O sing ye muse of a face a fleet a war a man a thought a trick a trick to break the walls of Troy and burn it screaming to the ground because the hand of victory shrouds the bard’s legends and makes blind beggars of us all

Now that it has finally washed up on our shores The Odyssey (2026, Christopher Nolan) it turns out was left there as a gift to be prized as the greatest movie of all time. Because it remembered what a hero is supposed to be unlike us still eating the lotus. In Odysseus we find a tragedy that doesn’t end with its protagonist paying for his redemption through being sacrificed or punished but by learning truth that cost him his entire life on a journey to find it. An odyssey if you will.

 

It’s pretty cool Nolan got a cast release date and budget this prestigious lavish to make a film that isn’t meant for complete idiots. Also I have my own personal rules about talking movies. Even though I believe everyone is entitled to an opinion for my own tastes preferences in the context of this post one is I don’t give a shit about your comparison between the book and movie.
     Somewhere at the top of what I consider the most effective powerful favorite tools of cinema or literary devices in general is when a character somehow is positioned amongst a cautionary atrocious pitiful deplorable element established as other only for said character through a twist embodies this very same accursed plight. Because the thought of that in real life is so powerful. What if I became something I hated? Something I feared? That defies logic heart and spirit. And in The Odyssey it’s The People of the Sea. I can’t believe Nolan wrote this screenplay himself. And by the way this is the first Nolan movie I felt genuine emotion. And a lot. Like full on sobbing. But tears of joy tears of beauty tears of pain. And by the way this is the first Nolan movie I think he matched maybe surpassed what Kubrick was capable of not that it makes any sense to compare the two.
     The structure of The Odyssey builds little by little. Constantly foreshadowing forging and reconfiguring our conception of the narrative’s events. And the way Nolan wrings every drop of drama and emotion out of every beat is by the heavy consequences for all of Odysseus’s actions along with their equally severe stakes whereby he atones for them. More than Penelope’s anxiety over the Suitors she tells Telemachus Ithaca needs a king because the people are fearful in a state of unrest because of talk about The People from the Sea. Like weaving a loom when the narrative is ready the way all of these events fit together is too staggering to believe it was made by hand. It’s as fine as they come. 
     Same thing with character motivation. Precision. Odysseus is introduced as fair in the scene that shows how he plucks his bow when hunting. So why does he go to fight at Troy? Because Agamemnon would kill his son if he didn’t. Yet when Eurylochus bemoans the question Couldn’t you have shown some mercy? it approaches potential moral ambiguity as to whether or if or how far we can sympathize with Odysseus’s actions ever so slightly making this question more and more difficult until it becomes unbearable.
     The final act has a monologue by Odysseus that shows the other side of the sacking of Troy. Twist. Reveal. There’s this line. What if when he fell down from the belly of the horse he saw ten years of rage pour into that city in one night? that at once drives straight into your soul and forces you to confront the reality of war and horrific violence murder of innocents. Making you never want to cheer at spectacle ever again. That is until he finishes the speech and you jump right back into fake movie world bloodlust insatiably thirsting for Odysseus Sword of Doom House of Blue Leaves Oldboy massacre of every single last Suitor. This is sophisticated. This is nuance. These conditions are complex but navigable.

     Yet as if if not more painful is what Odysseus says about the sirens’ wail It's everything you want most and most of all you want is what you’ve already had and lost and can never get back It’s every promise I made to my men that I couldn’t keep. These are the consequences of our desires our ambitions our hopes and dreams.

     Multipurpose motifs dramatic elements or character traits. Varied perspectives. Ambivalence. With stakes this high for a great warrior general with the gods demanding so much from him as to provoke him to defy them what better fractured narrative to evoke this than what is said about Sinon? What is it something like 1. Antinous tells Telemachus that he drew the lot to go to Troy but Odysseus chose Sinon instead so Antinous could stay and take care of his family 2. Sinon says he wanted to go to Troy so bad and Antinous family paid him to take their son’s place 3. Polybus says Sinon was Antinous’s shepherd’s son who wanted Antinous to take his place. Which of these is true? There’s no way to tell really. But I know which one feels true to me.
 
