I have lately begun rethinking whether I can continue blithely writing letters of recommendation for just any student to attend just any college.
My latest for CiRCE is a dialogue in which I mull the matter over.
Spring Albums
What I listen to when the winter is over.
Evening Star, Fripp & Eno
Late Night Tales, Air
Lost in Translation, Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Seventh Tree, Goldfrapp
Four Last Songs, Richard Strauss (Jessye Norman recording)
Kill For Love, Chromatics
You Must Believe in Spring, Bill Evans
Pocket Symphony, Air
Jukebox, Cat Power
Venice, Fennesz
Radio Amor, Tim Hecker
Vampire Weekend (eponymous)
Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, Claude Debussy
Articles I Would Like To Write
“I spent three hours on Tik-Tok and made a list of all the perverse things that your child knows about if your child also has a Tik-Tok account.”
On Cancelling Dr. Seuss
This is from a review of Frog and Toad are Friends.
Christians have maintained such daft opinions on children’s books for years. What is worse, reasonable Christians have politely nodded as their unreasonable friends and acquaintances have said such stupid things.
Granted, fear of Seuss is risible, but Christians can’t all-of-a-sudden pretend they care about others having reasonable opinions on literature. We invented the daft, preachy worldview review. The thing has simply gotten out of the cage in the last ten years.
The “I’m A Good Father” Show
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
-Benjamin Franklin
Little By Little is the latest episode of Proverbial. It briefly touches on a phenomenon I call the “I’m A Good Father” show, wherein a parent who doesn’t do a whole lot of parenting suddenly decides to start.
Know It All
“Dying societies accumulate laws like dying men accumulate remedies.”
-Nicolas Gomez Davila
As men implode–as their marriages fail, as their relationships with their children fall apart–they become all the more insistent that they know how happy, competent men ought to live.
Homage to Persephone: A Sometimes Gibbs Playlist
It’s basically spring.
SETI
If we ever found intelligent life outside of earth, there is a 0% chance their philosophy of gender and race would coincide with ours, which would mean about ten minutes after discovering alien life, #CancelAliens would start trending.
Why VidAngel Isn’t A Win
“There’s always free cheese in a mousetrap, though, and so Christians have blindly gone on for several years now thinking that the ability to edit TV and movies is a real win. Here’s the tin foil hat moment, though: buy DVDs. Stream less. Or at least buy a DVD of A Charlie Brown Christmas so that when the switch is made, you don’t have to hear Linus tell Charlie Brown that the real meaning of Christmas is contained in some passage from a TED talk on Marxism given last week.”
-from “When The Zeitgeist Begins Editing Old Films And TV Shows”
Ranked
I find Velazquez’s waterseller one of the noblest, most inspiring men ever painted.
There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. 