End of Year Grab-Bag: 2023
In the past I always shrugged off observance of New Year, and while I still have little use for the parties and the rankings I have come to appreciate this time of year as one that invites reflection and anticipation; a time to re-center oneself and move forward with intentionality, even if those intentions inevitably fall away or get brushed aside in the unexpected ways that each year can develop. Life, death, rebirth – these are naturally-occurring cycles as well as metaphors that have guided human experience and development for as long as we’ve been trudging our way along this planet, and I’ve come to realize that there’s no shame in non-cynically having them reflected in the ways we mark the passage of time. If tying them to a man-made calendar seems arbitrary, then so is life itself. Why try to pretend otherwise? In the spirit of embracing rather than trying to fight that arbitrary nature of existence, in seeing everything as the next step on a path rather than even a temporary destination – and also because once I turned 40 I gave myself the gift of never again doing any kind of ranking - I’m offering a look back on some of the bigger cultural experiences and reflections I’ve passed through since last January, focusing as much as possible on larger trends which are perhaps more revealing than singular instances.
This year was, above all else, the Cancer Year and the year that gave us our second child. Those are each trials and events that deserve their own posts at some point in the future or will be engrained some way within each and every post for the foreseeable future.
My family and I spent the first four months of the year living in a hotel room because a pipe in our kitchen burst over the sub-freezing Christmas holiday and flooded the first floor of our house. While we were waiting out the interminable repair and restoration of our own home, we tried our best to carry out a routine of normalcy despite this major interruption. For me, a large part of this was watching movies on an iPad in bed while my wife and son slept next to me. Given the time of year, a lot of this viewing was Oscar nominee catch-up, but I also embarked upon a mini-project of catching up on past Best Picture winners that I had never seen. I started at the beginning and tried to go chronologically for as long as they could sustain my interest or until Oscar season was over, which ever came first.
Wings I found as entertaining and genuinely spectacular as it was ridiculous. A pleasant surprise.
Broadway Melody was a tough sit but had so much of a specific type of early-sound-film-era ricketiness that I quite enjoy.
Cavalcade was stiff and boring in a way that I actually tend to find quite pleasurable, while The Great Ziegfeld was fun for its first hour-and-a-half and an interminable slog for its second. The less said about Cimarron the better.
I wrapped this little exercise up by re-watching It Happened One Night, which I hadn’t seen in quite a while. I knew that it wasn’t going to get any better than that any time soon, so I used that as an exit ramp until I likely pick this up again in the coming weeks after this year’s nominations are announced.
The first film I watched this year was Lethal Weapon 3 (fucking hell what a bore). The first new-to-me movie was The Menu.
The first movie I saw in theaters this year was The Fabelmans. The last film I saw in theaters this year (and judging by the amount of time left on the clock, likely the last one I will watch this year period) was Poor Things. This feels somewhat fitting as it’s a film that encompasses so many of the threads that ran through my experience of this year – life and death, parenthood, and the ongoing quest of finding meaning in a world that can be as cruel and frightening as it is wondrous. Each of these journeys are ones that deserve larger consideration in the coming months.
My major cinema “discovery” this year was Luis García Berlanga. I put that in quotes because I knew of him already and had seen his most popular film years earlier, but I finally went back and watched a chunk of his filmography early this year and became absolutely obsessed. His very specific style of incrementally building chaotic multi-character comedy hit something in my sensibilities square on the head – especially Placido and The National Shotgun, which have become two of my absolute favorite films. Berlanga himself has become an artist for me who feels like something of a North Star.
I also made room, as I always try to, for Hong Sang-soo – specifically Walk-Up and Introduction, two of his more recent films - who is building one of my favorite modern filmographies.
The film that had the most impact on me this year may well have been Film, by Samuel Beckett. It re-wired and clarified some things in a surprising but much-needed way that I’m still processing but may write about further this coming year.
In the wake of this viewing, I went back and watched a handful of Maya Deren films that were not Meshes of the Afternoon, which while canonical for me was also the only one I had seen. Not only is her cinematic grammar perhaps more than any other filmmaker a direct extension of the language of dreams, but it’s also one that she was able to sustain over the course of her all-too-tragically-brief career.
I of course participated in the Barbenheimer phenomenon, though not on the same day. I did, however, see Oppenheimer in 70mm at the newly-reopened Tara theatre – the first movie I had seen projected on film since, I would imagine, the Hateful Eight roadshow screening in 2015. Oppenheimer led me on a rabbit-hole of any and everything concerning its subject, which led me to The Last Podcast on the Left and their series on the Manhattan Project. I became briefly obsessed with this show as a whole right in time for one of their hosts to be rocked by an abuse scandal. Que sera.
