I watched 127 movies in 2025, on par with last year. Of the first-time viewings, these are the ones I’d be most happy to watch again. Just like my write-up of movie favorites from 2024, I’ll excerpt previous posts for the best of the best. Listed chronologically, in both the tippy-top-tier and the contenders. What I see in common for the top four is a compassionate, affirming spirit – whether that in new friendships, on the job, in love, in family and community.
A stranger rides into town and helps a woman with her struggling noodle shop. The feeling may fade a bit with time, but right now I’m in love with this movie. Such a big heart. And expansive enough that the main plot is interspersed with vignettes with unrelated characters, snapshots of a world beyond, full of concerns and worries and dreams just like our own.
Told in silent-film style, a story of two deaf Black women, in two different eras, finding love. Love the borrowing from pan-the-photograph documentary style, and vivid captions that let you imagine and dream along with the stories.
Running Running trails in the earliest morning light, just before dawn, is such a perfect gift before starting the workday. Red Hook again this weekend, will take one more run to complete the map. Maybe next weekend, though I don’t love the idea of hitting the same area three weekends in a row. We’ll see.
Around the Web This weekend I learned the phrase “haud yer weesht “, via Line of Duty. (Who else but Hastings?)
Where Americans Choose to Move and Where They Leave. Interesting to see some family trajectories mapped out here. “From 2020 to 2024, 1.47 million more people moved from California to elsewhere in the United States than from a different state into California. That outflow is equal to 3.7% of the state’s 2020 population.” Time to buy low?
Music Yosi Horikawa, Vapor. Had this album on repeat throughout the week. I love all the nature sounds mixed into bouncy, juicy, lush electronic stuff. Two faves: “Maki” and “Summer in 1987“.
Donnacha Dennehy: Land of Winter perf. Alarm Will Sound cond. Alan Pierson. Months of the year in chamber form. I liked this recording. “November” is the best, of course!
Movies Girls Town. Close friends, soon to leave high school, navigate shared tragedies. It’s very sweet and sad and funny. Two thumbs up.
Wolf Man (2025). Got exactly what I signed up for. Fun movie. Love that we see the early hints of transformation in the heigtened senses – smell, hearing. The sound design is especially good, as we take on the perspective of the protagonist. Early tragedy in the simple distancing from inability to communicate what he’s going through. Appreciate the novelty of the precarious greenhouse sheeting – take full advantage of your setting!
The Fate of the Furious. I’ve seen a lot of individual scenes before, but for the life of me I cannot tell you how or when. The spectacle is dialed in. The writing is bad. I don’t think I’d intentionally rewatch again. Vin Diesel wears the mythologizing well, but the Statham scenes easy eclipse everyone else in the cast.
Last week was my first full week back to work, post-holidays. I was surprisingly at peace on Sunday night, ready and accepting that it was time to get back to reality. Sometimes vacations can feel too short; sometimes, too long. Felt like this one was dialed-in.
Lately I feel like I have more space in my weekends somehow. Something has shifted. It’s like there’s just 2–4 hours that weren’t there before. I’m not sure how it appeared.
Took my first ride on the NYC Ferry this weekend, up the East River from Brooklyn to Queens and over to Manhattan. So pleasant!
Late last year I spent way too much time window-shopping for a new keyboard. It was an intense relief to finally buy one. Shopping can be a thrill and a vast emptiness.
Books War and Peace, cont.. Hit a bit of a rut this week. Whether chicken or egg, it coincided with losing my earlier consistency.
Running Just a few more miles and I can add the Red Hook neighborhood to my ran-every-street list. Got back to a longer run this weekend, aided by warmer weather. Above 35–40º, it gets much, much easier to manage a run over a longer period of time. Fewer garments to manage, lower downside risk if you mismanage ventilation or layering, etc.. And drinks stay warm.
Around the Web The life of a fangirl. “Fandoms create environments where participation happens almost always naturally and almost always horizontally.”
The Case for Blogging in the Ruins. “The blog, at its best (a best I aspire one day to reach) is Montaigne’s direct descendant. It’s a form that allows for intellectual exploration without demanding premature certainty. You can write a post working through an idea, acknowledge in the post itself that you’re not sure where you’ll end up, and invite readers to think alongside you.”
Against access. “Our environment has endless potential for life. For centuries, however, much of our vitality was forbidden. We were forced to stick with the effects of the hearing and sighted world. Now, though, we are all in varying stages of flight.” How accessibility (in a common understanding of an “us” making the world easier for a “them”) falls short, with particular focus on ASL interpreters. Very interesting!
The loneliness crisis isn’t just male. “What our polling reveals, though, is that it’s a youth loneliness crisis, rather than a male loneliness crisis. Age, not gender, shows far greater correlation with antisocial attitudes and beliefs. Younger voters — both male and female — are increasingly paralyzed by anxiety and fear, and they are finding it harder and harder to socialize. In fact, when you look at the data, the ‘antisocial crisis,’ as I like to call it, is actually most pronounced among young women, who experience the highest rates of social isolation.”
“One of the most underappreciated things about the recent past washow common boredom was.”
Funkadelic, Maggot Brain. I really like the title track. Interesting to hear this transition in music history – borrowing from blues, gospel, psychedelic rock, blending it all up and leaving nothing out.
Movies 45365. Documentary of people in a place (Sidney, Ohio). If you like this sort of “snapshots of everyday life around town” documentary – I really do – check out Hale County This Morning, This Evening.
