What i’m digging

musings on music, film, books, art, and pretty things.

2024

December 2024

15 - Started Nutcrackers with Ben Stiller. Watching Alien: Romulus solo.

Viewing:

Home Alone (kids only - both the original first movie and the new remake)
Dear Santa (per our friend Tehya’s recommendation; thoroughly charmed by the kid, very funny, enjoyed)

Reading:

A 17yo starting Normal People

November 2024

Listening:

Men Without Hats
Run the Jewels
a 14-yo memorizing Eminem
Shrek soundtrack
Sound of Music on vinyl
illegal Christmas music before Thanksgiving, against my direct mandate

Reading with kids:

Naptime - Iris De Mouy
Our Fort - Marie Dorleans
The Quiet Crocodile - Natcha Andriamirado

A 17yo reading Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club

Becca working on Rumors of Another World, All the Light, and Cherilyn Clough’s follow-up memoir

I finally start A Confederacy of Dunces. Loving. Hilarious.

Viewing:

It’s hard to overstate the joy that watching The Great British Baking Show has brought to all of us. What a masterclass in how to compete hard, value people, and give and receive criticism and feedback. Love.

Me solo: Furiosa, His Three Daughters, Mad Max, The New World (what an elegant, elegiac love poem disguised as a two hour plus movie)

x4: Trap (a very enjoyable Shyamalan!), Don’t Move (nifty little thriller), Thelma (new all-ages-ish classic, thanks JT for the recommend; 93yo grandma out to track down a scammer is a tale worth telling)

26 - Yes, Hot Frosty for my MIL’s bday. Shhh…it’s not Thanksgiving yet.

October 2024

Listening:

Shovels and Rope
Sound of Music soundtrack
Volbeat, per Rachel

Viewing:

finished Bad Monkey, per Jeremy. Loved.
Brooklyn Nine-Nine
finally, finally finished The Wonder. also this month, me solo: It Follows.

21 - Finished The Winter Soldier. A few SNL clips to close the day. Follow up to the best skit ever: a second installment of George Washington, this time talking about what Americans will do with the English language. So good. Also: listening to Tool, Belinda Carlisle, Nirvana, and Tricky while driving with our senior to college fair. A big highlight.

20 - A little more Winter Soldier. Watched…The Purge with Olders. Good idea? Well, I don’t know. I saw it a while back. They’ve wanted to for a while, which doesn’t make it okay or mean it’s going to happen. But we did. They were underwhelmed. I appreciated as a thought experiment, and the visceral terror that comes from imagining your own home being under attack…it’s a provoking and disturbing thought. But I enjoyed watching and talking with them about it.

19 - Captain America: The Winter Soldier, with our Youngers. This is a joy, to share this for round 2 and see our Olders also digging. Again. Then: Get Out with them on a Saturday night. Big hit. Held up.

15 - The War on Drugs - Lost In the Dream, started My Octopus Teacher documentary, partial episode of Elementary with JX. He’s trying to figure out an uncrackable safe mystery involving a cracked safe.

September 2024

Listening:

Viewing:

Finished Dark Matter.

Reading:

On the last Ramona book with the boys. Soooo good.

June 2024

Listening:

the Raveonettes
Xavier Rudd

Viewing:

Sugar, the Colin Farrell Apple TV series that starts out noir detective and…really, really enjoyed.

May 2024

Listening:

Beastie Boys - Ill Communication (1994)
Elton John - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973)
Sparks - Kimono My House (1974)
Amon Amarth

Viewing:

Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2023). Not a big fan of prequels these days, but enjoyed seeing the origin of Snow and some backstory on the Hunger Games. 5/19
Unfrosted (2024). Strange, uneven, but enjoyable. And for the first and possibly last time in our family history, we bought Pop Tarts to eat during. Not the healthy-ish kind. Straight up reg. 5/20

01 -
Read The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere a 2013 Hugo-winning short story by John Chu. Not one I’ll likely read aloud as a family bedtime story.

Watched an episode of Brooklyn 99. Amy disappears before her sergeant exam, Terry thinks a break room refresh is just the thing. It’s not.

April 2024

24 - Continuing to watch Star Wars episode 8 The Last Jedi. I have been enjoying this arc (starting with episode 6). Our Olders loved Star Wars for a season of their lives earlier, and then around 2017, felt, I suppose, like they’d outgrown out - or rather, wanted to see other types of things. So this is my first time through with episode 8 and (soon) 9. I think we’re all enjoying it. Even the Countess Becca, who finds great delight in ‘accidentally’ confusing Star Wars with Star Trek.

23 - Listening to Robert McCloskey’s timeless 1951 collection of stories about Homer Price. “Don’t turn it off! We’re still listening!”

21 - Becca reading A Series of Unfortunate Events with the boys. Listening to Bishop Allen, George Ezra, LP, Jenny Lewis, Spoon, and Adrianne Lenker. Oh, and Amon Amarth for me, on AirPods and headphones. Continuing to watch The Last Jedi.

Bouncing, with our Olders, amongst film-watching and a trio of shows: Brooklyn 99, Gilmore Girls, and now Resident Alien. We recently finished the third Kenneth Branagh interpretation of Agatha Christie’s great detective Hercule Poirot: A Haunting in Venice. Like the last one, Death on the Nile, I love the mix of locales and mingling of characters; I also feel with both that my enjoyment as a whole was less than the sum of its pieces. Great character, some good scenes, not blown away by the wrap-ups.

