Monday, May 17, 2021

Long Trips

6 Day Arizona/Utah Trip

7 Wonders Road Trip in Washington

10 Best Hikes in San Diego

17 Camping Spots Near San Diego You Need to Visit

26 North County San Diego Beaches

Acadia National Park/Cutler Coast (Maine) [Acadia All American Road]








Byron Bay (New South Wales, Australia)

Burney Falls (Shasta County, CA)

Carbondale, IL

Channel Islands (CA)

Chesapeake Conservancy (MD)

Cherry Point Farm and Market (Michigan)



Delaware Bayshores (Delaware and NJ)



The Grey (Savannah, GA)

The Grey Eagle (Asheville, NC)



Hoh Rain Forest (Olympic NP, WA)

Hot Springs (on the French Broad River, NC)

Hot Springs National Park (Garland County, Arkansas)




Louisiana River Road

Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias (Yosemite National Park, CA)

Mekong Cuisine Lao and Thai (San Diego)

Mill Creek Park (Youngstown, OH)



Oneida, TN (Five Great Hikes)

Oregon Hot Springs






Snow Canyon SP (Utah)

Soichi Sushi (San Diego)

Spicy City (San Diego)

Steamy Piggy (San Diego)

Sunshine Coast (British Columbia, Canada)

Upper White Falls (Asheville, NC)

Walls of Jericho (TN)

The Wave (Arizona)

Verbatim Books (San Diego, CA)


Sunday, May 16, 2021

Joker (Canada/USA: Todd Phillips, 2019)





Joker (Canada/USA: Todd Philips, 2019: 121 mins)

Adkins, Ashleigh. "The Joker: “When Laughter and Medicine Fail the Psyche." Letterboxd (October 25, 2019)

Bradley, S.A. "Again, Volatile Substance: Caligari Goes to the Oscars." Hellbent for Horror #93 (April 26, 2020) [Bradley makes a case for three Best Picture nominees as horror films: Joker (Todd Phillips), 1917 (Sam Mendes), and Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho).]

Brooks, Dan. "What’s the Panic Over ‘Joker’ Really About?" The New York Times Magazine (October 2, 2019)

Cleaver, Sarah Kathryn and Mary Wild. "Joker (2019)." Projections (October 22, 2019)

DeVega, Chauncey. "Joker: A harsh indictment of neoliberalism and gangster capitalism." Salon (October 9, 2019)

Koski, Genevieve, et al. "The Man Who Laughs, Pt. 1 - The Dark Knight." The Next Picture Show #196 (October 15, 2019) ["The narrative and tone of Todd Phillips’ latest is heavily inspired by TAXI DRIVER and KING OF COMEDY, but given the attention paid to the work of Martin Scorsese on this podcast of late, we decided to look at Phillips’ new JOKER in tandem with a more literal cinematic predecessor: Christopher Nolan’s THE DARK KNIGHT, featuring Heath Ledger’s posthumous Oscar-winning performance as the Clown Prince of Crime himself. In this half we consider Ledger’s Joker in the context of a film that took a radically different approach to the comic-book movie and its villains, debate some confounding plot specifics—and whether they ultimately matter that much to one’s enjoyment of the film—and try to remember what it was like experiencing DARK KNIGHT independent of the subsequnt superhero movie deluge it helped spawn."]

---. "The Man Who Laughs, Pt. 2 - The Joker." The Next Picture #197 (October 22, 2021) ["Todd Phillips’ new JOKER gives a concrete origin story to a character who, in Christoper Nolan’s 2008 film THE DARK KNIGHT, willfully obfuscates what turned him into Gotham’s Clown Prince of Crime. In this second half of our look at two grim-and-gritty takes on the character, we examine JOKER, and some of the discourse around it, in an attempt to pinpoint meaning within an audacious and violent film, and consider how it fits into Phillips’ filmography of put-upon males processing rejection; then we dive into how it connects to DARK KNIGHT, not just in its treatment of the Joker, but also its depiction of Gotham, and its considerations of class and morality."]

