Something New (This Week)
Music I used to listen to, movies I watch now, another old book, and music I'll listen to in the future.
Good time of day, readers. Goodbye February, hello March. I hope you used your free Leap Day for something lovely. I spent this week listening to a lot of music, watching several movies, and reading two new books. Let’s talk about some of them:
Umphrey’s McGee - Local Band Does O.K.
I’ve had reason to dip into the memory banks, my personal history books, to revive some music that was, at least at some point, central in my life. That led me to Umphrey’s McGee’s (that’s weird to type) debut album Local Band Does O.K. For someone like me who feels like they can’t remember anything longer than twelve hours, hitting play on this and remembering every lyric, every guitar lick, and every percussion flourish, was a marvelous and strange reprieve from that strain of thought. Umphrey’s is not just the jam-band, Grateful Dead rip-off that I seem to hear them categorized as (don’t get me wrong, they are definitely sometimes those things), and this first album proves that.
Letterbox’d Check-In
Since my last writing, here is what I’ve watched on the “big screen”:
High Noon (1952) - Streaming now on Amazon Prime and Paramount+
Mildred Pierce (1945) - Available for rent
This thing goes hard, and is completely insane. I watched it with my partner while we were waiting for, and then sitting with, our friends in an AirBNB during a poetry festival. I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen.
Chungking Express (1994) - Streaming now on HBO Max and The Criterion Channel
Tony Leung run me over with an airplane
A Place in the Sun (1951) - Streaming now on Kanopy
I’m writing a longer piece on this at the same time as I’m writing this. Stay tuned.
Perfect Days (2023) - In theaters now
More like Perfect Movie. I stayed up past my bedtime to write about maybe my favorite movie of last year, and I feel like I could write much, much, much more about it in the future. Additionally, it has one of the best soundtracks in ages, consisting of almost exclusively western music, and its use of these songs in its eastern story is powerful as hell. SEE THIS MOVIE.
Ross Thomas - The Backup Men
The newest addition to my $5 used paperback collection of all of Ross Thomas’s novels, The Backup Men is one of the installments in one of the series of books involving the same characters. My read-though of Thomas’s work is so loose that I can’t even specify where this one lies in the series order, or in his bibliography at large. Being able to pick up and read through a book with this amount of casualness is a necessary break from my otherwise non-fictional reading life.
Erika de Casier - Test It
I was offered this song on my Discover Weekly, if I remember correctly, and I instantly connected with it. It’s got sultry dark club R&B vibes, and I will absolutely dig into the rest of Casier’s 2024 album Still sometime very soon. This is going into at least five of my playlists.
Thanks, as always, for reading. That is just the tip of the iceberg for my past week of consumption. Your boy has been crushing tape lately. Speaking of, today is New Music Friday, which I’ll share more about on Instagram, and it’s a good one. It’s also release day for Dune - Part Two, which I am confident will be marvelous. And next week, we’re prepping for our favorite frivolity, the Academy Awards. Maybe I’ll write something about those, predictions or predilections or derelictions. Time will tell.
TTFN,
Bobby