Dylan at 85
Today is Bob Dylan’s 85th birthday. I expect he finds that number at least as weird as the rest of us do — how did Bob Dylan manage to survive to be 85 years old? But also: how was Bob Dylan ever less than 85 years old? In 2021, I […]
Lexias: Intimate Men and Intimate Grace
Since writing my previous post about loneliness and horror, I’ve had cause to think a lot about varieties of loneliness, lostness, violence (physical and especially psychological), and intimacy. Some has been purely theoretical, trying to continue to tease out some ideas I explored in that post, some has been more immediate, […]
Lonely Passions and Lonely Horrors
At the end of February, my favorite critic of horror cinema, Willow Catelyn Maclay, wrote a piece for her Patreon titled “The Aesthetic of Loneliness in Horror”. It’s subscribers-only, so I won’t quote much from it here, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since I first read it, and […]
Richard Thompson at 75
Yesterday, April 3, was the singer-songwriter Richard Thompson’s 75th birthday. Thompson is renowned for two things, really: his extraordinary talent with a guitar and his ability to channel various styles and tell myriad stories in the short space of a song. I’m not going to write here about his long career […]
The Hauntings of Lydia Tár
The first shot of Todd Field’s 2022 film Tár is phone held by an unknown person, filming a sleeping Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) on a plane. Over the image pop up chat messages: —our girls an early riser isnt she —haunted —ha you mean she has a conscience —maybe —you still […]
Sifting Through Centuries
Vampire Weekend have a new album coming out in April and have released a couple singles from it, “Gen X Cops” and “Capricorn”, as well as videos to go along with them. The videos both use imagery of New York City in what looks to me like the 1970s and early 1980s. […]
2023: Looking Backward
Ends and beginnings. I have no sense of 2023 as a particular thing, and I expect in the future that I will think back to various events and items of the year and not remember that 2023 was their year. Perhaps this is a post-2020 effect. The years feel indistinguishable. […]