Hobbies Are Actually Portals
Happy Friday and welcome to lucky number 13!
There's a piece about how my current hobbies influence my writing (11.5 minute read) and links to things that inspired, enlightened, or entertained me this week.
I hope you have a great weekend!
Hobbies Are Actually Portals (11.5 min read)
In one of the early newsletters I talked about jumpstarting my creativity during quarantine by flooding my system with new experiences. It was something that was hard to do during COVID and I realized I’d taken the ability to do that for granted. One of the reasons I missed it was because taking up a new hobby is like stepping through a portal to new worlds and new people who may inspire your work.
I had this experience in 2019 when I started learning how to make pizza.
I can count on one hand the things I’ve loved my entire life and pizza would be the thumb I start with. Growing up in Ironton, Ohio we had Giovanni’s at least twice a week and for sure every Friday during football season. Mr. Gatti’s was across the river in Russell and I loved going there for pizza and for the arcade (which brings up another subject I’ll get to in a bit). I’ve lived in New York and Chicago, both famous for their pizza, and now Los Angeles which has become an excellent pizza city in its own right. I’ve eaten so much pizza over the years and in all that time it never occurred to me to learn how to really make it at home until 2019.
That summer we had a couple of “make your own pizza” parties at the house using Pillsbury crusts, jarred sauce, bags of Kraft mozzarella and assorted toppings. I thought I was supposed to roll out the dough and I got so irritated when it kept sticking to the roller. But it was still fun and at some point a couple of weeks later I started thinking that it couldn’t be THAT difficult to make my own sauce, and it would probably be so much fresher than the jarred stuff.
After doing some research on tomatoes I drove out to Pasadena to Roma Market to pick up a couple of cans of San Marzanos, imported from Italy. I met the owner, Rosario, who has been working there since his family opened the place back in the 50’s. He’s 81 years old now and rarely misses a day of work. Even through the pandemic he was there with his mask on, every single day.
When I told him why I was there he walked me around the store, picking out the ingredients I should use, like fresh mozzarella and quality olive oil. The whole time he’s telling me the history of the market, how he invented what the store simply calls “the sandwich,” and how they sell hundreds of them a day now. (We have them at least twice a month) It was a history lesson, life lesson, and a character study all in one, the kind of experience you don’t often get in Los Angeles because of how things are siloed off.
He asked what kind of flour I was using and I confessed that I hadn’t tried making my own dough yet. He led me to the bags of 00 flour, the specific kind used in making Neapolitan pizzas. I went ahead and grabbed a bag and figured I’d give it a shot. But Rosario wasn’t finished.
He asked if I had a peel for transferring it to the stone and I told him not yet, so he tipped me off to a restaurant supply store not far away. An hour later I was wandering through a warehouse sized-space, aisles lined with bulk items I'd only seen in their final broken down form in restaurants, giant vats of pickles, or 1,000 count boxes of ketchup packets. The place was humming with workers pushing carts around, stocking up on items for their various places of business. It was a whole ecosystem I benefit from but have never seen because I only ever engage with the finished product.
Learning to make pizza has led me to a number of those experiences over the past two years. It’s something I have in common with a couple of great friends, it gets me into interesting conversations with cooks and pizzaiolos, it leads me to new neighborhoods in search of ingredients or pizza popups being run out of someone’s house. The process of making the dough and the pizza itself is an independent activity that engages my brain so that my subconscious mind can churn away on story problems. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to wash my hands in the middle so I can type a note into my phone or write down a new idea in my journal.
It’s also fed my love of paraphernalia. There aren’t that many tools of the trade for writers. Pens or pencils, notebooks, a laptop, software. You don’t get to obsess over quality and craftsmanship over nearly as many items. Two years into making pizza and I have an oven, a stone, multiple peels, Detroit style pans, cutters, serving boards, you name it.
My other current obsession is pinball.
I loved pinball as a kid but I went decades without even thinking about it until I started going to Bar 82 in The Arts District a few years ago. They have mostly newer machines but they also have a number of the old electro-mechanical machines that are just so tactile and satisfying to play. When we bought our house I picked up a machine for my office, a 1976 Williams Space Odyssey, which they had to rebrand as Space Mission after they were sued by MGM. (You might have caught a glimpse of Space Mission it in episode of 5 of Loki! We play the same game!)
