Fond of rumpots, crackpots, and how are you, Mr. Wilson?

Mrff. Hard forcing myself to engage online lately. Last week I can blame on project brain (two YouTube videos posted in less than a week, which never happens), but this week I can only chalk up to a combination of inertia and lack of an emotional gas pedal. I did get some good in-person interactions, heading to Boston to hang with felisdemens et al (man, I've forgotten frickin' everybody's username). A wonderful time had with folks I'd not seen in a while, but after an evening of full-bore large-group socializing on Friday I got as far as lunchtime on Saturday before I was requesting living room squatting with as few expectations as possible. Very much worth it. Friday had a fire pit.

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Random stuff, in the order that they occur to me:

1) The Rolling Stone 500 Albums listening project is off to a good start: Ask Rufus by Rufus with Chaka Khan, Los Angeles by X, Nevermind by Nirvana (the only one here I'd listened to in full before now), The Clash self-titled, Dónde Están los Ladrones by Shakira, and Mama's Gun by Erykah Badu, in that order. Six albums, six thumbs up. Since they're supposed to be in random order, I've been having hypnagogie pull the index cards. I told her she's been good luck so far; she says, "Or is it because you love music?" Since she just pulled Willy and the Poor Boys by Creedence Clearwater Revival, I'm sticking with the good luck theory. (For now, anyway. Drake could turn up aaaaany second now.)

2) I finally posted a new YouTube video after a more-than-two-month silence, having finally recovered sufficiently from the dag-flabberin' click-and-drag NIGHTMARE I'd set for myself on the previous one. I'm still trying to get up the gumption to put myself back on camera, but I did settle for doing a voiceover, which is plenty vulnerable and gives me ample opportunity to cuss about my lack of decent gear. The vid has been received well—apparently people like it better when you don't smack them with a 45-minute clip montage, go figure.

3) True to form, I've already started the next video. Hi, I'm Adam.

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Entering this for the record:

The Project
Listen to every album in the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list. Ai yi yi.

The Background
I took a stab at this once before, years ago, when I was trapped in a cubicle, bored off my bustle, and desperate for distraction. That, sadly, was a half-assed stab at best, and the attempt beached itself rather quickly after my job requirements and attention span both drifted. I return to it with renewed vigor, bolstered by recent reading and an obsessive deep-dive into Abigail Devoe's YouTube channel.

The Reasons
1) Fun
2) Filling in major gaps in my own cultural history
3) Shaking up my stagnating listening habits
4) Giving artists and genres I dislike a fair shot, with hopes of gaining appreciation
5) Self-betterment (more on that in a bit)
6) Because I can

The List
Yes, the Rolling Stone list is controversial and problematic with a generous helping of "...I'm sorry, what now?" but I'm going with it because it casts such a wide net—everything from Billie Holiday to Nine Inch Nails to Merle Haggard to My Chemical Romance to Mobb Deep to Earth, Wind & Fire to James Taylor to John Coltrane to Metallica to Taylor Swift to gods know what else. As an ending point, open to criticism; as a starting point, it'll do fine. I'll be using the 2020 version of the list, i.e. the last time they did a full survey, but I'll also throw in the nine or so titles they added for the 2023 "revision" (and hoo boy, do I have a few words on that nonsense).

The Preparations
Because this is me, I started by cobbling together a massive spreadsheet, then decided I also needed a massive stack of index cards to go with it. If it's worth engineering, it's worth over-engineering. Also, it keeps the voices away.

The Rules
1) Every album must be listened to in its entirety, preferably in one sitting. Even if it's an album I've heard a hundred times. Even if it's an album I've been purposefully avoiding for decades (especially if I've been avoiding it).

2) Albums will be selected in a random order. Hence the index cards. One of the problems I ran into the first time around is that I was going in list order, and when I ran into something I wasn't enthusiastic about I suddenly found I had Something Important to Do Right Now. So, new plan: commit to listening, then randomly select what I'll be listening to, no substitutions allowed.

3) No multitasking—every album will be given full attention. This here's the self-betterment part: I'm using this as a method to force myself away from the flippin' screen and take some meditative time, preferably outside, definitely with good headphones. Feeling the need for that right now.

4) No turning this into web content. This one might not stick, but I'm afraid that if I try to make this into a video series or a new blog or some such it's going to become yet another Thing that I feel guilty about not finishing. So for now, I'm keeping it for me. My output will be limited to the index cards: a star rating, a few lines of commentary, a few choice tracks, and that's it. I might very well change my mind, because in truth it would make a good something-or-other, but I can't finish the video projects and the music blog I already have, and to review, this is five hundred albums.

The Beginning
I'll start as soon as I'm done setting up the index cards, which should be today. Wish me luck.

I welcome input! And also Advil. Plenty of Advil.

