Ahead on Differential

Here are ten things.

1. Let's get architectural: two of my favourite kinds of dwellings are surf shacks and A-frame cottages. The playful spirit of the so-called “gingerbread cottages” of Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts (like the so-called Pink House) come in at a strong third.
2. In what the great Spencer Hall called a “controlled demolition,” New York Times art critic Jason Farago takes a scalpel to the Brooklyn Museum's new Pablo Picasso exhibit, whose title is so embarrassing I can't will my fingers to type it out here.
3. For GQ, Howard Beck on napping as a practice in the NBA. If an evening nap is good enough for Jimmy Buckets, it's good enough for me.
4. Danny DeVito talked to Arnold Schwarzenegger for Interview Magazine, and it got existential.
5. RIP Blaseball. As the pandemic started to ramp up in early 2020, I stumbled into the tail end of this eldritch baseball simulation's first season, cheering on the lowly Seattle Garages. I watched aghast as our star pitcher was Incinerated by the Forbidden Book. I watched the game grow and blossom in a veritable cultural phenomenon. I'm sad it's gone, but frankly, I'm surprised it stuck around as long as it did. Nothing this insular or weird was ever going to be compatible with the desires of venture capital. Godspeed to you, The Game Band, for gracing the world with your creation when it needed it most; I look forward to what's next. Godspeed to you, fellow fans, and may your eternal Party Time be a happy one. Garages forever!
6. Speaking of baseball: here's Cincinnati Reds rookie Elly De La Cruz simply annihilating a Noah Syndergaard fastball.
7. The Atlantic's Walt Hunter lays out what I know firsthand because I did it as a workshop exercise: ChatGPT can't write poetry for shit.
8. Watchlist Roulette: closing out the Blank Check Buster Keaton miniseries with College, Steamboat Bill, Jr., and The Cameraman, and a Maya Deren double feature of The Private Life of a Cat and Meshes of the Afternoon.
9. RIP The Iron Sheik. I will be 93 and riddled with dementia but I will always remember him calling Caillou “the jabroni of the earth.”
10. “The Weather-Cock Points South” by Amy Lowell:

    I put your leaves aside,
    One by one:
    The stiff, broad outer leaves;
    The smaller ones,
    Pleasant to touch, veined with purple;
    The glazed inner leaves.
    One by one
    I parted you from your leaves,
    Until you stood up like a white flower
    Swaying slightly in the evening wind.
    
    White flower,
    Flower of wax, of jade, of unstreaked agate;
    Flower with surfaces of ice,
    With shadows faintly crimson.
    Where in all the garden is there such a flower?
    The stars crowd through the lilac leaves
    To look at you.
    The low moon brightens you with silver.
    
    The bud is more than the calyx.
    There is nothing to equal a white bud,
    Of no colour, and of all,
    Burnished by moonlight,
    Thrust upon by a softly-swinging wind. 

#tenthings

Here are ten things.

1. It was my friend Willow's birthday, and to celebrate the event, a bunch of friends and acquaintances got together, ate pizza, yelled at Game 6 of the NBA Eastern Conference Finals, sang, played guitar, discussed the merits of Tommy Wiseau and yacht rock, and otherwise shot the breeze. I'm still not at a point in my life where I'll say no to a classic house party.
2. My friend CJ and her search for Kelly LeBrock's Weird Science shoes. Nike, I know you're reading this: the 40th anniversary of this movie is in a couple of years, and sneakerhead culture is still going strong. Now is the time to bring back the '84 Too Highs.
3. Daywrecker alert: Timeguessr, which is like Geoguessr, but for photography. (via Baio)
4. I love baseball, especially fake baseball, I love podcasts, and I love sleeping. Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio combines all of those things in a single package. Think “baseball radio ASMR” and you're getting close. Kevin Goldstein of Fangraphs wrote up the show last January.
5. Shout out to local pizza chain Slice & Soda and their comically large pies.
6. There's something refreshing about /Film's Top 100 Movies of All Time list. There's the fact that it's unranked. There's the fact that every entry comes with a de facto double bill pairing. And there's the subtle choice of “top” in the title rather than best, because this list has a certain movieness to it; it reads like a who's who of rewatchables and comfort watches.
7. Watchlist roulette: Whit Stillman's acerbic yuppie talkfest Metropolitan and Oliver Stone's brain-melting conspiracy thriller JFK.
8. For absolutely no reason other than I find it wonderful, here a 2019 video of the great jazz guitarist Bill Frisell performing “You Are My Sunshine” as only he can.
9. RIP Tina Turner. She was, as the song goes, simply the best.
10. “Jesus visits my uncle's office” by Andrew Aftel (via Pome):

