jackb
quarantine livin’
it’s not all that bad
granted, my parents have a nice house with a yard and a pool and i get to see my dogs again, so it’s easy for me to say.
my schedule every day has been something like this:
- 2pm: wake up for class meetings on slack and zoom
- 4pm: get out of bed, alternate between playing viola and reading
- 6pm: dinner, watch the sopranos
- 9pm: dad starts complaining that he’s tired, goes to bed
- 10:30pm: mom falls asleep on the couch while we watch the british baking show
- 11pm: catch up on homework
- 12:30am: shower
- 1:00am: watch anime, youtube, twitch streams
- 6am: fall asleep
some days we walk the dogs around the neighborhood for a while in the afternoon. surprisingly, i don’t listen to much music. i shuffle a playlist for a bit while i’m showering or when i’m doing housework, or occasionally a particular song will pop into my head and i’ll listen to it a few times. the past few days i’ve had “oh darlin’” by the beatles and “kokomo” by the beach boys stuck in my head, so i’ve been humming along to that.
music
the main thing missing from my routine is travel. not in the sense of going significant distances, but literally in the sense of traversing from one place to another. my locomotion is a constant loop between my bed, the bathroom, the kitchen, the living room, and the street. this really ought to be the case for everyone given the pandemic, but it’s no coincidence that, in the absence of walks to and from class or appointments or coffee shops, active music listening has also largely departed from my routine. i do most of my listening while i’m on the go; last year it was almost all in my car because i spent so much time driving to and from work, and this semester it was between classes or while i waited for the bus. my intuition is that this is relatively uncommon, and it’s surprising to me that this is the case. i think of myself as someone who loves music (and pizza! and the office!!! and dogs!!!!!!!), and yet, i apparently use music as a space filler. my former 90+ minute commute to and from work in atlanta traffic was a psychic black hole that needed to be filled, so i obliged with the only stimulation allowed by the DMV, namely music and (hands free!) phone calls. all that said, i’m still trying to keep consistent with getting my viola chops back in action, so maybe i’m not so phony.
what i have been listening to is a mix of lofi, some korean groups, bedroom pop type stuff, and a few other scattered things. i really enjoy old school, balls-out love songs. stuff like put your head on my shoulder.
tv
i’ve been working through the man in the high castle and the sopranos a good bit, because my parents will watch them. high castle is alright. we started season 3 and i don’t really care for it too much anymore but i like to give things a fair shot.
the sopranos is pretty good. we’ve only gotten through season 2 so far so i don’t know if it’s still not at the ‘good’ part yet or if i’m just a philistine, but i don’t quite see reason for it to be as hyped as it is. i’ve heard it called one of the best shows of all time. still, it’s interesting and i like talking to my therapist about dr. melfi because it prompts him to talk about the theory and ideas behind psychotherapy and why show biz always gets it wrong.
anime
i finished full metal alchemist: brotherhood last week after having started it before the quarantine. VERY good show, and relatively short at roughly 60 episodes. it has a somewhat simplistic view of human struggle and failure, but it’s charming and the characters are compelling enough to carry it. it has a little bit of everything; humor, flashy magic, top-notch openings, political subterfuge, and wholesome romances. it’s on netflix.
i started watching jojo’s bizarre adventure this week, on recommendation of its ubiquity in memes. it’s not very good in the sense of writing and characterization, technical stuff like that, but it’s hilarious and insane. i pulled an all-nighter because i kept saying “one more episode” and then cracking up too hard to sleep. it’s about the joestar family fighting against ancient vampires through time, and every protagonist has a name like Jonathon or Joseph, so they all go by JoJo, hence the title. every single character is a hyper-muscley adonis dude with 16 abs and shoulders broader than a car. the villains in the second arc have these mediterranean/egyptian/persian looks with turbans and tattoos and lip rings, but their only clothes are basically loincloths and they’re all named after 80s rock bands. it’s so dumb, i love it. the openings have kind of weird 3d animation going on but the music is tight, and of course there’s the famous use of ‘to be continued’ as the riff from roundabout kicks in to end every episode. highly recommend this one if you’re in the mood for shits and giggles. it’s also on netflix.
i’ve been watching my hero academia off and on for the past several months. there are four seasons out right now and i’m currently an episode or two into that one. i will be catching up next week. i think of it as a shonen with the tone of a slice of life anime; the art style is softer and you’re more likely to say “he’s so cute!” about deku (protagonist) than you are to say he looks cool (not that he isn’t cool). this is one of those shows that’s fun enough to watch and has a broad enough concept that it could conceivably run for a really long time. it’s about society if almost everyone had a superpower, and how people step up to become heroes to keep the peace, because the cops are just useless (as usual). the fights are pretty fun to watch, with the one small drawback that because everything is so power oriented, there isn’t a ton of cool choreography like you see in naruto or in full metal. there’s a wide cast of characters and the show does a good job of making them all at least someone that you want to root for, if not particularly deep in every case. you should check it out on hulu.
