#and spent my whole night listening to the hamilton soundtrack

[noobsomeexagerjunk]

thoughts on starry after multiple listens

(dated July 8, 2020 because i might make another one)

Edit: I SHOULD FACT CHECK MORE

the Starry soundtrack is as impressionist as the painters it invokes by energy alone, which is impressive given the style of music used (of which i’m fine with, but not partial to)

the Prologue does this right off the bat

the people of Monmartre are very critical of the rest of France and I adore it

i can feel theo’s overwhelment in Impress Me

Impress Me does a wonderful job at introducing the setting of the show

that song is a ball of pulsating yearning—no wait that’s the whole show

Theo got so stressed he walked blindly into Madame Segatori’s cafe

learning that the Le Tambourin was named as such due to its tambourine aesthetic via Vincent’s portrait of Segatori is just incredible to me; the table is shaped like a tambourine

“If Paris is the world, Monmartre is Bethlehem; and art is our Amen” sounds so powerful

A New Horizon is so warm

i expect Theo and Vincent to be very cuddly with each other everytime they interact

“dream with me, dear brother” is the energy of this song

french wheat fields will forever haunt me because of this damn musical

*insert Do You Like the Color of the Sky? post here*

like, so much emphasis to the sky

Vincent’s dreaming leaking into Theo’s trading practice surely must be a sight to see

chain imagery hits hard after hearing Wheat Fields/Finale Ultimo

in this yellow house, we dream of freedom

“should I really take this giant risk?” “brother, I took a giant risk coming here—fuck yeah do it!”

United in Distaste reeks of Vincent’s intimidation—it has new kid in school energy and I am living for it

Vincent coming to Monmartre (and when he arrives in Arles) like “Hey, I’m new in town, and it gets worse,”

Bernard has apparently spent enough time with Theo to be able to identify Vincent by frowning alone

Rude of Gauguin to yoink Vincent’s painting like that; Segatori immediately hangs it tho—

Gauguin sounds like he’s going to corrupt anyone who approaches him—dude announces his horny nature during his introduction

Gauguin IS a savage and a whore and the best thing about that is that he knows it; even better knowing the vision of his costume

Segatori’s displeasure throughout the song implies that the artists that frequent her cafe also argue amongst themselves frequently

“keep in mind that we’re academic rejects, Vincent”

with the way Degas, Pissarro, and Morisot tease at Gauguin (noting that Gauguin, Bernard, and Toulouse-Lautrec are together in a later song), it sounds like they’re are hurling insults from a separate tambourine table

Toulouse-Lautrec sounds dramatic; Bernard sounds like he’s not sure where he is artistically—both are a mood

Of the post-impressionist table, the only one retaliating with genuine insults is Toulouse-Lautrec; Bernard and Gauguin only end up defending themselves while Toulouse was ready to tear down Degas and Morisot

Pissarro IS old (at this period in time in the musical) damn

Morisot is unyielding with her insults, “speaking of size—“ holy shit oh no

i reiterate—why is Toulouse-Lautrec the only one actually speaking in a French accent; almost everyone there is French

since I’m aggressively referring to him, I think Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec merits a musical of his own, and that’s based on what first learned about him when I first listened to Starry

by extension, also Berthe Morisot

Monmartre’s artists be like “We’re very critical of ourselves and each other, and while that’s worth being intimidated by, don’t be intimidated by us! What do you have to bring to the table, foreign painter?”

Something poetic about how what Vincent wants being what all the artists want hereby making him a member of their squad is so warm to me—galleries are gravity INDEED

“We will embrace the madness we design, or lose our mind,” IS THIS FORSHADOWING BECAUSE IT FUCKING SOUNDS LIKE IT

“i am loving this! YES, GET ANGRY!” if only i can identify who said this

Something After All is directed towards Vincent, right? It better be, I lack context

Theo’s yearning is so relatable and I fear not being able to fulfill it

bless Kelly and Matt for giving Jo so much depth in Enlightenment

apparently she deadass learned English for the purpose of translating the letters she had compiled??? yo i love that

poetic how Jo invokes making a legacy since she’s the one who actually preserves her brother-in-law’s legacy (and by extension, herself and her husband’s legacies)

at first listen, i immediately drew a comparison to Hamilton’s Eliza; Jo is better both musically and literally, given that Vincent van Gogh is far more relevant than Alexander Hamilton will ever be, even with LMM’s musical

not trying to start beef, just an observation

Jo’s yearning is also such a mood

fire, light, and road imagery being invoked huh

it is by this point i’ve to the realization that the reasons one goes to Monmartre that was cited in Impress Me tie in very well to the individual characters’ desires in this show

Where Are We Going? goes so hard ugh yes

“I need a stronger strategy to seize my immortality!” Gauguin’s incredible ambition is the root of his dissatisfaction; doesn’t help that he’s impulsive both in the musical and IRL

Toulouse prioritizes integrity and Bernard prioritizes progression—I wonder what this means for their characters in the show

Toulouse and Bernard calling Gauguin out on his known shitty behaviors feels like they’ll be problems Vincent will have to deal with in Act 2, when they live together

this is where Gauguin leaves for Martinique, right???

which one is the act 1 closer, really??? The Sower or The Road??? help me please

everyone in town is really concerned for Vincent

it wams me how much Segatori believes in him

Bernard’s right, Vincent van Gogh’s artstyle IS a melting pot

learning that Toulouse-Lautrec capitalized on his art during the peak of his career really adds weight to his concerns on Vincent’s inability to sell

i like to imagine the everyone’s in the gallery during The Sower

Theo and Jo’s relationship progressing as Vincent’s works don’t sell hits upon realization

Theo falling hard when he learns that he and Jo yearn for the same thing tho

recontextualizing the imagery that Vincent found beauty in into imagery that demonstrates his person is just mighty good of Kelly and Matt

then again, so much of his person is in the artwork to begin with

“and everyone knows your reap what you sow.” w o a h!!!

The Road starts like a dramatization of one of Vincent’s breakdowns and how he copes with them, or perhaps this starts after one??? The opening verses suggest a lot

also ties his road to his dream of freedom with what i believe is his travel to Arles

“North, South, East, West—navigate from inside you,” = “With conscience as my compass,”

“i am guided towards the night” this Vincent knows the answer but is so clearly far from its reach and is desperately trying to figure out how to

soul of fire, crystal heart and blizzard-like brain; the man is passionate and everyone knows it

“Fascinating, but maybe just a little too soon,” sounds like that at this point, Toulouse-Lautrec and Bernard genuinely recognize and admire Vincent’s talents, but also understand that the world is still against him and that they have the experience to prove it

the “sunlight and storms” imagery always concern Theo, Jo, and Vincent’s relationship with each other

Gauguin popping up in this song with the compass imagery implies the show’s going to make him a pretty interesting foil to Vincent; this sounds like him traveling back to Paris, or at least him attempting to vibe in Martinique

this hurts when you remember what happens to Vincent

“curse of the gifted” is a phrase i am too afraid to understand

DYLAN SAUNDERS CAN SLAY ME WITH HIS VOICE

The Yellow House sounds yellow somehow

who clears their throat before writing a letter???

Gauguin’s frustration’s against Vincent’s admiration of him is amusing

sounds like Gauguin hasn’t found his “freedom” yet

Theo is one generous fellow

this arrangement lasts for only 2 months; given the apparent span of this musical, The Yellow House is a very “calm before the storm” song

wait a minute—

apparently, Vincent REALLY admired Gauguin and was so excited for his arrival at the yellow house

i fear the dramatization of their disagreements

“Don’t tell Theo I said that,” it amuses me how the van Gogh brothers’ relationship is so well-known to these painters

based on the gifs lurking, the ear incident WILL be dramatized and I am terrified for my heart on how it will be depicted

Sunlight and Storms quotes the original letter from Jo to Vincent surprisingly well (i attempted to read some—there’s so many! this was one of the first ones i came across)

this song hurts when it hits how little time Jo and Theo had together as a married couple

I am convinced a lot happened between Sunlight and Storms and On the Threshold of Eternity

this definitely was after a breakdown

i skip this song just so i don’t think about the obvious implications, i must confess

the meaning of “sunlight and storms” hits the hardest here

“we will not let your illness keep you from finding your freedom”

The Red Vinyard is so full of a brother’s love

this hits me, and i speak as an only child

“You’ve carried me more than you’ll ever know,” AH—

when Theo finally sees the new horizon, Vincent is seeing it too

and what Vincent saw he put on a fucking canvas

“i can see it—a new horizon” = “the sight of the starry night”

they say that at the time, not much was thought of the iconic painting

i could only wonder what might’ve happened between The Starry Night and Wheat Fields

all the piano motifs coming together in Wheat Fields/Finale Ultimo, just like that

“I’m ready for harvest time” is melodically similar to “The road is bright”, particularly when it’s just Vincent singing the line alone

despite the obvious, I don’t think I’ll grasp the meaning of the final song; i also skip this one so i don’t think about it

#starry #starry musical #vincent van gogh #theo van gogh #jo van gogh bonger #agostina segatori #paul gauguin #emile bernard #henri de toulouse-lautrec #edgar degas #berthe morisot #camille pissarro #impress me #a new horizon #united in distaste #something after all #enlightenment #the sower #the road #the yellow house #sunlight and storms #on the threshold of eternity #the red vinyard #the starry night #wheat fields/finale ultimo

[nostalgicbones]

All EVEN numbered questions 😁💕

(this is so many i HIT TUMBLRS TEXT BLOCK LIMIT LOL. THANK YOU FOR THESE)

2. What musical got you really  into theatre?

WICKED!!!!!!!! wicked was the first soundtrack i listened to obsessively. i still adore it and try to catch any tours that come my way (i miss u wicked…)

4. Name three of your current Broadway crushes.

OH OKAY HM. well we all know i LOOOOOVE ben platt… i also ADORE sutton foster. (she was my first broadway love, probably) and ooo lets go with jeremy jordan how could you not love him

6. Favourite off-broadway show:

heathers!

8. 2013 Tony opening number or 2016 Tony opening number?

2016!! both are iconic though

10. A musical that closed and you’re still bitter about. Rant a bit.

DEAF WEST SPRING AWAKENING…. SO IMPORTANT…. DIED TOO SOON…. didn’t even get a tour :’(

12. Worst  stage to screen adaptation?

rent, i think. there’s something very off about the movie version to me

14. A musical you would love to see produced by Deaf West?

ohhhhh wow this is such a hard question because deaf west can add so much to a narrative!! i think i’ll say dear evan hansen, just because of how much i love the show and how it focuses on miscommunication, and how deaf characters would enhance that!

16. If you could go to a concert at the 54 below, who’s would it be?

BEN PLATT!!!!

18. Make a broadway related confession.

uhhhH back when i was 14 i spent like every night in front of a mirror lip syncing to my favorite songs…. ranging from popular to gimme gimme, naturally. i did it so often i still revert back to the mannerisms sometimes singing along now

20. Express some love for understudies and swings!

swings are LITERALLY the most hardworking people in the business. i cannot imagine keeping the amount of material they have to learn fresh and present in my mind at a whim… wow. also, for dear evan hansen specifically, they are all precious and adorable!!!! would love to see all of the understudies tbh

22. Which Disney movie should be made into a musical?

COCO!!!!!!!!!!!!

24. Name a character from a musical you would sort into your Hogwarts house.

EVAN. HANSEN. IS A HUFFLEPUFF!!!!!!

26. Best on stage chemistry?

ben platt and laura dreyfuss…. their connection was electric the whole room buzzed with it

28. What book, tv show, movie, biography, video game, etc. should be turned into a musical?

eleanor and park. if you’ve read the book, you know how important music is to the narrative already, so it wouldn’t be to hard to establish a musical identity. i think it would really fit in with the YA lean to musicals lately. and it would be some fantastic representation!

30. Favourite role played by Aaron Tveit?

(i just asked a friend to pick the actor)

this is tough dude… probably gabe in next to normal??

32. What musical has made you laugh the most?

that’s such a hard questions cause musicals always hurt so much you know!! they all usually make me laugh and cry. maybe thoroughly modern millie? or heathers! or in the heights, oh my god in the heights was great with timing. (i also couldn’t stop laughing during deh but half of that was secondhand nervousness)

34. A musical that has left you thinking about life for a long time or deeply inspired you.

both dear evan hansen and spring awakening have deeply affected my life. the longer i spend time with them the more i seem to discover about them! so they always keep me thinking. they tear my heart out and give me hope for the future simultaneously.

36. Name a musical you didn’t like at first but ended up loving.

hmmmm. rent, maybe? my first viewing was roughhh but the longer i ruminated with it and learned the backstory the more i appreciated it. also, the music is great!

38. Favourite dance break.

forget about the boy!!!!

40. What’s a musical more people should know about?

well i mentioned aida earlier… i also got to see an american in paris on tour and loved it! a proshot was in theatres about a year ago, if that ever happens again check it out

42. Name a Tony performance you rewatch and rewatch.

deaf west spring awakening!!!!! or hamilton. loooooooove. also dear evan hansen predictably

#lexanswers #this is so long i’m sorry!! #anonymous #long post

[lovelykat001]

Before We Go- Part 3

A/N: Still adding tags if anyone else would like to be tagged in this series. Sorry for taking so long to update this, I had to move. Now I’m pretty much settled in my new apartment so it shouldn’t take me nearly as long to update next time.

Warnings: Cursing

Word Count: 1,971

Part 1 Part 2

Chapter 3

Walking down the street at this ungodly hour has brought you two closer. It could be that at this point you were so tired that you drifted closer to Steve unknowingly. Your body wanted to be close to him in case you dosed off. Steve could tell you were tired.

He looked at you and smirked, “You still awake over there?”

“Yeah, course,” you straightened your back up and opened your eyes wider to make your point. He just laughed at you and you smiled along. “Maybe I am a little tired. Talk to me so I can stay awake!”

“Alright, what do you want to talk about?”

You went with the first question that’s been in your mind all night. “What’s the deal with this wedding?”

Steve scratched his beard. “An old colleague of mine is getting married to another colleague of mine. They’re both pretty good friends so it would be kinda rude for me not to go.”

“You mentioned earlier that you were going to see someone. Who is it?”

Steve sighed and cast his eyes to the ground, “An ex.”

Your mouth formed an ‘o’, “I’m sorry, you don’t have to talk about that.”

Steve smiled kindly and stepped closer to you to let someone pass him on the sidewalk. “Well, enough about me. Your story by contrast is far more compelling.”

You gave a humorless laugh and looked up toward the sky. “Oh, my turn. Okay. Uh… I’m pretty straightforward. I’m a normal girl with one brother. My husband works in finance. Who I conveniently cannot provide a photograph because my phone is broken,” You roll your eyes and Steve chuckles.

“Conveniently. How’d you guys meet?”

You adjusted your purse strap. “I was in London working at Sotheby’s.”

Steve nods, “Bigshot.”

“Yeah after a few years in London I started getting this… I don’t know. Th-the French have this word, depaysement, um, disorientation like the feeling of not being in your home country. And I had a hard time making friends in London, and…”

Steve puts his hand on his heart and chuckles sympathetically, “Aw, that’s so sad!”

You chuckled too and reached up to scratch your head. “And so my boss was like, ‘Do you want to go to Boston for this show?’ And Michael was there.”

“Right.”

“Have you ever had a feeling and just known somewhere in your bones that someone was going to play a major part in your life?” You turned to look at Steve’s now soft features.

Steve nodded, “Yeah.” You knew there was something more to that but you just let it be. If he wanted to talk about it, he would.

You cleared your throat, “Anyway, he… his wife had just left him for this guy that we know and at that point she had just taken the kids. And so the last thing he wanted was to get involved with someone.”

“Well, for the record, I can’t imagine you being the last thing any man would want.” He let his gaze linger on you for a little longer, but you were comfortable with it.

“Thank you,” you turned away from his gaze, “So I, uh, I bought the painting that my boss wanted me to get and I sent it back without me, and I haven’t been to London since.”

Steve let out a big breath and shook his head. “A lot of complications there. Brave girl.”

“The funny thing is that I remain proud of it to this day. That I was… the girl who recognized love and jumped.” You sighed, “And now my marriage is going to be over. What I need is a time machine.”

Steve’s eyes lit up. I could tell he had an idea. He sped up ahead and stopped at a payphone. “Well, we kinda have one. A few years ago they turned all these old payphones into time machines. You pick one up dial 1993, and someone will pick up and tell you exactly what was happening on that corner at that time. It was funny.”

You couldn’t help but smile at him. You loved his playful imagination. “I don’t even need to call that far back. I just need to call yesterday.”

Steve, plucky as ever, snatched the phone up, “Well, let’s try.” Steve starts pressing buttons and makes the button sounds with his mouth. You had to laugh at this dork. He stares at you holding the phone out. “What would you tell yourself?”

You mosey over to the phone with a stupid grin one your face, much like the one Steve has as well. You put the phone up to your ear and tilt your head. “Y/N, it’s you from the future,” you playfully roll your eyes and look at Steve, “She doesn’t believe me.”

“Well, of course. You have to tell her something secret, something only you know.” He smiles cheekily and you know you’re going to have to tell an embarrassing secret.

You sigh, “So you know that tiny scar you have on your forehead? The one that you tell everyone you got while hiking in Argentina,” Steve bends down to look closer at your forehead, “ But you actually got at home while dancing around because you get way too excited during the song ‘The Election of 1800’ in the Hamilton soundtrack.”

Steve cranes his head back in laughter and grabs at his heart. “This is my favorite story already.”

“Sshh, it’s collect,” you joke with him. “So whenever Aaron Burr says ‘It’s 1800, ladies tell your husbands vote for burr’ you put way too much momentum in your swing across the floor and the corner of the counter caught you as you fell. You spent the whole night in the E.R.” You could still see Steve silently laughing his ass off next to you. “Okay, oh good. You believe me now. Okay, so whatever you do, don’t talk to any strangers outside the airport,” You side-eyed Steve playfully and smirked a bit to let him know you were joking.

Steve winces, “Ouch.”

“Actually… just skip Chicago altogether. Stay home, get a movie, order takeout, have a bubblebath and go to bed. Because everything will be fine in the morning. Alright.” You hang the phone back on the hook.

“Yeah but then you wouldn’t have met me,” Steve grins at you crookedly.

You look into his eyes and search for something. Some kind of answer that you wish was that easy to find. “I still haven’t figured out if that’s a good thing or a bad thing yet.”

Steve raises his eyebrows but brushes it off quickly. “Alright well let’s continue on our way.” Steve tries to walk away.

You pick up the phone and hold it out in his direction. “Oh, no. You’re not getting off that easy.”

Steve laughs, “No, no, no. I don’t mess with the physics of space and time.”

You stared directly into his eyes, “Hamilton.”

He laughs. It’s true, he does owe you after you told him that story. “Alright, alright, give it to me. But I don’t want to do yesterday; I want to do like 2014.” Steve imitates the sounds for pressing the buttons again. “Steve, hey it’s me, you from the future.” He moves the speaker from his mouth to comment to you “He bought it, idiot.”

You laugh at him despite wanting to hear an embarrassing story of his own.

“Listen, when the San Francisco Giants make the World Series, take all your money and put it on them to win. Yes, I know it sounds crazy. Do it. Okay, Bye.” Steve hangs up the phone.

You stare at him incredulously, “That’s it?”

Steve nods, “That’s it. Everyone knows when you got a time machine the first thing you do is gamble.”

“I wasn’t aware of that.”

“And…” Steve puts both hands inside his pockets and pulls them inside out to show nothing. “Nothing. Didn’t work.”

You laughed at him and linked arms to continue walking down the street. Steve looked down at your linked arms and then looked at you. A genuine smile spread across his face.

You continued walking for a few more blocks before Steve spoke up. “What if we just call your husband and tell him you’re in Chicago? We could make up a good reason.”

Wow, he must really think you were here cheating. Or at least doing something you didn’t want him to know about. “He already knows about Chicago.”

“Well, he doesn’t need to know what you’re doing here.”

“He knows that too.” You cross your arms over your chest.

“Well, then why do you have to beat him home?” You turn to look at him. “What? Is there something you have to do before he gets there? Look, whatever it is, he��s an idiot if he can’t put it past him. And you’re not the type of girl to marry an idiot.”

You sigh. It was nice to hear those words but you knew given your situation it wasn’t true. “Even if there were something that I needed to do when I get back, I’m still not going to make it on time.”

“Okay well, let’s figure out a way to make it okay that you didn’t do whatever it is that you had to do.” Steve looked at you with pleading eyes. You could tell he really wanted to help. “Look, I’m sure you’ve already thought of this, but is there maybe someone else who can do it? Whatever it is?”

Oh my god, he was right. Maybe you could call someone. Steve could tell by the look on your face that you cracked the code. “I’m out of coins are you out of coins?”

Steve looked around frantically. There was a Laundromat that was still open right in front of you. He ran in quickly and started asking the only man in there questions. You couldn’t hear what they were talking about but Steve waved you in.

~~~~~~

You were on the strangers phone waiting and praying for your friend on the other line to pick up. “Pick up, pick up, pick up.”

A groggy voice answered, “Hello?”

“Pam, It’s Y/N.” You said frantically.

“Y/N?”

���I’m so sorry to call this late did I wake the baby?”

Pam whispered, “No, no. Are you okay? What’s going on?”

“I don’t know how to say this but I need a huge favor right now.”

“Of course, of course, anything.”

God bless Pam. “I need you to go to my house and in the backyard there is a key in the magnet box by the pool filter. Take the key and go in the back door. The alarm code is 4242. Go up to the bedroom. On the bed is a letter, it’s addressed to Michael. Take it home and save it for me when I get back. But listen, promise me that you won’t read it.”

“Of course I won’t. You have my word. Okay, it’s 4AM now. How much time do I have?”

“You have like 5 hours.”

“It’s as good as done, Y/N.”

You could finally take a breath of relief. “I love you. Thank you”

“I love you too. Call me later when you get a chance. Everything is going to be okay, now. I promise. Bye.”

“Bye.”

You hung up the phone and closed your eyes for a second to appreciate your friend. Steve came over to you. You walk towards him and wrap your arms against his midsection and bury your face in his chest. Steve is shocked but responds quickly and wraps his arms around you and rubs your back soothingly. He dips his head down and places a small kiss on the top of your head. Neither of you would admit it, but this felt nice. It felt right.

