The Checkout Counter #35
September 2025

Mon Oncle

Adam

The Art of a Lie

happy october 🎃 it's still pretty sunny and warm where i am, but the nights are getting considerably cooler and coming much earlier. another seasonal note is that i'll be participating in at least a few days of weird web october (and you can, too!). watch this space 🔎

thanks, as always, for reading!

Film

  • Rope, 1948damn that's crazy!!!

    so funny that the james stewart character spends the entirety of these guys' school careers justifying murder, then gets scared when they turn out to be murderers. get it together man. love the oppressive, single apartment setting, especially how blinking neon signs emerge at night and cast unnatural colors onto the increasingly tense environment.
    Crime, thriller, drama. Two men host a dinner party right after strangling a former classmate to death.
  • Adam, 2019 (آدم)really lovely stuff. some of the shots here look straight out of a vermeer painting. it's a simple, familiar story of a stranger challenging the routine way of life and breaking through someone's hard exterior, and it's done so quietly and with a lot of kindness.
    Drama. The daily routine of a baker and her daughter is interrupted when a young pregnant woman knocks on their door.
  • Mon Oncle, 1958this is overlong and too mired in nostalgia for my taste, but what a visual delight! the ridiculous modernist house rules.

    this was never really laugh-out-loud funny to me, especially since most of the gags have the same point (the modern lifestyle is absurd, i get it), but there's one memorable shot of a neighbor mowing grass in the funniest way possible.
    Comedy. Monsieur Hulot lives in a charming, aged apartment surrounded by boisterous market stalls and cafes, while his sister and her family have moved into the ultra-modern, high-tech suburbs.

Books

  • The Art of a Lie, Laura Shepherd-Robinsonfun read! the setting of a georgian-era confectionary shop is super unique and i'm not familiar with the time period, so this was a glimpse into a truly alien world. lots of twists and turns in this one—i guessed a twist early on (i think every reader will have this passing thought), but was still nicely surprised when it turned out to be true.

    as the story goes on, things do get a bit silly and stretch my credulity: multiple characters go to insane, expensive lengths to keep up a lie to the point of absurdity. still kept me rapt, though!
    Historical fiction, mystery. In 18th century England, a widow struggles to keep her confectionary shop afloat after the violent and unsolved murder of her husband. A new customer introduces her to an unfamilar delicacy called iced cream.

Music

Games

Articles & essays

Blogs

Around the web

  • Za DiscMixer, LITHOBREAKERS
  • Destination Modern Art, MoMAoh my god i finally found this again. i have such a strong memory of playing around with this site as a kid (~2004ish) and being enamored with all the ways i could interact with art. i was able to launch this with a flash emulator, though the escalator area seems broken. so wild that this still exists on MoMA's website (for now...!).
  • tv.garden
  • Stream of a stream

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