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Post-it Galen @willowpudge27.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)

A 4-star review of The Lost World: Jurassic Park

This is a hard one to review honestly, because owning a VHS copy as a child means every line of dialogue in this movie is indelably inked on my psyche. But what do we really have here? Good actors doing the best they can witha real dumb script. Jeff Goldblum & a young Vanessa Chester are the standouts.

This is one of the most jam-packed, convoluted plots I've seen in a minute: a team of scientists goes to the dino island to to naturalist work to help get the island labelled as a nature preserve. BUT after they get there a second, much larger team shows up to do poaching to start a zoo. BUT one of the scientists is a saboteur meant to stop them. BUT the leader of the poachers wants to hunt a t-rex so he kidnaps a baby. BUT the scientists steal the baby and heal it's broken leg. BUT the t-rexes attack them and blow up all their stuff. BUT now they get saved by the poachers and have to work together. BUT after fighting raptors together the poachers betray the scientis and still poach a t-rex. BUT the t-rex gets out and goes Godzilla on San Diego. BUT Jeff Goldblum finds the baby and uses it to lure the t-rex back to the boat.

Jesus theres like 3 movies in there, anyway something something parenthood the end?

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Post-it Galen @willowpudge27.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

A Sand County Almanac (Aldo Leopold)

A 5-star review of A Sand County Almanac

Written in the '40s, A Sand County Almanac is author Aldo Leopold's treatise on conservation, nature, and ethical land use. About 2/3 of the book is a series of not-quite-poetry odes to the natural world. First a section dedicated to spending a year, one month at a time, on a farm in the woods of Wisconsin, then a wider-ranging section discussing the ecology of further wildernesses, including Mexico, Canada, & even Iowa! The last 1/3 of the book is a direct discussion of ecological ethics in America, the triumphs and failures of American conservation, and a reevaluation of those ethics for the future.

A beautiful book well worth anyone's time, just about everything Leopold says rings true to today. Sometimes it's hearting to read his fears when they regarded issues that have since been solved, for example the loss of the Yellowstone wolves has been reversed (50 years later) through conservation efforts. Other points, like the anxiety about potential damage wrought by the auto industry, weigh heavy knowing much worse things have gotten since then. It's sometimes frustrating that Leopold acknowledges that Indigenous communities have developed land ethics of the type he advocates for, but basically never examines them at all. This does come across to me as a tactical choice to appeal to '40s White America, and while I understand, with modern eyes it's a palpable omission.

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Post-it Galen @willowpudge27.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Playing this Saturday (9/12) with LaRaie Zimm & Undertones Trio 8:00-10:30pm at The Friendly Tap in Berwyn, IL

A flyer with all the same info in the tweet

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Post-it Galen @willowpudge27.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Bone: The Complete Edition (Jeff Smith)

A 5-star review of Bone: The Complete Edition by Jeff Smith

What if Lord of the Rings, but with Mickey, Goofy, and Scrooge McDuck? Honestly just a great piece of fantasy. The 3 Bone cousins Fone, Smiley, & Phoney are run out of Boneville after one of Phoney's get rich schemes falls flat. Lost in a distant valley, they have run-ins with monsters, dragons, and lost queens, their fates eventually becoming fully entwined in that of this land

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Post-it Galen @willowpudge27.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Ope, late post! Playing tomorrow with Ernest Dawkins' Young Masters in the Claudia Cassidy theater in the Chicago Cultural Center at 12:45pm to start off this year's Chicago Jazzfest!

A flyer for 2026 Chicago Jazz Festival, September 3-6, 2026, presented by Wells Fargo.

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Post-it Galen @willowpudge27.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929)

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Post-it Galen @willowpudge27.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Playing this Wednesday (7/22) with the Max Brown Sextet at Fulton Street Collective in Chicago, IL alongside Sam Butler's Visions Ensemble. Show starts 7:30!!

Picture of me playing bass in dramatic black and white

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Post-it Galen @willowpudge27.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Friedrich Nietzsche translated by Walter Kaufmann)

A 3-Star review of Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

Beyond Good and Evil is Friedrich Nietzsche's attempt to put down his philosophy in plain, easy to understand writing, communicated through a long ordered list of thoughts, points, observations, and questions.

His fundamental point, to my interpretation, is that while society in the "modern day" (1885) is moving away from religion, people are not really engaging with the question of what "good" and "evil" really are without a presupposed diety or with whether those are even useful concepts to hold onto at all anymore.

To my taste, I find about 60% of what he says to be interesting and insightful. There's thoughtfulness about the dangers of dogmatism, the foundations of morality, and worthy takes on existentialism.