This past weekend marked the return of the big annual air show at the local executive airport (read: airport that the common unwashed rabble don't get to use), and I think I speak for the majority of us townies when I say I'd like to kick the organizers someplace sensitive. There's plenty of ground-level come-look-at-the-cool-planes that sounds like fun, especially for families with kids, but the issue is that the headliners this year were the Air Force Thunderbirds. A big draw and a big get, to be sure, so they were given the clearance to arrive early to rehearse, and then had multiple performances over several days. Fun!

Except.

When I say it's the local airport, I mean way local. I mean we drive past the airfield daily. I mean said airfield is on Bath Road, and some weekends we walk to Bath Road. Jets, however, don't have a concept for the term "local". Jets need space to operate, especially if they're rehearsing flight formations, and the space they operate is the entire surrounding space, i.e. right over every house and business in town. Back when I lived in Glens Falls, we had the balloon festival, which meant occasionally looking up and going, "Oh hey look, hot air balloons!" Much less fun is having naps interrupted by jet engine screech, with no recourse other than stomping onto the porch in your skivvies and impotently shouting "PIPE DOWN, MAVERICK, WE GOT IT THE FIRST TIME".

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1) Thing I didn't mention from the weekend is that I had my first ride in a Tesla, which...okay, look, I reeeeally wanted to hate it, to reassure myself with the meh of it all while thumbing my upturned nose at the Muskrat, but oh. my. god, is that a great car. It runs like silk on skin. It beeps at you when the light turns green. IT HAS A FRUNK. I didn't know I needed a frunk. I kinda need a frunk.

2) One of these days we're going to get up early enough for a morning walk and it will not, in fact, be raining.

3) Video production procrastination continues apace! [pause for applause] I did manage to write some voice-over copy while stuck at the office, and took a moment today to defibrillate the channel's social media accounts. That totally counts! Taking credit! Preening now!

4) And pardon me while I bury the lede, but one nice thing about creative procrastination is all the other things you get done: you know that novel that's been in the editing process for over a decade now?

EDITING.

IS.

FUCKING.

DONE.

This deserves a full post on its own, and it's going to get one because I'm going to need whoa-yikes quantities of help, but for now it feels...good? I think? Scary? Because Jesus on a moped, now what?

This morning it's the good tired, the kind that results from entertaining out-of-state visitors for the weekend. Justin and Carly are online friends that hypnagogie made through her work with EFT couples therapy, and they stopped with us for a few days as the eastern terminus of a long road trip. Wonderful people, who we clicked with in that way you hope long-distance chat friends will click when you finally get to meet them. This meant several days engaging in the time-honored activity of Doing the Touristy Things We Don't Normally Do Because We Live Here So Why Bother, which was even better since we didn't really know what the touristy things even are. Spoiler: We do now.

Friday: Guests arrived in late afternoon and were plied with homemade pork chops forestière and Manhattans before crashing in the guest room/gym/YouTube studio/library/etc. (read: tiny room for all the stuff we have no space for elsewhere).

Saturday: Ceremonial trip to Dog Bar Jim's, the hippy ramshackle coffeehouse that is our standard Saturday morning haunt, followed by the grand walking tour of Brunswick, followed closely by them checking into their inn and everyone basically passing out for a few hours. We reconvened for dinner at Noble Kitchen, which did not disappoint. I forget what I ordered, but it was amazing, and the sticky toffee pudding for dessert tried its squishy damnedest to murder us from the serotonin centers down.

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Van Ryder Games: Hey!

Me: Hey yourself.

VRG: Lookee! Final Girl board game!

Me: Ugh, pass.

VRG: Solid horror themed content!

Me: Hard nope.

VRG: Designed specifically for solo play!

Me: [stops mid-syllable) ...I'm listening.

VRG: Infinitely replayable!

Me: I've heard that one before.

VRG: With expansion sets out the yin-yang!

Me: [scoots chair closer] Go on....

VRG: The packaging is also the game boards!

Me: Keep talking.

VRG: That you can mix and match!

Me: [audible whimpering noise]

VRG: And you can create custom cards right on our website!

Me: [carefully keeping hand away from wallet pocket in desperate attempt to retain some modicum of sensible control] Okay, hang on, expansion sets cost m-o-n-e-y.

VRG: Yep.

Me: So I—

VRG: Under 20 bucks.

Me: ...fuck. [whips out debit card Annie Oakley-style]

VRG: Told ya.

Me: I'm getting ONE. Base set and one—ONE—scenario. Period. I mean, I don't know if I'm even going to like th—

[45 minutes later]

Me: [screaming into phone] WELL THEN WHO DOES BUY BLACK MARKET KIDNEYS? I HAVE NEEDS.

(Seriously, I was not expecting to go all in on this.)

1) Another rainy morning, another walk denied, boo and fie and a pox upon it all, even though the rain and the high temp in the mid-70s are both still nice.