City of Gold (2015). Follows along with food critic Jonathan Gold as he explores LA food, and with other talking heads about his impact on food writing, etc.. At its best when its attention is on the city.
Fragments for Venus (short). Straightforward description and juxtaposition – sometimes the basic ingredients are the most potent.
Tron: Ares. Gorgeous to look at, and I think a larger screen would shift my opinion a bit, but all the dazzle in the world cannot save a leaden script, delivered flatly. Interesting to see Minecraft-life voxel cube material when techno-things disintegrate – very similar presentation in Superman (2025) with the reality rift thing.
And so the last chunk of holiday break comes to a close. A few highlights: Sunday morning walk to a cafe to read, and then to a diner. A brief return to the office for a couple of days, and blasting country music all afternoon on Tuesday. Making red beans & rice on New Year’s Eve. Re-arranging the furniture and refreshing the apartment for another year. Playing Breath of the Wild for too long. Visiting a new coffee shop. Date night dancing to music videos. The usual early wake-ups feeling even earlier in a quieter city.
Books War and Peace. I feel a bit of wind going out of my sails during the battle scenes. They are beautifully written and fresh, but right now I’d like to get back to salon drama.
Running I really like running in the snow. Such fun. There’s often the nervousness the night before when the temps hit a new low, the shock of the cold on the first steps out the door, the sluggish pulse and shortness of breath, but then on warming up: bliss.
“You can take a barbell strategy to travel. Either go for a year, or two, or ten, however long you need to go to open a bank account. Or, stay no longer than a few days in the same place, and come back often. The world is changing, and […] there will be combinations of place and time lost to us forever.”
“Why aren’t there more intermediate options between eating in a sit-down restaurant, and cooking your own meals? […] There is a magical place with plentiful such options, and it’s called Taiwan.“
LTJ Bukem presents Earth, Vol. 1, good compilation of various drum & bass. This music used to grate but I think I’m better at hearing past the drum chatter now. “Faith” makes me think of Pilotwings 64 (complimentary).
Tenet. Third time I’ve seen it? Steadily growing on me. Each time I watch I find something new.
Presence. First movie of 2026. A ghost moves through an empty house as we see through its eyes, and a family moves in, and they learn about each other. Director Steven Soderbergh: “The beauty of projects at this scale is I can just do them without having to talk to anybody.” Another quality Soderbergh I saw recently is Black Bag.
Grand Theft Hamlet. Actors out of work during the pandemic decide to stage a play in the videogame world of Grand Theft Auto. It’s funny, crazy ambitious, and has a few touching moments. Quality documentary!
Two-day work week last week, and another one coming this week. Highlights of the time off so far: reading breaks, catching up with family, coffee every morning, playing Switch again, morning runs, movies and TV, walks in the neighborhood, “study hall” to learn more coding stuff, making end-of-year charitable donations, and making gumbo for Christmas dinner.
I vibe-coded a white noise app this weekend. Functionally it’s a copy of the most-used features from my previous go-to noise website. But now I can do the same in a dedicated app outside the browser, more finely tailored for how I use it.
The coding itself was very pleasant and absorbing, just me and Codex in the terminal ripping for a couple hours, testing ideas, whittling things down, circling back for a bit of polish. Reached ~1000 lines of good-enough-for-me code, called it a day, started thinking about other problems to solve. Nothing like home cooking.
I like this idea of “Ins and Outs” to set the tone for the new year. Now pondering what my 2026 should hold, after the examples from Chris Martin and Carl Barenbrug. I think I’ll keep these weekly posts on the “In” list.
Books War and Peace. So it begins. I’m 150 or so pages into it and while nothing monumental has happened so far, it’s been a ton of fun. I think I misconceived the book based on 1) the title and 2) Russian setting and 3) the author, and assumed it would be something more heavy and dour and serious. But it’s has a lightness and liveliness that’s been really fun to read so far.
Running Challenging but fun weather this last week: running in sleet one morning, and in a few inches of snow yesterday, with random skids and slides and postholes demanding extra effort and attention. So fun. A great time to insist on regularity, to the extent that I can.
Around the Web “Capitalism (and now AI) increases the number of trade-offs we face, and therefore increases the importance of meta-preferences—the stories we choose to live inside.”
Does it help to know history? “The real sin that the absence of a historical sense encourages is presentism, in the sense of exaggerating our present problems out of all proportion to those that have previously existed.”
“All art galleries are a bit weird eh. Each time you visit, there are a hundred paintings scattered in rooms and you walk through like uh-huh, uh-huh, ok, that’s nice, uh-huh, ok. Then at random one of them skewers you through your soul and you’re transfixed by the image for life.”
“So many want the fruit without the root. The glow without the gutting. The revelation without the reverence.”
Music J.S. Bach: The Art of Fugue, perf. Cuarteto Casals. I’ve never clicked with this work, but yet I persist. String quartet version is novel, at least.
TV The X-Files, s5e12 “Bad Blood“. Vampire shenanigans! Great to see them locked into a silly register, and in a Rashomon-like multiple-perspectives narrative.
Line of Duty, s5e5–6. What a great series. Each is only a handful of episodes each, but hard to think of many that hold the quality bar this high through multiple seasons.
