We renewed our lease this week, so we’ve got at least another 15 months in Brooklyn. Let’s hope year number three is the best one yet.

I also went to a house party for the first time in ages. It felt so normal and pleasant, just good ol’-fashioned low-stakes positive community. What a nice boost to launch into a new week.

Running
I also got a nice boost from my weekend long run. The Brooklyn Public Library system has a new Browse the Branches program. At every branch, you can collect a unique sticker and put it in a little booklet, like the National Parks. I plotted out a 15-mile loop to 11 branches in my area, and ran to collect them in 4 inches of snow and slush. Perfect Saturday morning action, followed by a perfect equal and opposite reaction: the Saturday afternoon nap.

School
Learning the Java Spring Boot framework and it’s been a pleasant surprise! I had one of those moments of looking back and seeing step-change progress. I didn’t clearly notice it while it was happening, but I have been learning a good bit, and looking back, I can see a clear growth in knowledge from then to now. No substitute for hands-on.

Books
The Sleepless – Enjoying it, but lately I’ve been too sleepy to make much progress at bedtime. Will definitely keep chipping away.

Music
The recent snowfall led me to Ferron’s “Snowin’ in Brooklyn“, which led me to “As Soon As I Find My Shoes I’m Gone“, which led me to the rest of the album. I dig it!

Beyoncé has a couple new country songs. I love “TEXAS HOLD’EM” – but that 2010s-indie-folk whistling in the chorus had me doing a double-take. I like the backing sounds in “16 CARRIAGES“, with a whip cracking, clop-clop horsetread sound at the close, etc.. The density of musical ideas in her recent work is so incredible. You hear similar in “MY HOUSE” recently, another multi-mode single that shifts form two minutes in. I need to take another tour through her discography.

Inspired by that Grammy duet with Tracy Chapman, I took some time to listen to Luke Combs. I have pretty adventurous musical taste, I think. Some genres I don’t prefer, but I’m willing to sample anything. So I was fascinated by the feeling of comfort I had when listening to, say, “One Number Away“. It made me remember back to elementary/middle-school age. My school bus driver had wired up 3-4 speakers from the radio through the length of the bus. So country music was my soundtrack, morning and afternoon, every day from 1st through 8th grade. I wonder how to weight the music (it’s a good song!) vs. my upbringing, but there’s probably something deeply embedded in my psyche that responds to country, even though I rarely listen to it. (Another thing that jumps out is how easy it is to understand the lyrics! I barely pay attention, anyway.)

After hearing of his death, I also listened to a lot of Toby Keith and… well, it’s not for me. “Ain’t It Just Like You” is pretty good, though (despite a relatively weak chorus).

As I mentioned last week, I listened to a lot more of Alice Coltrane. Definitely prefer the later era. Lukewarm overall? Realized I’d listened to Eternity a few times before – “Om Supreme” is still great. The spiritual flavor of her work as heard on Radha-Krsna Nama Sankirtana is an interesting turn. I like the dreaminess of “Ganesha“, and the intimate devotional of “Prema Muditha” makes me feel like I’m intruding somehow.

EARTH, “Your Song“. I love hearing the familiar – 2000’s pop/R&B – in languages I don’t understand at all.

Yusef Lateef’s Eastern Sounds is perfect soundtrack when it’s the end of the workday and I’m sort of winding down, BUT I’m also sort of still in the groove. You can just glide forever on this.

Articles & Episodes & Twoots
Jerusalem Demsas has a substack, which is an easy subscribe.

Speaking of expertise on housing, I don’t often think about accounting and tax policy, but there’s a good argument that depreciation policy holds back housing construction, and it would be “easy” (relatively speaking) to make it much better.

This episode of Plain English on anxiety got me thinking. One nice bit: the very important distinction between therapy and “therapy content”.

10x – Funding Ideas for Better Public Service. I had no idea a program like this even existed. It is welcome and reassuring to see the government with experimental, improvement-focused programs.

“Most podcasts are boring because the interviewer is asking questions they already know the answer to, faking the role of an ignorant audience member. They’re much better off asking questions they don’t know the answer to, but genuinely want to know the answers to.”

On casual programming: “At a high level, there’s one thing that sticks out to me: there’s little computation involved in most of these. They’re mainly about data wrangling and automating tedious manual tasks.”

Words of Wisdom
“You can do two things: you can pout, or you can go out there and respond.”

