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Entertainment Roundup
I’ll just pull this next line from my last entertainment roundup, which I think I did in 2020.
The enjoyment of art is integral to the making of art, and I’m a firm believer in the adage that what comes out is only as good as what goes in.
Live Music: When I lived in Montreal I went to multiple concerts a week. Now that I live in a small town on a remote island in the North Atlantic, I go to far fewer concerts. A lot of my live music experiences since moving back have come from my attendance of showcasing conferences. There never fails to be at least one act that gets me especially excited. Over the last couple years I’ve been particularly blown away by the following: Avalanche Kaito, Hope Dunbar, Jud Caswell, Basset, and a whole bunch more. Like, a whole bunch more.
Recorded Music: I started a couple playlists this year that I am trying to build into a tiktok series. Lowen has been one of my favourite finds. I saw a post saying it was Progressive Doom. Doom may be my second least favourite sub-genre of metal, but Prog is my favourite genre modifier of all, so I checked them out and loved it. We have a shared spot in this household where me and my husband each poke links to albums we want to check out, and we recently discovered that we had both added this album. I also stumbled across Jordann Funk’s album Tsuga and I’m not sure where it came from. I think it was an algorithmic recommendation when I was putting together a playlist. I’ve been listening to it over and over.
Games: Non-stop RGG Studio just keeps putting out games and they just keep on outdoing themselves so nothing has changed on the gaming front in the last 5 years. 2024 saw the release of Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name and Infinite Wealth (the 8th game in the mainline series) The Man Who Erased His Name was a shorter game. Only 4 chapters I think, but the amount of effort they put in to it was astounding. By far my favourite Colosseum minigame of the entire franchise. The ability to finally be able to change Kiryu’s clothes during the game was super fun, and the night on the town! OMG! And then of course the gut wrenching emotion in the main story. Youtube is filled with clips of streamers weeping at the finale.
Then Infinite Wealth came out and it is another masterpiece. Possibly one of the longest games in the franchise. Loved the two protagonist back and forth a la Yakuza 0, and deeply appreciated the changes they made to the drop down menu combat system introduced in Y7. I am not a big fan of menu based RPGs, and one of my favourite things about the other games in the series is the combat system which makes you feel very in control. For IW they’ve added some elements to bring that feeling back. And of course, now I want to visit Hawaii!
I also now know what Pokemon and Animal Crossing are like because they introduced minigames mimicking their gameplay into the series. Neither are my kind of game. I managed to complete the Pokemon clone in order to get the substory, but I failed to make any progress in the Animal Crossing clone as I just find that type of game incredibly boring. (I did go all in on making a sleazy resort on the island to get through the parts of the game that are mandatory.)
Anyway, really looking forward to playing Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii when it comes out in February!
Movies: We watched a lot of movies. Most of which I can’t remember, but some standouts were during our annual Halloween movie watching extravaganza. Jennifer’s Body was a stand out. Apparently it did not do well on release, and it sounds like it was marketed as something it is not. I may have found it particularly enjoyable because it pokes fun at what a musician will do to make it big. The Autopsy of Jane Doe may have been my favourite of our horror-a-thon. It was so minimal. Mainly two living characters, and the corpse. The corpse was played by a yoga practitioner who was hired for her ability to lie perfectly still. If you read all my movie reviews, I think it will become apparent that movement and the abilities of the human body are one of the things I look for in a film, so the skill of playing a corpse so perfectly is totally my jam.
I feel like we watched a couple movies in which Hugh Grant was the antagonist and I really enjoyed him in that type of role.
We also watched the entire Fast & Furious saga over Christmas. Well, we watched the original earlier this year, or maybe it was last year, but we figured they would be something we could have on in the background while we did other things. 1-7 turned out to be pretty good, and we paid more attention than we were expecting. I think 3 and 5 were the best, at least they’re the one’s whose plots I remember best. They took a turn towards the Marvel Movie style of film making from 8 onwards which is not the choice I would have made. (I have seen very few Marvel Movies, and only a couple all the way through. They are not for me.)
Finally, one of our (more recent) Holiday traditions is to put on holiday romance films in the background while we go about the cooking/cleaning/decorating aspects of Christmas. Every film was about a woman who decided to stop perusing her dreams in order to stay with the man she loved. Needless to say, I was not impressed.
Television: Last year Juels Bland told me that since I love shows where the main character is an individual competent at their job who also happens to be a real asshole that I would probably enjoy Justified, and he was right! We really enjoyed the lead actor so we watched Deadwood which was also fantastic. Something about the two series that stood out to me was that each had a character that spoke in a totally unrealistic flowery way that I enjoyed immensely. (Walton Goggins’ character in Justified, and Ian McShane in Deadwood.) Something I dislike about a lot of Hollywood films is how people talk in a totally unrealistic manner that is totally contrived. Somehow both these shows made those character’s quirks believable. I think the difference is that in these programs those characters dialogues contributed to plot and character development, whereas in the Hollywood movies it seems like they’re just trying to generate clips.
We binged all four seasons of the Swedish/Danish drama The Bridge. It was good. Really good. The Bridge is so good that every nation that shares a border with another has made a direct copy. It is a goal of mine to someday watch them all.
We watched Reacher because someone told us it’s got an Equalizer style vibe and we really enjoyed it. The thing that makes this stand apart is that, in the show at least, Jack Reacher is not an asshole, just a very competent dude. I have been reading the books as a result, and in the books he is a bit of an asshole, but is also hyper aware of innocent bystanders and goes out of his way to make sure no one not involved in the conflict gets hurt, which I find very refreshing.
