pretty things 1

Parking some thoughts on a bunch of pretty things from the first half of this year as well as a couple ugly ones

SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

There are a couple dualities put into play here. Principally, there are two parallel stories threatening intersection, love stories with characters reprising / forgetting / remembering, channeling their essence across two ambiguously related settings.

The other duality is contracted between the viewer and the movie, because what Weerasethakul directs in SYNDROMES is a version of life that is so similar to our own in texture and pacing it can be disconcerting. Even the camera seems to forget which reality it belongs to sometimes, losing itself by lingering on scenes long after their actors depart. Slow cinema often gets described as meditative and a lot of Weerasethakul’s work is, but SYNDROMES doesn’t seem to carry any of that term’s weight. In a truly staggering achievement, it is the rare movie that seems to move in real time.

PAST LIVES (Celine Song)

It felt really striking that Nora and Hae-Sung don’t actually talk about that much substantive across each of their brief moments of connection: it’s always what did you do today, or how did that go, or often, just silence. That quality stands in stark contrast to the space for emotional honesty that Arthur and Nora seem to have carved out in the world of PAST LIVES, one that has its secrets but allows for directness (one of their later conversations is probably the best written thing in this movie). Instead, what Nora and Hae-Sung seem to bask in is their shared foundation and past, something that really doesn’t need to be (and perhaps can’t be by definition) put into words

For me, that’s the best decision Celine Song makes here, because so much of what Nora and Hae-Sung are supposed to mean to each other are edifices constructed by time and imagination. Even the way Hae-Sung speaks Korean is slightly slower and softer to Nora, almost like how my Korean relatives speak to me when I’m back there; there is some intimacy in that, but also some distance. That’s brutally honest filmmaking and it’s a credit to PAST LIVES that this rigor enhances it rather than detracts.

It also wins in small moments. One of the best movie endings in recent memory. It’s brutally funny. I think the first scene lying in bed where Arthur speaks Korean took a few years off my lifespan.

Nourished by Time - Erotic Probiotic 2

This is the best album of the year. The first time I played this album, I put it on as I walked out the door figuring I’d pound through it on my commute, and I literally stopped in my tracks a couple blocks away 30 seconds into the first song. It floored me on first listen, floored me on second listen, floored me when I found out it was a debut album, and continues to floor me a couple months on. If I could create every album in this one’s image I would: 9 songs, 34 minutes, apparently 3 different genres every second. Most importantly: it’s pretty, so pretty, sometimes sounding like a juiced up Channel Tres and other times psychedelic rock. I don’t really have any meaningful criticism or viewpoints here, I just think everyone in the world should listen to this.

ASTEROID CITY (Wes Anderson)

This is probably the best movie by one of the best directors working today, an extension and a perfect refinement of Wes Anderson’s career. Most Wes Anderson movies are pretty sad, and some of the recent ones (DARJEELING LIMITED, GRAND BUDAPEST) are downright devastating. Usually I feel that his signature tone, the visual language, and the rigid framing devices are playing a game of ping-pong with the subject matter; in alternation, in his past movies, these things beat out a rhythm, a wry and melancholy one that’s uniquely recognizable.

In ASTEROID CITY, these elements feel totally united. This movie is a play within a play, and that structure allows Anderson to reflect its (multiple) writers’ and (multiple) cast members’ griefs onto its cosmic scales. I don’t think a work has ever made me think more about how art can be explicitly cathartic but also totally unknowable and opaque, and ASTEROID encourages us to see those layers.

aespa - “SPICY”

This song is a buzzsaw, really vicious stuff, one of the best K-pop songs I can remember. Any industrial-sounding pop song these days recalls PC Music, maybe even the ~2018-19 stage of hyperpop that ultimately translated into. But Charli and SOPHIE (and gecs and glaive ultimately after) pitched up and pitched down their voices into oblivion: we always said it sounded “futuristic” but the version of the future that they conjured was outdated on arrival, robot-centric and retro. The key is to remember that the future never feels like what the future was supposed to be like. This one definitely doesn’t.

