Monthly Archives: March 2021

One Year

Posted on by Standard

It has been a year. While no one can really comprehend all that has been last during our pandemic year, there is some optimism that the world will at least partially reset. If only it were that simple.

But what kind of world will it be? Will it be a world where social injustice is met with with activism? Will the fast world of McDonald’s be replaced by home cooking? Will the interest in home gardening sustain itself? Will positive change really happen? Will the movies ever be the same again? How will we interact as people? How will work at our jobs? Will we have jobs?Will people finally give up listening to REO Speedwagon?

I cannot answer those questions, but bringing them up helps our society face them and built something better. Sadly, I fear we will all just forget everything we learned and struggled through and go back to what was. That would be disappointing. I want to believe that a better world will emerge, but I have doubts.

As someone who is social by nature I find it odd that I don’t miss gathering in large groups. I miss concerts to an extent and going to the pictures. Man I miss going to the movies. But overall, I am fine just staying in and reading my books, listening to music or watching tv.

This “time off” has made me enjoy taking long walks, sitting on my pack porch and doing more and more cooking. I also am less concerned about having stuff. This has resulting in a massive decluttering which has been therapeutic in that it has made more open space for the apartment.

The cooking has been interesting. I’ve learned t make a lot more Indian, Thai, Korean and Mediterranean dishes that I like. I’ve spent a lot more time in international grocery stores which has bene interesting in that there is often a discovery in every aisle. Like kimchee, which will sit in the fridge forever and it is always filling, or various Indian sauces which will always give things a spicy edge and provide flavor. Oh, and cauliflower rice is the bomb.

On the flip side, I’ve had to learn a lot about cleaning products, hand sanitizers and applications for bleach.

While I never injected myself with bleach, I did do some floor mopping and surface cleaning with it to such an extent that the smell never got on my nerves. Looking back, that crazy scramble for hand sanitizer, latex gloves and Clorox Wipes was a theater of the absurd. Everyone became obsessed with it. It got a little out of hand.

Separation Nation remains in full effect. Over the last year I have seen a few of my friends here and there as they stopped by to visit social distantly and say hello. But, generally, I haven’t seen many of them for over a year. That’s weird. It also is kind of freeing though in that this distance and isolation really has helped a lot of people discover who their real friends are.

Having been vaccinated now I feel obligated to help others get their appointments. I’ve been doing this for a few weeks now and it has been very rewarding. It has underscored my hope that all of this makes people care abut their neighbors and fellow human beings. I suspect it will not since Americans are, by nature, stupid and selfish.

So the best advice. can offer is to pay it forward, any way you can. We need more empathy in our world right now and even more in the future. Empathy and giving up REO Speedwagon will lead the way.

I still plan on doing social distancing and masking up. I don’t really think I am going to change my routine up all that much.

For me, I really have enjoyed the weekly Zoom get togethers I have with friends in other places. it’s been nice to have social interaction and a sense of camaraderie. It also has introduced me to lots of crazy things like Korean TV shows, new recipes and an appreciation for new authors and bands.

I also have made it through the year by doing a weekly online board gaming night and that has been a lot of fun. It keeps the brain working and I get to some friends! It is interesting how board gaming was able to pivot to new formats during all of this. I also am doing word search puzzles which keeps the noggin’ sharp.

Had the pandemic not come I doubt I would have discovered so much new music. Thankfully, The Wants, The Reds, Pinks & Purples, The 1981, Phoebe Bridgers and Swansea Sound have been around to keep me company. I also have really enjoyed rediscovering Telex, Felt, The Jazz Butcher and The Close Lobsters.

I also have listened to more jazz than I used to and watched more streaming symphony concerts than I had previously. I still hate Phil Collins.

There also is a cool app called Radio Garden that lets you hear radio from around the world. I have listened to stations in Madagascar, Liechtenstein and places like that. It is interesting to hear what Western music is played where. For example there’s a lot of contemporary country getting played in Triesen, Liechtenstein.