~~~~~~~

Tagged:@goalie-love @pieceofshir @ironspiderguy @wordsonapagexoxo @lilulo-12

#steve rogers #captain america #steve x reader #steve x you #steve x #steve x y/n #steve rogers x you #steve rogers x reader #steve imagine #steve rogers imagine #chris evans #chris evans x you #chris evans x y/n #chris evans x reader #chris evans imagine #infinity war #avengers #avengers imagine #sam wilson #sam wilson x reader #falcon

[traveling-couch-potato]

Puerto Rico Day 9

It’s finally here! HAMILTON DAY!!!! We wanted to do a whole day dedicated to the show but couldn’t fit it all in. We started off with breakfast at La Bombonera in Old San Juan for some Mallorcas (recommendation of Lin-Manuel Miranda himself...via his Twitter). So good. It’s the love child of a donut and croissant if the donut took a more dominant role. It’s sprinkled with powdered sugar and filled with a fried egg, melty swiss, and thin slices of ham.

Puerto Rico is all about those sweet/savory combos and I am here for it!

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The festival wasn’t in full swing yet so we decided to do a bit of a morning walk to the Puerta de San Juan where we entered Paseo del Morro. It’s a gorgeous path along the base of the Castillo San Felipe del Morro right along the water. You get a great view of the giant waves crashing into the rocks on one side and the towering wall structures to the right. 

Leaving through the Puerta de San Juan gate!

The path was full of cats. Literally anywhere you look there’s a cat. There’s feeding stations run by the Save-a-Gato organization which is why all the cats like to gather here.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Once we finished up the walk we had a lovely chat with another visiting girl (and fellow Hamilton-fan) before we finally regained enough energy to officially enter the grounds of the San Sebastian Street Festival. We started off near the market centers around the Plaza del Quinto Centenario. Tio Danny had a booth set up so we picked up a Maduro (Beef/Plantain Empanadilla) and walked through some of the stalls which featured a ton of local Puerto Rican artists selling everything from painted gourds to pressed flowers to sweets. I’m not much for knick knacks and jewelry but food always calls to me especially if I have no clue what it is. This meant my 2nd purchase of the day was a tiny container of Majarete. It tasted like a blended rice pudding (though it’s apparently made with rice flour) with your typically cinnamon notes but a nice underlying coconut flavor as well. It was extremely viscous so the tiny cup was the perfect size.

The first of many street food snacks courtesy of the San Sebastian Street Festival.

We continued walking until we hit a street lined with Bounty sponsored booths. Angel still hasn’t had a chance to try one of my favorite Puerto Rican foods, Bacalaito, so we had to order one and it was GIGANTIC. This one was more crunchy and flat than my previous one, almost like a fried cracker/pancake crossbreed. But of course I also needed to try something new so a few booths down I pointed at the first item I didn’t know. I ended up with a cup of Sorulittos de Maiz. Basically corn fries. They basically taste like corn meal fries (because that’s what they are). Or corn puffs that were never fully dehydrated. Like every other item here, it was served w/ a side of Mayoketchup. 

Fried foods galore! So good but so bad for you (not that that matters when I’m on vacation!)

Some of the sweets I bought from one of the stalls. They have a ton of lollipops and these coconut/fruit combo bite things (that I clearly don’t know the name of).

We spent a bit more time wandering the festival browsing booths and enjoying the music before we headed out. Of course we needed dessert though so we may a quick trip to Chocobar Cortes so I could get a proper chocolate tasting. I got their Spiced Chocolate (Anise/Cinammon) and one of their Hazelnut. It’s pricey at about $2.50 a pop but it’s worth the occasional indulgence

The day portion of the festival is very family friendly w/ parades (main one was at 5pm on Thursday though you can catch smaller privately organized ones at random unscheduled times), giant head displays, and tons of music.

Tons of live music all around the entire city.

Sad we were gonna miss the parade, but a nice marcher asked us if we want a pic and of course we couldn’t say no.

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After so much food we decided to make the 2 mile trek back to our hotel by foot. On the way we passed by the San Juan capital and decided to take a look around. No line or entrance fee, just a quick security check. The center of the building is gorgeous and although the displays in the building were all in Spanish, it was a nice pitstop.

The center of the building sports this beautifully intricate high ceiling. Pictures absolutely don’t do it justice.

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Once we got back to the hotel, we got ready for our night out to the greatest show in the world: HAMILTON!!! First we had to stop by another restaurant Ricky/Florin recommended to us (along w/ the rest of the internet): Santaella. They do take reservations through Opentable and I would highly recommend it. They place can get very busy depending on your luck. The restaurant itself is gorgeous w/ antique style filament lightbulbs lining the ceilings and a lit tropical plant display window on the back wall. Their food was a bit more American/French w/ a Puerto Rican influence but at this point I was craving a taste of home and welcomed the familiar menu. It is a classier place so no tap, but still water is available at $2.50/person which is more reasonable than other high end restaurants I’ve visited.

Gorgeous restaurant interior. Definitely a slightly dressy place, perfect for a pre-show meal (though service is a bit slow so make sure you have enough time).

We started our meal w/ the Foie Gras Terrine which was served over a fruit jam (I believe guava) and a fresh mini baguette that spouted steam as soon as we snapped it in half. The terrine had a uniform creaminess offset by some roasted pinenuts. The salty and fatty flavors of the foie gras were nicely balanced by the jam too. For our mains my friend got the Veal Cheeks w/ Creole Fricasse and Root Veggie Puree and I got the Marinated Skirt Steak w/ Malanga Shoestring fries. The veal was practically spoonable and the veggie puree had an almost cheesy flavor. Otherwise it was like a very well-made beef stew. The skirt steak was quite tender for such a cheap cut of meat and the marinade was nicely caramelized which brought out a delicious charred sweetness. It was topped w/ a pickled chimichurri that gave my mouth a much needed break cause the meat portion was HUGE. Seriously a delicious meal and I can see why Ricky/Florin would give it the thumbs up

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With our bellies full and our wallets empty, we made the 10 minute walk over to the Luis A. Ferre Theater. Picked up our tickets (which I was freaking out about because the email stated you needed the original purchase card which I forgot), got in line, and got to our seats. Not the best seats since the side overlook obstructed my view slightly but I am infinitely thankful to have been in the room where it happens.

This part is less travel-bloggy and more Hamilton-fanny but this is more or less my diary so who cares. I didn’t think I’d cry too hard. I’ve seen the show 3 times, met Lin, met his family, listened to the soundtrack a million times, I’ve been there done that, but absolutely not, as soon as he walks out I start sobbing. I felt my face scrunch up and tears well up in my eyes as my hero took the stage. The entire crowd cheered and rawred for a solid 2-3 minutes. My voice was still raspy from the cold but I tried anyway. The entire cast is wonderful and I am so ecstatic about seeing them again in San Francisco next month. After the show we booked it to the stagedoor. I’m tagging this post w/ Hamilton so hopefully someone will see this LIN DOES NOT STAGEDOOR. The three Schuyler sisters did though as well as a member of the ensemble. They were all such sweet people and while I hoped to save my $10 bill for Lin to sign, I felt it was appropriate to get it autographed at the last show he’ll ever perform as Hamilton. 

We met some really cool fellow Hamilton fans at the stagedoor (shoutout to my new friend Alicia!) and ended the night with a very interesting conversation with an Usher about the political climate in Puerto Rico among other serious topics. We didn’t end up leaving until past midnight. I’m so fortunate to have been in the crowd to see one of Lin’s last performances.

Tips in case any Hamilton folks finds this post: 1) There are quite a few extra seats. Due to some political stuff, the venue changed and seats were reassigned. Since the new venue is larger, that means there’s a decent number of empty seats.

2) To get the seats just show up at the theater. On our 7:30pm performance night, I met 2 women who got in that started waiting at 4pm. Though they said there were people since 6am.

3) Ticket prices range and it’s easier to get a spot if you’re a single viewer. Also don’t forget the lotto!

4) GOOD LUCK! I hope someone gets to see this and takes a chance at those day of tickets. (Seriously you have a good chance, I met ~10 people this trip that got day of tickets)

#puerto rico #puerto rico travel tips #travel tips #travel blog #food blog #food blogger #puerto rican food #pr food #food adventures #traveling couch potato #puerta de san juan #travel log #traveling #wanderlust #sanse 19 #san sebastian #san sebastian street festival #street festivall #san juan #puerto rican street food #street festival

[dustedmagazine]

Listed: Joshua Stamper

Photo by Christopher McDonald

After 25 years composing and arranging, Joshua Stamper’s versatility remains as notable as ever. The artist moves fluidly from classical to indie-rock to chamber music and more. While collaborating with acts like mewithoutYou and Robyn Hitchcock or scoring films, he manages to release his own work, too. Reviewing Stamper’s most recent release, Justin Cober-Lake described PRIMEMOVER as a “soundtrack for a particular kind of year in the church life, one with puzzles and rest, beauty and complication.” His work, as with PRIMEMOVER or his new Elements project, tends to be multidisciplinary, with Stamper incorporating an array of influences from outside music. With his breadth of input and output, it's no surprise that Stamper would offer us a list that includes music, visual art, philosophy, and poetry.

Thierry De Mey — “Unknowness, for percussion and sampling: Love Function is to Fabricate Unknowness”

My brother gave me Thierry De Mey’s Kinok for my birthday about twenty years ago. He bought it on the strength of the album cover alone. It’s a record I have returned to dozens of times. “Unknowness” is utterly arresting — a deep and loose sway juxtaposed with startling percussive gestures as unpredictable as ricocheting gunshots. It is all swing, mystery, magic, and space. I feel when listening that I am reduced to sub-atomic scale, where mountains of granite become a gossamer mesh that I move through as a stroll in the park, looking at trees that are freeze-frame explosions.

John Cage — “Water Walk”

4'33" is a popular punching bag for Cage critics. The piece is derided as an adolescent practical joke from an impertinent child of a composer who gets his kicks deliberately wasting audiences’ time. “It's not music” is the common refrain, but the complaint behind the complaint is that it is alienating; that the only way in which the piece facilitates communal experience is that everyone feels on the outside of an inside joke.

When I was younger, I shared this impatience with Cage. Then I came across “Water Walk,” a piece premiered in January 1960 on the popular TV game show I’ve Got A Secret. My view of John Cage and his music were both upended, instantly and utterly. Instead of a preening and pretentious provocateur I encountered a playful and guileless individual filled with wonder; one who took unfettered joy in people, invention, and the sheer fact of sound.

In the space of one viewing, 4'33" shifted from an insolent and self-satisfied prank to a concentrated celebration of community and sound — a wide-eyed invitation to pause, together, all of us here sharing this space, LISTEN, all of us here sharing this space, together, pause. My self-righteousness shattered. All becomes music. I haven't heard anything the same way since.

I’ve since spent a great deal of time with his writing, lectures, poems, prints and music, and wonder how I could have ever thought ill of the man's intentions. It may seem obvious, but Cage taught me that an artist’s own life is the clearest interpretative lens through which to understand their work.

Prince and the Revolution — “I Wonder U” (from Parade)

Sgt. Pepper-esque sound design, kaleidoscopic orchestral arrangements, the hushed voices of Prince, Wendy and Lisa riding on a composite groove of such integrity and force that it sounds like it's forged from steel...

I first encountered Prince’s Parade the summer between my high-school graduation and my first year of college. “I Wonder U” is less than two minutes long, but I was stopped in my tracks. The song feels like the liminal space between dreaming and waking, at once welcoming and dangerous, where multiple musics converge like Charles Ives’ double marching bands destined for head-on collision. Discreet melodies and rhythms and keys bleed in and out of each other, but also exist as vital layers in a larger whole. It's a hypnotizing 3-D sonic Venn diagram.

My decision to major in composition was set.

Jasper Johns — “Regrets”, 2013, oil on canvas

Jasper Johns said, “I think that one wants from a painting a sense of life. The final statement has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can't avoid saying.”

“a helpless statement” – I find myself breathing deeper and slower with Johns’ words, grateful for the reminder that before anything else, art making must be grounded in vulnerability and weakness. The hope and the challenge in Johns’ words is its call to distillation, to get to the heart of the heart of the heart of a matter, where there is simply nothing else that can be said. The process of distillation even involves the shedding of all those things we sometimes mistake for the work itself: craft, expertise, training, credential. There’s a threshold that must be crossed, a moment of lift-off where will and deliberation are left behind and the work takes flight on what is inevitable, as involuntary as a cry or a laugh.

Palestrina — “Missa Brevis”

“Painting is time, music is space.” So said one of my brother’s undergrad art professors. Of course, you’d expect the opposite, as space is the context in which painting exists while time is the fundamental warp and woof of music. But my most profound experiences with music are always characterized by new spaces being revealed or created. By “space,” I don't mean some state of cerebral or emotional revelry. I mean real, actual space — with dimensions. A space that’s shocking in its physicality. This happens to me constantly.

My first experience of Palestrina’s “Missa Brevis” was in a choir rehearsal in my junior year of high-school. It was a catalytic event. A braid of interweaving melodies and counter-melodies emerged, enveloping me and everyone else singing, and the room seemed to expand. I wanted more. The vocational pull to become a musician was like being swept out to sea.

Every time I return to this piece, I experience this expansion. The patient dip and rising of every “Kyrie,” “eleison” and “in excelsis” creates its own cosmology, its own dimensions and gravity. Our relationship to time is also a relationship to space; their woven-ness is inextricable. The space-time continuum isn't just a physics thing.

Ann Hamilton — The Event of A Thread

Years ago, I had the opportunity to experience The Event of A Thread by Ann Hamilton at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. A massive silk that moves like water or vapor, a field of swings, a record stylus, wooden crates of live pigeons, paper scrolls spilling onto the floor, a ceiling peppered with pulleys, bags of words and sacks of sound... It's difficult to describe the piece, in either its scope or particulars, but I became a child.

In Ann Hamilton's discussion of the piece, she says, “It happened because a space was made for it to happen.” The inverse implication of this statement is that if space isn't made, things won’t happen. In my experience, solitude, reflection, exploration and craft are so easily bullied by the crush of life and of calendars, but Hamilton’s observation presses an urgent case for the care and protection of these kinds of spaces to think and puzzle and make. How much wonder, play, rest, and beauty could exist only for want of a place to exist?

So, with that, “it happened because a space was made for it to happen” – my working manifesto.

Mary Oliver — Upstream (Section One: “Of Power and Time”)

“It is a silver morning like any other. I am at my desk. Then the phone rings, or someone raps at the door. I am deep in the machinery of my wits. Reluctantly I rise, I answer the phone, or I open the door. And the thought which I had in hand, or almost in hand, is gone.”

The untroubled waters of a day whose promises have yet to unfold are not untroubled for very long. But the most persistent interruptions are those that come, as Oliver describes, “not from another, but from the self itself.” The resonance for me is deep.

In a 2015 On Being interview, Mary Oliver tells a story about when she learned she had received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (she didn't even know that her latest, American Primitive, had been submitted for the award): she was at the town dump looking to buy shingles to shingle a roof with. A painter friend of hers came by, joking, “Ha, what are you doing? Looking for your old manuscripts?”. Oliver just laughed and continued looking. When recounting the story to Krista Tippett, she chuckled and said, “...my job in the morning was to go find some shingles.”

To simply be dedicated to the work of the day, to be unmoved and uninterrupted by either rejection or by accolade represents a degree of settledness that I find very beautiful and very challenging.

She was known for writing while she was walking...

Ludwig Wittgenstein / Wendell Berry — “How to Be a Poet”

To continue on the subject of the working life, last night I came across a beautifully concise quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein that speaks to a consistent tension I experience: the urgency to cultivate the solitary and silent spaces required for thinking and working, and a loud and frenetic pull in the opposite direction to “produce” (to what end? - I constantly find myself asking). He simply says: “I can only think clearly in the dark."

This sentiment is echoed in Wendell Berry's proverb-like poem “How to Be a Poet” (wit and wisdom go together well):

“...Any readers who like your poems, doubt their judgement.” [...]

“Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in.”[...]

“...make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.”

Both Wittgenstein and Berry cut against the grain of popular priorities of content-creation, audience-building, beating the algorithms and cutting through the noise (again, to what end?). Instead, they throw open a window to the generous gifts and glories of a life lived in obscurity.

Andy Goldsworthy

Andy Goldsworthy’s work re-convinced me that art has power. That it is able, for those with ears to hear and eyes to see, to create or reveal a different way of inhabiting the world, of inhabiting one's own humanity. My introduction to Goldsworthy was a documentary by Thomas Riedelsheimer called Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time. I watched tall stone cairns being built on the beach, slowly and carefully, only to be disassembled by the gentle but unremitting incoming tide. I was transfixed by bright yellow leaves stitched together and set loose along a creak, moving like a lazy water snake, wending around rocks and logs and gradually twisting and breaking apart. Balls of bright red dust thrown into the air to form dissipating crimson clouds; delicate stick-curtains collapsing at the breath of a breeze; one-ton snowballs on a London summer day, melting to water and then to air.

As Westerners we tend towards a conception of beauty that is extremely specific, a precise and particular point in time: the crest of a wave, a flower that's just bloomed, a new car rolling off the truck at the dealership, a man or a woman at twenty-five... But Goldsworthy's work does something different. It includes these moments but also folds them into something larger. One begins to see the whole story of a thing, from its initial conception all the way to its inevitable fading or destruction, and all of it is beautiful. This changes everything.

I recognize in myself a preference for the promise of a thing more than the reality of a thing, but as I interact with Goldsworthy’s work my understanding of beauty is slowly and gently disassembled, like one of his beach cairns. It is replaced with a widened aperture, a more charitable and hospitable read of the people and the world around, and I'm welcomed into a more generous way of being.

Ornette Coleman — “What Reason Could I Give” (from Science Fiction)

Jane Austin’s Mr. Knightley says to Emma Woodhouse, “If I loved you less, I could talk about it more...”

All I can say about this piece: I’m fully convinced that this is what angels sound like.

#dusted magazine #listed #joshua stamper #thierry de mey #john cage #prince and the revolution #jasper johns #palestrina #ann hamilton #mary oliver #ludwig wittgenstein #wendell berry #andy goldsworthy #ornette coleman

[clayray3290]

Clayray Closeout 2020

Alrighty, I am writing this in 2021 because I had things to do on New Year’s Eve lol.

Well, 2020 has been quite a difficult year. I am grateful to be as fortunate as I am, but at the same time, most of the year I have spent full of rage and despair and frustration and fear and grief at all of the loss and all of the injustice and just all of the horrific things that have happened this year. For 2021, I’m trying to find hope and to gather strength to persevere and keep on doing my part in fighting for what is right and contributing good to the world.

Art played a huge part in helping me get through this year, so let me take a look back at some of that great art:

Music - Artists

BTS

Jesse & Joy

Niall Horan

Glass Animals

McFly

Taylor Swift

Fiona Apple

Little Mix

Chloe x Halle

Secret

Who knew BTS would top this list? I’ve followed them from before their debut, but I am a casual fan at best. Though I was supposed to take my mom (who is a bigger fan than I am) to the concert at the Rose Bowl this year...until the pandemic happened.

Obviously, I did not go to any concerts this year, so there are no artists that got a bump from my having seen them live this year. However, some old standbys released some new albums this year - Jesse & Joy, Glass Animals, McFly, Little Mix. And speaking of Little Mix, news of Jesy’s departure from the group sent me into a spin down memory lane listening to their discography more. Also T. Swift’s two (2!!) new albums were in heavy rotation as well.

Secret made this list too, even though of course they’re disbanded now. My love for them stays strong, and their solo releases this year I enjoyed - Particularly Jieun’s Make It Love.

Chloe x Halle I started listening to much more than before, because “Ungodly Hour” is a fantastic album. Which juuuuust missed the cut of my top albums.

Music - Albums

BTS - MAP OF THE SOUL: 7

Niall Horan - Heartbreak Weather

High School Musical: The Musical: The Series Cast - High School Musical: The Musical: The Series Original Soundtrack

Jesse & Joy - Aire (Versión Día)

Fiona Apple - Fetch the Bolt Cutters

Starry Cast - Starry

Glass Animals - Dreamland

ZOMBIES 2 Cast - ZOMBIES 2 Original TV Movie Soundtrack

Taylor Swift - folklore

Beyoncé - The Lion King: The Gift [Deluxe Edition]

HSMTMTS and Z2 are products of work, but there generally are some fantastic songs from these soundtracks that I love independently. Olivia Rodrigo has turned out to be a star, and “All I Want” is gorgeous. And “Flesh & Bone” in particular is incredible and young people found such meaning from its lyrics, like “No more hesitation, it’s time we start to realize / With all this separation, silence is still taking sides.”

I have a fraught relationship with Glass Animals’ Dreamland right now because I had bought a limited edition vinyl, but there has been a whole rigmarole because it was super delayed (literally months!) and I went home to Michigan and so then I had to change the delivery address to my friend’s, and then she moved, too, so it has been a whole thing.