Unfortunately the other 40% of the book is rough. Nietzsche gives the impression of a 14-year-old Call of Duty-playing suburban 4chan user who thinks he's the only person in history to have an original thought. All of his good ideas are kneecapped by his insistence that actually Yes, Heirarchies Are Good and we should base society around empowering the Strong. His rank misogyny is thankfully contained to one chapter, but it does render said chapter vestigial. His obsession with hierarchy extends to another chapter of pure race science garbage, comparing the "base natures and values" of all the different races of the world: Germans, French, Italians, English, & South Germans. His antisemitism is at least interesting in that, while he pretty heavily rails again the contemporary Anti-Semetic League, when he tries to be positive about Jewish people it comes of as extremely condescending and othering. Finally, the book ends on a poem so bad that translator Walter Kaufman mentions multiple times throughout the introduction to the book, the footnotes to the edition, and the intro to the poem itself that it is a "blemish without which the work would be much improved"

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Post-it Galen @willowpudge27.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Playing this Friday (7/17) with the Max Brown Sextet at Clara in Chicago, IL 7:00-10:00pm Then next week on Wednesday (7/22) I'll be with Max Brown again as a quartet at Fulton Street Collective in Chicago, IL at 7:30, alongside Sam Butler's Visions Ensemble

Nightly schedule for Chicago bar Clara for the month of July

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Post-it Galen @willowpudge27.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

Damn, the penis tumor strategy never let me down before

A game of wordle with 2 words played.
All letters in PENIS are incorrect
All letters in TUMOR are incorrect

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Post-it Galen @willowpudge27.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Gigs this week! Playing with Ernest Dawkins' Young Masters this coming Thursday (7/9) at Fred Anderson Park in Chicago, IL, starting 5:30 Then on Friday (7/10) with the same group I'll be at Harper Court in Chicago, IL at noon

A flyer for the Young Masters Summer Concert Series 2026, with shows June 18th (passed), June 30 (Welles Park, 6:30), and July 9th (Fred Anderson Park, 5:30)

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Post-it Galen @willowpudge27.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Playing tomorrow (7/30) with the Young Masters at 6:30pm at Welles Park in Chicago, IL

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Post-it Galen @willowpudge27.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

A Storm of Swords (George RR Martin)

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Post-it Galen @willowpudge27.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

White Shadows in the South Seas (1928)

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Post-it Galen @willowpudge27.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Playing tomorrow (5/26) with the Max Brown Quartet at The Whistler in Chicago, IL starting at 9:00

A poster for the Max Brown Quartet The Whistler, in plain text over a field of Brat Green

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Post-it Galen @willowpudge27.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Got some gigs coming up! This Saturday (5/23), I'll be playing with the Young Masters at Hamilton Park in Chicago, IL at 1:00PM Then next week on Tuesday (5/26) I'll be playing with the Max Brown Quartet at 9:00pm at The Whistler in Chicago, IL

A black and white image of me playing the bass, sitting on a stool

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Post-it Galen @willowpudge27.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

The Broadway Melody (1929) 1 1/2 stars btw, cause I had to cut it off

A 1 1/2-star review of The Broadway Melody (1929)

A painful slog. The Broadway Melody is an early musical where there's basically 3 things going on. 1) There is a weird, incestuous(?), throuple between songwriter Eddie Kearns (Charles King) and the singing Mahoney sisters, Hank (Bessie Love) & Queenie (Anita Page). Eddie is involved with Hank, but when he sees that Queenie has gone through puberty since the last time they met, he realizes shes hot now and falls for her completely, losing all interest in Hank immediately. This is so so so gross and ruins all sympathy for Eddie, the protagonist of the film. The fact that (SPOILERS!) he gets everything he wants in the end is tbh disgusting and leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Fuck Eddie fr. What carries it through this stuff is that Bessie Love & Anita Page are delightful, with excellent chemistry throughout. 2) This is a musical about people putting on a musical (technically a revue, but c'mon). Other than the female leads, the best parts of the movie are the light comedy scenes making fun of the behind the scenes interactions of musical productions, mostly because of the ways they resonate (through the lens of the songwriter who is obviously a flawless genius) to musical productions I have personally experienced. The overall tone of everything tracks completely to modern-day musical cheese and I do appreciate that. There is a clear historical line between this film and Lin-Manuel Miranda. 3) This is a musical where all the songs are performances in the revue they are putting on or otherwise played by characters diagetically, so they're...kinda boring and largely irrelevant to the plot. Some decent dance sequences but nothing to write home about.

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Post-it Galen @willowpudge27.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

Assassin's Apprentice (Robin Hobb)

A 5-star review of Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb

Oh man this one was up my alley. A high fantasy with some almost fairy tale-like elements mixed in for flavor. The character work here is excellent and the layers of plot and intrigue are complex and satisfying. It sort of reminds me of if Games of Thones scaled way down and stayed in one place with one character the whole time. I'm going to be itching to come back to this series. Also a lot of good dogs throughout.

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Post-it Galen @willowpudge27.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

Playing a double header this Saturday (5/9) at the Friendly Tap in Berwyn, IL! First with Undertones Trio 4:00-6:00, then for Dave & Jodi's Night of 1,000 Stars 8:00-10:30

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