I find myself going through one of my periodic considerations of subscribing to the Criterion Channel. There are so many films there that I would like to watch, but it is hard to imagine how I would fit enough time into my life to make a subscription worthwhile. I’ve been watching Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, on Kanopy via my local library. I’ve had to do it in twenty-minute chunks over the course of the last few days, because that’s the only way I can fit movies into my life these days. I’m not sure that’s the ideal way to watch classic cinema.
And now WordPress seems to have mysteriously stopped displaying images stored in my S3 bucket.
Technology is terrible and I hate it.
I randomly found this delightful arrangement of the Goldberg Variations for a small orchestra among yesterday’s new releases. I really like the Goldberg Variations, but tend to find solo classical piano overly fiddly for casual listening. This recording seems like the perfect solution.
It’s nice that Amazon is helping out with my plan of never buying anything from them again by turning their search results into total garbage. Whenever I do look for anything there, I get a sea of ads and bogus listings from shady sellers.
I’m watching David Lynch’s Dune. It such a glorious mess of a movie.
If you find yourself getting ready to say “I don’t disagree with you,” just go ahead and say “I agree with you.” It’s what you actually mean, and doesn’t sound weirdly passive-aggressive and noncommital.
Someone I know spent the latter half of the past week waiting for the results of a COVID test.
It finally came back negative yesterday.
Nine months into this pandemic and 250,000 dead, it is CRAZY that we do not have widespread, readily available rapid testing.
I have not looked at either Twitter or Facebook since the election was called for Biden, and it has been pretty great.
Stunning Revelation | Talking Points Memo:
According to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Sen. Lindsey Graham approached him about throwing out all mail-in ballots in counties that had higher than average ballot signature mismatches. This is a request (almost certainly at President Trump’s behest) to violate the law by throwing out huge numbers of legally cast votes on an absurd premise. He might as well have asked Raffensperger to falsify the numbers. And in fact, I think that is what it amounts to. This comes out in a new interview with Raffensperger from The Washington Post.
To review the obvious, Graham is a United States Senator and the Chair of the Judiciary Committee. He’s also a lawyer. He’s the one charged with overseeing the Senate’s review of who should serve in the federal judiciary.
Lots of people seem to really like The Caretaker, but I am unpersuaded.
I’m listening to The Caretaker’s An Empty Bliss Beyond This World. I have never heard of the guy before—nor listened to any of his stuff—but ran across a reference to him in a review of the new William Basinski album.
So far, it seems like he takes snippets of vintage music recordings, loops them, and layers a bunch of hiss, crackles, and distortion over them. That’s it.
And yet, the guy seems to have churned out tons of this stuff. I am generally not one to look down my nose at anyone’s art, and judging from the reviews and the YouTube comments, a lot of people seem to **really* like his work. I guess it’s just not for me me, or else I’m missing something.
The new William Basinski album, however, is very good.