The very definition of lean and mean. 🖤

I finally got around to seeing all the Child’s Play / Chucky movies, and pound for pound, this is probably the most tolerable deep dive of a long-running horror franchise I’ve ever done. A few notes:

• The decision to continue with animatronics and puppetry for the duration of the series is absolutely crucial to its success. CGI would have made these movies unwatchable.
• I like how the series is kind of made up of rhyming… See more →

L very thoughtfully picked up this great little book for me while she was in Scotland a few months ago. Subtitled “AFTER a late start, a first career, illness, raising children, a crisis of confidence, leaving it in disgust…,” it’s a perfect guide for someone like myself who’s returning to making art in earnest in middle age and trying to get past the imposter syndrome. It begins with a helpful reminder that there are many… See more →

I’m always grateful for an opportunity to see artful indie animated shorts on a big screen within biking distance from my home, and in recent years the Philadelphia Film Festival’s program has been reliably good. This year’s, though it included some strong entries, was unfortunately sorely lacking in thematic variety: Six of the eight films were about parenting or marriage. I won’t say they didn’t honor those experiences, but few felt especially insightful. Unlike their… See more →

After many years away, I’m back in the used-CD market, and it feels like home. This isn’t the Cars compilation I had on my wishlist—despite the title, this one is more than I needed—but I could hardly balk at two and a half hours of prime power pop for eight bucks, even if I’ve always been baffled by its product category: it collects the hits for the casual fans and B-sides and unreleased stuff for… See more →

Today I did that thing where I knowingly miss the point of the Met, whizzing past its vast collection of antiquities from around the globe in favor of a marquee exhibition of modern American painters. It was Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock this time, and by far the largest collection of either artist’s work I’ve ever had the privilege of viewing. I was especially keen to dig in on Krasner, as I’m as guilty as… See more →

When I first heard about Secretary of Defense War and human tribal tattoo Pete Hegseth’s announcement that the jihadist mass-murderer Nidal Hasan would be executed by firing squad and it would be publicly live-streamed, I responded with instinctual revulsion. I firmly oppose capital punishment on both moral and pragmatic grounds, and making it messy and public is the stuff of unfettered authoritarianism, not to mention likely to only further embolden publicity-hungry aspiring terrorists. But after… See more →

I initially decided against Dr. Giggles tonight in favor of watching Dark Night of the Scarecrow, but when the doctor himself, Larry Drake, showed up in the very first scene in Scarecrow, I took it as an omen and made it a double feature. I got slightly more than I expected from Giggles (his demented giggling is truly infectious!), a video store staple I never got around to seeing in its early-90s heyday. I wonder… See more →

More than a few moments in Marina Herlop’s Dja Dja tempt me to call it the best Björk album since Vespertine, but Herlop packs far too compelling a range of ideas into this record to just leave it at that. Among other things from my somewhat limited frame of reference for this sort of thing, I hear bits of the choir in Kenji Kawai’s Ghost in the Shell score, the abstract vocal experiments of Mike… See more →