Manaharan, Karthick. "'We Are All Clowns' - A Defense of The Joker." The Philosophical Salon (October 14, 2019)




Friday, May 14, 2021

Minari (USA: Lee Isaac Cheung, 2020)





 Minari (USA: Lee Isaac Cheung, 2020: 115 mins)

Chee, Alexander. "What Minari Means to Me." Gen (March 3, 2021) [Lee Isaac Chung’s film took me through his past and into my own family’s story"]

George, Peter Kim. "Minari Isn’t Really About the American Dream. It’s About US Empire." Hyperallergic (February 11, 2021) ["In Lee Isaac Chung’s drama, immigration should be considered through the lens of displacement and diaspora, with its characters exhibiting resilience rather than assimilation."]

Kang, Inkoo. "Minari Broke New Ground for Storytellers of Color, But Creatives Don’t Want to Be Pigeonholed." The Hollywood Reporter (April 14, 2021) ["The Oscar-nominated film navigates the immigrant American journey, but writer-director Lee Isaac Chung, producer Christina Oh and Steven Yeun emphasize its themes are broader than the Asian American experience: "We were just trying to tell something honest.""]

Kim, Jean. "Caught Between Worlds Minari, Nomadland, and reflections on Asian-American identity." The American Scholar (August 12, 2021)

Lazic, Manuela. "Make the Case: The Restraint of Steven Yeun in Minari." The Ringer (April 12, 2021)

Lee, Kevin B. "Kevin B. Lee’s New Video Essay Explores Mourning with Minari." Hyperallergic (April 14, 2021) ["In a Hyperallergic exclusive, Lee muses on the aftermath of the Atlanta spa shootings and how the media imagines Asian Americans."]

Rebeggiani, Stefano. "Minari is a Deeply Christian Reflection on Failure." Angelus (February 25, 2021) 





Thursday, May 13, 2021

Dialogic Cinephilia - May 13, 2021

DiCaprio, Leonardo, et al. "Back in Time: Making Once Upon a Time in Hollywood." American Cinematographer (July 26, 2019)

Gribben, Crawford. "Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America: Christian Reconstruction in the Pacific Northwest (Oxford University Press, 2021)." New Books in Christian Studies (March 29, 2021) ["In America's Pacific Northwest a group of conservative Protestants have been conducting a new experiment in cultural transformation. Dissatisfied with what they see as the clumsy political engagement and vapid literary and artistic culture of mainstream Evangelicals, these Christian Reconstructionists have deployed an altogether different set of strategies for the long game, fueled by their Calvinist theology and much-more-hopeful apocalypse. In Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America: Christian Reconstruction in the Pacific Northwest (Oxford UP, 2021), Crawford Gribben presents a hybrid study of historical, theological, literary, and anthropological analysis of this variant of Evangelical counter-culture. Gribben paints a rich and detailed portrait of this loosely banded, sometimes coordinated migration to the "American redoubt." This migration has led, in part, to the establishment of a network of communities and institutions that include churches, a liberal arts college, a publishing house, and an ambitious media strategy that has already had an outsize impact. From their outpost in Idaho and prompted by their revised postmillennial eschatology, these Christian conservatives are preparing to survive the collapse American society and to reconstruct a godly society that will usher in the Kingdom of Christ. For this group of born-again Protestants, their apocalyptic strategy is precisely to be left behind."]

Grier, Miles P. "Why (and How) August Wilson Marginalized White Antagonism: A Note for Hollywood Producers." Los Angeles Review of Books (April 12, 2021)

Jones, Matthew. "The Case for Animal Rights: A Defense of Tom Regan." Philosophy in Film (October 24, 2020) [On Tom Regan's 1987 book The Case for Animal Rights and Bong Joon-Ho's 2017 film Okja.]

Koresky, Michael, Nicholas Rapold and Amy Taubin. "Bong Joon-Ho's Parasite." Film Comment Podcast (October 26, 2019) ["At Film Comment, we love it when we get behind a movie and then see other movie-goers share the love. Parasite, the funny and fierce thriller from Bong Joon Ho, was on the cover of our September-October issue, but wasn’t released in theaters until mid-October. But what a release! Audiences are packing the theaters. To talk about the movie’s appeal and Bong’s masterful filmmaking, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with contributing editor Amy Taubin, who wrote out September-October feature on Parasite, and FC columnist and critic Michael Koresky."]

