My efforts for Spectrum Culture this week began with an incredibly difficult movie to write about: Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color. The movie is so densely inscrutable that any attempt to summarize it (or even more daunting, to speculate on its meaning) is practically doomed to failure. I feel I did all right, but I’m actively looking forward to writing on what appears to be a fairly simple documentary for this coming week.

On the music side, I wrote about the new album from Caitlin Rose, which is very solid. Though I didn’t make this comparison in the review, it reminded me a lot of Shelby Lynne’s one great album. That’s a very good thing, especially if Rose doesn’t follow a similar trajectory to Lynne and follow it up with an absolutely atrocious effort.

Finally, I threw a few words at Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections for our List Inconsequential feature on unhappy families in literature.