2) No idea what I'm having for breakfast today. We're out of bagels, we're out of avocados for smushing on toast, and I've come to the conclusion that cereal is not actually a food because I end up carb crashing an hour and a half later. We do, however, have healthy-brand Oreos, so....

3) I took a Klonopin yesterday afternoon to see if it would help the anxiety-related lightheadedness. It, shall we say, did not: I stood up, I turned left, the room turned right, I sat down again, and long story short we ordered from Portland Pie instead of me making chicken florentine pasta as planned because knives and I were not going to get along. Chalk one up for science.

4) I keep saying I'm going to write at length about the YouTube channel here, and I never do. I also keep saying I'm going to make a new video for the YouTube channel, and ditto. I'm sensing a correlation.

5) Just realized I never made coffee this morning. If you'll excuse me....

So let me tell you about my morning.

I was up at the crack of dawn, very much nonconsensually. I work from home most days, a literal "roll out of bed, log on in my boxers" affair, but that usually gets scuttled by Marlowe the Buttface Cat, who's old and cranky and would be yelling at us kids to get off his lawn if he had one, and likes to inform us in no uncertain terms that it is no longer fully dark outside. Today he had a legitimate grievance—his feeder needed refilling—but no matter, we were up, we did not murder the cat, away we go.

hypnagogie did the Lord's work by making coffee (Jim's, brand based out of Massachusetts, medium roast), and I exercised self-care with a sesame bagel with plain cream cheese, toasted because I'm not a monster. Most mornings we'd be out for our daily walk right about now, a habit we sometimes lapse on but which has truly proved life-altering since we started last fall. Today, however, it's raining, which is bad news / good news, no walk but ye gods does a rainy morning set a baseline of contentment for the day. Always welcome. I'll need to venture out at lunchtime to get to therapy (an entry for another time), but for now I'm leaving my headphones off and absorbing as much calm as I can before I have to start the work that I'd prefer to ignore but seeing as how they're giving me money and all I guess I'll pay attention.

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Since I seem to be posting here again, I should take a moment to promote my new website: the What You Listen To project started three months ago as an outlet for my music writing, in which I perform deep-dives into the songs I love and pick apart the deliriously complicated reasons why. I'm proud of all of the pieces I've written so far, but here are a few I'm particularly fond of if you need a place to start:

"Dancers to the Left of Me, Architects to the Right, Here I Am, Stuck in the Middle with You"
—an introduction to the project, the reasons why writing about music is futile, and the reasons why it's necessary

"Blood River 1918," Skye Wallace
—an elegy for 2020, written on the back of a sepia postcard from a century before

"Baby Got Going," Liz Phair
—taking down the patriarchy not by kicking the door in, but by stealing the keys to the clubhouse

"Wolf Like Me," Lera Lynn ft. Shovels and Rope
—the art of the cover song, part I: what happens to subtext if you push the whole operation into the next genre over

"California Dreaming," Lee Moses
—the art of the cover song, part II: when the original gives you the mind and body, and you're left to provide the soul

"Monk Time," The Monks
—the ongoing argument about when punk began, aimed at the '60s band possibly too punk to care

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Give the page a look if you've got a moment to spare. If you want to keep up with future entries, all of the usual social media and RSS feed information is at the bottom of the page. Thanks for reading!

1) Andrea got her second COVID vaccination shot yesterday, which means today she feels like twice-baked man ass. In an effort to create something cool, refreshing, and not too gloppy, in light of the low-grade fever she's been running since late morning, we came up with my New Favorite Thing: 1 cup of vanilla bean ice cream + 1 can of blood orange Sanpellegrino, blended. We've decided to call it a "Brutus," because it's basically an Orange Julius only bloody, and also because she won't let me call it "Et Tu, Fruité".

2) I'm still trying to get used to not having an aneurysm while glancing through the Twitter trending list. My anxiety doesn't quite know what to do with this state of affairs.

3) The quarantine is a good time to reconnect with old acquaintances, like Kingdom of Loathing. The major difference this time around is that my lack of a life away from the Internet is someone else's fault.

"Heyyyy, Adam, it's me, eBay. You up?"
"No. Go away."
"'Cuz I was thinking we haven't hung out in a while."
"There's a reason for that."
"There is?"
"Yes. We broke up."
"YOU broke up. I'm still here."
"You have nothing I want, eBay."
"Now, now. You know THAT isn't true."
"Look, I—"
"OoooOOOooohh, what's this?"
"I'm not looki—"
"Oh, my! It's a Criterion Collection DVD of Buñuel's 'That Obscure Object of Desire'!"
"I don't care."
"In 'like new' condition."
"I. Do. Not. Care."
"It's out of print, you know."
"I KNOW it's out of pri—"
"Got it right here."
"LOOK. Bargain or no bargain, out-of-print Criterion is way out of my—"
"Twelve bucks."
...
...
"I fucking hate you, eBay."
"I know. Visa?"
*sigh* *grumble* "Sure."
"SINCE YOU BOUGHT THE CRITERION 'THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE,' HERE ARE NINE HUNDRED OTHER ITEMS YOU MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN. JUST STEP INTO THIS CONVENIENT BOTTOMLESS PIT WE'VE DUG FOR YOU."

