Maybe I can treat this comment section as a hole in the ground in which to whisper that I came around to appreciating The Bear in its second season, which I think still has Master of None disease, is too eager to impress and the big guest star episode stinks (although good use of Odenkirk as a sneering bully), but the finale made some choices I really respected. Can probably afford to be accommodating toward this show now that everyone is too famous to do more than another season tops.
Oh and I just got Enter Ghost from the library. I love it so far — just very strong on a technical level, with some of the best dialogue writing I’ve encountered in recent fiction.
Chris and I just watched the original Taking of Pelham One Two Three, which I swore up and down I had seen but halfway through realized maybe I had only seen clips of? He had somehow definitely never seen it! We loved it. It felt like the perfect cynical dirty tight movie to watch after nearly dying of the flu for a week (I had so much empathy for the mayor).
Oh, and I'm re-reading The Haunting of Hill House for the millionth time to teach it and that book just gets better and better. No one does the porous mind unstable narrator better than Shirley Jackson.
I'm rewatching Law and Order for the first time in order and since I graduated law school. A little peek into how episodic tv used to work--the same warrant issues happen in like four episodes in a row. The last one I watched, a neighbor asked Briscoe "don't you need a warrant for that?" and Briscoe replied "who are you, the Supreme Court?" so now everyone in my apartment has been walking around saying "who are you, the Supreme Court?" at every indignity.
I also watched Birth and y'all weren't kidding about the soundtrack.
I'm still reading War and Peace but I am getting close enough to the end that I do feel like finishing it is inevitable, if still far way. *this is my roman empire voice* this is my Daniel Deronda.
Watching—just watched Vertigo for the first time last night, and it was dreamier than I expected! I didn’t watch a lot of Hitchcock growing up, and every time I watch a new (to me) movie of his I’m surprised by it.
Reading—Ted Chiang’s short story collection Exhalations for a book club. I love when sci-fi writers blend sci-fi tropes and emotional weight. It made me want to revisit Arrival.
Rewatching: American Fiction for a podcast about the Oscars. Last night I dragged half a dozen friends to a 35mm screening of Deborah Stratman’s Last Things, which I know is a Fran Magazine favorite and is definitely a House Welch-Larson favorite.
Reading: The White Album by Joan Didion. Currently in a bit of a reading rut.
I watched all the Mission: Impossible movies this past week, at first because my partner was out of town and Tom Cruise weirds her out. I watched them in the baffling order 7, 6, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1. There's 3 decades of action movie trends you get to see through these, from "jumping sideways in the air while shooting two guns" to "Bourne-style punching in the dark." Rogue Nation was my favorite by far, everything is right in the sweet spot: Tom is both kiiind of funny and kiiind of sexy, the plot's complicated but not exhausting (looking at you Fallout and Dead Reckoning), the movie is gritty but still gorgeous, the stunts are cool but not goofy. The opera scene is my favorite in any of these movies and the final unmasking is the greatest. "Sir, Hunt is the living manifestation of destiny and he has made you...his mission." Come on!!!
Tried to bake the banana loaf they serve at the coffee shop near my house but there's something they're hiding. It's so fluffy!
Listening to early The Microphones tapes and live shows. There's really clear musical and lyrical throughlines in Phil Elverum's stuff which are rewarding to trace.
i recently finished rereading persuasion but that feels kind of like cheating at recommendations… like oh my recommendation is one of the six perfect gems by the master of the english novel… however that is my recommendation
in the depths of grad school application psychosis i picked up stardew valley again and was immediately plunged back into its agonies--voracious need to extract as much money from crops as possible, hoarding at least one of each item in case someone wants it as a gift, going to “sleep” at 4pm because i depleted my energy in the mines, not talking to any towns people or forming relationships... just like real life!
i’m this close to finishing the entire cronenberg filmography, just need to round it out with rabid and crimes, which feels like a nice way to book end. finding a lot to appreciate about his late career weirdo turn and the way his preoccupations are deeper and more complicated than people who read only the first half of his filmography tend to notice. i was thinking about how he and soderbergh have a kind of unshakable chad energy--maybe because they aren’t so precious? idk
The Paris Review podcast's latest episode is George Takei reading an early story from Jun'ichirō Tanizaki about an obsessive man's path to satisfaction. I listened to it while sitting alone in a large concrete tub at the Indian Springs spa in Truth or Consequences, NM where the water is cloudy and it only costs $5 for a half hour alone. I loved it fully.
