Robert Redford: The Retarded Hemingway-Kerouac of Catalog Writing

Did you know that Robert Redford - famous actor, director, and Sundance Film Festival creator - also has a catalog? He does! It’s also named Sundance because that’s his favorite fake word and it’s full of “unique”, “artisian”, “independent style” clothes and furniture and stuff. But the best part of this catalog is the introduction letter on the inside cover of each issue penned by Mr. Robert Redford himself. Did you know he writes, you guys?? He’s a poet.

Bobby Red welcomes you into each catalog with the meandering stream-of-consciousness thought patterns of Kerouac crammed into the stunted sentence structure of Hemingway told through the sepia-toned lens of nostalgic Hollywood. Who’s ready to buy Adirondack Cottage Furniture!

Austin, Texas.

It’s hard to talk about anything else as this is personal for me.

Pioneering family members carving a future for themselves in the early 1800’s.

Mother born there. Me spending summers there learning to fish, hunt, walk barefoot, cozy up to armadillos and rattlers and the sound of june bugs slapping against porch lights at night.

Over the years witnessing growth and sophistication collide around music and art and science. Memories of my first girlfriend swinging on a tire hanging from a long rope tied to a high branch. Later friendships - Willie Nelson, Terrence Malick, Ann Richards.

I love Austin. I love its new, adventurous, homegrown energy.

I’m glad we shot this catalog there. I wish we had shot it at my grandfather’s house on Scenic Drive. It still stands there.

Enjoy.

-Robert Redford

This is his Sundance Catalog “Early Summer 2008″ letter. Looking past the minefield of fragment sentences and grammatical errors, attempting to follow his logic, what I found was an alarming insight into the apparently nightmarish life and mind of Robert Redford.

Expansion after the jump…

He introduces us to Austin as a city intensely close to him - not surprising considering his, no doubt traumatic, childhood he goes on to describe there. Certainly the town in which you must spend your formative summer vacations learning to walk barefoot (a physical therapy both painful and embarrassing as “walking barefoot” is something most of us pick up naturally as infants) only to find that your reward for a hard day’s work is to “cozy up to” armadillos - the giant armored rats of the south - and DEADLY POISONOUS SNAKES, is a town you will be hard-pressed to wipe clean from your memory.

Over the years he watched Austin’s folksy desert landscape transform itself into a metaphysical battleground for abstract ideas you didn’t even know were in opposition to each other. He watched as Growth smashed devastatingly into Sophistication, narrowly missing Music, Art, and Science, who were hanging out in the area. All he had left for comfort in this cold, confusing new Austin was the vague memory of a girl on a kind of make-shift swing, fashioned ingeniously from an old discarded tire and a length of sturdy rope. Was the memory a faithful record of his past or was it the desperate, hopeful creation of a little boy with a troubled history? He couldn’t say for sure, but he resolved to hold onto this memory and, in time, perhaps dedicate it’s aesthetic to a shop or a catalog he would one day own. Also, his friends were very famous.

He fled only to return once more: to shoot the Early Summer 2008 Sundance Catalog in the town he still manages to love thanks to the girl and her swing. Despite all that had happened in Austin, he’s glad the catalog was shot there although he really would have preferred to shoot it somewhere else. Did you know his Grandfather’s house is still around there? It is. Anyway. $700 boots!

Tags: austin, catalogues, expensive clothes, expensive funiture, famous people, famous writers, robert redford