While I finish digesting my lunch and feigning industry:

1) Things that make my ears prick up: "I need to throw out some of these magazine racks." Suffice it to say that I now have a box of magazine racks, because you can't stop the music, the feeling, or the covetous grabby-hands when shelving supplies are at stake.

2) NPR Music has created a series of weekly-updated Spotify playlists, and the one entitled Slingshot is enough for me to add them to my Christmas card list.

3) Recreational marijuana possession is now legal in the state of Maine. NO REASON WHY I MENTION THIS CHRIST ALMIGHTY WHY ARE YOU ASKING SO MANY QUESTIONS

4) The temperature in Brunswick squeaked above 80 yesterday, for the first and only time so far this year. I adore Maine so much.

5) A week or so ago I finally watched Wings, the first Oscar winner for Best Picture. I expected silent melodrama, and got it. I also got frank violence, male and female nudity (!), one briefly-glimpsed but unmistakable lesbian couple (!!), the first-ever screen kiss between two men (!!!), a young and devastating Gary Cooper, some excellent tracking shots, and possibly the best aerial photography I've ever encountered. Very much worth the while. (I would like to state for the record that I only chuckled a little bit at the title card that read, "Oh, Dave, Dave—I was trying to get just one more Heinie just for you—")

I got my dunce ass pulled over last night. It was my own stupid fault—I have a tendency to speed under the best of conditions, and the last leg of a three-hour commute home is not the best of conditions, so I failed to lift my cinder block foot from the gas on the exit ramp and got clocked at 57 in a 35 zone. I had already been rage-cruising for most of the trip, and had juuuust been getting myself into a better headspace with liberal application of Beastie Boys tracks when this happened, and...yeah, from there, my mood was toast. The police officer who nabbed me was terribly nice, though, which is blessing given that I wasn't aware that failing to switch to a Maine driver's license within 30 days of moving here is an arrestable offense. I got home, greeted hypnagogie, commiserated about how stressed she was, and joined her in declaring fuck the everything as we smothered our misery with sushi and G&Ts and Brooklyn Nine-Nine reruns. Good times.

So yeah, sorry, boss, can't come in to work today, because turns out? It's against the law. Also, your employee is a numpty.

Needless to say, the task at hand today was getting a new license, and I have to say that between the yesterday's cop and today's jaunt to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles I have to conclude that everyone on the state payroll in Maine must be a Canadian expat. I swear unto you, I have never had such a pleasant DMV/RMV/BMV experience as the one this afternoon: quick, friendly, no getting the impression that I'm inconveniencing the whole office with My Problem. Also, it was nice knowing that even with wet hair and a zit on the end of my nose the size of El Capitan, it will still be a better license photo than the previous one. (The photographer had managed to catch me a quarter of the way through a blink, so I look baked to the point that my language skills were somewhere behind me. Y'know, exactly the impression you want to give when you're pulled over.)

As I type this, the pouring rainstorm we've been enjoying is having its first lull, and my stomach is overfull with homemade burgers with havarti and avocado, and life is pretty dang good, all told. Should be good sleeping weather, which I'm greatly looking forward to. Good night, my dears. Dream kindly.

I have no idea what to say.

There are certain protocols that go along with returning to blogging after an extended absence: the "yeah, it's been a while since I last posted" shrug, the catch-up details on what's been going on, the indication that regular posting will/may recommence. (Apologies for any of the above are optional. Unless you're me, in which case bring on the wailing performative regret!) I've done a thousand reboot posts like that, and I am sick unto death of writing them because I always do them wrong, with all my mea culpas for things that don't need mea culpa-ing and all my promises with no stiff cardboard backing. All I know is that I've been wanting to get myself moving again on journaling for months, but have had no gumption to do so. hypnagogie just started up again with daily morning entries after a very long absence, however, so I'm going to borrow a cup of gumption from her and see how this goes.

The lack of initiative has largely been because Life decided to shake stuff up like a souvenir snow globe: first, I moved to Brunswick, Maine to be with hypnagogie on shorter notice than expected, to an apartment with a purple front door and its own washer-dryer. The good news is that the apartment is amazing, Brunswick is amazing, my life up there is amazing, no regrets. The bad news is that Maria Kondo-ing and packing up my accumulated worldly possessions had to happen VERY VERY QUICKLY, as did getting Nik off to Job Corps in Vermont, so March and April were downright gonzo-pants. Well, that and the other bad news that I'm still working in Lexington and the powers that be have denied us the possibility of working from home, so I get to commute 2 1/2 to 3 hours each way, five days a week, complete with Boston-area I-95 traffic both coming and going. That level of nonexistent work/life balance doesn't leave much brain-space for ruminations on, like, coffee cups or season 2 of Fleabag. (OMG watch Fleabag seriously because I can't even with the thing it's SO GOOD.)

