Magazine mashup of the July/August 2021 issue of Chicago Parent. More mashups here.
Category: Posts
Short notes, long essays, and everything in between.
Favorite Films of 2000
I’m creating my movie best-of lists retroactively. See all of them.
As usual with this silly but enjoyable series, I started by consulting my logbook for all the movies from 2000 I’ve seen. That initial list of 36 films had some pretty easy cuts (Men of Honor, My Dog Skip) and plenty of titles I liked but knew were bound to be honorable mentions.
Deciding on my final 10 was probably the easiest time I’ve had doing so in a while. Then again, it required me to cheat for the first time.
On to the list…
1. Unbreakable
I mean, it’s one of the greatest films of all time—and not to mention in my Letterboxd Top 4—so what else would you expect? One scene that sticks out: showdown in the kitchen.
2. Return to Me
A personal and family favorite that’s not only underrated as a romantic comedy but also as a Chicago movie.
3. Almost Famous
Kinda surprised this didn’t hit the #2 spot, but that doesn’t negate my love for it as a musician and former journalism student.
4. High Fidelity
Another great Chicago movie, and one that hit me hard when I saw it in college. So much so that I incorporated it into an essay I wrote for a writing class about my (at the time) brief and unsuccessful dating history. To quote Cusack’s Rob Gordon: “I always had one foot out the door, and that prevented me from doing a lot of things, like thinking about my future and… I guess it made more sense to commit to nothing, keep my options open. And that’s suicide. By tiny, tiny increments.”
5. Cast Away
Hard to argue with Russell Crowe winning Best Actor for Gladiator, but Tom Hanks winning his third Oscar for this role as a cap on his decade-long hot streak would have been just as good. (See also: my list of top movie music moments.)
6. Gladiator / The Patriot / Remember the Titans
An unprecedented three-way tie! It had to be done. All are historical epics (that are just barely historical), led by A-list movie stars at their peak, and became the Holy Trinity of time-wasters for lazy social studies teachers during units on Ancient Rome, the Revolutionary War, and Civil Rights respectively. (See also: Fatherhood in The Patriot and Interstellar and Remember the Titans in my top movie music moments.)
7. In the Mood for Love
A gorgeous, transfixing meditation on love, modernity, and the things we don’t say.
8. Best in Show
Of all the indelible moments from this absurdly hilarious mockumentary, “busy bee” sticks out the most.
9. Frequency
Throughout middle school I used my Juno email account to send occasional dispatches blurbing the movies and TV I was enjoying at the time to friends, family, my soccer coaches, church family friends—basically whoever I knew who had an email address. (In retrospect they were pretty similar to my Media of the moment series.) All that to say, I remember raving about Frequency in one of those emails. Rewatched it last year and it holds up.
10. The Emperor’s New Groove
If I’m being honest, this spot is mostly for the supporting character Kronk, who elevates the movie from fairly rote Disney animation fare to sublime quotable comedy.
Honorable mentions:
- Charlie’s Angels
- Thirteen Days
- Miss Congeniality
- Meet the Parents
- Erin Brockovich
- Chicken Run
- Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Media of the moment
Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild Story of Mad Max: Fury Road by Kyle Buchanan. An excellent oral history of one of the greatest films ever made. One of the many tidbits: George Miller’s first choice to play Max was Heath Ledger, which I now can’t stop thinking about.
The Northman. A brutal, heavy-metal fever dream from Robert Eggers.
A World Lit Only By Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance by William Manchester. Published thirty years ago, its scholarship is out of date and perspective rather flippant, but the writing remains spicy and illuminating.
We Own This City. A sequel of sorts to The Wire that was just as compelling with a much shorter runtime. Gotta hand it to HBO Max, which has accounted for pretty much all of my TV viewing over the last year or so between this, Winning Time, Minx, and Station Eleven.
Top Gun: Maverick. The first Top Gun is kinda bad. This one is not.
The Office BFFs: Tales of The Office from Two Best Friends Who Were There by Jenna Fisher and Angela Kinsey. I’ve listened to the Office Ladies podcast since the beginning—where much of the book’s content has been covered previously—but still found this enjoyable and informative.
How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith. This fits into a nonfiction genre I really enjoy, where the author visits various places/people that connect to the book’s central theme and explores their histories. Smith covers some stuff I was already familiar with but much I wasn’t—including that the Statue of Liberty has shackled feet.
On a beach waiting to witness
A poem
⁂
On a beach waiting to witness
works of fire thundering forth for the Fourth of July,
sparklers burst against a cloudy sunset—
the flames of liberty burning out fast.
Darkness descends
and the main event announces itself
with flash-bangs against the firmament:
Declarations of incandescence,
self-evident in their light, loudness, and pursuit of happy viewers.
United they fall,
a coterie of combusted paper—
explosive evidence of
cheap dreams.