Starry is an as-yet unstaged musical about Vincent van Gogh, and it is exquisite. Please give it a listen and fall in love with it like I did.

Lastly, I once heard “Fetch the Boltcutters” as “Vegetable Goddess” and I cannot unhear it.

Movies

Soul Yes, would love if we could have a Black protagonist be a Black protagonist for the whole movie, but look, this is a beautiful beautiful film that is so meaningful. I cried so much.

The Old Guard It would be an honor to be slayed by Charlize Theron, Kiki Layne, or Gina Prince-Bythewood.

Palm Springs A delightful time loop take, and just so darn charming.

Emma. Works better as a comedy than a romance, but lusciously shot and Anya Taylor-Joy takes one of the trickiest Austen heroines and brings her to full life.

A Recipe for Seduction Okay, this one��s a joke. The KFC x Lifetime “movie” is ridiculous, but I have no regrets watching it.

The above list is just of movies that newly came out in 2020.

I watched a whopping 390 movies in 2020, 200 of which were Quarantine Movies with my friend Richard w/a Beard (Our 200th was BLOODY NEW YEAR, literally begun on New Year’s Eve with just moments left of 2020). Rw/aB and I watch mostly B-movies, slashers, giallos, psychedelic musicals, 80′s sex comedies, kung fu movies, and made-for-TV kids’ movies. And the KFC x Lifetime movie. (For the record, my top 5 of these movies would be: Blood Beat, Killer Workout, Pieces, StageFright: Aquarius, Mr. Boogedy. Honorable Mention to The Apple and Miami Connection.)

Honorable Mention: Sound of Metal (Technically a 2019 movie), Lucky Grandma (Also a 2019 movie), Hala (Again 2019), the Disney+ music specials like Hamilton and Black Is King, the Pixar SparkShorts particularly Loop, our DCOM releases this year - Zombies 2 and Upside-Down Magic and Secret Society of Second-Born Royals

Films I Want To See But Haven’t Yet: Minari (I can’t believe I haven’t seen it yet), One Night in Miami..., Definition Please, Disclosure, The Forty-Year-Old Version, The Personal History of David Copperfield (DEV PATEL), Nomadland

Television

I May Destroy You What an awe-inspiringly incredible show. Michaela Coel is a force.

Ted Lasso On a much lighter note than I May Destroy You, lol. This show could’ve been so stupid, but it is actually so deft and wise and mature. And just so full of heart.

The Baby-Sitters Club It is hard to take a beloved work and reboot it. But this show not only made it contemporary, but updated it to be relevant and to ring true for today. And it is just simply a really good show. 

Normal People My heart aches from this show, and in the best way.

Little Fires Everywhere This show took an incredible book and distilled it into its best form, packing just such gut punches along the way.

Not New: Pen15, Crash Landing on You (Did a group watch with friends for this, like we did with Erkenci Kus last year!), Schitt’s Creek, What We Do in the Shadows, Watchmen, Kidding, Succession

Honorable Mentions: Never Have I Ever, The Queen’s Gambit, Lovecraft Country, Bridgerton, Dead Still (A show about a Victorian dead people photographer!), The Amber Ruffin Show (I’m not actually much of a late night person, but I adore Amber Ruffin), Dash & Lily, Supermarket Sweep Reboot, Julie and the Phantoms, Taste the Nation, Little America, The Stranger (RIP Quibi)

Shows I Haven’t Finished Yet But Will: Ramy, Saved by the Bell Reboot, Gentefied, The Mandalorian, Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist

According to my Trakt, I watched 282 hours of TV and 522 hours of movies in 2020 (But this was before the last week of 2020, so this is an undercount). That’s 805 hours total, which would be about 33.5 days lmao, so basically a month of my year was spent watching something hahahahahaha. I watch a lot.

But apparently, I listen even more? According to my Last.fm, I scrobbled 30,916 songs, making for total listening time of 74 days and 8 hours. Whew! Well, let’s get into my top songs then~

#Clayray Closeout

[emo-boy-oliver-blog]

Life Update #51

Heyyy yall! It’s the 11th of December and I’ve been on holidays and it has been great! A lot has happened as I haven’t updated for almost a month but I’ll just list the biggest stuff that happened :)).

So after a little while of being on holidays my mum and I drove down to Melbourne, we also brought the dogs (which is why we drove down). It was a whole day of driving which was a t r e k but it was cool when we got there. Once I arrived in Melbourne all was pretty cool, we stayed at my nan and pops house which meant deadname central but apart from that it was cool. We went over to my aunts house with my cousins n shit and turns out they all saw a video on my YouTube about being trans so they were all calling me Oli but with she/her pronouns but it’s a start. My step dad caught a plane down there a while in and stayed at my grandparents as well. A couple days into my trip I was at my aunts house and my uncle was saying a heap of homophobic shit even though he knows I’m trans so I ran off and wrapped presents with my accepting cousin, he doesn’t quite understand what being trans is but I explained it to him and he’s starting to get it, he’s in his mid twenties, anyways that night shit got really intense and dark and I can’t say everything that happened online but basically my mum and I had a really intense discussion with my uncle and he said he didn’t get it but he will accept me. On the day before Christmas we went to my Step Dads family for their families Christmas. It was really cool, my step dads family is very accepting especially because his sister is a lesbian and his nephew is gay so everyone was calling me the right name and pronouns. I spent most of the day chatting to my step brothers girlfriend because neither of us knew everybody since we aren’t like I N the family, she was really cool and she is a uni student. I also talked with my step brother and sister and my step sisters boyfriend a bit. I got some gifts from my step dads family which I was not expecting!! I got a cool t shirt and a rebel sports voucher and an itunes voucher and a jar filled with gingerbread, non-alcoholic rum balls and candy canes. That night we went to carols by candelight with some of my mums friends from the UK. They were visiting Australia so we met up with them in the city and had dinner and then saw the carols. It was my mums friend and her husband and son and daughter. The son  was twenty something and was also called Oliver and Oli as a nickname!! We went back to their apartment in the city to hang out and then we stayed in a hotel ourselves. On Christmas morning we drove back to my nan and pops and I got presents!! I got pop vinyls and a P!ATD record and mini guitar figurines and lush bath bombs and a calligraphy set and lights that said ‘OLI’ and cards against humanity and just lots of cool stuff! We then went to my aunts house and the whole family was there, we ate heaps of food and I played with my cousins daughter who is 3 years old and adorable. She played hide and seek with me but would always hide in the same spot and I’d pretend I had no idea where she was for a while. I also buried ‘treasure’ in the garden for her to dig up. The older family members played cards against humanity with me and it was super funny and entertaining.

On boxing day I flew down from Melbourne to Tassie and met my dad and step mum there and we stayed at our house down there, it was a really nice time. For the first day my uncle was there as he had been there for Christmas and he gave me a really nice wallet for Christmas. Also on that trip we went on a really long road trip and went to a national park where we went on a bushwalk and saw a platypus!! On that roadtrip we also went to a really pretty spot for a picnic, it was in front of this beautiful blue water surrounded by mountains on squishy green grass. We ate rolls and I read ‘Elites of Eden’ and we played this cool outdoor came called ‘Finska’. We also went and saw the boats finish the race of ‘Sydney to Hobart’ and the boat I had bet on won so I got $50. Mine didn’t even win first to the finish line though, the first place got an hour taken off for cheating so mine won!!! On New Years Eve we walked down to the harbour and saw some really nice fireworks to celebrate 2018. While in Tassie I went and saw the new Star Wars with my dad which I didn’t really like BUT THEN we all went to see ‘the Greatest Showman’ which OH MY GOD MY NEW RELIGION! The music is iMPECABLE the story made me cry it was honestly my favourite thing ever, in fact I’m listening to the soundtrack right now, I also fell in LOVE with Zendaya who is in it, she is my actual wife I am IN LOVE. Also while in Tassie I got a basketball because in Melbourne I discovered a passion for shooting hoops.

Over the holidays I became close with my old unrequited crush of four years and wOW fell for her again, I told her again and nEWSFLASH she’s still not interested, she was super sweet about it but ahh it hurt my heart a little lot bit. I’m glad we are close again though because she was once my best friend and i missed her.

Once I arrived back home a heap of lgbt+ clothing arrived that I got for Christmas and also a card from one of my internet friends!! Also when I got back I did a lot of catching up with friends. Pretty soon after I got back I caught up with my best bro, we went to the shops and went to an arcade and played a couple of games and saw the greatest showman (yes again its amazing) and then he slept over at my house which was lots of fun. We swum in the pool and had water fights with my water guns. Then a little bit later I caught up with the same bro and a girl from my old school, we went ice skating together and then went to the arcade and it was sUPER FUN. I’ve also been taking photos in the photobooth every time I go to the arcade so I have a collection on my pinboard. Then a day or two after that I went over to a friends house and 5 of us from my theatre place caught up. We played a card game called ‘What do You Meme’ and listened to Hamilton and watched Pitch Perfect. I felt really happy because 3 of them were cis dudes and they were treating me exactly like they treated each other apart from a couple pronoun slip ups and it felt nice to be treated like a boy.

Yesterday my best pal and I went to a trans support group!! It was amazing!! Basically we walked into this room and there were a heap of teens sitting on couches and chairs and we sat on some chairs and I was super awkward and nervous at first but everyone was so sweet and we all put nametags on saying our names and pronouns. For the first hour-ish a trans woman gave us a talk and we asked questions and stuff like that just about legal rights and working while trans and all that stuff. For the next hour we all chatted and I stopped being awkward and I made a heap of pals which is so exciting! I’m so excited about next months meet up now.

Well that’s all for this long ass update, today my mum and I went and looked at a house we might rent and tomorow I’m going to the shops with a friend

Update soon woot

Oliver

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#1yrago Hamilton's eerie relevance to this moment in America's terrifying political journey

Lin-Manuel Miranda's smash Broadway musical Hamilton -- which recounts the events of 240 years ago -- keeps looming large in our very current political discourse, from Hamilton's role in the establishment of the Electoral College to Mike Pence's night at the theater and the ensuing Trumpian call for a safe-space for vulnerable politicians who have only their status as the second-most powerful man on the planet to defend themselves from the terrifyingly mild petitions delivered by actual, globe-striding singing fellows.

Hamilton's fame is entirely justified. We literally sing it all day long in our house. We've had to ban our daughter from belting it out at top volume in the car. The music's score, lyrics and performances are among the best to ever emerge from musical theater.

Last month, Miranda announced a forthcoming Hamilton "mixtape" full of demos, remixes, and covers, and people who pre-ordered (like me) have been treated to a trickle of early release tracks, some of which were as good or better than the original score, some of which were not my cup of tea.

But today, the whole album dropped, and we've been listening to it in heavy rotation, and I would like to commend one track to your attention: Valley Forge (Demo) [Explicit], which was the precursor to this track on the final soundtrack.

That's the track that's riven me, speaking directly to the part of me that is terrified by the taking of the White House by a out-and-our fascist who is packing his cabinet with literal criminals -- the part of me that's spent a month working feverishly with other activists to figure out how we're going to fight this monster and win our way through to something better.

It's a track that mixes the Allan Ginsberg and Martin Luther King, that speaks of victory and defeat, that is about suffering losses without surrender, that is scathing on the subject of "allies" who decide that collaborating to protect themselves is more important than fighting to win, but still expect you to carry the struggle. It gave me shivers.

https://boingboing.net/2016/12/02/hamiltons-eerie-relevance-to.html

[writtingmyowndeliverance]

BURN

Lin Manuel Miranda x Reader

Summary: Lin cheated on reader and reader remembers so they can forgive him.

Word count: 2.5K

Warnings: None 

A/N: I just can’t imagine Lin doing this to his wife tbh

When you first met Lin, you couldn’t describe the feeling inside you, it was like a blast of energy directly from your heart to every inch of your body. Now 20 years later after that and 12 after you get married. Every inch of your body was full of an energy. A bad energy. You were trembling with anger and pain. Because the only person you’d ever want to spent the rest of your life with had cheated on you and you were trying to forgive him. You loved him so much you wanted to forgive him. So you tried to remember all the good times you had with him.

 From the moment I met you, I knew you were mine.

You were 15 at the time and he was 2 years older than you. You met him because you were neighbors in Inwood. You just moved from another country, because your father get a job in the United States and you were trying to get the little boxes that belonged to you out of the truck. You put them one above the other. You were struggling a little bit and almost dropped everything. Suddenly someone grabbed the box that was on top and you turned to look at the person. I was him. And since your eyes laid on him you knew you were helpless. His smile was so bright and his eyes were shining. He was beautiful.

“Can I help you with these?” His voice was quite funny and got inside your mind like and echo. “I mean, it seemed like you were having a little bit of problem… Excuse me? Are you listening to me?” You were staring at him all the time he had been talking. His voice…

“yeah…yeah. Of course, I’d really appreciate that” You said after taking a grip of yourself. You were acting ridiculously with a guy you didn’t know the name.

“Ok. Don’t worry. Just tell me where to put them… I’m Lin by the way” Lin? That was a very peculiar name…

“Hi, Lin, you can put them inside the house next to the door. I’ll tell my father to bring them upstairs later” You were making a great effort not letting you voice crack, which was something that happened every time you were nervous or crying. He get inside the house and put the boxes down. He looked at you and you looked back. You didn’t know what to do right now. Your mind was numb.

“You know… You haven’t told me your name yet” He smiled and you immediately blushed. He instantly blushed too and added “Only if you want to, of course.”

“What? Oh! Yeah! Sure! I’m sorry I was a bit distracted. I’m y/n”

“y/n? What a beautiful name...” You blushed again and you could feel your face even hotter. “Anyway I have to go, but it was nice meeting you, y/n” he smiled and turned away. You watched him walked away with the memory of his smile still in your mind.

“y/n? Who is he?” Your sister asked you. You didn’t answered your her question and just shrugged.

“Just a beautiful gentleman”

Be careful with that one, love.

It passed 1 year in which you felt, as your sister liked to say, like flying. Lin had come to your house a lot of times and he was like family. He was so charming with your mother and so respectful with your father. Everyone seemed to know that you liked him and that he liked you, but not everyone seemed to liked it.

“I don’t know what is your problem, why you don’t like him?” You were talking about this new letter he wrote to you about this new idea that he was thinking about and your sister sighed so loud that it interrupted you. You looked back at her and decided to face her.

“It’s not that! I’m just worried, y/n. You really like him, but it doesn’t mean he feel the same…” She said.

“How do you know? You know nothing. You are just saying that because you liked him too!!” You snapped back. You were tired of her attitude towards him. He was so nice with her, but she didn’t care.

“What?!?”

“You think I don’t realise the way you see him. But he likes me too, I know. And you can’t do anything about it!”

“STOP IT! That’s not true. I’m just worried for you. I don’t want him to hurt you. I’m your big sister is my job. I want you to be happy. y/n, I swear I don’t feel anything for him, but please be careful.” You looked her in the eyes and decided she was telling the true. She was just worried. You smiled

“Don’t need to worry. He would never hurt me.”

The world seemed to burn.

After 2 years of meeting him, after countless letters, going outs and adventures. He finally asked you out. Everyone in your family was happy for the two of you, including your sister. He was super sweet about it. He asked your father first for his permission and then planned a dinner for the both of you. You remembered his face, all shy and nervous trying to ask you. You remembered him dropping the bracelet he got for you that night, after accepting.

“You look beautiful…not that you aren’t beautiful. I mean even more, if that’s possible.” You laughed. He always knew what to say, that was you loved about him. You fell in love with him, because he was so intelligent, so creative. You were so into him and he into you. After that, you did everything together. You were one, yet still had your own space; it was a wonderful relationship. Everything seemed to burn.

After 6 years of dating and 8 of knowing each other. He asked you to be his life partner. He surprised you with a choreography with your friends and one song he just composed for you. It was slow, yet catchy and danceable. After he finished he stood in front of you, whose face was burning from the happy tears, and kneeled.

“y/n, will you…”

“Yes” You interrupted him. He laughed

“Let me finish. Ok?” You nodded “Y/n, will you… I’m serious… stop laughing!” You nodded still laughing.

“Yes I’m sorry”

“Ok… y/n l/n, I knew I wanted to know you since the first time I looked at you. And I knew I wanted to be with you since the first time you laughed at one of my bad jokes, so… will you do me the honor to spend the rest of your life with this pain in the ass who is talking to you?”

“YES! I love you, Lin. I’ll always do. No matter how many bad jokes you make.”

“I love you, y/n” He said putting the ring in your finger.

 It had passed 12 years since you get married and 18 years in a relation most people would kill to be in. Passionate and sweet. Always caring for each other, always trusting each other. So how? How things ended up like this?

You were brokenhearted and rethinking everything. Trying to understand.

In clearing your name, you have ruined our lives.

You remembered how you found out. You were eating your breakfast one morning, trying to stay awake. You had waited for Lin all night to come home, but he never appeared. He had been staying out for a few nights, but you never worry. He was just busy with all his work. He became famous through all these years, but what could you expect after 2 really successful Broadway shows and 1 soundtrack for a Disney movie. He really was non-stop. Your phone beeped and you took it. You though it was one of Lin’s motivational messages, but you were wrong. It was your sister.

“Are you ok? I can’t believe he did that” You read out loud. You were confused. What happened? You decided to call her for an explanation, but your doorbell sounded. You opened the door and it revealed your sister, with a worrying look in her face, who immediately hug you.

“Please tell me how you feel” she said.

“I don’t know what you are talking about… Why am I supposed to be bad?” She gave at you with an incredulous look and then followed it with a pitying one.  

She told you everything you needed to know. She told you how she found out. It was on the news. You listened to her and could feel your heart broke. After that you felt nothing.

“Y/n, I told you. I knew he was going to hurt you one way or another. I’m so sorry, but I’m here for you. Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”

“I want to be alone” You said. Your voice was dry “Please”

She got up and kissed you. You waited her to be out and then got up from the chair you were in. You looked around you. Why? Why he cheated? Why he told everyone? Wasn’t he happy with you?

You and your words, obsessed with your legacy.

You remembered how you stood there in the middle of your house for god knew how long until you heard a knock on your door. You opened the door and looked at him. He looked miserable. He opened his mouth, but then stopped. You let him in without saying a thing and then slammed the door closed. He jumped at the sound and turned to look at you.

“I’m sorry” He just said. He looked at you. His eyes were red and swollen. He took a step toward you but you stepped back. He looked down. You could tell he felt embarrassed. It was ok. He should.

“Why?” You asked. Your voice sounded like a mix of anger, pain and confusion. He swallowed before answering.

“I don’t know”

“You know better than that. Why?”

He dropped to his knees and started crying, you didn’t feel anything. He looked pathetic. He looked nothing like the boy you met, like the man you fell in love with. The man you loved.

“I was so helpless… I felt so helpless” He was sobbing in the ground

“Why you published it? Why you told the whole world something that wasn’t their business?” You didn’t understand why he cheated, but some part of you knew you’d eventually could forgive him, but that wasn’t the thing that bothered you the most. It was why he told everyone about it. It was something it concerned just the both of you, not the others.

“Because if it wasn’t me, they would have told everyone!!! It was because….” He hesitated. Now you knew why. Everything he had done in his life was because of that. “Because of our future. Because of our legacy” You laughed.

“You didn’t do it because of that. You writing a 5 pages of explanation and then post them in every social media wasn’t because of our legacy. It was because of yours.” He was, all his life, obsessed with that legacy thing. Even if he didn’t admitted it, but it was true. All his musicals had that. Usnavi, Hamilton, all of his characters at some point had touched that subject.

“Please…please forgive me, y/n. I didn’t know what I was doing, I-”

“Just leave, Lin” He started shaking his head, still in the ground, maybe denying the words that just came out of your mouth “Lin, get up and leave. I need some time to think” He got up and locked eyes with you. His eyes showed regret and desperation, yours showed pain and emptiness. He knew he hurt you, and the only thing he now could do was to give you everything you could need and now you needed time.

I’m erasing myself from the narrative. ( You have torn it all apart)

You spent the next 2 months on your own. Lin’s belongings were still in your house. They belonged there. Just like him. You knew that, but you needed that time alone. Most of the people in your social media were giving you their support, others were blaming you for making him do that. Wow. Like it was your decision to be cheated on. You didn’t care, though. Everyone could talk shit about you or Lin. Nothing was going to make you made a public statement. You would never destroyed Lin’s thrust like he did with yours. He destroyed your relationship with, no one wrong choice, but two of them. Cheating and telling the whole world about it. You were still mad at him, but you couldn’t help missing him. Missing feeling his arms at night, missing his love. He was staying at the theater every night. You knew only the guys of the show were supporting him, even though they were quite disappointed, the girls were on your side and left the girl he cheated you with on her own. You didn’t blame her completely. It was his choice too. You hoped that he would feel the same way you were feeling now. You hoped that he would burn.

 You forfeit all rights to my heart (With only the memories of when you were mine)

The next month from then, you weren’t on your own. Pippa would be in your house every night so you wouldn’t feel alone and Renee and Jasmine always come in the day to help you feel better. The only times you were completely alone were in which they were at the show and when you shower or go the bathroom. You used that time to think about the past, about those days in which it was no one, but you and him. Everything was burning then, in a beautiful way. Everything was shining. Now you were burning and you could only hope it would stop. You had talk to him the day before. He seemed sad. You were sure he was. You had talked to him about your current situation. You both agreed to start from the beginning in each other thrusting. You both admitted you were feeling incomplete without each other. Then, you just hugged quickly and say goodbye.