Another quick hit of quality from the last week was reading a late DH Lawrence novella, The Virgin & the Gypsy. Surprisingly un-porny, yet thick with truth. My partner picked up his Apocalypse on the same trip last weekend and says to me, 'I have found a book I love.' I haven't read anything since the college days of Sons & Lovers; Lady Chatterly and now I have to go back to SWAG and hoover up The Rainbow & Women in Love.
Musically, this week I discovered Omni Garden's Moss King record an had MJ Lenderman Live & Loose and Etta James Rock the House on repeat.
This reverse-perspective collective Sunday dispatch was so fun to read!
I’m a bit late to commenting, but I’ll just add that I’m rereading both the Ferrante Neapolitan novels and His dark materials right now, and they are a very strange double feature because the Neapolitan novels are really one long saga, changing only as the characters themselves get older and change, whereas the Pullman is supposed to be one big epic saga but its individual parts are so completely different from each other in scope / perspectives you get as a reader that it feels in some ways less like a coherent unit telling one big story
I have been reading Ministry for the Future because about five men who i love very much have asked me too. they just want to discuss the big ideas. Also The Golden Thread about the history of textiles, Man's Search for Meaning just in case it helps.
I am trying to "quit YouTube" which has meant a lot of rewatching an Australian telenovela style series called Bump about a cryptic pregnancy but you know, gotta have something mildly entertaining while I knit and sew!
And I have very much been enjoying live queer poetry for pride month (which it is in New Zealand) getting to see my friends perform!
Read: finished Blackouts by Justin Torres, which I liked but felt a kind of distance from, I think because reading so much dialogue written perfectly/novelistically made the characters seem more like mouthpieces than people? The more nonfictional bits worked better for me; I want to try to read it again with adjusted expectations. Then started Thomas Pynchon's Vineland and am immediately having the time of my life.
Watched: am enjoying the gradual uploads of Taskmaster Australia to youtube but miss the Taskmaster NZ season 2 cast and my hideous crush on Guy Montgomery. Also Lovely and Amazing... possibly a reach but Holofcener reminds me of Alice Munro in that the characters are so precise and easy to understand that their fuckups, and the ways they fuck up, feel kind of inevitable?
Watched The Tourist, a 6-episode series starring Jamie Dornan (no Dakota Johnson in sight). Lots of fun with plenty of surprises. Season 2 is scheduled to be released on 2/29.
i’ve been doing a bit of a sandra hüller dive lately bc of her big awards season double bill :-0 was reading the recent new yorker profile of her which talks about this german production of hamlet she was in recently, so i hunted down the filmed version on youtube. it’s kind of ivo van hove-y and abstracted, some cool sound / prod design that includes a large copper flat that generates tones when it’s pushed around by the players. and she’s amazing as hamlet, she’s such a compelling actress, naturalistic in a way that really grounded the production. unfortunately i do not speak german and the auto generated subtitles are a bit wonky, but it did move me to start rereading hamlet. it’s interesting to revisit something you’ve seen presented in so many different ways in so many different periods, they’re all overlapping in my memory! i always forget how funny even his tragedies are.
and for book club right now i’m also reading dream story by arthur schnitzler, which was adapted into eyes wide shut. it’s pretty much scene for scene eyes wide shut! i think we’ll be rewatching when we meet to discuss which will be fun--adaptation book club!
I watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind for the first time this weekend and truly loved it. Love when it when a movie with a massive impact and legacy manages to have such a deep impact on me.
Also been listening to the new Dua Lipa! And making my way through a watch through of Nathan For You which I had mainly seen through online osmosis up til this point.
