Just listened to: Teeth of Time (2025) by Joshua Burnside at the recommendation of my friend Josh (no relation). Arresting, sometimes brusque, close mic’d shiny-brogue Irish neo-folk to whose genre description we might occasionally add the affixes “glitch” or “-tronica.” Highly recommended.
One niggle: Would it be too much to ask Burnside to endow his songs with proper endings? I acknowledge that the title of the last track is “Nothing Completed” and that there’s a certain formal congruence between that idea and the fact that almost all the tracks here either fade into nothing quickly or come to a sheer, abrupt stop, but if he’s trying to tweak our aesthetic noses with this, he has in my case succeeded.
Just watched: The Great Escaper (2023), written by William Ivory and directed by Oliver Parker. “Sweet without straying into sentimentality,” reads Rotten Tomatoes. “Moving relationship stories,” reads one of the movie’s genre tags on Letterboxd. They’re both right. But where’s blurb that reads: “Never has a cozy movie carried so much potential for human moral development”? A culture grows hale and virtuous if we all watch this film.
Now, none of its lessons are novel:
Kindness goes a long way—but it often requires courage.
War is hell.
Lifelong commitment to another human is heaven.
Enjoy life.
Grieve life. (Do not stuff it.)
Yet the lessons came to me in an inspiring, beautiful way that made me cry tears of guilt and gratitude: Guilt for my lack of gratitude (and thus joy) in life, and gratitude for the guilt.
And of course, the other lesson is one about the craft of filmmaking: If you’re directing Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson (may she rest in pace), you’ll probably do just fine if you simply tell your cameraman to just point his camera in their direction and let the film roll.
Just listened to: Christmas Songs (2004) by The Eddie Higgins Trio. Straight-ahead Christmas piano trio jazz of the sort you get for free on a Roku music channel.
Lately, I have grown slightly bothered by the aloneness of two of my favorite things to do: listening to recorded music and reading books (and poetry). In most cases, these pursuits involve me walking, standing, or sitting by myself taking in artifacts of work done by people I don’t know—often people who I couldn’t know this side of eternity because they’re dead. Of course, none of that entails listening to records and reading books solo can’t be good. Often, the artifacts are insightful or beautiful enough to move me toward thanksgiving to the Ultimate Creator, to engender joy or peace, to inspire good deeds, and even adjust the course of my life.
No, the bother comes from the non-sharing of these very benefits. I suppose addressing that bother is partly why I blog. Yet blogging is an indirect way to share. It’s not exactly interpersonal. And interpersonal is the way of Life.
So. Today I took two small steps toward making music appreciation and book reading interpersonal: (1) I called...
Noel made a distinction I’d never thought to make before: extraverted is not the same outgoing. He defined the former as something like “given to gaining energy from social interaction” and the latter as something like “fully at ease making new friends, as if by reflexive desire rather than by effort.” This was to help me understand the difference between me, an extravert who isn’t outgoing, and him and Mary, who are extraverts and outgoing.
The fact is, Noel and Mary are inspiringly friendly. They show enthusiastic, obviously sincere interest in other people, regardless of their initial familiarity, in the same way that I show enthusiastic interest in virtue, reflective conversation, expressiveness, and good music. I want to be like them.
I do usually find it energizing to interact with new people. But I just don’t seek out such interaction quite as liberally or reflexively. And...
Just watched When Harry Met Sally (1989), written by Nora Ephron and directed by Rob Reiner. With the exception of the old sub-subgenre of the elite screwball comedies and with very honorable mention to the equally old but not as screwy The Shop Around the Corner, romcom is not my genre. But this is the best of its late-20th-century breed, at least that I’ve seen. It’s a screenwriter’striumph. Yet I am left wondering: Can a man and a woman be just close friends?
After this He then says to the disciples, “Let us go into Judaea again.” The disciples say, “Rabbi, the Judaeans were lately seeking to stone you, and you are going there again?” Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours in the day? If one walks by day, he will not stumble, because he sees the light of this cosmos, But if one walks by night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him” (John 11:7-10).
If love is calling, damn the fear of death. Full speed ahead. Do what is right.
Walking and talking with You yesterday afternoon up to West Falls reminded me of two things:
I feel most alive when I am expressing myself with intensity, and
it would be best if I arranged my prayer-walk time to allow for freedom to pray expressively, intently, fervently.
*Correction, 7:19 PM same day: I feel most alive when I am expressing myself with intensity because of love. The point is not the intensity but rather the love—the purposeful regarding of others as at least as important as myself and wanting their good—that sets off the intensity. When I am praying fervently because I have set my face toward love, I feel very alive. And I think it’s the kind of praying that leads to action.
I think we’d all be saner if we opted for an eight-day week: Five days for professional working, one day for rest and relaxation, one day for household maintenance and administration, and one day for working toward larger, non-professional goals. (Hopefully all days for socializing of various kinds.) The Romans used to do it. And the seven-day week, its salient place in the Genesis creation story, has no observable basis in the created order, although it is probably based on an old, inaccurate understanding of that: At least two ancient civilizations, Sumeria and Babylonia, explicitly based their seven-day week on how many planet they thought there were—Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn—plus the sun and the moon. So why keep it, other than cultural inertia?
I suppose I have to figure out how to dovetail an eight-day week with a 365-plus-day year with a proposal for year. (Ten four-week months plus a five-week month plus a five-day party?) And of course, if we can’t even muster the political will to eliminate the Daylight Savings Time switch…
Just listened to: a recording of Messiaen’s L’Ascension (1933) by Paavo Järvi conducting Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich on Alpha Classics (2019) while on a short sunset walk. Because sometimes you wanna go beyond la frontière Debussy. A devout, twenty-something, 20th-century French organist composes a short, innovative, delicious four-course symphonic prix fixe from a mathematically constrained but phenomenally boundless (thus predictably unpredictable) harmonic palette, neither tonal nor dodecaphonic. And a world-class, Grammy-winning Estonian conductor and his first-rate Zürcher waitstaff serve it with all the attention and grace you expect at a Michelin-starred restaurant.
“Why does my heart feel so bad? Why does my soul feed so bad?” All year, You’ve had the strangle moral imperative to joy buzzing around my ears. It could be that I’m putting too much stock in a single command of Paul’s. But with:
“get to” being the word of the year,
Travis having made such an impression on me with the primacy he assigns to joy, and
all the specific words that have come to me on the subject this year,
it has been hard to avoid. And more than ever, the role of joy as an anchor for the words I say to others remaining words of life and not words of death has become apparent. I may not need to dig the well of self-love in order to love others, as so many folks extrabiblically claim, but I do apparently need to dig the well of joy: I have spoken brusquely again and again in recent weeks—this despite all the recent emphasis I have placed in my mind on letting “all my words be full of grace.” Why? Because it’s “out of the overflow of the heart” that “the mouth speaks.” If I...
I’m not sure I enjoy any sociospatial context more than free-spirited, small-group conversation at a table at Webster’s Bookstore Café, surrounded by the sight and smell of used books, the taste of good tea, and the sound of vintage hipster music that isn’t even trying to be cool. (I just wish they stayed open past 7 PM!)
Just watched In the Mood for Love (2000), written and directed by Wong Kar-wai. An exquisite Hong Kong pas de deux and series of color-coded pseudo tableaux vivants depicting the sad, halting victory of moral vanity over smoldering desire.
