Started my long weekend with a bit of journaling, now I sit by the big window watching the snow fall. Life is good.

Art
La Cadie Diaspora, mixed media textiles, stencil, collage, embroidery, stiching by Merill Comeau. Embers, quilt by Barbara Danzi. Thar, sculpture in porcelain, earthenware, glaze by Kathy Butterly. The Boating Party, oil on Canvas by Mary Cassatt. Paysans Sortant et Allant au Marché (Villagers Going to the Market), oil on board by Philomé Obin. Trains and Bridges, lithograph in black on wove paper by Jolán Gross-Bettelheim.

Books
War and Peace, continued.

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?)

"The most virtuous thing is usually to make an up-front investment in making things easier, so that going forward, you are not making high day-to-day expenditures of your patience, energy or happiness."

How the Brooklyn Bridge has changed over time. I had no idea the bridge had trolley cars at one point.

The real reason New Yorkers' groceries cost so much. Zoning strikes again! Expensive elevators strike again!

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?

A finding that "Living next door to someone as a child increases the probability of having the same occupation as them 30 years later by about 10 percent." (via)

The United States needs fewer bus stops …and better (faster) service as a result.

Oops, You Wrote a Database.

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".

Tako Tiki, Hirsutes Farfelus. Oddball winds + percussion.

The Platters, The Flying Platters Around the World. I really like "Twilight Time".

Titanic, Vidrio and HAGEN. How to summarize these – Latin experimental chamber pop?

Philip Glass, Etude No. 1 → No. 8 perf. Vanessa Wagner. What you'd expect!

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.

TV
The X-Files, s5e15 "Travelers". Body horror!

The Abandons, s1e1.

Hannibal, s2e12–13. Such a perfect and devastating season wrap-up. "In the pantry!".

Line of Duty, s6e1–2. I care about one thing and one thing only!

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.

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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.

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Took my first ride on the NYC Ferry this weekend, up the East River from Brooklyn to Queens and over to Manhattan. So pleasant!

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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.

Art
Pink Honey, acrylic, pencil and ink on burned paper by Modupeola Fadugba. The Waterfall, oil on canvas by Henri Rousseau. Fireflies, woodblock print by Tsukioka Kōgyo. Garland of Fruit surrounding a Depiction of Cybele Receiving Gifts from Personifications of the Four Seasons, oil on panel by Hendrick van Balen the Elder and Jan Brueghel the Elder. Cleaning Jesus, gelatin silver print by Walter Martin

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!

DeafBlind people are creating a new language. An PBS intro to ProTactile, which I learned about from the article above. It looks beautiful and fun!

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."

The philosophy of Solvej Balle.

It's hard to justify Tahoe icons.

How Markdown took over the world.

What an unprocessed photo looks like.

Are You Enjoying Our Linguine?: How American tourists took over everything. "They feel challenged. They feel alive. They are Americans. They are frontier people. They love a cultural mystery."

Notes on Afghanistan.

Mamdani moderating – high hopes!

Music
Netherwalker, Odyssey of Respair. Guttural screamy metal with some classical grandiosity.

Beethoven: Sonatas 18, 27, 28, 31 (The Lost Tapes / Live) perf. Sviatoslav Richter.

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.

Charlie Hunter, Ella Feingold, Different Strokes for Different Folks. Bluesy, funky guitar + bass + percussion. "Nasty, Ain't it!?".

Bill Evans Trio, Haunted Heart: The Legendary Riverside Studio Recordings. Just really good start to finish. A favorite moment this week was a pre-dawn run in Prospect Park with this album playing. Magical.

Charles Lloyd, Figure in Blue.

SML, How You Been.

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.

TV
The X-Files, s5e14 "The Red and the Black". I dunno, is this going anywhere?

Hannibal, s2e9–11. This is going somewhere!

Lost LA, s1e1–3. PBS!

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.

Art
Openings, Red Rock Variation: Lake Superior Landscape, acrylic on canvas on board by George Morrison. Man and Newspapers in Grass, Central Park, gelatin silver print by Tod Papageorge. Vokeo Island Lewa mask in wood and varnish.

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.

Around the Web
2026: "We’ve officially landed in the “made up years” era, where the years don’t feel real, rather, opening lines for a YA doomsday sci-fi book." Let's try that again. This year is our year. Only 12 months until the late 2020's.

