Default Genders MAIN POP GIRL 2019 (2019)

glammy progvaporwave Postal Service one-bettering Ben Gibbard's loquaciousness

MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN by Jonathan Lethem (2000)

we only really went to the Hollywood neighborhood library, a bizarre building that family friends later turned into a bakery.  I read somewhere around a hundred Hardy boys books from there, until the Franklin W. Dixons really started sucking and fourth grade me branched out (around #128, Day of the Dinosaur) my suspension of disbelief began to waver. it is odd, getting back into detective fiction over twenty years later, finally reading the classics that were getting ripped off by pulps, and the juvenile distillations thereof.  I can't quite put my finger on it, but something with Poe inventing the form, the detective being a uniquely American creation, beholden to nothing but a code of ethics and a quest for the truth, damn the torpedoes.  I did read Agatha Christie in middle school, and watched more than my fair share of Poirot and her other detectives, all safely removed from danger, as they puzzle out the parlour room, but I've always preferred the American PI, someone with a cousin of a death wish.  Lethem understands being this sort of literary inheritor, a low-fat imitation of the real McCoy, who lives life just as vividly but can't read people as quickly, who is fooled and manipulated and hoodwinked against his own best interest, how the difference between a man and a true detective is that a detective just can't stay home, it's an Ahab of sorts, a mental illness is often an addiction to narrative, an unease with ambiguity, a refusal to let sleeping dogs lie.

there's a film, long in gestation, that is supposedly due out this year, but they've set it back a half century, and Bruce Willis is supposed to be the most charismatic character, so expectations are below sea level.

THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS dir. Joel Coen & Ethan Coen (2018)

If you spare three owl eggs, maybe your mercy will be a bullet clean through.



How high can a bird count anyway?

DON'T WORRY, HE WON'T GET FAR ON FOOT dir. Gus Van Sant (2018)

Portland icon shared with the wider world through Van Sant's steadfastness and vision. based on an autobiography, addled like only inebriated memory banks can be, it could only be maudlin if there wasn't such rich, pulpy juice to squeeze from Callahan's joie de vivre, and from Donny's tremendously patient humanism and humor. Jonah Hill steals the show from even Joaquin goddamn Phoenix. I wonder, if he'd gotten to make it, if Robin Williams could have stayed sober. maybe the twelve steps don't matter, it's just the walking.



It is hard teaching people faith.



Deal with pain, deal with shame, before it's too late.

Nivhek AFTER ITS OWN DEATH/WALKING IN A SPIRAL TOWARDS THE HOUSE (2019)

an alias of grouper, queen of astoria, the city that should be. i wish i could tell you it was more Paradise Valley but it sounds like Ms. Harris is Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill again and its morosity has ferocity.  and elegance, like a jungle cat that was transported by steamship to a European country estate and is now loose in the manor, stalking and killing the blithe, keeping young in the wine cellar.