.) Or gently curling up into bakasana. Or building a meditation practice. Or nailing a joke while telling a story where people pay rapt attention.
I’d leaned into motorcycles when my life was packed with busy empty things, avoiding my grief about a marriage ending. I was so brittle. My bike whisperer brother found a 1980 Yamaha XS 400 for me that became a community project in the center of his shop, more than an hour from my home. His former band mates, a curious neighbor, friends from school, even my Dad showed up odd nights and on weekends to help bleed a brake line, paint the tank, fix the fuel pump. Piece by piece, beer by beer, by mid-summer I had a bike.
Practicing for my riding test, talking physics and music with my brother, learning new fixes from friends–all ways I leaned into growth and joy as I was grieving the end of another part of my life back at home.
Anyway, I felt like visiting with something that feels joyful and expansive that I carry with me—especially while waiting in isolation at home during the pandemic can make things feel small and limited.
In the quiet sheltering month ahead, I wish you the giddy joy of new mastery of something thrilling and difficult. I hope you become a new machine. And I’d love to hear about it.
How are you? What are you working on, artistically or otherwise? Who or what has shaped who you are? What inspires you? Send a letter to luke@retroduck.com and let me know.
From artist/writer Tim Lane, here is one on The Smiths, his days as a Catholic school boy, the convolution of memory and revelation, and the separation of art and artist.
Hey Luke,
Morrissey’s been a bit of a disappointment, hasn’t he? I was so psyched to see him in Flint a few years back, but then he canceled. And then a whole slew of cancelations took place, and he was being talked about, and I discovered for the first time some of his political leanings. How in the hell, I wondered, could the guy I listened to back in my formative years with, I’ll be honest, a little bit of unease, but a lot of admiration, turn out like this? I mean I love The Smiths. The music is great. And Morrissey’s vocals were, and maybe still, are, great, but the lyrics were the thing I picked apart. “Oh, the alcoholic afternoons that we spent in your room. They meant more to me than any living thing on Earth. They had more worth,” or, “Why pamper life’s complexities when the leather runs smooth on the passenger seat,” or, “There’s a club if you’d like to go. You could meet somebody who really loves you. So you go and you stand on your own, and you leave on your own, and you go home, and you cry, and you want to die.” It was like he was always singing directly to me, directly to us, right? I mean this guy knew, right?
So how?
It amazes me to this day that I never wound up seeing The Smiths. It’s kind of like being a fifty-year-old Catholic who’s never received communion.
I’m not Catholic anymore, but while I was in elementary and middle school, I was more Catholic than the pope himself. I was an altar boy from fourth through tenth grade, really. I would serve on the altar in some capacity every day for two weeks straight, and then intermittently for the next two weeks, and then I got a week off before the rotation began all over again. EVEN IN THE SUMMERS!
I have this poignant, lucid memory of the second time The Romantics came to town which is wrapped up with so many other old memories of being Catholic.
I had red hair: so I never had a girlfriend. I mean it’s like Intro to Philosophy: Logic 101. Right? Red hair was death. The girls in my class were into guys with the dark hair, or the blond hair, but not the red hair. Do you know that the red hair gene is totally being weeded out of the gene pool? In so many years, like ten or fifteen or twenty—I’m not exactly sure—there won’t be any natural redheads on the entire planet.
The number of masses I sat up on the altar in my black cassock and flowing white surplus, scanning the church for cute girls is a lengthier catalogue than the Book of Psalms. Catholics are into ritual and routine, if nothing else, so families usually attended the same mass each Sunday. By tenth grade, when I wasn’t scheduled to serve, I’d occasionally volunteer to serve ten o’clock mass on Sundays anyway. My dad and I usually went to eight o’clock mass, but the really cute girl with the slightly stylish dark hair and penetrating dark eyes went to ten. I mean like how could she not have noticed me? For six years, I had almost been a permanent fixture on that altar. I had certainly noticed her. Enough to think about her. I mean like I had thought about her for a while. A good long while. I think I might have dreamt of her once. And then, by God, a miracle (which had nothing to do with her) happened in tenth grade. My buddy started dating a public school girl, and her girlfriend was apparently just as lonely as me? Similar dark hair and eyes as my scope at the ten o’clock mass. Cute. Suddenly I had a girlfriend. I mean like I was just thrown in the back seat with this girl. It was strange, but I was happy (until she dumped me).
Shortly after this, The Romantics came to town, and for some reason that totally escapes me, the girlfriends couldn’t go. Maybe they had Model UN or something. Maybe they’d been grounded for smoking pot, like most public school kids did. Maybe their parents didn’t want them dating Catholic school guys. I don’t remember. But I clearly remember what happened at the concert. The concert was at the Capitol Theater. My buddy and I were sitting left of the stage, about midway up. The cute girl from church, who was older now, and even cuter, was sitting behind us. I recognized her instantly. And I’ll be damned if she didn’t recognize me. When our eyes met, she flashed a big smile, and we froze like that for a moment. In that instant, her eyes and smile said, Oh, it’s you! I’ve been waiting for this to happen. It’s taken longer than I figured it might, but I always knew it would happen. We’ve been on course for a slow-moving, head-on collision for some time, haven’t we?