 I hope that you burn the same way I do

In the next two weeks, everything was back to normal. At first, things were awkward. You were together again, but you were starting over. It passed 4 days until you hugged and 1 week for you to kiss. Then everything seemed came back to normal. All your feelings were familiar, yet fresh and with each touch he would give you, an energy, directly from your heart, filled every inch of your body. You were rediscovering each other slowly in this new phase of your life, but you were happy, because you were sure all bad things were left in the past. And you hoped that he burned with these new and familiar feelings on the inside the same way you were.

#hamilton #hamilton an american musical #hamilton x reader #hamilton imagine #hamiltrash #hamilcast #hamilcast x reader #hamilcast imagine #lin manuel miranda #lin x reader #lin manuel x reader #hamfam #lin imagine #jasmine cephas jones #phillipa soo #pippa soo #renee elise goldsberry #anthony ramos #daveed diggs #okieriete onaodowan #leslie odom jr #christopher jackson #alexander hamilton #lin is so happy #i swear #he is so pure #i cant imagine #him cheating #sixth fic #mine

[yipyo20]

1: Name Morgan
2: Age 19
3: 3 Fears The Dark, the unknown, and heights
4: 3 things I love Art, food, and titties
5: 4 turn ons Intelligence, common interests, pony tails, cuddling
6: 4 turn offs Harmful gossip, disloyalty, lying, dumbassery 
7: My best friend Idk I have a lot of great ones.
8: Sexual orientation straight as an arrow
9: My best first date Pass
10: How tall am I ~6’ 3"
11: What do I miss the money I spent on Black Desert Online
12: What time was I born I think like 11:00pm or so
13: Favorite color GREEN
14: Do I have a crush Very much so
15: Favorite quote “Never go through life saying ‘I should have.’"
16: Favorite place Disney World
17: Favorite food Shamrock Shakes
18: Do I use sarcasm Nooooooo
19: What am I listening to right nowi can hear my mom watching something educational sounding.
20: First thing I notice in new person their complexion 
21: Shoe size 11 😏
22: Eye color green
23: Hair color dirty blonde
24: Favorite style of clothing dope jackets
25: Ever done a prank call? Not that I recall
27: Meaning behind my URL came up with it when Webkinz was a thing.
28: Favorite movie Avatar
29: Favorite song Bad Romance
30: Favorite band Starbomb
31: How I feel right now Bored
32: Someone I love My mom
33: My current relationship status Single
34: My relationship with my parents better with my mom but my dad is chill
35: Favorite holiday Christmas
36: Tattoos and piercing i have None
37: Tattoos and piercing i want None right now
38: The reason I joined Tumblr To network with peers…that’s going well…
39: Do I and my last ex hate each other? I don’t think so but it’s been months since we talked and I’d like to keep it that way.
40: Do I ever get “good morning” or “good night ” texts? On occasion 
41: Have I ever kissed the last person you texted? Well she’s my mom so no, not really the way the question implies
42: When did I last hold hands? A few weeks maybe
43: How long does it take me to get ready in the morning? Anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour
44: Have You shaved your legs in the past three days? No 
45: Where am I right now? My bed
46: If I were drunk & can’t stand, who’s taking care of me? Fuck if I know.
47: Do I like my music loud or at a reasonable level? Reasonably loud
48: Do I live with my Mom and Dad? My mom, aunt, and grandpa
49: Am I excited for anything? All that lies ahead
50: Do I have someone of the opposite sex I can tell everything to? No
51: How often do I wear a fake smile? Not often
52: When was the last time I hugged someone? Today
53: What if the last person I kissed was kissing someone else right in front of me? I’d be indifferent
54: Is there anyone I trust even though I should not? No
55: What is something I disliked about today? Didn’t get home until 10:20pm
56: If I could meet anyone on this earth, who would it be? My future wife.
57: What do I think about most? School and memes
58: What’s my strangest talent? My fingers are all partially double jointed
59: Do I have any strange phobias? No
60: Do I prefer to be behind the camera or in front of it? Behind in the director’s chair
61: What was the last lie I told? No idea
62: Do I prefer talking on the phone or video chatting online? Video chatting
63: Do I believe in ghosts? How about aliens? Aliens more-so. With ghosts, as Bill Nye says, I’m open minded but skeptical.
64: Do I believe in magic? It’s called quantum physics
65: Do I believe in luck? No
66: What’s the weather like right now? Foggy
67: What was the last book I’ve read? I’ve started on "the art of game design” by Jesse Schell
68: Do I like the smell of gasoline? No
69: Do I have any nicknames? Morgo, Morgie, Morgana, etc.
70: What was the worst injury I’ve ever had? A broken heart (no but really I broke my wrist once)
71: Do I spend money or save it? Both as people tend to do
72: Can I touch my nose with a tongue? No
73: Is there anything pink in 10 feet from me? A pink pearl eraser next to me
74: Favorite animal? Mimic octopus
75: What was I doing last night at 12 AM? Listening to the Hamilton soundtrack for the first time
76: What do I think is Satan’s last name is? Trump (oops did I get political)
77: What’s a song that always makes me happy when I hear it? My Band by D12
78: How can you win my heart? Love art as much as I do
79: What would I want to be written on my tombstone? Remember me. Never forget. For I live now only in your memories.
80: What is my favorite word? Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
81: My top 5 blogs on tumblr Pick 5 I follow and there ya go
82: If the whole world were listening to me right now, what would I say? Love others as they are all as human as you.
83: Do I have any relatives in jail? Maybe, I actually am not sure.
84: I accidentally eat some radioactive vegetables. They were good, and what’s even cooler is that they endow me with the super-power of my choice! What is that power? To fill anything. Bank account? Check. Drink? Check. The void in my heart? Checkarino.
85: What would be a question I’d be afraid to tell the truth on? “How often do you jerk of?"
86: What is my current desktop picture?
 None actually 87: Had sex? Yes
88: Bought condoms? No
89: Gotten pregnant? No
90: Failed a class? Yes
91: Kissed a boy? No
92: Kissed a girl? Yes
93: Have I ever kissed somebody in the rain? Maybe idk
94: Had job? Yes
95: Left the house without my wallet? Yes, it was terrifying
96: Bullied someone on the internet? No 97: Had sex in public? No
98: Played on a sports team? Yes
99: Smoked weed? No
100: Did drugs? No
101: Smoked cigarettes? No
102: Drank alcohol? Once when I was a kid I accidentally drank vodka 
103: Am I a vegetarian/vegan? No
104: Been overweight? Maybe a bit
105: Been underweight? No
106: Been to a wedding? Yes
107: Been on the computer for 5 hours straight? Child’s play
108: Watched TV for 5 hours straight? ChILd’S PLAy!
109: Been outside my home country? No
110: Gotten my heart broken? Ye
111: Been to a professional sports game? Yes
112: Broken a bone? Yes
113: Cut myself? Not like self harm but yeah
114: Been to prom? Twice
115: Been in airplane? Yes
116: Fly by helicopter? No
117: What concerts have I been to? Mannheim Steamroller, American Idol top 10 tour
118: Had a crush on someone of the same sex? No
119: Learned another language? Spanish 4 in high school and a few Japanese words and phrases
120: Wore make up? Unwillingly
121: Lost my virginity before I was 18? No
122: Had oral sex? Yes
123: Dyed my hair? Yes
124: Voted in a presidential election? Yes
125: Rode in an ambulance? No
126: Had a surgery? Not to my recollection
127: Met someone famous? None that come to mind at the moment
128: Stalked someone on a social network? Just a tad :3
129: Peed outside? Yes
130: Been fishing? Yes
131: Helped with charity? Yes
132: Been rejected by a crush? Can’t be rejected if you never ask
133: Broken a mirror? Yes
134: What do I want for birthday? A shot at the life I want to live.

#sorry the formatting is shitty

[thesnhuup]

Pop Picks – March 28, 2019

March 28, 2019

What I’m listening to: 

There is a lovely piece played in a scene from A Place Called Home that I tracked down. It’s Erik Satie’s 3 Gymnopédies: Gymnopédie No. 1, played by the wonderful pianist Klára Körmendi. Satie composed this piece in 1888 and it was considered avant-garde and anti-Romantic. It’s minimalism and bit of dissonance sound fresh and contemporary to my ears and while not a huge Classical music fan, I’ve fallen in love with the Körmendi playlist on Spotify. When you need an alternative to hours of Cardi B.

 What I’m reading: 

Just finished Esi Edugyan’s 2018 novel Washington Black. Starting on a slave plantation in Barbados, it is a picaresque novel that has elements of Jules Verne, Moby Dick, Frankenstein, and Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad. Yes, it strains credulity and there are moments of “huh?”, but I loved it (disclosure: I was in the minority among my fellow book club members) and the first third is a searing depiction of slavery. It’s audacious, sprawling (from Barbados to the Arctic to London to Africa), and the writing, especially about nature, luminous. 

What I’m watching: 

A soap opera. Yes, I’d like to pretend it’s something else, but we are 31 episodes into the Australian drama A Place Called Home and we are so, so addicted. Like “It’s  AM, but can’t we watch just one more episode?” addicted. Despite all the secrets, cliff hangers, intrigue, and “did that just happen?” moments, the core ingredients of any good soap opera, APCH has superb acting, real heft in terms of subject matter (including homophobia, anti-Semitism, sexual assault, and class), touches of our beloved Downton Abbey, and great cars. Beware. If you start, you won’t stop.

Archive 

February 11, 2019

What I’m listening to:

Raphael Saadiq has been around for quite a while, as a musician, writer, and producer. He’s new to me and I love his old school R&B sound. Like Leon Bridges, he brings a contemporary freshness to the genre, sounding like a young Stevie Wonder (listen to “You’re The One That I Like”). Rock and Roll may be largely dead, but R&B persists – maybe because the former was derivative of the latter and never as good (and I say that as a Rock and Roll fan). I’m embarrassed to only have discovered Saadiq so late in his career, but it’s a delight to have done so.

What I’m reading:

Just finished Marilynne Robinson’s Home, part of her trilogy that includes the Pulitzer Prize winning first novel, Gilead, and the book after Home, Lila. Robinson is often described as a Christian writer, but not in a conventional sense. In this case, she gives us a modern version of the prodigal son and tells the story of what comes after he is welcomed back home. It’s not pretty. Robinson is a self-described Calvinist, thus character begets fate in Robinson’s world view and redemption is at best a question. There is something of Faulkner in her work (I am much taken with his famous “The past is never past” quote after a week in the deep South), her style is masterful, and like Faulkner, she builds with these three novels a whole universe in the small town of Gilead. Start with Gilead to better enjoy Home.

What I’m watching:

Sex Education was the most fun series we’ve seen in ages and we binged watched it on Netflix. A British homage to John Hughes films like The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Pretty in Pink, it feels like a mash up of American and British high schools. Focusing on the relationship of Maeve, the smart bad girl, and Otis, the virginal and awkward son of a sex therapist (played with brilliance by Gillian Anderson), it is laugh aloud funny and also evolves into more substance and depth (the abortion episode is genius). The sex scenes are somehow raunchy and charming and inoffensive at the same time and while ostensibly about teenagers (it feels like it is explaining contemporary teens to adults in many ways), the adults are compelling in their good and bad ways. It has been renewed for a second season, which is a gift.

January 3, 2019

What I’m listening to:

My listening choices usually refer to music, but this time I’m going with Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast on genius and the song Hallelujah. It tells the story of Leonard Cohen’s much-covered song Hallelujah and uses it as a lens on kinds of genius and creativity. Along the way, he brings in Picasso and Cézanne, Elvis Costello, and more. Gladwell is a good storyteller and if you love pop music, as I do, and Hallelujah, as I do (and you should), you’ll enjoy this podcast. We tend to celebrate the genius who seems inspired in the moment, creating new work like lightning strikes, but this podcast has me appreciating incremental creativity in a new way. It’s compelling and fun at the same time.

What I’m reading:

Just read Clay Christensen’s new book, The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty. This was an advance copy, so soon available. Clay is an old friend and a huge influence on how we have grown SNHU and our approach to innovation. This book is so compelling, because we know attempts at development have so often been a failure and it is often puzzling to understand why some countries with desperate poverty and huge challenges somehow come to thrive (think S. Korea, Singapore, 19th C. America), while others languish. Clay offers a fresh way of thinking about development through the lens of his research on innovation and it is compelling. I bet this book gets a lot of attention, as most of his work does. I also suspect that many in the development community will hate it, as it calls into question the approach and enormous investments we have made in an attempt to lift countries out of poverty. A provocative read and, as always, Clay is a good storyteller.

What I’m watching:

Just watched Leave No Trace and should have guessed that it was directed by Debra Granik. She did Winter’s Bone, the extraordinary movie that launched Jennifer Lawrence’s career. Similarly, this movie features an amazing young actor, Thomasin McKenzie, and visits lives lived on the margins. In this case, a veteran suffering PTSD, and his 13-year-old daughter. The movie is patient, is visually lush, and justly earned 100% on Rotten Tomatoes (I have a rule to never watch anything under 82%). Everything in this film is under control and beautifully understated (aside from the visuals) – confident acting, confident directing, and so humane. I love the lack of flashbacks, the lack of sensationalism – the movie trusts the viewer, rare in this age of bombast. A lovely film.

December 4, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Spending a week in New Zealand, we had endless laughs listening to the Kiwi band, Flight of the Conchords. Lots of comedic bands are funny, but the music is only okay or worse. These guys are funny – hysterical really – and the music is great. They have an uncanny ability to parody almost any style. In both New Zealand and Australia, we found a wry sense of humor that was just delightful and no better captured than with this duo. You don’t have to be in New Zealand to enjoy them.

What I’m reading:

I don’t often reread. For two reasons: A) I have so many books on my “still to be read” pile that it seems daunting to also rereadbooks I loved before, and B) it’s because I loved them once that I’m a little afraid to read them again. That said, I was recently asked to list my favorite book of all time and I answered Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. But I don’t really know if that’s still true (and it’s an impossible question anyway – favorite book? On what day? In what mood?), so I’m rereading it and it feels like being with an old friend. It has one of my very favorite scenes ever: the card game between Levin and Kitty that leads to the proposal and his joyous walking the streets all night.

What I’m watching:

Blindspotting is billed as a buddy-comedy. Wow does that undersell it and the drama is often gripping. I loved Daveed Diggs in Hamilton, didn’t like his character in Black-ish, and think he is transcendent in this film he co-wrote with Rafael Casal, his co-star.  The film is a love song to Oakland in many ways, but also a gut-wrenching indictment of police brutality, systemic racism and bias, and gentrification. The film has the freshness and raw visceral impact of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. A great soundtrack, genre mixing, and energy make it one of my favorite movies of 2018.

October 15, 2018 

What I’m listening to:

We had the opportunity to see our favorite band, The National, live in Dallas two weeks ago. Just after watching Mistaken for Strangers, the documentary sort of about the band. So we’ve spent a lot of time going back into their earlier work, listening to songs we don’t know well, and reaffirming that their musicality, smarts, and sound are both original and astoundingly good. They did not disappoint in concert and it is a good thing their tour ended, as we might just spend all of our time and money following them around. Matt Berninger is a genius and his lead vocals kill me (and because they are in my range, I can actually sing along!). Their arrangements are profoundly good and go right to whatever brain/heart wiring that pulls one in and doesn’t let them go.

What I’m reading:

Who is Richard Powers and why have I only discovered him now, with his 12th book? Overstory is profoundly good, a book that is essential and powerful and makes me look at my everyday world in new ways. In short, a dizzying example of how powerful can be narrative in the hands of a master storyteller. I hesitate to say it’s the best environmental novel I’ve ever read (it is), because that would put this book in a category. It is surely about the natural world, but it is as much about we humans. It’s monumental and elegiac and wondrous at all once. Cancel your day’s schedule and read it now. Then plant a tree. A lot of them.

What I’m watching:

Bo Burnham wrote and directed Eighth Grade and Elsie Fisher is nothing less than amazing as its star (what’s with these new child actors; see Florida Project). It’s funny and painful and touching. It’s also the single best film treatment that I have seen of what it means to grow up in a social media shaped world. It’s a reminder that growing up is hard. Maybe harder now in a world of relentless, layered digital pressure to curate perfect lives that are far removed from the natural messy worlds and selves we actually inhabit. It’s a well-deserved 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and I wonder who dinged it for the missing 2%.

September 7, 2018

What I’m listening to:

With a cover pointing back to the Beastie Boys’ 1986 Licensed to Ill, Eminem’s quietly released Kamikaze is not my usual taste, but I’ve always admired him for his “all out there” willingness to be personal, to call people out, and his sheer genius with language. I thought Daveed Diggs could rap fast, but Eminem is supersonic at moments, and still finds room for melody. Love that he includes Joyner Lucas, whose “I’m Not Racist” gets added to the growing list of simply amazing music videos commenting on race in America. There are endless reasons why I am the least likely Eminem fan, but when no one is around to make fun of me, I’ll put it on again.

What I’m reading:

Lesley Blume’s Everyone Behaves Badly, which is the story behind Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and his time in 1920s Paris (oh, what a time – see Midnight in Paris if you haven’t already). Of course, Blume disabuses my romantic ideas of that time and place and everyone is sort of (or profoundly so) a jerk, especially…no spoiler here…Hemingway. That said, it is a compelling read and coming off the Henry James inspired prose of Mrs. Osmond, it made me appreciate more how groundbreaking was Hemingway’s modern prose style. Like his contemporary Picasso, he reinvented the art and it can be easy to forget, these decades later, how profound was the change and its impact. And it has bullfights.

What I’m watching:

Chloé Zhao’s The Rider is just exceptional. It’s filmed on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which provides a stunning landscape, and it feels like a classic western reinvented for our times. The main characters are played by the real-life people who inspired this narrative (but feels like a documentary) film. Brady Jandreau, playing himself really, owns the screen. It’s about manhood, honor codes, loss, and resilience – rendered in sensitive, nuanced, and heartfelt ways. It feels like it could be about large swaths of America today. Really powerful.

August 16, 2018

What I’m listening to:

In my Spotify Daily Mix was Percy Sledge’s When A Man Loves A Woman, one of the world’s greatest love songs. Go online and read the story of how the song was discovered and recorded. There are competing accounts, but Sledge said he improvised it after a bad breakup. It has that kind of aching spontaneity. It is another hit from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, one of the GREAT music hotbeds, along with Detroit, Nashville, and Memphis. Our February Board meeting is in Alabama and I may finally have to do the pilgrimage road trip to Muscle Shoals and then Memphis, dropping in for Sunday services at the church where Rev. Al Green still preaches and sings. If the music is all like this, I will be saved.

What I’m reading:

John Banville’s Mrs. Osmond, his homage to literary idol Henry James and an imagined sequel to James’ 1881 masterpiece Portrait of a Lady. Go online and read the first paragraph of Chapter 25. He is…profoundly good. Makes me want to never write again, since anything I attempt will feel like some other, lowly activity in comparison to his mastery of language, image, syntax. This is slow reading, every sentence to be savored.

What I’m watching:

I’ve always respected Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but we just watched the documentary RGB. It is over-the-top great and she is now one of my heroes. A superwoman in many ways and the documentary is really well done. There are lots of scenes of her speaking to crowds and the way young women, especially law students, look at her is touching.  And you can’t help but fall in love with her now late husband Marty. See this movie and be reminded of how important is the Law.

July 23, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Spotify’s Summer Acoustic playlist has been on repeat quite a lot. What a fun way to listen to artists new to me, including The Paper Kites, Hollow Coves, and Fleet Foxes, as well as old favorites like Leon Bridges and Jose Gonzalez. Pretty chill when dialing back to a summer pace, dining on the screen porch or reading a book.

What I’m reading:

Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. Founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson tells of the racial injustice (and the war on the poor our judicial system perpetuates as well) that he discovered as a young graduate from Harvard Law School and his fight to address it. It is in turn heartbreaking, enraging, and inspiring. It is also about mercy and empathy and justice that reads like a novel. Brilliant.

What I’m watching:

Fauda. We watched season one of this Israeli thriller. It was much discussed in Israel because while it focuses on an ex-special agent who comes out of retirement to track down a Palestinian terrorist, it was willing to reveal the complexity, richness, and emotions of Palestinian lives. And the occasional brutality of the Israelis. Pretty controversial stuff in Israel. Lior Raz plays Doron, the main character, and is compelling and tough and often hard to like. He’s a mess. As is the world in which he has to operate. We really liked it, and also felt guilty because while it may have been brave in its treatment of Palestinians within the Israeli context, it falls back into some tired tropes and ultimately falls short on this front.

June 11, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Like everyone else, I’m listening to Pusha T drop the mic on Drake. Okay, not really, but do I get some points for even knowing that? We all walk around with songs that immediately bring us back to a time or a place. Songs are time machines. We are coming up on Father’s Day. My own dad passed away on Father’s Day back in 1994 and I remembering dutifully getting through the wake and funeral and being strong throughout. Then, sitting alone in our kitchen, Don Henley’s The End of the Innocence came on and I lost it. When you lose a parent for the first time (most of us have two after all) we lose our innocence and in that passage, we suddenly feel adult in a new way (no matter how old we are), a longing for our own childhood, and a need to forgive and be forgiven. Listen to the lyrics and you’ll understand. As Wordsworth reminds us in In Memoriam, there are seasons to our grief and, all these years later, this song no longer hits me in the gut, but does transport me back with loving memories of my father. I’ll play it Father’s Day.

