(presents, films, radio, and futures)

Santa must really like me

how was your Christmas.

mine was very good. Santa brought me great presents.

one was Susana Imaginário‘s Timelessness collection. it’s a beautiful edition, clearly made with great love and care. you don’t see much of that anymore. plus, the edition is signed by my friend, which is even better. the love and care extend to the contents too. i wrote about one of her books here, and have more reviews over here.

.

the other great present has a tale.

there’s a music store near where my mother in law works, and she walks past it every day. at some point early in december she got it in her head that i should pick up the violin. my wife still said i was interested in getting back to the clarinet and talked about buying one. but my mother in law said she liked the violin better. and so she asked Santa to bring me one, and he did.

it’s been a few days and a few tries. i thought it was going to be easier to learn, or at least get the hang of, since i know how to play the guitar, and can usually pick up other stringed instruments very easily. but violin apparently is not one of them. i think it’s the bow, it doesn’t suit me. it’s only been a few days of course, but i can usually tell early on if i have talent for an instrument or not. and i think violin is a no, unfortunately.

the cat is also interested in the violin, as you can see. and so is B. (she asked her parents so many times to have lessons when she was a just a wee lass, but they never took it seriously).

she tried it a couple days ago, and i thought she sounded better than me. maybe her little self was right, and she does have talent for the instrument. anyway i got her to play whatever with it while i improvised some jazz nonsense on guitar around G, and it was so much fun. i could finally make real an old dream of mine, which was to jam with my wife. i even recorded it, and got her to agree to keep trying. i’m very happy about this. maybe that was the real present. (plus, the day after christmas i immediately got an idea for a short story about fiddles. i think it’s a funny and cozy one).

here’s a picture taken by mistake. you can barely tell the violin case. but there’s a certain something to it i like.

.

we finished watching Pluribus and… meh. it’s ok. it’s probably better than most things now, but it suffers from the same problem every single recent show suffers from, whatever its other qualities. the story told in ten forty plus minutes episodes should have really taken at most two hours to tell. we already spend so much time looking at screens, there’s no need to extend it further. everything else about the premise and the implications has been said elsewhere. all of that gets a six or seven from me. it’s an original enough take. and it does seem to have a moral center. that’s already rare enough. but still, i would rather have the paraguayan luddite moral absolutist as the focus of the show. but i guess people relate more to the unsure and flip flopping nature of the actual main character. i’ll probably watch the rest when it comes out, but my suspicion is that it will be either more of the same, or worse. because now it almost always is.

.

as a result of this conversation B. and i talked about watching old movies. and french movies more specifically. so yesterday we watched Le Mépris, by Jean-Luc Godard. only later did we find that Brigitte Bardot had died just a few days before, probably when we first had the conversation.

the movie is kind of boring and pointless and even at times annoying. beyond a couple of conversations involving Fritz Lang that were half interesting but sort of seemed to drop from the sky and be unrelated to the rest of the movie, the only thing of note in it, really, was BB’s beauty, which of course was otherworldly and worth the celluloid. i don’t know anything about nouvelle vague, but now i’m wondering if it’s worth exploring or not. maybe we got unlucky with this one. either way, we intend to watch more old movies, and less recent ones (i don’t say new, because we don’t really watch movies from the last… ten, fifteen years, maybe. with very rare exceptions).

.

we started listening to the radio. we have one of those survival ones with a flashlight that you can crank, and we brought it to the smoking room. plus the one from the record player in the living room. we mostly tune in to the classical music station (there aren’t a lot of options here in the middle of nowhere and it’s the least low brow, though i suspect we will still check the local ones occasionally, the ads especially are hilarious). radio is a weird little world we know nothing about. it was already dying when we were kids (though i still got to record several cassette tapes with music played on the radio, in the olden days of the nineteen nineties). on new years eve we were amused by the messages people were sending in to the show. lonely people. many expats yearning for their home. then a famous architect was interviewed for whatever reason and talked about watching the history channel and believing in aliens. yesterday we listened to part of an interview with the country’s most famous astrologer. it was half cringe, half enthralling, but always entertaining. apparently our zodiac signs will have a great year. the stars think so anyway.

right now, it’s playing Astor Piazzolla.

.

at this time there are always articles about new year babies. in 2026 the first two in the country were Alice and Isaac. somewhat unusual names to find. but more importantly also the names of the characters in my last book. since i am still reeling from the experience of writing it, and feel like it was a milestone and a turning point of sorts, i found this significant, even if i don’t know the meaning.