Ahead on Differential

Here are ten things.

1. Happy Super Bowl Sunday to those who celebrate. Every championship season, I'm reminded of the modding communities that keep old sports games alive, updating the rosters and jerseys season after season. So shout out to the modding teams responsible for Tecmo Bowl 2023 and NFL Blitz 2023.
2. I am totally in the tank for whatever the Shutdown Fullcast crew does, and this includes Spencer Hall and Holly Anderson's newsletter, Channel 6. This week's free missive included a link to the 2008 Roofball World Championships. What is roofball? Why are all the participants in this supposed world championship seemingly all from Oregon? Fair questions both, but I invite you to just wade in the waters of adults putting a lot of time and effort into a backyard game (complete with score bugs and multiple camera angles, shades of classic Major League Wiffleball), all the while decked out in the finest fashions of the day. Says Hall in this very newsletter: “This is what the sports internet should have been, what it is at its best, and what it still could be.”
3. A new one for your rotation of morning puzzles: Cine2Nerdle, one part tile puzzle, one part Wordle.
4. My friend John Hex finally released his long-threatened defence of the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie.
5. I didn't catch up on 2022 movies much this week, but I did finally watch a movie with one of the greatest tiles of all time: 1967's Nikkatsu noir A Colt Is My Passport. And it rips!
6. What is the smokiest movie? (via Todd Vaziri)
7. Catching up on some tunes: New York City, the new album by the Men, is a continuation of their Neil Young-via-Replacements-via-Sonics brand of guitar fury. It is also a colossal SEO nightmare.
8. RIP Burt Bacharach. Hiring he and Elvis Costello to play “I'll Never Fall in Love Again” in the second Austin Powers movie is one of the top 5 things Mike Myers has ever done.
9. Here's a weird one: I sunk over 1,000 words into Obsidian building a wiki for a grip of fictional characters that have been living in my head for years. I have no plans to make this into anything else, but it is nice to have this information somewhere that isn't my brain. I really like the idea of a wiki being not just a way of building a fictional universe, but telling a story by itself, as a kind of hypertext fiction.
10. Here's a peek at my current poetry project, a sci-fi/romance novella in verse:

    Nor physicist nor engineer nor botanist nor cook;
    I was just born here and got as comfortable as I could,
    
    a ghost in the fuselage, a small spectral heart
    in the outland folds of an infinite atlas,
    
    longing for the margins, the coffee table,
    the choppy waters at the edges of the page.
    
    The whir of the engines gets the best of me,
    and the brass tumblers in my brain slide into place
    
    and I sink into the plush sleep of those on solid ground

#tenthings

Here are ten things.

1. February came in like a lion, specifically a frost lion of myth that can freeze anything it lays its paws on. It got so cold that it didn't matter if the temperature I was reading was measured in Celsius or Fahrenheit. I wore thermals under denim like a sicko.
2. Writer Adam Sternbergh on reading recklessly. I'm trying to apply some of these rules to my own reading habits, with fitful success. (via Austin Kleon)
3. It's Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction season! The longlist of nominees has dropped, and while I have some questions (chief among them: why is Joy Division and New Order considered one thing but Wham! isn't included with George Michael?), I am psyched about seeing Warren Zevon, Missy Elliot, and Willie Nelson under consideration. Is this the year that Kate Bush and Iron Maiden get in? And god dammit, I am too young for the White Stripes to be here!
4. This week's Movie Bowl was a gimmick bracket called Denz-Hell in a Denz-Cell, which focused on the career of Denzel Washington. Malcolm X defeated Training Day in the finals, and in many ways it is the correct final, but I spent the whole week thinking about the work Denzel had done with the late Tony Scott. In 2016, Jesse Hassenger of the AV Club wrote about those movies and how they fit in the context of both artists' respective oeuvres.
5. In the spirit of this Movie Bowl, I finally caught up with Carl Franklin's Devil in a Blue Dress, based on the Walter Mosely novel of the same name. I'm a sucker for anything hard-boiled, and Denzel, as you can imagine, is hyper-charismatic as Easy Rawlins, so I had a fantastic time with this one.
6. The great Iranian filmmaker Jafar Pahani was released from jail after a hunger strike. Never forger that, to date, this man has made four films “illegally,” one of which was smuggled out of Iran in a thumb drive hidden in a birthday cake so it could play the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.
7. Patrick Willems released an 85-minute master class on film analysis that probably would have saved me a few thousand dollars in tuition fees.
8. More Criterion Closet fun, this time featuring triple Academy Award nominees Daniels.
9. This week's Shutdown Fullcast was a mailbag episode, and it was a total banger.
10. A poem: “Catch” by Langston Hughes:
    

    Big Boy came
    Carrying a mermaid
    On his shoulders
    And the mermaid
    Had her tail
    Curved
    Beneath his arm.
    
