The Criterion Channel had a 25% off sale a month or so ago, so I bought a yearly subscription. It is nice to have a huge library of movies worth watching. Quite a difference from Hulu and Netflix …

I’ve also read a few books over the past month. We had an extra long holiday break from school this year so I had lots of time.

Recently watched: North by Northwest (1959), Strangers on a Train (1951), The 39 Steps (1953), Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto (1954), Gente del Po (1947), Kiru (1962), Kenki (1965).

Recently read: The Passenger and Stella Maris (Cormac McCarthy), The Shape of a Pocket (John Berger), Nova Express: The Restored Text (William Burroughs, edited by Oliver Harris), Notes on Nothing: The Joy of Being Nobody (Anonymous).

Made a pot of beans, did two loads of laundry, cooked lunch, cooked dinner, shoveled the driveway. First day of 2025. Here we go.

Our elites have not suddenly become morally abhorrent; the financial globalization that [Martin] Wolf championed has allowed them to remove themselves from democratic accountability, state regulation, and communities of obligation. It has also decimated countervailing powers such as organized labor, working-class political parties, and capital controls. The market never was “permeated” by the values of duty, fairness, and decency: it was constrained by nonmarket forces. Wolf has spent his career arguing that reason and freedom demanded the removal of those constraints. And here we are.

Trevor Jackson (2025, January 16). Never Too Much [Review of the book The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, by Martin Wolf]. The New York Review of Books.

“The pocket in question is a small pocket of resistance. A pocket is formed when two or more people come together in agreement. The resistance is against the inhumanity of the New World Economic Order. …our exchanges strengthen each of us in our conviction that what is happening in the world today is wrong, and that what is often said about it is a lie.”

John Berger, from the back cover of his book The Shape of a Pocket (2003)

On the speakers right now:

From Jack Prather’s Autumn 2. Full album here