Got these cool artifacts from my dad’s friend, whose late mother kept them with her ancient typewriter for lord knows how long.
Perhaps a member of the Typosphere can help with dating them, and explaining the “FR 25” on the oil can?
Category: Posts
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Seagulls patrol the shoreline
A poem
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Seagulls patrol the shoreline,
murmurating against the gusts
and peeking down for fish
beneath the surf.
We patrol for rocks in the sand
and swoop down for skipping stones
that soon will join the fish.
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Links of the moment
The sound of a dialup modem, visualized.
Turning broken plates into art.
Drawing the cozy web.
CGP Grey hilariously grades all 50 U.S. state flags.
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Au Revoir to Aaron Rodgers
With Aaron Rodgers now officially traded to the Jets, I felt compelled to commemorate the end of his era in Green Bay—something I did for his predecessor.
It feels impossible to fully honor Rodgers’ on-the-field legacy given his endless highlights and memorable moments over the last 15 years. But I’m with Mike Spofford at Packers.com, who attempted to summarize his overarching memories of Rodgers:
Just the jaw-dropping plays in big moments that I’ll never forget having witnessed, the ones that upon reflection remind you that the extraordinary, no matter how frequent, is never ordinary. Third-and-10 to Jennings in the Super Bowl, fourth-and-8 from the 48 in Chicago, off one leg (and back foot) to his namesake in the Dez game, the Hail Marys in Detroit and Arizona, the last-minute deep-middle heave to Jordy on a frozen Soldier Field, Cook on the sideline in Dallas, the diving Jamaal at Arrowhead, back-to-back to Adams to set up Crosby in San Fran, … the list feels interminable, and for that we’re all blessed.
I too witnessed all of these plays (on TV at least), but the Super Bowl XLV run will remain at the top for me. I was a year out of college and have vivid memories of watching each of the playoff games against the Eagles, Falcons, Bears, and Steelers. Adding those to similar memories from 14 years before, when I saw the Packers win Super Bowl XXXI, means I’ve been a blessed fan indeed.
I’ve half-joked with non-Packers fans that once Rodgers retired or left the Packers I would also retire from Packers fandom, just knowing that I’ve been insanely lucky rooting for a team with 30 years of sustained success and two all-timers at quarterback and that the bill will surely come due for that prolonged luck—so I might as well quit while I’m ahead.
I’m not gonna fully quit. But I am going to put these decades of dominance and my enjoyment of it into a metaphorical capsule that I can appreciate forever.
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On the passage of bathtime
There’s a quote I discovered floating around Instagram Reels that people use as narration for clips of their little kids:
You have little kids for four years. And if you miss it, it’s done. That’s it. So, you gotta know that. Lots of things in life you don’t get to do more than once. That period between 0 and 4, 0 and 5, there’s something about it that’s like a peak experience in life. It isn’t much of your life. Four years goes by so fast, you can’t believe it. And if you miss it, it’s gone. So you miss it at your peril, and you don’t get it back.
(I was surprised to learn the speaker is Jordan Peterson, whom I’ve never read or even heard speak before. Not interested in litigating Peterson as a whole, just taking this quote for what it’s worth.)
I was talking with an older coworker about kids and how mine recently turned 4. His are all grown now, he said, but he would do anything to have just one day when they were 4 again, to do bathtime and all the other kid things that fill your life so intensely for a few years before the kids grow into other phases.
It’s a sentiment I’ve heard often, usually in the form of parenting clichés like “The days are long but the years are short” and “They’re only young once.” The annoying thing about clichés is that they’re usually both trite and true, and I’m grateful for when they tap me on the shoulder at just the right time.
A recent example: I was sitting with my 4 year old playing with his Carry Around Robot Town as (who else?) The Okee Dokee Brothers were on in the background—this time their 2018 album Winterland. He was immersed enough in the game that he actually let the album play through instead of wanting to jump to his favorite tracks, and that allowed me to enjoy some of their quieter, more reflective songs he’s usually not interested in.
