What I watched: Forsaken, a 2014 western with Kiefer and Donald Sutherland. It was a decent story about a gunfighter who decides to try and come home and patch things up with his old man and try and start over again—only you know what happens next. The story is pretty cookie cutter, but the acting is good.
What I read: I’m in the middle of a new book that is so much easier to read than that fucking phonebook I slogged through for something like 3 or 4 months. I should be done with this one within a couple of weeks I think.
What I listened to: Our latest stop on the tour of the best engineered albums of all time brings us to Tom Petty’s Wildflowers album. Recorded over the course of a couple of years and released in 1994, this is easily the best work that Petty ever did. Musically speaking, there are no tunes that warrant skipping past, and the sonics are very good. Although this album is technically considered a solo album, he recorded it with the Heartbreakers, except for that pesky drummer who eventually left the band and was replaced by the guy who played on this album. This was also the first album that Petty did with producer Rick Rubin. Engineers were Dave Bianco, Richard Dodd, Stephen McLaughlin & Jim Scott. Petty originally wanted to release a double album with 25 songs, but Warner Brothers said “hell no” to that, so the song list was trimmed down to 15. The other songs were eventually released on other Petty projects or put in a drawer until after his death.
The recording is super clean with a full frequency spectrum and a great sound stage. If I didn’t know any better, I would swear that the song was recorded one instrument at a time. The snare, which is a notoriously difficult instrument to record properly, is meaty without any ringing or hollowness. Petty’s vocals are right in the sweet spot and his tone is much better than on other albums. I never get tired of listening to this one.
i havent actually watched anything of note this week…tho i did come across a trailer
now that looks like it will be good dumb fun
welcome to the dayshift motherfucker……im definitely going to be using that
and listening to flemming
a dutch pop singer i normally wouldnt have the time of day for….but his new song…..is catchy as fuck and has a great bass line
Fantastisch! I don’t suppose they’re ever been entered in EuroVision, have they?
not yet
wait and see for next year i guess
Ermergerrd that movie looks so good!!! Can’t wait!
Didn’t start any new books. I had to get on the waitlist for the stuff I wanted. And of course it all came in at once. 🤬
Still watching The Great Pottery Throw Down. I didn’t realize how many seasons there were. It’s interesting, entertaining, and doesn’t require anything of me.
My fave type of television…doesn’t require anything of me.
I finally got around to watching this gem:
It is many cuts above the typical “world has ended” flick.
Oh by the way, that’s the whole movie, it’s not just a trailer, if you have about an hour and a half to kill. It’s well worth it.
It is muggy as hell here today. I’m doing inside work: cooking ahead, reviewing our wills, cleaning the office, boring boring boring. And saving content for next weekend’s BrainDrain. As always, @Butcherbakertoiletrymaker, I greatly appreciate you taking it over the last Saturday of the month.
Tried to watch the Kids In The Hall new episodes… On Amazon Prime.
They’re not kids anymore. They’re seniors and it is kind of sad and depressing.
The Doomsday DJ bits, wow were they grim. Dave Foley’s expressions turned them from little throwaway bits into something brilliant but really hard to take.
I tried too. I had such high hopes, couldn’t make it past the second episode. Just not funny. ☹️
I watched S1 of The Flight Attendant thanks to DS recommendation. She is such a trainwreck that it gave me anxiety induced stress dreams. I’m totally watching S2 next week 😜
I started Pretty Little Liars Original Sin (HBO). I like that they lean into campy horror genre and the main cast is diverse but the lead girl is white of course. There are lots of cringe “woke” scenes that deal with racism, sexism, suicide, rape culture, and pedophilia (adult with a teen)…but by “deal with” I mean they show it and don’t actually address why it’s problematic… which means the scenes are used for cheap shock value and entertainment which is gross.
Ugh the racist scenes have the character stop short of saying “Black” more than once even though it is implied. For example the white girl says “That other girl got the lead role because she is…” and her father interrupts her and says “better than you?” Which just makes it worse because they are treating “Black” as a bad word and it seems like the writers are trying to maintain plausible deniability by not making the racist girl be overtly racist.
Spoiler Alert. The racist girl dies so hopefully they stop with that garbage.
We have our local handyman here today, fixing things that I should have fixed a long time ago. So far, we have the light over the sink, the light fixture/ceiling fan on our front porch, and the segment of downspout that was missing. Also, the big light in my little home studio is no longer making that 60 cycle hum, so I can start recording acoustic instruments and tube amps again. My wife is very happy.
…caught a couple of not-new flicks this last week…the last castle with robert redford as an ex-general of some renown incarcerated at a military prison run by james gandolfini…it wasn’t bad but aside from the military angle it trod a pretty familiar path…does have a couple of good turns by, among others, a young mark ruffalo
…& also the giver which is an adaptation of a book about a post-civilizational-collapse society in the brave new world model of pharmaceutically balanced conformity that’s lost both its moral dimension & by way of a visual conceit (that I’m pretty sure was part of the original story) exists in monochrome…jeff bridges is the curmudgeonly “receiver of memory” who has to pass those memories of a world the rest of the society no longer has any knowledge of to a successor…hence the title…knowing it was a book first didn’t exactly get it a pass for the parts that seem wrong-headed but knowing that they were clearly intended to be more by way of allegorical than literal helped smooth some rough edges
…also think I’m (at least temporarily) caught up with the latest season of westworld…which I think I’d consider an improvement over the third one based on what I’ve seen so far…though not as interesting as the first season or two…aaron paul isn’t bad…but jeffrey wright, evan rachel wood, ed harris, tessa thompson & thandiwe newton continue to be good enough to make him & the hemsworth & james marsden seem like some sort of second string?