Books​

• Intermezzo - I'll always think of this as a deeply moving exploration of love and who gets to have it and the error in thinking that any of us get to decide.
• Blood Meridian - The Judge. His contradictory components of astonishing intellect and base violence. The scene where the men are trapped near a volcano and the Judge shows them how to make gunpowder - everything it says about this novel's themes, the nature of violence and what it does to us foremost among them - left me dumbfounded and awed.
• A Swim In The Pond In The Rain - A really fascinating look at the creative process. I might be misremembering, but the part talking about how getting to the point where contradictions emerge in a work as the point where something truly interesting is starting to happen is something I think about a lot. If that's not really in there and I'm misremembering, I'll be thinking about it a lot all the same.
• Moby Dick - For five minutes after reading the book I sat in dumbfounded silence. When the five minutes were up I'd concluded that while the book contained indelible images, truly gripping passages, and erudite ruminations on too many ideas to recount – I was disappointed a bit, and felt it was another one of those overwrought, distended books people insist on calling important without actually considering whether or not the thing was even enjoyable. And yet, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.

Movies

• One Battle After Another - My favorite PTA movie next to Boognie Nights. Funny while not skimping on big ideas. I'm not a parent, but the last scene was incredibly moving nontheless.
• Black Bag - A really compelling spy story that's hardly about spycraft at all.
• All That Jazz - An engaging film with lightning-quick pacing and cutting. Thirty minutes in, I wasn't sure if I was enjoying myself given the story and all the formal innovation. By the end I was all in.
• Closely Watched Trains - I didn't know what to make of this thing at first. Then I started recognizing these components of Wes Anderson throughout, these shots, and tricks - and I'm not going to say that thinking of the Wes Anderson elements made it better, but maybe that helped me understand better what was happening, and from then on I was enraptured.

Albums

• Getting Killed - This is the album. From the first moments, I felt suffused with a buzzing sensation having experienced such of dirth of music that made me feel anything really for such a long time. And while that's true, I'm still not sure I get this album's appeal; which might serve only to make it more fascinating.
• The Crux
• Baby - I called my sister up and told her this album was the next Blonde; I'd hated that album initially but have come to love it since. I didn't get the album outside of Baby on the first listen through; some mixture of the often unintelligible lyric and the hip hop of it all dancing on the knife's edge of whatever can be called rnb/hip-hop. Since, when I want to feel something like a love burning so intensely that your voice chokes, something I've never really felt – I put this album on.
• Deadbeat