I return to the series Black Mirror, determined to definitively rank them and be prepared for the upcoming series 6. Dark, dark dark and terrifying in how close we are, how close we live, how much we are dependent on technology and its role that’s baked into virtually every part of our lives and relationships.

Amon Amarth, Swedish death metal singing of Viking sagas, introduced by my friend A—-. Had on heavy rotation.

March 2024

Loving the Vaccines’ latest, Pick-Up Full Of Pink Carnations. Their cheerful-ish punk-flavored rock rolla keeps enough pop and irresistible hooks to fill up albums worth, while still drawing from some of my faves from the late 70s, late 80s, and early 00s (that respectively respectfully would be Ramones, Jesus and Mary Chain, Franz Ferdinand).

Middle of the month: two weeks to make my way through the Killers’ catalog, full albums beginning to end. The big surprise for me: their last, Pressure Machine, such a gentle turn that’s still them, but brings Springsteen-style storytelling to the forefront and stands up to repeated listens.

Watched May December with Becca. Unsettling.
Watched Past Lives by myself, ready to watch again with Becca. Loved, loved, loved.
Other watches: ongoing Brooklyn 99,
Oppenheimer with Olders. Not only matched, but surpassed my expectations.

04 - Started Star Wars Return of the Jedi with all of us. It’s that season of our lives. Started Oppenheimer with the Olders. In the first 45 minutes, Nolan’s ability to deconstruct this era of history and provide both a personal and a large-scale bird’s eye view is mesmerizing.

Re-reading an old Jeffrey Archer short story anthology Becca brought from the library. It’s a large hardcover edition with illustrations by Paul Cox, and the format has brought me a new level of enjoyment to many of these classic stories.

February 2024

Finished watching Under the Skin.
Some Kind of Wonderful for first time with the Olders. One of my favorite of the ‘80s John Hughes-ish universe rom-coms. 2-17
Star Wars episodes 4 and 5 with all of us. That would be the original (A New Hope) and the excellent The Empire Strikes Back. Our 4-year old thinks Darth Maul is great, as did his now-13yo bro at age four. Our 16yo and 13yo are not impressed with the original trilogy overall (episodes 4-5 so far; their favorite is E2 Attack of the Clones).

January 2024

28 - The Smiths, circa 1984, on a Sunday, with a little Echo & The Bunnymen thrown in (Hatful of Hollow, Ocean of Rain, respectively).

22 - Once upon a time, my daughter and wife started watching Gilmore Girls together while waiting for me and my “one more minute” timeline that is sadly…not infrequently more than one minute, as I’m racing to finish just one more thing or one more piece of work before joining my wife and two Olders for a little bit of evening viewing together. I have enjoyed the bits and bites of seen of it and know the the characters well enough to sort of know what’s transpiring at different points. But when I walked in and saw a certain figure whose identity took me 1.5 seconds to figure out…it was game over. By that, I mean that if I had any idea that Sebastian Bach, all-time great metal vocalist, was a recurring star on Gilmore Girls, then I would immediately have been forced to shut down any viewing of the show not involving me. I took his presence as an invitation from the universe to share two of Skid Row’s greatest hit videos from the 1980s (that was his band). The bittersweet balladry of I Remember You and the great rebellion anthem to close out the decade, 1989’s Youth Gone Wild. My family seemed mesmerized by my curation, so I continued on to one of the decade’s other great metal vocalists, Judas Priest’s Rob Halford, and we watched them light up the world with 1982’s You’ve Got Another Thing Coming. So good. Gilmore Girls, Sebastian Bach, Judas Priest. That’s a triad.

21 - I raced through Liu Cixin’s 2008 novel The Three-Body Problem; “race” in the sense that I was sucked into the multiple-era storyline about…Earth, humanity, and their place in the universe(s). Thank you, Ken Liu, for the 2014 translation that made it possible for me, as an English reader, to read.

Things I watch solo in January

Finally finish season 2 of Foundation. I will say it: it is making a case for a place in all-time great science fiction television.

Things Becca and I watched in January

Saltburn. Not a fan. So many aesthetic and performance elements to appreciate, and sometimes dialog, and oftentimes the delicious immersion of Rosamund Pike in her role. But overall? Left me feeling empty; not the sum of its parts, not anything to inspire, to educate, to elucidate, to contribute necessary meaning or context to life, and in the end…something that was entertaining enough to finish once, respect the work that went into it, and then leave behind, not to revisit.

General

A 7- and 4-year old watching Peg + Cat. “There’s lots of things you can learn from it that are good…can we watch it?!”

Attack of the Clones / Anne of Green Gables. Yes, we started both of these on consecutive weekends during an ice storm. Both stories about orphans beginning with An (Anne, Anakin). There are a few differences after that. Our Youngers are thoroughly enjoying tracking the evolution of characters through the Star Wars universe and we are enjoying their enjoyment. Aaaaand…1985’s Anne of Green Gables has held up so, so well. The love of nature and relationships and imagination and learning and…the kindness shown by many, juxtaposed by the pettiness that is alternately cruel and hilarious; yet always infused with a beauty and awareness of life and those who share a space with you on the paths life takes you. Such a beautiful adaptation.

A 16-year old re-reading A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and then handing it over to me to begin; I hand over A Gentleman in Moscow for her to fall in love with for the first time.

I love that. A 13-year old reading The Outsiders for the first time.