And you take on the dreams of the ones who have slept there

Happy Saint Patrick's Day! Have some assorted, mostly non-Irish items of interest.

1. Welcome to The Museum of All Things Awesome and That Go Boom. The catalogue won't be out until July, but I am very proud of my contribution. In the meantime, enjoy the history of the collections, the calendar of events, and the tiny hats on the Ganymedean brain slugs. I really like the logo.

2. I am really very honored by all the things asakiyume said about my film writing on Twitter.

3. Thanks to handful_ofdust's review of Nicholas McCarthy's At the Devil's Door (2014), I've been listening repeatedly to "Break Under Pressure" by Jerry's Diner. As far as either of us can tell, the song was written and recorded for the movie, but it is a pitch-perfect piece of new wave. The ominous verses burst out into a sparkling, anthemic chorus which is no less lyrically downbeat; I don't know its context in the movie, but I can easily imagine teenagers at home and at concerts singing jubilantly along, exactly the way that "Love Will Tear Us Apart" is an incredible earworm, almost parodically poppy. The band appears to have a self-titled debut album, but I cannot tell anything else about them.

4. I meant to comment on two obituaries as they went by: Ken Adam and Peter Maxwell Davies. The former was a seminal production designer with credits as far-flung as Night of the Demon (1957) and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968); his high-tech, Mod-futurist work on Dr. No (1962), Goldfinger (1964), and five more Bond films through Moonraker (1979) gave us the spy-fi aesthetic that has been with us ever since. I hope someone showed him Miike Snow's "Genghis Khan" and I hope he liked it. The latter was a composer whose work I should have known better, since his chamber opera The Lighthouse (1979) was one of the most sea-haunted things I've ever seen staged. He set multiple works by George Mackay Brown, one of my favorite poets; he wrote a selkie tale for small children and a piano and string quartet with Northumbrian pipes for the Emperor Hadrian. I didn't realize when I saw The Devils (1971) that the music was his. The good news in both cases is that the art is still in the world. It seems to make some difference to how I perceive it if the people are or not.

5. The mail just provided me with a copy of rose_lemberg's Marginalia to Stone Bird (2016). It has been receiving wonderful and well-deserved reviews all over the place. It's got a great dybbuk poem and a lot else besides.

I must attend to the potatoes and corned beef.