Ryuichi Sakamoto - “andata”

I didn’t really grow up listening to classical music and despite my mom’s best efforts the only song I can play on the piano is “Down” by Jay Sean (through half of the first chorus), so sometimes when I listen to Sakamoto’s work, I worry I don’t truly grasp its dimensions. But at the same time, I’ve always also felt that Sakmoto’s music is quite simple in the best way, really, because it’s all call-and-response. That’s true at the atomic level, piano melodies that are so resonant that the notes sound like words, questions and answers that may as well be sentences: but also at the highest level, especially in the past 5 years as he confronted his own mortality publicly and through his work. Especially in those simpler compositions, the central contract is illuminated: now the call and response isn’t just within, but also between himself and the listener.

After the news of Sakamoto’s passing I spent a couple days going back through the archives. Some of it seemed to shine a little bit brighter and harder than it did originally for me, like the more prog electronic stuff (Esperanto) or the wintery, oblique electronic ambient he made alongside Alva Noto (which always made me think a bit about 808s & Heartbreak). But my first reaction after hearing of Sakamoto’s death was to go straight to this song, the opener to his 2017 album async. The core of it is storybook pretty - and the piano covers he’s recorded at various times allow us to see that framing, too - but it also sounds broken and decayed, and so sad. Each phrase reaches up and out.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

I’ve been thinking a lot this year about why all the art that I’m at all interested in creating is reactive, whether it’s my writing (almost always about other art) or photography. I think maybe it’s because for me, art has always been less about catharsis through creation and more about reflection, getting to inscribe the 50% I understand and the 50% I don’t.

Right before this game came out, I had a long conversation with one of my close friends about sharing some insecurity around lacking a “true” creative spark — and being worried about taking up a game that seemed entirely oriented towards a sandbox mentality. Nice physics system sounds sweet but I was trying to play a Zelda game, not become an architect forced to draw with Joycons.

I spent like 10 of the first 30 minutes of this game building a cart and was like “oh wow I could get into this,” then got on TikTok and immediately saw someone who built a military tank and I didn’t touch the game for 3 weeks. But now I’m back in it, struggling a bit for sure and building some really long bridges instead of solving puzzles, but I think starting to feel it click. I think the best video games have to strike this brilliantly difficult balance between replicating faithful systems like life so you know there are Rules (if I do X, I’ll reliably get Y) but also letting you transcend them (because you are playing a video game, and that should afford you some godhood). They got it locked in.

Succession

*spoilers obviously*:

I’ve spent a lot of time in the wake of the season 4 finale - pretty much the only show I’ve finished, let alone kept up with week-by-week, in years - thinking about a line in Lili Loofbourow’s review for it in The Washington Post that’s to the effect of: “sympathy…is a potent instrument,” one to be wielded with a careful eye towards its implications.

“Succession’s” foundational principle always seemed to be that every primary character is a piece of shit, and everything else revolves outwards from that - including what I view as the inevitable conclusion of that piece-of-shit-ness. Then if “Succession’s” foundational conceit is that those people can be complicated, occasionally relatable, and often likable: then it’s fair to view that as the price of entry (who would watch the show if that wasn’t the case?) but also a really dangerous tool. Often, those two thrusts seemed to come into conflict and cause one to eclipse the other: I’m not sure the show’s season 3 had really decided whether we were supposed to love or hate the Roys, either.

“Succession” is instantly anointed for me in the prestige TV pantheon and I think at its best, the only thing I can recall better are stretches of “The Wire,” season 3 of “Game of Thrones”. But I think that tendency of the show to “show the work” emotionally will always frustrate me and in reflection, has robbed what was an otherwise outrageously good landing of some authenticity.