The tone is supernatural perilous. The lives of these characters at the fate of the gods. A time of apparent magic. And speaking of fate the gods consequences foreshadowing the dual meaning subtext of Odysseus's line I’ve followed Agamemnon long enough takes the cake. The Odyssey is a puzzle of dueling perspectives. Similarly Agamemnon’s advice to Odysseus in Hades Don't go in the front door expecting a homecoming of garlands and praise sneak through the back Assess.

     Nolan is the guy who made still the only other of his films I enjoy Tenet (2020, Christopher Nolan) he is a cinematic physicist. At the end of his monologue when Odysseus says They will only be able to sing songs of his exploits until all of his mistakes are forgotten this kinetic energy stays in motion reserved looked at as many different things. As in we can overlook his war crimes beyond which wisdom about leadership can be learned or we can ignore the mass murder of innocents coursing through from Troy to every military campaign ethnic cleansing guerrilla black ops terrorist dictator coup genocide that is a constant throughout all human history only to continually repeat it which we no doubt will. Maybe Circe was right about disguises? Assess.

 
7/17/2026 AMC Madison Yards 8
7/18/2026 AMC Madison Yards 8
Atlanta, GA
 

Reunited and It Feels So Good AKA What To Do When You Lose Your Bullet Journal

(Look what they did to my beautiful boy (they sent him back to me, safe and sound and with a fast, simple process))

And but so but I've done some ~Bullet Journaling~ for the past decade or so*, and for the first time I've recently had to confront a new to me problem: What do you do when your "put everything here" repository ... isn't ... here?

The premise of the Bullet Journal for me is that the one notebook is where I can, should, and do put everything.  As Darren Bauler once said to me, "I just want to put everything in one place, if I have too many projects, I spend too much time worrying about what thing I make goes in what bucket, which distracts me from making things."  Or as the book has it: "The idea is to be consistently unburdening your mind.  It will be able to rest assured, knowing that everything is safely recorded in your notebook." (Carroll 86)

I use most of the canonical collections: daily log; monthly log; future log.  Mostly I use these in the absolutely stock version from the original videos and book. Even that version had a little too much "mindfulness" and process for me,so I have mostly not followed the more recent iterations, which seem to be first evolving into a (n even) more self-helpy place, with "write your life" (?) replacing "your life's operating system" (???) and subsquently offending some folks by pulling a lot of material down and stashing it securely behind a paywall.

I mention these core collections and the way I use them to highlight two things:

1. I use this 'sucker every single day (the daily log), and
2. I put basically all of my scheduling thoughts into it (this month's monthly log or the future log); and

It turns out that those two things combine to mean that the absence of the physical journal was nearly paralyzing.  I didn't want to plan, or to think about planning, my days, weeks, months or year for the first couple days.

Eventually I grabbed an old Field Notes and at least got back to daily logging, which had the desired effect of "unburden"ing my mind a bit and helping me hold the day-to-day more or less steadily on course.  But still I noticed a kind of stasis, an unwillingness to cut bait and start a new notebook; I ended up holding in a sort of abeyance any and all plans more than a couple days out.  I felt like I was a little bit in limbo, and it didn't feel great.

As I draft this, it's June 30, and the great folks at Alaska Airlines have, as of yesterday, reunited me with the Traveler's I'd left on an airplane some two weeks before!**  I plan to spend a chunk of my evening patching the holes in it left by my couple weeks without it and un-stuck-ing myself by doing some planning; making my monthly log for July and updating the future log as needed.

But I think it's also going to be worth reflecting a bit on the not-great quality of dependence I feel about this tool.  After all, the point of a tool is to increase capacity when you use it, not to remove capacity when you can't use it.