In preparing an online lecture on Scorsese’s Raging Bull, I reread the chapter of Thompson’s Scorsese on Scorsese regarding that period of his life and career, and filed away a brief mention of a project he started working on with Marlon Brando that would have been about the massacre at Wounded Knee. The film never came to be, but this did somewhat illuminate my later viewing of Killers of the Flower Moon.
TV to me continues to settle into formulaic mediocrity more often than not, but I loved Succession, The Bear, Jury Duty, and White Lotus Season 2 and greatly enjoyed Fleischman is in Trouble.
Towards the end of this past summer I listened to Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness all the way through for the first time in quite a while and for maybe only the second time in my life. This was never one of my albums in my youth, and the Smashing Pumpkins weren’t one of my bands. I never disliked them, but for whatever reason I only ever knew the hits and never really dug any deeper. I fell hard for this album this go-round – enough so that I spent way too much on the vinyl. I also went back to Siamese Dream and heard Mayonnaise for the first time; this became the song I probably listened to more than any other this year. I like it quite a bit as a man in my early forties – as an adolescent, it likely would have gained a near-religious importance to me had I ever listened to it.
Speaking of vinyl, my record-buying compulsion was mostly centered around closing in on completion of my Pearl Jam and Tom Waits collections. I also bought and treasure the reissues of Stop Making Sense and Up, which I always considered one of the more underrated REM albums but which even then has always surprised and delighted me on each re-listen.
The older kid has become, to his father’s great delight, obsessed with The Beatles. He can sing several songs by heart almost in their entirety, he’s starting to know their names, and he knows which album by sight is “the Octopus’ Garden one.”
Speaking of those lads, they released a new song this year. I was cynical about this for a while because it felt like a novelty, and I assumed what ended up being true – that it was one of those unfinished Lennon songs with some Harrison input that finally got re-worked by the surviving members. And hadn’t we done this before? I don’t know quite why I was so resistant – even if the above was true, did it matter? – but I finally listened to it within the last week and shifted from being politely underwhelmed (inevitable when the biggest band of all time releases a single 50 years after they break up) to now finding it almost impossibly moving. As with everything Beatles-related these days, there is an inevitable melancholy, an acknowledgement and reckoning with the notion of time passed and people lost, and yet in equal part there is the beauty in knowing that even as the world moves on, something of us lives beyond our singular lives. Call it commercial-minded grave robbing if you must, but I do prefer to think of it as something of a hint towards the continuity of the eternal self within us all.
The first thing I read was Out at Sea, a short play by Slawomir Mrozek about three men of differing social classes stuck in a life raft trying to convince each other of which one makes the most sense to sacrifice for food.
I reread a lot of Michael Crichton this summer. I spent many a morning at the zoo with Sammy, and that always makes me think of Jurassic Park and Congo. I re-read Jurassic Park last year, which I still quite enjoy; this year I re-read Congo (which I liked more than I thought I would) and Rising Sun (a tedious chore) and then read Sphere for the first time, which I would perhaps have enjoyed more were it not the third in a row – he’s a very repetitive writer and I was just tired of all of his tropes by that point.
Finally reading Gold’s Carter Beats the Devil sent me on a spree of reading and buying books about stagecraft in general and stage magic specifically, building and tying into as it did my recent obsession with Disney’s Haunted Magic attraction and its use of basic illusions like Pepper’s Ghost. This all feels like it’s going to coalesce into something at some point but I’m not sure what.
Speaking of eventual coalescence, I continue to be fascinated by the idea of Walt Disney and his life as one that represents the conversion point of artistry, celebrity, megalomania, politics, city planning and urban development, manipulation of legal and constitutional limits - the whole story of American popular culture and its development into a central force in our existence, for good and ill, is all there.
Whenever we travel, I like to go to any and every used bookstore in the area we can find. I usually try to find some book, usually a book of plays, that I’ve never heard of an isn’t readily available any other way. This summer, while we were in Sarasota for the Fourth of July, I found a book of two plays by Francois Billetdoux and read Tchin-Tchin, which starts with a man and a woman meeting for drinks. It is revealed that the man’s wife and the woman’s husband are having an affair with each other, which has prompted this meeting. The two subjects of the scene go on over the course of the play to get together in the fallout of their previous relationships and fall into a pattern of co-dependence and alcoholism.
My above-mentioned experience with Beckett’s Film lead me to read not only the published text of that script/outline, but some other short Beckett works as well as some passages from Ionesco’s Notes & Counter Notes that felt particularly relevant.
As the year draws to a close, I am re-reading Murch’s In the Blink of an Eye as class prep and reading The Mothman Prophecies and The Upanishads. Each of these are in their own way about a journey towards truth and understanding. I can think of no better way to bring a year, especially this year, to an end.