    Jesus and his disciples
    entered the office of my uncle,
    whose name was Norman, and who sold
    eyeglasses for great profits.
    And Jesus said unto him,
    “Are you having a good day
    at the office?” And Norman replied,
    “It is a fair day.” And Jesus said
    unto him, “Is that right?” Then he
    and his disciples proceeded to
    take hammers, and they smashed all of the
    eyeglasses. Then they opened the
    cages where the secretaries worked,
    so the workers flew away, like doves.

#tenthings

Here are ten things.

1. It was Steph's birthday! Happy birthday!!!
2. Normally, Dairy Queen is known for its hot eat and cool treats, but 'round these parts, most establishments are Treats Only. But! They serve chili dogs at the DQ in Lachine, so Steph and I made an evening out of visiting this particular location on the banks of the canal.
3. For Defector, David Roth on Elon Musk's Twitter:

   It is a miraculous thing, or anyway an impressive one, to invent a platform on which anyone can speak to anyone/everyone else, about anything. But because these people don't really value people or togetherness very highly, or have much to say, or consider the future as anything but a place where they will become richer, they don't really know what to do with that.

4. I keep shouting out Alex Pappademas because he's one of my favourite ex-Grantland writers, and his many of points of obsession (Ween, Keanu, Steely Dan) mirror my own. His recent profile of Dave Matthews for GQ is a corker.
5. Music television institution The Midnight Special has revamped its YouTube page, uploading full episodes and select performances. Check out Donna Summer shoulder-shimmying through “I Feel Love” as the backing band does a pretty good job of interpolating Giorgio Moroder, or Christopher Cross performing “Sailing” in an Earl Campbell Houston Oilers jersey.
6. Australian producer Dankmus, who turns classic Simpsons episodes into chill and/or groovy tracks, returns from a two-year hiatus with a rollicking plastic funk number.
7. Patrick Willems goes Bollywood.
8. The 2023 Cannes Film Festival is in full swing, and I'm thrilled that the notices for the new Martin Scorsese film Killers of the Flower Moon are positive.
9. In anticipation of Master Gardener, the great Scott Tobias goes long one of my favourite Paul Schrader films, Light Sleeper.
10. “Mushrooms” by Laura Kasischke:
    

    Like silent naked monks huddled
    around an old tree stump, having
    spun themselves in the night
    out of thought and nothingness—
    
    And God so pleased with their silence
    He grants them teeth and tongues.
    
    Like us.
    
    How long have you been gone?
    A child’s hot tears on my bare arms.

#tenthings

Here are ten things.

