Category: Posts
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A ‘Bluey’ song exploder
One of my Christmas presents was Bluey: The Album on vinyl. My wife got it as a joint present with my son since we’re both big Bluey fans. The first song on it is an extended version of the theme song I’d never heard before called “Bluey Theme Tune (Instrument Parade)”: After the standard opening,…
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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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Links of the moment
An ongoing series The opening of Top Gun: Maverick as a perfect pop song. Power to the Ukrainian librarians. Amazing photos from NASA’s Artemis I mission to the moon. A short history of the Avatar Papyrus logo and the amazing SNL sketch that mocked it. No more very.
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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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Links of the moment
An ongoing series The latest annual Vanity Fair/Billie Eilish interview is out. How Peter Jackson’s AI is remixing The Beatles. An ode to the “prescient obsolescence” of cassette tapes. Ban TikTok.
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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…