So yes, I want to write, and no, I have no idea what to write about. I'm trying to remember that back in the day, lack of content was hardly a hindrance—behold, World, my lunch choices! Are you not entertained?! How on earth did I do this several times a day? It probably has something to do with being in my 30s, and/or having nothing better to do. Whatever. My apartment has a purple front door, my job has good free coffee, Fleabag is available for streaming, the sky is up there, the earth is down there, ob-la-di, ob-la-da. Meet back here tomorrow? Same time, same place?

hypnagogie and I have an now-annual tradition of attending AMC's Oscar Showcase, where they marathon all of the Best Picture nominees over two consecutive Saturdays (give or take Roma, because Netflix was totally passing AMC nasty notes in study hall or something so now they're not invited to the birthday party, Sheila). It's ridiculous amounts of fun, highly recommended if you're a movie fan, but it leaves me with a whole armload of opinions that have nowhere to go. My original plan was to do the old recap post thing in advance of the awards themselves, but the final movie finished screening less that 24 hours before the Oscars were to begin, and with the crunch on I decided to just let it go, telling myself I didn't really have many things to say.

Then the Oscars happened, and I now have things to say.

So herewith I present the 2018 Best Picture Nominees Wrap-Up post I neglected to write on Sunday, now with the smooth, fruity flavor of indignant hindsight:

Black Panther
I saw this in the theatre when it came out a year ago, and was blown clear out of my socks. I saw it again on Saturday and...well, it was still really good, but my socks stayed on. I think hypnagogie pegged it when she said that the first time we were awed by its newness, and once that newness no longer had surprise attached it lost some of its power. The areas where it truly innovates lie in the production design, the costumes, and the score, the parts that serve to evoke this magnificent place and culture; not coincidentally, these are also the areas where it deservedly won its Oscars. I also admire its willingness to look at race and isolationism head-on in a way that typical popcorn fare usually doesn't. Beyond that, though, it's a Marvel movie that does what Marvel movies do: you've got your hero's journey, your villain, your CGI fighty-smashy, your startling plot twists that stopped being startling eight movies ago. It does these things better than most, sure, and I think Black Panther is hugely important and am delighted it has been so enormously successful. But there's a growing superhero fatigue that's been sinking in over the last decade, and the awe that I felt the first time around didn't hold up enough on the second to completely silence it.

BlacKkKlansman
I wasn't expecting BlacKkKlansman to knock me out the way that it did. I'd heard that it was problematic, that it has a gratuitous opening and a savagely unsubtle ending, that Spike Lee's directorial voice comes in so loudly it's practically screaming. All of that is true, and I wouldn't have it any other way. It's what makes Spike Spike, a man who has never had time to hold your hand while you catch up because there's a goddamn war on. When it's time to show you the racism, he shows it all, unflinching, staring it right in the face and not asking your permission before insisting you do the same. All this makes the film sound like a blunt force weapon, and it certainly can be, but the force is employed carefully, thoughtfully, and only when needed. This film is an example of nuanced and mature craftsmanship on every level: writing, direction, cinematography, design, acting (Adam Driver was robbed), music, all of it. What's more, it's entertaining—it takes this combination of one-line elevator pitch and deservedly righteous anger, and somehow makes it suspenseful, engaging, even funny (it has my vote for the greatest spit-take in modern cinema). I clearly haven't been watching enough Spike Lee lately, and I mean to fix that.

Bohemian Rhapsody
Man. I wanted to like this, really and truly. But never have I ever seen an Oscar-nominated film saddled with such a ham-handed, cliche-ridden, clanging-eyeroll-inducing, mind-numbingly bad screenplay. It's the sort of biopic that VH1 used to do in the '90s to bank on the success of Behind the Music. Speechifying about how Queen is "for the outcasts," making music that "crosses genres"? Check. A Conservative Father who doesn't understand his own son's art, who shows up just barely enough to set up a tearful reconciliation at the end? Check. Major Events consolidated to the point that, say, Freddie announces he's changed his name at the dinner where his parents meet his band and his soon-to-be wife, literally 30 seconds before receiving a phone call announcing they have a new manager? Check. A Visionless Record Executive who sneeringly proclaims, and I quote, "Mark these words: NO ONE will play Queen"? Check, check, and check. The whole film, in fact, is a checklist; it's like the filmmakers printed out the Wikipedia page and turned it into a storyboard. Milestones are presented not as milestones but as fan service: we're supposed to cheer in recognition, reveling in our knowledge of a future that the characters can't see yet. Freddie has trouble with the mic stand at his very first gig, so he rips out the boom and uses that as we all know he will for the rest of his career. At a label meeting he comes up with the album title "A Night at the Opera" on the spot after playing some opera as an example of, um, opera, I guess. Now let's all watch as *stomp*stomp*clap* is invented! We know it's going to be a classic! The confused people in the studio don't! Irony!