I will also be thinking a bit about NOT LEAVING MY FUCKING NOTEBOOK AND TWO FAVORITE PENS ON THE GOD DAMNED AIR PLANE.***

* It would take some digging to figure out exactly when. Certainly I had adopted the notions of collections by early 2019, and I read the early round of publicity the method got, even tho at the time I was more a hipster PDA guy, due mainly to my depraved lust enthusiasm for binder clips.

What I can't immediately determine is when I started daily logging. It's at least possible that I actually started daily logging as a work thing (thus, in notebooks that are jobs ago and long gone) and only later brought it home. Hard to say and boy do I not feel like going through that shelf just at the moment to figure it out.

** Perhaps more importantly, Alaska lost and found has reunited me with all the stuff that was crammed into the notebook, especially and most notably two of my very favorite pens, both gifts from Noodles, my beloved Caran d'Ache 849 and Kaweco Liliput. The lost and found crew—or the journey the notebook went on—did break one pen, but I think I managed to glue it back together, so that's a small price to pay. That they used the built-in elastic band to close the notebook up—vertically, not horizontally—I will forgive, even though I never, ever use the band, either properly or, as they did, improperly, because it's a good sign that there's something lightly wrong with the cueing the tool gives you, if you can put it on wrong and are led to do so. It's a lesson, you see.

*** In the spirit of full disclosure: This only occurred to me at 8:30 p.m. on July 2.

Because YOU Demanded It! Nibbling Around the Edges of Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew (in 2026)

Home sick today, I thought to revisit a paper bag on the shelf, which turned out to contain a pile of comics I couldn't resist a couple months back. Reading these gently funny, harshly punny, books is a good use of a sick hour, if you have any affection for the conventions of VERY early 80s team superhero comics. What stuck out to me, though, was less fewer the mainline story or character elements and more the now-weird artifacts of comic books circa 1981. An example might be "do comic book panels need backgrounds Y/N".

Okay one thing I'm embarrassed to admit is that only this time did I get the joke that Yankee Poodle and Alley-Kat-Abra are fighting because ... they're a cat and dog. Duh. Hope you like that "Crashing Boars" joke, because it shows up in each of the first four issues, I think.

Also I remember at the time (roughly 1986 when I was reading this, so already in cheapo scavenged back issues) thinking Yankee Poodle was the better of these two characters, but I think now the clear creator fave is Alley-Kat-Abra, who gets most of the best lines—like such as "Pipe me aboard, Captain."—in addition to being the one all the boy characters like.

Sometimes your colorist maybe is thinking about something else.

I assume the letterer here had some beef with the great Scott Shaw! and denied him his bang deliberately. Of note: I have never seen this letterer's name anywhere else, ever. As the oldest aphorism in funny-animal comics has it, when you mess with Scott Shaw!, you best dig two graves, one for your top half, and one for your bottom half.

These ads are incredible.

This house ad is also incredible, at least for the last couple lines. I genuinely didn't know Detective Comics Comics had this degree of a sense of humor.

Was everybody liking this? No, not everybody was liking this.

You know, comic books. For kids.

With ... jokes like kids like, about production techniques and references to artists from 40 years before.

It's interesting to me that the main characters are drawn with so much less loving care and fun than this throwaway movie-director character, with a series of pretty good hat jokes and an absolutely perfect Three-Stooges-take panel. If there is any justice in the world, the next time you see me, I'll be wearing this "AUTEUR" hat. Also is it me or is "PERSON" in the context of a world where everyone is a non-human talking animal kind of fucked up?

I'm actually angry they missed the "fowl-up" joke here. They're birds FFS do I have to think of everything around here?

Also angry about what an incomprehensibly awful thing this is to say, in context. Look at the below, but only if you have a strong, strong stomach.

