I am missing Amar quite a bit right now. Or maybe the idea of Amar - we'd drifted in and out of closeness over the years, but he represented something more broadly wrt the zeitgeist. Being connected to the Culture. He'd like that I think.
He did an annual music list which served as a touchpoint for a lot of people. The rest of the distribution list is keeping it going this year which is both wonderful and heartbreaking. It is still a little surreal and shocking for someone to just be gone like that.
Anyway - here is what I posted on that thread:
staycation is kinda nice. i wake up in the morning and my brain wants to deal with work things i'm responsible for and then i realize - nah - i don't need to do this. very liberating indeed.
so instead i'm taking pleasure in voluntary house tidying (this is what growing up actually means - hello adult paradigm). catching up on champions league football (atletico "fashy" madrid are officially my least favorite club). doing deep dives into old school jamaican ska (hot take - ska >>> reggae - reggae messed with the best parts of ska).
There will be lists. Not quite ready with them yet, and I struggled to keep up with new music this past year, so I'll probably just fall back on everything old is new again (at least to me). But I did read a bit. And I certainly watched a lot of TV (didn't we all?).
Speaking of TV - Book of Boba is pretty lame. Mando was fun but the Boba Fett show just seems like they took all the charm out of the previous show, while throwing in a bunch of stupid, nonsensical scenarios. Maybe I'm just reaching the end of the line with the bloated corpse of the extended Star Wars universe. And if we're being honest with ourselves, maybe it was never that great to begin with, and more derivative than anything else. But hey - this is the mono-culture nostalgia.
Anyway - here's hoping for an upswing in 2022.
Less COVID, more Klay.
And hopefully we'll get to go on some family adventures.