I also have written more. I have had a lot of time. Two of the outlets I contributed to regularly folded and I had to scramble for fresh freelance work Luckily, I was able to interview John Doe, Tim Burgess (The Charlatans), Kathy Valentine (The Go-Go’s) and Chris Frantz of Talking Heads. Those were all fun! I also did a few reviews of streaming theater events and films.

Not being able to travel sucks. I don’t miss flying, airports or packing. But, I do miss seeing people I normally see when I travel. Even though I have gotten my jabs I still am in no rush to get on a plane. I can wait.

I mentioned before that I missed movies. That may have been off base in that I did still watch them at home. However, because streaming was insanely off the hook this year, I found a lot of good TV and films. I also got media credentials for the Vienna Shorts Film Festival and Slamdance which allowed me to see some really different, cool stuff.

Slamdance was pretty great. they had a really good selection of short films and they had some feature stuff that was really evocative. Trammel was my favorite short film. It’s about a guy whose only real communication with the outside world is through visits with his local pharmacy technician. It is sweet funny and has a lovely melancholy to it.

CODE NAME: Nagasaki is an emotional documentary about family, self-discovery and alienation. Marius and Fredrik are two friends who live in Norway and pretty much hang 24/7. Driven by a passion for movies and filmmaking they decide make a film about Marius’ quest to find and meet his long lost Japanese mother.

Seeking out a mom who left him decades earlier does not come without some intense drama and the film has that in spades as Marius weighs his every move with careful deliberation. The emotional distance between the two is heartbreaking and as the movie plays out these feeling of solitude and separation become further amplified.

It looks fantastic. Mixing black and white and animation, this powerful piece of cinema was named the fest’s best documentary film.

I also enjoyed the gritty minimalism of No Trace (Null Trace), another example of the exciting things filmmakers are doing in Quebec right now. shot in black and white it looks amazing.

Set in a dystopian future, the plot is sparse but centers on a callous smuggler whose hardened by life attitude shows cracks after she guides a young woman and her child across the border to safety. Unaware that their lives are inescapably linked their journey and struggle for survival is emotionally tense and compelling.

Director Simon Lavoie is a master of visual storytelling and I really liked how the narrative evolved with barely a spoken word. This will probably go into wide release.

Grimy Brit films were represented at Slamdance with A Brixton Tale, a film that takes on a lot of issues in a compact amount of time. Class status, exploitation, love and the art world collide in a movie filled with unsavory characters who just want to survive.

Speaking of gritty…. I watched Trainspotting again. The film has just turned 20 and it is still really enjoyable. Well as enjoyable as a film about heroin addiction can be.

Two decades on, the acting still stands out and the soundtrack perfectly frames everything. It doesn’t sound dated at all. In fact, I had forgotten about how good the Blur song in it was.

Upon seeing it, it made me miss Edinburgh. It’s an interesting flick too in that it calls out a lot of striking societal issues which have been careful been woven into the film. Robert Carlyle is a force of energy, Jonny Lee Miller is cool as a cucumber and Ewan MacGregor shines in his breakout film. I am curious to see how Ewen Bremmer plays Alan McGee in that biopic he is doing.

It is pretty cool that Perseverance is on Mars. JPL did some amazing things to get that project going and their efforts did a lot to lift the nation’s spirits.

It was amazing to watch the landing and see all the data come in over the last few weeks. Isn’t it amazing what science can do?

Here’s one last thing! There is furniture news! I have some new DVD shelves and bookshelves. It’s helped with the massive declutter in terms or organization and storage.

Anyway the adjustment into a person who is going back out into the world is Underway. Hopefully when it happens in a few weeks things won’t seem as desolate or sad or weird. I am not holding out hope. But it will be nice to not have as much of the worrying.

Entropy

Posted on by Standard

Note: I wrote this abut a month ago when it was really, really, cold out. I had forgotten that I had this as a draft.

