Just A Peck 0005 // Spike Lee, James Lovell, Ben Folds

Just A Peck
Welcome to the latest issue of Just A Peck. I'm glad you're here! New issues come out most Sundays. Unsubscribe at any time. If you'd rather subscribe via your feedreader, the rss feed is here.

WHAT I'M EXCITED ABOUT THIS WEEK

Highest 2 Lowest, a new Spike Lee joint with Denzel Washington and Jeffrey Wright based on one of my favorite Kurosawa films opens this week! YESSSS!
Excalibur Con
Excalibur Con, Duluth's annual pop culture & tabletop gaming convention, is this weekend at the DECC.
Rock Of Ages Teen Edition
Rock of Ages Teen Edition opens this week at the Duluth Playhouse. Get your tickets here!

JOURNAL

Choo Choo Paddle
Jody and I, along with our friends Tom and Brandy, took the narrated Duluth River Train tour which left from West Duluth and went along the St. Louis River for several miles. Then we disembarked from the train, got in kayaks and a canoe and leisurely paddled back. There was still a bit of wildfire smoke in the air, but it a lovely day.
Wrecktangle Pizza
After four hours of paddling, Wild State Cider and Wrecktangle Pizza were exactly what we wanted.
Ghost Town Run
Ghost Town Run, an all-ages novel by my awesome friend, Luke, is available in paperback for the first time!
Friends Gathering
We drove to Wisconsin to visit some childhood friends. We played games, brought each other up to speed on our families, and reminisced.
What I watched:
  • Black Girl (1966). A classic of world cinema. The first sub-saharan African film by an African filmmaker to receive international attention.
  • 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984). Not great, but better than I remembered. Some pretty remarkable production design, plus Bob Balaban as a computer genius named Dr. Chandra, and Helen Mirren as a Russian.
  • Panic in the Year Zero! (1962). Low-budget AIP cold war exploitation pic directed by (and starring) Ray Milland, also with Jean Hagen and Frankie Avalon.
  • Pavements (2024). Much like Pavement, this documentary about "the world's most important and influential band" somehow manages to both satisfy and subvert the expections of the form--simultaneously earnest and irreverent. I love the music and the slacker ethos of Pavement, and I loved this doc.
What I'm reading:
  • I finished The Mountain in the Sea. It was exceptional. A propulsive, intelligent, hopeful, *beautiful* novel of ideas (AI, sentience, semiotics, conservation) with cyberpunk influences. I ordered the author's other books immediately.
  • I also finished The Starless Sea. This month's book club book.
  • Middlemarch, Eiliot
  • Codebreaker, Martel

MEMORIES

Five Years Ago:
Socially-distanced deck party
Members of the Twin Portals community met in person for the first time in almost six months. We stayed outside and socially distanced. (This was still before anyone really understood what was going on.)
Thirty Years Ago:
Ben Folds Five
Ben Folds Five released their first album. I have listend to this album (and their subsequent ones) from start-to-finish countless times since then. It was fascinating to read Ben Folds' reflections on how that album came about.

MY FAVORITE QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"It is not just the symbols we use in our langauge that are arbitrary--it is what we choose to signify with them.

We give words only to the things that matter to us as a society. The things that make no difference to us are erased from our world by never becoming part of language in the first place.

In this way, each language organizes the world into a pattern. Each langauge decides what has meaning--and what does not. As native speakers, we are born inside this pattern, this semiotic cosmos."
--Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea
That's it for this week. Stay safe, friends. Thanks for reading!

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