    Being a fisher boy,
    He’d found a fish
    To carry—
    Half fish,
    Half girl
    To marry.

#tenthings

Here are ten things.

1. A weird one to start off: rediscovering the joy of eating eggs for breakfast. Shout out to eggs.
2. The nominations for the 95th Academy Awards dropped this week. Now, the Oscars may or may not matter, but the event itself is WrestleMania for cinephiles. How will the storylines resolve? Will the heel win over the beloved babyface? What swerves could there possibly be? My only real note here is that Cate Blanchett, as awesome as she was in Tár, already has two statuettes, so I'm all in on Michelle Yeoh and Team Everything Everywhere All at Once having a big night.
3. Sometimes you shitpost yourself into a hypothetical. Here's my all-time NHL All-Germany team: Draisaitl (will go down in history as the greatest German hockey player of all time, full stop; they're going to put his face on stamps one day), Sturm (Marco, to be clear; no shade to Nico, he can cry into his Stanley Cup ring about it if he likes), Hecht, Ehrhoff (just two solid dudes), Krupp (Avs legend, real heads know), Kölzig (now, this is a guy, Oli the Goalie, come on!).
4. Earworm of the week goes to this 11-year-old cover of “Nyan Cat” done in the style of prog-rock enfants terribles Emerson, Lake & Palmer, concocted by one Kobi LaCroix. It's shockingly good.
5. Adam Granduciel of the War on Drugs runs down his pedal board. This is my version of ASMR.
6. Every now and again, the back catalogue of an artist I like will just appear unannounced on Spotify. This time around, the work of Tokyo math-funk weirdos Zazen Boys has arrived on the platform. Zazen Boys 4 is my suggested entry point (it features “Weekend,” whose immortal music video is how I found out about this band circa my time on Tumblr), but “Riff Man” from Zazen Boys III might be my favourite of their songs.
7. New music alert: the new White Reaper album Asking for a Ride kicks ass, all punk fury, glammy power pop, and Destroyer worship.
8. An intersection of relevant interests: John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats in the Criterion Closet.
9. 2022 catch-up: Charlotte Wells's moving, achingly 90s drama Aftersun and Todd Field's mesmerizing, patient character study Tár.
10. “There are no boring people in this world” by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, translated by Boris Dralyuk (via Eileen Chengyin Chow):
    

    There are no boring people in this world.
    Each fate is like the history of a planet.
    And no two planets are alike at all.
    Each is distinct – you simply can’t compare it.
    
    If someone lived without attracting notice
    and made a friend of their obscurity –
    then their uniqueness was precisely this.
    Their very plainness made them interesting.
    
    Each person has a world that’s all their own.
    Each of those worlds must have its finest moment
    and each must have its hour of bitter torment –
    and yet, to us, both hours remain unknown.
    
    When people die, they do not die alone.
    They die along with their first kiss, first combat.
    They take away their first day in the snow …
    All gone, all gone – there’s just no way to stop it.
    
    There may be much that’s fated to remain,
    but something – something leaves us all the same.
    The rules are cruel, the game nightmarish –
    it isn’t people but whole worlds that perish.

#tenthings

Here are ten things.

1. Yesterday was me and Steph's 14th anniversary! I don't think she reads the blog, but in case she sees this particular post: I love you so much.
2. So the 14th anniversary is the ivory anniversary, and what contains ivory? That's right: teeth. And what has teeth? Why, rats, of course! To celebrate our anniversary, Steph and I welcomed two tiny dudes into our home: Trumpet and Trombone.
3. It was a Movie Bowl week! In the 1974 edition of the contest, Young Frankenstein beat out The Texas Chain Saw Massacre for the championship belt and a spot in the Tournament of Champions. Over in the Sickos Bracket, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla reigned supreme.
4. Thanks to a combination of mild temperatures, wet snow, and active wind, I got yetified.
5. Jacksonville Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence threw four touchdowns and four interceptions in his team's miraculous 31-30 comeback win over the Los Angeles Chargers in the Wild Card Round of the NFL playoff. No QB in history has thrown that many picks while throwing that many touchdowns and won. It's an absurd stat line we will never see the likes of again. It makes me so happy.
6. I was so happy with this two-pack of USB squid cables that I bought two more.
7. The new Blank Check miniseries on the films of Danny Boyle started off with a corker of an episode on Shallow Grave.
8. Bailey Freeman, aka Foolish Baseball, asks the hardest-hitting question in sports media: does Pittsburgh Pirates legend Andrew McCutchen play better in the proximity of furries?
9. The great Louie Zong stays winning, extending his K.K. Slider-fied cover banger streak to four: here's his Animal Crossing-style covers of “Ain't No Sunshine” by Bill Withers and “Papa's Got a Brand New Bag” by James Brown.
10. An excerpt of Steph's favourite poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot:
    