Yet after the rockets’ rainbow glare
burst in the air,
what was still there?
Susurrant waves. Crescent moon. Winking starlight.
O see, can you say:
The ancients abide o’er the land.
(Of the free?
We the people disagree.)
What does that cloud mean?
That was a question from my 3 year old during a recent walk as he was looking at the sky. We’d recently introduced him to the concept of seeing recognizable shapes in clouds, so I’m guessing that’s what he was getting at. But this phrasing was so much more deep, man.
Previously in Accidentally Philosophical Preschooler: “what music is that noise?”
At home in the Library of Congress
In a delightful convergence of two of my favorite things, Steven Johnson wrote about a research trip to the Library of Congress:
Everything about my visit was an object lesson how a government agency can make a public resource available to its citizens in an efficient, useful, and even aesthetically-pleasing fashion. I am generally not all that sentimental about older forms of technology, but there was something about sitting in that near-silent room—flipping through the scanned pages of someone’s diary looking for clues, with only the quiet whirring of the microfilm in the background—that made me feel immediately at home. It was, for me at least, pretty close to my platonic ideal of how to spend a birthday.
Hear, hear! Later, on being struck by the Library’s location on Capitol Hill:
The entire space at that eastern end of the Mall is dominated by three imposing structures: Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Library. It’s as though the seat of the federal government has been divided into its own tripartite schema: Power, Justice, and Information. There’s something fitting about it, even as the news cycle is now dominated by the activity in the other two buildings, a testimony to how much the Founders, for all of their flaws, believed that the free flow of information was central to a functioning democracy.
And long may it flow.
My son’s media of the moment
A spinoff of an ongoing series
Bluey. A not-small number of times after watching an episode I’ve thought, “Was that one of the greatest episodes of TV ever?” Hot take: the only TV shows a kid needs, really, are this and Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood—the yin and yang of instructive, high-quality children’s entertainment.
Picture books aplenty. A few he and I have enjoyed in equal measure lately: Creepy Carrots and Creepy Pair of Underwear by Aaron Reynolds, Jazz for Lunch by Jarrett Dapier, and Up the Mountain Path by Marianne Dubuc.
Our Planet. Gave this Planet Earth spinoff on Netflix a whirl with him and he was mesmerized. Nature is so metal.
YouTube. An amazing learning tool. He learns about volcanoes in a book; check out this compilation of eruptions. He starts t-ball class but has never played baseball before; let’s pull up some highlights of a random game.
The Okee Dokee Brothers. Always and forever.
My home screen
The funny thing is this looks similar to the last time I shared my home screen, despite having gone through a few different iterations since then.
But I landed back at the black wallpaper and (even more) minimalist layout for a few reasons:
- My recent job change allowed me to delete several apps I didn’t need or want anymore, which inspired me to ditch the alphabetically grouped folders for one folder of my most frequently used apps.
- The ability to remove apps from the home screen without having to fully delete them lets me hide the lesser used ones in the App Library.
- Keeping most apps out of immediate sight introduces some friction into my device experience, forcing me to use search more often to find things.
- I want to make my phone as uninteresting and unstimulating as possible in an attempt (perhaps in vain) to use it less.
Playground adventures anew
The playground at the park near my parents’ house is getting renovated, which means the place as I knew it from ages 11-18 will be no more.
I’m glad for the memories I have from there, many of which are shared with my childhood best friend, Tim, who also lived a block away from the park. We logged countless hours at the basketball court and amidst the playground, making up spy games and other shenanigans.
The shenanigans have continued into the next generation, with my son and his cousin having romped around the same structures I did. Here they are last summer on the very old and rusty slide:
They took many, many turns on the slide, engaged in a constant loop of climbing up, sliding down, and running around. The next time we visit that slide will be gone, replaced with another slide for adventures anew.
This is the bookend
After nearly 7 years, today is my last day at my library job.
It was my first full-time library position after a few part-time jobs out of library school, and for that alone I am immensely grateful.
Whenever someone asks me how I like working at a library, I say I love it because every day is different. It’s been a blessing to be able to do so many things that were both personally and professionally fulfilling:
- help patrons at the Info Desk, which inspired both the Refer Madness and Teach Me How to Dewey series
- resurrect the library’s oral history project
- shepherd a website/calendar redesign
- edit the bimonthly print newsletter
- manage the social media, which inspired my own recent “influencer” career
- put together the weekly email newsletter, which directly led to my next role in email marketing
Including grad school, I’ve been in the library world for over 10 years. And though I’m leaving it for the time being, rest assured I’ll remain an avid library patron and advocate. You can take the boy out of the library but you can’t take the library out of the boy.