Lazic, Manuela. "Make the Case: The Restraint of Steven Yeun in Minari." The Ringer (April 12, 2021)

Lee, Edward Ashford. "The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines (MIT Press, 2020)." New Books in Science, Technology, and Society (April 2, 2021) ["Are humans defining technology, or is technology defining humans? In The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines (MIT Press, 2020), Edward Ashford Lee considers the case that we are less in control of the trajectory of technology than we think. It shapes us as much as we shape it, and it may be more defensible to think of technology as the result of a Darwinian coevolution than the result of top-down intelligent design. Richard Dawkins famously said that a chicken is an egg's way of making another egg. Is a human a computer's way of making another computer? To understand this question requires a deep dive into how evolution works, how humans are different from computers, and how the way technology develops resembles the emergence of a new life form on our planet. Lee presents the case for considering digital beings to be living, then offers counterarguments. What we humans do with our minds is more than computation, and what digital systems do--be teleported at the speed of light, backed up, and restored--may never be possible for humans. To believe that we are simply computations, he argues, is a "dataist" faith and scientifically indefensible. Digital beings depend on humans--and humans depend on digital beings. More likely than a planetary wipe-out of humanity is an ongoing, symbiotic coevolution of culture and technology."]

Merin, Jennifer, et al. "Movie of the Week: Sugar Daddy." AWFJ (March 28, 2021) 

Raworth, Kate. "A Renegade Solution to Extractive Economics." Your Undivided Attention (February 11, 2021) ["When Kate Raworth began studying economics, she was disappointed that the mainstream version of the discipline didn’t fully address many of the world issues that she wanted to tackle, such as human rights and environmental destruction. She left the field, but was inspired to jump back in after the financial crisis of 2008, when she saw an opportunity to introduce some fresh perspectives. She sat down and drew a chart in the shape of a doughnut, which provided a way to think about our economic system while accounting for the impact to the world around us, as well as for humans’ baseline needs. Kate’s framing can teach us a lot about how to transform the economic model of the technology industry, and help us move from a system that values addicted, narcissistic, polarized humans to one that values healthy, loving and collaborative relationships. Her book, “Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist,” gives us a guide for going from a 20th-century paradigm to an evolved 21st-century one that will address our existential-scale problems."]

Rowley, Rick and A.C. Thompson. "American Insurrection: Deadly Far-Right Extremism from Charlottesville to Capitol Attack. What Next?" Democracy Now (April 14, 2021) ["A scathing new report by the Capitol Police’s internal watchdog reveals officials knew Congress was the target of the deadly January 6 insurrection, yet officers were instructed to refrain from deploying more aggressive measures that could have helped “push back the rioters.” Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports domestic terrorism incidents surged to a record high in 2020, fueled by white supremacist, anti-Muslim and anti-government extremists on the far right. The Post found that, since 2015, right-wing extremists have been involved in 267 plots or attacks, leading to 91 deaths. Reporter A.C. Thompson, who explores the threat of far-right extremism in the new PBS “Frontline” documentary “American Insurrection,” says there was a “massive pool of radicalized individuals” ahead of the January 6 attack who were being pushed toward violence by “an abundance of lies by the former president, by this entire conspiratorial right-wing media and social media ecosystem.” We also speak with director Rick Rowley, who says many white supremacist groups began to splinter during the intense backlash to the violence in Charlottesville in 2017, but Trump gave the groups new life ahead of the January 6 insurrection. “Many elements inside the white supremacist movement found in him a path into the mainstream,” says Rowley. “They took off their swastikas, and they wrapped themselves in the flag.”]


Monday, May 10, 2021

Dialogic Cinephilia - May 10, 2021

Bastién, Angelica Jade. "Them is Pure Degradation Porn." Vulture (April 14, 2021) 

Bronstein, Ronald, et al. "Josh & Benny Safdie and Uncut Gems Team on the Making of Their Electrifying Crime Thriller." Film at Lincoln Center Podcast #256 (October 7, 2019) ["On Day 11 of our New York Film Festival daily podcast, we explore the making of the festival’s surprise screening, Uncut Gems. In the introduction, Eugene Hernandez, FLC’s Deputy Director and Co-Publisher of Film Comment, is joined by Eric Kohn, IndieWire’s Executive Editor & Chief Critic, to discuss NYFF, the importance of film festivals, and the evolution of the Safdies. Then we go to yesterday’s NYFF Live talk on the making of Uncut Gems, moderated by Kohn. Directors Josh and Benny Safdie (Heaven Knows What, Good Time) were on hand to detail the process of making this electrifying New York City-set thriller, joined by co-writer and editor Ronald Bronstein, producer Sebastian Bear McClard, composer Daniel Lopatin, and casting director Jen Venditti."]

Dornelles, Juliano, et al. "Bacurau." The Film Comment Podcast (October 7, 2019) ["The new film Bacurau centers upon the residents of a remote Brazilian village who gradually discover that they’re being hunted by a group of Western tourists. Part class-warfare satire, part thriller, the movie gripped audiences at the New York Film Festival and it marks a major achievement by its directors Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles. In this episode, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold joins FC Assistant Editor Devika Girish in a conversation with Mendonça Filho and Dornelles where they discuss five key scenes from the film. These include the opening scene, which takes us via drone shot and truck drive into the film’s remote setting; a psychotropic interlude in which the residents of Bacurau dance the capoeira in preparation for battle; and finally a climactic action sequence that occurs in a local museum. They also discuss a memorable exchange between Udo Kier, who appears here as the icy-cruel leader of the mercenaries, and Brazilian acting legend Sonia Braga, who plays the village matriarch. Listen ahead for details on the making of each scene."]

Kang, Inkoo. "Minari Broke New Ground for Storytellers of Color, But Creatives Don’t Want to Be Pigeonholed." The Hollywood Reporter (April 14, 2021) ["The Oscar-nominated film navigates the immigrant American journey, but writer-director Lee Isaac Chung, producer Christina Oh and Steven Yeun emphasize its themes are broader than the Asian American experience: "We were just trying to tell something honest.""]

Koski, Genevieve, et al. "The Man Who Laughs, Pt. 1 - The Dark Knight." The Next Picture Show #196 (October 15, 2019) ["The narrative and tone of Todd Phillips’ latest is heavily inspired by TAXI DRIVER and KING OF COMEDY, but given the attention paid to the work of Martin Scorsese on this podcast of late, we decided to look at Phillips’ new JOKER in tandem with a more literal cinematic predecessor: Christopher Nolan’s THE DARK KNIGHT, featuring Heath Ledger’s posthumous Oscar-winning performance as the Clown Prince of Crime himself. In this half we consider Ledger’s Joker in the context of a film that took a radically different approach to the comic-book movie and its villains, debate some confounding plot specifics—and whether they ultimately matter that much to one’s enjoyment of the film—and try to remember what it was like experiencing DARK KNIGHT independent of the subsequnt superhero movie deluge it helped spawn."]

---. "The Man Who Laughs, Pt. 2 - The Joker." The Next Picture #197 (October 22, 2021) ["Todd Phillips’ new JOKER gives a concrete origin story to a character who, in Christoper Nolan’s 2008 film THE DARK KNIGHT, willfully obfuscates what turned him into Gotham’s Clown Prince of Crime. In this second half of our look at two grim-and-gritty takes on the character, we examine JOKER, and some of the discourse around it, in an attempt to pinpoint meaning within an audacious and violent film, and consider how it fits into Phillips’ filmography of put-upon males processing rejection; then we dive into how it connects to DARK KNIGHT, not just in its treatment of the Joker, but also its depiction of Gotham, and its considerations of class and morality."]

Romney, Jonathan. "Los conductos is a swirling, cryptic journey into a hellish Medellín night." Sight and Sound (April 14, 2021) [" Camilo Restrepo’s stunning debut mixes up myth, fantasy and contemporary Colombian social reality to potent effect."]

Sandoval, Isabel. "Seeing as the Other: Klute and Senorita." E-Flux #117 (2021)








Sunday, May 9, 2021

Dialogic Cinephilia - May 9, 2021

“Why should an artist’s way of looking at the world have any meaning for us? Why does it give us pleasure? Because, I believe, it increases our awareness of our own potentiality.”
— John Berger, Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing (1960)


Cleaver, Sarah Kathryn. "Swept Away: A Thematic Dive Into the Depths of Undine."  Curzon (April 1, 2021)


Davis, Joseph E. "When Your Authenticity is an Act, Something's Gone Wrong." Psyche (March 31, 2021)

Dorian, M.J. "Listener Q&A." Creative Codex #10 (September 2019) ["Our first Listener Q&A episode!!! So many compelling questions including: Are left handed people more creative? Was Nikola Tesla spiritual? How do you quiet the doubting voices in your mind? What was Frida Kahlo's life like after the accident? Is creativity a supernatural force? What is the nature of evil?"]

