There Is Only One Will Holt

Timeless Philosophy

By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond the winning.
Lao Tzu

Let it go, let it go…
Elsa

2013 Movies and Me

Here are the best film year 2013 movies that entered my eyeballs (tiebreaker goes to movies not nominated for awards):

• Upstream Color
• Stories We Tell
• Gravity
• 12 Years a Slave
• A Hijacking
• Blue Jasmine
• Her
• In The House
• American Hustle
• Rush

The worst 2013 movie that subjected me to itself: C.O.G.
The most wasted opportunity documentary (next time let Werner make this one): The Act of Killing
The best movie that featured Werner Herzog as a villain but wasn’t just a documentary wherein Werner Herzog was the director: Jack Reacher

And now something different, the best non-2012, non-2013 movies I saw in 2013:

• The Passion of Joan of Arc (from another planet?)
• All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
• A Place in the Sun
• The Elephant Man
• Primer
• Rust and Bone
• A Man Escaped
• Un Chien Andalou
• The Big Lebowski
• Bridge on the River Kwai
• The Prestige
• Ratatouille
• Jackie Brown
• Election (Johnnie To’s, not Alex Payne’s)

The worst non-2012, non-2013 movie I watched in 2013: The Fury by Brian De Palma — a 60 year old Kirk Douglas does parkour in this 1978 movie made by the most binary director out there.

Most dated movie: The Swimmer, whoa boy. Burt Lancaster races a horse in this one.

Most epic driving sequence: tie, The Year of Living Dangerously, driving through a roadblock drunk on Vangelis, or Withnail and I, waking up in the backseat of a car and asking a drunk Richard E Grant what he is doing and having him turn to the camera and say “Making Time!” as he weaves through highway traffic, assorted booze as his co-pilot, Jimi Hendrix’s guitar as herald.

Pictures of Planes from The Right Stuff

Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff is a great book, but a great book that didn’t feature any pictures of the amazing planes, jets, and rockets that populate its stories. Chuck Yeager, Scott Crossfield, Joe Walker, Al White, the Mercury 7, and many other possessors of the right stuff thrusted through the sky in these vehicles. This list is roughly chronological.

X-1

X-1A (Yeager broke the sound barrier in this)

X-2

D-558-1

XF-92A (book refers to it as “horrible”)

D-558-2 (book refers to it as “beautiful”)

X-3 (book should’ve described this as “needle-nosed”)

X-15 (the plane that was to be a bridge towards the X-20 and manned ground to space flight)

F-104 Starfighter (Yeager’s crash towards the end of the book happened in one of these)

Mercury-Redstone and Mercury-Atlas rockets

X-20 Dyna-Soar (never flew)

Planes Dropped from Motherships

Typical X-15 Mission (alleged)

P-51 (what Yeager flew in WWII)

Tale of Baby Mouse

In pictures.

Shivering mouse, found alone on the porch, unable to move. We brought him inside, heated him up for a couple hours, and gave him a warm meal. We then set him up in a shelter near where we found him, with enough provisions to last him days and with hope that his renewed vigor would allow him to reconnect with his mouse family.

My Favorite Zen Koan

A man walking across a field encounters a tiger. He fled, the tiger chasing after him. Coming to a cliff, he caught hold of a wild vine and swung himself over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Terrified, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger had come, waiting to eat him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little began to gnaw away at the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine in one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!

Zack Parsons sent me this over IM when I was in college. I never knew why but that could describe most of our conversations. It moved me so much that I have, to this day, never forgotten it.