SWELL DWELLS
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Theatrical Reinvention and Queer Joy in Cats: The Jellicle Ball
Throughout my time as an avid theatergoer, some of my absolute favorite productions of musicals have been those that take the original source material and radically reinvent it. These shows barely change the original text, but instead through direction, performance, and design they breathe a new life into the material in unexpected ways. Diane Paulus…
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Books! Reading! My favorites of 2025
2025 was the most serious reading year of my life. I cannot say with any certainty that I read the most books I ever have in a year, as I read voraciously in high school and college but never quite kept track. But I set clear goals for myself, and in particular I wanted to…
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2025 Film Recap – my Favorites & more!
For my money, 2025 was an excellent year for cinema. In fact, I’d argue that this was the most complete year for movies since 2019, before the pandemic. To be clear, I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad year for movies, but I do think some years are overall better than…
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How are you, Swell? Thoughts on my mental health.
I promised myself I was going to write more this year. I fully intended to use this space to share my feelings on all sorts of things, and even if nobody read it at least it would be a platform for me to get my thoughts out of my head in a longform fashion that’s…
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My Top 10 Films of 2024
A year has passed since I last posted on this blog… ah, the dreams and intentions I had of posting far more regularly. Yet sometimes an entire year can pass us by, a year of work, projects, trips, personal moments, joy, pain. Ah well. It is very much my intention to post here more frequently…
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My 25 Favorite Films of 2023
Movies! Films! Cinema! Being that this is my first real post here on the new blog, allow my to impress upon you just how much I absolutely love movies. You probably know that about me, but if you didn’t… now you do! The gist: I’ve loved movies from a very early age, obsessively re-watching and…
Musings & Reviews 