MOD

Speaking of videos, Kottke highlights a number of great films available for viewing, free for nothing, on Hulu.

I'm about three-quarters of the way through Beautiful Boy, and a paragraph two-thirds of the way stuck with me, about how much the author, David Sheff, found Requiem for a Dream to be "unbearable," while his meth-addicted son, Nic, was "thrilled by it."

Nic later told me that the drug scenes, accompanied by throbbing music from the Kronos Quartet, which are cautionary, nearly unstomachable for most people, made him want to get high.

When I first watched the film, years ago, I'd thought it was incredibly dark and painful, clearly a cautionary tale, but now I want to watch it again to see if I can understand it in a different light.