There is truth here

but impossible to tell exactly where.

All that you touch, You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
Is Change. 

God
Is Change. 

– Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

You don't sing to feel better. You sing 'cause that's a way of understanding life.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom – 3/5

You'll forgive me, but I memorized "Harlem" by Langston Hughes dozens of years ago and I always struggled to figure out what it meant. Ma Rainey helps me get there. "What happens to a dream deferred?" aka, where do you put your rage? You can't aim your anger at the people who deserve it, the ones with the boot on your throat, because they'll just press harder. So you aim it at the people around you; occupants of the same leaky boat. If you put them on the bottom, at least it means you're not there. If you can't be with the ones you hate, hate the ones you're with. I overall didn't really love watching this movie because it's just a play put on film, and Chadwick Boseman is playing to the back row; not allowing for any nuance or subtlety that film might provide. But the anger! The reaching for, the hanging onto what little power is available. "Or does it explode?"

I am a spectator at the unfolding of my thought;

I watch it, I listen to it.

– Arthur Rimbaud

He knows all things, past, present, and future.

He also knows all beings. But no one knows Him.

– Bhagavad Gita

I will participate in the game.

It is a wonderful, wonderful opera – except that it hurts.

– Joseph Campbell

That vast ground

of silence.

– Joseph Campbell

When I grow up,

I want to be everything.

Oh, hell no, your Majesty!

Coming 2 America – 2/5

What laziness, what lethargy, what apathy! It is not altogether bad but it is mostly worthless. But what potential! The barber shop guys still work. Randy Jackson should have worked. Wesley Snipes showed up to work. Good morning, my neighbors. Yes, yes, fuck you, too. 

It's a first thought.

Just not your first thought.

If tomorrow never comes.

Boss level – .5/5

This was bad.

When we all fall asleep, where do we go?

Billie Eilish: A Little Blurry – 3.5/5

I walk away a fan! Her and her music are so close to combustible, like it's one match away from turning to ash. She is this beautiful, volatile mixture of being hurt and openness – that is to say, the willingness to be hurt. She is a gleefully open wound. I hope it doesn't scar.

What is youth? A dream. What is love? The content of the dream.

Another Round – 4/5

I am mostly pleased that this is not a damning portrait of alcohol. It is good, and it is bad. And that goodness, we don't really talk about it seriously. The lifted conversation, the bad mood that rolls off the shoulders, the thick barrier between you and the outside world rubbed thin. We become passionate, we become funny, we become brave. And yes, angry and sad and those other things. I like that the movie admits that sometimes we need help, and here is this thing, this common thing, within grasp, except for the societal constructs that says we shouldn't, it's improper in this setting. And maybe. But also maybe everyone is different and we've all got to figure out what person it is possible to be; and if we need a little help to be that, then so be it. We've all got to find our own way, we need to learn to admit when we need help; and that applies to both the good drinking and the bad.

I'm real when it's useful.

Zack snyder's justice league – 1.5/5

It's fascinating! It's indulgent!! It's a collection of scenes that were included purely because they had been filmed!!! It's Superman realizing he needs to be a symbol of hope so he chooses the all-black outfit!!!! It's an extra two hours to be able to say it's marginally better!!!!! We did it!!!!!!

God loves me. I know he loves me. I want him to stop.

The last temptation of christ – 2/5

As fascinated as I am about the topic, this was not some great and interesting thing for me. I wish I could say what it was. I like Jesus as the doubter, I like Judas as not the betrayer but as the hand of god, leading things to where they're supposed to go. Does Christ mean as much without the crucifixion? Great question. This version of an answer, I just didn't feel it in my bones. If our relationship with god is a conversation, this felt like one I wasn't a part of. 

I guess it feels different when it's someone you love.

Promising young woman – 2.5/5

It's an odd mixture of tones, serious and lighthearted, grave and quirky, which I don't mind, it keeps you off guard, but I'm left not knowing what it wants me to think. Is there no hope here? Is everyone equally guilty? It's all-or-nothing approach makes me feel more sympathy for the bad guys, and I don't really want that. I guess I don't need for a thriller to provide solutions, or absolution. It's probably too much to expect. 

History isn't here yet. It's coming, but we got here early this time.