We got near the end when on came “New Year,” a beautiful tune in the form of notes back and forth between two friends inquiring about their lives and children.
Here’s the lyrical exchange:
Hey say, Happy New Year
Have you had much snow
And how’s that new baby boy of yours, JoeHappy New Year to you
The snow’s still deep
And he’s our little roly-poly
I sing him to sleepSay how’s the weather
Have you had much rain
And can that new baby sing your refrainThe weather’s changing
It feels like spring
And as he falls asleep
We can hear him singHave the leaves changed
Where does the time go
And now how old is that son of yours, JoeLeaves blow away
Time goes on
He’s all grown up now,
singing this songPerhaps you can now see why the combination of this song and the moment—cozied up next to that son of mine while he cutely played—made me tear up: I envisioned the time that has already passed in my life with him and how in a snap more time will pass and he’ll be all grown up and singing his own songs, only I won’t be cozied up next to him.
It was a moment of mono no aware, a Japanese phrase I love that indicates “the awareness of impermanence or transience of things, and both a transient gentle sadness at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life.”
That concept cuts both ways. Everything in this stage—and in life—is impermanent: the good moments, the hard times, the drudgery, the occasional euphoria. “Nothing gold can stay,” wrote Robert Frost. And that’s why it’s so important to love them at the age they are and every year they grow, because they’ll never be that age again.
There is one workaround for this: have another child. Our second is due in late May, so I’ll get another chance to start at zero and bask in this unique time once again. And you better believe I’ll be working extra hard to enjoy bathtimes while they last.
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The Church of ‘Bull Durham’
Really enjoyed reading Ron Shelton’s The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham, which I followed up with a rewatch of Bull Durham. He has such a wry, matter-of-fact style and perspective on his careers, most notably minor-league baseball player and movie writer-director.
Some quotes…
On being an athlete with intellectual curiosities:
Around this time it was becoming clear that I was living in two different worlds—the intellectual (or at least academic) world and the sports world—but it made no sense to me that they were distinct. They were dependent, connected, they fed off each other. At least I thought so.
On sports movies:
I’d played enough sports by then that I felt sports films got it all wrong. Their attempts to be inspirational felt cloying and false. When you actually play the game, there is little that is inspirational going on. It’s a competition; it’s physical; it’s a chance to test yourself.
A fascinating anecdote about how a test screening of Bull Durham went great in the room but not in the test scores:
The more highly educated the crowd, the more severely critical will be its analysis. Even—maybe especially—when the movie-watching experience is good. It’s a mistake to hand a pen and paper to professionals with multiple degrees and ask them to critique their experience. There seems to be a built-in expectation that the brain should overrule the heart, that the left side of the brain must dictate what the right side of the brain just processed—even when it contradicts that experience. The note cards were legible, neatly written, and expressed their critique in absurd detail compared to those of more working-class crowds, which tend to be of the thumbs-up, thumbs-down variety. In the heartland of emerging Silicon Valley—high-tech, the venture-capital center of the nation, with Stanford and all its tentacles of research—the audience had to deny its experience. What I thought of was: All I want is your reaction, not your fucking self-conscious notes.
On his feelings about baseball:
My interest in baseball isn’t analytical, romantic, or even patriotic. I like the game—it’s nuanced and difficult and physical—but it has an appealing vulgarity, an earthiness, and I’ve never quite understood the excessive lyrical prose that grows out of it. I’ve never understood the sentimentality it seems to inspire.
On the legacy of Bull Durham:
Perhaps Bull Durham has resonated all these years because it is about loving something more than it loves you back. It’s about reckoning. It’s about loss. It’s about men at work, trying to survive in the remote outposts of their chosen profession. It’s also about the women they fall for, and who fall for them. It cannot be dismissed that it’s also about the joy of playing a game for a living. It’s about team and connections and risk and reward. It’s about hitting the mascot with a fastball just because you want to, it’s about running and jumping and sliding around in the mud, it’s about interminable bus rides with a bunch of guys who are as lost as you are, and feeling lucky you’re on that bus. It’s romantic, and it’s supposed to be funny, and despite what most fans of the movie say, it is also about baseball.
