Thinking week
They sometimes happen. The weeks of noodling around with thoughts and no real input or output. That'll come a little bit further along the line.
36. *Flook, Flatfish (album, 1999)
37. *Flook, Flook! Live! (album, 1998)
38. *Flook, Haven, (album, 2005)
39. *Flook, Rubai (album, 2002)
40. Black Panther (film, dir. Ryan Coogler, 2018)
41. Elizabeth Zimmermann, Knitter's Almanac (nonfiction book, 1974)
Black Panther was a genuinely good film, coming hot off the heels of ushering The Shape of Water twice in one day. (Apparently I am now the kind of person who comes out of working at a cinema and immediately decides to pay to go to a different one. No ragrets.) They're an interesting pair: one expects TSoW to have a truckload of politics in it, and yet it's very determinedly straight-down-the-line romance; Black Panther ought by rights to be a superhero film about a bloke in a skin-tight catsuit, and yet here it is with its nuanced political points, its celebration of African diversity and diaspora - it's a comparatively small point, but I am delighted also that Ryan Coogler seems to understand that you don't need 5000 nuclear explosions to make a climactic battle scene. All you need is a bunch of people with spears and an emotional connection you prepared earlier. He's only 31, and all. Someone give this man a shiny statuette and a blank cheque. (Also I am automatically inclined to like a film if it has a woman over 40 in it with a good speaking role. Give me Angela Bassett or give me death.)
A lot of Flook this week. This is because, in the absence of anything else, Flook is what the inside of my head sounds like.