⌾ Recommendations | 3 Things
Hi,
It is Friday when I send out an email about things that bring some surplus jouissance to my life. I hope that you will enjoy them as well.
My kids have been on spring break this week. I've been spending lots of time with them and not exposing myself to new things. Today's list includes only three things.
|1| LISTENING (Album)—An old album that I return to often has worked its way back into my listening rotation. The album is A Certain Distance by Lusine (Apple Music, Spotify, Bandcamp). It was originally released in 2009, and the song Two Dots was the first track I heard. It's a major earworm, and it is still my favorite track. I also really like Twilight and Gravity a lot.
Incidentally, I played this in the car with my kids, and they liked it too.
|2| READING / LISTENING (Book)— I started combo reading and listening to an audiobook recording of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. Here is the description of the book:
On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom.
Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love.
At first, I was reading more than listening, but the narrator in the audiobook is very pleasant to have in my ears, and I've switched to listening much more than reading.
I posted some text from the book that I found interesting here and here.
The book seems to be paced like a good TV series, with each chapter acting like an episode. Overall, I like it. It's fun—not great, but fun.
After I finish the book, I'll probably write something about it on [S][J][P].
|3| WATCHING (Wrestling/Promo)—Longtime readers of this newsletter know that I love professional wrestling, that I think it is the great American folk art, and that it is also the best thing to use to construct metaphors for complex psychological theory.
Right now, Wrestlemania 40 is right around the corner, and some very cool stories are cooking. One of those stories is Drew McIntyre v. Seth Rollins for the World Heavyweight title.
It looks like the original plan was to have CM Punk v. Seth Rollins, but Punk was injured at the Royal Rumble and won't be medically cleared to perform come Wrestlemania, and Drew McIntyre has been written into Punk's place.
This past Monday, Punk, McIntyre, and Rollins had a promo (short for promotion—this is when wrestlers come to the ring and talk but don't wrestle), and it was good!
This promo involving CM Punk, Drew McIntyre, and Seth Rollins was really good! Something that makes it so enjoyable to me is that all three performers are known to be so good on the mic that they did not have a script. They were given a rough outline and the freedom to make the promo work.
Another thing that made the promo super interesting is that both McIntyre and Rollins don't like Punk for real, and Punk does not like them either. I think it is cool to see their "real heat" as they work together to tell a part of what I think will end up being a long-term storyline.
Fin:
That is it for this one. Till next time, make those glorious mistakes!