At some point I decided to stop being depressed. That might not be scientifically or clinically valid, and it took longer to see it through, but that’s about roughly how I experienced it, or at least remember it. I remember immiserating in bed one Saturday morning, spiraling darkly, stagnant. And then a mental sigh, and: “I’m tired of this.” I got up. I got dressed. I went for a walk. I felt better when I got back, though not the whole day. The next day I got up and made myself go walk again. I felt better.
It probably wasn’t just the walking. Therapy and experience and maturity chipped in, but the walking gave them fresh soil to grow in. Every day, every day, every day: outside.
And then one day earlier this week I realized, “…I… didn’t go outside yesterday!”. No special reason, just distractedly busy with other things. It had been least 1742 days, along with several years of habit before I started logging it. Annoying to forget, but also: I didn’t need it. It’s not the life-raft it used to be. Today I’m a different person with different needs, and it’s time to give those attention in different ways, new streaks yet to start.
I hate when there’s standing water around the house. I always squeegee the shower before I leave. And I hate when pools linger under the dish rack, or on countertops. We have a robo-coffee machine at work and I always dump the drip tray first thing every morning. Then I had a realization where it might come from. This might be a just-so story but I think it makes sense: mosquitos. Life-long nemesis, largely disappeared from daily life, but still shaping my behavior.
Books The English and Their History. Still a great read. When we get to newer periods, I’ll probably drop and switch to other books. I’m really curious about the ~300–1300CE time period.
Running Running early before sunrise is a pretty decent replacement for running late at night, which I don’t do much anymore. Similar quiet, calm, place-to-your-self feeling. Looks like I’ll end the year with around ~950 miles, much less than last year and annoying short of a nice round number.
“When I finish a book, I immediately read the first 10 pages of a new one so I am never between books.”
Why we love Jane Austen more than ever after 250 years. “It was Austen who gave us the perfect art of a socially realistic novel about people having to overcome their inner problems—rather than having to overcome problems imposed upon them by the world.”
Cold cases in the AI era. “The cold case genre delivers a kind of satisfaction more appropriate to the AI era than the cozy mystery genre, first because of the forensic software tech, the genealogy databases, document analysis systems, etc., and second, because audiences want stories about human judgment, about deciding what matters and what does not.”
Music The Acid, Liminal. There’s a bit of kinship here with Thom Yorke’s The Eraser in this particular flavor of vocals + electronics mix. “Tumbling Lights“, “Ghost“, “Red” – all great.
Movies The Commuter. Good clean fun. Very happy with how they shot the close-quarters fighting.
The Shop Around the Corner. Takes a while to get momentum but it’s a good one. Saw this at Metrograph and remembered that I really really need to go there more often.
For a team event at work, we went to an axe-throwing place. I was terrible to start, and didn’t mind being terrible. Something was off, not my night, oh well. I was happy to throw up bricks, and see if I got better results every few minutes when it was my turn again. Low stakes, low investment. And then I switched to a different hatchet, and suddenly I was consistently thunking metal into board. And success made it fun, and I tried harder. It’s okay to blame your tools sometimes?
I also went to our office holiday party this week, and also my wife’s. One comfortably chaotic, because I knew everyone. One intimidatingly elegant, because I didn’t. It feels good to dress up every now and then. Wear sweats on the flight if you must, but we should think twice about casualness creeping into every occasion.
I’ve been on the search for new washcloths. I really hate the default: thick, soft, fluffy, take weeks to dry. I feel like I’m the only person that likes thin, skritchy-skratchy ones. So anyway I got some hemp scrubbers and they’re great.
Visited the Studio Museum in Harlem today and remembered again how lucky I am to be in a city with so much good creative stuff just a train ride away.
Books The English and Their History, by Robert Tombs. Really happy with this so far. I’m a bit concerned it’s glossing over the old, old times a little too quickly. Might circle back to other books to add a few more layers there.
Running Mileage dwindling with the mercury. Had my first run in the snow this morning, a rare treat.
Around the Web Colors of Growth, a paper on using the colors in European artwork to get insight into economic activity in the past.
DS9 Redefined, “A Loving Restoration and HD Upscale of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”. Yes!
Silent Night (2023). John Woo action movie. Brutal, and could use a dose of humor here and there, but visually very fun. Love how they make sure you don’t miss a thing, even without dialogue.
Wake Up, Dead Man. It’s good! Appreciate the earnest religiosity. Took a bit of time to wind up, and lots of moments I think were supposed to be funny (?) didn’t land, but still good.
TV The X-Files, s5e10 “Chinga“. Yep, the one with the killer doll.
Last week I wrote thank-you notes to writers whose books I really enjoyed over the last year or so. It’s an exercise I started a few years ago. I usually end up sending out a dozen or so. I’ll get a handful of messages back, which is cool but very much not the point. Remember: “This will be easier, psychologically, if you don’t want to be a writer, don’t ask questions, don’t need advice, and don’t particularly care if you get a response. Spread gratitude, be free!”
Maybe next year I’ll extend the same to memorable artists, musicians, moviemakers, etc.?
This weekend we went to see Les Arts Florissants perform at BAM. The favorite of the night for me was the Messe de minuit pour Noël. I grew up Catholic, so it’s easy to recognize all the familiar parts of the mass. I found myself remembering back to old memories of fidgeting in the pews, ready for it all to be over. There was less fidgeting this time (only a little bit – those seats are cramped at Howard Gilman Opera House).