Movies
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Loved it. You see that Margaret is different – or at least that this won’t (only) be a typical coming-of-age/tween romance story – early on when we first see her bedroom. We see maps and star charts, and in her voiceover prayers, a search for place and meaning.

TV
A Real Bug’s Life, s1e2. Pleasantly upbeat and funny. I’m not the target audience, so I left feeling a little short on detail. For example, it just tossed out a quick aside on how bees can detect polarization of light (wild!) – and then moved on to the main plot. (But maybe enticing interest is the whole game?) Also: we can get the most insane footage these days. Leaps and bounds beyond what we used to have.

Jack Reacher, s1e2-4. Reacher is in pain and it’s hard to watch. :( A soft moment arrives and you see the walls go up. His knee-jerk smart-ass approach to life can be a little grating, but there’s a tender heart in there.

The X-Files, s1e20, “Darkness Falls”. Most exciting thing here is seeing a Titus Welliver guest spot, and a glimpse of the everyday lawlessness that still exists in the wilder corners of the States. And s1e21, “Tooms” was better than I feared! I appreciate the scene near the end, Mulder crawling through the tunnel like Bishop.

Batman: The Animated Series, “Feat of Clay” parts I and II – “Listen up, scum wad!” LOL. Such a treat to dip into this show again.

More reminder than revelation: weekend naps are worth it, in moderation.

Art
I like this gingerbread house I stumbled on during my run yesterday, artist unknown:

Blue Lagoon, is one of many cool quilts by Michael C Thorpe. (via)

I went to the Brooklyn Museum this weekend for Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys. Favorite piece there, by a wide margin, was Derrick Adams’ Floater 74. His recent work is super cool.

Running
Through most of the winter, my running has followed a casual “today’s mood” sort of program. Two weeks ago I started a new formal running plan, in prep for an upcoming race. So far, so good. One thing I’ve noticed is how adding 1-2 miles to a typical ~6-mile weekday run can feel like such a big adjustment. The extra exertion isn’t a big deal. But the ripple effects on diet, recovery, sleep, social time, etc. are very real. No such thing as a free run.

Books
A Crown of Swords. I finished the previous in the series with so much energy, but had a really hard time getting back into the groove. Moved on to others, for now.

How to Say Goodbye. It’s barely a book. Short read, loving/haunting illustrations.

The Sleepless. Noir-ish novel set in a near-future where we no longer need to sleep. Some people opt in, others do not. I’m enjoying the pace.

Music
A great week for listening!

Tracy Chapman’s Grammy appearance got me curious. “Fast Car” came out when I was a kid, and I remember it being low-key omnipresent on the radio up through high school. I never listened to her self-titled back then, but it’s good! I especially like “If Not Now…“. The piano and conga work reminds me of something from the Carly Simon “Anticipation” / Carole King “Tapestry” era.

I spent a lot of time with a couple playlists of opera duets, trios, quartets, etc.. A couple I really liked:
* “Dôme épais le jasmin à la rose s’assemble” from Delibes’ Lakmé has been on a bunch of soundtracks (about a minute in). It’s gorgeous, and you can’t unhear it.
* The oboes and basset-horn in “Mi lagnerò tacendo, notturno” stuck with me.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Blackbraid II is heavy and screamy. Really like the riffs in the second half of the album, as in “Twilight Hymn of Ancient Blood“.

I love the horns and general ’80s pop richness of Yukihiro Takahashi’s “My Bright Tomorrow” and “KILL THAT THERMOSTAT“, and the stereo bounciness of “OH LES BEAUX JAPANAIS!“.

I just love disco. If you give me a jangly rhythm guitar, a roving bass, four on the floor… I, too, will be ready for Murder on the Dancefloor.

Les Arts Florissants recorded a 3-volume/6-disc collection of madrigals from Carlo Gesualdo. The choral packaging is familiar, but the harmonies are so far ahead of their time. So many moments you feel a little unexpected ~twist~ in your brain. Also fits in that special category of “music that can function as wallpaper but also reward close listening”. Hard to recommend one, but worth a sample.

The adagio from Bohuslav Martinů’s harpsichord concerto is excellent.

I love the soft droning organ and synthesizer tones in Alice Coltrane’s Kirtan: Turiya Sings, how it fills up the ears. The album was “initially released in 1982 on privately-pressed cassette for her Vedantic Center’s students”. See “Rama Katha“. I’ll be spending more time with her work!

