86: The Finish Line

I feel like I'm limping over the finish line this year, but we made it. This year was good and bad and beautiful and hard. I got the chance to travel a little. I'm procrastinating on finding a therapist. I can feel my own voice asserting itself a little more, both at my day job and in my writing. Here are some of the things that defined and shaped my year.

It's been a bit of a running joke on this newsletter that I spent most of my year avoiding Infinite Jest. Finishing it was my one reading goal for the year. I did it! It's very good! I hated about a third of the experience! It feels like a miracle that the book manages to transcend its own sense of irony and drags itself, kicking and screaming, into an earnest and grace-filled light. That sounds like damning the book with faint praise but I do genuinely admire it, flaws and all. In all honesty, I'll go back and read it again sometime, although it probably won't be for another decade.

While I was simultaneously avoiding Infinite Jest and deep in the throes of a Trigun bender, I went back and reread the Trigun and Trigun Maximum manga. I'll always love characters who carry some conflict at the core of their being, and Trigun's gun-slinging pacifist sharpshooter fits the bill. So does the protagonist of the Murderbot Diaries. Murderbot hates themself, but the joy of reading Martha Wells' stories about the character is that she manages to balance that self-hatred against a beautifully honed sense of humor. Whenever Murderbot comes close to recognizing themself as a person, worthy of love, it feels dangerous. I love the character, and I hope someday they'll come around and find themself lovable, too.

Most of the movies I loved this year had to do with the danger of vulnerability, with characters who put themselves into the open, risking rejection and sometimes death, and doing it for love, for the joy of the chase, because they don't know how to do anything else. I'll write more later about my favorite 2023 releases: Oppenheimer, Past Lives, Showing Up, Asteroid City, and The Boy and the Heron. I'm looking forward to the wide release of Deborah Stratman's Last Things in January; more on that then too. I was also fortunate enough to catch up with a few older movies that knocked me over: Oldboy, Green Room, Take Shelter, Amadeus, Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop, Walter Hill's The Warriors, and Miyazaki's The Wind Rises. And I'd seen them before, but 2023 gave me the opportunities to see The Night of the Hunter, Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark, and Stop Making Sense on the big screen. I was lucky enough to join a screening of Aliens at the IFC Film Center with critic Matt Zoller Seitz, who hosted a conversation about the movie with me after the movie. We ate pizza from the cash-only place around the corner before the show, and I was so nervous I could feel myself shaking, but the conversation was a good one, and I'm so glad to have had the opportunity.

As for the small screen at home, I'm bad at TV, but I was able to carve out some time for Jury Duty, Poker Face, and Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. Between the Scott Pilgrim reboot and Trigun: Stampede, it's been gratifying to see new versions of old stories that are less interested in rehashing familiar plot points and more invested in deepening their characters in new and surprising ways. The new Scott Pilgrim and the new Trigun both manage to do this while remaining true to their respective characters.

The Mountain Goats did something similar with their new record Jenny from Thebes, which revisits a beloved character of theirs after an absence of many years. I first got to know Jenny through the lo-fi album All Hail West Texas, although it's technically impossible to "know" a character like Jenny, who is built around a sense of mystery and who is primarily defined by her absences. Jenny from Thebes clarifies some of her motivations while still letting her slip away from the listener's grasp; she can't be owned, and she's always free, and the show-tunes sensibility of this new rock-opera album is an intuitive fit that I'd never have known to expect. I was also surprised this year by an unlooked-for taste for country/folk music: learning to love Jason Isbell and Jess Williamson, the twang of longing in an old guitar. I spun the record by boygenius constantly; same with Caroline Polacheck's Desire, I Want to Turn Into You. I took a deep dive into Disasterpeace's music, then a hard swerve into the soaring operatic notes of Sisters of Mercy and Peter Murphy.

I mentioned at the top of the newsletter that I had the chance to travel a little; my husband and I took a trip to New York City, partly to celebrate an anniversary and partly because neither of us had been before. We walked everywhere, and we ate like kings. Most of our time was spent in museums. I cried when we found the unicorn tapestries at the Cloisters, and when we turned a corner at the Museum of Modern Art and unexpectedly came across Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World. We caught a matinee of Hadestown, and a lovely big exhibit of Georgia O'Keeffe's work that was built primarily around her repetitive sketches and studies. I've always liked O'Keeffe, but I fell in love with her contemporary Diego Rivera on another trip, this time to Detroit, where I spent a solid half hour craning my neck up at his Industry Murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Finally: I planted handfuls of wildflower seeds around the patio in the backyard last winter. This spring we had daffodils, and in the early summer we got mixed poppies, pink and red and white, and a variety of cornflowers, most of them so blue it made my heart hurt. They were followed by black-eyed susans and sunflowers and a mass of green that won't bloom till next year, after the plants have established their roots. I can't wait to see them this upcoming year.

What I wrote:

For Seeing & Believing, I wrote a review of Michael Mann's Ferrari, a movie I like very much.

Keep an eye out for Seeing & Believing next week; Kevin and I will each publish our respective Top 10 lists for the year.

As for the rest of the year, here's a roundup of a few additional things I wrote and talked about that I'm pleased with:

For Tor.com, I wrote about the indie horror movie Skinamarink and its resonance with fear of the Rapture.

For Bright Wall/Dark Room, I wrote about Michael Mann's 1981 feature debut Thief. I also had the privilege of covering the True/False documentary film festival in 2023. (I'll be going back again in 2024!)

Kevin and I transitioned the Seeing & Believing podcast into a newsletter, in which we trade off reviews every other week. It was a joy to write about Raven Jackson's All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt and Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron.

Before we switched to the newsletter, Kevin and I closed out the podcast with a good long conversation about our collective approach toward engaging with movies.

I had a very long conversation with my friend Ethan Warren for his own newsletter about The Mountain Goats.

And I returned to Eye of the Duck podcast a few times, starting in February with a conversation about one of my all time favorite movies, Steven Soderbergh's Solaris.