January, man. Always a disaster. Just pulls the life right out of you, day by day and hour by hour, at a time when you didn’t have much life to put into the thing to begin with. Dim sunrise that never happens by weak dusk that feels like it was never any brighter in the first place. The lights don’t turn all the way on. It’s a peculiar nuissance of my workplace, but, whatever infinite genius installed the track lighting gave all of them dimmers that can’t actually be set to 100%. Temperamental as an old river scow, on bad days, those lights might give you 50. If you’re really nice when you ask.
Because it’s January and I like structure, I stacked all my usual “thirty days of _____” programs with a few that I devised on my own. Thirty days of yoga. Thirty day meditation challenge. Dry January? Sure, why the fuck not. Quit Twitter? I was gonna do that anyway! Thirty days of writing? I mean fuck man, it’s hard enough out here already, let’s add yet another layer. Why the fuck not.
The writing thing was necessary and, as of today (27 days!), a fuck of a lot of fun, too. I needed to break and reset the bones on my relationship with the process of actually sitting down to write. I spent a lot of 2022 putting stakes in the ground on some pretty large objectives, writing-wise, but couldn’t mechanically put in the work to get there, based on both the bad habits I’d picked up for myself, and the approach-avoidance that I think every single writer shares with every other writer. (This means: when it’s time to sit down and write: your brain basically goes full kamikaze mode on you. Like, that aircraft carrier sure looks MIGHTY FUN TO CRASH INTO, DON’T IT?? mode.)
Anyway. Bones were broken, and bones have been reset. (7,400 words on The Rise of Skywalker in the middle of it? Not exactly the goal, but also, not outside the rules of the program, either.)
I am relishing the degree to which, at the very least, kamikaze mode seems to have been scared into a corner. Turns out your brain is lying to you? All the time? This month, maybe even more so than usual?
The internet is no longer for porn
Turns out, the internet is over. I guess we could have all seen this coming, but this piece in particular really lensed it in a sharp way, for me anyway. There was almost painful pang of nostalgia when recalling the fact that in the early days of “all this,” you’d get online, and then immediately start seeking your tribe, the people who liked the same things you did. I started a GeoCities blog in 1997 and immediately started writing about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (so little has changed it actually makes my head spin); by 2000, I was talking Star Wars action figure collecting and customization on the old Rebelscum site and boards; and even by the time Tumblr launched, it was like, shit: what if we’re all just the same kind of horny all the time.
And then, I guess, in the 2010s the business model for all the “benevolent” content farms that were providing these experiences for us, became: what if there were only 3 platforms and they were everything.
I bailed out of Elon Musk’s Twitter on Apocalypse Night, about five days before the last epiosde of Andor. (I’d really intended to quit on the day of the last episode of Andor, but, that’s another thing Elon fucked up.) I deleted altogether after he went after trans people and Anthony Fauci in the same tweet. The reasoning isn’t unlike what Noah Smith mentions in the article above: Twitter became Elon Musk’s discussion forum and I was absolutely sick of the moderator, because the moderator’s an asshole. And an idiot. And a fascist.
That was something else that occurred to me in all this: especially in the past six years, we’ve all had a come-to-Jesus moment about what it means to be confronted by fascism; what you actually do, rather than merely say, in that situation. Well: Twitter is run by a fascist. Every tweet on the platform supports fascism, just as surely as every dollar spent on anything related to Harry Potter funds anti-trans hate. Sorry, but that’s just the math.
Sometimes it isn’t any more complicated than it appears. You can enjoy being in the Twitter suckpile just as much as you can enjoy going to a production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child — I have done both — but please, don’t be under any illusions about what monster billionaire you are giving your money to, and what they are going to do with it.
And speaking of lenses
Glass Onion nearly made first place on my list of the best films of 2022; and in terms of physical production, I don’t think anything was better. Best lighting, best camera, best production design. Just a dazzler.
So, I went down a Steve Yedlin rabbit hole the other day. Have you guys been to his site? It’s bonkers. He has a general premise that our common understanding that movies captured on film look different from movies captured digitally is simply a self-fulfilling feedback loop with no basis in fact, and his rhetorical and evidentiary reasoning is pretty fucking astounding.
Here in the outer world, two things happened in pretty short succession: my Super 8 camera broke (for the first of what I am sure will be many times), and I spent about a week fully fucking obsessed with my 4K setup. I went deep on basically every disc I own, checking and re-checking settings against key scenes, information online, and my own sense of what movies I am very familiar with are “supposed” to look like. (The only thing I haven’t done, ironically, is look at Glass Onion in 4K, mostly because I’m hoping some weird loophole exists in Rian Johnson’s Netflix contract which will allow him to release the film on UHD disc.)
It’s been a hoot; but, it’s also been weirdly corrective to the whole “January” of it all. Look: this month’s been ghastly, for a lot of the usual reasons, and some unusual ones as well. Disappearing into movies is a tried-and-true remedy for me; but it’s rarely felt as sensual, as complete, as it has in the past few days. I watched the 4K restoration of Lawrence of Arabia the other day and I was nowhere on this earth, for those four hours. Half an hour of Heat, same thing. The first two thirds of Return of the King (there was a disc error after the Pelennor), same thing. Maybe this is my new January thing: 30 days of the best-looking movies money can buy.