"When there's no meaningful resistance, is there any real transformation?"

"A thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it. A thin desire is one that doesn't." (via)

"Luckily because of the way I began, I’m the cockroach of this industry. I can survive any version of it."

It's cool how many different cultures have some form of psychopomp in their stories of the afterlife.

"A question no writer wants to raise in a reader’s mind is ‘why are you telling me this?’"

"It is more important to see the stories in ourselves than to see ourselves in the stories."

"Everyone's house looks like a dentists office now" and Merchandising the Void.

"Doomerism assumes you can opt out and hold your position. That refusal is neutral. That the world will wait while you decide. It won’t."

53 Directors Pick Their Favorite Films of 2025.

Paper Jewels: Postcards from the Raj.

On the creativity of videogame pixel art made for CRT displays.

"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."

Music
Le grand embrasement: Music for a Mad King perf. Into the Winds. Bouncy, festive olde musicke. I really liked it.

Chopin: The Complete Nocturnes perf. Tom Hicks. They're all lovely but I have trouble staying inside the music. Attention drifts.

Shostakovich: The Piano Concertos; Solo Works perf. Yuja Wang, Boston Symphony Orchestra cond. Andris Nelsons. The Andante from the second concerto is brilliant. The rest, familiar and didn't capture me.

Freddie Roulette, Spirit of Steel. Slide guitar, mostly bluesy, sometimes Hawaiian-tinged. I liked "Song for My Father".

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).

Movies
Hercules (1997). I don't love it, but I think we can all relate to Hades' mood swings. Read up on the first 15 minutes.

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!

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Extended Edition. "Forth, and fear no darkness!"

TV
The X-Files, s5e13 "Patient X". Back on the season arc. Fox Mulder has lost his mojo!

Hannibal, s2e4–8. Will Graham has regained his mojo!

Land of Sin, s1e1. Every country has its rednecks.

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.

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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.

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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.

Art
Really cool online exhibition of Tom Lloyd's work at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

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."

"A book is, we know, an unrivaled technology for living more life."

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."

It was only a matter of time: HighAgency.com.

Stimulation Clicker is, sadly, very amusing.

The Story Behind Isamu Noguchi’s Playscapes in Atlanta and Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green. (Thanks, Jara.)

Orson Welles on Christmas.

How the White Savior Became This Year’s Cinematic Punchline.

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.

Bach: Sonatas and Partitas, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, perf. Chris Thile. Mandolin transcriptions are very nice.

Bach: Weihnachtsoratorium / Christmas Oratorio (BWV 248), Thomanerchor Leipzig, Gewandhausorchester cond. George Christoph Biller.

Bach: there's no one better!

Movies
Superman (2025). It's fine. The dog is annoying.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Extended Edition. Better than I remembered. I think the extra footage helped stitch things together better, a bit more heft where we previously skimmed along.

Little Women (1994). Heart: warmed! Loved this movie.

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.

Hannibal, s2e1–2.

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.

(A nice bookend for how I started the year: remembering when I need to ignore myself.)

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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.

Art
Landscape, oil on canvas by Rufino Tamayo. The Shortest Day, book illustrations by Carson Ellis. Cutting the Stone (The Extraction of the Stone of Madness), oil on board by Hieronymus Bosch.

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.

Around the Web
Growth matters and The only number that really matters.

"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."

On Reading Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Maybe a 2026 project?

Terence Malick's disciples. Always read Bilge Ebiri!

Teenagers need to be free.

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."

Bad policy leads to ghost apartments.

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.

Folk Physics, Parallels.

Bach, Six Sonatas for Organ, BWV 525–530 perf. Aart Bergwerff. I really like this organ, very warm.

Bach: The Toccatas perf. Jonathan Ferrucci.

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.

TV
The X-Files, s5e1x "Kill Switch". Rogue AI!

Line of Duty, s5e3–4. This show will wind you up and break your heart.

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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

Art
Street Scene with Runners, 1930, gelatin silver print by James Van Der Zee. Wall of Hats, chromogenic color print by Nola Nelson. La Sirène and Her Playmate, metal cut from oil drum by Georges Liautaud. Conjur Woman and the Virgin – Mecklenburg County, collage on masonite by Romare Bearden. The Medici palace frescoes by Benozzo Gozzoli.