books
i’ve mostly read things for class recently. i’ve enjoyed the marxism stuff from my critical theory class (lol) and readings from my film class about certain directors and the state of hollywood in the 90s. there will probably be dedicated posts to these topics when i get around to it.
i’ve been slowly working through ‘our death’ by sean bonney. it’s a collection of poetry, letters, and essays, mostly poetry. the whole thing has a very strong anarchist bent, but it’s not really political, not exactly. it deals more with the feeling of beeing utterly alienated from spirituality and the feelings of disillusionment in the current moment. the tone and delivery of my previous post is pretty overtly inspired by bonney, so that will give you a sense.
i plan to pick up walden again this week if i can stomach it. we’ll see how that pans out. i’m interested in it because it was referenced a lot in a book of essays by mark greif i sifted through a few months ago. i don’t really buy into the mythical “return to nature” aspect, at least not in the literal sense. people love to ‘gotcha!’ thoreau by pointing out that walden pond is like 10 minutes from his parents’ house. i don’t really put any stock in that criticism because he did, in the end, spend a few years living self-sufficiently and bartering fairly for what he couldn’t produce himself. the important part, from what i can tell, is more about the spirit of returning to tangibility and being responsible for the activities and projects we undertake. it’s extremely dense and meandering, though, which is why i have a hard time picking it up.
movies
courtesy of the film class i’m taking, i’ve been watching many more movies this semester than i usually did before. it’s nice to discover that i do in fact have the attention span for it. i haven’t attempted anything monolithic like apocalypse now or the irishman, 3 hour odysseys of film, but you know what i’m talking about. it’s the effect that makes people comfortable watching an entire season of television but turn their nose up at watching a single entity that takes 2 hours. my favorites from the class, which is entirely about american film in 1999:
the blair witch project, which i had not seen before my professor screenshared it over zoom. i happen to be of the opinion that a movie simply cannot be legitimately frightening because suspension of disbelief doesn’t go that far, but this was at the very least deeply unsettling and quite stressful. i’m more interested about the making of the film, though. i’m sure there are plenty of places you can research this more in-depth than this quick paragraph, but the things that stuck out to me are the ‘method’ approach not just of the acting, but the whole production. the actors portraying the students in the film were publicly stated to be dead in the months leading up to theatrical release, and remained so for months after. their imdb pages even listed them as deceased. official film websites usually include extras, trivia, interviews with actors and directors, that sort of thing - blair witch’s website instead functioned as an extension of the “missing, seeking information” vibe in regular publication about the film. the actors were not given scripts or warning about what shenanigans they would encounter in the woods, and weren’t fed very much to help exacerbate their stress. part of what makes the film so effective is the performances, but finding out that the actors didn’t read lines or have cues and were genuinely terrorized also begs the question of whether it’s really acting. still, this movie rocks and, i’m told, was incredibly important in the history of horror.
we watched the boondock saints as well. this movie was kind of strange; it has that same fantastical hyperrealist vibe you get from a lot of action/violent movies in the era (think tarantino). it’s about these two brothers in south boston who fall into some information about a meeting between higher-ups in the russian mob, which leads them onto a crusade of vigilantism against all the particularly evil organized crime guys in town. it’s pretty ridiculous most of the time, especially willem dafoe’s character (the fbi guy on their trail), but, whether heavyhandedly or not, it does kind of make you think about ethics and how much authority individuals have to take care of business. plus they’re good catholic boys just like me :)
if you haven’t seen office space then you probably should right away. it’s the absolute peak of “job sucks, i just wanna grill for god’s sake” americana. which reminds me, office space is written and directed by mike judge, the guy who makes king of the hill. apt. it kind of does the american beauty thing where the solution to the issues of disillusionment with work and difficulty with fulfillment are treated with checking out entirely - peter in office space says “i’m not gonna go to work anymore. no, i’m not gonna quit, just, i don’t like it, and i don’t wanna go”. this movie’s extremely cathartic, hilarious, and hits many of the same anxieties we still have about work culture nowadays, with some notable changes from the late 90s. many of us today i’m sure would be thrilled to have access to the kind of job that peter says makes his life worse every day than it was before, for example.
you should probably also watch when harry met sally. yeah, yeah, it’s a romcom, but the good kind. the very good kind. minimal bullshit (you do need some to make a romantic plot work), very funny dialogue, and really bizarre characters that are extremely relatable in their own way. i watched this on recommendation from a friend, and it also happens to be one of my mom’s favorite movies. do with that what you will, but i really earnestly recommend this one.
that’s all for today folks, if i think of more stuff to add on here i’ll either make a post referencing it as its own topic or i’ll add it to this list, or both. if you see something missing from this list then let me know and i’ll add on.