What I’m reading:

The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin. I am not a reader of fantasy or sci-fi, though I understand they can be powerful vehicles for addressing the very real challenges of the world in which we actually live. I’m not sure I know of a more vivid and gripping illustration of that fact than N. K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award winning novel The Fifth Season, first in her Broken Earth trilogy. It is astounding. It is the fantasy parallel to The Underground Railroad, my favorite recent read, a depiction of subjugation, power, casual violence, and a broken world in which our hero(s) struggle, suffer mightily, and still, somehow, give us hope. It is a tour de force book. How can someone be this good a writer? The first 30 pages pained me (always with this genre, one must learn a new, constructed world, and all of its operating physics and systems of order), and then I could not put it down. I panicked as I neared the end, not wanting to finish the book, and quickly ordered the Obelisk Gate, the second novel in the trilogy, and I can tell you now that I’ll be spending some goodly portion of my weekend in Jemisin’s other world.

What I’m watching:

The NBA Finals and perhaps the best basketball player of this generation. I’ve come to deeply respect LeBron James as a person, a force for social good, and now as an extraordinary player at the peak of his powers. His superhuman play during the NBA playoffs now ranks with the all-time greats, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, MJ, Kobe, and the demi-god that was Bill Russell. That his Cavs lost in a 4-game sweep is no surprise. It was a mediocre team being carried on the wide shoulders of James (and matched against one of the greatest teams ever, the Warriors, and the Harry Potter of basketball, Steph Curry) and, in some strange way, his greatness is amplified by the contrast with the rest of his team. It was a great run.

May 24, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I’ve always liked Alicia Keys and admired her social activism, but I am hooked on her last album Here. This feels like an album finally commensurate with her anger, activism, hope, and grit. More R&B and Hip Hop than is typical for her, I think this album moves into an echelon inhabited by a Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On or Beyonce’s Formation. Social activism and outrage rarely make great novels, but they often fuel great popular music. Here is a terrific example.

What I’m reading:

Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad may be close to a flawless novel. Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer, it chronicles the lives of two runaway slaves, Cora and Caeser, as they try to escape the hell of plantation life in Georgia.  It is an often searing novel and Cora is one of the great heroes of American literature. I would make this mandatory reading in every high school in America, especially in light of the absurd revisionist narratives of “happy and well cared for” slaves. This is a genuinely great novel, one of the best I’ve read, the magical realism and conflating of time periods lifts it to another realm of social commentary, relevance, and a blazing indictment of America’s Original Sin, for which we remain unabsolved.

What I’m watching:

I thought I knew about The Pentagon Papers, but The Post, a real-life political thriller from Steven Spielberg taught me a lot, features some of our greatest actors, and is so timely given the assault on our democratic institutions and with a presidency out of control. It is a reminder that a free and fearless press is a powerful part of our democracy, always among the first targets of despots everywhere. The story revolves around the legendary Post owner and D.C. doyenne, Katharine Graham. I had the opportunity to see her son, Don Graham, right after he saw the film, and he raved about Meryl Streep’s portrayal of his mother. Liked it a lot more than I expected.

April 27, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I mentioned John Prine in a recent post and then on the heels of that mention, he has released a new album, The Tree of Forgiveness, his first new album in ten years. Prine is beloved by other singer songwriters and often praised by the inscrutable God that is Bob Dylan.  Indeed, Prine was frequently said to be the “next Bob Dylan” in the early part of his career, though he instead carved out his own respectable career and voice, if never with the dizzying success of Dylan. The new album reflects a man in his 70s, a cancer survivor, who reflects on life and its end, but with the good humor and empathy that are hallmarks of Prine’s music. “When I Get To Heaven” is a rollicking, fun vision of what comes next and a pure delight. A charming, warm, and often terrific album.

What I’m reading:

I recently read Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, on many people’s Top Ten lists for last year and for good reason. It is sprawling, multi-generational, and based in the world of Japanese occupied Korea and then in the Korean immigrant’s world of Oaska, so our key characters become “tweeners,” accepted in neither world. It’s often unspeakably sad, and yet there is resiliency and love. There is also intimacy, despite the time and geographic span of the novel. It’s breathtakingly good and like all good novels, transporting.

What I’m watching:

I adore Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 film, Pan’s Labyrinth, and while I’m not sure his Shape of Water is better, it is a worthy follow up to the earlier masterpiece (and more of a commercial success). Lots of critics dislike the film, but I’m okay with a simple retelling of a Beauty and the Beast love story, as predictable as it might be. The acting is terrific, it is visually stunning, and there are layers of pain as well as social and political commentary (the setting is the US during the Cold War) and, no real spoiler here, the real monsters are humans, the military officer who sees over the captured aquatic creature. It is hauntingly beautiful and its depiction of hatred to those who are different or “other” is painfully resonant with the time in which we live. Put this on your “must see” list.

March 18, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Sitting on a plane for hours (and many more to go; geez, Australia is far away) is a great opportunity to listen to new music and to revisit old favorites. This time, it is Lucy Dacus and her album Historians, the new sophomore release from a 22-year old indie artist that writes with relatable, real-life lyrics. Just on a second listen and while she insists this isn’t a break up record (as we know, 50% of all great songs are break up songs), it is full of loss and pain. Worth the listen so far. For the way back machine, it’s John Prine and In Spite of Ourselves (that title track is one of the great love songs of all time), a collection of duets with some of his “favorite girl singers” as he once described them. I have a crush on Iris Dement (for a really righteously angry song try her Wasteland of the Free), but there is also EmmyLou Harris, the incomparable Dolores Keane, and Lucinda Williams. Very different albums, both wonderful.

What I’m reading:

Jane Mayer’s New Yorker piece on Christopher Steele presents little that is new, but she pulls it together in a terrific and coherent whole that is illuminating and troubling at the same time. Not only for what is happening, but for the complicity of the far right in trying to discredit that which should be setting off alarm bells everywhere. Bob Mueller may be the most important defender of the democracy at this time. A must read.

What I’m watching:

Homeland is killing it this season and is prescient, hauntingly so. Russian election interference, a Bannon-style hate radio demagogue, alienated and gun toting militia types, and a president out of control. It’s fabulous, even if it feels awfully close to the evening news. 

March 8, 2018

What I’m listening to:

We have a family challenge to compile our Top 100 songs. It is painful. Only 100? No more than three songs by one artist? Wait, why is M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” on my list? Should it just be The Clash from whom she samples? Can I admit to guilty pleasure songs? Hey, it’s my list and I can put anything I want on it. So I’m listening to the list while I work and the song playing right now is Tom Petty’s “The Wild One, Forever,” a B-side single that was never a hit and that remains my favorite Petty song. Also, “Evangeline” by Los Lobos. It evokes a night many years ago, with friends at Pearl Street in Northampton, MA, when everyone danced well past 1AM in a hot, sweaty, packed club and the band was a revelation. Maybe the best music night of our lives and a reminder that one’s 100 Favorite Songs list is as much about what you were doing and where you were in your life when those songs were playing as it is about the music. It’s not a list. It’s a soundtrack for this journey.

What I’m reading:

Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy was in the NY Times top ten books of 2017 list and it is easy to see why. Lockwood brings remarkable and often surprising imagery, metaphor, and language to her prose memoir and it actually threw me off at first. It then all became clear when someone told me she is a poet. The book is laugh aloud funny, which masks (or makes safer anyway) some pretty dark territory. Anyone who grew up Catholic, whether lapsed or not, will resonate with her story. She can’t resist a bawdy anecdote and her family provides some of the most memorable characters possible, especially her father, her sister, and her mother, who I came to adore. Best thing I’ve read in ages.

What I’m watching:

The Florida Project, a profoundly good movie on so many levels. Start with the central character, six-year old (at the time of the filming) Brooklynn Prince, who owns – I mean really owns – the screen. This is pure acting genius and at that age? Astounding. Almost as astounding is Bria Vinaite, who plays her mother. She was discovered on Instagram and had never acted before this role, which she did with just three weeks of acting lessons. She is utterly convincing and the tension between the child’s absolute wonder and joy in the world with her mother’s struggle to provide, to be a mother, is heartwarming and heartbreaking all at once. Willem Dafoe rightly received an Oscar nomination for his supporting role. This is a terrific movie.

February 12, 2018

What I’m listening to:

So, I have a lot of friends of age (I know you’re thinking 40s, but I just turned 60) who are frozen in whatever era of music they enjoyed in college or maybe even in their thirties. There are lots of times when I reach back into the catalog, since music is one of those really powerful and transporting senses that can take you through time (smell is the other one, though often underappreciated for that power). Hell, I just bought a turntable and now spending time in vintage vinyl shops. But I’m trying to take a lesson from Pat, who revels in new music and can as easily talk about North African rap music and the latest National album as Meet the Beatles, her first ever album. So, I’ve been listening to Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy winning Damn. While it may not be the first thing I’ll reach for on a winter night in Maine, by the fire, I was taken with it. It’s layered, political, and weirdly sensitive and misogynist at the same time, and it feels fresh and authentic and smart at the same time, with music that often pulled me from what I was doing. In short, everything music should do. I’m not a bit cooler for listening to Damn, but when I followed it with Steely Dan, I felt like I was listening to Lawrence Welk. A good sign, I think.

What I’m reading:

I am reading Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Leonardo da Vinci. I’m not usually a reader of biographies, but I’ve always been taken with Leonardo. Isaacson does not disappoint (does he ever?), and his subject is at once more human and accessible and more awe-inspiring in Isaacson’s capable hands. Gay, left-handed, vegetarian, incapable of finishing things, a wonderful conversationalist, kind, and perhaps the most relentlessly curious human being who has ever lived. Like his biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, Isaacson’s project here is to show that genius lives at the intersection of science and art, of rationality and creativity. Highly recommend it.

What I’m watching:

We watched the This Is Us post-Super Bowl episode, the one where Jack finally buys the farm. I really want to hate this show. It is melodramatic and manipulative, with characters that mostly never change or grow, and it hooks me every damn time we watch it. The episode last Sunday was a tear jerker, a double whammy intended to render into a blubbering, tissue-crumbling pathetic mess anyone who has lost a parent or who is a parent. Sterling K. Brown, Ron Cephas Jones, the surprising Mandy Moore, and Milo Ventimiglia are hard not to love and last season’s episode that had only Brown and Cephas going to Memphis was the show at its best (they are by far the two best actors). Last week was the show at its best worst. In other words, I want to hate it, but I love it. If you haven’t seen it, don’t binge watch it. You’ll need therapy and insulin.

January 15, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Drive-By Truckers. Chris Stapleton has me on an unusual (for me) country theme and I discovered these guys to my great delight. They’ve been around, with some 11 albums, but the newest one is fascinating. It’s a deep dive into Southern alienation and the white working-class world often associated with our current president. I admire the willingness to lay bare, in kick ass rock songs, the complexities and pain at work among people we too quickly place into overly simple categories. These guys are brave, bold, and thoughtful as hell, while producing songs I didn’t expect to like, but that I keep playing. And they are coming to NH.

What I’m reading:

A textual analog to Drive-By Truckers by Chris Stapleton in many ways is Tony Horowitz’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize winning Confederates in the Attic. Ostensibly about the Civil War and the South’s ongoing attachment to it, it is prescient and speaks eloquently to the times in which we live (where every southern state but Virginia voted for President Trump). Often hilarious, it too surfaces complexities and nuance that escape a more recent, and widely acclaimed, book like Hillbilly Elegy. As a Civil War fan, it was also astonishing in many instances, especially when it blows apart long-held “truths” about the war, such as the degree to which Sherman burned down the south (he did not). Like D-B Truckers, Horowitz loves the South and the people he encounters, even as he grapples with its myths of victimhood and exceptionalism (and racism, which may be no more than the racism in the north, but of a different kind). Everyone should read this book and I’m embarrassed I’m so late to it.

What I’m watching:

David Letterman has a new Netflix show called “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction” and we watched the first episode, in which Letterman interviewed Barack Obama. It was extraordinary (if you don’t have Netflix, get it just to watch this show); not only because we were reminded of Obama’s smarts, grace, and humanity (and humor), but because we saw a side of Letterman we didn’t know existed. His personal reflections on Selma were raw and powerful, almost painful. He will do five more episodes with “extraordinary individuals” and if they are anything like the first, this might be the very best work of his career and one of the best things on television.

December 22, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished Sunjeev Sahota’s Year of the Runaways, a painful inside look at the plight of illegal Indian immigrant workers in Britain. It was shortlisted for 2015 Man Booker Prize and its transporting, often to a dark and painful universe, and it is impossible not to think about the American version of this story and the terrible way we treat the undocumented in our own country, especially now.

What I’m watching:

Season II of The Crown is even better than Season I. Elizabeth’s character is becoming more three-dimensional, the modern world is catching up with tradition-bound Britain, and Cold War politics offer more context and tension than we saw in Season I. Claire Foy, in her last season, is just terrific – one arched eye brow can send a message.

What I’m listening to:

A lot of Christmas music, but needing a break from the schmaltz, I’ve discovered Over the Rhine and their Christmas album, Snow Angels. God, these guys are good.

November 14, 2017

What I’m watching:

Guiltily, I watch the Patriots play every weekend, often building my schedule and plans around seeing the game. Why the guilt? I don’t know how morally defensible is football anymore, as we now know the severe damage it does to the players. We can’t pretend it’s all okay anymore. Is this our version of late decadent Rome, watching mostly young Black men take a terrible toll on each other for our mere entertainment?

What I’m reading:

Recently finished J.G. Ballard’s 2000 novel Super-Cannes, a powerful depiction of a corporate-tech ex-pat community taken over by a kind of psychopathology, in which all social norms and responsibilities are surrendered to residents of the new world community. Kept thinking about Silicon Valley when reading it. Pretty dark, dystopian view of the modern world and centered around a mass killing, troublingly prescient.

What I’m listening to:

Was never really a Lorde fan, only knowing her catchy (and smarter than you might first guess) pop hit “Royals” from her debut album. But her new album, Melodrama, is terrific and it doesn’t feel quite right to call this “pop.” There is something way more substantial going on with Lorde and I can see why many critics put this album at the top of their Best in 2017 list. Count me in as a huge fan.

November 3, 2017

What I’m reading: Just finished Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, her breathtakingly good second novel. How is someone so young so wise? Her writing is near perfection and I read the book in two days, setting my alarm for 4:30AM so I could finish it before work.

What I’m watching: We just binge watched season two of Stranger Things and it was worth it just to watch Millie Bobbie Brown, the transcendent young actor who plays Eleven. The series is a delightful mash up of every great eighties horror genre you can imagine and while pretty dark, an absolute joy to watch.

What I’m listening to: I’m not a lover of country music (to say the least), but I love Chris Stapleton. His “The Last Thing I Needed, First Thing This Morning” is heartbreakingly good and reminds me of the old school country that played in my house as a kid. He has a new album and I can’t wait, but his From A Room: Volume 1 is on repeat for now.

September 26, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished George Saunder’s Lincoln in the Bardo. It took me a while to accept its cadence and sheer weirdness, but loved it in the end. A painful meditation on loss and grief, and a genuinely beautiful exploration of the intersection of life and death, the difficulty of letting go of what was, good and bad, and what never came to be.

What I’m watching:

HBO’s The Deuce. Times Square and the beginning of the porn industry in the 1970s, the setting made me wonder if this was really something I’d want to see. But David Simon is the writer and I’d read a menu if he wrote it. It does not disappoint so far and there is nothing prurient about it.

What I’m listening to:

The National’s new album Sleep Well Beast. I love this band. The opening piano notes of the first song, “Nobody Else Will Be There,” seize me & I’m reminded that no one else in music today matches their arrangement & musicianship. I’m adding “Born to Beg,” “Slow Show,” “I Need My Girl,” and “Runaway” to my list of favorite love songs.

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[radreviews]

2017 SQUAD PICKS

Hello, it’s us. It’s been awhile, but we’re back with our favorite art, moments, and trends from 2017. I usually have a whole preamble to set the stage for our picks, but let’s just get into it:

RADHIKA

In-Theater Experiences Every year I have a few movies that remind me how great the movie theater experience can be. A couple of years ago it was Magic Mike XXL; this year it was Get Out and Spider-Man Homecoming. I saw both films in packed houses, with the audience reacting to every line delivery, cameo and plot twist as it happened. It was exhilarating, and I can’t imagine seeing the films any other way. It reminded me that sometimes film needs to be a collective experience—that peer reactions can be the very thing that makes a good movie great. The same thing can be said of live theater, an inherently shared experience. Humblebrag time… we finally saw Hamilton this year and it exceeded the hype and expectations. I also listened to the soundtrack a million times and memorized all of the words after seeing it so, yep, I’m one of those people now. Also! We saw Mean Girls: The Musical in its previews in DC and holy wow you’re all in for a treat. Lady Bird Forget what I said about collective experiences because I saw this incredible film by myself, crying quietly through the entire third act. There are always films whose stories don’t necessarily overlap with my experiences, but make me feel everything (last year’s was La La Land). This film has universal love from every critic with a beating heart and it’s one thousand percent deserved. Lady Bird was my favorite film of the year — a beautiful portrait of the confusion of adolescence, of familial frustration and of love. It was note-perfect. Despacito CALL ME BASIC but I love this song. I will not apologize for how happy it makes me, for how secretly sexy the lyrics are, for how directly my mood is impacted by those opening chords. Also, I prefer the Justin Bieber version don’t @ me. “Remember Me” from Coco

Let’s not talk about how much I cried during Pixar’s Coco (but if you must know, it was A LOT), let’s talk about the five different versions of its original song “Remember Me” that appear on the official soundtrack. There’s the three versions directly from the film (each BEAUTIFULLY sung by Benjamin Bratt, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Anthony Gonzalez), a Spanish version, and inexplicably a version by Miguel?!!??!? It’s a classic case of I didn’t know I needed it until now, but thank you for this gift.  CTRL - SZA Everything is all caps, and wow, what a debut. “The Weekend” spoke quiet sadness about being the ‘other woman,’ “Supermodel” delved deep into being unloved and retaliating, and everything before and after touched on the intricacies of relationships and heartbreak. It was personal and it was stunning. “Lemons” - blackish Eleven days into the new year, we already had one of the best episodes of the year. In a pointed middle finger to Trump, blackish became a mouthpiece for what all of us were feeling two months after the election—anger, confusion, and helplessness—and instead of harping on the negatives, it made lemonade. Traveling I was 2 steps away from going full “wanderlust”-Instagram-caption mode this year. I’ve always wanted to travel, but 2017 was the first year where I threw caution (and money) to the wind, and just…booked stuff. I went to Cuba, Philly and Nashville for the first time, explored San Francisco and Boston again with friends, and flew back to Michigan, Chicago, and Cleveland for various engagements and weddings. If ever there was a year where a few days of distraction were not just welcomed but needed, it was 2017. There’s only more exploring to be done in 2018. Pod Save America I think it’s safe to say we all feel more politically angry and engaged in this era of backwards politics. Twice a week, I relied on the educated discussion, hilarious banter, and informed opinions of former Obama staffers Jon Lovett, Jon Favreau and Tommy Vietor to fill me in on what I should be angry about that day. It’s a podcast that just feels necessary. Also, I now own a ‘Friend of the Pod’ t-shirt and I feel like I’m part of a cult, but it’s the coolest cult ever. Bojack Horseman

It’s common knowledge that I love art that makes me cry, but I never thought I’d cry while watching a cartoon. This show is equal parts acerbic, hilarious, and downright depressing (read: I love this show so much). Harping on the fragility of time, the fourth season of Bojack Horseman continued its upward trajectory and gave me one of my favorite quotes from and about television, probably ever. Bojack is one of the smartest, most thoughtful and well-written shows on this incredibly vast television landscape. We are so lucky to have it. The Emergence of Timothée Chalamet Relatively unheard of before 2017, Chalamet starred in two of the best films I saw this year — Lady Bird and Call Me By Your Name. Chalamet inhabited two completely different, complicated characters but made them both vulnerable, empathetic, and mesmerizing. He’s a star and even if the Academy doesn’t recognize him this year (which would be objectively incorrect), I’ll watch anything he’s in from here on out.

PROMA Trailer Hype

I have never experienced a theater crowd cheering for a freaking trailer before – titters of excitement for Harry Potter, at best – but once the Black Panther full trailer dropped there was only one logical response. We cheered for it before  Spider-Man: Homecoming, before Marshall, before Thor: Ragnarok, and I hope to cheer for it again before February 2018, which is finally close. Seeing Things in Theaters Multiple Times Since moving to New York, I’ve never seen a movie twice in theaters - first because of cost and then because of time. Honestly I probably haven’t done it since high school, but I used to love it, and this year I finally returned to that with The Big Sick and Spider-Man: Homecoming. Worth it. A First Time with an Oldie

I’ve loved Titanic since I first saw it in 2000, but of course I was too young to see it in theaters. It was re-released in 3D for a quick stretch in 2012, but I was in India at the time, so this year marked the first time I saw Titanic in theaters, that too in impressive 3D. I will never tire of watching old favorites in packed theaters full of people who love the film as much as I do and hum along with the music or clap for big moments. The Year TV Got Angry In a year when we were all perpetually existential or angry, it was cathartic to see TV mirror that state. I reveled in the female rage of The Handmaid’s Tale, the intersectional activism of Dear White People, She’s Gotta Have It, and the straight-up middle finger that was Difficult People. Having an AppleTV is almost as gratifying as screaming into the void! Facemasks A pack of facemasks literally arrived on my and Radhika’s doorstep at a point in 2016 when we didn’t realize we needed them. Since then, I’ve tried to always have some sheet masks around and let myself splurge on a charcoal mask that I’ve done almost every weekend without fail since September. Put on a mask, start an episode, remove  and rinse. Treat yo self. Mean Girls: The Musical Seconding Rads on this. I was lucky enough to catch Mean Girls in the workshop stage before it left New York for a summer hiatus and then previews – even in that early stage it was fantastic. It’s exciting to have been with a piece of art through all these iterations (not even including the movie and its decade of cult-status), and I can’t wait to see it blow up next year. Existential Twitter Twitter was always at its most funny and weird during ungodly night-time hours; The night is darkest before the dawn and now it’s like Night Twitter 24/7. From politics to entertainment, we are at least winning at hilarity on social media. But seriously, delete his account. The Return of MoviePass This squad has been preaching the gospel of MoviePass since like, 2014, and I’ll admit I faltered in the middle there when it hit $50/month (I took the 3/$30 plan instead). But now it’s $9.99/month and people have heard of it and don’t make that blank face when I talk about it and wow guys we are saving so much on movies I feel so alive!!! People still regularly ask me if it’s legit/worth it/a scam, but I am happy to answer them and spread this joy. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Listen, some shows are just pure joy and this is the second Amazon show to give me this jarringly unfamiliar sunny feeling in my heart when I watch (shootout to you, Mozart in the Jungle). This show is like eating ice cream covered in candy (but with some sweet wine) and the best part it gets me inspired to create. Oh, Hello Dittoing Rads again because our first theatre experience of the year was one of the best of my whole life. I laughed so fucking hard at Oh, Hello — I’ve never seen a piece of comedy so meticulously crafted, down to every word of every joke, and you could hear the payoff in the laughs, which hardly ever stopped.

