Arch Daily - "Calvin Seibert Sculpts Impressive Modernist Sandcastles"
Friday, July 31, 2015
The Tao of Pete Carroll
Sports Illustrated - "Pete Carroll, NFL's eternal optimist, is ready to turn heartbreak into triumph"
"“I’m interested in how culture influences grit,” says [Angela] Duckworth[, a psychology professor at Penn]. “And Pete has very deliberately created a culture that encourages passion and perseverance—the two components of grit.”
In Carroll she sees what psychologists call an authoritative parent: warm but demanding, unconditionally supportive but with high expectations. And so she agreed to meet with the Seahawks. No one mentioned the Super Bowl by name, but everything they talked about was really about Seattle moving past it.
The Tao of Pete didn’t fully form until Carroll was well into his 40s, in his third decade as a football coach. He had a personality and a style, but he didn’t have a system. Nothing that he’d written down. Or turned into a book. The Jets fired him from his first head coaching gig after one season, the Patriots after three. It’s not that Carroll failed; his record in four seasons as an NFL coach stood at a respectable 33–31. But major success had eluded him.
He took a sabbatical, almost a year off, in 2000. There’s a famous story about the epiphany Carroll had around this time. He was reading a book by John Wooden that described how it took the old UCLA coach 18 years to win his first national title. And then Carroll slammed the book shut, inspired. He took the USC job in December of that year and started to write down not only what he wanted to accomplish but how he would go about it. He filled legal pads and the outsides of manila folders with so many notes that he ran out of space to write. He dissected every aspect of performance. Details that seemed small—like having players preorder for the Trojans’ omelet station in order to save a few minutes at breakfast each morning—were implemented to improve efficiency. He asked his assistant coaches to explain their vision in 30 words or less, and then he invited Snoop Dogg and Bubba Watson and janitors and actors and CEOs onto campus and asked them the same thing.
He turned the Trojans into a powerhouse and all those notes into a book called Win Forever. To Carroll, it became less about the victories and more about the process. He exposed the Trojans to myriad influences, demanded they put in the work and then supported their follow-through. If it all felt a little rah-rah—some called him Pom-Pom Pete—what mattered most was that his players believed him."
...
"“Everyone said he couldn’t coach in the NFL,” says Mike Garrett, Carroll’s athletic director at USC. “They said he was a college coach. But I always felt like he wanted to go back. Like he had something to prove.”
Carroll did not adapt his approach for pro players, guys who are supposed to roll their eyes at Tell The Truth Monday or Competition Wednesday, those motivational gimmicks that purportedly work best in college. He hired a competitive surfer-turned-sports-psychologist. He studied sleep patterns. He brought in Bill Russell and Will Ferrell and Jon Gruden as guest speakers. He held a shooting competition between former SuperSonics Detlef Schrempf and Shawn Kemp, complete with a fog machine, a laser-light show and introductions from CenturyLink Field’s P.A. announcer. He sought advice from musicians like Macklemore and a former president, Bill Clinton.
“It always came back to competitiveness,” he says of the motivational ploys, the nontraditional hirings, the myriad guests. “I didn’t have a word for it, but it’s striving for something, not against something. Then I found a name for it.”
Grit."
Thursday, July 30, 2015
Monday, July 27, 2015
Saturday, July 25, 2015
Thursday, July 23, 2015
Friday, July 17, 2015
The Revenant
January 7, 2016
Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu
Cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
Suicide Squad Trailer
August 5, 2016
Written & Directed by David Ayer (U-571, Training Day, End of Watch, Fury)
Starring Will Smith, Jared Leto, Margot Robbie, Viola Davis
Aziz Ansari's Book on Modern Romance
Aziz Ansari - Modern Romance
Excerpt from Chapter 5 - International Investigations of Love:
"My initial thought was that Tokyo would have a highly active dating scene. It is a booming metropolis, throbbing with life and energy, arguably even more so than New York. You have everything – the tastiest restaurants, the coolest stores, and the weirdest stuff that you can't find anywhere else in the world. An entire video arcade filled with nothing but photo booths? Yep. A vending machine that grows and sells fresh heads of lettuce? Yep. A restaurant with a dinner show where bikini-clad dancers ride in on huge robots and tanks? What else do you think goes down at the Robot Restaurant in Shinjuku?
Plus, I'd heard rumors of "love hotels" – which are what they sound like: hotels specifically built for hooking up. But, of course, this being Japan, they sometimes have really amazing decor – there's even a Jurassic Park–themed one. Seriously, this exists. I am not joiking.
NOTE: There were no photos available online so this is an artist rendition commissioned by me for the book. I hope the rooms are this cool and you get picked up from the airport in a tricked-out JP Ford Explorer from the nineties."
New York Times - "Review: Aziz Ansari’s ‘Modern Romance’ Explores Dating in the Digital Age"
Jonah Hill's Prank Mixtape
New Yorker - "All Grown Up"
"Really, the character was defined by his prosthetics: blindingly white false teeth intended to dazzle and a large fake penis for handy fondling. The only problem was that the dentures gave Hill a lisp. So he dialled his way out of trouble. Years ago, he got his first film audition, for “I Heart Huckabees,” because Dustin Hoffman was impressed by a CD of prank calls he’d made, and the phone remains his favorite instrument for developing a character. “You have no idea what a stranger is going to say,” he said. “As Donnie, I’d call this Best Buy in Hawaii,” and then talk for hours to shed the lisp and acquire insight. “They stay on the phone the longest—they have amazing customer service.”"
Can someone please find and release this?
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