— चार हजार सात सौ सैंतीस —

Very little for me to update you on today . . . I had my walk with Alexia (to my office and back) on Monday evening, expect to walk with her again this evening (to Lake Washington and back), but last night I nether spent time with anyone, nor got on any video chats with anyone. Not even Shobhti was around: yesterday and today he has evening shifts at Total Wine & More, and yesterday he worked from 4:30 to 10:15. Tonight he works from 5:00 to 10:15. How they make these shifts that vary in such ways, I have no idea.

So anyway, I basically spent the evening watching my TV screen. Shobhit made more bhaturas (deep fried flatbreads) for the leftovers of garbanzo beans from the night before, before he left for work—but, there was little enough left of the garbanzo beans that I decided to leave that for Shobhit, and had a "Jaipur Vegetables" Indeal meal packet with three of the bhaturas Shobhit had left behind. He ate the rest when he got home from work, right after I got into bed.

In the meantime, I watched the very good documentary on Netflix, Crip Camp, which Karen actually told me about a couple of months ago and I've also heard about a couple of times on one of my movie-themed podcasts I listen to. I already expected to like it, but it honestly exceeded my expectations. It's about an Upstate New York summer camp for disabled kids in the early seventies, many of the attendees of which went on to become truly transformative activists who were instrumental in eventually getting the Americans with Disabilities Act passed. I have a Virtual Lunch with Karen scheduled for tomorrow and I look forward to discussing it more with her; I'm eager to find out if she has ever met any of these activists, many of whom must be real heroes to her, as a wheelchair user herself.

The most striking thing about the documentary is what essential history it covers, and a truly untold story for the mainstream public. I would guess that outside of disability organization circles, almost no one knows anything about this stuff. The film was just generally well made as well, and I would recommend it to literally anybody and everybody.

Then I tired to watch a stand-up special by some British woman comedian I had never heard of, and she wasn't good enough for me so I turned it off after about ten minutes. After that I went to The Matrix Reloaded, which I stopped after about half an hour. I will likely still finish it, but even though I loved it at the time of its release, this many years later, it's striking how dated that movie looks, in sharp contrast to how forward-thinking the original film remains even when watching it now. Much like the Star Wars prequels, the Matrix sequels works too hard to answer questions that, in so doing, actually degrades the quality of the overall experience.

— चार हजार सात सौ सैंतीस —

— चार हजार सात सौ सैंतीस —

Everything about the entertainment industry is just so weird right now. Of course, everything about everything is just so weird right now . . . as in, literally everything except "essential services" is on hold, and television and movie production is no exception. This means that for those industries, unlike many others (like, say, restaurants), once they can resume work, they still have to spend even more time getting that work done before we'll have any new content to pay for and consume. There's going to be this weird, dead zone of entertainment long after society is (hopefully very gradually) returning to normal: movie theaters will open, but there won't be new movies to open in them. I mean, in some cases there will be at first, as a whole bunch of tentpole release dates were already postponed.

Besides that, I'm likely to avoid movie theaters for some time even after they re-open. Who wants to sit in an enclosed space with other people before there is treatment or a vaccine? And I say this as an unusually avid cinema lover. But, I have to realize, I kind of love my own lung capacity even more. So, I still need to contemplate how I will move forward with my hobby of writing and posting movie reviews, which has also been virtually nonexistent now for more than two and a half months. Since February, the only review I have written was of Onward once it was on Disney+, and only because I knew it would have still been in theaters if things had been normal.

I wonder if we're about to get a lot more animated movies than usual for a while? Animation is something that everyone can work on remotely.

— चार हजार सात सौ सैंतीस —

[posted 12:29 pm]