One of the things I love most about early or Renaissance or classical music is imagining what it was like to hear it when it was new. Maybe in a stuffy ballroom, or in a cold, dark church. Orchestras today are often cover bands, so a performance can be a sort of time travel. I think about how even when you’re having a great day, a torch song can make you feel love’s torment, or an anthem can make you feel boundless, even if nothing around you has changed. Or like this weekend, I can listen and feel humility, reverence, hope. There’s something comforting in connection to a tradition that’s lasted for hundreds and hundreds of years, even if I’m not part of it in quite the same way these days.
Books Rebecca. This is such a fun book. I’m nestling into the warm embrace of melodrama.
One Long River of Song.
Running Splitting my weekend long runs into two days more often lately. Call it cowardice or cleverness, it is very exhausting to do the usual mileage in the cold snap we’ve had.
The Western demands its myth—the one where courage restores the world and a man’s violence is the nation’s virtue—and High Noon offers it only grudgingly. There is no sweeping horizon here; we see only a sliver of prairie. The real action takes place on Hadleyville’s bright, empty streets and on faces flattened by sunlight. The West is emptied of romance, replaced with a collective anxiety that threatens to boil over.
Rafael Karlen, Sinking Cities, with Camerata, Queensland Chamber Orchestra. Modern choral stuff. “Everything Changes” is pretty good, but the rest didn’t have as much staying power for me.
Books Rebecca. For whatever reasons, I thought this was set in the 1800s. Quite a surprise when the main characters spend their time driving around town. Fun so far, so melodramatic!
The San Quentin Project. Photographs of daily life in the prison, along with work from a photography class with the inmates – their annotations and reflections were super cool.
Around the Web “That’s a Victor Frankenstein move: Get disappointed that your creation doesn’t immediately match the image in your head, declare it a failure, and abdicate.”
Requiem for Early Blogging. “If someone wanted to troll you, they’d have to do it on their own site and hope you took the bait because otherwise no one would see it.”
“My philosophy of authenticity is that it doesn’t exist in the way people wish it did. I don’t believe it’s possible to perform in a way that’s authentic. People will say, I just post for myself, which is a lie. They say that because they feel it’s morally better to be that way, and I really disagree with that. It’s okay to feel like you’re performing and even want to perform a bit. That’s not evil. It’s a condition of living.”
“The bottom line is that ‘we’ is squishy. I is the brave pronoun.”
The work of getting people to leave cults. “For that reason, Kelly and Ryan are not looking to convince people of any particular version of reality or truth. They do not seem to be interested in truth at all, really. When you use your experience to test whether or not something is true (the holiness of a guru, the righteousness of a cause) then, Ryan told me: “The person who gives you that experience will own you.” Their work is to usher people into a state of skepticism about the conclusion they have drawn from their experiences; beginning to open them up to the idea that individual experience is not the same as truth or reality.”
How to Make a Living as an Artist. “Growing tired of painting something people love is a good problem to have. Do not worry about it until it happens. May you be so lucky.”
Movies You’ve Got Mail. Overall, good watch! Tom Hanks character is a jerk, though? I wonder how it compares with the original. “I wanted it to be you.”
Roter Himmel (Afire). A stressed-out writer tries to finish his work, but everything gets in the way. I really like Christian Petzold’s work overall: Phoenix, Barbara, and Transit are the others I’ve seen.
Sleepless in Seattle. Second viewing (the first). Love the melancholy in this movie – one characters knowing exactly what they’re missing, the other just coming to realize it. Better characters, more funny than You’ve Got Mail.
A House of Dynamite. Choppy Bourne-style editing was a little annoying. A bit on-the-nose in the writing here and there. Suitably stressful. Left me a little cold?
Thinking about disappointments lately, and the opportunity to double down on what I want regardless. Renewing efforts, aiming for maximal success helps minimize regrets.
Fun exercise: get a big sheet of paper and tape it on the wall. Turn it into a calendar. Add sticky notes for all the travel you plan and want to do in the coming year. Dream it into existence!
A few moments at my favorite burger place a Saturday afternoon:
Books Richard II (Shakespeare). I read a bunch of Shakespeare back in 2021, and this one ranked pretty highly back then. Enjoyed even more after reading The Eagle and the Hart earlier this year. I like the differing gifts and deficits of the main actors, the contrast of moral clarity vs. political success. Richard’s a wastrel in his position as king, but has a depth as tragic figure where you can’t help but feel for him. Everyone else is similarly compromised in some way.
Not sure what’s next. 🤔
Running More adventures in Bushwick. A lil’ persistent cough keeping the mileage down.
Around the Web Romanticizing running outside in the winter. “Overcoming your own disapproval of a season will remind you of the impermanence of life around you. Everything is malleable.”
Sabrina Carpenter, Man’s Best Friend. Glad someone is keeping disco alive: “Tears” is so fun. The rest of the album, I could take or leave. It all sounds very… saturated?
Movies Train Dreams. Loved it. I liked the book, too. Joel Edgerton is a natural at the contained, hesitant, introspective roles. as in Master Gardener. (Hereby issuing a challenge to filmmakers, though: show a nostalgic happy memory scene without filming it at golden hour! It’s lazy. People have good memories in all kinds of weather and times of day…)
The Insider. Third viewing, I think. (The first.) This time around, better recognized how the title applies to Bergman as well as Wigand, how he ends up as a sort of whistleblower, too.
I put in a lot more hours at the office and wonder, where does motivation come from? Why does work feel like so much fun sometimes, and how do you know whether or not it’s fulfillment or a substitute?
