112: Dad Energy

The heat broke. The summer solstice has passed. My heirloom tomato bushes are dotted with green fruit. I took a long bike ride this morning, and I'm going to watch Bull Durham tonight with friends, most of whom have never seen it; watching Bull Durham feels like a triumph for this particular circle of friends because it is a Dad Movie through and through. Most of us have an intense concentration of Dad Energy, regardless of gender and despite the fact that none of us are actually parents.

I don't know how Dad Energy works in other cultures or locations; the version I'm most familiar with is a kind of slow-moving (but no less passionate) intensity, paired with a practical concern for everyone's well-being. The Dad Friend will walk your dog or feed your cats or jump your car battery for you. They'll take ages to go through a museum, stopping to read every plaque and to closely examine every artifact in the case. They'll patiently explain how hockey works to you. They grill, or they bake, or they make their own ice cream, and they never post the results of their culinary experiments on Instagram. They putter. Dad Energy is the kind of unassuming intelligence I most associate with my late grandfather, who read a lot and thought a lot about what he read, but rarely talked about it, at least not pretentiously.

What I wrote:

For Reactor, I took a deep dive into a line in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga that didn't sit right with me. Writing this piece helped me clarify a few of my own feelings about the movie; it also made me appreciate what George Miller is doing with the story as a whole, except for one crucial misstep.

For Seeing & Believing, I reviewed the lovely indie movie Janet Planet.

What I Talked About:

I got together with the Exiting Through the 2010s podcast to talk about Steven Soderbergh's Logan Lucky, a heist comedy that has, to my mind, the only pop culture reference joke that gets funnier with each passing year.

What I'm reading:

I just picked up Apostles of Mercy by Lindsay Ellis, the third book in the Noumena series. It's an alternate history about first contact with aliens going horribly, predictably wrong, mostly from the perspective of a young woman with a linguistics degree and a strange bond with one of the aforementioned aliens. I'm a sucker for science fiction that takes linguistics seriously, and I appreciate just how weird Ellis's aliens are. I'm only in the opening chapters of the book at the moment, but so far, it's scratching the speculative-fiction itch just right.