I love building with Legos, as regular readers will know quite well. When I was a kid, I would frustrate my older brother because I’d want to “use my imagination” with the pieces instead of building the actual sets. As I’ve gotten older, I very much build what’s advertised on the tin (as today’s contributor might put it).
Still, few things are more fun than diving into a random pile of pieces and just winging it. When my niece and nephews were younger, the one activity they could all get behind was doing just that with Uncle Tyler. We’d dump a bunch of Legos onto my parents’ dining room table and go to town building stuff. They would ask me to build various things for them, but my favorite was seeing the crazy stuff they came up with.
One thing I’ve come to appreciate is that I am not a Master Builder—far from it. I see the things people do with Lego and I realize I am still, in terms of skill, a six-year old building overly geometric structures.
Lego have really gone “mainstream”—not that they were ever on the fringes, but they’re now advertised for everyone from kids to adults—and the talents of millions of builders are easily on display via social media, television, streaming, etc. People will spend hours building entire cities, full of hyper-specific details, or complex spacecraft with motorized parts. It’s all quite fun—and humbling.
Naturally, it’s become competitive, and television shows feature Lego builds taking on insane challenges to see who is, truly, a Lego Master.
It’s wild to think how different the world was just twenty years ago. The Internet in the early 2000s was in this weird, fun phase between the DIY ethos of the 1990s and the then-emerging-but-still-scrappy social media juggernauts of today. I first learned about YouTube from a print article in Newsweek, of all places, around that time. Sure, there was content online, but mostly text; slower connections meant that video wasn’t so easily obtained (getting to college in 2003 and experiencing truly high-speed Internet for the first time was life-changing).
In other words, cable television was still king. Indeed, it was something of a golden age—or, perhaps, a dark age—of trashy reality television. Survivor was an international phenomenon. MTV stopped playing music videos and just showed annoying youths screeching at each other in luxury houses. Watching shows about people shopping for houses in those pre-Great Recession days was a national pastime.
In retrospect, reality television was something of a precursor to modern YouTube, in which audiences formed parasocial bonds with television hosts. Sure, the possibility for engagement was far more remote, but people got really into those shows. But the cultural power was far greater, because everything was filtered through the Big Three networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—and a host of related channels. Everyone was talking about, say, Lost or The Office at work; media journalists called these “water cooler shows,” because everyone would discuss them at the water cooler the next day. “Appointment viewing” was another term, because you couldn’t just watch a show whenever you wanted to—you had to watch it live or wait for a rerun. Ergo, if you wanted to be up on things at the water cooler, you had to keep your appointment!
The fewer options combined with rigid airing schedules meant that far more people were watching the same programming. The kind of scattershot fracturing of media we experience now was not really a problem. Sure, there were tons of channels and you could watch one of those instead of whatever the hit show was, and plenty of folks did; but so many people wanted to be in on the conversation. There wasn’t just a parasocial relationship with television hosts or characters; there was a social element to television.
It also meant that shows were competing for eyeballs in the same finite time blocks. TiVo and DVRs alleviated this competition slightly, as you could record one show while watching another in the same block, but it wasn’t like you could hop on YouTube and watch tons of show clips or sports highlight reels or the news.
Little did we realize it at the time, but the era of cable television’s dominance was swiftly ending. For that moment, though, it seemed stronger than ever (perhaps there’s a lesson there), and the competition for the top ratings was fierce.
The king of primetime (or, at least, one of the jester-princes of the era) was investigative journalist Chris Hansen, who’s iconic phrase “why don’t you have a seat” became one of the earliest memes. Those words meant that a degenerate pervert was about to get his comeuppance.
As morally satisfying as the show was, there was always something a bit sleazy about it (and not just because grown men were attempting to engage in illegal acts with minors), and the new A24 film Primetime (2026) explores the darker side of the program.
While visiting my older brother the other weekend, we drove down to the AMC in Savannah, Georgia to catch Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026). I’m of the mind that if there is a Spider-Man movie, I must see it.