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!

Narrative String Theory. (via)

The New Yorker on the best films of 2025.

Music
Byrd: Three Masses; Taverner: Western Wind Mass perf. King's College Choir, Cambridge Willcocks.

Oklou, choke enough. Pleasant bleeps and bloops and vocals. I like "harvest sky".

Wallners, End of Circles. The title track is really good.

Saya Gray, Saya. Interesting experimental mix of pop, country, folk? "H.B.W" is cool.

The Hilliard Ensemble, Perotin. For all your 13th c. French choral polyphony needs.

-M-, Fatoumata Diawara, Toumani Diabaté, Lamomali, Lamomali Je t'aime. Malian EDM? I like the dark house vibes that "Ama kora" starts with.

Masayoshi Fujita, Smoking Tigers (OST). Gentle, lots of Marimba!

Into the Winds, Le Parfaict Danser: Dance Music 1300–1500. Fun collection, and especially love the cover art – a detail from the south wall of the Magi Chapel.

Movies
Undine (2020).. What a strange little film. Delivers a fantastic scenario in a very straightforward way.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Extended Edition. Still very rewatchable. I think this is my 4th or 5th time seeing it, and I'd be happy to plug in for another half-hour if I stumble on it again. Humans > hobbits > dwarves > elves, for the record.

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.

Line of Duty, s5e2

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.?

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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.

Art
Still Life, oil on canvas by Fernand Léger. Storm in Umbria oil on canvas by Elihu Vedder. Crib quilt, c. 1950s New York. Coupe (footed bowl), earthenware and glaze by Gertrud and Otto Natzler.

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.

Around the Web
An eleven-year-old writer's to-do list. Not bad.

Perhaps the best personal gift guide is the one you write for yourself over an extended period.

Move fast because "your work degrades, becomes less relevant with time. And if you work slowly, you will be more likely to stick with your slightly obsolete work." (via)

American AI influencing the language of British legislators.

High Noon (1952): Wait Along, Wait Along…

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.

The Quietus albums of the year. Time to start stocking up for 2026 listening.

Music
Wallners, Prolog I. "in my mind" spent a lot of time on repeat.

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.

Palestrina: Missa Papae Marcelli | Motets perf. Sistine Chapel Choir cond. Massimo Palombella. "O Bone Iesu" is a little 90-second retreat from all that ails you.

Monteverdi: Vespers 1610 perf. Dunedin Consort dir. John Butt. Love the "Duo Seraphim", sublime.

Movies
n/a, oops!

TV
The X-Files, s5e9 "Schizogeny". Yeah, the one with the killer trees.

All Her Fault, s1e6–8. It gets sillier as you go along.

Line of Duty, s5e1. Here we go again: time to chase down some 👏 bent 👏 coppers.

Sharp Objects, s1e1.

Sex and the City, s1e1–2.

Thanksgiving is the best holiday of the year and it's really that simple.

Art
Man Conquers the Cosmos, mosaic by Fritz Eisel. Portrait of Elisabeth Bellinghausen, painting by Bartholomäus Bruyn the Elder. Pleas and Thank Yous: 100 True Stories, lacquer on aluminum by Gwendolyn Knight. Standing male cupbearer, Sumerian sculpture in calcite with lapis lazuli and shell inlay , ca. 4500–1900 BCE.

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!

One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder. Short essays and whispers from memory lane.

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."

"Art in museums is valuable. And it’s valuable because museums made it that way."

101 Things I Learned Listening to Every Number One Hit: Part 1.

"Every generation imagines a version of Shakespeare that reflects its own aspirations and anxieties, which means every generation gets him wrong in revealing ways."

Henry Oliver and Rebecca Lowe discuss theories of time and On the Calculation of Volume, and Solvej Balle's Novels Rewire the Time Loop.

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."

Memory Palaces: Exploring the history of London’s cinemas online and on foot.

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."

Music
A few from drummer Senri Kawaguchi…

• Buena Vista. The main motif in "The Phoenix" is an incredible earworm.
• Cider ~Hard & Sweet~.
• Dynamogenic. "Storm Warning" is a lot of fun.

Charpentier: Messe de Minuit, Ensemble Marguerite Louise dir. Gaétan Jarry. Just exploring another rendition after sampling one last week.

