Welcome to the latest issue of Just A Peck. I’m glad you’re here!
JOURNAL
I had the week off to recover from my surgery. I still worked a bit, but in smaller spurts and with breaks in a comfy chair. For the most part, I sat in my chair (or on the deck when the weather was nice)–bolstered by my post-op binding and pain meds–and read, or hobbled down to the television and watched movies. Jody took good care of me, and things have gone as well as could be expected.
We played a couple of board games this week, including Cascadia and Sagrada (one of the new games we picked up at BigBadGameStore) which involves drafting translucent dice to craft stained-glass windows for the Sagrada Familia.
A Reddit thread inspired us to try a new food truck that is semi-permanently parked in Lakeside all summer: The Out of the Blue Fish Co which specializes in Lake Superior (and other local lake) fish.
Heading to Bayfront for Fourth Fest seemed unwise given my limited mobility, so we stopped by a friend’s house briefly for smoked meats and conversation, then watched both Superior’s and Duluth’s fireworks from about ten miles away on our deck.
WHAT I WATCHED THIS WEEK
The Philadelphia Story (1940). Hepburn is great, and it's lovely to see Stewart start off with a hard, grumpy shell (foreshadowing the version of him we'll get after the war) but then slowly expose his soft nougaty boyish center. This was his only (non-honorary) Oscar, I believe. The Oscar-winning script is great too (except the creaky parts where men lecture Hepburn on what is required to be a good woman and the jokes about domestic abuse). The drunk scenes were hilarious. Are there contemporary screenplays that aspire to this level of wit and linguistic cleverness?
The background story of the production is fascinating. "My, she was yar." "The course of true love...gathers no moss."
My Summer of Love (2004). I'm excited about the new Pawel Pawlikowski film this year, and
Ida is one of my five-star movies, so I'm not sure why it took a friend's recommendation to remind me that this one existed. (Also, I had no idea that Pawlikowski gave Emily Blunt her breakthrough role!) Three fantastic lead performances (Paddy Considine!). Definitely has a late-90s/early-00s stylistic vibe, but even though I prefer the iconoclastic formalism that Pawlikowski uses starting with
Ida, you can tell already that he is immensely talented.
RoboCop (1987). "I'd buy that for a dollar!" Verhoeven maximalism. Dystopian satire of fasco-corporatism, American consumerism, and fetishistic violence. Ridiculous and awesome. Did they get a volume discount on squibs? A murderers' row of killer character actor performances — too many to list here. Did you know that Monte Hellman was an uncredited second-unit director and shot some of this movie's iconic scenes, including the armored truck chase at the beginning? Commercial parodies including Nukem, a family board game from Parker Bros. ("Get them before they get you!") and the 6000 SUX ("Bigger is Better, an American Tradition — 8.2 mpg"). Phil Tippett's animation for the ED-209 might be my favorite part.
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). William Wyler knew how to compose a shot and Gregg Toland knew how to shoot one. The powerful moment in which Al returns home and he and his wife see each other for the first time in years reminded me that I still need to read Mark Harris's
Five Came Back. Stunning deep-focus photography. Crowded dance halls and department stores, and slightly undersized sets, add to the sense that Al, Fred, and Homer feel a little trapped. (The undersized sets also make Myrna Loy look very tall. She wasn't.) A surprisingly nuanced take on the struggles of returning servicemen for 1946.
Dave Made a Maze (2017). This is like if Michel Gondry made a slightly puerile
Backrooms. A DIY indie from Bill Watterson (no, not
that Bill Watterson) done almost entirely in cardboard. Don't let the cardboard genitalia dissuade you, though —
Dave Made a Maze is inventive and fun. Some clever dialog, delightfully "handmade" puppetry and animation, and a great nod to
Richard Wiseman's Assumptions.
Hedda (2025). This was our Family Movie Discussion pick for the month. A fascinating adaptation from Nia DaCosta that shifts the focus from Hedda Gabler's potential mental illness and Ibsen's question of whether she was her father's daughter (Hedda Gabler) or her husband's wife (Hedda Tesman) to what exactly is preventing Hedda from being
her own person (just Hedda). The choice to set it at a wild party to give Hedda's puppet-master manipulations more room and to provide an external expression to Hedda's internal fire is a good one. Tessa Thompson and Nina Hoss are both really strong.
WHAT I READ THIS WEEK
Finished:
The Fortunate Fall, by Cameron Reed.
How is this not one of the primary works of the cyberpunk canon? What an absolutely brilliant bit of philosophy and world building. I don't know why Reed's second novel only came out this year (30 years later), but you'd better believe that I bought it in hardcover. In the happy, make-believe world of my imagination, Reed has been stockpiling essays, stories, and novels for three decades and is now going to release them all in a tsunami of world-changing ideas timed with Hari Seldon foresight and atomic-clock precision for maximum impact.
Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe.
I enjoyed this from the start, but didn't fully understand what Achebe was doing until the end. Once you hit those final paragraphs, it becomes tragically, horrifyingly clear. A powerful novel that paints a picture of colonialism from the perspective of the culture that was flattened and erased. I found out later that this is one of Hilary Mantel's five favorite historical novels (
a list I hadn't seen before, with four other great recommendations that I've never read and which are now in my queue).
The Getaway, by Jim Thompson.
Holy shit. I already thought this 50s noir was knife-sharp and brutal, and then I hit that last third where it becomes an allegorical descent into hell. Inhaled this in a single day. If you've only seen the movie adaptations, you're in for a grim, cruel surprise.
In Progress:
MEMORIES
Ten Years Ago:
Ten years ago, Jody, Kaylee, my mom, and I visited our exchange student Soeren and his family in Germany. We spent a little over a week in Northern Germany seeing Bremen, Bremerhaven, Hanover, Hamburg, and Berlin. It was an amazing trip, but getting to spend time with Soeren and his wonderful family was absolutely the most memorable part.
QUICK LINKS
WHAT I'M EXCITED ABOUT
Oh my god, you guys! Legally Blonde opens at the Playhouse this week!
MY FAVORITE QUOTE OF THE WEEK
"The alternation of day and night is merely a physical phenomenon, time is a question of being human and, frankly, how could I consider myself a human being, I who have only known thirty-nine people and all of them women? I think that time must have something to do with the duration of pregnancies, the growth of children, all those things that I haven't experienced. If someone spoke to me, there would be time, the beginning and end of what they said to me, the moment when I answered, their response. The briefest conversation creates time. Perhaps I have tried to create time through writing these pages. I begin, I fill them with words, I pile them up, and I still don't exist because nobody is reading them. I am writing them for some unknown reader who will probably never come—I am not even sure that humanity has survived that mysterious event that governed my life. But if that person comes, they will read them and I will have a time in their mind. They will have my thoughts in them. The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living, that will not be me, because I will be dead, and will not be that person as they were before reading, because my story, added to their mind, will then become part of their thinking. I will only be truly dead if nobody ever comes, if the centuries, then the millennia go by for so long that this planet, which I no longer believe is Earth, no longer exists. As long as the sheets of paper covered in my handwriting lie on this table, I can become a reality in someone's mind. Then everything will be obliterated, the suns will burn out and I will disappear like the universe."
— Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men
That’s it for this week. Stay safe, friends. Thanks for reading!