I’m not a huge comic book nerd (although I like them; I just don’t know all the deep lore and storylines and such), and I haven’t devoured hundreds of issues of Spider-Man comics, but I’ve always appreciated the character. Plus, my generation came of age with the Tobey Maguire flicks (directed by none other than Sam Raimi). I’ve heard it said that each generation has their Spider-Man; mine is Maguire (and my Mary Jane is Kirsten Dunst). Also, where else are you going to see Willem DaFoe lose his mind as a super villain (and not as just every other character he plays)?
That said, I love the character and his backstory. Spider-Man is basically a goofy kid with amazing powers who has to grow up fast and learn some hard lessons. He is duty-bound—“with great power comes great responsibility”—to protect those around him, even at great personal cost. Very often, Spider-Man doesn’t get the girl; sometimes, the girl gets killed!
That theme continues with the current iteration of Spider-Man as portrayed by the eternally boyish Tom Holland, albeit with a twist that I think Spider-Man: Brand New Day essentially nullifies.
Well, long after the brouhaha has passed, I’m finally doing it: writing my review of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026). Dr. Wife and I saw it back on Saturday, 25 July 2026, in inglorious 2D (as opposed to glorious 3D or IMAX). Overall, we enjoyed it.
Before diving into the film itself, let me address the meta-narrative/-commentary around the film: the woke casting. Yes, Ellen Page (now going by “Elliott”) appears playing a Greek soldier. If you were going to cast a woman-pretending-she’s-a-man as a male Greek soldier, Ellen Page was about as benign as you could get. The role is a young man who is drafted, essentially, when he’s still a little boy, so he’s kind of gangly and weak, even after ten years at war. Ellen is dispatched in the first few minutes of the film, and only appears again as a shade from the Underworld, her figures so obscured by mud and her voice so obscured by scary audio effects that, at long last, she can actually pass as a man.
It’s the same for the other controversial casting decisions: Lupita Nyong’o as Helen (and Helen’s sister) and Zendaya as Athena. As much as I loved the “Helen of Detroit” memes and thought it was kind of ridiculous to cast the incredibly black (but still beautiful, just not “Helen of Troy” beautiful) Nyong’o as a flaxen-haired Grecian super beauty, she appears only fleetingly in the flick. Zendaya’s casting is, perhaps, the most egregious, primarily because, well, she plays herself the entire time—making one or two facial expressions while wordlessly staring at Odysseus. At least here it makes sense, because (MINOR SPOILER ALERT) she’s basically a representation of his trauma over the atrocities he committed at Troy, so looking like a pouty bullfrog is a bit more excusable.
None of that is to endorse this casting—there were many superior choices to portray “the face that launched a thousand ships”—but to note these roles are fairly minor. Remember, Helen is the catalyst for The Iliad, which details the origins of the Trojan War; The Odyssey focuses on Odysseus’s long voyage home after the war. Matt Damon was convincing as Odysseus, and Anne Hathaway was exquisite as Penelope, Odysseus’s besieged but loyal wife.
One more note on the casting: the one time the diversity casting made me LOL was when the Indian actor portraying Odysseus’s lieutenant exclaimed, proudly, “We are Greeks!” It was so incongruous, it made me laugh. That is, perhaps, a commentary on the pitfalls of “woke” and/or DIE casting: there is a thing that it is to be “Greek”—or “Indian,” or “English,” etc.—and we all know, even if we don’t want to admit it, that a guy from the Indian subcontinent is not Greek (although I’m sure some wags would point to Alexander the Great’s conquests of the far western edges of India, or note the common Indo-European ancestry, etc., but let’s not get carried away with autistry here).
Last summer I filled in for the pianist of the First United Methodist Church here in our new little town. Their regular pianist was, until this past Sunday, teen phenom John Patrick Hutchinson, who is already a world-class classical pianist at the age of seventeen (actually, I think he turns eighteen today, based on my foggy recollection of the pre-concert notes; happy birthday, JPH!). Hutchinson gave a farewell concert called A Final Measure: Notes Before Departure this past Sunday evening at the church; it’s his farewell because he’ll be heading to conservatory in a couple of weeks.
Instead of being held in the sanctuary, where the piano is unfortunately hidden by the organ, it was held in a small chamber just off of the sanctuary—and it was packed. The old men of the church started grabbing additional chairs from various Sunday School classrooms and other church hidey-holes as attendees poured in—as they continued to do well after the advertised start of the program. It was really amazing seeing, in this small city in an obscure corner of South Carolina, several dozen people—I estimated about 80 people in attendance—turning out to hear this young man play.
