You might be familiar with the concept of a starter pack. It’s a kind of meme format.
In a starter pack, people put together a few images or phrases or whatever, which are representative of something — a gym bro, a local Mexican restaurant, a 1980s heavy metal video.
New Yorker magazine does its own variant, where it asks people they profile to create a starter pack for themselves, consisting of a movie, a TV show, a book, and an album, which are somehow representative.
I had to try it. So here goes:
Bejako starter pack ingredient #1 (movie): The Princess Bride
If you’ve been a reader of this newsletter for a while, this should be no surprise.
My optin page literally says:
“I write a daily email newsletter about direct marketing, copywriting, and my love for the books and screenplays of William Goldman.”
Well, Goldman wrote the screenplay for The Princess Bride, based on his book of the same title.
(He also wrote the famous line, “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” On my website, that morphed into, “Hello. My name is John Bejakovic. You found my website. Prepare to decide.”)
The fact is, I saw The Princess Bride for the first time when I was 11. It was the perfect mix of adventure, romance, and self-aware humor for 11-year-old Bejako.
I guess I’ve never really matured past 11.
The only thing that’s changed for me over the years, as I’ve continued to re-watch this movie, is that I appreciate how it doesn’t talk down or moralize to you.
“Life is pain,” is the core message of the story. In the end, the bad guy goes free. And the main character, Westley, dies. Though ok, miracles do sometimes happen, as do happy endings.
Bejako starter pack ingredient #2 (TV show): Twin Peaks
David Lynch, who made Twin Peaks, died a couple weeks ago. There aren’t many celebrities whose deaths I care about… but I cared about Lynch. He was hinting there might be a season 4 of Twin Peaks, and now it will never happen.
Season 2 of Twin Peaks, which came out in 1990, was largely atrocious.
Season 3 of Twin Peaks, which came out 25+ years later in 2017, was surprisingly good.
But the best is still the original season 1, which Lynch directed and co-wrote.
It has the usual Lynch blend of mystery, sex, horror, weirdness, and quaintness. Plus beautiful shots of wind blowing through the trees.
Bejako starter pack ingredient #3 (book): Dune
I had the most trouble choosing a book for my starter pack.
That’s because, as I wrote a few weeks ago, I don’t particularly enjoy reading, even though I’ve read a lot my whole life.
I also wasn’t sure how to choose a book here. A book that influenced me? Or that I enjoyed reading? Or that I thought was particularly well written?
I ended up going with enjoyment, and picked Frank Herbert’s Dune.
I first read Dune when I was 20, and then a couple more times since.
The story is familiar enough after all the TV shows and movies made based on it in recent years.
I guess what I like in it, beyond the familiar but rousing story of the arrival of “The One,” are the elements of religion… the formation of legend… plus simply the promise of a drug you can take, which makes you so smart you can literally predict the future by seeing all possible outcomes in parallel.
Bejako starter pack ingredient #4 (album): Station To Station by David Bowie
I like a lot of Bowie albums. This one is my favorite. I like the style, sound, strangeness of it, all mostly fueled by cocaine and paranoia.
By the way, coked-up Bowie from this period has inspired the central tenet of this newsletter. In an interview with Playboy, Bowie said:
“Nothing matters except whatever it is I’m doing at the moment. I can’t keep track of everything I say. I don’t give a shit. I can’t even remember how much I believe and how much I don’t believe. The point is to grow into the person you grow into. I haven’t a clue where I’m gonna be in a year.”
Maybe in a year, I’ll have to do another, different starter pack.
For now, this one will give you more insight into me than most people who know me in person have.
As you can probably guess, today’s email was based on the Daily Email Habit “puzzle” I sent out today.
Sometimes it’s good to write emails like this, to surprise people, and to simply let them a bit into your own world.
But other times, entirely different emails are called for. And that’s what I make sure Daily Email Habit puzzles do, day in and day out.
If you’d like to get started with your own daily email habit, starting with tomorrow’s puzzle, which is entirely different and much more difficult to guess at than today’s, here’s where to go: