by Quentin Lewis

Weeknotes: 4/28/24-5/4/24

weeknotes museum television music family politics

This Week:

  • More diligent work from my Collections Management students on the Hartwick Seminary materials.
  • I’m in the final stretch of finishing the NAGPRA grant…which is good, because the deadline is next Thursday!
  • My wife and I finished watching “The League”, a funny, filthy show that used a friends fantasy football league as a vantage point for talking about adult friendship, sex, parenting, and aging. It’s also a cartoonish show about fairly terrible people getting up to madcap antics, and works in that regard as a kind of zany romp. The last season was definitely not as funny as the first few, but the last few episodes had both of us laughing quite a bit, so we don’t feel particularly cheated by it.
  • My dad turned 80 on Monday. He’s over in the Czech Republic right now, and my mom threw him a party, which we called in to to wish him a happy birthday.
  • I did some last minute touch-ups on the art we installed at the President’s house on Friday.
  • I watched with sorrow and horror as students, staff and faculty around the US were arrested and assaulted by police and others, while (by and large) peacefully protesting. While such protests are not outside the norm for most colleges, the near-instantaneous crackdown and the deployment of police by University administrators seems to be fairly novel. Stay safe, friends.
  • For reason’s I can’t exactly articulate, I’ve been listening to Bob Dylan’s 1979 album “Slow Train Coming”, which is the first of his “born again” albums. Nick Cave famously called it “the nastiest Christian album” ever made (and he would probably know!), and its combination of genuine faith with damning indictments of the selfishness and violence of the world is really something only Dylan could pull off. “When He Returns” is an astonishing and rich gospel number, full of rage and blood and hope.