March roundup

Monthly -ings

March! Was! Crazy! A super busy month with some big changes coming up but I’m superstitious enough to be evasive about it until they’re final. On to the roundup of things that rattled around in my head this month…

By ig user @oslo_and_alfred

Reading

Books / audiobooks

• Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer, Rax King

• Poetry Unbound, Pádraig Ó Tuama (see also: the podcast by the same name)

• Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion (grim!)

• Penance, Eliza Clark

• For the tbr: The Atlantic’s Great American Novels list

Articles

• Been reading a lot of stuff about AI, like everyone:

  • Early computer art in the 50s and 60s (why does AI art feel so different?)

  • The online degradation of women and girls that we meet with a shrug (bleak)

  • Have we reached peak AI?

  • AI can’t give you good taste

• Reading about clothing / style, as always: Corporate Fetish, Clothes in books and ways to go wrong, Zadie Smith on clearing out her closet

• The shortcut is probably too long

• Music journalism may have to write its own obituary for free

• Teen subcultures are fading

• This series of essays on Adderrall

• Love anyway (You know the price of life is death, that the price of love is loss, and still you watch the golden afternoon light fall on a face you love, knowing that the loving face too will one day fade to indifference or bone… mwah!)

Elsewhere on Substack

• Loved these “crappy drawings” from

  Iridescent Ordinary

• Tempted by this guide to make your phone dumb and 100 ways to spend more time offline from

  time spent offline

• Further dumb phone temptation: It’s obviously the phones,

  Many Such Cases

• Dune 2 Annotated and Should we just ban *all* social media,

  Read Max

• Who killed the social contract,

  Joshua P. Hill

Watching / Rewatching

• Dune: Part Two (WHAT A THRILL)

• Hail, Caesar! (Alex Karpovsky’s 5 seconds on screen kill me every time)

• Blade Runner 2049 (had to revisit after learning Gosling wrote the baseline scene)

• All That Jazz (Roy…hello…)

• The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (theater kid energy for good)

• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (20 years of making me cry)

• La Haine (man…)

• All of Us Strangers (I honestly thought it would have sad moments but a happy ending…joke’s on me, huh)

• Magnolia (Tom Cruise, the psychopath that you are)

• The Stranger (I was very sleepy and confused much of the time but the performances and sound design…very vibey)

• Also rans: Doubt, The Holdovers, Die Hard: With a Vengeance, Wayne’s World

cruel and unusual, what this movie did to me

Surfing

Passing on the good internet vibes. (On a related note: I deleted my TikTok account this month and immediately felt better. Will Twitter be next?)

• Fonts In Use - An independent archive of typography

• Postal Service for the Dead - A PostSecret-inspired project to work through grief

• An A/V exploration of Mexico City - LOVE a good soundscape

• Getty Museum Releases 88K+ Images of Artworks with CC0 - happy browsing

• I signed up for the Colossal newsletter and it’s wonderful. Favs from this month: aerial fruit merchants of Hanoi, public toilets in Tokyo, four centuries of chromatic wonders, illustrations library

  

Listening

• Harvest, Neil Young (welcome back king)

• Blue, Joni Mitchell (welcome back queen)

• The Greater Wings, Julie Byrne

• Time (The Revelator), Gillian Welch

• Desire, I Want To Turn Into You, Caroline Polachek

Coveting

From my “I want that” screenshot archive — a Jeep Wagoneer (just imagine Otis in there), a transparent raincoat à la Joi in BR2049, and this funky Blaupunkt radio/speaker set. Life would just be better with these things, I think.

Writing

ICYMI: Posts from the blog this month.

• The fallow season: Thoughts on solitude

• Let’s go to the movies: My favorite big-crowd theater experiences

• What’s in a nickname? Thoughts on the things we call each other

Otis of the month

My sleepy boy

As always, would love to hear about your standout discoveries or revisits of the month!