I didn’t watch a lot of movies last month… Like so many of us, Babylon (Damien Chazelle, 2022) broke something deep inside me. The end of cinema is nigh… The end of cinema arrived long ago…
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras, 2022)
This was really overwhelming. Just the sensation that cyclical waves of institutionalized, medicalized violence overtake people—the same people—over and over again in this country. A monstrous, revolutionary feeling.
Midnight Diner, season one (Joji Matsuoka, 2009)
I saw one review describe this show as un-binge-able and that’s absolutely correct. I watch it at night and it puts me to bed. No sense that I need any more of it. It manufactures the ineluctable calmness of completion. At the end of each episode, the characters teach you how to prepare the dish that was central, for whatever reason, to tonight’s morality tale; sometimes they even wave at you and say goodnight. As for the tales themselves, they are surprisingly brutal—people are injured, people die. But everything is resolved by the end. For the proprietor of the diner, each patron’s whole life’s story takes only twenty-odd minutes to tell. It’s comforting, in a way, that to think, for so many people, one day I too will just be a twenty minute story. “She liked to eat scrambled eggs; tragically, she died.”
Mazzy Star (Mazzy Star, 1993)
This has been my True Mood for weeks now. This expresses my Deep Attitude toward Things. (I will not look up the lyrics, or anything about this band or album. I am not a vulgar Seeker of Knowledge!!)
Dolphine (Mega Bog, 2019)
Some coworkers and I started listening to & getting really into Mega Bog because a communal work email that we all monitor got a publicity email about Mega Bog. That’s just true, there’s nothing I can do about it. Publicity emails work. It’s terrible.
To Bring You My Love (PJ Harvey, 1995)
Started listening to PJ Harvey because I was flipping through Orlam and became aware that it is incredibly rad. I guess moreso than I expected: “Voul village in a hag-ridden hollow / All ways to it winding, all roads to it narrow.”
Batman (Prince, 1989)
Ugh I was listening to this because I saw a tweet about it, undoubtedly because of, I later realized, a superbowl commercial for the Ezra Miller Flash movie that revealed Michael Keaton’s Batman would be making an appearance. But by the time I found all that out it was too late, I was in too deep. Prince’s Batman overcame me. It’s too powerful.
Strange Days (The Doors, 1967)
Was listening to this because I was reading that Eve Babitz essay where she’s so mean to The Doors guy. (“He was Bing Crosby from Hell.”)
Love at First Sight (Scorpions, 1984)
Was listening to this because I read an excerpt from a not-yet-published in English Annie Ernaux joint. It was so Ernaux. She was like, I was just leaving the hospital where I was visiting my mother on her deathbed and I desperately needed a man. It was the era of The Scorpions. Or something like that. I’m sharing the link but I’m not reading it again. My memory is too pure.
Figures of Harmony: Songs of Codex Chantilly c. 1390 (Ferrara Ensemble & Crawford Young, 1995)
Magister Grimace gang rise up.
Welcome To Zamrock! How Zambia’s Liberation Led To a Rock Revolution, Vol. 1 (1972-1977) (Compilation, Now-Again Records, 2017)
A really good vibe. This genre was unfamiliar to me, I was doing some reading on it.
Spotify’s This is Liszt playlist on shuffle
I’ve been alternating both my guys while I read Benita Eisler’s Chopin’s Funeral. I am not going to add the whole list (!) to the TEOTWR playlist because it’s 8 hours long… So I just added Lang Lang’s Liszt: My Piano Hero (2011) because that’s so cute.
Behind the Bastards two part episode on the John Birch Society (Robert Evans, 2020)
The guy who founded the John Birch society was the inventor of (or just bought the company that produced, to be honest I’m not sure) a candy called the Papa Sucker. This is mined to incredible effect by the hosts. It never isn’t funny, when they bring it up.
History Is Sexy: “Episode 66: Did the Illuminati Cause the French Revolution” (Emma Southon and Janina Matthewson, 2022)
Listened to this as a sidequest to Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast season on the French Revolution, which I am one day going to finish.
Ah, of course, this popular podcast did an episode on the Illuminati and folded after the next episode…
Apparently one of the early versions of the conspiracy claimed that during the French Revolution there was, as I have written in my notes, “a ball where guests were given human skin–bound copies of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man.”
Behind the Bastards four part episode on Andrew Tate (Robert Evans, 2023)
Didn’t know anything at all about this guy besides that he’d been arrested, now feel a deep and abiding panic regarding him, since apparently he’s Svengali’d the world’s youth!! (Not sure if that’s just because I’m old, so I’ve fallen for an old-person narrative about “the youth.”)
Was totally shocked that episode one of this was about Robert Bly, a guy I think of as the translator of one of the okay Hafez translations (as opposed to the bad Hafez translation, which is just made up), and not a proto–men’s rights activist!
At one point deep in this four-part series, the producer says something like having Iowa Writers Workshop in your bio is a red flag on par with having MENSAH in your bio. Always nice to hear what the “writing world” looks like to people on the outside looking in!
“Ravages of the Wild Beast in France” (London Magazine, 1765)
“Although we have taken care not to stuff our magazine with the many accounts we have had of the ravages committed among the people in the South of France by a wild beast, to which they have not as yet given any proper name; yet as we have in this month given a representation of that voracious creature, we think it necessary to give at least one of the most remarkable accounts that have been communicated to the public by the foreign newspapers, as follows…”
“Winter camping that was so warm in -15℃ snowfall / Solo camping / sleep with cats” (RiRang On Air, 2022)
I think this is supposed to be some sort of ASMR thing, but ASMR is clearly leaping beyond the bounds of its genre and becoming something else—see Skinamarink (Kyle Edward Bell, 2022), which is a sort of elevated ASMR creepypasta, for more insight into where it’s going.
I have watched a few of her videos but this is the first one I saw and the most enchanting: it’s “Christmas Day” (aka it was posted on Christmas Day), it’s very cold and snowy but her tent is still open to the elements so she can have a jolly cooking fire on which to prepare delectable meats, and she is joined overnight by several mysterious cats.
She’s set up on a campsite, so it’s also one of the least difficult of her videos. In some of the other ones, she (appears to be?) alone in the woods. She is also, in these remote camping videos, often joined by random cats. It’s… unclear whether that’s just what it’s like, in the woods in Korea—cats everywhere?—or if the cat encounters are staged. I genuinely cannot tell.
It’s possible I am going to watch this every Christmas for the rest of my life. Or I’ll forget all about it, in the memory-wiping wash of gentle ASMR content into which I am now forever algorithmically plugged.
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