Currently Reading

• One of these days I’m going to start reading again. But today is not that day.

Currently Watching

• Constellation, Season 1
• Curb Your Enthusiasm, Season 12

Currently In Queue

• Killers of the Flower Moon
• The Holdovers

Currently Listening

• Apple Music recently released a new daily Mix– Heavy Rotation– that captures what you recently have been listening to. Sounds like a perfect addition to Current Things! I’ll be interested to see if this web embed automatically updates as the mix is updated.
• I continued listening to Paolo Nutini’s Last Night in the Bittersweet, but as you can see I’ve also been revisiting Maggie Roger’s Surrender, Olivia Rodrigo’s GUTS, and Geese’s 3D Country.
• I also bet you can tell what songs are on my running playlist!
• Maggie Rogers has a new album out in April! I heard a few at her Atlantis show and couldn’t be more excited for it!

Currently Planning

• April: Disney cruise for Julie’s mom’s 75th birthday
• July: Kentucky to visit family and drop off kids for two weeks
• August: West Coast: Portland, Bay Area, Los Angeles, Disneyland (and maybe Yosemite!)
• December: post-Christmas trip to Kentucky
• TBD Late 2024/early 2025: Joshua Tree area for Julie’s brother’s wedding (maybe Vegas on the front end?)

Concurrently

• I’m going to try and do a better job of posting about my past and future travels. I added a new dedicated Travel page and a new section in Current Things to help highlight this! Here’s a blog post introducing the new Travel page and a blog post on the logistics of it.

Finished in February:

May December: Haynes always does such a good job of contextualizing sexual power dynamics and its effects on everyone directly and indirectly involved. We think of power asymmetries as straightforward and bad, but they’re often complex (but still bad!)

Also loved the 1990s made-for-TV style this was shot in– especially the score and the graininess of video.

Shout out to these two diametrically opposite, but equally impactful lines:

I don’t think we have enough hot dogs

This is just what grownups do

The Zone of Interest: The movie is in the margins.

We think of these people as monsters. And they were. But they were also humans. Humans did this.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Season 1: I’m a sucker for marriage as war allegories, so I think I liked this more than most. But this was done 10x better and more natural by The Americans

Rick and Morty, Season 7: It’s tough to review entire seasons of shows that aren’t really serialized (thematically or plotwise). Season 7 continues to be successful at what it’s trying to do. Its presentation isn’t my favorite, but it’s inventiveness and just plain weirdness more than make up for it

True Detective, Season 4: While previous seasons have been about masculinity, this one adds motherhood, femininity, and community to the mix with spectacular results. It centralizes on the idea of these concepts as “protectors” in their various forms. This is–by far– the best season of this show.

Maestro: This was fine. I like the ideas of how identity is complex and who owns it isn’t always straightforward. But ultimately I didn’t gain anything more than a surface-level understanding of how this duality affected Bernstein.

Past Lives: We’re not fated for things that are obvious. The allure for the other side of things will always be there.

Anatomy of a Fall: Even the truth is contextual

(The real moral of Anatomy of a Fall is to not find yourself on trial in France)

Previously, in Current Things…

February 2024
January 2024
December 2023
November 2023
October 2023
September 2023
August 2023
July 2023
June 2023
May 2023
April 2023
March 2023
February 2023
January 2023
December 2022
November 2022