Articles & Episodes & Twoots
The Vesuvius Challenge was successful. Incredibly cool that we can read text from charcoal. I’m trying to imagine the feeling of scholars who have been toiling within the field for decades, suddenly getting a rush of attention, abilities, technology that unlocks decades of progress… that they may never see.

“One of my New Year’s resolutions is to not try to be modest unless I really mean it.” Thinking on this, and I think I like it!

“I think people confuse the feeling of nostalgia for the past with the feeling of being alive in that moment. They think they are remembering a feeling that they are in fact only having now, as they remember.”

Service journalism meeting the people where they are: “We used 311 call data to find the New York zip codes with the most heat-related complaints per person. Then, we sent the guide to getting your heat fixed to nearly 1,400 addresses via postcards.”

IRS is taking a huge, much-needed step forward: the Direct File pilot is alive! Limited scope and availability, but hope this keeps moving forward.

Movies
The Place Beyond the Pines. My fourth viewing. My notes on the first, second, and third viewing show a growing appreciation – five will not be enough!

I really felt for Eva Mendes’ character on this watch. Dealt a bad hand several times over, just moving forward as best as possible. Emory Cohen is perfect as the very, very wounded teen putting on his best cool, unaffected front. And what’s with that smile at the end? What lessons has he learned?

I appreciated more parallels and echoes on this watch. Characters wearing t-shirts with lightning bolts on them. Gosling appearing with an t-shirt inside-out (like his life) after a major revelation. Dane DeHaan scooting around with his backpack and bike. Gosling barging upstairs to build a crib, dirty cops barging in to rob it. Bradley Cooper with his own two momentous walks up the stairs, and two trips into the woods. So neatly done. That soundtrack, too!

Fallen Leaves. Took a while to get used to the dry humor and deadpan delivery. Appreciated a setting I’ve not seen much of, working class Finland. Two star-crossed will-they-won’t-they lovers scratching out a bit of hope in a comically hostile world – turn on the radio and its either war updates or love songs.

TV
X-Files, s1e18, “Miracle Man“. One unexpected part of this rewatch is the emphasis on Mulder’s sister as a driving force. I didn’t remember her coming up so much. I love how direct Scully is when they’re interrogating people. She just says blunt things in the most calm, polite, “here’s your chance to convince me otherwise” tone. She’s got no time for your BS.

And s1e19, “Shapes“. Felt very anxious about the Native American depictions going in. Could have been worse! Most of all in this episode, I really appreciated how much this show travels around, all across the US, urban, rural, and everywhere in between.

Jack Reacher, s1e1. This was fun! I’m into it. I like Tom Cruise’s sarcasm and confidence in the movies – hard to match that – but this better fits the brutish charmer I remember from the books.

Miami Vice, s1e10, “Give a Little, Take a Little“. Parallels between life undercover and life as an informant. Interesting to see so many freeze frame moments. Fun guest stars: Burt Young, Terry O’Quinn, Michael Madsen.

For several years, I used the Day One app for daily journaling. It’s how I got the habit to stick. After a few years, habit established, I moved to paper journals instead. (It’s much more fun to see them stack up over time!)

I exported all of those old entries to some .txt and .json files before I deleted the app. A few days ago, I got the idea to upload those old journals to ChatGPT. And then I asked it to work up a psychological profile and tell me about the writer.

Some qualities it highlighted:
– Socially Active but Sometimes Withdrawn
– Reflective and Thoughtful
– Adventurous and Curious
– Analytical and Introspective
– Humorous and Witty

Some areas of struggle/challenge/growth:
– Consistent Communication
– Balancing Social and Personal Time
– Tendency Towards Self-Criticism
– Overthinking Social Interactions
– High Expectations and Perfectionism
– Occasional Negative Self-Perception

We went further in-depth, poking and prodding. All pretty spot-on, seems like an accurate read with good grasp of nuances, not too much hallucination. I’m curious what it would be like to digitize and upload all those bound journals I’ve written in the 6-7 years since, and ask the bots to compare/contrast the two writers…

Art
“Chandelier of Lost Earrings” by Lauren Sagar and Sharon Campbell. (via @womensart1)

I love the @StampsBot account, where I get small little injections of art in my day, like this flower on a Rwandan stamp or this goofy Japanese bird or this Tajikistani ruby ore. Makes me think of sculptures you see in a public park. It’s not often moved me or stirred my soul, but I like the little touch of delight – “that’s nice”. More nice things.

Running
I felt like I’d gotten into a rut lately, with many runs happening at the ~same speed. Cranked it up for a couple miles on Tuesday, a literal change of pace, felt great.

