Month: June 2020

Media Diary (June 2020)

Some things I’ve experienced lately, in no particular order, and not necessarily only recent stuff:

Da 5 Bloods (Movie): Really enjoyed

I May Destroy You (TV): Fearless

Slow Burn: David Duke (Podcast): Still need to catch up on Season 3, but this look into Duke’s rise is gripping/horrifying

Original Cast Album: Company (Movie): Love this entire vibe

Undertaker: The Last Ride (TV): I’m a sucker for stories about old wrestlers

Blow-Up (Movie): Fascinating, still thinking about the creepiness of the park scene at night

Swallow (Movie): Was obviously gonna watch this, and my wife was obviously gonna tap out

Perry Mason (TV): So far, so good (especially the vintage LA setting)

Burn Motherfucker, Burn! (Movie): Speaking of LA, this was a compelling look at Watts and Rodney King

Shirley (Movie): I’ll watch Elisabeth Moss in pretty much anything

Quiz (TV): An interesting story, and weird to see Tom from Succession with a British accent

Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau (Movie): Sneaking back onto your own set as a masked extra (after being fired) earns absolute baller status

60 in 6 (Quibi): Great use of the short format (by an obviously top-notch existing brand)

Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn (Movie): This guy was something else

Space Force (TV): It got pretty mediocre reviews, but I found it to be generally fine

Harold and Maude (Movie): Loved it, and went on a bit of a Hal Ashby bender as a result…

Being There (Movie): Loved this even more…

Hal (Movie): Learned more about Ashby’s story (and sad later years)

Royalties (Quibi): Just alright, but has its moments, and the accompanying music videos are pretty solid

Andre The Giant (Movie): What a legend

On The Record (Movie): Sad stories of music industry abuse

13th (Movie): Should be required viewing, especially given the events of the past month or two

AKA Jane Roe (Movie): The interesting journey of the woman at the center of Roe v. Wade

Kirby Jenner (Quibi): Also just alright, but part of my ongoing attempt to be at least peripherally aware of the various Kardashians

Spaceship Earth (Movie): A story that I’d followed a little as a kid, but never knew the extensive history behind the founding group

Wisconsin Death Trip (Movie): My kind of strange, and I think Sarah should be the compulsive window smasher woman for Halloween


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‘Junk Drawer’ at Four (Months)

I’ve been having a good time putting together my “Junk Drawer” newsletter each week for the past four months (!), despite the fact that it really couldn’t have launched at a crazier time in U.S. history. 🙃

If you haven’t yet subscribed (which would be shocking given how often I shamelessly plug it), I’d be honored if you’d give it a whirl. It comes out every Sunday morning, it’s free and it only takes a couple seconds to add your email to the list:

https://bit.ly/kyleford

If you have any friends that might be interested as well, please feel free to forward them an issue or share this post using any of the social links below.

Thanks so much to all of my current subscribers, and here’s to keeping this train rolling! 🥂

It All Needs To Go

First of all, I want to be fair and give credit to the ICOC and (especially) our local church for starting some encouraging conversations about the events of the past few weeks. Obviously sooooo far to go (and the process will and should never end), but every journey starts with small steps. 💫

All of that said… (insert record scratch sound)

As evangelical momentum slowly builds on addressing institutional racism, we cannot afford to ignore the continued (and growing) threat posed by the robust misinformation ecosystem that helped inflame much of the ignorance in the first place.

An eye-opening and heartfelt message about black experiences with law enforcement on Sunday morning will go right out the window if it’s bookended by absolute garbage in social media feeds every other day of the week.

While it’s uplifting to finally hear some “I just wasn’t aware” comments from white evangelicals, it’s time to also consider why they weren’t aware, and if they’ve adjusted their media consumption habits to ensure that they’re weeding out sources of misinformation along with their old, uninformed thoughts about race in America.

In other words, if you’re starting to burn down institutional racism, all of the blatantly untrue, conspiracy-based or agenda-driven content from the likes of QAnon, Candace Owens, PragerU, Breitbart and so many more all also need to be tossed into the fire.

I’ve posted before about the importance of carefully monitoring and scrutinizing your sources of information, and while I hope that we continue to scream this from the rooftops during all-church discussions (we had an encouraging lesson about this a few weeks back, fingers crossed for much more), for those interested in starting this process themselves, I wanted to build upon my wife’s list of race-related media to explore with this short set of “radicalization and misinformation” recommendations:


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