L'avventura (1960)
Michelangelo Antonioni
This week's Cinema Tuesdays feature is one of my favorites, L'AVVENTURA. Come to the show: http://tprcinema.org
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Stranger Things

tannertan36
almost home
occasionally subtle

PR's Tumblrdome
NASA
Cosimo Galluzzi
Monterey Bay Aquarium
AnasAbdin

if i look back, i am lost
we're not kids anymore.
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ

Love Begins
Three Goblin Art
styofa doing anything
ojovivo

izzy's playlists!
Peter Solarz

#extradirty

seen from South Korea

seen from China
seen from India
seen from Bangladesh
seen from Mexico
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States

seen from Switzerland
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Singapore
seen from Honduras
seen from United States
seen from Japan

seen from Mexico
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from United States
@nathancone
L'avventura (1960)
Michelangelo Antonioni
This week's Cinema Tuesdays feature is one of my favorites, L'AVVENTURA. Come to the show: http://tprcinema.org
The new rules focus on areas such as AI protections for writers and actors and expanded eligibility for international films.
No Oscars for AI performances or scripts
Anna May Wong in Drifting (1923)
I am nowhere near as good as the professional photographers that I follow on Instagram for inspiration, but I am kind of proud of these shots I took at La Semana Alegre, a Fiesta San Antonio event that took place on April 23, 2026 and featured '80s acts like Tommy Tutone, Men Without Hats, and A Flock of Seagulls on one stage, and local/regional acts like Joe 'King' Carrasco, King Pelican, and Girl in a Coma on another.
It was a great event, not too crowded, but buzzing just enough to make things exciting. Please enjoy the photos... encouraging words are welcomed as I go along my photo practice journey!
What is the Habitable Zone?
We’re on the hunt for worlds that can sustain life! But how can we identify them from trillions of miles away?
We start the search within the habitable, or “Goldilocks,” zone around other stars – the not too hot, not too cold region where liquid surface water could exist on orbiting planets.
This artist’s impression shows a star with several planets within its habitable zone.
"Right now, in an environment that's so cruel and highly polarized, we need kindness and we need friendship and we need neighbors," says Eri
I've known this band for nearly 25 years, Erik and odie. even longer. It's always a joy to hear new music from them.
Kushner—who cowrote the screenplay for Spielberg’s controversial, eerily prescient film about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—recalls telli
This is a really good interview about one of Steven Spielberg's toughest, best, most overlooked and controversial films.
Interview: Reena Esmail, composer
At last week's Texas Music Educators Association convention and clinic, composer Reena Esmail was present to share a new band arrangement of one of her popular pieces, "Tuttarana." Being both a fan and classical radio host, I was pleased that she had a few minutes to sit down with me for a short interview about her work! This interview was conducted on Feb. 13, 2026.
Nathan Cone: I've enjoyed listening to your music for quite some time now, so I'm glad to meet you here in person! Here you are in Texas, in San Antonio, at the Texas Music Educators Association convention. So what brings you here?
Reena Esmail: I'm here actually because so many groups are performing my music--and it's been a few years--that people have performed my music at this convention, and I've never been before! It's my first time, and it's been amazing to just come and watch these students who are so talented, band, choir, orchestra, string orchestra, to hear all of them actually engage with my music, some of them for the first time.
And what do you feel about the whole vibe of the event itself here, and all this musical chaos?
I love it. I mean, it's huge, and it's so overwhelming. But it's also just amazing to see how seriously people take music and how much they love being here. And you can tell that people are here meeting people who they haven't seen in years. I myself have seen people I haven't seen in years that I wasn't expecting to see here. So it feels like just a very joyful coming together, and it's really cool to be a part of it.
Tell me about the piece that's going to be performed by the 6A band.
So the piece is called “Tuttarana,” and it started as a piece for treble choir, believe it or not. And it was a piece where, you know, a lot of music that's written for treble choir is just very, you know, pretty and, you know, light and stuff... and that's, that's not all of it nowadays, but when I was writing this piece, the conductor who I wrote it for was like, "Hey, I want something that's not just pretty and about flowers and trees. I want the exact opposite of that." And so “Tuttarana” was the exact opposite of it. So it's a really kind of a fast piece. It comes in very hot. It has Indian classical syllables. The choral version starts like [vocalizes]... and so you can imagine a band playing that, it's even louder, it's more raucous! It's really a wild piece.
