I’ve mentioned goblin mode a couple times (2024 week 4 and week 36), and this week I had another go-round, a shortened version. For me it usually involves an intentionally horrible diet, and playing videogames too long, and not going to bed on time, and so on. Minor sins, available for a limited time only.
I think about it like a bizarro mirror image of New Year’s resolutions. Every so often, it’s good to think about getting your act together. But it can warp your perspective, turning your life into a never-ending battle of shoring things up. Designing your goblin mode gives you a program for letting go for a time… and a chance to prove you can snap back to your standards. Permission to “fail” is a valuable thing.
Articles & Episodes & Twoots
RIP, David Lynch. Kyle MacLachlan remembers his friend. I didn’t love the couple of Lynch films I’ve seen, but appreciated the spirit of gentle, earnest, insistent optimism and goofiness, maybe most apparent in the daily weather reports he did for a while. And I was glad to see the bits of folk wisdom that surfaced in my feeds in wake of his death:
- “I wish what every addict wishes for: that what we love is good for us.”
- “Anger and depression and sorrow are beautiful things in a story, but they’re like poison to the filmmaker or artist. They’re like a vise grip on creativity. If you’re in that grip, you can hardly get out of bed, much less experience the flow of creativity and ideas. You must have clarity to create. You have to be able to catch ideas.”
- “It’s like dipping a white cloth into gold dye; you dip it and that’s meditation, then you hang it on the line in sunshine and that’s activity. The sun bleaches it until it’s white again, so you dip it and hang it again, and each time you do that a little more of the gold stays in the cloth. Then one day that gold is locked in.”
I wish The David Lynch Quote Collection cited the sources, but they have the ring of truth. Lynch directed a haunting PSA about littering in NYC, too.
I loved this conversation between Zena Hitz and Henry Oliver on The Common Reader, especially the linked part, analogizing the great literary works to great songs: “Me reading Lady Macbeth’s speech when I was 14 – what use did that get me? Nothing obvious. Except that sometimes the words are still in my head, and they echo in my head the way a great piece of music does.” I’d never thought of it this way, remembering snippets of plot or quotes or emotions, the way we might feel things again when we remember a chorus or a swelling of violins or what-have-you.
And they discuss living with these works, and how it’s good to read the great books early, so you can re-read and grow with them, and draw different meanings. (Made me think of how so many Motown songs were so fun as a kid, and as an adult, I can better recognize the anguish and frustration behind many of them.) The episode also has good critique of common methods literary criticism – “explaining things away, rather than raising problems.”, and a recollection of George Steiner’s encouragement to memorize poetry because it gives you ballast against the tides of life.
Let the user help solve their own problem. “The algorithmic-only model admits only one remedy: Improve the algorithm. But because no algorithm will ever be perfect, you’ll be playing this game of whac-a-mole forever.” This feels most true in e.g. Twitter feed and Spotify Weekly playlist. They will both nose-dive, quickly, if I don’t give it them hard shake every now and then. (via)
Why everything might have taken so long. (via)
Oliver Burkeman on the right dose of self-discipline. “Somehow, I’d turned the thrilling prospect of a better life into a sequence of lifeless tasks I had to execute – and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.”
Nabeel Qureshi collected some principles for living.
- “Once you are ok with people telling you ‘no’, you can ask for whatever you want. (Make reality say no to you.)”
- “Doing things is energizing, wasting time is depressing. You don’t need that much ‘rest’.”
- “Think in writing.”
- “The most valuable feedback usually hurts a lot.”
Decline the cease-and-desist of winter!
Watching Your House Burn on a Ring Camera. I’d never thought of this possibility.
Art
Farm near Duivendrecht oil on canvas Piet Mondrian. I don’t think I’d ever seen a Mondrian that wasn’t abstract color blocks, so this was really neat peek into the past, trying to imagine the steps in between.
Music
Tchaikovsky & Ellington: The Nutcracker Suites perf. Harmonie Ensemble/New York. Classical and jazz performances, both perfect in their own way.
Dobrinka Tabakova, Kynance Cove, On the South Downs, and Works for Choir. Lovely collection of choral work, peaceful and smooth. The “Magnificat” from Truro Canticles might be my fave.
Laura Cannell, The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined. Reminds me of Flute 3000, in the best way.
Mount Eerie, Night Place. Languid rock. I haven’t listened to anything like this in a while. Took a while to get my ears situated again!
Mk.Gee, Two Star & The Dream Police. Maybe like Prince x Frank Ocean (complimentary, of course)? See: “DNM” and “I Want“.
Movies
Den of Thieves. I never should have waited so long to see this. I was expecting something more schlocky (like, Expendables-level antics?) but this was tighter than expected. The main characters were all a little… off? I like when a movie can surprise you not for plot reasons but character reasons. That’s good stuff. You can see the fingerprints from Heat throughout the movie – dumpsters subbing in for airport substations might be my favorite. Appreciated seeing Eric Braeden in a small role here – his Victor Newman in The Young and the Restless back in the ’80s/’90s filled me with envy and fury.
Rebel Ridge. Opens with an Iron Maiden song, nice. Echoes of Rambo, with the opening confrontation passing over a bridge, and the contrast of military decency vs. police cravenness. I appreciate the inciting incident is a straightforward abuse of power, civil asset forfeiture, that isn’t strictly personal. At least not at the start. Really liked our main character’s calm, mostly polite, deliberate delivery – you can tell it takes effort, and that makes you more curious than a direct threat might. Excited to see what Aaron Pierre gets up to next.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It’s good that the core three has loosely expanded to six, because Harry is exhausting to be friends with. Ron and Hermione could use a breather. I love the Death Eater masks!
Books
Middlemarch, cont.
TV
The X-Files, s1e4 “Unruhe“. Spooky predictive death photos + an exploration of mental illness.
Severance, s1e3–5. I like see Cobel/Selvig put on the back foot a little bit by the Board, and clawing her way back. She’s can’t-look-away awful!
Mark Larson 