December 2023
The Checkout Counter – Issue 14
The Checkout Counter – Issue 14
Film
- Junk Head, 2017
Animation, scifi, adventure, action. A man with robotic augmentations journeys through a subterranean labyrinth to find a solution to humankind's lost ability to reproduce. - The Boy and the Heron (君たちはどう生きるか), 20231
Animation, adventure, fantasy, drama. A teenager is relocated to the countryside as the Second World War rages in Tokyo. As he tries to adjust to his new home, he finds himself drawn to an abandoned tower deep within the family estate. - The Eight Mountains (Le otto montagne), 2022
Drama. Follows the lives of two boys—one from the city, the other from a small town in the Alps—as they grow apart, then close again, over four decades.
Books
- House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski2
Horror, mystery. An apprentice at a tattoo shop stumbles upon a long and excruciatingly footnoted manuscript about a film that doesn't exist. - Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
Fantasy. Short and evocative descriptions of the many strange cities of Kublai Khan's empire.
Articles & essays
- against the will of game databases, Oma Keeling
- No Fap: A Cultural History of Anti-Masturbation, Aya Labanieh
- On Audience, Em Reed
- Aesthetic Environmentalism, Belmont Freeman3
Notes ↓
wishing everyone a safe and healthy new year 
as always, these posts can also be found on my website and subscribed to via RSS.
- the boy and the heron: a director nearing the end of his life asks us, and himself, "how do you live?" he then takes us by the hand and offers an answer. my movie of the year!
- house of leaves: i was curious if this book's famously unconventional formatting would feel gimmicky, but it works in an incredibly satisfying way. i could spend five minutes laboring over a single page, then zip past a hundred as the words decreased and the characters pushed deeper into the labyrinthine house.
most of my reading is done on a decade-old e-reader, so the physicality of this literal page-turner was a delight. i think this is the first book that made me feel uneasy in my own home. - aesthetic environmentalism: "Fallingwater is a sublime work of art, but it strains the proposition of an architecture 'in unity with nature.' Wright was the progenitor of what you might call an aesthetic environmentalism — if it looks natural, it must be virtuous — that characterizes much of the work in Emerging Ecologies."