After all, as one of my t-shirts says:
More of my library-related posts:
On ‘The Science’ and dedication to reality
There are many reasons why millions of America don’t trust The Science, including belligerence and ignorance, but if you ask me, I would say that the most important reason is illustrated by the stories above: Scientists are sometimes untrustworthy. If they want to rebuild our trust in them, then they should start with three steps:
1. Practice the self-critical introspection that would enable them to perceive that, because they are human beings, there are some things they very much want to believe and some things they very much want to disbelieve;
2. Acknowledge those preferences in public;
3. Show that they are taking concrete steps to guard themselves against motivated reasoning and confirmation bias.
One of the most transformative concepts I’ve encountered is from M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled. He talks about four pillars of good self-discipline, one of which is “dedication to reality.” (The others: accept responsibility, balancing, and delayed gratification.)
Peck uses map-making as a metaphor for how we build and understand reality:
We are not born with maps; we have to make them, and the making requires effort. The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be.
This effort is really hard work. It means sustained, resilient dedication to updating our maps. But/therefore:
What happens when one has striven long and hard to develop a working view of the world, a seemingly useful, workable map, and then is confronted with new information suggesting that that view is wrong and the map needs to be largely redrawn? The painful effort required seems frightening, almost overwhelming. What we do more often than not, and usually unconsciously, is to ignore the new information.
This happens to everyone, not just scientists. Motivated reasoning and confirmation bias are baked into human psychology, which is why they’re so hard to overcome. Hence:
A life of total dedication to the truth also means a life of willingness to be personally challenged. The only way that we can be certain that our map of reality is valid is to expose it to the criticism and challenge of other map-makers.
Which, again: really hard.
Peck’s metaphor is based on the legacy medium of printed maps but arguably remains even more applicable today, given how Google Maps and the like allow for real-time updates and helpful added layers of useful information like traffic flow, accidents, construction slowdowns, bike paths, and so on.
Similarly, thanks to the internet, it’s never been easier to encounter new information that either confirms or clashes with one’s existing map of reality.
So the challenge remains: what to do with that information?
Media of the moment
Jackass Forever. A dirty, cringey, gut-bustingly funny cinematic soul-cleanse. Bound for my end-of-year top 10 just like the other Jackass movies.
Everything Everywhere All At Once. I think I need to see this at least twice to fully appreciate it, not for any plot reasons but because it really lives up to its title.
Winning Time. I enjoyed this HBO Max show enough to keep watching, but not enough to stick with it after the first season ends next week.
A World Lit Only By Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance by William Manchester. Just started reading this and know already it will be a feast. More to come.
Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood. Richard Linklater’s latest film synthesizes elements from two of his previous ones: the quotidian nostalgia of Boyhood and the rotoscope animation style of A Waking Life.
Summer of Soul. The two words that came to me after watching this concert documentary: exuberance and excellence.
Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age by Dennis Duncan. Three stars for the book itself, five stars for the title.
Please (don’t) clap
Twitter’s only conclusion can be abandonment: an overdue MySpace-ification. I am totally confident about this prediction, but that’s an easy confidence, because in the long run, we’re all MySpace-ified. The only question, then, is how many more possibilities will go unexplored? How much more time will be wasted?
Wishful descriptions of Twitter as “the de facto public town square” or “the closest thing we have to a global consciousness” sound, to me, like Peter Pan begging the audience to clap and raise a swooning Tinkerbell.
You don’t have to clap.
The best parenting advice I’ve ever gotten
The best parenting advice I’ve ever gotten was from my own parent. Per my mom:
When all else fails, lower your expectations.
Runner-up is from my other parent. Per my dad:
Kids spell love T-I-M-E.
Come as you are, but be ready to change
The slogan of the church I attended in middle and high school was “Come as you are”, which was fitting for a nondenominational church in the hyper-liberal, irreligious enclave of Madison, Wisconsin.
I remember the senior pastor expounding on the slogan during one sermon. He added an addendum that I think transforms it into something even better:
Come as you are, but be ready to change.
Removed from a religious context, this sentiment embodies a yes-and approach to life that can translate to many other contexts:
- Read at whim, but also upstream.
- Own your abilities (no disclaimers), but keeping challenging them.
- “I dearly love this land / Because of, and in spite of, we the people.”
What’s yours?
Six movies at the end
The small movie theater near me temporarily closed in March 2020 due to COVID, but then sadly never reopened. (The one movie I got to see there before the end was Knives Out—not bad…)
Whoever closed the building for good clearly didn’t take a peek around the corner, because these movie posters are still on display over two years later:
For posterity:
- Minions 2
- Invisible Man
- F9
- Trolls World Tour
- The Way Back
- The Hunt
As a friend of mine replied after I sent a photo of this sad, sun-bleached time capsule of another era: “Not a single one I’d want to hang on my wall, otherwise I’d be making some calls!”
If COVID had struck just a few months earlier, the posters for Parasite or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood might have graced these cases. But that’s March at the movies for you.