1/2/2021> Relatively nice day so went for a walk (10+ miles) down to the Anacostia river + then back along the Potomac, both looking rather stagnant + polluted. Exchanged a dozen or so books along the way (scored an Infinite Jest). Today we weigh 167. Ate quiche (w/ carrots, turnips, green chili, mustard greens, etc.) + a farro/lentil soup w/ golden beets (which we hate, but not so bad in soup), kale, carrots, etc. washed down w/ kombucha. Watched Holiday (1938) + In Between the Lines (1977)... as mentioned in the last post, we'll try to log impressions of movies going forward in our movie log. Read Mess and Mess and by Douglas Kearney, a messy hodge-podge of some interesting (tho rather self-centric) writings + experimentations, but not sure it qualifies as a book object.

some thing scene on our walk

1/3/2021> Rainy Sunday. Read What It Feels Like to Cry with Your Brain by Mark Baumer, a book "about the snowman who ate his famous uncle" featuring Denzel Washington, another 1 of the 50 absurd books Baumer wrote in 2012. Some other books we've started to read lately + abandoned:

• The Art of War by Sun Tzu—started to read then realized we read it before in Thailand + was disappointed, military strategy just ain't our thing
• Rimbaud Complete—we've tried reading Rimbaud before but our brain just can't parse poetry. This had some of his prose so figured we'd give it a go but couldn't really process dat either
• Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay—the premise of this sounds fascinating but not that intrested to dig 500 pgs into it

Weighed 168 (tho after eating big lunch). We've been intermittent fasting for about a month now, where we don't eat for the 16 hours between ~8 pm–12 pm, which ain't too hard to do cuz was basically what we already did most days. But when u don't drink your caloric intake definitely stops at 8 pm (if not 7 or even earlier some days). We rewatched The African Queen (1951), especially classic when u consider the time + conditions it was filmed in, they actually went to the Belgian Congo + Uganda for a lot of the scenes, living in primitive conditions + the whole crew got sick except Huston + Bogart cuz they drank nothing but whiskey... "if anything bit us, it'd die," said Bogart (Amazon provides cool commentary if u roll the mouse over). Bogart obviously has a certain natural charm (despite him not exactly being handsome) that has always reminded us of our grandfather. Hepburn's natural demeanor annoys us but it's perfect for this part cuz she's meant to be annoying. On the set she complained about Bogart + Huston's drinking + in defiance drank nothing but water + got dysentery.... makes the scene where she dumps out Bogart's gin all the more meaningful. Lauren Bacall went along for the ride to accompany Bogart + acted as den mother, cooking + making camp.

Bacall making sandwiches for the crew

The behind the scenes stuff is what intrests us more (see also our Conquest of the Useless post on the making of Apocalypse Now + Herzog's diary on the making of Fitzcarraldo... not sure the movie would of made our desert island list had we not the read his diary (or seen Burden of Dreams, the movie about the making of Fitzcarraldo)). Or how reading Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film makes watching Beauty and the Beast (1946) all the more meaningful + in large part spurred us to write Marsupial (which is about the making of a fictitious movie), in which we quote Cocteau: "[The film] had killed me. It now rejected me and lived its own life. The only thing I could see in it were the memories attached to every foot of it and the suffering it had caused me."

We rewatched The African Queen cuz of our current (haha) obsession w/ rivers, the theme of our next album. Apocalypse Now + Fitzcarraldo are also good river movies, tho Fitzcarraldo is more about the sisyphean absence of the river, what happens if u try to go against the flow instead of with it. Our bedder-½'s (the 1 who vocalizes our lyrics) interest in rivers is cuz of her professional work, how food systems are shaped by rivers (the Mekong in particular). Our intrest is more abstract/ general, it don't even have to be a fizzical liquid river but can be a dadastream of information. To this affect we're thinking of tuning our guitar DADADD for the entire next album for multiple reasons. 1). D seems to be the key our bedder-½ is most comfortable singing in, 2) our harmonica is in the key of D minor (we also tuned our Turkish drum we bought recently to D) + 3) this tuning makes it easy to play D minor pentatonic (D-F-G-A-C-D) + D aeolian (D-E-F-G-A-B^♭-C-D) chords/progressions more naturally... not that we know shit about music theory but when we fuck around plucking strings these seam to bee the notes we like to hit + when we googled to see wtf we're doing we discovered this.