    Let us go then, you and I,
    When the evening is spread out against the sky
    Like a patient etherized upon a table;
    Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
    The muttering retreats
    Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
    And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
    Streets that follow like a tedious argument
    Of insidious intent
    To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
    Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
    Let us go and make our visit.
    
    In the room the women come and go
    Talking of Michelangelo.
    
    The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
    The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
    Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
    Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
    Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
    Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
    And seeing that it was a soft October night,
    Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

#tenthings

Here are ten things.

1. We had a big snow this week from the West. I went for a walk one night during the worst of it. There's romance to snowfall illuminated by the floodlights of a baseball diamond.
2. I finished a notebook, this pocket-sized purple deal I had for a while, home to grocery lists, lines for repotting in poems, and other assorted scribblings. So to the stationary drawer I went, where notebooks old and new are patiently waiting their turn to be filled out. I took out a Field Notes Dime Novel notebook I had started in 2018 and, for some reason, abandoned. Turns out, reading notebooks and journals is the cheapest form of time travel.
3. I think I'm going to try and become a cursive sicko. One evening last week, I did the teenage-girl thing of trying out new signatures, looping my D differently, completely changing the shape of the G. We'll see if this sticks.
4. The great Louie Zong released a two-fer of Animal Crossing-fied covers, one of “Rich Girl” by Daryl Hall & John Oates, and one of “Dancing in the Moonlight” by King Harvest.
5. Steph got the Tachsen Astrology book from their Library of Esoterica (we also own Tarot), and now I'm just out here coveting Taschen books about graphic design and movies. Hell, I'll even take a look at those books about copy writing and restaurant menu design.
6. I'm trying to engage in what Austin Kleon calls promiscuous reading. I told a friend recently that I wanted to get back into capital-F fiction but have failed spectacularly in that respect. On my bedside table, so to speak, are Bluets by Maggie Nelson (prose poetry), Equipment for Living by Michael Robbins (essays; file under “Klostermania”), and How to Write Short by Roy Peter Clark (I will ready any “how to” book on writing).
7. The 2022 catch-up train keeps rolling on: Henry Selick's Wendell & Wild (good but fractured) and Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (dazzling and devastating).
8. This week on PlutoTV: 48 Hrs., a true-blue cable classic.
9. RIP Charles Simic. “A 'truth' detached and purified of pleasures of ordinary life is not worth a damn in my view. Every grand theory and noble sentiment ought to be first tested in the kitchen—and then in bed, of course.”
10. A poem, via poem.exe:
    

    we humans
    night after night
    blinking back tears

#tenthings

Here are ten things.

1. Today is my cat Ruby's fifth adoptaversary! Over the 2017–18 winter holidays, we were half-looking at Kijiji for people looking to re-home their pets, and we stumbled upon someone nearby giving away their adorable brown long-haired tabby cat. So on a cold January day, I went for a walk with a pet carrier and brought my little girl home.
2. I'm not a big resolution guy (see the last edition of Ten Things), but I do want to get better at writing capsule reviews on my Letterboxd.
3. One of my favourite Nintendo 3DS games is Pocket Card Jockey, a pyramid solitaire/horse racing game from the studio behind the Pokémon games. After literal years of crowing for a port or a remaster, Tim Apple has granted my wish: Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On! drops January 20th, and might just be the killer app that gets me to subscribe to Apple Arcade.
4. What do the Fisher-Price PXL-2000 camera, synthetic tracheae, and the AT-727 Sound Burger all have in common? They are all featured in the Museum of Failure. (via Recomendo)
5. Two new additions to my bookshelf: The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols and the collected sonnets of William Shakespeare.
6. Every now and again I'll fall into the wonderful, questionably-accurate, likely-maintained-by-people-half-my-age Aesthetics Wiki and try to figure out what my bag is. Long story short, I may have been stealing some Dark Academia valour with my whole “goth professor” shtick.
7. NHL logos, Poké-fied.
8. I made some fried rice last week and I swear I saw the face of God.
9. 2022 cinematic catch-up, continued: the eye-popping, heart-wrenching visual feast that is Three Thousand Years of Longing, the Fincher-fied cape shit of The Batman, and what is likely to be 2022's Short Good Secret all-star, Leonor Will Never Die.
10. “After the Fire” by Ada Limón (via Carith)