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Lifeblood of reading
Alan Jacobs gets to the crux of the ongoing Hachette v. Internet Archive lawsuit, which pits publishers against libraries in the quest to determine who has the right to distribute digital books:
Whatever forces are arrayed against libraries are also arrayed against readers. But publishing conglomerates don’t care about readers; they only care about customers. If they had their way reading would be 100% digital, because they continue to own and have complete control over digital books, which cannot therefore be sold or given to others. They are the enemies of circulation in all its forms, and circulation is the lifeblood of reading.
I went long on the business of library ebooks a few years ago when Macmillan took its turn trying to screw libraries—and therefore readers.
Publishers might think they want to sue libraries out of existence because it will help their bottom line. But ultimately they’d end up like the Burgess Meredith character in The Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough At Last”: surrounded by a decimated literary landscape with nowhere to go.
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Holy book bans
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’m against book bans of all kinds. They’re the literary version of the Streisand Effect, not to mention small-minded and fascistic.
And yet, I also can’t get enough of people petitioning to ban the Bible based on the same criteria used for other books, most recently in Utah for example. It’s both A+ trolling and a useful countermeasure for exposing the absurdity of these anti-democratic laws.
It’s a good rule of thumb: if your legislation or policy makes the best-selling and most influential book of all time eligible to be banned, you done messed up.
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On the aesthetic mindset
I enjoyed the recent Armchair Expert conversation with Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross—the authors of Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us—about how the arts affect our brains and well being.
At one point they talk about having an aesthetic mindset, which isn’t some kind of highfalutin theory but instead just the concept of taking things in through your senses. Their four key aspects of that mindset: curiosity, playfulness, sense experiences, and making/beholding.
I’m definitely now intrigued by the book, not that I need to be convinced of its thesis…
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Links of the moment
An awesome “yeah” musical montage.
Start using more weird emojis.
And non-standard punctuation marks.
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RIP Marcus Theaters policy trailer
You know the part of movie theater previews when they show what’s basically an in-house ad for the host theater chain, along with housekeeping items like silence your phone, no talking, etc.?
I’ve learned these are called policy trailers and that many of them are available online. I was curious if I’d be able to find the one for Marcus Theaters, which dominated my adolescent theatergoing in Madison, WI, circa 2000-2006.
Lo and behold:
This is burned into my being. The movie clips did get updated over time with newer movies, but in my recollection the format stood for a long time. Just like the various movie studio intros, these trailers conditioned me to know I was about to (hopefully) see something great.
It’s one of the many theaters that COVID-19 killed, so I’ll cherish this video (like the abandoned movie posters) as another relic of a lost era.
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Recent Views
More photography here and on my Instagram.
My wife and son heart-bombed my car for Valentine’s Day while I was at work:
I’ve never tasted or seen Romanesco broccoli but it looks super cool:
He’s been using his new training-wheels bike a lot:
Some colorful stairs in Woodstock, Illinois:
Our friends built a mini sledding hill in their front yard and brought out the lights once it started getting dark to keep the party going:
Sun shade at a local park:
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Favorite Films of 2022
Pretty much every year I’ve done this list (since 2007), I’ve published it soon after the beginning of the year to coincide with the bevy of other year-end lists. But every year I’d end up watching more movies after publishing that would have been eligible and affected my list.
So I realized: what’s the rush? This year I took my time and saw what I could to give myself the best chance at an accurate accounting of my favorites of the year. I didn’t see everything I wanted to, but I did my best.
What makes my 2022 film year unique is that, according to my Letterboxd profile, I gave 4 stars (out of 5) to 18 movies, with nothing rated higher that stood out above the crowd. Maybe that says more about me than the movies themselves, but that still left me without a clear frontrunner.
Given that unusual parity, I thought it fitting to do an unranked, alphabetical list this time—something I haven’t done since 2014. All of these movies, plus many of the honorable mentions, stuck with me for different reasons.
