by Quentin Lewis

Weeknotes: 5/14/23 - 5/20/23

weeknotes family movies books teaching museum

This Week:

  • My son turned 10, and we celebrated with presents, cake, and a scavenger hunt.
  • Because it overlapped, we celebrated an early Mother’s day last Saturday, with an indoor picnic (from inclement weather) and grilled steaks.
  • I finished reading “E.C. Comics Weird Science Fantasy Volume 1”, which compiles the first few issues of the legendary EC Comics science fiction collection. As with a lot of 50s pop culture, most of the stories are saturated with anxiety about apocalypse. The art is, of course, astonishing, vibrant, and brilliant.
  • It was finals week at Hartwick, and my students in Collections Management finished up their final projects. Then, as is typical, we had a debrief about the class and how it went, to help me plan out next year’s iteration.
  • I watched “Something in the Dirt”. It was everything I wanted and didn’t get from “Under the Silver Lake”; Los Angeles and its secret darkness, endless conspiracy unspooling to encompass the world, and the ways in which our projection of the unknowable forces of the universe is really just a placeholder for the unknowable nature of the people around us. The only problem with this otherwise fascinating film is the conceit of it being a documentary. That was a bit too cute for my tastes and made the film a bit tonally uneven. But otherwise, another feather in the cap for the weird and deeply human filmography of Benson and Moorhead.
  • I worked on some graphic design to update an unfinished exhibit display.
  • I started putting together a formal object list for another upcoming exhibit.