    You ever think you could cry so hard
    that there’d be nothing left in you, like
    how the wind shakes a tree in a storm
    until every part of it is run through with
    wind? I live in the low parts now, most
    days a little hazy with fever and waiting
    for the water to stop shivering out of the
    body. Funny thing about grief, its hold
    is so bright and determined like a flame,
    like something almost worth living for.

#tenthings

Here are ten things.

1. Happy new year, y'all! So normally, I'd publish my Kleon-esque list of 100 things that made my year in 2022, but you know what? 2022 was kind of a shitty year for your boy. I don't much feel like combing through the wreckage at the moment. I will say, though, that the weekly ten things in a way market-corrects the annual top 100. But because I love reading it, I will link to Austin Kleon's top 100; I said it once and I'll say it again, without Austin, there's basically no Ahead on Differential.
2. Last January, in lieu of a resolution, I decided that the operating theme of my 2022 would be “habit.” Now I was doing pretty well until all the death and illness happened, and I don't want to recycle a theme, so I'm going to declare that 2023 will be my Year of Consistency, i.e. being better about keeping the habits I tentatively formed in 2022.
3. Steph and I started watching Jeopardy! on a whim just in time to be charmed by a soft-spoken below-the-line TV guy from Toronto named Ray “The Sway” Lalonde.
4. Overcast is my podcatcher of choice, but the barebones desktop version available on the app's website is sneakily useful for when listening to podcasts on my phone is inconvenient (i.e. when I'm at work doing audio-based tasks on my workstation). Last year, developer Marco Arment decided to discontinue the desktop version of Overcast, until he changed his mind when he realized just how popular this particular usage of his app was.
5. AoD Hall of Famer Jon Bois interviewed in the god damn Times.
6. 2022 cinematic catch-up update: the face-melting historical action extravaganza RRR, Jordan Peele's oddball thriller Nope, and Steven Spielberg's beautiful, affecting family drama The Fabelmans.
7. In the spirit of plugging people I've been ripping off for years: here are Jason Kottke's 36 things.
8. YouTube Digest: Linus Boman on Papyrus, Red Letter Media on the secondary VHS market, and Patrick Willems on Ambulance.
9. So this is a weird one: this past week I had a flash bulb memory of a gag-a-day newspaper-style webcomic I read in high school called Phil Likes Tacos, a about a dude who works in a taco place and his goofball bestie. Because nothing on the internet truly dies, I looked it up again, hoping to find some lingering trace of it. Not only did I find it, but writer/illustrator Andrew Bilitz is still making Phil Likes Tacos, which I find heartening in the way these kinds of small miracles to be. From the man himself: “Phil Likes Tacos is a webcomic I started way back on May 22nd 2002 and I continue to do to this day for whatever reason. Oh wait, it’s because it’s fun and interesting and there’s always something on my mind.” When it comes right down to it, anything worth doing, especially if you do it for a long time, has to be fun for you. Shout out to you, Andy.
10. A poem from Wikipedia Haiku:
    

    She worked at bowling
    alleys, peeled potatoes and
    even made cigars

#tenthings

Here are ten things.

