Author: Chad
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A COVID movie journal
As I’ve been going through my old journals and digitizing the entries—a tedious and time-consuming process that will eventually yield a much more accessible and searchable archive—it’s been fun and enlightening to rediscover things I was thinking about at any given time. Like this entry from March 10, 2020: I hadn’t seen Contagion at that…
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Quotes of the moment
An ongoing series “To be an artist, you don’t have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It’s just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life.” – Viggo Mortensen “The modern dogma is comfort…
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Recent Views
More photography here and on my Instagram. A sunbeamed leaf as seen through our car windshield: The yin and yang of a backyard bonfire remnant: At work in his corner office: Cloudy with a chance of a refill: The bubbles are back, and they’re multiplying: Mr. 3 Year Old is eager to shovel at the…
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My own ‘Back to the Future: The Musical’
I finally listened to the original cast recording of Back to the Future: The Musical, which is making its Broadway debut in June 2023. I can’t say I loved every song, though the new showtuned rendition of “Power of Love” is most welcome: It also reminded me that years ago I started making my own…
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Those tender trenches
Wanted to spotlight something from A.O. Scott’s interview with Steven Spielberg, where he talks about collaborating with screenwriter Tony Kushner on The Fabelmans: It’s hard to hold someone’s hand over Zoom, but Tony did a good job in giving me the kind of comfort I needed when we were tapping into moments in my life,…
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Movie trailers ruin movies
Alissa Wilkinson preaches the truth about movie trailers: At best they’ll just show you stuff you probably knew anyway, or don’t need to know — who’s in the movie, what’s on the soundtrack, the basic plot setup. Maybe the look or the tone or the vibe. But trailers aren’t designed to give you a glimpse…
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Librerapy: the life-changing magic of library browsing
As parents of littles know, going to the library with kids is a very different experience than going solo. (“Traveling with young kids is not a vacation, it is a trip.”) When in chaperone mode, if I’m lucky I can wrangle the three year old for just long enough to let me quickly browse the…
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Media of the moment
An ongoing series Athena. Come for the gangbusters opening 10 minutes—stay for the tense, heart-pounding drama of Children of Men-meets-The Battle of Algiers in a French apartment complex. (Streaming on Netflix.) The End of Education by Neil Postman. My third Postman book after Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly. Would probably rank it below those…
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Lord of the Rewatch
I just finished a rewatch of the Lord of the Rings trilogy extended editions, something I was saving for after I finished season one of The Rings of Power. And I’m glad I did because I was able to appreciate the trilogy that much more, with the events of Middle-earth’s earlier age as captured in…
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Recent Views
More photography here and on my Instagram. The view of the capitol building in Madison from the Madison Children’s Museum rooftop: Mr. 3 Year Old and his cousin on the slide at the Madison zoo: Stumbled upon this view atop a slide at a nearby suburban park: Ascending a magically wooded tunnel of stairs adjacent…
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In praise of microhistories
Clive Thompson on the appeal of microhistories: When you drill down deeply into a single subject, you nearly always realize: Holy crap, this is more complex than I’d have thought. This is true of just about any subject, right? And it’s exactly the opposite feeling you get from a “big” book, which strives to make…
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Maybe join a book club instead
Adam Mastroianni, in an article on the myths of political hatred: I think there is one very good reason to cap our political hatred: it makes us miserable. Not because we’re always coming to blows with our political enemies—the data suggests that doesn’t happen very often—but because we’re always thinking about them. I’ve seen perfectly…
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On the arts as blunt instruments
Alan Jacobs, considering a John Adams letter on the usefulness of the arts: Everyone in power, or aspiring to power, in this country seems to be studying Politics and War, though they will sometimes cover that study with a flimsy disguise. On the so-called Left we see surveillance moralism (and often enough the sexualization of…