1. I watched this cute, cozy, barely-good slice-of-life anime movie called Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop on Netflix, and I think I'm just going to have to admit to myself that I have a soft sport for this very specific kind of cute, cozy, barely-good slice-of-life anime bullshit. Is this what growth is?
2. The YouTube algorithm on my work email account is the best kind of fucked up. How do I know this? I fell into a rabbit hole of albums remade with video game soundfonts. Most of these are classic rock staples, because being a young classic rock-obsessed teen, I am very familiar with the mindset that's driven to make this specific kind of thing (hint: it's the same impulse that people made people make anime music videos in the 90s and 00s). Some nuggets: a Super Mario 64 version of Aja, an Earthbound version of Abbey Road, and a Pokémon Emerald version of In the Court of the Crimson King.
3. Speaking of Steely Dan: Jack Hamilton writes about the group's newfound favour among younger fans for The Atlantic, with a big assist from the book Quantum Criminals by Alex Pappademas (shout out Do You Like Prince Movies?, shout out Wesley Morris) and Joan LeMay.
4. I quite like the new Intel One Mono typeface, especially those curly brackets.
5. For The Ringer, Claire McNear on the legend of early Jeopardy! champion Barbara Lowe and why her run was scrubbed from the archives .
6. Jessa Crispin on the superfans who are against the WGA strike. (via Kleon)
7. I'm going to see Beau Is Afraid sooner rather than later, so naturally, my inclination is to watch the first two films by director Ari Aster, Hereditary and Midsommar. But I'm balking at just sitting down and having my mind flayed by these movies that, by all accounts, are visceral fucked-up emotional bruisers. I guess I'm just in my chickenshit era.
8. Things are decidedly not fucked up in the land of Watchlist Roulette: we have Brief Encounter (devastating), Soul (cute, great score), and My Night at Maud's (attractive and loquacious French people, my one weakness!).
9. This is a corollary item to last week's ninth item, which was also about the ongoing Blank Check Buster Keaton miniseries: so far, I've watched all four movies covered so far while listening to the episode in which they're discussed. This is maybe the most decadent thing I've ever done.
10. “Not All of Us Get to Be Ghosts” by Leila Chatti (via Pome):

    In December I watch movies about ghosts
    with a woman I call mama though she is not
    my mother, only a woman who is kind, this all
    I require. We take breaks to lean against each other
    on the porch, her sucking smoke from between
    her fingers, exhaling its skirling; each mouthful
    dissipating, becoming something like air. My breath’s
    a less impressive phantom, fleeting silver
    in the cold light. Standing there
    in our small shadows, we discuss the ways
    of the dead, their metaphysics, as if we were experts
    by osmosis, a certain knowledge absorbed. I say I think
    our ghosts become us, or at least reside in our dark
    like tenants we haven’t the heart to kick out.
    She says, though she hasn’t quite figured it out yet,
    there are rules: not all of us get to be ghosts.

#tenthings

Here are ten things.

1. The Writers Guild of America is on strike! For the love of all that is holy, pay the writers! Solidarity to the writers, this one might be a while.
2. Time to plug what some of my friends have been up to. My pal Hannah is currently slaying all comers on Jeopardy!; at time of writing, she's a five-day champion! That's just about the coolest thing, and it strengthens my resolve to one not day be the greatest French-Canadian Jeopardy! contestant of all time (i.e. win three games or $47,300; I'm coming for your ass, François Dominic Laramée!).
3. My friend Alex, who DJs as Dads FM, has a Twitch channel where he spins the smoothest music around, it's a great time.
4. My friend Amelia has recently put out the 50th and final edition of her newsletter Don't Threaten Me with a Good Lifetime. You suckers missed it while it was an ongoing concern, but the archives are there for your perusal.
5. Laura Olin is not my friend (yet) but the return of her newsletter is a cause for celebration. A plug is only fair since I basically swiped the whole “ending your list of ten things with a poem” bit from her.
6. For Defector, the great Casey Johnston on her quixotic quest to retrieve her lost AirPods.
7. Bobby Broccoli dropped part two of his documentary on disgraced researcher Dr. Hwang Woo-suk.
8. This week in Watchlist Roulette: Get Shorty (I love Elmore Leonard shit so much, and this is a fun one to watch with Jackie Brown and Out of Sight), The Double Life of Véronique (beautiful and elliptical), The Phenom (Noah Buschel is the real deal), and Tenet (loud, dorky, awesome).
9. The boys over at Blank Check are starting a Buster Keaton miniseries, so I started playing along by watching Three Ages and Our Hospitality. Man, that Buster fella sure could take a bump.
10. “Passing” by Elosie Klein Healy (via Pome):

    These are the days that must happen
    to you, Mr. Whitman says.
    