1. I would be remiss if I didn't wish y'all a merry Christmas. Today is Day 4 of my extended two-week holiday break, and I won't see the broad side of my office building until 2023. I hope y'all are talking it easy with people you care about, and who care about you.
2. “Santa,” as ever, was quite generous with his wares this year (including a lambswool cardigan that makes me think I should lean way more into looking deliberately professorial), but no gift surprised and delighted me more than this booklet of blank brackets I got. Close attention truly is the currency of love.
3. Speaking of brackets: nothing says Christmas like a holiday-themed Movie Bowl! For Movie Bowl: Christmassacre, 32 Christmas movies entered the arena, and The Muppet Christmas Carol, winner of the 1992 Movie Bowl, ultimately came out on top. Gen Xers and old Millennials like the Muppets, who'd have thought?
4. One last Christmas thing: I spent this morning writing while listening to my all-time favourite Christmas album, The New Possibility by John Fahey (here bundled with the very good Christmas with John Fahey, Vol. II).
5. Music notes: I listened to Tim Heidecker's new album High School, which might have made my Top 20 had I got around to it a bit sooner (“Sirens of Titan” was a late cut to my 2022 mixtape), and I've come to the conclusion that I may be more into Tim Heidecker's music than I am his comedy.
6. Y'all ever try to print an em-dash on a keyboard with no numpad? It's tough! That's why I've taken my first tentative steps into the world of text expansion apps. I installed aText, and now all I have to do to get an em-dash—like these—is type three regular dashes in a row.
7. In 2017-18, there was a trend on YouTube of people posting “empty mall mixes” of popular songs, where the track was manipulated to make it sound like it was, well, playing in an empty mall (the great Jia Tolentino wrote about it in The New Yorker in March 2018). The result is this strange mix of liminality and nostalgia, and the remix I keep returning to is this version of ABBA's “Dancing Queen” as played “over intercom in 1976 empty mall food court.” My friend Patrick brought my attention to a similar remix of Crowded House's “Don't Dream It's Over” where the song is performed “LIVE (but tickets were sold out).” The comment highlighted in the link, written by YouTube user Sean Cunningham, is a beautiful and-one.
8. This week on PlutoTV: the second half of The Truman Show, and all of Terms of Endearment, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Catch Me If You Can. PlutoTV remains undefeated.
9. My 2022 catch-up continues: I finally saw Top Gun: Maverick (unequivocally better than the OG), Glass Onion (man I hope they let Rian Johnson make like 30 of these) and Barbarian (FYC Justin Long for Best Supporting Actor).
10. “Miss you. Would like to take a walk with you.” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi (via Laura Saint Chevalier):
    

    Do not care if  you just arrive in your skeleton.
    Would love to take a walk with you. Miss you.
    Would love to make you shrimp saganaki.
    Like you used to make me when you were alive.
    Love to feed you. Sit over steaming
    bowls of pilaf. Little roasted tomatoes
    covered in pepper and nutmeg. Miss you.
    Would love to walk to the post office with you.
    Bring the ghost dog. We’ll walk past the waterfall
    and you can tell me about the after.
    Wish you. Wish you would come back for a while.
    Don’t even need to bring your skin sack. I’ll know
    you. I know you will know me even though. I’m
    bigger now. Grayer. I’ll show you my garden.
    I’d like to hop in the leaf pile you raked but if you
    want to jump in? I’ll rake it for you. Miss you
    standing looking out at the river with your rake
    in your hand. Miss you in your puffy blue jacket.
    They’re hip now. I can bring you a new one
    if you’ll only come by. Know I told you
    it was okay to go. Know I told you
    it was okay to leave me. Why’d you believe me?
    You always believed me. Wish you would
    come back so we could talk about truth.
    Miss you. Wish you would walk through my
    door. Stare out from the mirror. Come through
    the pipes.

#tenthings

Here are ten things.

1. It's the most wonderful time of the year. That's right, it's end-of-year list season! So to help you get into the holiday spirit, here are my 20 favourite albums of 2022. (here's a text version of the list)
2. I also made a companion playlist of my favourite tracks of the year. That's 90 whole minutes of bangers for your ass (if your idea of “banger” is “bitchin' power pop and/or sad songs about feelings”). Most of the albums on my top 20 are represented, but also represented are singles that either don't have a parent album yet, won't have a parent album, or whose parent album I have simply missed.
3. Winter has arrived in full force, greeting the city with heaps of cloudy, fluffy snow. There's just something about seeing cars and apartments and trees covered in pristine, white snow that just... makes me real happy.
4. Workplace extracurricular #1: The first official office Christmas party since 2019. Libations were consumed, karaoke was sung (I went with an old standby), astrological charts were pored over and parsed. It turns out there are way more fellow Pisceans at work than I thought.
5. Workplace extracurricular #2: laser-lightshow duckpin bowling, QA vs. Scheduling Edition. I am frustratingly bad at bowling (why blame it on my mechanics when I can blame it on the Jack and lemonades?); Steph, on the other hand, bowled five straight strikes to start off her final game and ended up with the second-highest individual score of the day.
6. A further experiment in adornment: I bought some fake nose rings on the internet and test-drove a different look.
7. My three hottest movie takes.
8. At long last, PlutoTV has landed in Canada, and has so far done an incredible job of replicating the peak-cable feeling of programming movies that are fun to dip in and out of, a veritable murderer's row of rewatchables. A sampling of what I caught, like, 30–45 minutes of this week: Coming to America, Zodiac, Days of Thunder, Collateral, School of Rock, and The Untouchables. The one movie I did watch in its entirety was the Robert Aldrich prison football movie The Longest Yard (capsule review: right up there with Slap Shot in terms of bawdy fuck-the-Man macho 70s bullshit), so now I have a better idea of what the whole Burt Reynolds thing was all about.
9. RIP Angelo Badalamenti. I've seen his work with David Lynch get praised, and rightly so, but seemingly no one has brought up his sweeping, Cooder-esque score for the sorely underrated Lynch joint The Straight Story. Floodgates: open.
10. “The Necklace” by Osip Mandelstam (translated from Russian by Christian Wiman) (via Laura Esckelson):

