All these terrible people whose weight the earth cannot afford, doing their best to take the rest of us with them to their Armageddon with the most toys, and not a one of them will ever be a tenth of a thousandth as cool as the living tradition of an epic poem performed with chugging guitar riffs: Exhibit A, Ereimang's "(Kwakta Lamjel)" (2023). All you fascists bound to be boring.

The swallows have returned to Capistrano: last night there were three student parties on our street alone and a fourth around the corner. We are waiting to see if this weekend will bring a new installment of upstairs neighbors.

I opened the refrigerator door and the Brita pitcher fell off its shelf and disintegrated itself in several gallons across the hardwood, so the first thing I did within two minutes of getting up was essentially wash the kitchen floor. I spent the afternoon drying a load of towels and drinking cans of seltzer.

It jarred out of my head too much of the dream I had just woken up from, the slippage of a kitchen sink drama written by a less commonly revived playwright than Shelagh Delaney: a teenage girl and her father who was just about the same age when she was born and still has such a fecklessly fox-boned, adolescent look himself, the two of them as they knock about town, him getting into more fights than holding down jobs, always telling the secret histories of their city which sound half like industrial legend and half like he just made them up, are more often mistaken for a couple than his actual girlfriend with whom he seems to interact most in the form of sincerely less successful apologies. They are clearly each other's half of a double star, a nearly closed system without jealousy, only the exhilaratingly irresponsible habit of dodging the adult world as if it were the two of them against it. It is unsensationally apparent to the audience long before it would cross any other character's mind that in addition to his total improvisation of parenting, he is doing his damnedest not to pass on the next generation of his own implicitly incestuous abuse, which does him credit and gives him little help in figuring out how to support his daughter through a transition he never quite managed himself. Toward the end, it started to flicker between stage sets and the plain world, between rehearsals and history. "I won't meet you," I had to tell the actor, standing in between scenes outside the year of the original production, the same fragile shoulders and thistle-blond hair of his photographs in the role: he would be dead decades before I heard of the play, much less managed to track a copy down. I could tell him that his children had gone into the arts. Onstage she was outgrowing his frozen boyishness and if he could catch up to her, he would still have to let her go.

asakiyume linked Residente's "This is Not America (feat. Ibeyi)" (2022) and it made me think of Elizma's "Modern Life" (2025), both of which should come with content warnings for current events.

I have discovered that BBC Sounds became region-locked about a month ago, which means that one of my major sources for randomly discoverable audio drama seems to have spiraled down the drain. I am completely indifferent to podcasts. I am a simple person and just wanted to listen again to Lieutenant Commander Thomas Woodrooffe being just as lit up as the fleet.

The close to eleven hours I slept last night may have exceeded the sum total of the week that preceded it which did not even have the decency to be hallucinatory as opposed to just blurringly strung out. I feel as though the sole things of value I accomplished were reading a new novel and writing about a movie. One night we walked for ice cream to CB Scoops.

Razing the ecosystem of our back yard seems to have produced a monoculture of black swallow-wort. spatch and I planted a medley of butterfly-supporting wildflowers while the yard was still a burnt-brown wasteland and I just hope any of them can survive the invasive cuckoo. I am not sure there is anyone we could even call to extirpate it. I still miss the rose and the mulberry trees.

Last night I showed him Portrait of Jennie (1948), which I had not seen since high school when my mother showed it to me. I had not understood then that it was so much stranger about ghosthood and time than any of its Hollywood contemporaries to the point where it would have been much more normal as a venture into the Twilight Zone or an ITV production in the '70's. It doesn't even look like its decade: its cinematographer shot it with lenses of the silent era for that extra shimmer of time-slip and died before it reached the screen. I just don't see that many films out of classical Hollywood I would call Sapphire and Steel in on. I can't remember if the 1940 Robert Nathan novella struck me as so formally as well as tonally weird. On a more mundane note, I love that the production picked up David Wayne because it was shooting in New York in 1947 and Finian's Rainbow was on Broadway. I had remembered an uncharacteristically quiet shot of his face screened through harp strings when I had forgotten the tidal crash of the Graves Light, tinted in luciferin-green as if the very film stock and not just its characters have washed back into 1925.

If Alexander Knox did introduce Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, I can blame him in a partial, positive way for the first film I ever saw in theaters, which was *batteries not included (1987).