The Week in Consumption
Music
Big Geese week this week, spent a lot of time with Getting Killed. Voice took a little getting used to, but I really came enjoy its ramshackle charms, like a less polished successor to Interpol. My old album for the week was In Dreams by Roy Orbison about whom I went in knowing nothing, but immediately recognised due to his presence on the Blue Velvet soundtrack. Overall very Elvis-y, didn’t get too obsessed with it I have to say. My back catalogue was Undertow by TOOL which I never got around to listening to before now. It’s very cool, but got the least attention, so I’m going to carry it over to next week because I make the rules around here.
Books
I finished The Poisonwood Bible the other day, having started it just at the end of last year. It’s about a family with four daughters who are doing missionary work in the Congo in 1959, and overlaps with the independence movement and the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. After I read Demon Copperhead, a lot of reviews said, yeah it’s pretty good but it’s no Poisonwood Bible, and you know what, they’re right. I was hooked, and regularly snuck away from my actual life responsibilities to get in ten or fifteen minutes. Having polished that off, I’m getting into Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo which I found on the library’s sale trolley for 25c, which was such an embarrassingly low price, I gave them 50c. Can’t hurt to fund the library (an extremely tiny amount).
Movies
I signed up for membership of my local(ish) indie cinema at the beginning of the year and made my inaugural visit last night to see No Other Choice. As a middle aged guy in a field which the kind of volatility that makes me constantly worry my job will drop out of existence at any moment, I found it deeply uncomfortable and very good. It took a while to get going but when Park Chan Wook cranks up the volume, both literally and figuratively, in a particular scene, it goes hard.
TV
I bought a Deadwood box set in, I don’t know, 2008? I’ve seen the whole thing before though I can’t remember if it’s these disks or good old fashioned piracy, but it remains magnificent.