    Take, from my palms, for joy, for ease,
    A little honey, a little sun,
    That we may obey Persephone's bees.
    
    You can't untie a boat unmoored.
    Fur-shod shadows can't be heard,
    Nor terror, in this life, mastered.
    
    Love, what's left for us, and of us, is this
    Living remnant, loving revenant, brief kiss
    Like a bee flying completed dying hiveless
    
    To find in the forest's heart a home,
    Night's never-ending hum,
    Thriving on meadowsweet, mint, and time.
    
    Take, for all that is good, for all that is gone,
    That it may lie rough and real against your collarbone,
    This string of bees, that once turned honey into sun.

#tenthings

Here are ten things.

1. Workplace extracurricular #1: axe throwing. Capsule review: not so fun when you're starting out, but awesome once you get into the swing of it. Play with a cocktail in your nondominant hand for maximum dirtbag vibes.
2. Workplace extracurricular #2: trivia night. Your boy was a force to be reckoned with; I don't know how one would quantify AAR (answers above replacement), but I was putting up hall of fame numbers in spite of all the tequila shots we were winning.
3. I am a big fan of Discord's new display font, gg sans.
4. An interesting rundown of how the Ralph Lauren coaching tree has had a deep influence on several branches of American fashion.
5. On The Big Picture podcast, host Sean Fennessey and guest Timothy Simons nerd out about the glory of physical media for 90 minutes. They talk about home theatre set-ups, preferred boutique labels, and the rush of buying 50 used Blus at a pawn shop for $100.
6. Over at the New York Times, Manhola Dargis and A.O. Scott break down the Sight & Sound Top 100 list, assess current trends in criticism and cinephilia, and wonder if the list overall is just a touch too classy.
7. I've been listening to the Fang Island song “Chime Out” a lot recently, a song I have adored for a decade, and realized the lyrics were nowhere to be found online. So in an uncharacteristic fit of confidence, I got in touch with Jason Bartell on Instagram and asked him if he... had the lyrics to “Chime Out” lying around somewhere. Long story short, he did, he shared them with me, and seemed moved that someone would ask in the first place. The lesson of the story? Life's too short to not let someone know that something they do or something they created makes your heart swell; no one dislikes hearing that.
8. Ear candy #1: Tony Molina, the Cali-based master of the 90-second power pop symphony, has a tremendous new album out called In the Fade. A lot of catchy, wistful 90s fuzz with some Tom Petty-isms thrown in for good measure.
9. Ear candy #2: Dazy, Richmond, Virginia's finest purveyor of irresistible fuzz-pop nuggets, has a new one out called OUTOFBODY. There is no better stompbox-drenched 1994 college radio crossover hit-ass song I've heard all year than “Rollercoaster Ride.” Damn near perfect.
10. “Self Portrait at Twenty Years” by Roberto Bolaño:

    I set off, I took up the march and never knew
    where it might take me. I went full of fear,
    I got the runs, my head was buzzing:
    I think it was the icy wind of the dead.
    I don't know. I set off, I thought it was a shame
    to leave so soon, but at the same time
    I heard that mysterious and convincing call.
    You either hear it or you don't, and I heard
    and almost burst out crying: a terrible sound,
    borne on the air and in the sea.
    A sword and shield. And then,
    despite the fear, I set off, I put my cheek
    against Death's cheek.
    And it was impossible to close my eyes and miss seeing
    that strange spectacle, slow and strange,
    though fixed in such a swift reality:
    thousands of guys like me, baby-faced
    or bearded, but Latin American, all of us,
    brushing cheeks with death.

#tenthings