Speaking of the Equalizer, I am a fan. I remember loving the original series in reruns on A&E when I was a teenager. I loved each of the films with Denzel Washington, and the series with Queen Latifah has been on my watch list forever, so we’ve begun watching it and enjoying it as well. I think we’re on season two now. We’ve also begun watching the scattered episode with Edward Woodward and it is as good as I remember it, but what I didn’t remember is how totally inappropriate the music is. What was Stuart Copeland thinking? Every tense scene is accompanied by really upbeat synth, and the show has an overall Doctor Who vibe which I didn’t recall, but maybe explains why I liked it so much.
Apart from violent vigilante justice and asshole cop shows, we also watched CTV’s Farming For Love and Hallmark’s Finding Mr. Christmas. We don’t generally like reality TV shows in this household. The main reason being, people seem to be directed to be petty, mean, and whiny in them, which we can’t handle. We gave Farming For Love a try (a dating show based on Farmer Wants a Wife) because we thought a Canadian show might be a little more sensible, and it was! We’ve been riveted for two seasons now! The Canadian show chose a different name because it is not all Male Farmer seeks Female Wife. There were male and female and gay and straight farmers. So like, reality.
Finding Mr. Christmas is a Hallmark channel competition show in which actors vie for the role of the leading man in a Hallmark Christmas romance. We watched the entire thing in two sittings. There were 10 men, and each episode one got eliminated. There was absolutely no backbiting or complaining or whining. The guys seemed to genuinely like and support each other and just work on doing their best and encouraging each other in the competition. I have since followed a couple of the guys on Instagram and they clearly all remained friends! So wholesome! Will definitely watch again next year.
Books: I joined a musician book club this year and the best book we read was Molly Gebrian’s book ‘Learn Faster Perform Better: A Musician’s Guide to the Neuroscience of Practising.’ Rejuvenating my practice regimen is number one on my musicianship goal for 2025 so it was an incredible resource for that. For the book club I gave it more of a read through, and now I’m really starting to dive in to the exercises. When I outlined my goals for 2025 I included appropriate reading material for every category, and this is one of the books I have for performance and practice goals.
As a consequence of our TV viewing, I also read all the Raylen Givens books by Elmore Leonard that the Justified series is based on and enjoyed them quite a bit (even though they are short, and I generally prefer tomes.)
I got the Landmark edition of Arrian’s book on Alexander the Great for Christmas so look forward to diving into that. Arrian was greatly influenced by Xenophon, even going so far as to add Xenophon to his name, and call his book an Anabasis, which is really rubbing in my face the fact that my husband has been trying to buy me the Landmark edition of Xenophon’s Anabasis for years, but it seems to be out of print and copies are priced like the classics literature version of Taylor Swift tickets.
Sports: Sumo continues to be the main event round here every two months. As we understand it, we’ve gotten into Sumo at a very exciting time. The level of competition is so good, and every tournament there is a revolving cast of contenders for the cup. There are some really really exciting young fellas coming up, and that in turn is making some of the others up their games.
Of course 2024 was an Olympic year so we tuned in to some of that. We’re not big summer sports fans here but always look forward to the Weight Lifting at the summer Olympics and this year we were treated to Breaking as well, which we are also big fans of. I think last year we landed on the world breaking championship and fell in love with Canadian Phil Wizard (among many others) I was so excited to hear that breaking would be in the Olympics this year. I hope someone brings it back at some point, though if they don’t I will console myself with knowing that a Canadian holds one of the only gold medals given out to the sport at the Olympics. We’ve watched quite a few other breaking and general urban dance competitions since. My favourite thing about the sport is that right before the final round, the judges have to come out and bust a move to prove they are qualified to judge the competition. I wish this happened in more sports. Imagine if boxing judges had to come out a go a round, or if figure skating judges had to come out and land a triple axel!
We’re also very excited to follow the new women’s hockey league the PWHL which was formed out of the PWHPA and the PHL. (Formerly the CWHL and NWHL respectively.) Back in the CWHL days I couldn’t figure out why no one would ever report on their games. It was all the top Olympic players and I would frequently tell rabid hockey fans about it and they’d get excited, but for some reason the media had all agreed that there would be no reporting on it. I recall saying, if you tell people it’s happening, they will follow it, and that is exactly what’s happened with the PWHL. They have a rich patron, and they have funded PR, Marketing, and they got the games broadcast with proper sound and Commentators. This season all the teams had to find bigger arenas to play in cuz they kept selling out. I am delighted and enraged all at the same time.
Art: I recently attended the North East Regional Folk Alliance conference in Portland Maine which was held at a venue right next to the Portland Museum of Art. I of course visited. They have a pretty extensive collection there, and a really cool art garden (which I had poked my head into a couple times mid conference.) They had a Whistler and some John Singer Sargent portraits. I had a lovely chat with one of the security guards who told me that there’s a whole wing of the museum around the corner from the gift shop that folks often don’t realize is there. I’m glad he pointed it out, because I would have missed it, and they had a Max Ernst there! I wrote a paper on Max Ernst for a High School art class so I have a special place in my heart for him, but I don’t think I’d ever seen any of his work in person before so that was particularly nice. My favourites were in the contemporary collection by Maine artist Brian Smith. He works with beads and shells and creates the most gorgeous stuff. The first three pieces in his website gallery were there and they were just stunning.