Do you do your arrangements then, for moving it from the choral to the band? And what was that like?
It’s interesting because when I started out, if you had asked me when I was like, 18, what I was going to be as a composer, I would have told you 100% I would be a chamber music composer. So that's like my training. Then I started writing more for orchestra, and all my schooling taught me how to do that. Then I graduated from school, started writing for choir, and got, like, very popular in the choral world. And then I started getting popular in the band world just a couple years ago! So for me, I've done a combination of original work for band and then transcriptions of my other work, so I can kind of understand what the animal of the band is, how it all works and fits together, how the different levels work, you know? It's interesting, because band has something in common with choir and that you're pushing air through instruments, but it's just a little bit different because you're using that air in different ways. And so it has a lot in common, for sure, with choir. And so sometimes those choral pieces translate over very well, but then there's a lot of additional challenges, like, there's so many instruments that I really have not written for before these last few years, like even saxophones and, you know, euphonium and things that I just didn't really have a venue to write for before now.
You mentioned that your music has gotten picked up in the past couple of years with conferences like this, and one of the things that I find so delightful at listening to the recordings and the performances that come out of TMEA is that the repertoire that they're performing has gotten younger and newer and more diverse. And so I think it's really, I mean, are you kind of seeing that as a benefit? I mean, that they're really hungry for new stuff?
I guess I wouldn't have known what [the convention] was before… I feel like I've just been the beneficiary of seeing this influx in this kind of repertoire change. But I think also, on the other hand, the Indian population is growing in Texas. There's a lot of people who have moved here and they want their kids to do well in Western classical music. They also want their kids to do well in Indian classical music. I'm kind of from a previous generation where there was none of that either, you know? And so we were just taught to assimilate and become, you know, doctors and engineers and all that. And I mean, still, there's nothing wrong with being a doctor or an engineer, but I think the idea that doing music is a really serious pursuit at whatever level you do it at is just becoming more prevalent in the Indian community, and that writing music that actually addresses that and allows young South Asian people to be able to express their own identity is really cool.
Do you get a lot of people coming to you for commissions? And what do they ask for?
I get so many offers for commissions. Actually, I probably can only take about 10% of the offers that come my way. And I work at all levels, right? I wrote a massive Concerto for Gil and Orli Shaham that's going up at the Kennedy Center in a couple of weeks. I'm writing for Philadelphia and San Francisco's symphonies, you know, I'm doing all of that, but then I'm also working in the educational world, and I think I try to take commissions where I can learn something. So I think, especially for the band world, I'm still learning a lot. I'm not trained to write band music, and it's really fun to have those challenges. I love writing music that's very simple for students. I love writing music that's very, very complex for professionals, and I love just kind of finding that continuum.
And how is it being a composer in the world of social media?
Ooh, it's interesting, because I guess one of the great things is that I'm able to find my audience more than I would have otherwise. Because, look, everyone has a song that is like that song picks you up off the ground when you're down, or, you know, whatever, the song when you're so joyful, it helps you feel that joy. And I think that we weren't able to tell the composer that that was our song before, whereas so many people have found me online and reached out to me via DM and said, you know, "Your music has meant so much to me," and it's amazing as a composer to actually feel that you're writing music that's making a difference in people's lives. And you know, it's tough. You're alone a lot with just your own thoughts and the piano, and you're hoping that things make sense. And then when someone tells you that your music has profoundly affected them... it really matters.
