Something New (This Week) vol. 28
A local gallery offering, a returning cultural movement, a returning TV show, and a returning sport.
Welcome to Something New (This Week), a (sometimes) weekly installation of recommendations for movies, music, readings, and more.
It has been a couple weeks since I have written. My partner and I were hosting her parents, and vacationed with them and her two sisters all of last week. It was a wonderful reprieve from things, even from thinking about all of my writing projects.
I am still neck-deep in thinking about human life in the current age, spurred by my Dry January (Brain Rot Edition) experiment, so my intake of movies, music, books, and other media and art is up and down, and I don’t have a ton of those types of recommendations this week. I still have plenty of things I want to forward to everyone, so let’s get to it:
Holding Space, at Froelick Gallery in Portland
I went to my first art gallery opening last night, for my friend Rebecca Boraz’s collection Holding Space. Her work, mostly relief and intaglio printmaking, is layered and textured and colored in wonderful detail, and each piece, by design, is alluringly unique. Tangled lines of tangled bodies drenched in color, gradating hash marks delicately carved, stark contrasts and subtle connections fill the gallery. Sprinkled throughout the room are Boraz’s ceramic works, a third dimension of hand-made design, bringing literal light and contrast to the exhibition.
The show runs now through April 12th, and Boraz will be giving an artist talk Saturday, March 15th at 11:00AM.
A New Romanticism
A great help to my current personal intellectual renaissance has been the thinking and writing of Ted Gioia, who I have recommended before. He published a summation of his thoughts, his writing, and collected recent writings of others that talk about an age of New Romanticism, an idea that I have also stumbled into myself. It’s a great place to get a sense of the idea overall, and read some different takes on it.
Positive change is coming. I believe that. So does Ted:
Andor is back
The first season of Andor, written and directed by Tony Gilroy, is unsurprisingly steeped in deep Star Wars lore. Surprisingly, the background context and “homework” necessary to get the full effect of the show is a bare minimum. That first season was my favorite season of any television show – excluding Succession – since the middle portion of Game of Thrones. It is genuinely marvelous, and remarkably grounded and human for a science-fiction show filling in gaps of a nine-movie tentpole American story-telling franchise about space wizards and aliens.
Season two is here, and the trailers make it look like the most beautiful Star Wars product in ten years – except for season one of Andor, which was the most beautiful Star Wars product in ten years as well.
This featurette includes some quotes from the cast that really speak to why I think this show is special: it is made by brilliant artists, the cast is filled with talented performers who care about the work, the production is inventive and frequently hand-made, and the story is about people, their choices, and the attached consequences.
Baseball is back
This is just a personal decision I’ve made in my life. I don’t really know what has brought me here, but I know that it is activating a pleasure center that otherwise won’t be reached. It’s important to light-up as many pleasure centers as you have, fellow human, as long as no one suffers any consequences for it. My partner might start suffering the sounds of baseball coming from our sound-system for the next 200 days, but that’s a private matter, and you should stay out of it.
I am a fan of my friends’ team, the LA Dodgers, and of the team my adolescent personal hell: the Chicago Cubs. The influx of Japanese players is fun as hell, the Dodgers are a financially over-bearing juggernaut, games move faster, and the ability for completely unimaginable, strange occurrences to happen in this weird-as-hell sport are all reasons I am going to playing games on my tv and radio during the workday and my evenings. Cultural institutions are struggling and changing, and I’ve decided to take them while I still have them.
Join me, won’t you?
The official YouTube page for the entire league created and posted the following video. What a strange, and strangely wonderful, time to be alive:
Thank you, as always, for reading. I love you, and I’m glad you’re here. I’ll write to you soon (very exciting album coming out this month!).
TTFN,
b