Everything is falling apart. I just finished spending 45 minutes getting the internet back online. I am not sure if it was a network outage or some weird thing on my end. But I do know that I trouble shooted the daylights out of my modem and router and finally got it working. It was incredibly frustrating.

I hate talking to service companies and (f)utility companies. They never really help and you always end up either shouting at them or trying to bang your head against the wall getting them to understand you.

If that wasn’t bad enough there was about a two week stretch last month (February) of really, really bad cold weather. There was ice and snow and subzero cold. St. Louis in winter is no fun anyway, but this was a particularly nasty stretch of weather. in fact, it was the longest cold spell with single digits temperatures since the 1940s.

For about 16 days it was in the teens at its warmest with wind chills between -15 and -25. It was no fun. Early , I toughed it out and planned things out to minimize exposure. After the first snow stopped, however, I went ahead and shoveled the back steps, driveway and front entryway. Thankfully, it was the kind of snow where you could just sweep it away.

It was like sweeping inside a meat cooler. I set my phone alarm for 30 minutes so I would not be out very long. It was 1 degree out and a -8 windchill. Ick!

It was like seriously Jack London and Ernest Shackleton cold. It was not a time to play around. I didn’t even have a Tauntaun. However, I did wear layers and paced myself. I got a lot of it cleared off in pretty decent time. Having finished that, I threw down some salt because it was supposed to snow two more times over the coming days and all the smart people from the weather bureau said it would help keep freezing down when the next snow hit.

It did snow again and boy were they right about throwing salt of gritty stuff on the ground.

Next, I moved the trashcan and recycle bin next to the back stairs, so it was right outside the back stairs so all I would need to do is open the back door and go a few steps to unload recycling and trash. My motivation for this was to avoid going outside again for a long period of time. I am glad I did this because I didn’t leave home for six days. I bundled up and dropped stuff in bins twice but I was only outside for, at most, maybe a minute or two.

The entire time this was happening I was worried about the pipes freezing. There is no-one living on the second floor which meant that no one was running a tap lightly at night to keep things from freezing. Luckily everything held.

It was Pushkin novel cold outside.

With regards to warmth, plugging in heaters and using every available blanket to bundle up was fun. Not really. Although things were not too cold inside, it got a bit rough when the winds picked up. But there was whiskey, hot tea and hot chocolate for that.

Having weathered that fiasco the drama of the water heater unfolded. There was no warm water for nearly a week. The pilot light just would not stay lit. A guy game to fix it and installed a new thermometer in it and things got warm for a few hours. But then it was cold again. This was the saga. Light pilot light, have warm water for a short duration and then it was cold again. Repeat, repeat, repeat. It went on forever, almost as long as the Battle of Iwo Jima. There also was water leaking for the tank into the drain in the basement.

So the back and forth of getting my property manager to fix this went on and then they fixed it. When they sorted it out it was if the Red Sea had parted or something. It was insanely frustrating.

Then there was the entropy in the outside world. People were losing their goddamn minds. They couldn’t get vaccinated. They chose not to get vaccinated. They didn’t eat the red M&M’s. They insisted on going out maskless. They watched Friends. Civilization was ending.

If that wasn’t enough my freelance client spent a lot of time explaining to me that the Pope was a robot. Normally I would have cut my losses and run but she was paying me and the money was a nice supplement to the work income I was losing because the store was closed.

These kind of failures are emblematic of modern times. Things break, fall apart or need to be disassembled and then reassembled until they are in working order. In the end it all get sorted. Unless you need a vaccine in Missouri, then you are just screwed.

To call the ineptitude and disorganization around Missouri’s distribution of Covid vaccines Stalinist would be a compliment. This kind of total bureaucracy mixed with an unwavering sense of malice is utterly vile. The lack of compassion and disinterest in planning is simply inexcusable in our world. It is all infuriating.

On the plus side, I did get finally get my first shot. I only had to register at 20 (yes 20!) places before getting lucky. I even dug out the map of the state so I could find all these hick towns in the region that got more vials of vaccine than they had residents.