Lastly, you're here in Texas, in San Antonio, what have you gotten to eat and what have you enjoyed?
I just got here yesterday, so I definitely haven't eaten much yet, but I have walked along the River Walk, and that is so beautiful. Oh my goodness, it's such a live city. I was walking last night back to my hotel, and there's just like, all these bands playing and people playing outdoors, and it's far south enough that the temperature is really nice at this time of year. So I've been enjoying it. It's such a fun town.
The late Robert Duvall was made an honorary Texas Ranger following the release of "Lonesome Dove," and shot more than a half-dozen films in
The late Robert Duvall was made an honorary Texas Ranger following the release of "Lonesome Dove," and shot more than a half-dozen films in the Lone Star State, including his Oscar-winning role as Mac Sledge in "Tender Mercies."
“A lot of people in New York don’t know what goes on beyond the South Jersey Shore. To try and show that there’s something out there besides New York and L.A., that justifies good emphasis," he said to me during a 2015 interview.
Cows, 2025. Shot on Ektar 100 film and photo-adjusted with Snapseed.
SANDRA dir. Luchino Visconti (1965)
Two views of the Burleson County Courthouse in Caldwell, Texas. Designed by J.M. Glover, constructed in 1927. Shot in summer 2025 on Kodak Ektar 100 film.
Before there was a film industry in Hollywood, there was the Star Movie Ranch in San Antonio. At the dawn of cinema, a group of motion pictu
Before there was a film industry in Hollywood, there was the Star Film Ranch in San Antonio. TPR's David Martin Davies shares how at the dawn of cinema, a group of motion picture pioneers came to the Alamo City to produce the first authentic westerns. @texaspublicradio-blog
The Stanley Theater opened in Luling, TX in 1948 with a Gene Autry double feature. It not longer shows movies. In the early 2000s it housed an antique mall; I think a church meets there on Sundays now. I love the mid-century futuristic space antenna on the sign.
Shot in July, 2025 on Kodak Ektar 100.
2025, A Year in Movies
Since 1999, I’ve logged every movie I’ve seen, in the theater, online, or at home on video. In 2025 my total went down even further, and I think I need to turn my cinephile card in. I watched only 56 movies, down 18 from 2024. I did spend more time practicing piano, and working out at the gym. (I can actually see some results there, which is good.) But I've also just felt a little more distracted than normal this year, unable to concentrate on longform reading and media. And I guess I've been a little uninspired, too. So that kept me from accomplishing my movie-watching goals. Fifteen of the movies were new releases viewed at the theater (that was up by 2 from last year), another dozen or so were big screen classics at TPR’s Cinema Tuesdays. My favorite new movie in the theater was “Sinners.” My favorite new-to-me movie from a previous year that I watched was "Past Lives," which I watched on an airplane and still connected with, despite the uncomfortable setting. The oldest movie I watched was "Girl Shy," a Harold Lloyd comedy that is now over a century old, and still hilarious.
Oh, this year I also started using the Letterboxd account I created a long time ago, so if you want to connect, I'm here: https://letterboxd.com/nathancone/
Hot-linked films will take you to articles I’ve written about the movie.
The Impossible Zappa Carry On Flow The Thing From Another World Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl Heat Lightning Texasville Paddington in Peru Deadpool & Wolverine Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Tall Story Barry Lyndon Past Lives Paris, Texas Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope Pee-wee’s Big Adventure Sinners Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser Mission: Impossible The Final Reckoning An American in Paris Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould Sky High (1922) Él The Fugitive The Sugarland Express The Annihilation of Fish Superman (2025) Runaway Radio Phineas and Ferb the Movie: Across the 2nd Dimension Seven Samurai The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone Weapons The Fantastic Four: First Steps Wayne’s World Rock ‘N’ Roll High School La Piscine Highest 2 Lowest Lawyer Man Bringing Up Baby Fantasia 2000 Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale The Long Walk Citizen Kane One Battle After Another Elemental Tron: Ares His Master’s Voice Girl Shy To Kill a Mockingbird Wicked: For Good Zootopia 2 Wake Up Dead Man Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid Avatar: Fire and Ash The Producers
TPR's Nathan Cone's annual look back on moments from his past year, including music, movies, [TPR] members, and a memorial.
Time for my annual look back on things I did this year.
Merry Christmas from Miley.