Okay this is the last chance—turn back close tab NOW if you want to keep thinking of Pig-Iron as a loveable goof, rather than a cruelly taunting predator.

Jesus god, man, you're talking to a duck! Do NOT talk about cooking eggs on your body and eating them!!!

Inland Empire plot analysis

I saw Inland Empire (2006, David Lynch) at the Paramount Theater in Austin, TX twenty years ago. And have rewatched it quite often. Even posted a piece here last year. After each and every time I watched Inland Empire I have never got it. Until now. Also proud if not smug claim here I snooped around online and don’t think anyone else has tried this interpretation. And not that it matters but I have been obsessively rewatching it and taking notes and thinking about it these past couple weeks. 

All of the scenes in Poland with LOST GIRL and PHANTOM are Vier Sieben. Scenes I been calling the Sepia Polish Narrative. And as I’m sure you know Vier Sieben is the film based on a gypsy cursed Polish folk tale where both of the leads were killed which had to do with something in the script. The same script being filmed as On High in Blue Tomorrows. In Vier Sieben Lost Girl plays a character having an affair behind her husband’s back with her lover played by SMITHY. Lost Girl and her lover both intend to leave their respective spouses for each other in the film.
     Vier Sieben Lost Girl also eventually becomes a prostitute on the street. Her husband Phantom beats her up because of this. Her lover ends up killed on the street. And her lover’s wife is stabbed in the stomach murdered too. Some intriguing bits along the way are that her lover’s wife earlier says I won’t let you have her. And she mentions that she can’t have kids. All of this either can be found in the same screenplay filmed as On High in Blue Tomorrows or manifested as effects of the cursed old Polish folk tale.
     In On High in Blue Tomorrows NIKKI GRACE and DEVON BERK likewise play an adulterous couple. And Nikki’s character SUE BLUE will similarly work the street as a prostitute. Up to this point I’ve been using character names as they’re listed in the credits but me diverging from that here I’m making up my own names and want to refer to the character Julia Ormond plays instead of DORIS SIDE from here on as ORMOND.
     In both Vier Sieben and On High in Blue Tomorrows the female lead has an affair with a male character whose wife is played by ORMOND. I posit that the interrogation scene with white tee and jean shorts ORMOND with a screwdriver sticking out of her gut is in between the films Vier Sieben and On High in Blue Tomorrows. She has the gut wound she got in Vier Sieben and when she stabs street prostitute Sue it’s a scene that’s part of On High in Blue Tomorrows enacting her character’s revenge for committing adultery with her husband BILLY SIDE.
 
Another big mystery occurs when the two leads are reading the script of On High in Blue Tomorrows what happens when they see someone watching them from then disappearing inside the Smithy’s House set on their soundstage. Later revealed it was another Nikki. I see the Smithy’s House set as a locus where the curse shifts the leads between worlds.
     Nikki Grace is a rich movie star. Her husband PIOTREK is protective jealous possessive Polish. When Nikki shifts to what I like calling her Mumblecore Narrative this starts with the scene she’s cooking scrambled eggs on the stove. The beautiful thing about Inland Empire and David Lynch for that matter is that the divisions between these worlds aren’t clear cut. They’re blurry. Intuitive. Cinematic. Dreamy. I think white trash Sue Blue Axxon N monologues to the guy behind the desk is On High in Blue Tomorrows whereas Mumblecore Narrative Nikki is at the barbecue in the backyard and the guy who has the ketchup accident all over his white tee is Smithy.
     As in Smithy is married to Lost Girl and neither of them are characters in either Vier Sieben or On High in Blue Tomorrows. This couple lives in Southern California. Sometime during or after filming her role as the lead in Vier Sieben Lost Girl got trapped in that room where she has to watch tv and cry. That is until her husband Smithy finds the old Polish people with some kind of metaphysical supernatural or otherwise abstract cinematic capacity who’ve summoned him to reunite them with their son à la Blue Velvet once he delivers the pistol they give him to Mumblecore Narrative Nikki so she can kill the Phantom.
     Yet another crucial link is Lynchian violence. Lynch is a master of sound design. Consider how in Vier Sieben when the character Lost Girl plays is severely beaten by her cuck husband and when Mumblecore Narrative Smithy assaults his wife both instances take on this unsettling jarring abrasive violent static sound design that links them. This link is how the curse works. Like déjà vu or some force beyond your control pulling you into shifting you into another reality. But again speaking of sound design what happens when Nikki kills the Phantom? Peaceful. Soft.
 
