Reboot
Happy January. This is the thirteenth issue of Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit — it’s just like all those other email newsletters, except have you tried unplugging it, waiting 10 secs, then plugging it back in?
A quick look back before another trip around the sun.
Year Two
Against my better judgement, I’m gonna try to keep at this newsletter for another year. Hopefully, with this little reset in the schedule, a new email from me will appear in your inbox on the first day of each month eleven more times. Will the plan hold up this time around? We shall find out together. But first…
Ten things I read, watched, and listened to last year that I liked
This list is neither ranked, nor comprehensive, nor representative — it’s just a grab bag of new things that I enjoyed in 2023 and that come to mind now as I tap this out, exploiting a cheap way to fill an email up with content. Thank goodness listicles never go out of style.
I Want More, Donny McCaslin 🎵. I’ve been following McCaslin and his Blackstar brethren since 2015 when the “Blackstar” single first dropped and it was revealed that Bowie’s band was a local NYC jazz band who played all around town — and I suddenly realized I could see them whenever I wanted. Half of them have moved out of New York since then, and they rarely play together as a group anymore. But they still get together to record McCaslin’s albums, and this one comes as close to capturing their live intensity as anything.
“Mischief,” Mark Guiliana 🎵. Guiliana is one of the Blackstars who moved out of New York (well, New Jersey), to LA. But he comes back this way often enough. His quartet performance at the NYC Winter Jazzfest last year was a highlight, one of the best shows I’ve seen him do. But then his show at the Village Vanguard later in the spring was a lowlight, the first time I was underwhelmed seeing him live. Go figure. His 2022 banger was “continuation”. This 2023 track is ganglier, but still moves.
The Memory Palace, Ep.209 “Wake” ⚾️. It’s still hard for me to believe that Tim Wakefield is dead. Of all the tributes I watched or read, this episode of Nate DiMeo’s podcast remains the thing that I think best captures what made the steadfast knuckleballer so special.
Sam Miller’s Pebble Hunting ⚾️. Sam Miller’s baseball newsletter is my favorite email newsletter, even when it’s not about baseball. Case in point, his “Strange Things Happening Every Day” email goes from talking about weird double plays — in particular, one where the center fielder’s throw home “beat both the runner who had been at third and the runner who had been at second” — to harvesting olives on his parents’s olive farm, with a vignette about a man boasting about the “only four foods” he eats wedged in between. Delightful.
“Don’t Let the Robots Get You Down”, Paul Ford 🤖. Paul Ford has been writing about technology for a very long time, but not from the perspective of a tech bro/finance bro/media hack/startup wank, but like a normal human. He’s probably most famous for writing the 2015 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek known as “What Is Code?” — the whole issue, all just one article, explaining software in the most relatable way possible. More recently, he did turn his tech thoughts into tech businesses — his latest venture is a kind of internet bookmarking site called Aboard, and he writes the company newsletter. You’d figure an email newsletter from a tech startup would be bland and corporate-y, but it is not. This particular issue touches on something I think/worry about a lot these days — what is it that separates my work from work produced by AI (if anything).
Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science, Carol Kaesuk Yoon 📖. One of my pandemic finds was the book Why Fish Don’t Exist by Radiolab veteran Lulu Miller. It’s about taxonomy…and a lot of other things. But on the taxonomy part, it’s about how the way we order the world up into plants, animals, insects, etc. was not as scientific a process as you’d think, for much longer than you’d think. But now, the more modern, more scientific approach has led us to some counterintuitive realizations, like the fact that the category “fish” doesn’t really hold up — as in, lumping all floppy underwater things with gills and fins into one category doesn’t make any scientific sense, and even though there was a lot of resistance to this idea at first, most scientists would agree: “fish”, as a category, doesn’t really exist. Anyway, that book was great, wonderful; I give it away as a birthday/Christmas present all the time now. This book is not that book, tho. This book by Yoon is one of the main references for Miller’s book, and it’s just a great, if a little more nerdy.
La Bohème 🎭. I really like the movie Moonstruck. I liked it when it came out in 1987, I like it even more now, especially since I live in the same neighborhood where a lot of the scenes take place. Anyway, Nic Cage’s character is obsessed with opera, and so he takes Cher’s character to see La Bohème at the Met Opera — and when I looked it up on the Met’s website, I saw they still put on that very same production that they filmed in the movie. So I went to see it. According to the Playbill, I saw the “1,384th Metropolitan Opera performance of Puccini’s La Bohème,” which is the “most performed opera in company history.” This Franco Zeffirelli production in particular premiered on Dec. 14, 1981, with James Levine conducting. “Having been presented more than 500 times, Zeffirelli’s staging is the most performed production in Met history.” Fancy stuff.
Danny and the Deep Blue Sea 🎭. This revival of the 1983 play is by Moonstruck’s screenwriter, John Patrick Shanley. Subtitled “An Apache Dance,” the best part was when Aubrey Plaza and Christopher Abbott do some wacky interpretative dancing between the first two acts that perfectly reflect their troubled characters. This dance piece is by the same choreographers as the play, Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber.
Asteroid City 🎬. I know people have been saying this is all style and no emotional substance, but I loved it. Not only did I find the characters relatable and moving, but it really does have style out the wazoo. Such a fun movie — I’ve already rewatched it a half-dozen times at home. My first time seeing it, however, was at a Sunday afternoon screening at the big AMC in Lincoln Square (just a few blocks from the Met Opera) — where there was no sound coming out of the right channel. I’m not sure how many other people in the audience noticed, but we all sat there through the whole thing like that. When I talked to the staff afterwards, it seemed like the sound had probably been in that state for at least a couple of days — i.e., the entire movie-watching weekend! — since no one had touched the system since it was “fixed” after a flood from the Equinox gym upstairs. (I guess that was foreshadowing for getting flooded by my own upstairs neighbor.) Anyway, it’s a bad scene out there for movie projectionists, and the presentation at movie theaters in general is in a sorry state right now. Seriously bums me out.
Godzilla Minus One 🎬. I missed out on Barbenheimer and a lot of the prestige films from this year, like Killers of the Flower Moon, etc. But I bet this beats them all. I caught it in IMAX, which was perfect, as the story is painted with a big, kaiju-sized paint brush, including the smaller-scale human stories — but it totally works. Moonstruck’s director Norman Jewison said he wanted his movie to feel operatic, but I think Moonstruck is too quirky to reach those heights. As far as scale and emotional broadness go, I’ve been saying Godzilla is like a monster-movie opera.
Bonus: Kottke.org. Kottke’s blog has been around since 1998; it was started back when the internet was good and not terrible, like it is now. He took a sabbatical last year, the first extended break from posting that he’s taken in all that time. But now he’s back and the blog is as good as ever. He’s been at the top of my daily reading list for almost 25 years, introduced me to so many ideas and interesting things/people over that time. Glad he’s still around.
I thought this half-assed end-of-year list would be quick to knock out. It was not! Stupid idea. Anyway…
Other rabbit holes
Voice of a Star Wars Fan. If the three letters ILM mean anything to you, then this mind-blowing portrait of obsessive fandom is not to be missed.
Absent Friends. Chris O’Leary’s list of 2023’s departed. And here is Chris Barker’s Sgt. Pepper’s–style portrait.
2023 as a playlist. This Spotify playlist compiles some of the picks above, plus some other 2023 bits and bobs.
Happy new year. See you again in a month.
jf