by Quentin Lewis

Quentin's Weeknotes 1/1/2023-1/7/2023

weeknotes family movies books museum music

This Week:

  • I returned back to work after a wonderful and enriching break. It was Christmas, Hazel’s Birthday, and the New Year, along with family visits, trips to fun places, and lots of great food.
  • Like seemingly everybody, we watched Glass Onion. Despite the shared character, it was a very different movie from Knives Out, zany and madcap compared the latter’s austere mannerism. But it was tons of fun all the same.
  • I finished reading M. John Harrison’s retrospective collection “Settling the World”. Many of the stories are collected in a now-out-of-print collection that I had already read called “Things that Never Happen”. But reading those stories afresh was almost more delightful and rewarding than the first time I read them. I had missed the fierce and anguished Thatcher-era politics of “Running Down”, the thoughtful and genuine feminism of “Science and the Arts”, and the creepy medicalization of “Yummie”,  and “The Crisis”. And the new-to-me stories of “The Causeway”, “The Machine in Shaft Ten”, and “Doe Lea” were equal parts engaging, unconventional, and brilliantly written.
  • Thanks to a delightful gift from my folks, we got a year of the Criterion Channel. It’s a pretty bewildering streaming service, and with the addition of many films I’ve never heard of, it’s a big exciting apple from which to take a bite. We started out with a bang, watching Hitchcock’s “The 39 Steps” a movie that was equal parts preposterous, funny, and exciting.
  • A lot of my work this week involved just catching back up after a week off. I spent a lot of time de-installing “Front Row Center: Icons of Rock, Blues, and Soul” and prepping the galleries to be painted for the new exhibit curated by Museum Studies students.
  • I finally got around to watching the video of “Sing Nowell” which was a tribute concert to Tony Barrand, who died about a year ago. Tony was a brilliant singer, dancer, and teacher and a big influence on my life. The music he made with Nowell Sing We Clear (some of which is performed here) is a regular part of my holiday season and this was delightful performance by enthusiastic and talented folks: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wUa6U_zwEY&w=560&h=315]