Tag: movies

Thursday Links To Love: April 9, 2020

Sigh. Bill Withers. Rest in peace.

At this point, stay-at-home orders seem an endless spooling of time towards the horizon, except there are few of our standard markers of measurement (when did I last shower? Have I brushed my teeth today? Who knows?).

Anyway, here are some Thursday links for you. Click on what’s interesting and ignore the rest.

Whether or not you have children tugging on your sleeves, locked in the house with you, you are aware of the compelling power of boredom. But boredom can be just a pit stop. In this link, Agatha Christie notes, “…there’s nothing like boredom to make you write.” I am still waiting to be bored enough, I suppose.

Bored or not, go watch Portrait of a Lady On Fire. Best viewed in HD, this lush love story is nothing like you’d expect (and not nearly enough nudity, but ah well. We can’t always get what we want.).

Sigh. Potential COVID vaccine in the works. I don’t even like putting this in the links, but if it helps you feel better, go ahead and read all about the vaccine, how long it might take, and what’s next.

But…there is some good news. The SXSW Film Festival may be canceled, but Amazon is putting films from the SXSW festival online, for free, for what would have been the ten days of the festival. Bonus: filmmakers who screen their films will still get their screening fees. As of the time I typed this post, there was not yet a set date, so mark the site and check back.

Thursday Links To Love

From yesterday’s chilly walk along Stony Run. Hope in the weeds and the art of graffiti.

Dispatch: still not quite certain what day it is. Each seems to flow like water into the next. Here are some links to keep you afloat.

First, something to watch that is not the human depravity that is Tiger King (AVOID). The Barkley Marathons is available through Amazon Prime and is an example of the kind of value you can get for $1.60 in Tennessee. Essentially, a race with fewer than a dozen winners in its 25-year history. 11/10 would recommend.

Back-up viewing if you don’t have Amazon Prime but have someone’s Hulu password: the documentary on Margaret Atwood. She is a badass from way back. Turns out, a word after a word after a word is power.

Next, something that is incredible to look at, and even better to participate in: the Getty Museum’s call for people to recreate famous artworks from things readily available at home. Locally, the American Visionary Art Museum is leading the charge.

For those “working” at home and looking to bone up on some skillz that are business-related, Moz wants to give you some free classes for SEO, backlinks, and other interwebs-optimizing topics.

It’s challenging to find links these days, it seems, that aren’t filthy with news of COVID-19, and we don’t need more of that, but here’s one for my freelance/self-employed/contractor friends anyway: yes, you are now eligible for unemployment. Here’s a direct link to Maryland’s online unemployment form, and another link to find instructions for your state.

In books, KWeeks and I are nearly done reading Michael Pollan’s book A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams. One of the things that struck us both today was the following quote from JD Steddings:

“There is hope in honest error, none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist.”

Pollan adds, “Small mistakes in the finished product revealed the hand of the worker; perfection was opaque.”

Also, from Ruskin: “No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.”

May your work, whatever it is, be scarred with the beauty of imperfection, and may all of your errors be honest.