#I also watched the entirety of Bob's Burgers while working on Christmas gifts

[notbecauseofvictories]

what have you been watching/reading/listening to recently? i love your media opinions

I have terrible media opinions, but thank you for asking anyway!

WATCHING My latest fascination is with Netflix's 1670, a mockumentary comedy set in early modern Poland. There's something about a irreverent historical comedy that always finds me where I live---I loved season two of Miracle Workers for that exact reason, plus The Little Hours. Even The Court Jester, though that one is more just because I love Danny Kaye.

1670 is very funny, filmed Office-style with asides and pointed looks to the camera. Nobleman Jan Paweł is familiar, a trusty blend of ignorance, bluster, and unintentional comedy; rounding out the group is his ultra-devout wife, a lazy eldest son, his second son, a scheming priest who wants to climb the Catholic ranks and has a taste for torture, his over-educated over-liberal daughter, and a handful of locals---including Maciej, from Norway, who is apprenticed to the blacksmith on a study abroad program. There's a particularly good scene where his daughter starts crusading against climate change---but the people of the town stop listening when she announces it will happen in 480 years.

"Thirty years sounds more terrifying. We'd definitely do something then," one of them says, staring down the lens of the camera.

READING I think one of the strangest bits of growing older is the realization that the world is growing older with you. For example, I just read Mattie Lubchansky's Boys' Weekend, which is a charming, unsettling dystopian graphic novel in its own right---however, it also forcibly punted me back to about 10 years ago, when I loved Matt Bors and The Nib and was thrilled by the idea that the Sunday funny pages might give way for their 2.0 cousin.

That world has gone away, been eaten up---something the novel touches on, ironically. Still, it's surprisingly affective to think that Lubchansky and I have been moving forward all this time, each in our separate ways. That even now, a decade later, I can pick up a library book and know their lineart at a glance.

LISTENING Lately, I can't get enough of Larry & Joe---a fusion band, made up of a USian banjo picker and a Venezuelan master of musica llanera. Their music is a delight, and dovetails with some of my other favorites. (I do still listen to the album fusing Chinese folk music and Appalachian old-time, and I love that playlist of metal music from many cultures.) There's something that gets me about musicians swapping sounds this way---maybe because it's the same thing that created so many music genres in the first place. And if you've been following me long enough, you know I'm weak for a huge, weird, mess of people making noise.