Never open a blog post with an apology.
- I bought the new battery case for the iPhone. Even though I have a new iPhone, the battery life is shit, or at least it is when one abuses facebook as much as me. The case isn’t as bad as it looks online, and is well-designed as far as feel and function. The thing I like is the battery is integrated into the OS, so you have two battery gauges in Notifications, and the phone is smart enough to run off the external until it is dead, then switch to the internal, or charge the internal from the external. The bad is that the headphone jack won’t work with L-bracket headphones, and my car’s controls don’t work 50% of the time with the wired connection. (The bluetooth is fine, though.) I can now get about two heavy days of use from an overnight charge.
- I wanted to write a big thing about the Thanksgiving trip to Hawaii but didn’t. Here are the pictures.
- I saw the movie Spotlight on Saturday. It’s the story of the Boston Globe uncovering the Catholic molestation scandal in Boston. It has some decent performances in it, like Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, and Liev Schreiber. I didn’t love it – I felt like the structure was pretty flat, like it was a drama filmed by working through a New Yorker article line by line instead of a script. This seems to be a common theme in docudrama type films as of late, and it makes me wonder if people can only grok this type of thing when it’s so predigested, or if it’s a stylistic choice, and it will change after a certain point in time.
- The subject matter of the movie – the Catholic church epidemic of sexual abuse and the coverups, of course pissed me off to no end. It’s an apples/oranges comparison, but it was timely to me because we’re in this era of anti-Muslim rhetoric by christians, and the Catholic church is horrible in its own way because of this. (Yes, christian != Catholic, not all Catholics are pedophiles, etc etc. But still.)
- The one thing I did find interesting was the movie was set in 01, and there were a lot of near-past things that touched me, like seeing billboards for a then-monstrous AOL, and all the not-that-old-but-now-ancient technology, like giant CRT monitors. (And they all looked faked, like the glass tubes were taken out and replaced with fake screens or flat screens. Maybe they don’t film well on DV? Or are in scare supply?)
- I’ve been infatuated with Terry Riley as of late, particularly In C. I also love The Harp of New Albion, but there’s something particularly interesting about the modular, improvisational way In C is put together that I really love. There’s a score floating around for free with his performance notes that’s worth checking out, or read the wikipedia article.
- I haven’t been reading much or writing at all, and I’m very depressed about that and what to do next. The last book has pretty much stalled out and run its course, and I don’t know what to do about that other than move on. But it’s very depressing to put a year and a half into a book and then have it vanish from radar in a matter of weeks.
- Big travel week next week (IL, IN, WI) that’s wall-to-wall family stuff. I hope it’s not 40 below zero and snowing the whole time, but you get what you get.