Another good one this week: Motown in Motion, quilt by Stephen Towns in natural and synthetic fabric, polyester and cotton thread, crystal glass beads, metal and resin buttons.
Books Crossroads of Twilight. Finishing soon, I think more Shakespeare is up next.
Running Filled in some map in Bushwick this weekend. Maybe the first time I’ve had nice experience running in that neighborhood. A beautiful autumn morning elevates everything.
Monks in the casino. “Risk-aversion in the social sphere has combined with their risk-chasing in the market, and it’s created a genuinely berserk modern life script.”
When environmentalists choose panic over progress. “Well-intentioned but misinformed resistance to innovation and technology slows progress toward the very objectives environmentalism aims to achieve.”
Movies Jurassic World Rebirth. Leans toward the horror genre much more, right from the jump. Maybe too much anthropomorphizing with the obnoxious little baby one, and the napping T-Rex. Casual with child endangerment, but too cowardly to let a minor character die off. A mixed bag, but generally sustains the fun of the franchise.
Frankenstein (2025). Sins lead to suffering. Don’t let that happen! I like the Mia Goth’s naturalist wardrobe – feathers, lustrous velvets in green, gold, olive, flashes of purple like beetles. The ending scene at sunrise makes a fun contrast with Nosferatu (2024).
Back to work in full this week, and back to the office. So nice to get warm welcomes and questions about my travels. Absence makes the heart grow fonder? The ability to work from home so often is priceless. Full-time WFH, though… not for me!
Books Crossroads of Twilight, cont. This book is living up to its reputation (but I will finish it).
Running Took the last several months away from run club, and returned this week. Felt good to be back. After so much vacation time, my weekend long run was a bit of a struggle. Build, decay, rebuild.
Arvo Pärt, …Lente. Mostly familiar material, glad I revisited.
Movies Compensation. Loved this movie. Told in silent-film style, a story of two deaf Black women, in two different eras, finding love. Love the borrowing from pan-the-photograph documentary style, and vivid captions that let you imagine and dream along with the stories. It will make my end-of-year favorites, top tier.
Sick for most of the last week. Travel catching up to me, or something I caught on the last leg of travel. Coughing and coughing and coughing. The cabin fever is excruciating. But with 20/20 hindsight, I’m glad my norms have shifted. Better to be sick at home and working than going into the office and blithely infecting people.
Noticing a new acquisitiveness since I got back from Japan. I think I’m see my old stuff in a new light, feeling a big urge to replace it, overturn the old ways. Not yet sure what’s trying to be expressed. Listening.
Around the Web Please take one, wonderful essay on museum brochures.
“Part of “good practice” (deep focus, lots of iteration) is having properly-sized feedback loops. Too short a loop, and it subverts the development of voice (too many other voices jutting in, telling you how to be). Too long a loop, and you might lose momentum (some feedback, properly timed, is critical).”
“If Americans sometimes seem crass or like they take life at an easy stride, it is largely because they are not idle. To the British temperament, there is something vulgar and unsettled about this lack of idleness. And yet the Americans are quite relaxed. Being busy puts them at ease.”
Movies Black Bag. Took a little while to get on its wavelength, but ended up really liking this spy-couple story. Tight focus. Interesting visual choice to have that shimmery soft lighting glow. Appreciate the nod to “Let’s Get Lost“.
Trap. Not sure how I missed it the first time I watched it, but the small profiler role is played by Hayley Mills from The Parent Trap. Interesting that a movie like this can still succeed overall even when prominent characters are badly written/weakly acted. Good bones, good mechanics. Loved the angry conversation over pie.
Tremors. The time I watched this was on TBS or something as a kid. Never could track it down again, though I was generally aware of it. Enjoyed the setting in a dusty little western town, if it even amounts to that much. Don’t see that often.
TV The X-Files, s5e4, “Detour“. So glad to get back to a monster-of-the-week episode.
Hannibal, s1e4–6. Episode 5, “Coquilles“, is so good, the way it ties together themes of shelter/abandonment, fear/mourning, loss/escapism. Beautiful script, connects the killer-of-the-week to the main characters’ developments, moves the season arc forward, great stuff.
I spent the last two weeks traveling in Japan. The trip started from NYC to Tokyo, then quickly relocated to Osaka for a few days, and to Okayama for a few (day trips to Imbe, Kurashiki, Hiroshima, Naoshima), and then the last few back in Tokyo. Very different from my only other trip there, where I spent most of my time in Tokyo with brief visits to Hakone and Kamakura. I’m going to dump some of my notes I wrote down along the way.
Fun to feel complete disorientation on first arrival, trusting years of public transit instinct to navigate the first trains. Anything outbound looks good, if not, yolo, we can turn around and try again.
I forgot how lush Japan is. Damp and green, buildings overtaken by where it’s not hemmed in. Mountainsides ready to move downhill if not paved over. Fluid. And decaying. Narita airport is far from the city center, so you pass through a bunch of podunk towns on the way to the megalopolis.
It’s also very rugged. When I think “rugged” I usually think “rocks”, but here it is hills everywhere, steep forested hills just outside every town. Life squeezed in where it can be. In several places I’d seen baseball fields in the middle of houses, like right next door – nets put up around and above so sport can take place while protecting what’s nearby. Just like all the retainment walls on the hillsides or concrete embankments on the rivers. Protect with walls so what’s inside can be preserved, or exist in the first place.