The size of the crowd matched the size of the talent. Hutchinson played with a beautiful, perceptive touch, drawing out the colors of each piece. His dynamics were varied and intense, and he played the technical passages of each piece with a light deftness that made the notes almost float.
The program was very balanced between Romantic, Impressionistic, Baroque, and modern classical. He opened with Franz Schubert‘s Sonata in A Major, D. 664, a piece from the first half of the eighteenth century that foreshadows some of the developments of the latter half of that century. There were harmonies and colorings of chords that sounded almost twentieth-century in nature; imagine how daring this piece would have been in Schubert’s time!
I did not record any of his performance—refreshing, there were no cell phones whipped out during the recital—but I’ll share performances of his pieces from other people. Here’s Alexander Gavrylyuk playing the Schubert:
After this three-part sonata, we had a brief intermission. Hutchinson resumed the second half with the Andante from Alexander Scriabin‘s Sonata No. 2 in G# Minor, Op. 19 (Sonata-Fantasy). The piece hinted at the developments in tonal experimentation of the early twentieth century (apparently, Scriabin developed his own system of atonality independent of Arnold Schoenberg‘s [in?]famous twelve-tone composing system). This piece balanced late-stage Romanticism (and even Impressionism) with some of those more—shall we say—daring innovations of the early twentieth century; overall, though, I’d say it evoked Chopin.
Here’s Yunchan Lim playing the piece:
Next came J.S. Bach‘s Prelude and Fugue in D Minor (not to be confused with his famous Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, the one always heard in scary movies). I love a good fugue, and this piece really highlighted Hutchinson’s precision, as well as Bach’s beautifully mathematical mind. It was a shorter piece, which made for a nice little refreshment after the longer Sonata-Fantasy.
Here’s a performance by Marta Czech:
Hutchinson closed with the most modern classical piece of the program, Emma Lou Diemer‘s Serenade/Toccata. It’s a piece that experiments with lively polyrhythms and often harsh dissonances, but does so without descending into pure noise territory—the dissonances serve a dynamic and musical purpose. There are also some flowing and painterly sections, which give the piece something of a contemplative yin to the more experimental yang.
Here’s a performance from my alma mater, the University of South Carolina, performed here by Paige Broadworth on 4 February 2024:
After a standing ovation, Hutchinson returned to the piano to play a jaunty ragtime tune. I’m not sure of the title of the piece, but it was quite fun. The little old lady sitting next to me started telling me her whole life story during the encore, so I couldn’t quite appreciate the piece in full, but it was fun and bouncy.
If I had to choose one word to sum up this recital, I’d pick “color.” Hutchinson pulled the unique tonal colors out of each piece; indeed, the program, other than perhaps the Bach selection from The Well-Tempered Clavier, seemed to focus on pieces with rich, complex tone colors. And like a master painter, Hutchinson interpreted the colors of each piece with a skill beyond his years.
Also: what a gift! This church has been blessed with a phenomenal young talent; so has the town. It is proof that even—perhaps often—it is in out-of-the-way places where talents are bursting forth. Yes, perhaps those provincial talents inevitably are drawn to the cultural centers—New York City, LA, Nashville, Des Moines—but they come from all across our vast, great nation.
All I can say is, bravo, Mr. Hutchinson! We hope you come back home for another performance soon.
Back in late 2022 and early 2023, Ponty and I did a series of posts about our favorite films. I ranked 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back as my number one pick. If we redid the lists, I doubt it would rank that high, but it would certainly be in the top five.
At the time, I noted that Empire was the first film I ever reviewed for what would become Monday Morning Movie Reviews. At the time, I just called it Monday Movie Review, perhaps knowing there’d be days I’d miss the “morning” deadline. Regardless, the review of that film marked something of a turning point for The Portly Politico, moving away from primarily political topics and moving more decisively towards cultural ones.
One of the flicks on my mental “to view” list for some time now was today’s feature, The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971; that’s an Amazon Affiliate link; I receive a portion of any purchases made through that link, at no additional cost to you). It’s been wickedly hard to track down online, although I’ve seen its sequel, Dr. Phibes Rises Again (same affiliate link as above) available on a number of platforms. For whatever reason, I never cared enough to find the DVD (ibid.)—or to even consider looking for it!
