What I Did With My COVID19 Summer
I got a pretty manageable version of COVID19, testing positive on Tuesday February 1, being in good shape by Friday and stepping out of quarantine on Monday morning. I was scared shitless regardless of my mild symptoms because this disease does kill people, lots of people, people you know, people I know, people we both love. But, with my double vax and boosted status I started to relax when I didn’t feel any significantly trying symptoms. The first night was rough, but just rough like having a seriously bad cold. I spent that night and the next six nights sleeping on Martin Devaney’s air mattress in my basement. I spent the grand majority of my time in the basement sleeping and consuming fiction based media which was an absolute treat. I also spent a lot of time hearing my wife try to control two kids and I had the sad knowledge that I couldn’t come to help. NOTE: I did clean the shit out of the first floor of the house and prepare a re-heatable lunch every night after everyone went to bed. And turns out you have plenty of energy to clean if you’ve spent the day watching TV. Okay.
Remind me again why people don’t like Lost? I read something years ago that called this particular episode (The Constant) one of the greatest episodes of any TV show ever. Guess what? That article was right. It’s awesome. Daniel Faraday, Locke, they are all delivering the goods in the episode and Desmond, are you kidding me? I watched it, I liked it. I like Lost. I wish we still planned our lives around it the way we used to (I remember watching one of the episodes at the Turf Club and they weren’t going to start the show til the episode finished). Unbelievable.
Station Eleven. It’s on HBO Max, it’s about a pandemic. The pandemic is vastly more severe than COVID19. It was a dumb thing to watch in the condition I was in. It was incredibly enthralling. I watched the whole thing. I listened to the not super good podcast they made about the show while I was trying to organize the absolute mountain of kid’s clothes that we store in our basement. I loved the show. Like Lost, the show moves in non-linear steps between different elements of the story. There is not a time travel element, but it has some jarring similarities. Also, I’m a big sucker for a “play within a play” thing and that goes really well. I would’ve benefitted from a deep knowledge of the Shakespeare play “Hamlet” which I definitely do not have.
I put off seeing this movie for an inexcusable amount of time because I was hoping to catch it in a theatre. As I sat in my basement not even able to see my own family I didn’t think waiting until a larger screening option came up made sense. Wow. This documentary sounds so incredible. It’s some of the best live recordings I’ve ever heard, in any genre. And the 60s wasn’t always hospitable to high quality live recordings, why is this one so good? I don’t know if it was great source material or great modern day mixing or a combination. But man, what a joy to witness these performances. The context, the significance, the defiance with which Harlem organized a cultural concert series that went largely ignored outside of the Black community. It was a powerful story and it was weaved so well. And it was the rare music documentary where the talking heads truly supplemented the performances. I feel bad for not having jumped in and watched it sooner, but I’m glad I caught up with it and dug in.
Every fan of hip-hop is supposed to have seen the movie “The Warriors”. It is constantly quoted, referenced and it is just one of those movies that has become part of the culture. It’s not specifically about hip-hop, and apparently the studio did the studio thing of adding way more white characters to the film than were in the book version. But frankly, it was just magical to see this movie that I have heard quoted for my whole life. It was a treat to see the movie in its entirety. Also, I just never take in whole movies and it was so great to get it. I also rabbit holed deep into the movie and its actors on wikipedia.
Jesus that’s a huge photo of Karl Ove. I’m reading the second installment in his hyper biography “My Struggle”. I still don’t get why the shit it is titled that, but I will say that the first book found me at this perfect time in my life where I needed to understand how trying and confusing being a young father can be. I started to read Book 2 immediately afterwards and I just couldn’t catch the plot, I wasn’t interested, it didn’t grab me. Flash forward five years and I’m ready to hear more about this chapter in Karl Ove’s life. If you haven’t given his a work a chance I strongly recommend you check it out. I find it so calming to read about the mundane details of some Norwegian dude in Sweden as a way to make sense of the struggles in my life.
I have a vinyl collection but I really struggle to listen to it. I have a couple records I go to all the time but I never branch out. During my COVID19 time I was able to alphabetize the whole collection, put it in a nice set of storage and finally I can comfortably thumb through my shit and find things. It sent me to check out records I hadn’t in years or that I never had! I am loving it.
That’s about all I did. I had a couple meetings. I slept a lot. I tried to watch the Scorsese film “Mean Streets” but it was wild violent and I fell asleep. But now I’m back on fiction and movies and I’m loving it.