Before the pandemic I started branching out to play other machines at places like Bar 82 or Walt’s in Eagle Rock. Once everything shut down all I had was Space Odyssey for fifteen months. I played it almost every day (again, great independent activity for solving story problems) and found myself watching other people play on YouTube, coveting their basement arcades in the process. I was dying to play something, anything, other than Space Odyssey.
When the world opened back up I was like, well, a pinball being shot full speed from a plunger, bouncing around from bar to bar, playing every machine I could. I took a trip out to the Museum of Pinball in Banning for an open house where you could play any one of the hundreds on display. Just walking around looking at the artwork was enough to spark my imagination with a dozen story ideas, and again, I realized I had journeyed into a whole new subculture, with new jargon, new rules and rituals, and specific archetypes. Seeking out hidden machines around the greater Los Angeles area has led me into new and unexpected places, neighborhoods I never would have ventured to otherwise. All of it is filling the well of inspiration for further use. Both of these hobbies have been a huge benefit creatively.
There are so many of these hidden worlds and subcultures in LA. Down the street there’s an equestrian center and we frequently see people on horseback in line at Baskin Robbins. At one of the parks we take Ellie to there’s a Model Railroad Society building. I’ve seen a few shops here and in Pasadena that specialize in model trains. Every December we go out to Christmas Tree Lane in Pasadena and there’s a guy who has recreated entire railroad lines and routes going through different areas of the country in his garage.
There are bourbon subcultures on YouTube and a whole group of people who obsess over EDC (every day carry), which are… the items you carry on your person every day. There are so many options for digging into new subcultures, which can in turn inspire new ideas or add more specificity to your work. I haven't even gotten to the therapeutic benefits or the joy and camaraderie that comes from them.
Julie and I joke about what we'll do differently if we find ourselves reincarnated and get another crack at life. She would learn piano and guitar and take dance. I think I’d finish the scuba diving classes I started in high school and actually get my certification. But the truth is it’s never too late to start any of those things. My Granny Belden started taking piano and violin lessons in her 60’s, maybe her 70’s.
I’m not sure what’s next for me. My other all-time favorite food is sushi. Maybe a year from now I’ll be rummaging around seafood markets early in the morning, or meeting a seller coming off the boats with their catch. A year or so later there’s a good chance those locations and people will show up in a new spec.
In the meantime I just saw that Bar 82 has a pinball league...
Here's a great little article on Rosario and "The Sandwich":
Roma Market: A Pasadena Landmark With One Sandwich - But So Much More - Pasadena - Los Angeles - The Infatuation — www.theinfatuation.com Roma Market: A Pasadena Landmark With One Sandwich - But So Much More
Yodas of the Week
My friend Chris Whyland sent me the link to this article and podcast interview with George Saunders. I know I sound like a broken record about him but I've found his insight so helpful. In the recorded interview he talks about how he had to put a piece aside for a bit and when he came back to it he was able to see a solution to a problem because he was a smarter person than the guy who wrote it originally.
Normally when we come back to something we say we're looking at it with "fresh eyes." But we're actually looking at it with older eyes. We've had more life experience, solved other problems, picked up new perspectives, even if it's only been a few days.
I had that exact experience this week with a feature spec that's getting ready to go out. When I sent it to my agents five months ago I was a different writer. In the meantime I wrote 30k words of a novel based on it and started this newsletter, in addition to the show I'm working on. I saw that story in a new way and cracked it open again, solving some underlying issues that had always been bugging me deep down in my subconscious. Older me just knows how to write it better.
George Saunders on How You Know When the Talking Spider Belongs in the Story ‹ Literary Hub — lithub.com George Saunders is the guest. His new book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, is available from Random House. From the episode: Brad Listi: There are imaginative feats that unfold in the fiction of cer…
I love this quick video on a scene from BREAKING BAD. 2+2=
Why This Scene In 'Breaking Bad' Is A Perfect Example Of A Storytelling Principle - Digg — digg.com A good rule in storytelling is to "let the audience add up two plus two." Here's why this scene in "Breaking Bad" exemplifies that expertly.
Lucy Dacus: Tiny Desk (Home) Concert — www.youtube.com The Tiny Desk is working from home for the foreseeable future. Introducing NPR Music's Tiny Desk (home) concerts, bringing you performances from across the c...