some 2025 notes and vague 2024 reflections
waking up with the alarm clock
I’ve been sitting on a post-election rant and while I don’t think it’s perfect, I thought it might be better to save it and give myself time to edit some of its breathlessness away. But first, nevertheless, here are some things that brought me joy in 2024.
Industry, season 3
the Mets’ magical run to the NLCS
Marketspice at Pike Place, and also talking about cooking salmon with the guys at the main market fish stand
the score to Mike Leigh’s 1993 film Naked, by Andrew Dickson
skiing for the first time in two years, fearlessly for the first time ever
spending about 54 hours completely away from my phone at a friend’s cabin (letting it die and not recharging it) and spending most of that time reading Birnam Wood or sleeping
golfing at the Charleston Muni in South Carolina, instantly one of my favorite courses of all time -- surprised by how much I enjoyed my trip to SC/Georgia/Alabama
bocce ball and a joint at Seward Park
newfound closeness in friendships, and also my dog :)
now, for more of this energy:
It’s difficult for me to think it is not completely over. Whatever cliches there may be about democracy, the American Experiment, a melting pot; a firehose of self-awareness is required to admit to myself that I have to carry still some sliver of hope for the future while knowing that I have been right to assume to worst of America again and again for the past five years. I cannot tell if I want to, or if I have to. Either way is a form of self-preservation. It’s becoming easier than ever to choose who and what the biggest priorities in my life are, because we’re all, officially, together, losers. Perhaps it’s even naive for me to assume everyone has people for whom they hold onto any optimism they can, but I do. And trying to be optimistic, even for the sake of others, or even for myself, honestly fucking sucks. This country is about to become a reality show for the terminally, gleefully online. For everyone else it’s barely going to be anything at all.
As in Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (published, unbelievably, in 1935) my anecdotes with those voting for Trump -- my family, my friends’ families, my coworkers -- were voting for economic security reasons. They don’t like the guy, but these people want to secure a financial future for themselves and their kids. It’s a reasonable imperative, but, when dealing with the unreasonable, it’s difficult to explain to the deliberately naive that it may not matter. It’s clear, if you notice such things, if you want to notice them, that the United States has been a runaway truck for some time now. It didn’t start in 2016, it may not have even started in 1980. Picking up speed and ignoring the safety ramps. The hubris has been there since the beginning, when the founders wrote all men are created equal: something they, obviously, did not believe, or even consider. We’ve had plenty of time to fix the error of our ways, but we don’t want to. Who knows if the driver is falling asleep at the wheel or if there are even hands on the wheel at all. Many people are going to hit the brakes or find an off-ramp. I’m one of them. I don’t know how it will work, really, or even if it will work at all. But we have to take something of our lives back.
The supporting-rock-solid-journalism exercise is the easiest errand to run at this moment, and I don’t think that’s without its virtue. It was certainly my first instinct, in November. We are gonna have to have journalists’ backs, now more than ever. But for months now I have had to listen to the top-down structural thirst to give Trump context again and again while not only Kamala but the entire Democratic side had to throw a Hail Mary every day just to keep the game close. These truths now are self-evident in hindsight, of course, but my arm gets tired just thinking about it. (It feels a bit like the Tungsten Arm O’Doyle memes, which will live forever even though Shohei has a ring now.) Wouldn’t yours?
So much of the media ecosystem has felt like a “No shit, doc,” apparatus for years now. I have to seek a different kind of context. America is tumbling far too fast to have only started tumbling a decade or two ago. Five decades ago? Now we’re talking. For so many it’s been a terrible place all along, but I don’t think the US embraced being a terrible place until fairly recently. I suppose you need a sense of history, really, to decide whether you should embrace or reject something, or just accept it as it is. This is what we reject, with our hubris. We reject a different way of doing things. I would have to think things will get worse before they get any better. How much worse can be stomached is the question.
Maybe returning to the twentieth century for hints will give me an idea of how steep the slope was, or if, perhaps, the hill retreats higher into the fog than we all give it credit for. Maybe we’re all just delusional. It can happen here. It seems now like this is the perfect place for it to happen. And I know it doesn’t matter, but I’ve gotta figure out when it became clear that it might happen. Perhaps it’s a cliche, but Orwell’s Politics and The English Language is as good a place as any to start. I’m writing this because I read that. The clues are there: Orwell’s account of language corrupting the anesthetized brain (and vice versa) is absolutely damning in the era of the comments section. The search, for ways to stay inspired, to stay hopeful, continues.