ARJUN

“I’m not a body/the body is but a shell.” Like so many of us, I spent a scary amount of time this year being resentful and confused about a million different things happening in my hometown, state, and country – things outside of my own body, bigger than myself.  It is then maybe my (our?) subconscious trying to tell me something else in the shared themes of the music I was coming back to the most.  While I would say I was consumed by questions of the foundation our entire world rests on, my iTunes would counter that my existential questions this year were actually pointed inward, contemplating over what constitutes a relationship in 2017. “Is it warm enough for you inside me?” With the full acknowledgement that there was a LOT of great music from other artists, when I look back on what set music in 2017 apart from other years, I think I’ll most remember albums like SZA’s ctrl, Moses Sumney’s Aromanticism, and Charli XCX’s Pop 2.  These three have some pretty big differences (namely, how they literally sound), but I would argue that they are all contributors to the same internal dialogue that a single 20-something year old living in New York was having, if not always aware he was having it.  They ask questions about all forms of love and affection, including (but not limited to): What does it mean to love? What does that even look like in 2017? Is it co-dependent? Is it more than an initial attraction? Does it give us our worth? Is it harmful to tie our worth to it? How stupid are we for putting ourselves through it? If the stupidity makes us happy, is it actually stupid? How do we handle heartbreak? Do we take on an arrogant braggadocio? Do we show the utter lack of confidence hiding under that? And hey, what role does sex play in all this? “I’m not tryina go to bed with you/I just wanna make out in your car.” Admittedly, some of these aren’t the most original questions of all time.  It’s the way these artists answered (or tried to answer) them that felt special to this point in time.  When SZA says, “Lately you’ve been feeling so good/I forget my future/never pull out,” there isn’t even a question if they’re having sex, and no narrative build-up of her career; they are conditional to even be at the point in time being confronted.  For the narrator, the to-pull-out-or-not debate is less a sign of carelessness and more one of carnal satisfaction (though she points out it's pretty careless too).  In a borderline companion piece, Charli XCX adds on, “I just wanna spend the night/Fucking in your bed tonight/Watch a little TV/I love it when you need me.”  Sex and what comes after are given equal weight in all of the toiling, tossing, and turning. “Ooh no she didn’t/Ooh yes, I did.”

No doubt, these songs have selfishness and over-dramatization at work.  But elsewhere, there’s a clearly embedded sense of self-awareness, too.  On “Indulge Me,” Moses Sumney’s verse starts and ends with a bit of a call and response when he sings, “All of my old lovers have found others…All of my old others have found lovers.”  There’s meant to be some sadness here, but the wordplay suggests a certain irony; he’s far from shocked.  Similarly, on “Out of My Head,” Charli XCX, Tove Lo, and ALMA begin singing, “You got me doing all this stupid shit/you fuck me up like this,” before finishing with, “Secretly I’m kinda into it, though.”  It’s as if the narrator is fully aware that she’s enveloping you in her own problems and she’s totally cool with that – she’s even giving you a wink while doing it.  The listener is simultaneously watching a card trick and listening to the magician explain exactly what he/she is doing each step of the way. “I blame it on your love/every time I fuck it up.” All of that is to say nothing of the music.  Throughout, we are sent on a journey of eclectic sounds & compositions, ranging from no-fucks-given aggression to dancefloor escapism to soothing near-lullabies.  The fully-formed picture is ultimately what made these works feel alive in the present.  They’re messy, they’re self-important, they’re dramatic, they’re self-deprecating.  They’re 2017.

ADITYA

Master of None, season 2 It’s exciting to watch talented people swing for the fences. Master of None, Aziz’s love letter to New York, millennial aimlessness, Italian cinema, food, and about 45 other things, is a start-to-finish shot at greatness. It’s filled with terrific performances, and breathtaking shots. It also radiates intelligence in its observations; Dev might be aimless but Aziz has a point of view.

In a toxic 2017, the show’s generous nature stands out. In ‘New York, I Love You,’ Dev is completely absent; the exhilarating episode instead elevates viewpoints that are often reduce to stock clichés – the doorman, the driver, etc. In ‘Thanksgiving,’ Dev plays a clear supporting role as Lena Waithe’s Denise accepts her sexuality and hopes for her family to do the same. In episode after episode, Master of None pursues interesting stories, whether they’re with Dev or Arnold or Denise or Francesca or a taxi driver. The show insists that it’s worth caring about other people, and the spirit of empathy and curiosity is refreshing.  The show is unabashedly cinematic in its aesthetic. The first episode is a surprisingly detailed (if low stakes) homage to Bicycle Thieves, presented in black & white with dialogue entirely in Italian. Later references include L’Avventura and La Dolce Vita. Despite these influences, Master of None makes excellent use of the episodic nature of TV, with installments devoted to big issues, like the theme episodes of old. ‘First Date’ uses an inventive structure to highlight the bleak fun of app-driven dating. ‘Religion’ tackles..religion. ‘Door #3′ is a portrait of career indecision. Sprinkled throughout are observations of fame and celebrity, and Aziz’s (and Dev’s) status as a minority provides a unique observational lens. Let me point out that the season is also fun. It doesn’t matter how many hours of Fellini Aziz has watched; the moment he sings about eating food, it’s clear that Tom Haverford is irrepressible. The show is consistently funny, both sharp and silly (I’ll laugh at any framing of the tiny Dev next to his immense buddy Arnold). Dev’s relationship with Francesca is, for me, the best rom-com of the past few years. It’s bracing to watch funny, charming people fall in love, and there’s a thrilling prolonged scene in ‘Dinner Party’ - where Dev is sitting in an Uber processing the fact that he is desperately in love – that ranks among the best of the year.  Mask Off + I’m the One + Red Bone I’ve been told that I’m bad at “good” music. Because of the pretentious circles within which I reside, I’m often faking musical expertise. ‘You know who’s great?’  I’ll say. ‘Ess Zee Ayy. Yeah, no, SZA, that’s what I meant. They’re good.’ But when no one was looking over my shoulder, it was these three songs all day all year. That’s a liability! Get Out & Lady Bird Two brilliant debuts. Get Out is a biting satire/comedy/polemic built on a horror movie chassis. From the creepiness of the “No, no, no, no…” scene to the “haha…wait a minute” guilty recognition of the liberal family to the shoulder-slumping devastation of the keys scene, the film takes no false steps. Lady Bird is great all the way through, led by Saoirse’s fiery performance and a sparkling, hilarious script. Greta Gerwig’s love and understanding for the characters on screen shines through.  NYT’s “Trump’s Daily Life” Pieces The NYTimes has grown essential in the Trump era. Sure, sometimes they Disney-ify Nazis, or allow David Brooks to moan about the difficulties of getting a sandwich with a poor person. But have you seen the WSJ editorials, or the ever-multiplying panels of “experts” on CNN? I’ll take the Gray Lady. While there’s plenty to appreciate, I want to call out the Sunday night articles, usually by Maggie Haberman and 300 unnamed sources, that offer hilarious insight into Trump’s daily life. I can’t get enough of these. 8-12 Diet Cokes? 14 hours of TV? Tries to impress John Kelly by doing a push-up? Sexts himself from Melania’s phone? Tell me more. We laugh so as not to cry.  I Am Not Your Negro

The startlingly powerful documentary relies exclusively on Baldwin’s own words, culled from various letters and writings, and read by Samuel L. Jackson. Even if you’ve read Baldwin, to sit in the theater and drown in his unparalleled eloquence is a shattering experience. The director, Raoul Peck, works with Baldwin to underline the film’s relevance to present day. Images of police brutality in the 1960s fade into images from Ferguson; Baldwin’s words close the gap in time. Another standout section involving a clip of Baldwin explaining his “fixation” on racial issues onThe Dick Cavett Show- a Tonight Show forerunner - is a sharp rebuke to the anti-intellectualism that is currently pervasive.  I was hanging on to Baldwin’s words, amazed at their relevance in the world I would walk into when the credits rolled. I can’t recommend this highly enough.  Revisiting the Godfather A back-to-back screening of The Godfather Parts I & II was a lovely experience. I was particularly moved by the father and son seated behind me. Most of us learn to appreciate the Corleones through our fathers, forcing ourselves to stay awake the first time we watch it because our infallible dads insisted it was brilliant. The pair behind me was all too familiar. The father patiently entertained his son’s incessant questioning (who’s that again? Wait, why did they kill Luca? Can we get more popcorn?), leapt to cover his son’s eyes during the topless scene, and nudged his son excitedly during the Baptism. The kid is now mixed-up in the family business for life. Twitter I love Twitter. I love retweeting things I agree with and I also love retweeting things I disagree with with a “get a load of this guy”-type comment. I love jumping into the fray and tweeting something like “call your senator!” and then patting myself on the back. I love seeing what other people I follow like, and seeing that they like things that are very similar to what I like, further affirming the idea that everyone is on my side. I love political twitter. I love sports twitter. I love movie twitter. I love reading the first sentence of an article and immediately knowing that I want to tweet it out. I love twitter. Protests For when Twitter isn’t enough. I was dreading Trump’s inauguration day, fully anticipating tears when the Obamas finally helicoptered away to a much deserved peace. When the moment came, and Trump was sworn in, it was…bearable. I knew that in less than 24 hours, I would get to witness thousands of women marching in defiant response. The Women’s March had an incredible energy that I assumed was rare. But it was replicated repeatedly - at the airports after the attempted Muslim ban, outside the courthouse where the ACLU challenged the administration, throughout the city after the DACA decision, etc., etc.  I’m a longtime petition signer, but I’m a novice protestor. I’m not great at chanting and I’m bad at estimating how big to make letters. A lot of my signs looked like I’M WITH her. But with the Trump administration determined to reduce the idea of America, protests were catharsis. They were a messy, vital declaration to the administration that they would be met with a response. They’ve recharged and inspired and reassured, and they’re what I’ll remember most about 2017.

#best of #2017 #arts #movies #film #tv #music #sza #master of none #blackish #titanic #twitter

[amorremanet]

in which still no one asked for this, but it made me feel a little better about how i have a shitty day ahead of me, and pete got to go second because i have blatant authorial favoritism for him but at least i admit it?

their blog url: itwasafineaffair

Pete would tell you how many different pretentious, increasingly ridiculous theatre kid URLs he considered before finally, “going back to basics” and settling on lyrics from Cabaret’s, “Mein Herr,” but then he’d probably have to kill you because it’s a very large, embarrassing number.

That said, he still has the URL ghostsonatas saved in case he ever gets bored of Sally Bowles and decides to break out the August Strindberg.

Also, here’s the Liza Minelli version of, “Mein Herr.” Don’t ask Pete who his favorite Sally Bowles is unless you’re willing to clear your schedule for the entire afternoon because he has a lot of Opinions about that question.

their blog title: “yes, princess, i am immensely happy. thank you.”

which really only makes sense when you see Sebastian’s blog title.

Pete’s blog title used to make sense, because it kept the “Mein Herr” theme: “i’ve always said that i was a rover.” At one point, it was, “du sollst mich nicht mehr sehen, mein herr” because he’d just gotten dumped and was being emotional about it all over his blog title to restrain himself from actually being a shit to his ex.

But then his Princess finally got on tumblr, so Pete matched his blog title to Seb’s.

He would probably try to insist on matching icons, too, but Seb doesn’t see the point and he only got a non-default icon when he left Pete alone with his laptop for a few minutes and Pete picked a selfie for him to use.

For his own part, Pete’s icon changes every couple months, and when the novel starts, Pete’s icon is bearded Chris Evans holding a puppy.

the original posts they make: puns. shitposts. snarky liveblogs of whatever happens to be on TV at the moment. complaining about his coworkers. sub-post complaining about Todd (who usually doesn’t get it). all but outright saying that he is complaining about Todd (who still usually doesn’t get it). “random brief observations or whatever happens to be on Pete’s mind right now.” pictures of Seb’s dogs and/or their sponsor’s cat. pictures of Seb and Margot (give or take a few others, but seriously, Pete isn’t that close to very many people, and he usually only features Todd’s face when he can’t get out of it).

the kind of posts they reblog: Pete’s sidebar will tell you, “this is a personal blog, which means that i post whatever the hell i want and you can react however you want, but i’ll still keep posting whatever i want because it is my personal blog.” But to get a better idea:

cute pictures from blogs with themes like, “butches cuddling kittens” and, “bears cuddling puppies” and so on.

theatre, generally, and especially musical theatre. there’s a lot of general appreciation and theatre kid blogging — I mean, he’s right there and ready to reblog those photos from the one production of Midsummer’s Night’s Dream where Puck and Oberon are really, really close, or photos from when Ben Whishaw played Dionysus in Bakkhai — but Pete also reblogs more serious criticism, theatre history, commentary on the social and political significance of theatre, and so on.

Sometimes, he gets in a Mood and will lecture you on the significance of musical theatre specifically, and if he’s especially Moody, he’ll break out his copy of DH Miller’s Place For Us: An Essay on the Broadway Musical and flap loudly at you about why musical theatre is really and truly a dyed in the wool LGBTQ art form and stop trying to heterosexualize musical theatre already, it’s gross.

(On any given day, there is like a 95% chance that he will be in this Mood because Todd said something ignorant about musical theatre being, “stereotypical” and didn’t really listen when Pete went, “No, stop talking, here is why you’re wrong, you dumb-ass hipster white boy fuck” at him, and Pete just has a lot of residual feelings to express.)

Seriously, in the novel’s timeline, the critical pushback of historians, cultural critics, et al. going, “Um, actually? There are some aspects of this that are troubling for these reasons and we should really be having a Discussion about this” at Lin Manuel Miranda and Hamilton hasn’t started to happen yet…… but when it does? Pete will be all over it. He will be so. excited.

He won’t even be anti-Hamilton as such (like, he enjoyed the bootleg he watched since he won’t be seeing it live because jesus shit, tickets are expensive, but he also wouldn’t actually ask Seb to please use his parents’ connections to somehow find them Hamilton tickets or anything, because ehhhh, that sounds like a lot of work for a payoff that wouldn’t be worth it). Pete just loves it when people take musical theatre seriously as an art form and talk about it like that. It makes him so happy, he could just start crying.

politics or current events, sometimes. there aren’t really very many discernible trends in what he reblogs or doesn’t, on that front, beyond, “well, gay things and LGBTQ stuff more generally make pretty regular appearances” and, “Pete has tags specifically for, ‘disgruntled filipinx blogging’ and, ‘disgruntled biracial blogging.’”

fashion photography and fashion stuff generally, though:

1. it’s mostly for reference in his theatre things. Like, he does sort of enjoy the fashion stuff itself, and he has definitely reblogged some fashion things because he didn’t care about the clothes or the photography but thought the male models were gorgeous…… but even though he doesn’t usually work in costume design, Pete finds fashion stuff productively inspiring;

and 2. this happens a loooot less after February 2014, because that was when he got back from rehab (which his Mama insisted on because it was what Sebastian and Todd both did, even though Pete had already done his homework about outpatient options that didn’t involve going to Middle Of Nowhere, Minnesota, and he liked those ideas a lot better…… but he needed his Mama’s help to pay for any option, and she went, “inpatient rehab first, it’s definitely going to be better for you” and she genuinely believed that, so Pete cooperated)

Which was a big deal wrt Pete’s periodic fashion-blogging because one of the most important things that Pete got out of rehab was the one-on-one session where one of his the therapists said, “Peter, has anyone ever suggested that you might have an eating disorder?”

—which started as a, “face-crack of the century, wait what, what in the shit even are you talking about, of course they haven’t because I don’t have one…… right?” moment and eventually shifted his whole view of everything around and made him go, “holy shit, this explains so much” — and a lot of his initial resistance came out of how he’d never crashed and burned quite so obviously as people tend to think of when they hear the phrase, “eating disorder,” but still. that made so much sense out of so many things for him.

It also made him look more closely at his periodic fashion-blogging and go, “Oh. Some of this is definitely an exercise in self-abuse for me. I should maybe do that less and, like. Keep a better eye on that. And…… okay, wow, what the fuck even is my life, I really, really wish Mama had let me do the outpatient thing instead because holy shit, if they’d suggested that, I could go cling at Bastian right now instead of having to process this on my own with a bunch of nosy other patients sticking their faces into my business, like shit I appreciate the concern from most of them but I want to be with my best friend right now.”

(Pete got his clinging later, when he got back. And he unwittingly made Seb kick one of his slips off the wagon, because he’d spent almost a week coasting by on his ability to fake sobriety while telling himself things like, “okay, if I just moderately abuse my substances of choice, everything will totally work out fine”… but then Pete came home with the, “So, the shrinks in rehab said I have an eating disorder, and it makes sense and all, and I’m fucking terrified” news and Seb went, “okay no, that’s not going to work, Pete needs me to be there for him more than I want to be intoxicated”)

music. there isn’t a lot of rhyme or reason to what he’ll reblog, when, or why, because Pete will listen to almost anything.

One anecdote is that he hadn’t really had much exposure to Nicki Minaj, outside of, “Super Bass” and her verse in, “Monster,” until he deliberately went looking for Nicki stuff on tumblr because Todd, in his perpetually obnoxious hipster-ness, was trying to avoid her entirely because she was, “undeniably talented, but too mainstream.”

So, Pete wanted to annoy Todd and give him a huge middle finger for that shit because on one hand, yeah, uh huh. Way to say that about a black woman artist while actually paying (Bastian’s parents’) money to buy the Glee soundtrack legally, as if that is somehow LESS mainstream than Nicki Minaj, are you SERIOUS.

Also, Todd? YOU OWN MULTIPLE ALBUMS BY MAROON 5. STOP TALKING ABOUT HOW “ANTI-MAINSTREAM” YOU THINK YOU ARE BECAUSE YOU WEAR FLANNEL AND BUDDY HOLLY GLASSES AND YOUR ALLEGED “FILMS” MAKE NO SENSE.

And on the other, oh my god, shut up, you obnoxious fucking hipster, everybody already fucking gets it: you want to be original and edgy and insightful and cool, and you overcompensate because, on some level, you KNOW that you are none of these things, and you are an insecure little white boy who can’t deal with how ~*mainstream*~ more than a handful of his interests actually are, now shut up shut up shut up shut upppppppp.

Clearly, the best way to make this point to Todd was to loudly, insistently support Nicki Minaj and put her on Todd’s dash whenever possible.

That didn’t exactly work out as well as Pete wanted it to because Todd singularly failed to get the point (or maybe he did but just committed himself to acting like he didn’t, Pete’s not sure).

But on the other hand, Pete actually listened to more of Nicki’s music than, “Super Bass” and her verse in, “Monster” while doing this, and that’s the story of how Pete came to fanboy Nicki Minaj.

Chris Evans. A lot of Chris Evans. Not quite, “more Chris Evans than your body has room for,” but say, like…… two steps down from a lethal dose of Chris Evans.

Not that Pete neglects the rest of the MCU, exactly, but he’s like 80% there for Chris Evans, 10% there for Anthony Mackie, 5% there for Sebastian Stan, 3% there for Mark Ruffalo, and 2% there for literally everything else. And it shows. Because he really blatantly favors Chris Evans.

These numbers will change somewhat when CACW actually happens in-character, because Chadwick Boseman. But Pete’s number one will still be Chris Evans.

Tangentially: Please do not ask Pete if he prefers CEvans shaven or bearded. Just don’t.

Don’t do it because his answer will be, “I prefer Chris Evans right here, right now, with his tongue in my mouth and his hand on my ass” and he will think this is clever every. single. fucking. time.

Don’t talk to him about Tom Hiddleston, either. But……… you should avoid doing this for very different reasons.

Like, without any external influence, Pete’s opinion of Tom Hiddleston would just be, “meh *shrugs* whatever, like I haven’t seen a million sad puppy-eyed weird-but-pretty edgelord white bad boys before. Like I don’t have a cute but troubled pretty white boy with big sad Bambi eyes for a best friend. Okay, he’s talented, but ugggggggh, I’m BORED”

—but see, Todd kind of has a Thing for Tom Hiddleston. Todd kind of loves Tom Hiddleston.

Which makes Pete determined to really not love Tom Hiddleston, literally just to annoy and spite Todd for, “having terrible, horrible, no good, very bad, boring as shit taste — my Princess excluded.”

So, uh. Don’t do that. (Trying to talk to him about RDJ isn’t advised against, but only because Pete will just ignore it and pretend he has no idea who that is.)