Maybe I can treat this comment section as a hole in the ground in which to whisper that I came around to appreciating The Bear in its second season, which I think still has Master of None disease, is too eager to impress and the big guest star episode stinks (although good use of Odenkirk as a sneering bully), but the finale made some choices I really respected. Can probably afford to be accommodating toward this show now that everyone is too famous to do more than another season tops.
Oh and I just got Enter Ghost from the library. I love it so far — just very strong on a technical level, with some of the best dialogue writing I’ve encountered in recent fiction.
Chris and I just watched the original Taking of Pelham One Two Three, which I swore up and down I had seen but halfway through realized maybe I had only seen clips of? He had somehow definitely never seen it! We loved it. It felt like the perfect cynical dirty tight movie to watch after nearly dying of the flu for a week (I had so much empathy for the mayor).
Oh, and I'm re-reading The Haunting of Hill House for the millionth time to teach it and that book just gets better and better. No one does the porous mind unstable narrator better than Shirley Jackson.
I'm rewatching Law and Order for the first time in order and since I graduated law school. A little peek into how episodic tv used to work--the same warrant issues happen in like four episodes in a row. The last one I watched, a neighbor asked Briscoe "don't you need a warrant for that?" and Briscoe replied "who are you, the Supreme Court?" so now everyone in my apartment has been walking around saying "who are you, the Supreme Court?" at every indignity.
I also watched Birth and y'all weren't kidding about the soundtrack.
I'm still reading War and Peace but I am getting close enough to the end that I do feel like finishing it is inevitable, if still far way. *this is my roman empire voice* this is my Daniel Deronda.
And next week, I'm seeing Niall Horan in Dublin!
Watching—just watched Vertigo for the first time last night, and it was dreamier than I expected! I didn’t watch a lot of Hitchcock growing up, and every time I watch a new (to me) movie of his I’m surprised by it.
Reading—Ted Chiang’s short story collection Exhalations for a book club. I love when sci-fi writers blend sci-fi tropes and emotional weight. It made me want to revisit Arrival.
Rewatching: American Fiction for a podcast about the Oscars. Last night I dragged half a dozen friends to a 35mm screening of Deborah Stratman’s Last Things, which I know is a Fran Magazine favorite and is definitely a House Welch-Larson favorite.
Reading: The White Album by Joan Didion. Currently in a bit of a reading rut.
Playing: Tears of the Kingdom is ruining my life.
I watched all the Mission: Impossible movies this past week, at first because my partner was out of town and Tom Cruise weirds her out. I watched them in the baffling order 7, 6, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1. There's 3 decades of action movie trends you get to see through these, from "jumping sideways in the air while shooting two guns" to "Bourne-style punching in the dark." Rogue Nation was my favorite by far, everything is right in the sweet spot: Tom is both kiiind of funny and kiiind of sexy, the plot's complicated but not exhausting (looking at you Fallout and Dead Reckoning), the movie is gritty but still gorgeous, the stunts are cool but not goofy. The opera scene is my favorite in any of these movies and the final unmasking is the greatest. "Sir, Hunt is the living manifestation of destiny and he has made you...his mission." Come on!!!
Tried to bake the banana loaf they serve at the coffee shop near my house but there's something they're hiding. It's so fluffy!
Listening to early The Microphones tapes and live shows. There's really clear musical and lyrical throughlines in Phil Elverum's stuff which are rewarding to trace.
i recently finished rereading persuasion but that feels kind of like cheating at recommendations… like oh my recommendation is one of the six perfect gems by the master of the english novel… however that is my recommendation
in the depths of grad school application psychosis i picked up stardew valley again and was immediately plunged back into its agonies--voracious need to extract as much money from crops as possible, hoarding at least one of each item in case someone wants it as a gift, going to “sleep” at 4pm because i depleted my energy in the mines, not talking to any towns people or forming relationships... just like real life!
i’m this close to finishing the entire cronenberg filmography, just need to round it out with rabid and crimes, which feels like a nice way to book end. finding a lot to appreciate about his late career weirdo turn and the way his preoccupations are deeper and more complicated than people who read only the first half of his filmography tend to notice. i was thinking about how he and soderbergh have a kind of unshakable chad energy--maybe because they aren’t so precious? idk
The Paris Review podcast's latest episode is George Takei reading an early story from Jun'ichirō Tanizaki about an obsessive man's path to satisfaction. I listened to it while sitting alone in a large concrete tub at the Indian Springs spa in Truth or Consequences, NM where the water is cloudy and it only costs $5 for a half hour alone. I loved it fully.
