Bags 13 + 14.

Among my most unexpected — and now expensive (Happy Christmas to me from me) — media consumption habits of 2020 has been my new obsession with Ingmar Bergman’s work.

Just finished THE WORLD IN A GRAIN - Vince Beiser’s fascinating and must-read deep dive into sand and its myriad uses, controversies, history, and future - bringing my total books read this year to 80. My complete list, from today back through 2013, lives here.

No “year-in-review” posts from me because I can barely remember a week.

Vertical Dwellings Nestle into the Floating Miniature Landscapes of Rosa de Jong, via Colossal.

LEGO Botanical Collection Officially Announced, via The Brick Fan.

You can’t go to a concert any time soon. Can a pair of wooden speakers bring the show to you?, via The Washington Post.

Is Substack the Media Future We Want?, via The New Yorker.

Bags 9-12.

That strange feeling of accomplishment, exhalation, and slight panicked insecurity when you send something off to someone brilliant to work their magic on said something.

Monthly flea treatment / chase sequence complete. Ten seconds for Marley and The Morkie. Nine minutes fifty for The Jorkie.

EarBliss, 30dec2020: TIME OUTTAKES, by The Dave Brubeck Quartet.

This week, at Parenthetical Recluse… By Morning’s End.

Hokusai’s Great Wave, Sculpted in Lego Blocks by Jumpei Mitsui, via Spoon & Tamago.

Buttigieg to inherit a crumbling network of roads, subways and rails at DOT, via Ohio Capital Journal.

After stumbling with one film universe, DC is trying for two, via The Verge.

Vibrant Botanic Embroideries Embellish the Dried Leaf Sculptures of Hillary Waters Fayle, via Colossal.

Triggers of COVID-19 ‘Cytokine Storm’ Identified, via Medscape.

Essential creative advice from Ira Glass: The Gap Between Having Good Taste and Doing Good Work, via kottke.org.

Bags 5-8

As essential to my day as iA Writer is, a way to navigate to particular document sections / segments within a document would make it even more so. (I’m not missing it somewhere, am I?)

Note: this is an edited/updated version of Sunday’s “Input of Note” selection from issue 0033 my MacroParentheticals newsletter. You can sign up here, if so inclined.

Continuing from Wednesday: the first film remains my favorite of the saga; the second is a “perfect film” but I still prefer the first; and, though I’d forgotten much of Part III, now CODA, the re-edit – though only five minutes shorter than the original – felt different, more assured, and marked a fitting conclusion: the power of a defined existential purpose.

My opinion of PART III still holds in its new guise: Sophia Coppola’s performance is, like the film itself, unfairly maligned (I’m not sure anyone could’ve done much with the part – a plot device, at best, thankless from the first ink spilled – and I suspect that complaints about her are little more than a convenient personification of critical disappointment in the film itself); the mirroring variations and riffs on the themes established in Parts I and II are fascinating and tragic though meaningless unless you’re intimately familar with Parts I and II; and, though the Vatican plot is confusing as hell, it’s not a bad film by any metric (the fifth season of THE WIRE being comparable: a lesser season of THE WIRE is still better than 99% of television out there).

Recommended – though only if you carve out the time to rewatch the whole saga: what’s the point in listening to only the final notes of a symphony?

Bags 1-4.

Total Assembly Required, Greatest Batmobile Edition.

Reading:

That weird feeling when you plan on spending a week on something and finish it in a single morning.

The only surprise in WW84 was how bored I was: other than a few inspired moments, a stunning disappointment - especially since I loved (and still love) the first one so much.

A Shatner-run through the snowdrifts.

Sunday.

Issue 0033 of MacroParentheticals arrives later this morning: Godfather Coda, dog pictures, and project updates, oh my.