Oh, also, don’t expect Pete to care that the MCU and the XMCU are separate entities, or care that the canon of the XMCU can be a complete cluster-fuck, or give a fuck that all of the different Spiderman movies are not necessarily related to each other.

Don’t expect him to give a fuck about any of this because he thinks it’s way more entertaining to try and shove all of them into the same universe, just like you’d do with the actual comics.

Also, he has learned that he can get his cousin Emerson, Emerson’s weird nerd-bro friends, and Todd wound up really easily and make them do stupid things by feigning like he has no idea that Chris Evans and James McAvoy will not ever cross paths in a Marvel movie because of dumb copyright reasons, wondering why Hugh Jackman’s name isn’t on the cast list for Age of Ultron

and saying things like, “You know what would be the best possible thing for Thor: Ragnarok? At the midpoint, Sir Ian McKellan makes a grand entrance from behind some random curtains that weren’t there five minutes ago, purple cape billowing behind him, and Magneto punches Loki in the face. Boom, Ragnarok averted. They fill the rest of the movie’s runtime with Chris Evans taking me to dinner and a movie within a movie, it’d be totally meta, right? :D”

Yeah, Pete is also that person who would go to ComicCon in a “totally brilliant cosplay” as, “the World’s #1 S*tucky Shipper,” get super-method about his real-time LARPing as The World’s #1 S*tucky Shipper (but like, using actual method-acting, not, “Jared Leto sends giant health hazards to, harasses, and is otherwise horrible to his costars because lawl method” method-acting), and use it to satirize and take the piss out of both really OTT shippers and the people who act like shippers are Ruining Every Forever because they want to ship.

He’d also tell a nerd-bro that his favorite Gandalf quote is, “Do or do not, there is no try” but his second favorite Gandalf quote is, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one,” and point to a picture of Michael Gambon’s Dumbledore and identify him as Gandalf while identifying a picture of the Fourth Doctor as Dumbledore, all just to annoy the nerd-bro, then yawn and saunter away while the nerd-bro has an angry meltdown.

Someday, Pete is going to troll the wrong person (again) and it will get him into really deep shit (again) that he won’t be able to wriggle out of by being charming and witty (like he usually does when he gets himself into these situations), but his take on this is, “Hey, as long as I don’t unwittingly troll a super-villain, it’s not actually that bad. What is the worst thing that could possibly happen.”

(Seb would point of that that’s exactly what he said before getting shocked into three major heart attacks by another mutant, which in turn triggered his first transformation into a nine-foot-tall wolf-man? And that he has said it in many, many other situations that immediately went from Bad to Worse to Shitty to Excremental to “the motherfucking shit-pits that trailed down from the hill of Golgotha” because saying things like, “what’s the worst that could happen” and, “what could possibly go wrong” is seriously tempting fate to kick your ass — but he will also admit that Pete has better luck on this front than he does, and that Pete has better coping skills, and that Peter Paolo Matthew Arden just has his shit more together than Seb does in general, so he’s somewhat less likely to end up in Golgotha levels of shit from this.)

(But, please, Pete? He would really, really, really like it if you could please act like you care whether or not you get into a mountain of shit from tempting fate by trolling people so liberally, like. Please. Pretty please. He loves you so much and knows that he can’t protect you from the ups and downs of life itself, but you’ve already had so much bad shit happen to you that Seb wants to keep you safe from as much unnecessary bad shit as possible, and…… please? (⊙︿⊙) )

cat pictures. dog pictures. wolf pictures. guinea pig pictures. iguana pictures. giraffe pictures. if there is a cute animal out there, being cute, it has a place on Pete’s blog. especially if he can find an excuse to tag Seb in them and go, “it you” (which he mostly limits to cats and, after Seb trips and falls into mutant werewolf superpowers, wolves — but he’s also gone, “it you” on pictures of lizards, sharks, lions [specifically, the “do lions blep” post], giraffes sticking out their weird blue tongues, tapirs, and pugs wearing sunglasses shaped like flowers).

Pete watched a bit of Community because Seb seemed really into it, and he thought it was okay, not enough to really reblog it that much but okay — but he definitely reblogged a gifset of Troy going, “awww, I wanna lick it” over a puppy from “Cooperative Calligraphy,” specifically so he could tag Seb and go, “awww, Princess, it you.”

In fairness, Seb deserves that and totally agrees that he deserves it because sometimes, he needs a chaperone when he goes to the local ASPCA shelter, or he might well try to adopt all of the dogs. Which Pete finds adorable in theory, and really endearing from his Princess…… but also, Seb? You have six babies already. You would have seven if you hadn’t lost Chewie at the end of April, assuming that you still adopted Cat without losing Chewie. Cool it. Chill. You do not need more dogs right now.

Pete has also been known to go, “awww, Princess, it us” on photosets of cats and dogs cuddling with each other, and “it me” on pictures of pugs embracing wine mom culture

(the latter of which, in retrospect, he kind of regrets doing. Like, he more or less stands by it, but it made Seb get Worried about him and go, “Are you okay? Do you need to talk? Because you were just getting on my ass about not making self-deprecating jokes about sobriety because it worries you, but now it kinda looks like you’re doing the exact same thing, and I’m just?? Should I be concerned, Pete? Do you want to talk about something? Are you okay??? I love you, you’re important to me, I can talk if you want to” which was not what Pete intended at all.

Like, on one hand, he hates making his best friend worry about him because if you ask Pete, it’s only natural for them to worry about each other, but both of them also need to work on worrying about themselves a bit more effectively. Because precedent says that both of them sort of suck at it, probably especially when they think that they’re doing okay with it.

On the other, he hates making Seb worry because Pete is still working on getting used to the feeling of someone caring about you. Like, even with Seb, who’s done things for him like blow off an entire weekend of shit to get down to Yonkers from Poughkeepsie and come out to Pete’s undergrad after he’d had a really messy breakup that caused a wave of drama in his entire friend-group, because Pete went to a small liberal arts school full of theatre kids (even among people who weren’t in the theatre program), and the gossip mill was ridiculous, and everything was a fucking disaster…

…so, Seb lied to his prep school teachers about a vaguely defined, “family emergency,” lied to his grandparents about not having any classes on Friday for some contrived reason to get them to give him a ride to the Metro-North station in Poughkeepsie, booked it down to Yonkers, and spent a three-day weekend with Pete.

Eventually, his grandparents found out what was going on, because Seb called his Mom that afternoon to go, “Hey, jsyk, I’m in Bronxville with Pete earlier than we’d planned this weekend, I’m probably going to use the credit card in the City tonight, we’ll be safe and stuff, but his ex-boyfriend’s a jerk and it’s screwing things up with all his friends too and he’s really upset and he needed somebody to be there with him who’s not involved in any of it” — but by that point, he and Pete had already had their three-day weekend, so it was just kinda whatever.

But, yeah. Like, Seb’s done stuff like that for Pete since they first really started getting to know each other, but unfortunately, Pete’s father and older brother are people who exist. And some of Pete’s dickbag ex-boyfriends are also people who exist. And between all of them, Pete’s wound up having a hard time with the concept of people genuinely caring about him, and even with Seb, he can bristle and go, “No, stop, this doesn’t make sense, why are you doing this, ‘caring about me as a person thing’”

And on the dorsal fin, Pete doesn’t like making Seb worry about him too much because when he’s at his best, Sebastian is a loving, generous, selfless person who is an amazing friend and cares about people for their own benefit even if he isn’t their friend…

but this is not an ideal world, and under all of that, Seb also has a problem where he over-relies on other people for a sense of stability and a sense of who the Hell he even is (the TL;DR of why is, “untreated clinical depression and some of the longterm side-effects thereof”)

and when things go wrong for the people Seb loves, things can start going wrong for Seb himself in short order, because he worries about them, feels their pain a bit too intensely (but not outside the human average enough to make it mutant-level empathy), and generally turns the volume on his human disaster-ness up to eleven.

Like, in the past year-and-a-half, Seb’s had ten separate stumbles off the wagon, and four of them started in close proximity to Something Bad happening to someone he loves — e.g., his Dad had a routine arthroscopic surgery, which went well enough on its own, but Abe had a bad post-op reaction to the anesthesia, and Marceline told her other three kids to basically tell Seb enough to keep him in the loop, but don’t get specific because he’ll worry. Unfortunately, this left Seb with a lot of questions, which made him worry, which made him feel helpless and miserable and scared…

……and then he dropped off the radar for thirty-six hours and when Todd went to his place to check on him, he found Seb coming down from being strung out on Percocet. And, like, okay, on the plus? Seb hadn’t taken all of what he’d gotten his hands on and had flushed the rest before Todd had even gotten there…… but he’d still been really strung out, and he was less than entirely enjoyable to be around while coming down (like, Todd called Nick, Seb’s sponsor, for him, and Seb spent most of their call groaning when Todd said something that was true but that Seb didn’t like him saying)

……and Pete got to see this when Todd called him, going, “Hey, it’s cool if you can’t, since I know you, like, just got back from your Mom-mandated rehab visit a couple weeks ago, but…… uh. Seb hasn’t eaten lately because he got strung out and forgot about it, and I’m not allowed to use his kitchen because he likes it un-exploded, and I don’t want him to be alone, so, like? Can you maybe come over here and cook something? Or take his credit card and get take-out? Or if not, just say so and I’ll try calling Margot again, but…… pleeeeease?”

So, yeah, uh. Pete would really like to not be the cause for that sort of thing, because he doesn’t want to do that to his Princess — especially since you can sometimes get Seb to not totally lose his head about things, and in fairness, he is slowly getting better, but he’s also a stubborn jackass about calming down [which Pete can’t actually judge him for, since Pete is arguably even worse on the, “stubborn jackass” front sometimes, but still] — and also because it would really fuck Pete’s mental health up for Seb to go off the rails. Partly because Seb would be off the rails, and partly because Pete would feel guilty about it.

So, yeah. Long story short, Pete has a lot of feelings about why he regrets going, “it me” on the picture of the pug embracing wine mom culture.)

Golden Girls anything. He’s only even seen a few episodes of it, but he loves it anyway. He has often gone, “Princess, it us” on posts that featured both Blanche and Dorothy, but no one’s really sure if he’s Dorothy and Seb is Blanche, or if it’s the other way around. Pete isn’t even sure, but he’d probably tell you that it depends on the post.

In his defense, both he and Seb have responded to, “better late than [blank]” with the answer, “pregnant!” before, and generally, they both have decent claim to either role.

Seb personally feels like he’s probably more like Rose, but Pete refuses to let him be Rose. Todd is Rose. Todd has to be Rose because as much as Pete likes Betty White, he’s not actually that fond of Rose, and views her in much the same way that he views Todd: they’re kiiiiind of cute sometimes when they aren’t trying too hard and they bring something to the group that Pete would miss if it went away…… but they can also be really fucking nerve-grating, whoops.

Also, Seb isn’t allowed to be Blanche for her, “I looooove a tight man! A tight man with cast-iron pecs… thighs that could choke a bear… butt you could eat breakfast off of… hnnnnnnnnnngh” line

For one thing, Seb isn’t allowed to be Blanche for that line because he’s not discriminatory or anything with body type, but his favorite exes have all been at least a little bit chubby, so like… the exact opposite of a tight man.

For another thing, he can’t say the line right. He doesn’t suck at it or anything, but it’s just missing something. Probably conviction. Because Seb’s preference is not actually for a tight man and he’s putting less effort into the characterization than Pete is.

With anyone else, Seb would hold that he’s putting less effort into the characterization because it’s just supposed to be fun, but…… This is fun for Pete, so whatever. Do your Dramatic™ thing, Pete. Enjoy it.

the first person they followed: the lgbtlaughs blog

what kind of theme they’d have: light background, dark text, straightforward with easy navigation and space for a sidebar pic and links. Not too fancy, but clean and nice-looking.

what kind of text posts they make at 2am: “oh my god it is motherfucking tech week why are these idiots still calling LINE”

#that story with the mutants that i should find a working title for fml #pete arden: dramatic disaster #mine: writing #mine: shitposting #memes for ts #ocs tag #oc questions #tumblrisms #pete x seb #pete & todd #drugs ref// mental health issues ref// eating disorders ref// abuse ref// addiction ref// #brief passing mentions of pet death & medical/surgery things

[newromanticsvibes]

Songs that made me cry seeing Hamilton Chicago last night:

Burn

Satisfied

It’s Quiet Uptown

Who Lives Who Dies Who Tells Your Story

One Last Time

It was April 2016, and I found myself with a roommate who couldn’t believe I hadn’t listened to Hamilton yet and a half hour commute by colectivo to and from class in Buenos Aires. So, begrudgingly, I jumped on board the trend train and downloaded the soundtrack. And my life has never been the same.

Think about it: music, history, and intricate writing all put together on the same stage (or in the same songs). It unites some of my strongest passions, and it quickly became my soundtrack to the city during my time in Buenos Aires. I listened to it on the busses, as I walked, as I got ready in the tiny bathroom in the morning, and at night when I couldn’t fall asleep. I lived and breathed the characters and the lyrics of Hamilton at the same time that I was living and breathing a new, truer sense of self that God was calling me to step into. My friend Dawson spent two weeks calling me Aaron Burr, Sir. The Schuyler Sisters reminded me what I loved about the city. I listened to Wait For It as I slogged home in the spitting rain one day, and it sums up that moment perfectly in my memory. Obviously, songs like Burn and Stay Alive and The World Was Wide Enough and my all-time, hands-down favorite, Satisfied, pull at the heartstrings.

Yep, the whole album is flawless. But there’s one song that stands apart in my mind. Non-Stop was my song for confidence, because of this one line-

How do you write like tomorrow won’t arrive?

How do you write like you need it to survive?

How do you write every second you’re alive?

The music hits its peak here, the full ensemble backs up Burr’s voice, and the words couldn’t speak more deeply to my soul. I am telling stories in my head every second that I move through the world, for better or worse. Writing is the same basic function for my brain as breathing, and I love that.

One song that never clicked with me until last night, when I saw it live, is Hurricane. It’s the only solo song for Alexander Hamilton in the entire production, and it essentially establishes that he’s about to dig himself deeper into a hole he’s already tripped into headfirst. Yet watching it unfold live- with the lights, the pause between each note, and the ensemble’s choreography – it’s really a song about why Hamilton writes. In the face of every obstacle, throughout his whole life, he’s picked up a pen. And when there weren’t even any obstacles, he was so bent on leaving a legacy that he wrote his own problems into existence. It was an escape that only sucked him deeper into whatever was holding him captive.

Maybe that’s getting a little deep for Broadway, but in the moment I processed that, I flashed back to the climax of Non-Stop and wondered – why do I write? Why is this thing so ingrained in the who and how I am in the world?

I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t ever written my own problems into existence, or written myself deeper into one, inside my head if not out loud. Yet I don’t think the reason I write is to escape, or to leave any sort of legacy.

I write to get to know my own mind. I tell stories because I believe they matter, and I want to know why and how. At worst I write for the sake of writing, but at best I write for the joy.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of the musical Hamilton, has described it as a “love letter to writers” in its own way. And it is. Every moment has its worth in capturing, in putting words to, and at the end of it all, you have to know why you’re doing it for it to be worth anything at all.

And I know that I’ll see that show a thousand times more in my lifetime. To relive every moment and memory that I’ve connected with the songs – and to remind me why I write.

    Let me tell you about Hamilton.  Songs that made me cry seeing Hamilton Chicago last night: Burn Satisfied It's Quiet Uptown Who Lives Who Dies Who Tells Your Story…

[thesnhuup]

Pop Picks – February 11, 2019

February 11, 2019

What I’m listening to:

Raphael Saadiq has been around for quite a while, as a musician, writer, and producer. He’s new to me and I love his old school R&B sound. Like Leon Bridges, he brings a contemporary freshness to the genre, sounding like a young Stevie Wonder (listen to “You’re The One That I Like”). Rock and Roll may be largely dead, but R&B persists – maybe because the former was derivative of the latter and never as good (and I say that as a Rock and Roll fan). I’m embarrassed to only have discovered Saadiq so late in his career, but it’s a delight to have done so.

What I’m reading:

Just finished Marilynne Robinson’s Home, part of her trilogy that includes the Pulitzer Prize winning first novel, Gilead, and the book after Home, Lila. Robinson is often described as a Christian writer, but not in a conventional sense. In this case, she gives us a modern version of the prodigal son and tells the story of what comes after he is welcomed back home. It’s not pretty. Robinson is a self-described Calvinist, thus character begets fate in Robinson’s world view and redemption is at best a question. There is something of Faulkner in her work (I am much taken with his famous “The past is never past” quote after a week in the deep South), her style is masterful, and like Faulkner, she builds with these three novels a whole universe in the small town of Gilead. Start with Gilead to better enjoy Home.

What I’m watching:

Sex Education was the most fun series we’ve seen in ages and we binged watched it on Netflix. A British homage to John Hughes films like The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Pretty in Pink, it feels like a mash up of American and British high schools. Focusing on the relationship of Maeve, the smart bad girl, and Otis, the virginal and awkward son of a sex therapist (played with brilliance by Gillian Anderson), it is laugh aloud funny and also evolves into more substance and depth (the abortion episode is genius). The sex scenes are somehow raunchy and charming and inoffensive at the same time and while ostensibly about teenagers (it feels like it is explaining contemporary teens to adults in many ways), the adults are compelling in their good and bad ways. It has been renewed for a second season, which is a gift.

Archive

January 3, 2019

What I’m listening to:

My listening choices usually refer to music, but this time I’m going with Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast on genius and the song Hallelujah. It tells the story of Leonard Cohen’s much-covered song Hallelujah and uses it as a lens on kinds of genius and creativity. Along the way, he brings in Picasso and Cézanne, Elvis Costello, and more. Gladwell is a good storyteller and if you love pop music, as I do, and Hallelujah, as I do (and you should), you’ll enjoy this podcast. We tend to celebrate the genius who seems inspired in the moment, creating new work like lightning strikes, but this podcast has me appreciating incremental creativity in a new way. It’s compelling and fun at the same time.

What I’m reading:

Just read Clay Christensen’s new book, The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty. This was an advance copy, so soon available. Clay is an old friend and a huge influence on how we have grown SNHU and our approach to innovation. This book is so compelling, because we know attempts at development have so often been a failure and it is often puzzling to understand why some countries with desperate poverty and huge challenges somehow come to thrive (think S. Korea, Singapore, 19th C. America), while others languish. Clay offers a fresh way of thinking about development through the lens of his research on innovation and it is compelling. I bet this book gets a lot of attention, as most of his work does. I also suspect that many in the development community will hate it, as it calls into question the approach and enormous investments we have made in an attempt to lift countries out of poverty. A provocative read and, as always, Clay is a good storyteller.

What I’m watching:

Just watched Leave No Trace and should have guessed that it was directed by Debra Granik. She did Winter’s Bone, the extraordinary movie that launched Jennifer Lawrence’s career. Similarly, this movie features an amazing young actor, Thomasin McKenzie, and visits lives lived on the margins. In this case, a veteran suffering PTSD, and his 13-year-old daughter. The movie is patient, is visually lush, and justly earned 100% on Rotten Tomatoes (I have a rule to never watch anything under 82%). Everything in this film is under control and beautifully understated (aside from the visuals) – confident acting, confident directing, and so humane. I love the lack of flashbacks, the lack of sensationalism – the movie trusts the viewer, rare in this age of bombast. A lovely film.

December 4, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Spending a week in New Zealand, we had endless laughs listening to the Kiwi band, Flight of the Conchords. Lots of comedic bands are funny, but the music is only okay or worse. These guys are funny – hysterical really – and the music is great. They have an uncanny ability to parody almost any style. In both New Zealand and Australia, we found a wry sense of humor that was just delightful and no better captured than with this duo. You don’t have to be in New Zealand to enjoy them.

What I’m reading:

I don’t often reread. For two reasons: A) I have so many books on my “still to be read” pile that it seems daunting to also reread books I loved before, and B) it’s because I loved them once that I’m a little afraid to read them again. That said, I was recently asked to list my favorite book of all time and I answered Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. But I don’t really know if that’s still true (and it’s an impossible question anyway – favorite book? On what day? In what mood?), so I’m rereading it and it feels like being with an old friend. It has one of my very favorite scenes ever: the card game between Levin and Kitty that leads to the proposal and his joyous walking the streets all night.

What I’m watching:

Blindspotting is billed as a buddy-comedy. Wow does that undersell it and the drama is often gripping. I loved Daveed Diggs in Hamilton, didn’t like his character in Black-ish, and think he is transcendent in this film he co-wrote with Rafael Casal, his co-star.  The film is a love song to Oakland in many ways, but also a gut-wrenching indictment of police brutality, systemic racism and bias, and gentrification. The film has the freshness and raw visceral impact of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. A great soundtrack, genre mixing, and energy make it one of my favorite movies of 2018.

October 15, 2018

What I’m listening to:

We had the opportunity to see our favorite band, The National, live in Dallas two weeks ago. Just after watching Mistaken for Strangers, the documentary sort of about the band. So we’ve spent a lot of time going back into their earlier work, listening to songs we don’t know well, and reaffirming that their musicality, smarts, and sound are both original and astoundingly good. They did not disappoint in concert and it is a good thing their tour ended, as we might just spend all of our time and money following them around. Matt Berninger is a genius and his lead vocals kill me (and because they are in my range, I can actually sing along!). Their arrangements are profoundly good and go right to whatever brain/heart wiring that pulls one in and doesn’t let them go.