I get why the film is so popular. The music is wonderful, of course. Rami Malek does a fine job of bringing Freddie Mercury to life—not my pick for Best Actor, but if you're going to award something to Bohemian Rhapsody, he's easily the one you want to give it to. And it ends with the Live Aid sequence, which is exciting and well executed and as feel-good an ending as you're going to find, a perfect last word to take with you to the parking lot. But even there it left me wanting, because it didn't seem, well, real enough. The camera moves and drone shots felt like showing off. Scenes of the audience came off not like crowd of fans but crowd of paid extras, almost like a Pepsi commercial. And cutaways to Bob Geldof in the phone banks and the Visionless Record Executive alone and sad in his office became just more examples of screenplay bludgeoning. The Live Aid segment was great, but more than anything, it made me want to leave and watch the real Live Aid performance instead.

The Favourite
This is the one I was most looking forward to. If you've been avoiding The Favourite because you've already seen this kind of behind-the-throne intrigue-based costume drama: No. No, you haven't. If you've been avoiding it because Yorgos Lanthimos is a weird-ass little art-monkey provocateur...well, you're not wrong, but perhaps the weirdest thing about the film is how weird it isn't. I mean sure, it's got all of the lobster races and uncomfortable sex and grating background music you've come to expect from Yorgie-baby, but it's in service of a story that's surprisingly grounded. (This has a lot to do with the historical setting, I'm sure, which creates the sort of alien parallel world he likes to play in without having to force his actors to talk like they're reciting zip codes and avoid eye contact.) Give me the guy who ruined my week with Dogtooth, drop him in an 18th century castle, fold in dialogue you could dice tomatoes with, exquisite fondant-dipped visuals, and the absolute dream trio of Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz, and Emma Stone, and yes, more of that please, and thank you. Of all the things I saw over those two weekends, nothing has stuck with me quite like that last scene [BIT OF A SPOILER] when Colman places her hand on Stone's head, and we watch as she (and we) slowly realize just what she's created for herself, and the bitter cost. Watch this movie, full stop.

Side note: hypnagogie showed me a tweet that said, "YOR-GOS LAN-THI-MOS, put another dime in the jukebox, babyyy," and now I'm earwormed for life.

Green Book
Raise your blast shields now, readers: NO. No, no, no, and fuck to the capital NO. Seriously, Academy, what in the name of great Hephaestus's nose clippers were you thinking? Of all the provocative, insightful, exceptional films that came out in 2018, even limited to those that got nominated, you're going to honor a backward, bland, mealy-mouthed puff piece on racism that shoves a fascinating real-life artist literally into the back seat, so you can focus on the Good White Guy Who Learns a Valuable Lesson But Also Has Something to Teach You About Blackness, Mister Actual Black Person? This is a Best Picture of 2018 that smells like a Best Picture of 1986, only it's not classic, it's downright regressive. It dances around its own race issues like its shoes are tied together; the protagonist displays one deeply grotesque passive-aggressive racist act in the first five minutes, and then the film goes out of its way to show that he's an all-right guy who just has a few misguided ideas, not like those racists they meet along the way. Whatever prejudice he's harboring is pretty much gone by day 3 of their road trip, so much so that when Dr. Shirley's sexual orientation is revealed, Tony, a blue-collar guy in 1962, greets it with a shrug, and it's never mentioned again. (To be fair, the explanation he gives for his calm response isn't unreasonable, but by then we're in the canonization part of the narrative, so he's only doing woke-person things now.) Even his more overtly racist family decides to get on board in roughly five seconds, because the happy ending demands it of them.

I know, I know, this isn't the only thing in Green Book I should be focusing on as a film lover. The direction is fine if not exceptional, the acting from Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali is as excellent as I'd expect from them, the score came from the same bottle they pour over pancakes at the craft services table. But we're well past the "everyone just needs to be nice to each other" narrative, people. I know movies like Green Book make us feel good, but we can do better. We can honor better. We have to. (For further reading, I highly recommend this Facebook post. Thanks to friend Laura for linking me to it!)