Loose ends. What has to be my wildest take the way ORMOND in Vier Sieben tells her husband I’m not who you think I am. And one of the LA girls breaks the fourth wall and reiterates Who is she? Later when Mumblecore Narrative Nikki is getting attacked the aggressor says I’m not who you think I am is the result of the curse taking the linking connective possession of him. The ORMOND character in Vier Sieben curse is she is doomed to shift between Vier Sieben and On High in Blue Tomorrows. In the Smithy’s House set Piotrek is cursed to shift identities between Nikki Graces’s rich husband and Smithy the husband of Lost Girl. 
     What about that black and white scene in the beginning when the man and woman with blurred out faces go into that room with the couch and he uses her as his whore? This feels like Lost Girl submitting to sexual harassment casting couch to get a role in Vier Sieben. And this has been said before online I didn’t come up with it. A lot of people read into Mulholland Drive (2001, Lynch) a whole plethora of blue color-coded vast conspiracy systemic sexual assault quid pro quo Hollywood predator behavior and I’ve long asked myself how does this relate to the overall experience of deciphering meaning from the narrative of that film and now to an extent Inland Empire.
     I’m starting to lean a little more into it. Say Lost Girl had been taken advantage of by some predator producer is part of the curse. Say she’s trapped in that room because she’s captive held against her will forced to have sex with other men there. Say she shows this to Nikki through the silk hole. And the Lynchian exchange say Nikki Grace has distanced herself from corrupt Hollywood but gets this role even though she’s washed up has-been and Lost Girl in return experiences this as evidenced by that shot of her quoting dialogue from Sunset Boulevard (1950, Billy Wilder).
     And cringey notice those lines of dialogue when the LA girls at Smithey’s House say they let the Phantom do whatever he wants and eagerly spread their legs wide for him. This I will concede could serve dual purpose of reflecting him being a predator producer. Say the curse the VISITOR #1 tells Nikki a little boy went out to play and caused a reflection then evil was born could be read as the predator producer of Vier Sieben saw his opposite in that film. Namely him being married to Lost Girl and her cucking him. Say the Phantom’s hypnotizing manipulations is cinematic symbolism for coercing women into something they do against their will? This also presents a troubling interpretation of Smithy’s offhand remarks that he works for Phantom. But all the better to be used by the old Polacks to lure the horse to the well. I have a hunch Vier Sieben didn’t happen so long before On High in Blue Tomorrows as we may have thought.
     So ok Nikki probably drapes her blue silk robe over the chair in the theater at the end to symbolize her shedding the cloak of denial feigned ignorance of predator producer. Similarly at the end when Nikki sees rich Nikki wearing blue this could symbolize her remaining naïve in another sense. It seems too easy the way Nikki shoots Phantom. It can’t be that easy.
     But why we get an insert of Smithy taking off his green silk robe or pajama top I dare not venture to guess. I know what your thinking. But could it be that obvious? It’s not about the bunny. 
 
Closing. Ever notice how often the visual motif of movie lights occur? The title card I used to think was a lighthouse spot now makes more sense. Marilyn Levens’ Starlight Celebrity Show sequence opens with a Klieg light. The David Lynch voice cameo as BUCKY JAY that causes Irons to break character laughing all revolves around adjusting a light. You want the 2K lower boss? Try to find some more on your own have fun.