Justin’s Newsletter: November 2024
Vol. 4, Issue 11
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What’s Up With Me
Hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving! Wishing you all an even lovelier Christmas/holiday season. Can’t believe 2024 is almost over. Time is a merciless beast.
Watch the latest episode of Pasadena Media's award-winning TV show "Pasadena Monthly with Justin Chapman," featuring a review of the month's top stories, a history segment, and an interview with outgoing Pasadena Housing Director Bill Huang. Read more here.
Around Town
Great Reads
Here are some recommendations for interesting books I’ve read recently:
Omega the Unknown—Jonathan Lethem with Karl Rusnak
How I only recently came across this 2007 comic book collection by one of my favorite authors, I’m sure I don’t know. I do know that, while I was never really into comics until very recently—this one blew me away. It’s a remake of a 1970s comic, with his own eccentric spin and intellectual approach. I feel about Jonathan Lethem’s version as he did about the original one: “I couldn’t have articulated how it was setting up its reverberating mysteries, or functioning as a ‘serious parody’ a metatextual self-deconstruction of the superhero genre. I could have gone on reading the one issue again and again for the rest of my life, just imagining what it implied. This reading experience wasn’t only going to be unusual, it was going to be unsafe.” His co-author Rusnak added, “The narration is cerebral, pregnant with implication, metaphorical; I’ve still never read anything quite like it. It was a gateway drug to literature for me, especially the postmodern variety.” Lethem’s Omega the Unknown, then, is a worthy reboot.
Sekret Machines: Gods, Man, & War 3: WAR—Tom DeLonge and Peter Levenda
The third installment in To The Stars’ investigative series on the UFO Phenomenon, this work focuses on the national security threat that UFOs may pose to humanity. It essentially argues that humans should expect that aliens—or whatever pilots the unidentified and unidentifiable aerial vehicles that the U.S. government/military has admitted they can’t (or won’t) explain—are hostile to humans. Not only that, but humans are woefully unprepared for any invasion by aliens and extremely vulnerable in any conflict with them. To The Stars is an aerospace, science, and entertainment company founded by Tom DeLonge of blink-182 that has produced a number of really interesting books and multimedia on this topic.
Great Listens & Watches
A Modest Mouse show and two Blood Brothers shows this month really helped me heal in the days immediately following the election. A big but intimate crowd of people singing “Even if things end up a bit too heavy, we’ll all float on…” at the Bellwether was just what the doctor ordered. Good luck to us all in the days and years ahead… we’re going to need it. Tighten up your belt.
Spotlight on My Past Stories
In light of the election, I’m revisiting my articles on Congressmember (now Senator) Adam Schiff, former FBI director James Comey, Liz Cheney’s last stand, Bob Woodward on Trump, the first Trump administration’s foreign policy, withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, Europe’s anxiety about the Trump administration, and the resistance.
And read all of my journalism here.