I normally (for small values of “normally” that encompass the slightly more than a month I’ve been doing this Substack thing) do a couple of posts on the weekend collecting together other stuff that I’ve written, and talking about whatever movies we watched with the kids that week. This weekend that pattern was thrown off by me going to my parents’ on Friday to pay respects to my late uncle Joe, but as a way of easing back into normalcy, I’ll combine the two usual weekend posts and call that Monday’s entry.
Me on Substack:
— Joseph Lukasik, 1936-2021: Some reminiscences about my uncle. I completely spaced on one of the best stories: he used to play Santa Claus at our Christmas Eve dinners when I was a kid, stepping outside “To grab a smoke,” and then coming back in the red-and-white suit bellowing “HO HO HO!” and handing out presents. Over the years, this expanded to include a bunch of other families, so we would sometimes be waiting a very long time for his “smoke break” to end. He really was an amazing character.
—Journalism Is the Problem: There have been a lot of accusations of “clickbait” regarding misleading stories about breakthrough Covid infections, but I don’t think it’s as cynical as that. The real problem is fundamental to the way journalists are trained to select and present stories.
—Against Maximalism: A bit of yelling at clouds about the way every opinion gets cranked up to 11 these days, when in fact most stories are just not that significant.
—In Praise of Copyeditors: The other thing that’s been sucking up my writing time the last week or so is reviewing the copyedits on the book-in-production, so I wrote a little bit about that and how I appreciate their efforts to make me look like someone with a good grasp of English grammar.
Significant Developments in Chateau Steelypips:
I was too busy to write for any other outlets this week, but we did pass a milestone: as of Saturday, SteelyKid is now officially a teenager:
The celebration was not to the scale of some past birthday bashes on account of the pandemic and stuff, but SteelyKid’s BFF came over for the day to play silly card games and splash around in the pool. A good time was had by all. Happy birthday, SteelyKid!
Last Week in Movie Nights:
—The Suicide Squad: I let newly-teenage SteelyKid choose the movie, and this is where we ended up. This was quite a departure from the recent MCU binge, because it’s a DC Universe property with the amped-up level of gore that implies. It is not, however, ponderously serious in the manner of the Zack Snyder oeuvre— this is a deeply ridiculous movie that is fully aware of its own ridiculousness. It’s also got a good deal of comic visual flair. SteelyKid cackled madly throughout, and I enjoyed it as well.
—Vivo: While I was away Friday, Kate and the kids watched the new animated Netflix movie involving Lin-Manuel Miranda. (Kate texted me a shot of the title screen, but I’m too lazy to figure out how to get it off my phone.) I asked The Pip for a review, and got a simple “It was good.” (He’s a little dude of few words…) I asked for a plot summary and he said something really vague about monkeys trying to transport a song from Cuba to Miami. This was followed by a much more detailed description of all the implausible features of the boat that they used (“The sail was spinning around, but sails don’t work like that…”). He’s definitely mine.
—ZZ Top: That Little Ol’ Band from Texas: Last Sunday night I was struggling to find something that would keep me awake until a socially acceptable hour to go to sleep, so I clicked around our streaming services, one of which recommended this. Since bassist Dusty Hill died last week, it seemed appropriate to watch. This is one of those music documentaries made with the active participation of the band, so it’s not exactly wallowing in the more lurid details of their history. And it’s not that spectacular a history, anyway (other than the music being pretty great), since they kept the same lineup for fifty years, and were still playing together in the present day. Frank Beard had some drug problems in the 70’s, but other than that, they were pretty low drama. Which is weirdly compelling. And, again, pretty great music.
Links Dump:
—Academia: Waiting for Scotus: Timothy Burke thinking through some of what might happen with court cases about affirmative action programs at colleges and universities.
—The News: The Fox Made Them Do It! (American Exceptionalism Edition): Burke again, with a different take on the Fox News debate referenced in my Against Maximalism post above.
—Nü-Metal and Twilight Are the True Outsider Art, the Only Rebel Poets: Freddie de Boer with a scathing take on the Woodstock documentary I watched last week, and the idea of “poptimism” more broadly. I think he’s a little over the top with this (but you got that from the part where he wrote a blog post about it), but there’s some truth in the provocation.
—No Politics at the Dinner Table: Judgement Day with Michael Clune: This specific episode was mentioned by David Shoemaker on The Press Box (one of my favorite podcasts), and it sounded interesting enough to check out. This is, weirdly, also a kind of case against “poptimism,” albeit from a very different place temperamentally, arguing for more explicit aesthetic education in the literature curriculum. Again, I don’t entirely agree, but there’s probably some space between this and de Boer that I would find congenial; I may need to look up Clune’s book (in my copious free time…)
—Where Are The Robotic Bricklayers?: And now for something completely different… A blog called “Construction Physics” on why it’s weirdly difficult to replace human masons with robots. Spoiler: one reason involves non-Newtonian fluids.
Pseudo-Random Photo of the Week:
I’m behind in my photo processing, but finally finished the pictures from my hike two weeks ago at Monument Mountain over in MA. You can check out the full set on Google Photos, if you like.
Pseudo-Random Song of the Week:
This is the last track in the Mountain Goats playlist I have on a thumb drive in my car, and I listened to it multiple times on the trip down to my parents’ and back.
And that’s… a bunch of stuff. I’ll try to produce some more original content tomorrow, once I turn in these copyedits. Here are the traditional buttons:
And if you want to complain about my taste in movies, links, or random artsy nature photos, the comments are open.