For a moment, I was religiously numb. The Romantics took the stage and it was pandemonium. But it was like I wasn’t there. I was in between the concert and the altar. I was in between the Capitol Theater and St. Mary’s Church. I was in some gray limbo, waiting for the band to break through to me, waiting for the girl to take my hand, waiting for my life to start. Eventually, the moment passed, like so many other moments. My buddy and I probably exchanged looks, or I was jostled, who knows? The Romantics were great. I found myself caught up in the show, or was I ever really completely caught up in the show? I don’t know, man. I can’t remember. Was the cute girl with a guy? Was the cute girl thinking about me? Did she actually remember me, or had I read too much into her smile? And the dread, Oh, my God, the dread. I mean I was sinning right then and there, throughout the whole concert, just as I had been throughout my whole life: sins of the MIND. I had a girlfriend. We had only been dating for about three months, but it was official. We had kissed. She was wearing my varsity jacket. I was cheating.
I think that I actually felt relieved when the concert came to an end. The needle would rise, the record player’s arm would return to its perch, the record would get re-sleeved and life would continue. But that’s not what happened. When the lights went up, the girl tapped my shoulder. The girl tapped my shoulder. THE GIRL TAPPED MY GODDAMN SHOULDER, Luke.
“There’s a party out in Burton,” she said. “No way,” I said. She shrugged. She told me the address. She smiled. She turned and joined the people in the aisle pouring out of the theater. Of course, I thought. Of course there’s a party in Burton. Of course I have a girlfriend. The first girlfriend I’ve had for more than sixty seconds since eighth grade, and there’s a party out in Burton, on a school night, after the concert. Oh, there’s probably a party out in Burton every night. There’s probably so much going on out there, outside of this theater, all the damn time, and I have no idea. I have no clue. But the cute girl from church knows. Damn straight, she knows. She’s probably known for a long time. She probably knew all of that time we sat in church separated by rows of pews, stealing glances at each other. Oh, yeah, I’d caught her looking once or twice. I couldn’t help staring. And now, she had made a pass. All of those years of longing had paid off. But I went home, and several months later my girlfriend returned my varsity jacket and started seeing some senior who had his own car, and I never saw the cute girl from church ever again.
The Smiths have a song for that anecdote, don’t they? “Well, I Wonder,” maybe? Yeaaaaah, dude. Forty years later, I never listen to The Romantics anymore, if I’m being honest. I saw them twice while I was in high school. They came to Flint twice. But I’ve never seen The Smiths. I mean I liked The Romantics, but I loved The Smiths. It’s bizarre. I still listen to The Smiths all the time. Seriously! And as I said, I’m not Catholic anymore. Hell, I don’t even have red hair anymore.
Over the past ten years, I’ve had the opportunity to catch a handful of bands that I missed during their heyday—my heyday. Kraftwerk, Psych Furs, OMD, Modern English, to name a few. At each concert, I always find myself scanning the crowd for a familiar face from the past.
How is it that I didn’t know more about Morrissey? I’ve had more than several conversations with Sheila and my friends over the years on whether we should separate a person’s art from their politics. How do we separate what a person makes for the world from who they are? Obviously, it can be done. The question becomes this: Should it be done? Should I forego studying Bobby Fischer’s amazing chess matches (I mean it’s not like I can understand his moves anyway) because of his antisemitism? Should I have never voted for Bill Clinton? Should I boycott Woody Allen’s Manhattan? I’ve probably seen that film six times. Should I burn all of my Smiths records because Morrissey has come out and said some stupid racist bullshit? It’s hard. Or is it? Maybe I’m just lame. I guess what I’ve decided is that I will never try to catch a Morrissey concert if the opportunity arises, but I’m going to continue to cherish The Smiths. They were—and still are—such a part of me.
My mind is currently on auto-pilot, but need to call you soon. It’s cool to hate talking on the phone now so I plan to talk on the phone more. I can’t seem to formulate sentences anymore so need practice.
I need to organically run into Bill Murray. I don’t know if I used organically right, but I need to make some changes in my life to help this pending fortune along.
I think one thing you and I have always had in common is the basic inability to be unequivocally excited. I think (hope) there are still a few illusions out there to get ourselves wrapped up in. We just have to train ourselves to be excited about the everyday before we can address that.
What’s your mission statement? The last time I took a serious look at mine I was five and I was going to be a ballerina or a princess of some sort so it’s going to need some tweaking.
I think raw almonds might have special powers, FYI.
If I am in a bad mood for no apparent reason I take note of any basic needs I have ignored – put to the wayside and/or poor diet choices. I try to take corrective action instead of burn everything down based on reasons I have assigned when my body was in survival mode from the various poisons recommended to me as an American Consumer. If I am in a good mood, for apparent no reason, same thing: I am looking for magic charms to keep in my arsenal. This shit has to work both ways, no?
So I ate a few handfuls of almonds and rediscovered the storyline I needed to continue on as a just and fair actor in my life.
You should make a cameo, too. I will find you or you find me.
Love and miss you,
Adri
Adri,
When I am in a bad mood for no apparent reason, I think I do the same thing, and that is how I always come back around to you.