Another quick hit of quality from the last week was reading a late DH Lawrence novella, The Virgin & the Gypsy. Surprisingly un-porny, yet thick with truth. My partner picked up his Apocalypse on the same trip last weekend and says to me, 'I have found a book I love.' I haven't read anything since the college days of Sons & Lovers; Lady Chatterly and now I have to go back to SWAG and hoover up The Rainbow & Women in Love.
Musically, this week I discovered Omni Garden's Moss King record an had MJ Lenderman Live & Loose and Etta James Rock the House on repeat.
This reverse-perspective collective Sunday dispatch was so fun to read!
I’m a bit late to commenting, but I’ll just add that I’m rereading both the Ferrante Neapolitan novels and His dark materials right now, and they are a very strange double feature because the Neapolitan novels are really one long saga, changing only as the characters themselves get older and change, whereas the Pullman is supposed to be one big epic saga but its individual parts are so completely different from each other in scope / perspectives you get as a reader that it feels in some ways less like a coherent unit telling one big story
We will. Also, I recommend Society of the Snow. Outside of the plana crash, it's very watchable. Not horrir, only humanity.
I have been reading Ministry for the Future because about five men who i love very much have asked me too. they just want to discuss the big ideas. Also The Golden Thread about the history of textiles, Man's Search for Meaning just in case it helps.
I am trying to "quit YouTube" which has meant a lot of rewatching an Australian telenovela style series called Bump about a cryptic pregnancy but you know, gotta have something mildly entertaining while I knit and sew!
And I have very much been enjoying live queer poetry for pride month (which it is in New Zealand) getting to see my friends perform!
Read: finished Blackouts by Justin Torres, which I liked but felt a kind of distance from, I think because reading so much dialogue written perfectly/novelistically made the characters seem more like mouthpieces than people? The more nonfictional bits worked better for me; I want to try to read it again with adjusted expectations. Then started Thomas Pynchon's Vineland and am immediately having the time of my life.
Watched: am enjoying the gradual uploads of Taskmaster Australia to youtube but miss the Taskmaster NZ season 2 cast and my hideous crush on Guy Montgomery. Also Lovely and Amazing... possibly a reach but Holofcener reminds me of Alice Munro in that the characters are so precise and easy to understand that their fuckups, and the ways they fuck up, feel kind of inevitable?
Watched The Tourist, a 6-episode series starring Jamie Dornan (no Dakota Johnson in sight). Lots of fun with plenty of surprises. Season 2 is scheduled to be released on 2/29.
i’ve been doing a bit of a sandra hüller dive lately bc of her big awards season double bill :-0 was reading the recent new yorker profile of her which talks about this german production of hamlet she was in recently, so i hunted down the filmed version on youtube. it’s kind of ivo van hove-y and abstracted, some cool sound / prod design that includes a large copper flat that generates tones when it’s pushed around by the players. and she’s amazing as hamlet, she’s such a compelling actress, naturalistic in a way that really grounded the production. unfortunately i do not speak german and the auto generated subtitles are a bit wonky, but it did move me to start rereading hamlet. it’s interesting to revisit something you’ve seen presented in so many different ways in so many different periods, they’re all overlapping in my memory! i always forget how funny even his tragedies are.
and for book club right now i’m also reading dream story by arthur schnitzler, which was adapted into eyes wide shut. it’s pretty much scene for scene eyes wide shut! i think we’ll be rewatching when we meet to discuss which will be fun--adaptation book club!
I watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind for the first time this weekend and truly loved it. Love when it when a movie with a massive impact and legacy manages to have such a deep impact on me.
Also been listening to the new Dua Lipa! And making my way through a watch through of Nathan For You which I had mainly seen through online osmosis up til this point.