Episode 65: Inherent Vice... but not the movie

Prompts: 1220, Sage, Newspaper

We’re back to our regularly scheduled programming! After a mini panic involving corrupted files and cloud sleuthing, Neal and Lauren are reunited in glorious audio form. Thank you, Riverside, and thank you, listeners, for your patience!

In this episode, Neal grabs the morning edition and dives deep into His Girl Friday (1940) — Howard Hawks’s screwball masterpiece that forever changed Hollywood dialogue. You’ll hear about Cary Grant’s rapid-fire wit, Rosalind Russell’s secret joke writer, the gender-flipped origin story from The Front Page, and why the movie’s 191-page script clocks in at over 300 words a minute. Neal breaks down Hawks’s deceptively simple directing style, the film’s public-domain afterlife, and how His Girl Friday helped shape everything from Gilmore Girls to Aaron Sorkin.

Then Lauren turns the page to fine art and unpacks the life and legacy of Jasper Johns — the still-living legend of postwar American art. From flags and targets to encaustic wax and found newspapers, she traces how Johns blurred the line between abstraction and realism, pioneered “things the mind already knows,” and shared a creative (and romantic) spark with Robert Rauschenberg. Expect lessons in preservation, a crash course in art movements, and the revelation that Johns plans to turn his Connecticut estate into a creative haven after his death.

Also this week:
📬 A new patron joins the Curated by Chance family.
📚 Book Club updates (and a few reader confessions).
🪶 A porch-side dad review!

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Next week’s prompts have been drawn: Bear, 5, and German.

What could possibly go wrong?

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👉 https://ltlikesthis.substack.com/

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📘 Pickup Neal's newest book Law & Order: SVU – Confidential (out October 14):
👉 https://geni.us/HPgeZ

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