    And the nights passing in succession
    like images on film—
    
    old movie star moon
    filling up each frame then going into hiding.
    
    People don't live long enough
    to see the end
    
    of their experiments—
    at 24 frames a second it’s soon over—
    
    fireflies in the meadow,
    games of children flickering in the park.

#tenthings

Here are ten things.

1. The Clientele, one of my absolute favourite bands, announced the release of a new album, their first in six years, complete with accompanying single, music video, and tour in the fall. Hype levels are off the charts, even if said tour is bereft of Canadian dates.
2. What the hell is going on in the NHL playoffs?! The Leafs break their 19-year first-round curse, the upstart Kraken knock out the champs, and the Panthers come back from being down 3 games to 1 to send the greatest regular season team in league history packing for the summer. Utter madness.
3. Watchlist roulette: Warrior (guaranteed to make your dad cry), The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (I can 100% see why Schrader loves Ozu), Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (this is a comedy about American exceptionalism, right?), and Wedding Crashers (totally sociopathic, do not recommend).
4. The new John Mulaney special Baby J is funny, yes, but also a little more caustic and prickly and weary. Cocaine continues to be a hell of a drug.
5. The great Patrick Willems on the no-plot-just-vibes pleasures of Tenet.
6. Sometimes I recommend American contemporary classical music by a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, because no person is just one thing. I keep half-remembering John Luther Adams' Become Ocean, an awesome, roiling 45-minute orchestral piece, but by listing it here, I have commemorated it, so no need to worry that I'll ever forget it again.
7. The most devastating daywrecker I've encountered in a minute: Six Degrees of Wikipedia. (thanks, Steph!)
8. Steph and I played a lot of Overcooked 2 this past weekend. Like, a lot. You know what? Fun game! It 100% deserves a spot in your local multiplayer rotation. I also watched her play Paper Mario: The Origami King a bunch. Paper Mario games are consistently pretty weird and funny, so watching along is fun in and of itself.
9. RIP Harry Belafonte. RIP Gordon Lightfoot.
10. From Matthew Ogle's Pome, “Correction” by A.R. Ammons:

    The burdens of the world
    on my back
    lighten the world
    not a whit while
    removing them greatly
    decreases my specific
    gravity

#tenthings

Here are ten things.

1. For the first time in a long time, I made a social outing with new friends to the movies. We watched Air! It was totally fine! We talked about it on the way out! Man, I missed social outings to the movies.
2. Last week's game of Watchlist Roulette ended up landing on John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, which, surprise surprise, was awesome. No one hit extra-base hits into the gap during his prime quite like the Master of Horror himself.
3. Kevan MacKay, better known by his nom de YouTubeur BobbyBroccoli, put out part one of his series on disgraced South Korean researcher Hwang Woo-suk.
4. Wes Anderson is poised to have a big year, what with Asteroid City playing Cannes and all, but he's also having a moment on TikTok right now, as people are making tons and tons of little shorts inspired by his films set to Alexandre Desplat's score for The French Dispatch. In other Wes miscellany news, Kottke dug up some shorts he made to promote the 1999 MTV Movie Awards, and I also stumbled upon his American Express commercial.
5. The great Scott Tobias on one of my favourite comedies of the last five years, Support the Girls.
6. The Rewatchables dusts off the studio cameras and finally does Alien. All-time bad Bill Simmons take re: cats contained herein.
7. I went to the venerable Montreal institution Drawn and Quarterly for the first time in like a decade for the launch of the English translation of Dandelion Daughter by Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay.
8. Even though I don't have a pony in this particular race, nothing beats playoff hockey.
9. For this week's edition of Mild Takes from 2016: I played Overcooked with Steph! It's super fun!
10. A poem, via Pome: “Folk Song” by Tomaž Šalamun, translated by Charles Simic.