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In these types of times, I find it best to lean into the political underpinnings of culture instead of pulling back. Escapism can be useful, but does not rid dread or anger from any of us. This is precisely why I am dreading an Oscars run for Wicked: PART I. Responding to a corporate coup with another, just because it celebrates the possibility of another, more moral world, is not what I would call hopeful at this moment in time. Orwell begged us to have higher standards for our reading and writing so that we would have higher standards for our politics, and American corruption has tunneled through us all for long enough that it’s corrupted the entire media ecosystem.
The original Gladiator (2000) could be too clean of an analogy for what America feels like right now. One problem is that we, in our current state, do not have a revolutionary hero (Maximus); and I fear we’ve become a people who no longer ache for a revolution. Clearly the revolution implied to be building in Gladiator does not work. We know this because of the existence of Gladiator II, and also thanks to a lot of smart historians and archaeologists. (It appears Rome was in disarray in the years following the death of Commodus, but I don’t mean to get to “Always Thinking About The Roman Empire” here.) Anyway, by the end of Gladiator II, we’re at a similar place as we ended the first. A gladiator is a revolutionary hero, and he wears his hero’s (his father’s (???????)) armor. But has he learned anything, other than survived? Will the fact that the revolution is inspired by a living being rather than the eternal words of a ghost change anything for the progress of Rome? I guess we will have to wait for Gladiator III, which I won’t be seeing!
There’s a chance I am being uncharitable to GII, and if you feel I am, I can tell you exactly why. The trailer for the Robbie Williams biopic Better Man put me into a dreadful mood immediately before GII started. I realized during the movie that the two are not that far afield from one another, bearing promises of fame and riches and a name in history. But rare is the movie that interrogates what the flip side of the coin means. If we pursue such things, do we receive anything at all? Money is a real, tangible thing, sure, but if that money is purely in service of a higher station in life, do the rest of us benefit in any tangible ways ourselves? I know it’s rudimentary; every 25-year old white guy has been going through this feeling for seven decades and only a small percentage of them have broken through with an answer. Isn’t that its own sort of cultural insanity?
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Thank God I saw a movie this month that has an interesting response to that question. It’s Anora. I saw Anora on a Monday afternoon at the Uptown, which meant $6 tickets, which meant the local olds showed up by the dozens to see a movie about a sex worker. “Fuck yeah,” is what I kept muttering to myself during the trailers. I got that tingly adrenaline rush that comes when I don’t realize how excited I am for something until it’s happening, which the movie fully leverages before sending you home covered in gooey regret. In contrast to GII, which has more tribute than plot, I’m not so inclined to share details about Anora, which is 140 minutes of hectic plot pointing towards one acute conclusion. The common comparison is fairy tale, but it’s more of an ironic Greek tragedy to me. Ani suffers a gutting downfall, but the end of Anora had me thankful that she did not suffer a worse fate. The magic is the Russians: although the four main Russian performances whirling around Mikey Madison’s Ani -- of Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), of Igor (Yura Borisov), and of Vanya’s parents (Aleksei Serebryakov and Darya Ekamasova) -- each interact differently with the eye of the hurricane, they lead to the cohesive conclusion that this is not a life that Ani really wants. The money is awesome. Everything else would fucking suck.
Go see Anora. Stay involved. Use art to lean in, not out.
Looking forward to Nickel Boys and The Brutalist as I crawl to the end of 2024. My frustrations with the release of those and several other movies will likely be included with my more complete thoughts once I have seen both of those. I have been reading Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers alongside It Can’t Happen Here. They’re both marginally better than Intermezzo. Nothing I’ve read this year was better than Birnam Wood. Eleanor Catton captures the irony of feeling doom undeniably alongside a sense of hope that everyone cycles through in their 20s, in starker and starker contrast as we are all interminably online (though perhaps not forever). Everyone worth listening to, at least. I felt, too, during The Rehearsal (Catton’s debut novel, not the Nathan Fielder show) that Catton knows what the Internet is doing to all of us, particularly when it comes to avoiding a sense of class warfare in search of less pointed, more attainable online wins; she does this all without ever really addressing the Internet’s existence. Surely she will not be doing that in The Luminaries, either. But I haven’t read that yet: I’m taking it with me to New Zealand in 2025. (Yes, I know, leaving the US right now is kind of an act of giant hypocrisy. Save it lol)
I hope, as always, to be writing more when I’m there. See you then, hopefully. Happy New Year.