So when the sequel popped up on YouTube a couple of weeks ago, I decided to hunt down the original. Surely YouTube would have it as one of their free (with ads) flicks, yes?
Well, no. But someone—or two someones—had uploaded it to YouTube. I can’t vouch for how legit it is that they’ve done so, but they’ve head the film uploaded for seven years, so I imagine American International Pictures or the copyright holders of the various Great American Songbook tunes in the film don’t care or don’t know about the upload (hopefully I’m not outing them with this review). Regardless, two gentlemen in New Castle, Pennsylvania, have a little horror show called New Castle After Dark (website) in which they dress in the kind of tuxedos nerds wear to the prom. They also smoke lots of cigarettes and drink dark beer while they make some general comments about the flick.
It’s a charming setup, and I appreciated that they didn’t cut into the film too frequently. From what I recall, they do an intro, then host a segment midway through the film, and finally close with some concluding remarks. It’s just the right about of interstitial commentary, and I think it’s super cool that they’re trying to capture the spirit (no pun intended) of late-night horror hosts.
Here’s the flick with their commentary if you want to check it out yourself:
The premise for Dr. Phibes is insanely fun and campy: the titular doctor, who holds dual doctorates in music and theology, seeks revenge on the surgeons who he believes botched his wife’s surgery some years earlier. He methodically murders each doctor according to the Ten Plagues of Egypt from Exodus.
Phibes himself is a gruesome character. While his wife was going into surgery, he attempted to rush back to England from Switzerland. In the process he crashed his car, sustaining injuries that made it impossible for him to talk. To do so, he used his knowledge of music and acoustics to create a voice box (through which he comically drinks some champagne at one point). He also has a full, automaton band that plays jazz and pop standards from the 1920s (the setting of the film) and, anachronistically, the 1930s and 1940s.
Vincent Price portrays the devilishly ingenious doctor, so imagine Price’s stentorian voice filtered through an old landline telephone wire. It’s so goofy and awesome.
Yours portly doesn’t have any new music or covers this week, although I have arranged a delightful rendition of the theme from Agatha Christie’s Poirot and hope to record that soon (thanks to Ponty for that recommendation). Here’s the theme song itself, which is a killer sax solo:
The one thing that has forestalled my practicing and recording of my arrangement of the piece is my printer. I purchased an Epson printer some years ago because I’ve had good experience with other Epson products (we use their projectors frequently at school). The printer was, as most printers are, always a bit finicky, but it worked well enough for my needs, and it’s typically rare for me to need to print anything at home.
Then one fateful day I made the mistake of updating the firmware. Suddenly, the perfectly serviceable third-party ink cartridges I used weren’t good enough for my printer, which demanded only the finest (and overpriced) Epson ink. That took me down a rabbit hole of cheapskatery in an attempt to locate an earlier version of the firmware online.
I started writing this review Sunday evening and decided to spend time with Dr. Wife, who is now done with residency and living here in our South Carolina house permanently! This morning was full of errands, including taking Nugget to the vet for her annual visit and taking care of things around the house. Ergo, I’m finally getting around to finishing up this review. —TPP
Also, this post includes some Amazon Affiliate links (the book and movie titles). I receive a portion of any purchases made through these links at no additional cost to you. —TPP
On Saturday I wrote about Richard Matheson’s novellaI Am Legend, which I enjoyed reading over the past week. What prompted me to purchase the book was re-watching its 1964 film adaptation, The Last Man on Earth. The film stars Vincent Price is the role of Robert Neville, the titular last man on Earth not to succumb to a terrible plague that turns people into vampires.
My Boomer-esque journey into the glory of free movies (with ads) on YouTube continues with the 1978 remake Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the classic featuring the likes of Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, and Jeff Goldblum. At the time of writing, the film is available for digital rental or purchase on YouTube, but it was available for free last week:
Regardless, it’s been a couple of years or so since I last saw this classic, and watching from the relative intimacy of my office computer—up close, largely focused, with a clear view a foot or so from my face—I appreciated Invasion of the Body Snatchers more than ever.