Not registered yet, but I’m eyeing 20-mile trail race the next month or so. I haven’t done that distance since… maybe a few years ago when I was living out west and running around the Santa Monica Mountains NRA. After a move back east and slow build-up after injury, it feels so, so good to be back where that distance seems pretty reasonable and attainable. I feel like I have so many ideas for routes and challenges and can’t wait to take them on.

School
I got a Linux certification, and now I’m in the depths of Java. I still find the syntax a bit tedious, but I think I’ve turned a bit of a corner. It doesn’t matter that much!

Music
I saw André 3000 at the Crown Hill Theater last Monday. Felt great to support another ATLien far from home. Not the most incredible concert experience I’ve ever had, but very glad I went. Yancey Strickler’s write-up of the concert captures it well.

“The Long Day Closes” perf. The Sixteen, by Chorley & Sullivan, was a stand-out this week.

Books
Lord of Chaos: finally finished. Turned a corner in this book about 2/3 in, after nine thousand pages of table-setting, the pace picked up. And a narrative change where more was hinted and hidden, motives clear but intentions ambiguous. It got fun again!

On to A Crown of Swords as of last night. It’ll be nice to move on to somewhat shorter books. The last three were ~20% longer than series average, and a nice tidy 800 sounds great right about now. Eight more books to go. Honestly couldn’t tell you what compelled me to do this re-read, or to continue with it, but it’s been fun.

Articles & Episodes & Twoots
David Cain on The Two Ways of Doing is my favorite thing I read all week.

Embracing the reward while resenting the price just isn’t a viable way to go about something for long. You’re always in inner conflict. You’re driving with the brakes on.

An illuminating history of standard Western music notation, and why alternatives haven’t taken off.

ASCII Theater lets you stream free text-based movies in your terminal app. Captions, too! (via)

“To use AI at work requires you to think about what your work means to others, and what it means to you. ”

Gothamist on the NYC wildlife beat: Photos of Flaco, free for a year. And we’ve got coyotes in the city, too!

Beware fairy tale brain.

“Something I don’t like about Letterboxd is how the social aspect encourages users to have “clever” responses to a movie, when sometimes the only appropriate reaction is leaving the theater and silently reading the Wikipedia entry in the bathroom line.”

And in that spirit, here are my minimally clever thoughts…

Movies
Fast X. I’ve only seen some of #8, and totally missed #9. I’m kinda tapped out on this franchise in its current era. This is easily the worst scripted and worst acted of all the ones I’ve seen. But! Silliness has its merits, and Momoa is the argument in favor. I liked his a kooky Bane-meets-Joker angel of vengeance. Statham is a breath of fresh air, too. Feels like the franchise is choking on its nostalgia. The body count/collateral damage is piling up and it’s making me sad.

TV
True Detective, s3e3. Interesting to see the wartime-veteran angle picking up.

The X-Files, s1e17 “E.B.E.“. Glad we returned to mainline UFO stuff after a few episodes away. I love when people think their place is bugged and they tear it apart!

My fiancée was out of town all week, so in her absence, I went into full goblin mode for a few days. 😈 By the time we got to Wednesday morning, the thrill was gone!

Art
This MoMA overview of Henri Matisse’s cut-outs is really cool. I learned his transition into “drawing with scissors” was partially a desire for speed: easier to edit a painting, or just cover a larger space, by slapping some paper on the wall.

Running
On Tuesday night I did Bakline’s open-course race from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Short and sweet, good times. (Dave Hashim took some great photos.) Funny to realize I’ve been in NYC for two years, but only just now ran in Manhattan at night. Nighttime running was my default in Atlanta and LA, but somehow fell out of it. I need to get back!

Nice long run out to Sunset Park on the weekend. I love the Brooklyn Tower looming in the skyline like the Eye of Sauron (on the right). Squeezed in some trailrunning, too – also need more of that.

Articles & Episodes & Twoots
Nobutaka Aozaki made a large map of Manhattan, assembled from on-scrap directions from strangers. (via)

Wikiflix is a nice UI for movies that have ascended into the public domain. Amazing what a smidge of design polish can do to sell the product.

“OLLOS is an experiment that organizes everything in my personal computing environment on one unified timeline.” I really like this experiment, one big river of items to flow through.

“Montaigne turns your Apple Notes into a website.” Like the above, I like this personalization of computing. It’s going to be so cool to see how this trend develops, as the bots make it easier to PM something useful for yourself.