On to my top 10…
Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood
Richard Linklater’s latest film synthesizes elements from two of his previous ones: it’s the memoiristic nostalgia of Boyhood mixed with the rotoscope animation style of A Waking Life. This is a closely observed, gently told, fantastically wrought, and personally held story that shows off Linklater’s knack for capturing the beauty of the quotidian. (Streaming on Netflix.)
Athena
Come for the absolutely gangbusters opening 10 minutes and stay for the tense, heart-pounding drama of Children of Men-meets-The Battle of Algiers in a French apartment complex. It’s hard to watch at times, but also has a “can’t look away” quality that makes it both deeply cinematic and compassionate at its core. (Streaming on Netflix.)
Avatar: The Way of Water
Much like Top Gun: Maverick, James Cameron’s long-gestating sequel offers incredible spectacle, impressive CGI, and powerful emotional beats that elevate its rather rote plot and character development into epic myth. Though, unlike Maverick, the resplendently rendered fictional world itself is the star even above the performers. Bring on the sequels!
Babylon
I’ve been on a slightly downward trajectory with writer-director Damien Chazelle’s filmography: high on Whiplash, mixed-to-positive on La La Land, then kinda bored with First Man. His latest on Hollywood’s bacchanalian early years is everything but boring and jolted my Chazelle Meter back upward. Also a great (unofficial) prequel/double feature with Spielberg’s cinema-obsessed The Fabelmans.
Decision to Leave
South Korean writer-director Park Chan-wook is back after 2016’s The Handmaiden with a riveting slow-burn whodunit featuring Park Hae-il as an insomniac detective on a murder case and Tang Wei as his prime suspect—and complicated love interest. Part Gone Girl, part Vertigo, yet fully its own creation, the film combines Park’s technical prowess with a terrifically twisty narrative and a haunting conclusion. Don’t sleep on this one.
Emergency
In this impressive debut feature from Carey Williams, three college roommates—two Black and one Latino—ready for a night of partying when they discover a young white girl passed-out drunk in their house. How they deal with that turns into a high-wire racial reckoning, tragicomedic social satire, and beautiful portrait of male friendship. Like Superbad meets Get Out. (Streaming on Amazon Prime.)
The Fabelmans
In a year full of autobiopics (Inarritu’s Bardo, Mendes’ Empire of Light, Gray’s Armageddon Time), Spielberg’s personal tale of the dark magic of moviemaking reigns supreme, and serves as a cinematic Rosetta Stone for his iconic decades-long career. It’s also the funniest Spielberg has been in a while. Michelle Williams and Paul Dano deliver top-notch performances, but it’s Gabriel LaBelle who wins the movie and our hearts with his earnest and affecting turn as the teenaged Spielberg stand-in Sammy. That kid—just like the man he represents—is going places!
Jackass Forever
A dirty, cringey, and gut-bustingly funny soul-cleanse. There’s just something about this crew of delightful degenerates debasing themselves for the sake of entertainment that warms my heart and makes me laugh harder than just about anything else.
Top Gun: Maverick
Much like Avatar: The Way of Water, this dominated the box office, saved movie theaters (according to Spielberg), and provoked couch-jumping enthusiasm among its admirers. Though, unlike The Way of Water, it did so with sheer movie-star charisma atop the spectacle. Maverick, Cruise, and movie theaters: not dead yet.
The Wonder
I’ve realized that I will appreciate almost any movie that has something to say about religion, and that’s the case with this adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s excellent novel starring Florence Pugh as a skeptical nurse tending to a “miracle” child in mid-19th century Ireland. (Double feature recommendation: Anne Fontaine’s 2016 film The Innocents.) (Streaming on Netflix.)