Shinkansen, like Waymo, was utterly mindblowing for the first few minutes and then I quickly took it for granted. But it’s amazing that you can just walk up, buy a ticket, walk directly on the train, and 10 minutes later be traveling at 200mph or whatever.
It’s good to have small bits of travel mixed in with the overall trip. An hour or two of calm on a train or bus. Just enough to pull out a book and be in the moment in a different way.
Learned a lot about celadon pottery, and was especially curious about all the peonies and chyrsanthemums I saw carved in them. Also learned a lot about Bizen ware pottery. So great to have LLMs to ask about what I’m seeing and deep-dive on random questions throughout the trip.
Washlets/bidets are such a great invention. We should spread these in the States. Even coffee shops have them!
Interesting to travel and not have all the social cues. Here at home I can glance at someone and have a pretty good sense (confidence, at least, if not accuracy) of where they fit in – nerd, finance pro, Bushwick hipster, “cool” or “uncool”, etc.. Not so much there. I can tell when the overlap is obvious – skater chic travels – but plenty of everyday looks I couldn’t place.
I love eSIMs. Data is so cheap, no-brainer for future trips.. I remember my first trip to Japan, I bought a cheap burner flip phone so I could have service and text with a few friends I was meeting up with, and call for basic things that weren’t easily internet-able (“open today?”). This was 2007 if I remember right. Using Art Space Tokyo and paper guide I guess, and a map, and a willingness to just be kinda lost or not find things. Different times.
Averaging ~20,000 steps per day makes for a pretty good lifestyle.
The towns of Minoo and Imbe made me think about my birth place in rural Georgia. I respond to the familiar, smaller size of each, and the closeness to nature right out the back door. But they also add density, and neighbors, and trains. Best of both worlds? They were like a more ideal form of where I grew up. (Also makes me think of The Goonies or Stand by Me, for example – small town + plenty of friends nearby + plenty of nature for adventure.)
I have a new appreciation for ukiyo-e prints. I especially like the prominence of ghosts, people sitting in waterfalls, toads, goblins. It’s all much more lively and weird than I’d thought.
The ideal city size is one that’s large enough where it’s worth having a bike to run errands across town, but small enough where you don’t feel a need to brace yourself and armor up to do it.
As an experiment on this trip, I kept a regret log. Just jotting down poor decisions and 20/20 hindsight to help shape the trip. Among those:
Not adventuring the first night we arrived, instead letting myself crash and nap too long.
Not learning much of the language, and having more basic phrases locked in. I felt both rude and helpless during a few basic interactions. I’m smart enough to remember these things, and had plenty of opportunity to prepare.
Over-relying on the big train stations. It’s tempting to navigate to big central stations instead of smaller, less convenient ones. But they tend to be harder to get out of, to navigate through/around, harder to get oriented when you emerge, and a bigger pain to access on foot.
Not eating enough early enough. I always eat breakfast at home, but let that good habit slip. I like an early start, but coffee and pastry will only last so long, and the extra time for a reasonable meal makes a big difference in how the day plays out.
Going to the known tourist trap/shopping area just in case it wasn’t as bad as I feared. (It was. (It usually is.))
Movies All of these were watched as the creators intended: on am airplane seatback screen with tinny headphones.
Little Shop of Horrors. I had no idea what I was getting into – didn’t know it was a musical. Quite a fun one. Levi Stubbs singing as Audrey II seems like a clear bluesy/sleazy ancestor of Oogie Boogie and that crab in Moana. (I wonder if there are earlier examples in this lineage?) Fun to see Steve Martin’s precise theatrical choreographed movement (see also the Dirty Rotten Scoundrels training scene).
Tron: Legacy. It’s clunky. Interesting set designs, but not as thrilling, visually, as the original. Plot-wise, familiar father-and-son stuff, again not as fresh. Lots of “catch-up” explanations that slow things down. I like some of the religious undertones. Not sure why computer villains would spend time declaiming to vast ranks of soldiers.
Woman of the Hour. A blunt instrument at times, but effectively chilling.
TV The X-Files, s5e3 “Unusual Suspects“. The Lone Gunmen origin story! Richard Belzer playing a square!
Hannibal, s1e2–3. The Abigail Hobbs character is a tough role to play.
Crossroads of Twilight. Chipping away at the WOT series until I find my next novel. Seems like consensus ranks this as the worst of the franchise.
Running Kept my mileage in check, short and steady except for a very fun weekend loop. Looking forward to a couple weeks off.
Around the Web Will it internet? Spencer Chang time-travels with a watch.
“Subway Builder is a hyperrealistic transit simulation game. Build a new subway system from the ground up while dealing with real-world constraints and costs.” Made by @Colin_d_m.
“Even when telling the history of a country, Shakespeare’s worlds are small; Melville’s, despite being substantially hemmed to a boat, is somehow large. Maybe Shakespeare in some way captured all there was to be captured at the time; if so, in Melville we can see how much larger humanity has become: industry, trade networks, energy, science, anthropology, firms with multinational labour, knowable continents beyond great seas.”
Klaus Schulze, Deus Arrakis. Been killing it for decades. I should spend more time with his work.
Fusilier, Ambush. I didn’t end up loving the rest of the album as much, but I audibly said “wow” on my walk to work when I first heard one of the transitions in “LLC“. I love how adventurous the album feels.
