Just A Peck 0010 // Spirit of the Times, Breathless, Seedships

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.

WHAT I'M EXCITED ABOUT THIS WEEK

This week is Spirit of the Times! Zeitgeist's annual event is both a party and a fundraiser and is critical in ensuring that Zeitgeist continues to play a vital role in the community for years to come. See you there!
Duluth's Duluthiest website, Perfect Duluth Day, posted their annual Theater Primer. PDD is a treasure.
A new trailer for Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater's film about the making of Breathless, told in the style and spirit in which Godard made the original film. This is like catnip for me.

JOURNAL

I went to an interview and book signing for Steve Grove’s new book How I Found Myself in the Midwest, a “memoir of reinvention” . The discussion was moderated by Emily Larson. I’m looking forward to reading this. I have been an admirer of Steve and his partner Mary for a long time.

I hauled a big load of invasive weeds to the WLSSD Yard Waste center. It’s a constant battle to keep our yard from turning into a jungle.

Jody, Kaylee, and I went to see Million Dollar Quartet at the Duluth Playhouse. It’s a jukebox musical about a real-life gathering of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins at Sun Records where they all got their starts. I learned a lot about the origins of those four men and Sam Phillips, the man who discovered them. The actors were also the musicians, so it was like a 90 minute concert. We had a great time.

What I watched:

  • Of Stars and Men (1961). An animated educational film from the early sixties that is apparently highly regarded. I was underwhelmed and annoyed by it.
  • The Trial (1962). Orson Welles' take on Kafka. Some incredible visuals shot in an abandoned train station. Anthony Perkins crushing it, and a killer's row of famous European faces.
  • Summer with Monika (1953). One of the Bergmans I'd never seen. Brilliant and depressing. Young love, broken hearts, and Harriet Andersson blowing the doors off.
  • Ms .45 (1981). Abel Ferrara's cult film is part of Criterion Channel's Nunsploitation collection this month. Straddles grindhouse and arthouse, feminism and exploitation.
  • Brewster McCloud (1970). A part of the Criterion Channel's excellent Altman collection this month. A mess of a movie with some really enjoyable moments. Bud Cort, Salley Kellerman, and Michael Murphy. Plus Stacy Keach in heavy makeup and Shelley Duvall's screen debut!
  • Secret Honor (1984). Another Altman gap for me. A surprisingly sympathetic portrait of an unhinged Nixon. A one-man performance from Phillip Baker Hall that balances scenery chewing and vulnerability in a fascinating way.
  • The Virgin Spring (1960). Another cheerful, laugh-a-minute Bergman. Either that or a brutal portrait of the darkness within all of us. Gorgeous and devastating. Bergman and Nykvist might be my favorite Director/Cinematographer pairing.

What I’m reading:

  • I finished Under Fortunate Stars by Ren Hutchings on audiobook. A fun, twisty space opera with one of my audiobook pet peeves: split narration where the same characters are voiced very differently by different narrators.
  • Middlemarch, Eiliot
  • Vineland, Pynchon

MEMORIES

Ten Years Ago:
Kaylee had her first day of high school at Harbor City International, a school she loved. We dropped her off downtown every day and she would hang out at a coffee shop until the school opened. After growing up in rural Wisconsin, this time downtown every morning felt very metropolitan.

MY FAVORITE QUOTE OF THE WEEK

If joy is a deep form of love, it is also the raw engagement with the passing seasonality of existence, the fleeting presence of those we love understood as gift, going in and out of our lives, faces, voices, memory, aromas of the first spring day or a wood fire in winter, the last breath of a dying parent as they create a rare, raw, beautiful frontier between loving presence and a new and now blossoming absence.

To feel a full and untrammeled joy is to have become fully generous; to allow ourselves to be joyful is to have walked through the doorway of fear, the dropping away of the anxious worried self, felt like a thankful death itself, a disappearance, a giving away, overheard in the laughter of friendship, the vulnerability of happiness and the vulnerability of its imminent loss, felt suddenly as a strength, a solace and a source, the claiming of our place in the living conversation, the sheer privilege of being in the presence of the ocean, the sky, a young boy running from shadow to light or a daughter's face framed by the mountains, or from nowhere, a sudden turn of the tide in our favour - I was here and you were here and together we made a world.

-- David Whyte

That’s it for this week. Stay safe, friends. Thanks for reading!