Loving Inside
The way I see it, the big news today is that Bo Burnham's Inside is now available as an album collection of the 20 songs from the special, which amounts to 53 minutes (as opposed to the special's 87 minutes) of straight, fantastic music.
I can't tell you how much I loved that special—I'm hardly alone in this—I've already watched it twice. And considering how much great content there remains to get to see just for the first time, I would regard that as an incredible compliment.
And as it happens, when he directed the film Eighth Grade I considered it the best film of 2018. I had never heard of him before that, and was surprised to learn he had previously been a comedian who was almost shockingly young (28 at that time) who had gotten his start posting videos of his original songs to YouTube about a decade before that. He literally got his start as a teenager as an amateur humorist musician, and he expanded on that in other comedy specials he had on Netflix from his early and mid-twenties, performing a lot of songs in them as well. I went back and watched them a couple of years ago, and found them, basically, fairly enjoyable—but nothing approaching the excellence of Eighth Grade.
Inside is a different story, arguably his crowning achievement, an incredible flashpoint in the process of coming out of a pandemic—even though he never utters that specific word in it. (He does make a couple obvious references to it.) The musicianship on display here is deeply impressive to me, even if much if it is couched in humor (which is usually hilarious even by just that measure). I was delighted to learn it would be coming out as an album, and I bought it just this morning. I'm listening to it for the second time as I write this.
I do think the music is easily best experienced in the context of actually watching the special. But, the album also stands up incredibly well on its own terms. I really, really love it. Even with 20 tracks, at least 11 of them are at least close to standard song length, ranging between two and a half to five minutes each; the rest are all less than two minutes but are still great. I already can't get enough of it. His talent for both music composition and lyricism is really great, when for many others they're great at one but just okay at the other. In his case, somehow on top of all that, many of the songs manage to be both wistful and comforting all at once—the kind of thing that will forever bring us back to this point in time when we hear it, but in a pleasant rather than traumatic way.
As for last night? Shobhit had a late shift at work. I watched the pilot episode of the new Disney+ Marvel series Loki, which I really enjoyed. Then I watched the second episode of the Netflix fairy tale pandemic series Sweet Tooth about human-animal hybrid children, which sounds dumb but is quite lovely and, indeed, sweet so far. It was interesting to learn that it was shot during COVID but in New Zealand, with their landscapes standing in for Yellowstone. This would explain why, in the few scenes we see people in face masks, they are wearing cloth ones looking very much like the ones we've actually been wearing all this time. Seeing that creates a unique sensation, somewhere between surreal and jarring, if not outright unsettling.
After Shobhit did get home, I spent about an hour helping him just a little bit while he made a potato based dish in an effort to use up our leftover produce before we head to Portland this weekend.
I just finished with FaceTime lunch with Karen. We had plenty to talk about, not least of which was my impending return to the office—she was talking to me from her office, which she had already returned to herself the last time we had virtual lunch. She's still generally at that, much smaller office all by herself anyway. But we also talked about impending travel plans for us both: me to Portland with Shobhit this weekend and then to Idaho with Dad and Sherri the following weekend; she and her family are headed to Massachusetts on Tuesday, where they'll be able to visit her parents for the first time in more than a year and a half.
I know that there remain causes for concern and caution; I don't mention all of these things in any kind of vacuum. It's certainly heartening, though, to learn that where I am is even better off than I realized: not only is King County vaccinated at a much higher rate than that of Washington State, but Seattle proper has itself already hit the 70% threshold for people 12 and over! In fact, we are apparently the most vaccinated major city in the country right now, barely edging out San Francisco. Not only is Seattle at 70% full vaccination, but we're at 78% (12 and over) with at least one dose.
I feel even better about seeing movies in theaters now than I did before.
Anyway. As I said to Karen, it sure is nice to be passing these benchmarks that are positive, as opposed to the steady decline into awfulness that was the year 2020. This year is already very much the inverse, and it's nice to be in that mode. I mean, until the effects of climate change start wiping us out for different reasons, anyway.
[posted 1:15 pm]