Pennsylvania

Note to self: Look for Mary Lattimore interviews discussing her composition and documentation process. I’ve enjoyed her music casually for a few years, but after now seeing it assembled in real time in front of me—with her hands constantly moving back and forth between the massive harp in front of her and the delay pedal on her lap—I’d love to know more about her mental model for her music. Most other delay-oriented performances I’ve seen… See more →

Before the pandemic took hold and when I still lived in Brooklyn, I had been planning to check out Human Impact’s first-ever show at Saint Vitus in mid-March of last year. I’m lukewarm on the records they’ve put out since, so I wasn’t going to bother with this tour, especially since their tour mates Child Bite (who I’ve previously seen and enjoyed) weren’t playing the Philly show, but my friend Matt invited me to come,… See more →

I know, I know, you’re probably like, “Oh great, yet another martial-arts-infused ripoff of E.T. and Indiana Jones where the MacGuffin is a telekinetic rock that loves to eat ice cream,” but hear me out

I bought two tickets to this show during June’s post-vax frenzy of we’re-back-baby optimism. I actually thought someone would go to the show with me! I was so young. Not only were there no takers, I ultimately didn’t even want to go myself. I listened to some Idles records today in advance of the show and came to the sad realization that I’m just not that into this band. But couch inertia has cost me… See more →

Looks and sounds great, and the lead performance is fantastic, but oof, what a shoddy script. A short film stretched out to feature length with plenty of repetition and a variety of plot threads teased out and then just left to dangle, culminating in a tacked-on shrug of an ending that basically amounts to “the butler did it.”

Somehow, in the 25 years since I (or anyone else) last saw Deadguy, we all got 25 years older.

I’m glad Lydia Lunch exists, but man is she exhausting.

Before today, the last movie I saw in a theater was Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Seventeen months and 4 million COVID deaths later, Zola is, to say the least, a different movie for a different time, even if it was made before everything fell apart. Catching up, after the fact, on the viral tweet thread and subsequent Rolling Stone article that inspired it, I’m a little surprised the film didn’t do more with… See more →

If you know a better live band than the Sadies, you live a life of riches.

At @thetrocadero for the last time. 😢

The Big Mess Cabaret’s endearingly sloppy mix of queer-friendly vaudeville, drag, and burlesque was the first act booked when Joanna Pang took over ownership of the Troc from her father in 1994, making it a fitting finale for the venue 25 years later.

Leah and I discovered, roughly seven years after the fact, that we were at the same Soul Coughing show in Philly in 1998, long before we met. This Mike Doughty show was a fun opportunity to kind of recreate that night as if we had actually spent it together.

Soul Coughing was perhaps the most unique band to find a larger audience during the permissive major-label alt-rock boom of the ’90s, and to my ears,… See more →

A lot happened in 2018. The ruinous Trump administration continued doing its ruinous thing. I finally deleted my Facebook account. I had a stressful couple of months caused by something that rhymes with “head hugs,” which I would gladly trade the life of any loved one to avoid going through again. I visited the UK for the first time. I published 33 blog posts, including several well-received posts on design and development.

Projects

Let’s check in… See more →

I can’t decide if its ideas are muddled or merely complex, but as a pure action movie, Incredibles 2 is a lot of fun. I’m disappointed that the filmmakers couldn’t find a way to avoid the strobing effects that exclude epileptic viewers. For a company as creatively industrious as Pixar, that struck me as a lazy choice.

As for the preceding short film, Bao, bravo to Pixar for stepping away from the Eurocentric boys’ club,… See more →

First time in the @philauu basement in a decade (to see @KINGTUFFY) and it feels as familiar as ever, like no time has passed at all.

Projects

Since 2011, working with A Book Apart was my way of contributing to the design community while my own direction as a designer was uncertain. Over the course of 2016, as my new job at ProPublica restored my enthusiasm for design, I wanted to get back to working on my own projects and sharing what I learned in the process. Making time for that meant something had to give, so after producing the paperback/PDF… See more →

Biopics are an almost universally boring and unnecessary category, but I, Tonya subverts that by a) relitigating a scandal and depicting as a hero someone long understood to be a villain, and b) being brutally entertaining. Its pitch-black comedy is reminiscent of The Wolf of Wall Street, with inferior style but a vastly more appealing and sympathetic protagonist. As Tonya Harding and her mother, Margot Robbie and Allison Janney own the film, and without performances… See more →

Call Me by Your Name strikes me as an important achievement, but one that doesn’t speak to me as much as I had hoped, at least not as much as Carol or Moonlight, the other recent queer crossover hits that are inevitably offered for comparison. The gulf between its adolescent protagonist’s cosmopolitan intellectualism and my own experiences as a teen may be a factor, and it doesn’t help that I am definitely not a fan… See more →

A sweet fairy tale, easily the best of the small handful of Guillermo del Toro films I’ve seen. My one gripe is that it relies so heavily on the (strong) appeal of Sally Hawkins’ and Richard Jenkins’ performances that the film sags when they’re not onscreen. Michael Shannon is a serviceable villain, but his contours aren’t nuanced or idiosyncratic enough to justify the amount of attention del Toro lavishes on him.

A Metallica concert in 2017 is pretty unnecessary but I went anyway and my main takeaway was that Lars’s drums were purple and sparkly.

In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it ambulance scene, an EMT says awkwardly to her charge, “I’m just gonna… check you.” She looks enough like Abbi Jacobson – a Philadelphia area native, like Split’s writer/director, M. Night Shyamalan – that it instantly becomes my favorite scene in the movie, a random cameo with Jacobson’s hapless Broad City character stumbling into an EMT job for which she is comically unqualified. But it’s not her. In her absence, the scene… See more →

A love letter to a city I do not love, La La Land nevertheless did an impressive job of disarming me with its vivid palette and dazzling setpieces. It managed to seize on my love of music while circumventing my distaste for musicals.