Various, Tron OST and Nine Inch Nails, Tron: Ares OST. Fun compare/contrast – the electronic+orchestra hybrid in the first, with some pop mixed in, and then the more stark band/studio sound in the most recent.
The Consolers, Jesus Brought Joy. Gospel duets. You can’t not smile.
Movies The Silence of the Lambs. Still great! Would love to see it in theaters someday. When the lights go off and the night vision clicks on…
Manhunter. Still great! On this watch, struck my how quiet and thoughtful so much of the runtime is. Newly appreciated the climax, with our hero fully inhabiting the villain’s mindset and behavior, creeping through the moonlit forest to approach the house.
Tron. The cutting-edge visuals of the time are so different in style, and relatively crude compared to what we can do today, that they circle back around to become foreign and strange and wondrous again. Love that the in-computer world also had a bit of silent film look. Beautifully lived-in live-action interiors, too.
TV The X-Files, s5e1–2 “Redux I & II“. We’re back! Tough watch in the first , so much talk talk talk talk talk talk. Things picked up in the second one. Mulder is getting so affectionate! I’m ready for Scully to get out of bed, and for both of them to get back to weird middle-America spooky investigations. This main government conspiracy arc is never going to go anywhere! Remember who your friends are.
Hannibal, s1e1. Revisiting this for a third perspective on the Hannibalverse. I think Mikkelsen is my favorite Lecter of them all.
Words of Wisdom Irving Berlin: “Life is 10 per cent what you make it, and 90 per cent how you take it.” (Thanks, James)
This weekend we celebrated our anniversary. A highlight was a trip to the Metropolitan Opera, on my local bucket list. I love that we still have grand occasions and spaces like this: tuxes, chandeliers, gold, red velvet, broad curving staircases. Rituals and visuals that dial up your expectations, call your attention to share something outside yourself.
As for the opera itself, we saw Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which I’ve only heard a few excerpts of – the overture and the Commendatore’s re-entrance Great music and great singing (an untrained ear on this part), but I struggled in the second act a bit, where it felt like the momentum lagged. I was most disappointed by the bland staging, tough. Just like the spare set in the production of The Tempest I saw last year. It was all solid blue-greys colors and empty planes, uniform costuming. The transformation at the end was nice, but saving it for the very last few moments made for a leaden visual experience for most of the run – “It’s a famine of beauty, honey!”
“Crudele? Ah! no mio bene” was my favorite aria. There’s a romance to the lyrics, and an earthy practicality: the loving, patient, compromise sometimes needed when committing to a shared vision.
Worked late a lot this week. It eventually caught up with me – I wonder if it contributed to my late-week sniffles? – but i don’t regret it. I had a thought that maybe I’ve been leaving too much buffer, not enough pressure. I default that way, a natural caution and conscientiousness. But it leaves opportunities on the table.
Books Sense and Sensibility. Finished this yesterday and loved it. I’d rank it below Pride & Prejudice, along with most other books.
Running A steady but lighter week, tapering a bit before a race next Sunday. This morning was a map-filling run to finish off the last few streets in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood.
Around the Web Brian Eno in conversation with Ezra Klein. A fun idea: “Children learn through play and adults play through art” (of course not the only way). And this was nicely put: “When we look at any piece of art, we are not looking just at that piece of art; we are looking at this piece of art in terms of our personal history. It’s like you are hearing the latest sentence in a conversation you’ve been having for your whole life.”
Selling Lemons: The hidden costs of the meta game. “If a buyer can’t distinguish between good and bad, everything gets priced somewhere in the middle. If you’re selling junk, this is fantastic news”
Daryl Johns, Daryl Johns. Throwback-y pop/muzak/mall jazz/sitcom intro music, calling back to Sting or Toto or Rick Springfield or the like. “I’m So Serious” is a good example.
Last week I went bouldering for the first time in 6 years or so. So great! I need to work that back into my life. For me it’s one of those pleasures like playing guitar or videos, where I never got very good, don’t particularly care, and find a lot of satisfaction in re-learning the basics every now and then.
Books Sense and Sensibility. Things I’m appreciating: mixing dialogue with summary of dialogue and the way the narration undercuts and pokes fun at its subjects. Also appreciating how primogeniture and entailment make even the most comfortably wealthy women so vulnerable. An incredibly enjoyable book.
Running This weekend I ran a long loop touring some of my least-favorite neighborhoods, and had a great time. It’s not only where you are, but what you make of it.
Around the Web Zadie Smith on The Art of the Impersonal Essay. “It’s in that optimistic spot that I set out my stall, yes, and my ideas and arguments such as they are, sure, but without demanding to see anyone’s identifying papers in the opening paragraph.”
Encourage purposeful friction. “In general, if you can reduce the friction required to start doing or continue doing a thing, you’re more likely to do that thing, and keep doing it longer. Great! Helpful. Unless the thing is something you don’t want to keep doing.”
Illiteracy is a policy choice. “If you live where I do, in Oakland, California, and you cannot afford private education, you should be seriously considering moving to Mississippi for the substantially better public schools.”
Why Warm Countries Are Poorer? “A big percentage of equatorial population actually lives in mountains: The closer to the equator, the higher up the capitals!”
“Aphorisms never accomplish anything. Their whole talent is traveling beyond their occasion, gathering force as they go, to end up on a refrigerator magnet.”
Movies Weapons (2025). Fun to watch but nothing lingering afterward. The vignette structure is a welcome change of pace.
