Morocco, 1930 - ★★★. I loved that the C-plot of the film is that Gary Cooper owes everyone in his unit $60 because he just can’t stop hitting up prostitutes.
A Life of Her Own, 1950 - ★★★. Oh hey did you know that nothing matters, nobody will really love you, you’re aging wrong, and New York has never once made a single person happy?
Guest of Honour, 2019 - ★★★. Casting the best living Lawful Evil actor as a health inspector is a damned inspired choice. Making that character the protagonist is a more curious one. I think it mostly worked.
I really loved Santeri Liukkonen’s article, Age of distractions or how to calmly enjoy what you are doing in 2021. I still struggle with the myth of multitasking, and get distracted far too easily. This quote, “If we can’t manage to control our whims, we won’t be able to work effectively towards our long-term goals. I guess it’s just that simple.” hits hard.
I love figure skating/ice dancing. Rebecca Jennings wrote a tremendous piece over at Vox about why the sport is in decline: Figure skating lessons are declining. Can the 2022 Olympics save the sport?. I have one hot take it’s this: nobody watching actually considers figure skating to be a sport. It should lean into itself as a performing art.
My Favourite Quotes from Several Short Sentences About Writing
Page 45:
A cliché is dead matter.
It causes gangrene in the prose around it, and sooner or later it eats your brain.
Page 57:
Many people assume there’s an inherent conflict between creativity and a critical, analytic awareness of the medium you work in.
They assume that the creative artist works unconsciously and that knowing too much about matters like grammar and syntax diminishes or blunts creativity.
This is nonsense. You don’t need to be an expert in grammar and style to write well.
Page 68:
The difficulty of writing isn’t a sign of failure.
It’s simply the nature of the work itself.
For the writer, “flow” is a trap.
So is any word that suggests that writing is a spontaneous emission.
Writing doesn’t flow, unless you’re plagiarizing or collecting clichés or enlisting volunteer sentences.
Page 80:
One of the few sad parts about writing is that it’s almost impossible to surrender to the manipulation of your own prose.
Page 89:
A belief that the writer’s real work is making newness out of nothing.
As if creativity only takes place where the ink stops and the blank page begins.
Where the cursor starts blinking.
As if newness couldn’t originate between sentences or within a sentence.
As if revision were essentially secondary and uncreative.
Page 100:
Resist the temptation to start organizing and structuring your thoughts too soon,
Boxing them in, forcing them into genre-based containers.
Postpone the search for order, for the single line through the piece.
Let your thoughts overlap and collide and see what they dislodge.
Page 100:
How do you begin to write?
Look for a sentence that interests you.
A sentence that might begin the piece.
Don’t look too hard.
Page 103:
The piece is now two sentences long.
Not two sentences plus the missing pages that haunt you.
Page 117:
Writing doesn’t prove anything,
And it only rarely persuades.
It does something much better.
It attests.
It witnesses.
It shares your interest in what you’ve noticed.
It reports on the nature of your attention.
Page 121:
Novels contain far less chronological narrative than you think.
Take a page from almost any novelist.
Look carefully at each sentence.
How many propel the story forward in time?
And how many are devoted to enriching our sense of place and character?
Page 134:
Discipline is nothing more than interest and expectation, a looking forward.
It’s never hard to work when you’re interested in what you’re working on.
International Object Podcast 127 - Peacock McMahon
Jason Mann joins me to discuss the WWE Network move to Peacock, and what that could mean to non-wrestling fans finally being able to just casually watch WCW twenty years after its demise.
Youtube is a bad place, but every now and then a good video appears. Because I can’t seem to stop going there, I can at least make it easier for you (and future me) to see what was worth it.
I bought the new Chromecast in January. It replaced my Roku Stick from 2017, which had begun glitching and slowing down. I like the Roku and thought of just replacing with another, but the Chromecast looked interesting enough to try. I like the dingus. It’s fast. I like the pink remote. The voice commands are better than anything I’ve used. And AppleTV+ just showed up today. I watched an episode of the new snoopy show. It’s cute.
I almost never watch YouTube on a computer. It’s always on TV. Sometimes I’ll watch a video as a palette cleanser between movies. Sometimes I don’t have the concentration ability to watch something “real,” so I’ll go on YouTube and watch 40 minutes of trailers.
I don’t usually stop a TV show halfway through, but I abandon YouTube videos all the time. Scrolling back on the month’s history to find the few I’d like to remember, I was surprised how many were in there.
I finished The World Ends with You this month, just in time to watch a Polygon tribute video. Speaking of the 3DS, finishing TWEWY made me spend some more time with it, and I realized my backlog was big enough I could actually avoid buying the 11 Great 3DS Games Overshadowed by Switch.
Fran’s Not Here is a show about Toronto, co-hosted by Sawyer Paul and Robert Pilgrim. Read blog posts about each episode. The show is hosted at Anchor, where you can subscribe however you want.
Stray Dog, 1949 - ★★★. Good noir. This movie occasionally just stops to take in the sights, be it a seedy neighbourhood or a baseball game. Lots of slow interrogations with anxious cops losing their minds because the city just keeps getting worse around them. Mifune slowly begins to think every crime that’s been committed happens because a thief took his gun.
Cat Ballou, 1965 - ★★. if all mediocre films were like this, I think people would enjoy them more.
Arsenic and Old Lace, 1944 - ★★★★. Second time around, I’m still not sure it holds together. But it’s kind of worth it just for Cary Grant to look at me sometimes?
Black Lizard, 1968 - ★★★★. When this pandemic is over I’m never going to shut up about this movie at parties.
It’s not the best game of 2020, but it’s the only video game of 2020. It felt like medicine, dropped right at the exact moment it was needed. We played it for a combined 400 hours. We had friends over. We built a cozy place. We watched fireworks together in yukatas. It was comforting and easy and nice.
Hades
This week, I’m posting my 5 favourite games of 2020. Everyone put Hades on their best of 2020 list. It’s probably game of the year for people who play a lot of video games. If you don’t, maybe it’s too difficult and too button-heavy and fast. But if you grew up on beat-em-ups and your thumbs are still calloused, this is probably the best game you could possibly play.
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (2019)
Link’s Awakening is everybody’s favourite game from their childhood and this remake is painfully adorable and twee. It’s very strong nostalgia drugs. It’s probably the best short Zelda (there’s a lot of bests in the Zelda world). I loved all of the seconds of it.
Manifold Garden
If you liked Portal and can stomach peering into infinity, Manifold Garden is a pretty great treat. Puzzly and maddening and mildly headache-inducing.
Sayonara Wild Hearts
I adore short games. I played this twice, first on iOS, then later on Switch (which did come out in 2020). It’s better with a controller, and perfect on a TV, where the gorgeous art style can really suck you in. Sayonara Wild Hearts has such focus, such a strong sense of taste. Best soundtrack. Best longboard girl. So much love.
Luke is a metaphor