The Academy and seemingly my entire family fell head-over-heels for Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s science fiction classic, Dune. And who am I to disagree? But the other night I re-watched the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, which recounts the great Chilean surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky’s mid-’60s attempt to adapt the novel to the screen. He never made the movie, but in the attempt he basically invented the next thirty years of science fiction cinema. Along the way, he roped in H.R. Geiger, Moebius, Mick Jagger, and Salvador Dalí. He put his 12-year-old son into five-hour-a-day, seven-days-a-week martial arts training to prepare him to play the story’s hero-messiah. And he tried to create “an artistic, cinematographical god.” In a way, he did make the movie—but just like how in the Bhagavad Gita Arjuna cannot look at Krishna’s divine form with human eyes, we’re only allowed to perceive Jodorowsky’s Dune indirectly. It’s enough.

I’ve been listening to a great new podcast by David Weinberg called “The Superhero Complex” that focuses on the saga of the Rain City Superhero Movement, a well-intended vigilante group that took to the streets of Seattle in the early 2010s dressed up in spandex. Their intention: to fight crime. The story orbits the charismatic and troubled Phoenix Jones, a former MMA champion in a Batman suit with the nipples cut off. Jones proves to be a worthy, at turns heroic and tragic—and always captivating—central figure. The show is chock full of interesting characters, but the best part is David’s lyrical, affectionate, and often laugh-out-loud funny narration. I can’t wait to listen to the rest. (Full disclosure, I’m proud to be friends with David.)

The great art+writing collaboration magazine 7x7.la is currently holding a show of featured collaborations at Beyond Baroque, a literary center in Venice, California. I love this project and am lucky to have had the chance to participate in it—and to have my collaboration with the artist Corinne Chaix featured in this show. I participated in a reading and round-table discussion two weeks ago (the recording is here). If you’re in the LA area, I encourage you to visit the show for its closing reading next Saturday, May 7 at 5pm. My partner—and resident Lightplay book reviewer—Lisa Locascio Nighthawk will be giving one of the readings.

For many years now instead of running the Chrome or Safari web browsers (made by Google and Apple) I’ve been using the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox browser. (Of course, paired with the indispensable uBlock Origin extension). How many regrets do I have for escaping the corporate browsers? Zero. Now the comic artist and digital rights activist Leah Elliott has released a delightful update of Scott McCloud’s original Google-commissioned Chrome launch zine. Parodying corporate propaganda is where it’s at. Go read “Contra Chrome”—and change your browser!

The writer Kate Folk’s new story collection Out There is full of brilliance, deadpan humor, the occasional horrifying twist, and some unexpectedly moving passages. You should absolutely be reading this book. As a longtime admirer of Kate’s writing, I read many of these stories when they came out—such as the eponymous blockbuster story “Out There,” originally published in the New Yorker. But now that her collection is out, I’ve been rereading them, and I’ve found that taken together the stories have even more power. Reminiscent of Shirley Jackson and Phillip K. Dick, but with a voice all their own, these tales are joy to read. Go pick up a copy of Out There today.

If you ever attended American high school, you may recall taking a brief class that focused on STDs, abstinence, and the perils of promiscuity! If your experience was anything like mine, that class did precisely nothing to prepare you to navigate your own sexuality, relationships, and health. It doesn’t need to be like this! That’s the starting point of my Seed Field Podcast interview with Dr. Theodore Burns, a therapist and professor at Antioch who has ideas about how we can reform sex education. I especially recommend a listen if you have a young person in your life. I think we had a great conversation.

This outing was a two-mote experience because, as after any good museum show, we couldn’t leave without going to the gift shop. And good stuff we found. I bought the catalog, which has uneven essays but who cares, you’re there for the concept drawings and artboards, which it delivers. I also picked up Susan Napier’s Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art, which I’ve been reading with great pleasure. It connects biography with film criticism to form both a very specific portrait of an artistic genius and also a larger meditation on the interplay of life and art.

The newly-opened Academy Museum (of the American Academy of Motion Pictures) has an exhibit featuring the art of Hayao Miyazaki, the Studio Ghibli founder and director of masterpieces like My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away. I got to see it three weeks ago and haven’t stopped thinking of it since. Worth the price of admission on its own is his conceptual drawing of the eponymous dwelling—chicken-legged and charismatic with jutting turrets and impromptu clotheslines—from Howl’s Moving Castle. Other highlights: poems Miyazaki wrote on Ghibli letterhead to his team while they made Princess Mononoke, countless incredible backgrounds and gels, Miyazaki’s 6-second stopwatch that measures 24ths of a second, and his practical but perfectly-designed drawing desk with built-in light table. Closes June 5th.

Have you heard about the protests in Jackson Demonstration State Forest? Many dozens of protestors have been interrupting logging, staging sit-ins, and collaborating with the Coyote Valley Band of Pomo Indians to try to wrest control from pro-logging CalFire and have the Indigenous people who’ve lived in the forest for millennia take the lead on deciding how this land is managed. The protests have flown under the radar for months; I’ve only known about them because a close friend is deeply involved. But despite not getting press, the protestors persisted. Now they’re starting to win. New Timber Harvest Plans have been suspended for the rest of the year; the Pomo are holding government-to-government negotiations with the State of California; and the big regional newspapers, like the LA Times in this pretty good feature, have started covering the protests. It’s an inspiring movement, showing how powerful even a few dozen activists can be if they stay principled and disciplined and keep pushing. But the most exciting part to me is the collaboration with the Pomo—as you may know, I think the US should return the National Parks and much more to the tribes. Jackson Demonstration State Forest would be a great place to start. If you’d like to get involved or send support, I’m told a good place to begin is this website.

I wrote a long profile of José Ramos-Horta, the 24-year exile and advocate for freedom for East Timor who won the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize and then, in 1999, returned home and became his newly free country’s president. José was a profound pleasure to interview, addressing me in emails as “my dear good man Jasper” and sharing a fascinating, tragic, but ultimately sweet story. The article ran as the cover story for the Antioch Alumni Magazine, which I co-edited. You can read it online.

Readers of the last installment of Lightplay will know that I love using my moka pot to make stovetop espresso. But prolific and sonorously English YouTuber James Hoffman, in a delightfully deep dive into this impractically-steampunk coffee brewing method, corrects us: the liquid the moka pot makes is not, precisely, espresso.