There is a downside to the “TGIF” mindset – be careful about wishing your life away!

“‘There’s no sound I don’t like,’ Aissam said, with the help of interpreters during an interview last week. ‘They’re all good.'” We can heal forms of deafness with gene therapy. The next decade of medicine is going to be incredible.

But on the other hand… “I worry that one of America’s superpowers is to spin up yarns to reduce the urgency for action.”

A story of a hate crime in a local park caught my eye this morning. I had a similar experience when I was out for a run at some point last year. (I got some homophobic slurs / violent threats when I dared to run with… running shorts?). No identity harm for me, and didn’t really feel physically at risk. But nonetheless I was really shaken/sad/angry/baffled by the malice. Mercifully, I’ve had a briefer experience than the victim in the story, and one with none of the fallout that family has had. But I can relate to the jumbled feelings in the wake. Can’t imagine what it’s like when that’s a normal risk in your daily experience.

Music
Dido & Aeneas is one of my favorite operas. The songs that close Act III – “When I am laid in earth…” / “With drooping wings…” – are rightfully celebrated. Beautiful stuff. But on this recording from Nuova Musica, the dance / “Often she visits…” section really caught my ear. I love the period instruments, and the recording is so spacious.

Learned about Jah Division from a running buddy – Joy Division covered in reggae/dub form. “Fu Manchu Dub” is a good one.

I’ve gone through the same pattern with just about every album in the Radiohead family tree:
1. Okay…
2. Hmmm I dunno…
3. Hold on a minute…!
4. Okay I love it. :)
From The Smile’s latest album, the early fave is “Teleharmonic“. We’ll see how things change on replay after replay.

I’m going to see André 3000 & flute-friends in concert soon. 😎

Movies
Due to the aforementioned goblin mode, took in quite a few this week.

Kimi is a perfectly solid 90-minute thriller. What jumped out on rewatch is the perfection of the corporate exec role – sympathetic and instantly suspicious.

The Creator has very cool sets and setting, and I’m always open to more philosophical scifi. “Everything In Its Right Place” is a sick needle drop, the way it fills the ears. I remain frustrated that John David Washington has such a compelling presence and charisma, but scene to scene, in every movie, my trust in the acting waxes and wanes. :/

Scream 3. It’s total nonsense, in a good way. Like a soap opera, maybe. Hone in on a few elements, dial them up. Appreciate that all of these movies explore trauma exhaustion, the film industry, the press, bloodthirsty audiences, toxic fandom, etc..

Barbie. Wonderfully inventive and vivid… and repeatedly stalls out for talking points. And a little too much Ken, for my taste? Found it dazzling and frustrating, and I wonder what a shorter, zippier cut would feel like. Cast was great, and I really, really hope we see more movies with stylized sets and practical effects like this. The artifice can be so invigorating. Loved the the staginess and visible seams in Anderson’s Asteroid City and Roald Dahl adaptations, for example, and the spare spaces in Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth.

The Kid (1921). My first Charlie Chaplin. A clean 54 minutes. Sentimental, filmed with a doting smile on the lens. Fun to see signs in Spanish in old Los Angeles. But wild to see a major city in shambles, all those dirt roads, and even the average/nicer areas looking shabby. People who long for the days of yesteryear should spend more time looking at old film and photos. The past sucked!

Flashdance. I remain fascinated with Pittsburgh, where this movie takes place. Probably the never-visited US city I’m most curious about. Anyway, this is perfectly overstuffed plucky-striver fun. The musical x gritty Midwestern industrial crossover here makes me itchy for a Streets of Fire rewatch. “This is one of those movies that goes for a slice of life and ends up with three pies.” – Ebert says it like it’s a bad thing!

Phoenix (2014). Somehow Saturday afternoons have become my time for quiet European drama. Here we have a Holocaust survivor, the only surviving of her family, recovering from a major reconstructive surgery, and reluctant to leave the country to start over in Jewish sanctuary cities. She remains in Berlin in hope of finding her husband, who had likely turned her over to the Nazis. They meet and we see their relationship transform. It’s really good. This is the middle of a thematic trilogy from Christian Petzold – Barbara and Transit are also excellent. I’ll be watching more from him.

TV
Miami Vice, s1e9, “Glades“. Don’t know where to begin here, it’s so strange, with our heroes doing guerrilla warfare in the swamp. But it had me thinking about the value of TV built for commercials: you get a break!