First cow – 4/5

Friendship isn't some grand thing. To take Lynda Barry out of context – it is the little thing. "Its spark and breach so ordinary, we do not question it. The atom split. The little thing." The power of an atomic sun in just enjoying someone's company, the unstoppable cosmic chain of events set in motion eons ago that allowed two people to meet in just this place at just this time. Two people who like each other, and the miracle of it all.

Life began for me,

when I ceased to admire and began to remember.

– Willa Cather

Well, I think being shy basically means being self-absorbed to the extent that it makes it difficult to be around other people.

The end of the tour – 3/5

I think there's a great movie to be told about David Foster Wallace, and this only touches on the potential of that. It's clear that the thoughts that consume/consumed him is reflected in his work, but it feels enjoyable albeit small here. It's a nice conversation and it feels like a nice conversation but I think it deserves more. And so I think a better movie would have been to combine his interview and his books and his articles into one meta-narrative, some larger epic about not just him but the entire world's inability to communicate effectively with another living person, and what it means to drown in America's great chemical cocktail of loneliness, despair, and hope. "The author looms above his page And thinks it strange that at his age, He can not find the proper words To describe his only world."

I love crazy ideas. They made me rich.

Godzilla vs Kong – 2.5/5

This was stupid but the fights were fun. There's just enough of a silly mythology within Alpha Titan / Hollow Earth bullshit that it leaves me excited to learn more. 

I write songs for the people who do jobs in the towns that I'd never move to.

Bo Burnham: Make Happy – 4.5/5

There is an underlying current of self-hatred throughout this thing that I adore. It exists in this wonderful middle place of knowing how to please others but not knowing how to please yourself. It is a desire for an audience tackling the need for an audience at all. It is being so lost in the liminal space that you don't know whether you're coming or going. It is pleasing and pandering and painful as you see someone so elegantly unwind themself; and like a magic trick, you barely realize what's happening until it's done. Ultimately – if you're constantly wondering and worried about how to make someone else happy, then you'll only become what they want from you, and the only cost is yourself. 

You can't lose something you never had.

How to lose a guy in 10 days – 1.5/5

My internal timeline may be wrong, but this movie feels like the segue point between the high concept romantic comedies of that late 90s early 2000s to the "we're just two charming people enjoying each others' company" that came along around the time of Knocked Up. When these two awful, lying people aren't being themselves, I hated this movie. But there's one scene, where for a very short five minutes they are just allowed to be the charming things that they are, that this movie has the breath of life. It proves out that a romantic comedy can be just interesting enough when it's just about watching two people fall in love.

I remember.

Minari – 4/5

I feel like I grew up inside this movie. The trailer, the yellow refrigerator, the Mountain Dew, the peeing in bed; those were all mine. I've rarely seen myself in movies as I saw myself in this movie about people who look nothing like me. So that's nice. Nostalgia aside, there is a rich world with rich characters and a lovely grandma and a denouement that almost almost almost touches something special. For a hot minute, it was about two people who simply had contradictory views of how to live the rest of their lives. Staying together out of a love that was no longer there; surrounded by reminders of their love in their children but only staying together out of that memory of a love. That was good. I'd like to have seen how that turned out. It's braver to leave someone than to rush in to a burning building to save them. But hey, if it felt like this all the time, it'd be hard for me to leave, too. It makes me want to go back.

The planned obsolescence

of the human species.

Why would you do that to them?

They had something to care about that wasn't you.

He speaks

in summations.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” she says.

“They’ll do anything to get themselves out of the misery of the world that they’ve created for us."

– Claire, Leave Your Body at the Door How ketamine became the drug of choice for our dissociated moment

Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope —

but not for us.

– Kafka

You can be anything.

Even nothing.

Memory

just doesn't hit like it used to.

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is,

Infinite. 

A memorable

 fancy.

– William Blake, The marriage of heaven and hell

Simone Weil, in her essay on affliction,

says that pain is like the moment when an apprentice hurts himself for the first time on the job; at such moments workers say, “It is the trade entering his body.”

Every word

wants to be understood.

The pursuit

of whims.

I have a great life.

I wish you were in it.

None of us are smart enough

to not do it again.

Style is what you do

 with what's wrong with you.

– Sharon Stone, from her autobiography

Henceforth, I will paraphrase this and therefore make it my own by saying "Style is what you do with what you don't have."

The present

is a kaleidoscope.

– Isabel Allende, The house of the spirits