The once-in-a-generation phenomenon of Toronto winning a major league championship couldn’t have asked for better weather for a parade—or a city more hungry for a reason to take an impromptu long weekend.
As we stare down the remaining days of the work week, allow me to let you live one more moment of glory. Given how this newsletter recently referenced both Damon Stoudamire and Kyle Lowry, it was all leading up to this:
(Coincidence, or is Kyle a subscriber to The Jumpstack? I’ll never tell.)
Bored man gets paint
I don’t think you could imagine a week that’s more packed with masculine significance than this one, bracketed with Father’s Day and the Pride Parade—and, in between, the Raptors victory celebrations. Masculinity, and how it’s defined and understood and performed, is an ongoing conversation:
This article approaches the concept from multiple angles, revealing the hidden life of an artist who created some of the now-largely-forgotten images imprinted on the North American consciousness. J.C. Leyendecker’s work was overshadowed by protege Norman Rockwell, who flirted with some The Talented Mr. Ripley-level obsession with him:
Leyendecker built into his men a whole spectrum of masculinity, and we can read into them our own longings, our own inadequacies, and our own vanities, too. Where one might initially see toxic men, a deeper look reveals confused and wounded souls, presupposing the crisis masculinity currently finds itself in. It’s not hard to imagine this is because the crisis is neither new nor unique. Through Leyendecker it may be possible to reconsider our understanding of masculinity, to reevaluate the male characters in the work of writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and to see a subversive subtext that has always been there within our iconography of masculinity.
A good time for Keanu Kontent
It’s impossible to avoid Keanu Reeves lately. So, the movie series I curate and host at Revue Cinema won’t be avoiding him, either:
A deep dive into how Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure was made reveals that Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves practiced a dance routine that didn’t make the final cut—but it took them to the home of an unexpected celebrity:
Anyone who has seen that promo shot of Bill and Ted “doing really aggressive air guitars” at a bus stop can only imagine what happened next for the characters. “That’s not in the film anywhere because that’s the opening dance number,” explains Winter, adding, “Stevie Nicks had a dance studio in her house in Phoenix, so Keanu and I rehearsed for weeks with some great choreographer for it.”
With another sequel currently in production, 28 years after Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, it’s a good time to catch up on where it all began.
Riding along the @BrimleyLine
Ron Howard’s aliens-and-old-people movie was released this week in 1985. Wilford Brimley was just 50 when he played an elderly retiree in Cocoon. From there, a somewhat morbid, yet completely entertaining Twitter measurement for celebrity age was born:
No one is spared, save those early on their journey. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, for the Brimley/Cocoon Line comes for us all.
And that’s the latest smoke break with your work wife. Hit reply if you have feedback about The Jumpstack. (Or just click the heart below.)