PicoBlog

The Boniface Optionis a strange book. I’d say eighty percent of it already appeared in The Benedict Option (I’m certainly not accusing author Andrew Isker of plagiarism; I’m simply saying that the ideas are not new). But this book is just over half as long, and the ideas have been re-imagined here as pugnacious and resentful. If you had ever wondered how The Benedict Option would have been if its author were a late-millennial Calvinist Memelord Of Moscow, Idaho, well, now you have your answer.

Happy three days til Christmas! If you were anything like me in high school and early college, you were probably the type of annoying person who snuck your more palatable emo & pop-punk Christmas-themed songs into the mix of corporate-approved winter-time pap during the holiday season so you’d be able to listen to at least a few things to keep you sane during the seemingly endless eight-hour-shift-that-always-ends-up-becoming-twelve-hour-shift days and nights at Starbucks.

Everyone loves Slate Star Codex’s monthly Links posts. I recently realized that I, too, get access to a lot of monthly content I can talk about. I’ve decided to try out these short form multi-review posts, monthly, as a treat. Be warned, these are designed to be written faster, so they might have more technical errors or typos. Comment if you catch one. I also think it’s best to avoid separating the list into LOVED IT, KINDA LIKED IT, HATED IT as usual.

Two summers ago, I was driving on a South Dakota reservation with a film crew and Catholic journalist, following a group of Knights of Columbus trying to advance the cause of Nicholas Black Elk, a Lakota Native American catechist. During the long drive, we discussed faith, fatherhood (most of the passengers had small infants and newborns), and films — but one topic initiated by a fellow traveler was “What would be the movie you’d want to show your son?

Among a certain set of movie-crazy undergrads in the early 1990s, Hal Hartley was the coolest young director alive. You’ll have to trust me on this, because contemporary evidence is scarce. If you identified as an “indie type,” as I did during this period, VHS tapes of his first two features, The Unbelievable Truth and Trust, were in heavy backpack circulation, and his hour-long Surviving Desire became a coveted rarity, like owning a copy of Neil Young’s On the Beach.

The best seat at ChikaLicious Dessert Bar in the East Village is, unsurprisingly, at the counter facing the open kitchen. Here, you get a rare glimpse into a pastry chef’s workspace, which is usually holed up and out of sight in restaurant kitchens or basements. You’ll probably have an up-close view of Chika Tillman, the owner, dipping her spoon into a metal food pan filled with Meyer lemon sorbet or some other soft cream in search of the perfect quenelle.

The word “revivalism” is a bit of slur for some today, and not just the highbrows, or the mainline, or the progressive evangelicals. I hear this term at times from quite unlikely sources. Photo by Christian Dubovan on Unsplash What do people mean by the term when they are criticizing it? I’ve long pondered this, wrote about it in King Jesus Gospel, but it’s a term that still turns the lip upward for many.

Most people know Revolutionary Road as a wonderfully sad 2008 movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. But RR was a Richard Yates 1962 book before that, one that was wildly popular with critics and other literary authors, but not with the wider public. It’s a beautifully written book with the theme of “hopeless emptiness,” precisely how the main characters, Frank (Leo) and April (Kate) Wheeler, refer to their lives in 1955 Connecticut suburbia.

(Rewatch/Rewind is a feature in which I revisit a film that once made an impression on me, but I haven’t watched in at least a decade. Spoilers should be expected.) When I was young, maybe 16 or so, a kid murdered another kid in the quiet little New Jersey town where I went to high school. I didn’t know them; they were a little younger than me, but it happened not far from where I lived, in a long, lonely stretch of woods bisected by a country road.