Other movies I enjoyed:
- The Banshees of Inisherin
- Prey
- Everything Everywhere All At Once
- Turning Red
- Emily the Criminal
- The Northman
- Hustle
- Barbarian
- Kimi
- Glass Onion
Non-2022 movies I watched and enjoyed:
- Hud
- Summer of Soul
- Ponyo
- The Hunt for Red October
- Yojimbo
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Ratatouille
Rewatching Ratatouille recently made me think of a line from the Guardians of the Galaxy Honest Trailer, which portrays Marvel as so dominant and drunk on its own power—and its fans so eager—that a weird movie with a trash-talking raccoon and monosyllabic tree can be a smash success. Their tongue-in-cheek name for the studio: “F— You, We’re Marvel.”
Ratatouille is Pixar’s “F— You, We’re Pixar” moment.
A movie about a rat becoming a chef by controlling a human through his hair? Oscar win for Best Animated Feature. Portray the critic as a cadaverous meanie? 96% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Touché, Pixar.
(Somehow Ratatouille is ranked only #7 on my Pixar rankings, which feels low. Though in my 4 year old’s unofficial Pixar rankings it’s tied for #1 with WALL-E.)
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The Lion King
It’s hard for me to watch The Lion King objectively as an adult when it’s so deeply ingrained into my being, having been released when I was 7 years old and subjected to countless subsequent rewatches in our family VCR—not to mention inspiring my own adult creative endeavors.
But rewatching it now—with my 4-year-old son next to me wide-eyed and rapt—made me appreciate just how top-notch everything in the movie is, including:
- the epic Hans Zimmer score
- one of the musical numbers in particular, which I ranked the best Disney song of all time
- the balance of meta and wacky humor with deadly serious drama
- the stunning animated vistas
- the strangely sensual “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” sequence
- the delicious scenery-chewing voice work of Jeremy Irons
- Rafiki keepin’ it real and real weird (in elementary school a buddy and I would reenact the Adult Simba/Rafiki scenes over and over again because we thought they were the funniest. thing. ever.)
Along with Moana, it’s one of the rare Disney musicals that gives me several goosebumps moments. (Though unlike most modern animated films for kids, it achieves all of this with aplomb in under 90 minutes.)
There’s so much fascinating stuff going on about family and trauma and destiny and shame and other things that went completely over my 4 year old’s head, but reminded me why it was such a massive hit at the time and endures in its appeal to all ages.
Two stray notes:
- We’ve watched it on DVD and Disney+ and both versions obscure the legendary SEX/SFX conspiracy moment—the former by seeming to blur the design and the latter by cutting past it entirely. This feels like a win for the conspiracy theorists.
- It felt wrong to have the modern, post-2006 Disney castle intro at the beginning of the Disney+ version. Use the classic version, you cowards!
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Links of the moment
The Internet Archive has a collection of digital calculator emulators.
Why Jack Black’s performance in School of Rock is uniquely excellent.
A taxonomy of tooth acting.
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Tools of the moment
Pretty much everything from my last update.
Kindle Paperwhite. After years of holding out, we got one last Black Friday and I finally started using it. I wasn’t against e-readers before; I just usually prefer print or audiobooks. But the e-ink screen and appealing handling of the Paperwhite is quite nice.
Safari browser. I’ve been a longtime Firefox devotee since ditching Chrome, but recently it started throwing me error after unresolvable error that made using it on my MacBook Pro a nightmare. So I resorted to Safari and have found it much more enjoyable than I remember.
Not Twitter. Twitter’s ownership change was an excellent impetus for me to step away. It’s always been a time-suck, and I’ve mostly been a lurker anyway. Not fully deleting it since I want to at least hold onto my username, but happily finding other ways to use my time online.
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Jack would NOT have fit on the door in ‘Titanic’
I’m sorry, but it’s true.
I say that in spite of the apparently real investigation into this internet-famous debate by National Geographic and James Cameron himself:
All the evidence you need is from the scene itself: When Jack tries to get on the door, it almost capsizes. Putting two grown, soaking-wet adults on it amidst the post-sinking chaos—especially without Jack being able to act as bodyguard—would’ve sunk it easily.
So RIP to Chippewa Falls’ favorite son and cinema’s most famous manic pixie dream boy.