    Every true poet is a monster.
    He destroys people and their speech.
    His singing elevates a technique that wipes out
    the earth so we are not eaten by worms.
    The drunk sells his coat.
    The thief sells his mother.
    Only the poet sells his soul to separate it
    from the body that he loves.

#tenthings

Here are ten things.

1. It dawned on me that I have many friends, people who I admire and share hobbies with, that I never do see in person. So in an effort to break free of this particular spiral of isolation, I hit up a poetry reading at a local used book store (local note: if you haven't visited Phoenix Books, please rectify that), knowing that I'd run into people I hadn't seen in months. Now I have a bunch of plans in the coming week. Funny how that works.
2. It's been a big couple of weeks for stuff on YouTube for your boy. First off: I devoured several of Lady Emily's videos because I, too, spent an inordinate amount of time watching James Rolfe yell at old video games in his prime.
3. Every new Doc Destructo video is a cause for celebration, and this one is about the agony and ecstasy of playing Valheim.
4. On April 10th, the avatar of chill studiousness known as Lo-fi Girl disappeared, and the internet fucking lost it. As it turns out, this was all in the lead-up to the launch of a sister synthwave stream, complete with its own mirror-world mascot, Synthwave Boy. Sometimes we can have nice things.
5. I am thrilled to report that the new Dougie Poole album The Rainbow Wheel of Death absolutely fucking knocks. Get some cosmic country in your life.
6. I love hyperspecific playlists/mixes, and so I made one called It's Senior Year and I Don't Own a Blazer to Wear on My Date So Here I Am at the Gap Buying a Blazer.
7. I also love a good hyperspecific novelty Letterboxd list, so I made one called “Movies where Cate Blanchett plays a steely American who speaks German and trips at an inopportune time.”
8. The great Roger Ebert passed away a decade ago, and the just as great Austin Kleon remembers his late-period blogging and drawing.
9. Oh how the gods of chance have smiled down upon me during these last games of Watchlist Roulette: we have Hanna (kind of like a YA Bourne movie?) and Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill (what sumptuous problematic trash the man makes, and I say this with love).
10. An excerpt from “A Parking Lot in West Houston” by Monica Youn (via Pome):

    Angels are unthinkable
    in hot weather
    
    except in some tropical locales, where
    from time to time, the women catch one in their nets,
    
    hang it dry, and fashion it into a lantern
    that will burn forever on its own inexhaustible oils.

#tenthings

Here are ten things.

1. JOHN WICK 4, MOTHERFUCKERS! It owns bones! Manna from the action movie gods! DONNIE FUCKING YEN! I saw it with my sisters! I had a big-ass Diet Coke! Fun!!!
2. OPENING DAYYYYY! GO JAYS GO! Fuckin' baseball, bro!!!
3. Speaking of baseball: in 1985, the great George Plimpton published on of the best April Fools' Day gags of all time in the hallowed pages of Sports Illustrated: “The Curious Case of Sidd Finch”.
4. Over at Uproxx, Steven Hyden counts down the 100 best debut albums of all time.
5. After a couple of years of fitful activity, the great I Don't Even Own a Television podcast, a punk-rock beacon of literary hijinx, has packed up the van and driven off into the golden Cali sunset. J., Collision, if y'all ever see this: thank you. Your show fucking rocked. Ride the crab, forever and ever.
6. I was spoiled by the gods manning the Watchlist Roulette wheel: The Changeling, The Battle of Algiers, Female Prison #701: Scorpion, Pigs and Battleships.
7. If Line Goes Up was Dan Olson's Spalding Gray monologue, its sister video, The Future Is a Dead Mall: Decentraland and the Metaverse is pulling hard from the Charlie Brooker playbook. Call it Metaversewipe. (Bonus rec: I still think Olson's 2021 video The Nostalgia Critic and The Wall, aka “Comfortably Doug,” is one of the great video essays of the decade so far).
8. If you stream or otherwise need closed captions in a pinch, Web Captioner is one of the better, deeper utilities I've seen that you can use.
9. RIP Ryuichi Sakamoto.
10. Matthew Ogle's Pome newsletter is back with a vengeance. Here's “Intelligent Design” by J. Estanislao Lopez:

    An engineer in Wisconsin claims to have improved grief's design. Aerodynamic, he says, showing off his sketches, barely grief at all! Applying physics like salve to a wound, he remembers what Torricelli said about vacuums, what Carnot said about absolute terror. He grabs a pencil and revises one more time. There's money to be made in this, his father would assure, chopping chicken-necks through the afternoon. Flightless birds! The engineer pores over schematics, grimaces at draft after draft. His last sketch: confused. Joints unlabeled. A room inside a room inside a room.

#tenthings

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Here are ten things.

1. In perhaps the most predictable Movie Bowl since Mad Max: Fury Road steamrolled the field, Everything Everywhere All at Once earned itself a place in the upcoming second Movie Bowl Tournament of Champions by defeating another crowd favourite, Glass Onion.
2. I did something no 35-year-old man should ever do: join TikTok. Pray for my algorithm.
3. People Make Games (a sister YouTube channel to the top-tier board game review channel Shut Up & Sit Down) take a look at the wild world of Excel eSports (yes, the same Excel you use at work).
4. The great Susan Kare, a legendary graphic designer responsible for the iconic visual language of the Apple Macintosh and the ubiquitous Microsoft Solitaire deck of cards, randomly showed up in my various feeds a couple of times, and who am I to question synchronicities like this. Fun fact: Kare is the subject of what I consider to be the greatest fit pic of all time.
5. Jason Kottke, who's been doing this better and for longer than most of us, celebrates the 25th birthday of his eponymous blog.
6. T-Pain, king of AutoTune, has released a covers album, and in the tracklist is a heavy psych/soul take on Black Sabbath's “War Pigs”. Reader? It fucking goes.
7. So I'm trying out this thing where I actually watch movies from my Letterboxd watchlist, so I watched Phenomena (very bloody and very bloodless), Luca (Pixar has this shit down to a science), The Bourne Identity (the last 90s thriller), and Fist of Fury (Bruce Lee rules, it's a shame about the movie around him).
8. Over at Filmmaker Magazine, Ryan Swen interviews Jon Bois.
9. RIP Lance Reddick.
10. “In Memory of the Utah Stars” by William Matthews:
    

    Each of them must have terrified
    his parents by being so big, obsessive
    and exact so young, already gone
    and leaving, like a big tipper,
    that huge changeling’s body in his place.
    The prince of bone spurs and bad knees.
    
    The year I first saw them play
    Malone was a high school freshman,
    already too big for any bed,
    14, a natural resource.
    You have to learn not to
    apologize, a form of vanity.
    You flare up in the lane, exotic
    anywhere else. You roll the ball
    off fingers twice as long as your
    girlfriend’s. Great touch for a big man,
    says some jerk. Now they’re defunct
    and Moses Malone, boy wonder at 19,
    rises at 20 from the St. Louis bench,
    his pet of a body grown sullen
    as fast as it grew up.
    
    Something in you remembers every
    time the ball left your fingertips
    wrong and nothing the ball
    can do in the air will change that.
    You watch it set, stupid moon,
    the way you watch yourself
    in a recurring dream.
    You never lose your touch
    or forget how taxed bodies
    go at the same pace they owe,
    how brutally well the universe
    works to be beautiful,
    how we metabolize loss
    as fast as we have to.

#tenthings