Víkingur Ólafsson, Opus 109 (Beethoven | Bach | Schubert).

Ladytron, Kingdom Undersea.

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?

TV
The X-Files, s5e8 "Kitsunegari".

All Her Fault, s1e3–5.

Winning Time, s2e1.

Thinking about disappointments lately, and the opportunity to double down on what I want regardless. Renewing efforts, aiming for maximal success helps minimize regrets.

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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!

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A few moments at my favorite burger place a Saturday afternoon:

Art
Tibetan skeleton dance costume in silk and flannel. [Untitled] (Picnic - Fancy Hat), drawing by William Steig. Phoenix and Lobster, woodblock print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi. Ceramic shark from the Tolita-Tumaco cultures of coastal Ecuador/Colombia. Silhouettes, woodcut print by Jeanne Amato.

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."

"We’re losing the ability to be influenced by things we don’t fully understand yet."

"It seems like, by default, you are stuck with whatever level of resourcefulness you brought to a problem the first time you encountered it and failed to fix it."

How men and women spend their days.

Gender gaps run both ways: the data.

Where do the children play? (via) Pretty wild:

some statistics on the American childhood, drawn from children aged 8-12:

• 45% have not walked in a different aisle than their parents at a store;
• 56% have not talked with a neighbor without their parents;
• 61% have not made plans with friends without adults helping them;
• 62% have not walked/biked somewhere (a store, park, school) without an adult;
• 63% have not built a structure outside (for example, a fort or treehouse);
• 71% have not used a sharp knife;

Even if those are inaccurately inflated by let's say 2-3x, this seems impoverished!

I like this idea of "resumability".

A walk around Prospect Heights.

AI-generated Magic cards.

Music
Eleanor Daley: Requiem and Other Choral Works The Choir of Royal Holloway dir. Rupert Gough. Great album. Favorites here are "grandmother moon" and "Open thou mine eyes".

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?

Marc-Antoine Charpentier: Messe de minuit pour Noel. perf. The Virgin Consort cond. Kyler Brown. Preparing my ears for an upcoming concert.

Oneohtrix Point Never, Tranquilizer. All the perfect bleeps and bloops you could hope for! I'll keep this one in the rotation for a bit longer.

Karina Canellakis conducts Tchaikovsky perf. London Philharmonic.

Bach: The 7 Toccatas perf. Francesco Tristano.

Brahms: Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 cond. Kirill Petrenko cond. Berliner Philharmoniker.

Faye Webster, Atlanta Millionaires Club. I like the bass and Rhodes and slide guitar in "Right Side of My Neck".

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.

TV
The X-Files, s5e7 "Emily".

Hannibal, s1e11–13.

All Her Fault, s1e1–2.

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?

Art
This weekend I saw a nice collection of Faith Ringgold works at Jack Shainman Gallery. Especially liked Coming to Jones Road #2: Sunday Evening on Jones Road, acrylic on canvas with pieced fabric border. Reading and exploring afterward led me to Subway Graffiti # 3, acrylic on canvas pieced fabric.

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.

Around the Web
Fun Wikipedia wormhole: amate paper, shaft tomb culture, and Olmec colossal heads.

"I'm a huge fan of death. … I think it's the metronome of our existence."

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."

"It’s astonishing that the richest country in world history could convince itself that it was plundered by immigrants and trade."

"You can in fact do time travel. You do it by going to some key places right now."

"i miss blockbuster because it forced you to pick one thing and live with the consequences."

Friction was the feature. "When the legibility of effort disappears, institutions often fall back to cruder filters".

The Taliban Drove This Afghan Trumpeter Into Exile. He Still Dreams of Home. (Congrats, Mishti!)

"Does calling a timeout actually do anything? Does it help?" Analyzing timeout strategy in college volleyball.

"Semicolons are humanity's last stand."

Atlanta Is… a new podcast on my playlist.

Music
A few albums from Alexandre Kantorow…

• Saint-Saens: Works for Piano & Orchestra
• Brahms: Piano Works. Still don't love it, but a new appreciation for the Ballades, Op. 10.
• …Plays Brahms & Schubert

A playlist of Chicago House Music.

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).

TV
The X-Files, s5e6 "Christmas Carol".

Hannibal, s1e9.