28 Years Later. This is a good blend of high and low. References to Bible stuff, Bergman, Hamlet. I like the use of montage to unsettle and give some historical resonance. Appreciate that the father and mother are very imperfect. What’s with movie dystopias leaving all the women in floral dresses?
TV Line of Duty, s4e2–4. I love Hastings. An imperfect but forcefully moral leader, endlessly disappointed that others set such a low bar for themselves.
Last week I was out of town for 3 days, out in San Francisco for a work conference we were hosting. I’ve been there maybe a half-dozen times now, and I think it’s gotten better each time. Or I’m just different, finding it a bit easier to get on its wavelength.
On the day of the conference itself, I didn’t have formal responsibilities. So just tried to be a welcoming and friendly presence, using the opportunity to strike up conversations with customers, prospects, vendors. Not my natural inclination in a crowd – I was completely fried by the time I went to bed, after the after-after-party – but at the very least, a nice change of pace from the usual.
Two trips to the Pacific coast in the last month, but the view from the plane had me itching for a mountain edition.
Books Sense and Sensibility. Inconsistency is hurting my moment. Need to get back on track.
Running Heading out of town threw off my rhythm, and cut into my mileage but I rallied for a great long run yesterday. Cooler weather seemed to boost everyone’s mood – lots of greetings and smiling faces. Even the seedier neighborhoods couldn’t deny it.
Movies Get Out. Masterpiece, gets better every time.
Challengers. So fun! Sexy, messy, shot in interesting ways, makes dramatic mountains out of molehills. Interesting to watch a movie where I’ve heard the soundtrack before seeing it.
TV Abbott Elementary, s4e22. I think I’ve seen more season finales than regular season episodes? Always surprised how gently they close things out.
Line of Duty, s4e1. They know how to start with a bang.
Last weekend felt like I barely had any time. Felt good to get back to routine, and by comparison, feels like I’ve been luxuriating in vast expanses of time to work with, happily filled. A good feeling.
Running Yesterday’s long run was tough. I bet the layoff/irregularity of the travel week threw things off, and odd timing last week. Filled in a few more pockets of the Brooklyn map, which feels good.
Baby Rose, BADBADNOTGOOD, Slow Burn. I like the backing music/arrangements a lot but the singing style, and the shound of awll the chewred-up shlurrred wuordsh, is really grating for me. :(
Movies Knives Out. Re-watch, still fun, and funnier than I remembered.
District 13. Another re-watch, still fun. There is a certain delight in seeing physical/athletic greatness on screen, often worth the drop in dramatic/acting talent.
Saved!. Light teen comedy skewering a certain strain of Christian moralizing. We don’t often see people sincerely wrestling with their religion on screen.
TV Alien: Earth, s1e1–2. Some interesting additions to the mythology but something is just slightly off. Not sure if I’ll continue (but I might!).
CSI: Miami, s6e18. One of the worst-written/looking episodes.
Last week I went to Los Angeles. My first time back since I moved here to Brooklyn. Took some trips down memory lane – my old apartment, favorite coffee shop, neighborhoods and restaurants with good memories – and also remembered what a lonely and strange time it was. I’d arrived there just a few weeks before the first inklings of a new virus, and a couple months later, lockdown. Happy to be there, and remembered what drew me west, but lots of old emotions shook loose, rose to the surface.
I remember when I first left I had a feeling that I might need to go back at some point and try again. I’m not sure that itch is there the same way. I’d be happy to live there again, but it’s less… mysterious now? A known quantity for the right time of life, whenever that may be.
I rode in a Waymo for the first time while I was out there. It was such an odd mix of mind-blowing experience – wow! it’s really happening! – and just completely mundane. After a few minutes, it felt totally normal and safe and pleasant. Hard to imagine going backwards from here. (I think I also feel safer as a pedestrian, seeing how well it picked up on runners!)
I also had my first experience on a diverted flight when thunderstorms shut down JFK, and my first time visiting (a hotel on the fringes of) Detroit. Lucky that I don’t have more travel scars of this kind.
Running Last week all of my running was in my old Santa Monica neighborhood. Mostly around 5am, to squeeze it in before work on east-coast hours. Nothing beats a run on a quiet moonlit street.
Music Gabriela Ortiz, Yanga perf. Los Angeles Philharmonic cond. Gustavo Dudamel. I like the hand drums and general expansion of the percussion section, but I just could not get into this.
Violin Concertos Nos. 3 & 4 perf. Francesca Dego, Sir Roger Norrington con. Royal Scottish National Orchestra.
Piano Concertos perf. Jeremy Denk with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. I used to read Jeremy Denk’s blog quite a bit, so a novel surprise to see this one pop up in search. Timpani adds so much to the opening of the D minor piano concerto – a punch you simply can’t get with just the strings and winds.
Movies Ingrid Goes West. The influencer cliches feel a bit dated and worn already, but luckily it’s more focused on the obsessive fandom turned sour. Good physical comedy, too.
Zodiac. I think this is the 4th time I’ve seen it? It’s so easy to watch this movie.
Drumline. Love seeing Atlanta on film. The main character is very annoying but loved Orlando Jones as the band director.
TV Binging a new TV obsession one week, and then completely abstaining the next week.
Line of Duty, s2e6 and Line of Duty, s3e1–6. Interrogation scenes are consistently great in this show. Not sure I’ve seen many other TV shows use them as effectively.
Mark Larson 