Something New (This Week)
A 2016 movie, its filmmaker, some new old music, and some new new music.
Hi hi. Though my activity here has been sparse to start this calendar year, my personal listening and watching and reading has been very productive. I hope yours has been, too. Here are some things that I’ve enjoyed recently:
Silence - Martin Scorsese (2016)
As I near the end of my long, drawn-out project of watching every Martin Scorsese movie in chronological order (a wonderful experience), I have come to his present mode, or stage, or phase, or whatever you’d like to call it: the trio of Silence, The Irishman (2019), and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). Each film is an adaptation of a book, and each is a very long meditation and confrontation of very long-standing American and human ideas. I have seen Irishman and Flower Moon, but I had not seen Silence before, a movie that seemed like it “wasn’t for me” when it was released. I was 26, and I was flowering in my new life in Portland, and I hadn’t become as studios as I am now in my film watching and consumption, and honestly I thought it would be a bore. After maybe five minutes of watching the movie, I knew that assumption was dead wrong, and that I was watching something special.
This was one of the best and most cohesive visions of story and place paired with staring down some of the biggest and scariest ideas of organized religion, colonialism, faith, ego, western and eastern ideologies, and humanity. It is sometimes tortuous in its depictions of violence and dread, and deeply touching in its portrayal of simple and basal pleasures. It is immediately one of my favorite Scorsese movies, one of my favorites from 2016, and just one of my favorites ever, I think. If you ever catch me re-watching this thing (which you absolutely will), maybe ask me how I’m doing on a broad and spiritual level (probably not great).
You can stream the movie, currently, on Paramount+ and Showtime. You can also rent it from wherever you rent movies. Might I recommend taking my path, and renting a blu-ray from your local movie rental shop?
A Martin Scorsese Super Draft
In perfect and random timing, a podcast that I check-in on every year, Screen Drafts, did an entire month of shows on the work of Martin Scorsese. The premise of the show is that several guest hosts will come on and, using some simple made-up rules of fantasy drafting, will rank a collection of movies. In this version, which is spread out across three episodes and involves nine different guest hosts, the show ranks 30 of Martin Scorsese’s feature films, most of which I have now seen (though I haven’t covered his documentary work, a large portion of his filmography). The three episodes are a combined THIRTEEN hours of podcasting, which has to be some kind of record for a single subject. A lot of those hours are banter and pre/post-show table setting, but all of it is good, and the process of trying to collaborate on a ranking of someone’s work is strangely tortuous, often surprising, and always great fun.
https://screendrafts.libsyn.com/
The Ackleys
The first quarter of 2024 has promised a ton of new music from artists I love, or at least are talked about endlessly: Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Justin Timberlake, Ariana Grande, Bleachers, Maggie Rogers, Lenny Kravitz, on and on. The first release I latched on to, and still have the most electric excitement about, is Waxahatchee’s upcoming Tiger’s Blood, due March 22nd. Katie Crutchfield, a.k.a. Waxahatchee, is an artist whose affections are shared by my partner Caitlin, and her music can be heard in our house with regularity. To prepare for the new release, I’ve been listening back to everything Crutchfield has released, and for the first time, that has included her work with her twin sister Allison in their band The Ackleys, who were only active from 2005 to 2008, before both moving on to different projects. I’m here to inform you that the lone LP that The Ackleys released is absolute heat. Katie was the primary songwriter for the group, and you can absolutely hear commonalities within this record and the entirety of the Waxahatchee discography.
Other Songs
For the first time in my life, I’ve successfully kept up a “songs from this year that I like” playlist for more than nine days. I’m not always on top of the new releases every week, but I’ve been more focused on it than usual, and there has been a couple of great things so far, and more that I still need to add. You can follow that playlist here:
That’s it for this week.
Thank you, as always, for reading. There’s a ton of great art coming my way, and probably coming your way, too. I’m seeing live music tonight, Dune 2 is nearly here, there’s a poetry festival in a coastal Oregon town this weekend, people are making music, people have written books; there is light in the world, still. Keep looking, and you will find it.
TTFN,
Bobby