Friday, May 8, 2020
Watching
Spike Lee's 3.5-minute tribute to New York City is as moving as you might expect, especially since it's cut to––what else?––the “Theme from New York, New York” as made famous by Frank Sinatra. It's impossible to suppress the surge of euphoria that swells and spills over as the song slows to its rallentando (thank you, Wikipedia).
Lee shot his short film on Super 8, giving the images the prettily decomposed quality of decades-old home movies found half buried in some junk shop. Which makes the contrast all the more cryball-making when Lee's lens finds one healthcare worker after another at the short film's climax. In fact, people are mostly absent from the film until that point. No surprise given the shelter-in-place order, but still elevating front-line workers to the place they deserve.
Watch New York, New York, a Spike Lee joint, here.
Listening
I've rediscovered Prefuse 73 after responding to one of those Facebook chain letters about influential albums. I wanted to choose something to represent my entree in electronic music but nothing came immediately to mind except Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works, Vol. II, a classic to be sure, but not one I discovered until relatively late. Apart from stumbling on occasional bangers like Squarepusher's “My Red Hot Car,” I doubt I seriously committed to electronic music (i.e., paid cash money for a record) until 2003's One Word Extinguisher, and even then I came to it sideways, from hip-hop. I'm also listening to The Books, with whom Prefuse collaborated. This musique concrete darling was a Pitchfork favorite back in the day, and I remember enjoying but quickly moving on from Thought for Food.
Reading
Most of my reading time is devoted to various books about monsters in preparation for a new course I'm co-teaching this fall. Finally, the nudge I needed to read Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula, books I've somehow avoided until now (some English major). I'm having trouble sustaining this monomania, however. A generalist to the last, my wandering eye flirts with the many unread books in my library: The Damned Utd, to fill the void where soccer used to be, and Moby Dick because if not now when?