What I’m reading:

Who is Richard Powers and why have I only discovered him now, with his 12th book? Overstory is profoundly good, a book that is essential and powerful and makes me look at my everyday world in new ways. In short, a dizzying example of how powerful can be narrative in the hands of a master storyteller. I hesitate to say it’s the best environmental novel I’ve ever read (it is), because that would put this book in a category. It is surely about the natural world, but it is as much about we humans. It’s monumental and elegiac and wondrous at all once. Cancel your day’s schedule and read it now. Then plant a tree. A lot of them.

What I’m watching:

Bo Burnham wrote and directed Eighth Grade and Elsie Fisher is nothing less than amazing as its star (what’s with these new child actors; see Florida Project). It’s funny and painful and touching. It’s also the single best film treatment that I have seen of what it means to grow up in a social media shaped world. It’s a reminder that growing up is hard. Maybe harder now in a world of relentless, layered digital pressure to curate perfect lives that are far removed from the natural messy worlds and selves we actually inhabit. It’s a well-deserved 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and I wonder who dinged it for the missing 2%.

September 7, 2018

What I’m listening to:

With a cover pointing back to the Beastie Boys’ 1986 Licensed to Ill, Eminem’s quietly released Kamikaze is not my usual taste, but I’ve always admired him for his “all out there” willingness to be personal, to call people out, and his sheer genius with language. I thought Daveed Diggs could rap fast, but Eminem is supersonic at moments, and still finds room for melody. Love that he includes Joyner Lucas, whose “I’m Not Racist” gets added to the growing list of simply amazing music videos commenting on race in America. There are endless reasons why I am the least likely Eminem fan, but when no one is around to make fun of me, I’ll put it on again.

What I’m reading:

Lesley Blume’s Everyone Behaves Badly, which is the story behind Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and his time in 1920s Paris (oh, what a time – see Midnight in Paris if you haven’t already). Of course, Blume disabuses my romantic ideas of that time and place and everyone is sort of (or profoundly so) a jerk, especially…no spoiler here…Hemingway. That said, it is a compelling read and coming off the Henry James inspired prose of Mrs. Osmond, it made me appreciate more how groundbreaking was Hemingway’s modern prose style. Like his contemporary Picasso, he reinvented the art and it can be easy to forget, these decades later, how profound was the change and its impact. And it has bullfights.

What I’m watching:

Chloé Zhao’s The Rider is just exceptional. It’s filmed on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which provides a stunning landscape, and it feels like a classic western reinvented for our times. The main characters are played by the real-life people who inspired this narrative (but feels like a documentary) film. Brady Jandreau, playing himself really, owns the screen. It’s about manhood, honor codes, loss, and resilience – rendered in sensitive, nuanced, and heartfelt ways. It feels like it could be about large swaths of America today. Really powerful.

August 16, 2018

What I’m listening to:

In my Spotify Daily Mix was Percy Sledge’s When A Man Loves A Woman, one of the world’s greatest love songs. Go online and read the story of how the song was discovered and recorded. There are competing accounts, but Sledge said he improvised it after a bad breakup. It has that kind of aching spontaneity. It is another hit from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, one of the GREAT music hotbeds, along with Detroit, Nashville, and Memphis. Our February Board meeting is in Alabama and I may finally have to do the pilgrimage road trip to Muscle Shoals and then Memphis, dropping in for Sunday services at the church where Rev. Al Green still preaches and sings. If the music is all like this, I will be saved.

What I’m reading:

John Banville’s Mrs. Osmond, his homage to literary idol Henry James and an imagined sequel to James’ 1881 masterpiece Portrait of a Lady. Go online and read the first paragraph of Chapter 25. He is…profoundly good. Makes me want to never write again, since anything I attempt will feel like some other, lowly activity in comparison to his mastery of language, image, syntax. This is slow reading, every sentence to be savored.

What I’m watching:

I’ve always respected Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but we just watched the documentary RGB. It is over-the-top great and she is now one of my heroes. A superwoman in many ways and the documentary is really well done. There are lots of scenes of her speaking to crowds and the way young women, especially law students, look at her is touching.  And you can’t help but fall in love with her now late husband Marty. See this movie and be reminded of how important is the Law.

July 23, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Spotify’s Summer Acoustic playlist has been on repeat quite a lot. What a fun way to listen to artists new to me, including The Paper Kites, Hollow Coves, and Fleet Foxes, as well as old favorites like Leon Bridges and Jose Gonzalez. Pretty chill when dialing back to a summer pace, dining on the screen porch or reading a book.

What I’m reading:

Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. Founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson tells of the racial injustice (and the war on the poor our judicial system perpetuates as well) that he discovered as a young graduate from Harvard Law School and his fight to address it. It is in turn heartbreaking, enraging, and inspiring. It is also about mercy and empathy and justice that reads like a novel. Brilliant.

What I’m watching:

Fauda. We watched season one of this Israeli thriller. It was much discussed in Israel because while it focuses on an ex-special agent who comes out of retirement to track down a Palestinian terrorist, it was willing to reveal the complexity, richness, and emotions of Palestinian lives. And the occasional brutality of the Israelis. Pretty controversial stuff in Israel. Lior Raz plays Doron, the main character, and is compelling and tough and often hard to like. He’s a mess. As is the world in which he has to operate. We really liked it, and also felt guilty because while it may have been brave in its treatment of Palestinians within the Israeli context, it falls back into some tired tropes and ultimately falls short on this front.

June 11, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Like everyone else, I’m listening to Pusha T drop the mic on Drake. Okay, not really, but do I get some points for even knowing that? We all walk around with songs that immediately bring us back to a time or a place. Songs are time machines. We are coming up on Father’s Day. My own dad passed away on Father’s Day back in 1994 and I remembering dutifully getting through the wake and funeral and being strong throughout. Then, sitting alone in our kitchen, Don Henley’s The End of the Innocence came on and I lost it. When you lose a parent for the first time (most of us have two after all) we lose our innocence and in that passage, we suddenly feel adult in a new way (no matter how old we are), a longing for our own childhood, and a need to forgive and be forgiven. Listen to the lyrics and you’ll understand. As Wordsworth reminds us in In Memoriam, there are seasons to our grief and, all these years later, this song no longer hits me in the gut, but does transport me back with loving memories of my father. I’ll play it Father’s Day.

What I’m reading:

The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin. I am not a reader of fantasy or sci-fi, though I understand they can be powerful vehicles for addressing the very real challenges of the world in which we actually live. I’m not sure I know of a more vivid and gripping illustration of that fact than N. K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award winning novel The Fifth Season, first in her Broken Earth trilogy. It is astounding. It is the fantasy parallel to The Underground Railroad, my favorite recent read, a depiction of subjugation, power, casual violence, and a broken world in which our hero(s) struggle, suffer mightily, and still, somehow, give us hope. It is a tour de force book. How can someone be this good a writer? The first 30 pages pained me (always with this genre, one must learn a new, constructed world, and all of its operating physics and systems of order), and then I could not put it down. I panicked as I neared the end, not wanting to finish the book, and quickly ordered the Obelisk Gate, the second novel in the trilogy, and I can tell you now that I’ll be spending some goodly portion of my weekend in Jemisin’s other world.

What I’m watching:

The NBA Finals and perhaps the best basketball player of this generation. I’ve come to deeply respect LeBron James as a person, a force for social good, and now as an extraordinary player at the peak of his powers. His superhuman play during the NBA playoffs now ranks with the all-time greats, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, MJ, Kobe, and the demi-god that was Bill Russell. That his Cavs lost in a 4-game sweep is no surprise. It was a mediocre team being carried on the wide shoulders of James (and matched against one of the greatest teams ever, the Warriors, and the Harry Potter of basketball, Steph Curry) and, in some strange way, his greatness is amplified by the contrast with the rest of his team. It was a great run.

May 24, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I’ve always liked Alicia Keys and admired her social activism, but I am hooked on her last album Here. This feels like an album finally commensurate with her anger, activism, hope, and grit. More R&B and Hip Hop than is typical for her, I think this album moves into an echelon inhabited by a Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On or Beyonce’s Formation. Social activism and outrage rarely make great novels, but they often fuel great popular music. Here is a terrific example.

What I’m reading:

Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad may be close to a flawless novel. Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer, it chronicles the lives of two runaway slaves, Cora and Caeser, as they try to escape the hell of plantation life in Georgia.  It is an often searing novel and Cora is one of the great heroes of American literature. I would make this mandatory reading in every high school in America, especially in light of the absurd revisionist narratives of “happy and well cared for” slaves. This is a genuinely great novel, one of the best I’ve read, the magical realism and conflating of time periods lifts it to another realm of social commentary, relevance, and a blazing indictment of America’s Original Sin, for which we remain unabsolved.

What I’m watching:

I thought I knew about The Pentagon Papers, but The Post, a real-life political thriller from Steven Spielberg taught me a lot, features some of our greatest actors, and is so timely given the assault on our democratic institutions and with a presidency out of control. It is a reminder that a free and fearless press is a powerful part of our democracy, always among the first targets of despots everywhere. The story revolves around the legendary Post owner and D.C. doyenne, Katharine Graham. I had the opportunity to see her son, Don Graham, right after he saw the film, and he raved about Meryl Streep’s portrayal of his mother. Liked it a lot more than I expected.

April 27, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I mentioned John Prine in a recent post and then on the heels of that mention, he has released a new album, The Tree of Forgiveness, his first new album in ten years. Prine is beloved by other singer songwriters and often praised by the inscrutable God that is Bob Dylan.  Indeed, Prine was frequently said to be the “next Bob Dylan” in the early part of his career, though he instead carved out his own respectable career and voice, if never with the dizzying success of Dylan. The new album reflects a man in his 70s, a cancer survivor, who reflects on life and its end, but with the good humor and empathy that are hallmarks of Prine’s music. “When I Get To Heaven” is a rollicking, fun vision of what comes next and a pure delight. A charming, warm, and often terrific album.

What I’m reading:

I recently read Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, on many people’s Top Ten lists for last year and for good reason. It is sprawling, multi-generational, and based in the world of Japanese occupied Korea and then in the Korean immigrant’s world of Oaska, so our key characters become “tweeners,” accepted in neither world. It’s often unspeakably sad, and yet there is resiliency and love. There is also intimacy, despite the time and geographic span of the novel. It’s breathtakingly good and like all good novels, transporting.

What I’m watching:

I adore Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 film, Pan’s Labyrinth, and while I’m not sure his Shape of Water is better, it is a worthy follow up to the earlier masterpiece (and more of a commercial success). Lots of critics dislike the film, but I’m okay with a simple retelling of a Beauty and the Beast love story, as predictable as it might be. The acting is terrific, it is visually stunning, and there are layers of pain as well as social and political commentary (the setting is the US during the Cold War) and, no real spoiler here, the real monsters are humans, the military officer who sees over the captured aquatic creature. It is hauntingly beautiful and its depiction of hatred to those who are different or “other” is painfully resonant with the time in which we live. Put this on your “must see” list.

March 18, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Sitting on a plane for hours (and many more to go; geez, Australia is far away) is a great opportunity to listen to new music and to revisit old favorites. This time, it is Lucy Dacus and her album Historians, the new sophomore release from a 22-year old indie artist that writes with relatable, real-life lyrics. Just on a second listen and while she insists this isn’t a break up record (as we know, 50% of all great songs are break up songs), it is full of loss and pain. Worth the listen so far. For the way back machine, it’s John Prine and In Spite of Ourselves (that title track is one of the great love songs of all time), a collection of duets with some of his “favorite girl singers” as he once described them. I have a crush on Iris Dement (for a really righteously angry song try her Wasteland of the Free), but there is also EmmyLou Harris, the incomparable Dolores Keane, and Lucinda Williams. Very different albums, both wonderful.

What I’m reading:

Jane Mayer’s New Yorker piece on Christopher Steele presents little that is new, but she pulls it together in a terrific and coherent whole that is illuminating and troubling at the same time. Not only for what is happening, but for the complicity of the far right in trying to discredit that which should be setting off alarm bells everywhere. Bob Mueller may be the most important defender of the democracy at this time. A must read.

What I’m watching:

Homeland is killing it this season and is prescient, hauntingly so. Russian election interference, a Bannon-style hate radio demagogue, alienated and gun toting militia types, and a president out of control. It’s fabulous, even if it feels awfully close to the evening news. 

March 8, 2018

What I’m listening to:

We have a family challenge to compile our Top 100 songs. It is painful. Only 100? No more than three songs by one artist? Wait, why is M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” on my list? Should it just be The Clash from whom she samples? Can I admit to guilty pleasure songs? Hey, it’s my list and I can put anything I want on it. So I’m listening to the list while I work and the song playing right now is Tom Petty’s “The Wild One, Forever,” a B-side single that was never a hit and that remains my favorite Petty song. Also, “Evangeline” by Los Lobos. It evokes a night many years ago, with friends at Pearl Street in Northampton, MA, when everyone danced well past 1AM in a hot, sweaty, packed club and the band was a revelation. Maybe the best music night of our lives and a reminder that one’s 100 Favorite Songs list is as much about what you were doing and where you were in your life when those songs were playing as it is about the music. It’s not a list. It’s a soundtrack for this journey.

What I’m reading:

Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy was in the NY Times top ten books of 2017 list and it is easy to see why. Lockwood brings remarkable and often surprising imagery, metaphor, and language to her prose memoir and it actually threw me off at first. It then all became clear when someone told me she is a poet. The book is laugh aloud funny, which masks (or makes safer anyway) some pretty dark territory. Anyone who grew up Catholic, whether lapsed or not, will resonate with her story. She can’t resist a bawdy anecdote and her family provides some of the most memorable characters possible, especially her father, her sister, and her mother, who I came to adore. Best thing I’ve read in ages.

What I’m watching:

The Florida Project, a profoundly good movie on so many levels. Start with the central character, six-year old (at the time of the filming) Brooklynn Prince, who owns – I mean really owns – the screen. This is pure acting genius and at that age? Astounding. Almost as astounding is Bria Vinaite, who plays her mother. She was discovered on Instagram and had never acted before this role, which she did with just three weeks of acting lessons. She is utterly convincing and the tension between the child’s absolute wonder and joy in the world with her mother’s struggle to provide, to be a mother, is heartwarming and heartbreaking all at once. Willem Dafoe rightly received an Oscar nomination for his supporting role. This is a terrific movie.

February 12, 2018

What I’m listening to:

So, I have a lot of friends of age (I know you’re thinking 40s, but I just turned 60) who are frozen in whatever era of music they enjoyed in college or maybe even in their thirties. There are lots of times when I reach back into the catalog, since music is one of those really powerful and transporting senses that can take you through time (smell is the other one, though often underappreciated for that power). Hell, I just bought a turntable and now spending time in vintage vinyl shops. But I’m trying to take a lesson from Pat, who revels in new music and can as easily talk about North African rap music and the latest National album as Meet the Beatles, her first ever album. So, I’ve been listening to Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy winning Damn. While it may not be the first thing I’ll reach for on a winter night in Maine, by the fire, I was taken with it. It’s layered, political, and weirdly sensitive and misogynist at the same time, and it feels fresh and authentic and smart at the same time, with music that often pulled me from what I was doing. In short, everything music should do. I’m not a bit cooler for listening to Damn, but when I followed it with Steely Dan, I felt like I was listening to Lawrence Welk. A good sign, I think.

What I’m reading:

I am reading Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Leonardo da Vinci. I’m not usually a reader of biographies, but I’ve always been taken with Leonardo. Isaacson does not disappoint (does he ever?), and his subject is at once more human and accessible and more awe-inspiring in Isaacson’s capable hands. Gay, left-handed, vegetarian, incapable of finishing things, a wonderful conversationalist, kind, and perhaps the most relentlessly curious human being who has ever lived. Like his biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, Isaacson’s project here is to show that genius lives at the intersection of science and art, of rationality and creativity. Highly recommend it.

What I’m watching:

We watched the This Is Us post-Super Bowl episode, the one where Jack finally buys the farm. I really want to hate this show. It is melodramatic and manipulative, with characters that mostly never change or grow, and it hooks me every damn time we watch it. The episode last Sunday was a tear jerker, a double whammy intended to render into a blubbering, tissue-crumbling pathetic mess anyone who has lost a parent or who is a parent. Sterling K. Brown, Ron Cephas Jones, the surprising Mandy Moore, and Milo Ventimiglia are hard not to love and last season’s episode that had only Brown and Cephas going to Memphis was the show at its best (they are by far the two best actors). Last week was the show at its best worst. In other words, I want to hate it, but I love it. If you haven’t seen it, don’t binge watch it. You’ll need therapy and insulin.

January 15, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Drive-By Truckers. Chris Stapleton has me on an unusual (for me) country theme and I discovered these guys to my great delight. They’ve been around, with some 11 albums, but the newest one is fascinating. It’s a deep dive into Southern alienation and the white working-class world often associated with our current president. I admire the willingness to lay bare, in kick ass rock songs, the complexities and pain at work among people we too quickly place into overly simple categories. These guys are brave, bold, and thoughtful as hell, while producing songs I didn’t expect to like, but that I keep playing. And they are coming to NH.

What I’m reading:

A textual analog to Drive-By Truckers by Chris Stapleton in many ways is Tony Horowitz’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize winning Confederates in the Attic. Ostensibly about the Civil War and the South’s ongoing attachment to it, it is prescient and speaks eloquently to the times in which we live (where every southern state but Virginia voted for President Trump). Often hilarious, it too surfaces complexities and nuance that escape a more recent, and widely acclaimed, book like Hillbilly Elegy. As a Civil War fan, it was also astonishing in many instances, especially when it blows apart long-held “truths” about the war, such as the degree to which Sherman burned down the south (he did not). Like D-B Truckers, Horowitz loves the South and the people he encounters, even as he grapples with its myths of victimhood and exceptionalism (and racism, which may be no more than the racism in the north, but of a different kind). Everyone should read this book and I’m embarrassed I’m so late to it.

What I’m watching:

David Letterman has a new Netflix show called “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction” and we watched the first episode, in which Letterman interviewed Barack Obama. It was extraordinary (if you don’t have Netflix, get it just to watch this show); not only because we were reminded of Obama’s smarts, grace, and humanity (and humor), but because we saw a side of Letterman we didn’t know existed. His personal reflections on Selma were raw and powerful, almost painful. He will do five more episodes with “extraordinary individuals” and if they are anything like the first, this might be the very best work of his career and one of the best things on television.

December 22, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished Sunjeev Sahota’s Year of the Runaways, a painful inside look at the plight of illegal Indian immigrant workers in Britain. It was shortlisted for 2015 Man Booker Prize and its transporting, often to a dark and painful universe, and it is impossible not to think about the American version of this story and the terrible way we treat the undocumented in our own country, especially now.

What I’m watching:

Season II of The Crown is even better than Season I. Elizabeth’s character is becoming more three-dimensional, the modern world is catching up with tradition-bound Britain, and Cold War politics offer more context and tension than we saw in Season I. Claire Foy, in her last season, is just terrific – one arched eye brow can send a message.

What I’m listening to:

A lot of Christmas music, but needing a break from the schmaltz, I’ve discovered Over the Rhine and their Christmas album, Snow Angels. God, these guys are good.

November 14, 2017

What I’m watching:

Guiltily, I watch the Patriots play every weekend, often building my schedule and plans around seeing the game. Why the guilt? I don’t know how morally defensible is football anymore, as we now know the severe damage it does to the players. We can’t pretend it’s all okay anymore. Is this our version of late decadent Rome, watching mostly young Black men take a terrible toll on each other for our mere entertainment?

What I’m reading:

Recently finished J.G. Ballard’s 2000 novel Super-Cannes, a powerful depiction of a corporate-tech ex-pat community taken over by a kind of psychopathology, in which all social norms and responsibilities are surrendered to residents of the new world community. Kept thinking about Silicon Valley when reading it. Pretty dark, dystopian view of the modern world and centered around a mass killing, troublingly prescient.

What I’m listening to:

Was never really a Lorde fan, only knowing her catchy (and smarter than you might first guess) pop hit “Royals” from her debut album. But her new album, Melodrama, is terrific and it doesn’t feel quite right to call this “pop.” There is something way more substantial going on with Lorde and I can see why many critics put this album at the top of their Best in 2017 list. Count me in as a huge fan.

November 3, 2017

What I’m reading: Just finished Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, her breathtakingly good second novel. How is someone so young so wise? Her writing is near perfection and I read the book in two days, setting my alarm for 4:30AM so I could finish it before work.

What I’m watching: We just binge watched season two of Stranger Things and it was worth it just to watch Millie Bobbie Brown, the transcendent young actor who plays Eleven. The series is a delightful mash up of every great eighties horror genre you can imagine and while pretty dark, an absolute joy to watch.

What I’m listening to: I’m not a lover of country music (to say the least), but I love Chris Stapleton. His “The Last Thing I Needed, First Thing This Morning” is heartbreakingly good and reminds me of the old school country that played in my house as a kid. He has a new album and I can’t wait, but his From A Room: Volume 1 is on repeat for now.

September 26, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished George Saunder’s Lincoln in the Bardo. It took me a while to accept its cadence and sheer weirdness, but loved it in the end. A painful meditation on loss and grief, and a genuinely beautiful exploration of the intersection of life and death, the difficulty of letting go of what was, good and bad, and what never came to be.

What I’m watching:

HBO’s The Deuce. Times Square and the beginning of the porn industry in the 1970s, the setting made me wonder if this was really something I’d want to see. But David Simon is the writer and I’d read a menu if he wrote it. It does not disappoint so far and there is nothing prurient about it.

What I’m listening to:

The National’s new album Sleep Well Beast. I love this band. The opening piano notes of the first song, “Nobody Else Will Be There,” seize me & I’m reminded that no one else in music today matches their arrangement & musicianship. I’m adding “Born to Beg,” “Slow Show,” “I Need My Girl,” and “Runaway” to my list of favorite love songs.

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