BROKER (Hirozaku Kore-eda)

You can always count on Kore-eda to stay in the same bag, no matter the era or type of movie, but here we see it taken to a new extreme. BROKER is arranged like one of those domino chain reactions, an endless string of Chekhov's Guns with each player and motivation neatly nesting into another. It's outrageously contrived and while this movie does prevail for all the same reasons Kore-eda movies generally do (the learned, meditative pacing, a real saccharine streak that has always managed to feel raw and genuine), the load is a bit heavier than usual.

Gang Dong-Won is the highlight for me amongst a really strong cast. He's not the focal point but he has an insane manchild quality that works so well here as a foil, and it’s the only reason what's by far the best scene in this movie works (towards the end, you won’t miss it).

THE WHALE (Darren Aronofosky)

I broadly think of Aronofsky as one of the cruelest directors working today and this is one of his cruelest yet. What’s difficult is that there actually is some recognizable emotion, mostly lighting up our pity receptors and strongly assisted by an excellent Brendan Fraser and an equally excellent theme. We get plenty of both of those things. But as the start of the movie teaches us, our primary lens is voyeuristic and our primary role is to other. Empathy is not the same emotion as pity.

All of this is generally par for the course for Aronofsky. What’s new here for me is how THE WHALE pushes on the fourth wall, asking us to commingle our emotions for Brendan Fraser the character and Brendan Fraser the actor. It’s difficult to evaluate Aronofsky’s role in that casting independently from Fraser’s experience — which seems to have been universally framed by himself as positive — but from the angle of the filmmaker, I can’t imagine anything that seems like more of a cardinal sin, a truly manipulative and disrespectful approach. This movie did not make me feel good.

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

I read like 5 books over the holidays last year, my first extended reading stint in maybe 8 years, and then got stuck on book 3 of the Wolf Hall trilogy for I think literally 4 months. Great book but a real trap. I was a little worried this was going to be that again for me but instead I blazed through in a couple days, one of the best things I’ve read in recent memory.

Anyways there’s a really outrageously good passage about 4/5 of the way through about how we find ourselves only wanting to take on the happiness of the people we love, not their pain. I don’t even really want to unpack that, really, I just know I had to put the book down for a little bit and start another one.

feeble little horse - “Freak”

Reminds me a lot of the shoegazey turn that Alvvays took (or even - some of the last Soccer Mommy album?) but if it was even muddier, pop does not get better.

WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)

Let him cook

oso oso - “gb/ol h/nf”

oso oso is my favorite rock act ever by a million miles, just some dude from Long Island making bracing, Ian Cohen-core pop-punk. This one, a loosie between the critical fave mixtape and the magnus opus, wasn’t really my thing at first and has evolved into what I view as their definitive work. Whenever I need to create a bubble around myself to breathe I think of this song because it is so arresting that it feels like its own world. I listen to this one in the mornings, I listen to this one biking across the Williamsburg Bridge at night, I’m listening to it on a train right now as I write this. I feel like the word “timeless” is generally used to describe songs that seem like they could be seen as classics at some undefined point in the future. “gb/ol h/nf” earns its legacy in an entirely different manner — it seems like it channels something eternal, bursting into existence already weighedted down by history.

And some other things I really loved:

• Asake - Work of Art

• B. Cool Aid - Leather Blvd., probably the best rap album this year

• jonatan leandoer96 - Sugar World, where Yung Lean is David Bowie

• Youth Lagoon - “Trapeze Artist”

• Pavement, mostly Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain but also “Stereo” into “Shady Lane”

• Honestly man Kid A

• Frieren, the best manga running

• Jujutsu Kaisen, the best shonen manga running

• HARD BOILED (John Woo)

• JOHN WICK 4 (Chad Stahelski), the best one yet

• AFTERSUN (Charlotte Wells)

• AD ASTRA (James Gray)

• Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

• Stay True by Hua Hsu

• Lost & Found by Kathryn Schulz