Roma
My gods, what a sumptuous wonder of a movie. I want to spend the next fourteen paragraphs describing any number of frames in minute detail (this is the sort of film you want to hang in your living room), but I think everything you need to know is in that very first shot behind the opening credits, with the paving stones, and then the water, and then the reflection in the water, and I swear to you that I gasped out loud at the simple breathtaking elegance of it. Both Alfonso Cuarón's direction and his cinematography won entirely on merit; if we're judging it in terms of pure filmmaking, then Roma should have won best picture of this year, next year, last year, and I'll call you if this string of years ever comes to an end. If there's one thing that kept it out of my #1 spot, though, and I'm just now realizing it, it's that even as intimate as the story is and as good as the acting is, I feel like I could've gotten to know everyone a little better than I did. Cuarón never leans in for the close examination, always keeping the camera at a voyeur's distance. It's part of what gives it such a unique visual identity, but it leaves us perpetually on the outside looking in, even when we're hanging out with the family in their own home. The only times we're allowed in are during the riot, which puts us in the line of fire but strangely isolated, and the utterly brutal hospital scene, where we share the most vulnerable of moments but are left helpless as we watch it unfold. This is also one of the few times Cuarón keeps the camera still, forcing us to bear witness; brilliantly done, but I wish he'd let us in a tiny bit more as the story goes on. Still, this is the sort of film that makes young people want to be directors, which is a high compliment indeed. I need to watch it again. Repeatedly, if possible.

A Star Is Born
Movie of the year. Fight me.

Seriously, this thing wields such an emotional wallop for me I don't even know where to start. I saw it when it first came out, loved it, saw it again, loved it even more, and here we are. I wrote a response on Facebook to my friend Michael, who questioned why anyone would remake this damn movie yet again, and I'm going to cut and paste it here because I don't think I'm going to say it any better than I did then: "Oh, it's a COMPLETELY ridiculous choice for a remake. The story was old-fashioned 50 years ago. Judy Garland's version should have been the last word, and Streisand's should have proved it. To choose it as your directorial debut in 2018 requires ten pounds of hubris in a five-pound sack. But I'm going to quote Roger Ebert here: it's not what a movie's about, it's how it's about it. What Cooper did was to take all the overblown melodrama and ground it, finding the characters under the caricatures. Jack and Ally are fully realized from the inside out, both through the screenplay and two phenomenal performances (yes, including and especially Lady Gaga), and their boots are firmly planted in the real world with chemistry to spare. Jackson Maine is an alcoholic, not a Hollywood drunk, which is a huge distinction, and he acts and reacts and evolves and devolves and charms and disgusts in ways we've seen people in our own lives act out. Ally is no ingenue, goes into this partnership clear-eyed and willingly, sets limits, loves without coddling. And when that downfall comes, absurd as it may have been in the past, he falls like an addict, not like the tragic script convenience we saw in James Mason or Kris Kristofferson. So many remakes are about honoring the story, or the memories we have of the story; Cooper makes it about these people, and truly remakes it into something new.

"One last thing, about That Scene: I'm a performing musician. There is a moment when you're onstage that's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't been there: it's when you stop being yourself and start being the music. There's a loss of control there, that giving of yourself to the shared moment, carried by the people watching and listening and those around you. It's terrifying and exhilarating, and you realize in the same moment not only that this song, this phrase, this breath, is so much bigger than the room you're standing in, but that you yourself are so much bigger, big enough to hold it and carry it. I'd never seen a movie completely get it right before. 'Shallow' does."

Vice
Meh. A good "meh," but meh. I loved The Big Short from a few years ago, loved the audacity, loved that it dared to teach from within an onslaught of directorial tricks and communicate outrage with a trickster's attitude. Now here's Vice, which attempts the same feat, only now the bag of tricks feels like...just...a bag tricks, and I can't enjoy the puppet show because I can't stop looking at the strings. When the tricks work, they really really work, like the final fourth wall-puncturing soliloquy and the closing credits running in the middle (pure genius, that one; you'll see what I mean). But when they don't, they really really don't, and I left feeling kind of manhandled by the whole operation. The performances were all spot-on, with an unfortunate tendency to drift toward impression rather than character. (Steve Carell is best one on screen for the second Adam McKay movie in a row, and for the second Adam McKay movie in a row he wasn't the one to get nominated.) I do admire the choice to examine Cheney's wish to protect his gay daughter from scrutiny and the sort of legislation his party was wont to pursue; it was a level of complexity that these sorts of operations often lack. All in all, I was glad to see it, and it's a good "meh," but it's still a "meh."

My rankings of the Best Picture nominees:
1) A Star Is Born
2) Roma*
3) The Favourite*
4) BlacKkKlansman
5) Black Panther
6) Vice
7) Bohemian Rhapsody**
8) Green Book**

* = Roma is a better-made film, but The Favourite is the one I'd rather rewatch.
** = Green Book is a better-made film, but Bohemian Rhapsody doesn't make me want to punch inanimate objects while cussing.

hypnagogie and I visited our first marijuana dispensary in Maine a few weekends ago, which for a child of the Nancy Reagan era such as myself was an extended exercise in cognitive dissonance. Maine is fully pot-legal, but going to a dispensary still requires a medical weed card. CBD-related products, though, can be bought over the counter with adult ID, and hypnagogie has a chronic pain thing, so off to the hippie wilds of Ye Olde Down East we went to see if some CBD cream would help.

