Spectrum Culture was back in full wing this week, which meant that my words were all over the place as well. I was especially busy on the movie review front. First I weighed in on a highly problematic drama built around grief and guilt and contrived tension. We’re in that weird stasis zone in between the end of year Oscar fodder (much of which I can’t get screeners of because they’re being highly protective of pirating, even though they send them out as freely as Bed Bath and Beyond coupons to major critics and guild members) and the launch of the early-year push of good stuff. Drab artistic misfires are what’s available for folks like me, it seems.

More intriguing and certainly far odder was the film I covered for my other review of the week, a strange little art piece which I got to watch in advance of a retrospective at the Anthology Film Archives in New York. So didn’t that make me feel fancy? It was intriguing, baffling and exciting in its vehement difference. It’s exactly the sort of work that I’d never get to see if I weren’t writing for Spectrum.

Finally, I contributed to our latest list was about “Beautiful Songs About Cities.” I went with one of the few songs that makes me want to live in the city it’s about, or, to be more precise, makes me long for a fictional past in which I lived in that city around the time I was twenty-six or twenty-seven.