w/e 18 November 2018
It feels wrong, given there’s so much interesting and different music out there, but sometimes I must admit I’m keenest on a fairly narrow field of tuneful guitar music.
For example, I looked forward to the recent albums by Christine and the Queens, Janelle Monáe and Robyn, having liked their previous albums a lot… but then, after a few listens, I haven’t wanted to re-play them much. They seem well-liked and, you know, they’re fine. But they haven’t grabbed me.
But then I keep wanting to play and play Not With That Attitude by Fightmilk, or Tell No One by Bad Moves, or Future Me Hates Me by The Beths. So good. On the one hand they all sound like some bands I liked in the 1990s and maybe I should move on… but on the other hand, at least they’re not bands I liked in the 1990s — they’re 2018’s young people wearing glasses and playing guitar. So, they make me happy and it’s all fine!
This week I started work on a new site for a client and it’s going smoothly.
I’m using Wagtail a content management system that’s built on Django and so far I really like it. If building a content-heavy, fairly static site (like news, blog, information pages, etc) it saves a lot of the time one would spend on doing basic Django coding. And, it has admin pages that are much more suited to this kind of site than Django’s invaluable-but-utilitarian built-in forms. And, because it’s all Django the developer has a lot of control over details of the site’s configuration and can incorporate any other non-Wagtail code. So far, thumbs up.
I went to see Wildlife this week which I liked a lot. It’s the first film Paul Dano’s directed and stars Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal. I’d see most things that involved any of those three and I wasn’t disappointed. Also, Ed Oxenbould, playing Mulligan and Gyllenhaal’s son, was really good.
Most of Dano’s shots were static, only moving the camera when there was a reason to, and I loved that. I imagine I’d do similar if I directed something, as I always need a reason to justify any artistic/design decision (for better or worse). That sentence contains an “if” so big as to be mythical.
That’s all. Have a nice week.