---. "The Origin of Art." Creative Codex #1 (August 18, 2018) ["Travel back 40,000 years to the first known art made by human hands. How did creativity begin? Why does 'art' exist?"]




Sunday, May 2, 2021

Dialogic Cinephilia - May 2, 2021

Becker, Elizabeth. "You Don't Belong Here." On the Media (April 30, 2021) ["Before the Vietnam War there was a law that banned women from reporting on the frontlines of any war for the U.S. When President Johnson refused to officially declare a state of war in Vietnam, an opening appeared: no war, no ban. A handful of pioneering women bought one-way tickets into the battlefield. They had no editors, no health insurance and little or no formal training. This week, Brooke spoke about this time to reporter Elizabeth Becker, formerly a Washington Post war correspondent in Cambodia, NPR's foreign editor and then national security correspondent for the New York Times. Becker is the author of a new book: You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War."]

Dorian, M.J. "H.R. Giger: A Beautiful Darkness." Creative Codex #9 (September 2, 2019) ["H.R. Giger is considered by many to be the most evil artist in history. Join us as we take a deep dive into the abyss where Giger's strange ideas are born. In this episode we also explore: how did Giger create a style so distinct that people see it as 'out of this world'?"]

Koski, Genevieve, et al. "Vice Principles Pt. 1 - Casino." The Next Picture Show #194 (September 24, 2019) ["The big question at the heart of Lorene Scafaria’s new Hustlers — one about the corrupting force of American capitalism and who is allowed to rip off whom — is the same one that drive’s Martin Scorsese’s 1995 Vegas gangster epic Casino, a question both films address with no small amount of verve and flash. In this half of our vice-ridden pairing, we dig into Casino’s reputation as a Goodfellas retread and how its characters conform, or don’t, to our expectations about Scorsese characters."]

---. "Vice Principles Pt. 2 - Hustlers." The Next Picture Show #195 (September 30, 2019) ["Lorene Scafaria portrays the criminal scam at the heart of Hustlers with a sort of cinematic brio that has earned the film comparisons to the work of Martin Scorsese, in particular the similarly flashy Vegas epic Casino — and not just because both prominently feature chinchilla fur coats. In this half of our vice-ridden pairing, we talk over what works and what doesn’t about Hustlers before diving into the two films’ shared preoccupations with destructive trust and capitalist systems and compare the filmmaking flourishes Scafaria and Scorsese use to draw viewers into their seductive worlds."]

Meek, Michelle. "Sex Sells—But Why? and How? Author Maria San Filippo on Sexual Provocation in Film and TV." Ms. (April 6, 2021) ["How has sexual provocation been used by female filmmakers as a feminist act? Is it possible to separate art from artists? How have sex scenes changed over the years?" In her latest book Provocauteurs and Provocations: Screening Sex in 21st Century Media, San Filippo examines the history of sexual provocation in the media. Yes, sex sells—but why and how? In particular, she examines how female and queer filmmakers coopt sexual provocation for their own radical and sometimes even radically ordinary purposes.]

Phillips-Fein, Kim. "On the Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal." Who Makes Cents? #10 (April 1, 2015) ["Kim Phillips-Fein discusses her book Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal. Today we’ll focus on the history of resistance to the New Deal. Kim Phillips-Fein details how many of the most prominent elites had their ideas and practices shaped by groups that were part of organized resistance to the New Deal. She argues that this history helps revise common understandings of the rise of conservatism in the 1970s and after."]

Rankin, Matthew. "The Twentieth Century." Cinematalk (November 2020) ["As a bonus to the Cinematheque's presentation of The Twentieth Century, Mike King leads a lively conversation with the movie's ingenious creator, Matthew Rankin. Their talk touches on Canadian national identity, the real and fake Mackenzie King, "dollar store" production design, and much more."]

Tassell, Nige. "Why the Coen Brothers’ Cinematic Sleight of Hand is So Good." Literary Hub (March 19, 2021)