Nothing much to say about the experience, really, which might be the weirdest part of all—medical marijuana proponents are well aware of the image problem they need to throttle, so everything looked healthy (read: like a Minnesota Reiki studio) and smelled healthier (read: like getting groped by a lavender bath bomb). Aside from the ID check at the reinforced doors and a run across the street to the ATM because cash only, natch, everything ran Safeway-smoothly. That, and both customer service folks and the one other guy there all looked like the sorts who use "dude" as conversational punctuation, but that might just be southern Maine talking. Thing was, it was an unremarkable, quotidian transaction that took place at a cabinet with weed in it, which still feels wacky-alternative-timeline to me, the sort of thing in a Doctor Who episode that would make you yell at Russell T. Davies because come on, man. We stepped back into the parking lot with our little brown grocery sack, I looked around and went "...welp, that was a thing that happened," and thus ended the experience. Things change.

Report on CBD cream: didn't work. Booooooo.

I've been doing this on Facebook every three months or so, whenever I have a big enough influx of new music worth sharing, but since I'm trying to pivot away from the blue-and-white I figure I'll give you lovely DW residents first crack at it this time:

Who would like a custom-made Spotify playlist of your very own? Respond, please!

1) Text sent to hypnagogie first thing this morning: "What does it mean when I dream that the screw top for the big hatch on the top of my skull has gotten gunky, so I have to unscrew the lid and walk around with my brain exposed while I try to find something safe to clean both the hatch and my brain surface, which has also gotten schmutzy due to neglect?" My subconscious has all the subtlety of a water buffalo on a Victoria's Secret catwalk.

2) Speaking of cleaning the gunk out of skulls, I had my first neti pot experience over the weekend, which despite my fears was much less "adventures in waterboarding" and more "bad day swimming at the Y." Worth it, though: two minutes of Dear Merciful Zeus Why Am I Doing This, five minutes of Post-Studio 54 Coke Binge Nose-Blowing, and then 12 hours of Holy Bugmonkeys I Can Breathe.

3) I still haven't watched the Netflix/BBC Watership Down. I have no reasonable explanation for this.

4) My creative cycle tends to consist of one project that occupies me body and soul for a week or two, then gets relegated to the back burner along with all of my other unfinished projects until I notice it down the line for another fortnight of obsession. As I type this I'm in the trough section of my creativity wave form, when nothing is poking my brain hard enough to command my attention and the pilot light of my work ethic. This either means I'm just about to latch onto something, or else I'm entering a gross protracted YouTube-and-pretzels-in-bed bummer phase. Since I'd really prefer to avoid the latter, I might just take a lug wrench to the issue and force myself to work on something. Most likely it'll be the Twine project that I was gung ho over a month ago, but we'll see how things play out. Watch this space.

5) The problem with a mild winter is that when the cold and snow finally do arrive, as they inevitably will, I don't feel as if I have the right to bitch about it.

6) Spilling chicken soup in your lunchbox makes peeling and eating clementines a weird experience.

Hope you're having a net-positive week, friends. This here's the downhill stretch.

I remember this meme going around a decade ago, and never indulged, so. Courtesy of calliopes_pen:

1. Comment to this entry saying 'Ooo Shiny!' and I will pick 3 of your icons/userpics.
2. Make an entry in your own journal (or just reply if you prefer) and talk about the icons I picked!

Her three choices for me all fall in the pop reference continuum:



"Shrabster," the only episode of Sealab 2021 I ever watched, was a capital-T Thing in my social circle for long enough that I decided to create a handful of userpics from relevant catchphrases, such as "Sweet mother of holy fucking God..." and the immortal "Filet o' freakin' Fish, Dan." I intended this one to be used for flashback/reminiscence-type posts, but I don't think I ever actually did so.



From Edward Gorey's Gashlycrumb Tinies, natch. I've got all 26, of which I've used six or seven over the years. Maybe I should be glad I've lived a life that's only intermittently Gashlycrumb-appropriate. Maybe I should make more of an effort. (Created by and borrowed from neitherday)



MR. BOOGALOW. People who have known me for any length of time, please be patient a moment whilst I proselytize to the newcomers: If you haven't seen the 1980 post-apocalyptic neo-Miltonian disco rock opera The Apple, hie thee immediately to thy viewing devices and rectify this immediately. Mr. Boogalow is our hissably bedazzled villain, the CEO of Boogalow International Music, symbol for all that is evil in corporate rock culture in The Distant Future (i.e. 1994), and quite possibly [SPOILER ALERT] actually Glam Satan. The song "I Know How to Be a Master" comes during a makeover montage that roughly only the 37th most ridiculous thing in this movie, so by all means let this light into your life forthwith.