I recently watched My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991) for the first time in 35 years. I remembered only the last few minutes of the movie. I remember seeing the film with two friends in a theater in Indianapolis, but I must be misremembering other parts of that day, because the scenario in my memory could only have played out in 1990 but the movie wasn’t released until 1991. These things happen to memories sometimes.

Recently watched: Zydeco (Spitzer, 1994), Drugstore Cowboy (Van Sant, 1989), Carlos (Assayas, 2010). Also watched Dazed and Confused (Linklater, 1993), which I had somehow never seen before.

Currently reading: Austerlitz (Sebald, 2001), which is hitting me much like his novel The Emigrants did. It is hard to believe what people are capable of doing to each other. Hard to believe that it happened at such a large scale in Europe only 80 years ago. Hard to believe that it is still happening in places around the world. Even harder to believe that roughly half of the people in recent US elections voted to bring it to America.

It seems that Notepad++ got hacked last year. Lovely.

This has been a tough winter to run outside. Cold + wind + slippery snow. Hard to stay motivated.

Recently watched: The Limey (Soderbergh, 1999), F for Fake (Welles, 1973), Safe (Haynes, 1995), Hiroshima Mon Amour (Resnais, 1959).

Recently read: The Oxford University Press edition of The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories (Arthur Machen, edited by Aaron Worth, 2018). Currently reading Ubik (PK Dick, 1969).

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963

America needs his message more than ever.

Recently watched: A trio of films from Werner Herzog and one from Akira Kurosawa. Stroszek (1977), My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (2009), Fata Morgana (1971), Sanjuro (1962).

Recently read: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (PK Dick, 1964). The Man in the High Castle (PK Dick, 1962). Working my way through the Oxford University Press edition of The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories (Arthur Machen, edited by Aaron Worth, 2018).

I finished The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee (David Treuer, 2019) last night. It took a few weeks of on-and-off reading; it’s close to 450 pages (without the references) and small print. And dense.

I knew some of the pre-1890 history from reading other books, but the way it was presented in the first section of this book made me think about it in a completely different way. It had never dawned on me how different the pre-1890 experience was for different tribes. Different geographies, different cultures, different relations with their neighbors, different encounters with colonizers, different experiences with disease, different and shifting alignments during times of warfare. And so on. The first section of the book opened my eyes to how richly varied things were.

Subsequent sections dealt with 1890-present and most of that material was new for me. I came away from the book with (I think!) a much more realistic and nuanced understanding of Native America. Highly recommended.