Weekly Magic 6.17.25

A scrapbook of my creative life

What I’ve been inspired by this this week…

• Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy. I had never seen Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, or Before Midnight until this Sunday, which happened to be the eve of the day the two characters meet in Before Sunrise, which seemed somehow fated. An actual encounter inspired the movie Linklater had with a woman named Amy Lehrhaupt in 1989. After meeting at a toy shop and walking around all night, he told her he wanted to make a film about this feeling one day. Amy never reached out after the movie was released in 1995. He created the trilogy's next film in hopes that Amy would attend the premiere. In 2010, a friend of Amy’s wrote him saying that Amy died in a motorcycle accident in 1994, just before the first movie was filmed.

• The fact that Miss Piggy and Stevie Nicks are both Geminis

• The book The Waters by Bonnie Jo Campbell. I realized I was missing the rural fiction genre and wanted to return to my home state of Michigan. The first book I read of hers was Once Upon a River, and it really captured my heart. I recommend you check out her work. Here’s a quote from The Waters, “The island and its women loom large in the dreams of local folks, who sometimes wake up sweating from visions of witches in black (though the island women never wore black) or of crows watchful in treetops, or of swamp streams bubbling up through the floorboards of their houses. It is said the island, where healing waters percolate to the surface, was a place where women shared one another's dreams, a place where women did what they wanted.”

  

• I want to see the new Hilma Af Klint exhibit at MoMA called “What Stands Behind the Flowers,” a portfolio of 46 botanical drawings. Has anyone been?

• My friend

  Michelle Mattar
  ’s birthday cake from Bodega Cakes. Is this not the most bewitching and beautiful cake you’ve ever seen? Fun fact: the horns could be attached to clips and worn in her hair after the cake was eaten.

• This fact about the Summer Solstice: According to Time Magazine, Egyptian Stonehenge is the earliest indication that the solstice was observed, “About 6,000-6,500 years ago, nomadic cattle-herders in southern Egypt are thought to have arranged stones that line up with the path of the solstice sun in the Nabta Playa basin under the Tropic of Cancer. “[The solstice] was an important touchstone that said, ‘Well, the Nile is about to go into its flooding cycle’ and that would basically start their calendar,” as Sten Odenwald, a NASA astronomer, told TIME in 2016.”

• I’m suspicious that this bucket list is from 2012 because it references followers; however, I’m all about this aesthetic. Get out your markers and your best handwriting and make a summer bucket list for 2025.

  

• Love/hate lists on

  Dream Baby Press
  like this one from Holly Madison.

• Watching Love Island, USA as a sociological experiment. Anyone else?

• Did you know that tigers appear orange to humans because most of us are trichromats, but green to deer and boars, which are dichromats?

• Marble charts

  

• I love the 29Palms Astronomy Club Instagram Feed.