pretty things 4
DAYS OF BEING WILD, Open Water, Mk.gee, BEEF, etc.
DAYS OF BEING WILD [Wong Kar-wai] & Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson
I often find myself searching for resolution in art, and that impulse is most instinctive when desire is on the screen. It feels natural to treat that yearning as linear, something that propels one inevitably from a Before to an After — but in DAYS OF BEING WILD and Open Water, we are asked to pause and examine the spaces that sit halfway.
The best Wong movies traverse an interconnected web of desires, pulsing unpredictably from node to node like an electric signal. The CHUNGKING EXPRESS / FALLEN ANGELS duology feels like the natural endpoint of that vision, a moodboard of four independent stories. For me, what prevails from these films are disparate images that piece together a fuzzy mosaic in my memory — Faye Wong dancing through her room with a toy plane in hand, Takeshi Kaneshiro’s smoldering cigarettes — united emotionally by their throughlines. Both here and in most of his catalog, the spine is desire and its exploration: both in its dying embers but also in the moments of blaze that it comes alight.
But DAYS OF BEING WILD is not so much a web as it is one long relentless chain, one person’s desire devouring that of the next. Where the other Wong movies seem to view desire as a universal emotion with a million iterations, something that can be infinitely shattered and reformed like an image refracted through a kaleidoscope, what DAYS presents is more confrontational and zero sum. Sometimes these heartbreaks dissolve into emptiness and leave hollow gravestones of longing, but other times they leave glimmers of hope, illuminating new paths forward like torches. As we follow Yuddy through DAYS and examine how his past weaves its way back into his present, it seems that the ripples in his wake are more compelling than his actual destination.
Even when Wong movies provide narration through internal monologues (a device he triggers often, to devastating effect) they are often matter-of-fact, detached recountings of events. The interiority these opaque glimpses provide is totally theoretical, cloudy lenses that refuse to scatter the murk. In contrast, Open Water is a live wire charged with a different polarity, shot through radical openness. The entire novel revolves around one couple, its unnamed protagonist wrestling with how to reach for and nurture desire’s spark. Nelson’s voice is poised but flowery, beautiful in its fragility and how it wilts. Its depiction of how a relationship blooms and disintegrates is arresting, so personal that it’s written in second-person, placing us in the seat of its narrator. We are not permitted to abstract away.
Ultimately, these are both hopeful texts. Open Water does not offer redemption, but gives us enough hints to convince us that Nelson believes in it. Similarly, DAYS (much like my favorite non-Big 2 Wong movie, HAPPY TOGETHER) barrels through its moroseness and MATRIX-like color grading to blossom in its final act, something I view not just as an exciting turn but an essential creative choice that affirms its themes. This is the beauty of fiction as a form, the privilege of interrogating an emotional crux without the requirement of seeing it through. Here is where I feel fiction most closely mimics real life in its configuration: when a sentence is said or a decision is made or a desire is realized, we choose paths without the gift of knowing their destinations. Desire is complex, and these texts know that: but they also know that we deserve to see desire not just repressed, but in full bloom.
BEEF
The politics of BEEF are actually a little insane if you give them some thought: it seems to posit that we (especially We, the Asian-American children of immigrants) can trace each of our fundamental component faults back not just to our original childhood complexes but even further, generationally. The flashback episode of this show takes on new significance through this lens. It is a montage of traumas that, when bookended by present-day events, seem to be reflected 1:1 through the funhouse mirror of time to today. And not only that, but BEEF seems to equally believe that these failings are unbounded in their depth or ability to cause collateral damage. We are our faults, our faults are us, and together they are infinite. Nuts!
The politics are complicated even further by what the show seems to propose as its form of solution: radical openness and empathy, perhaps even literal oneness. These things are presented as laughably out of reach for nearly the entirety of BEEF’s runtime, for anyone, and when it is ultimately depicted, it’s something that Danny and Amy can only engage in with each other, the fellow broken. It’s a limited and limiting theory of salvation. BEEF is a seriously good show, so much better than I expected, but perhaps because its realm of choice is so close to home I also find myself a little unnerved by what it seems to say.
DÌDI [Sean Wang]
Modern boy coming-of-age stuff is funny. I think because there are some story notes that are basically indispensable (middle school social status, kids being gross, braces, being terrified of girls), these tellings can start to feel similar. And when things are similar, you have to ask questions about differences — what does this have to say that the others don’t?
On that front, DÌDI is actually crystal clear. The unique elements of this telling really are unique in this movie that is in part about this late 2000s advent of social media and the birth of online-ness, but also in part about race, and specifically a very specific sort of Asian-American upbringing that to me has always been so foreign and virtually incomprehensible.
I think in the simplicity of that answer lies both what works and doesn’t work about this movie. DÌDI is so good at capturing these two parallel experiences with nuance and placing them in dialogue with each other. The experience of being a thirteen-year-boy is largely incredibly funny (especially with the gift of a decade of distance), and this movie is razor sharp when it wants to channel that humor. Sometimes, though, DÌDI’s sharpness and sense of pacing leads it to rocket past establishing depth; for example, the brother-sister dynamic is just a little too thin and without texture, not totally able to answer why things happen beyond their narrative usefulness.
So then I’m forced to circle to my original question. What DÌDI has to say that the others doesn’t is so much about its trappings, and I also know my criticism about what it lacks is deeply personal in that I want more from a film that does manage such crispness. But I do know there isn’t really anything quite like this out there, so to this, I’ll keep coming back.
POOR THINGS [Yorgos Lanthimos]
Yorgos has definitely always liked posing questions, but in POOR THINGS it feels like he’d always rather make a joke than provide any answers. I’m a little surprised this gets so much run as a sex-positive / feminist work when it seems to 1) constantly conflate the former for the latter and 2) treat the former as a punchline and nothing more. There is a lot that’s good here — unforgettable set design, a technical clinic by Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Mark Ruffalo being perfectly in on the joke — but I’m not really sure POOR THINGS knows what it wants to say. It is surely fearless in what it chooses to depict on the big screen, but when these depictions are this flat and so totally detached from emotion, they can be dangerously flattening. Satire doesn’t earn its rent just by being outlandish, because things wouldn’t be outlandish if they didn’t tap into the personal. It feels like at the end of the day Yorgos is just pretty happy being one of the world’s most high-profile successful Weirdos (which is truly a cause I can get behind) but this just could’ve been so much more.
Mk.gee - “Alesis” (Mk.gee)
When Mk.gee starts rolling into the second verse of “Alesis,” murmuring the same lines that open the song — “I’m in another body, who’s in somebody else” — it doesn’t just sound like a callback. Even just one minute in, I am handed exhaustion, the echoes of someone flexing old muscles, testing out the pedals tentatively, then accelerating. I know most songwriting works this way, seeking to conjure the trappings of familiarity from newness: the best songs sound like they could have lived forever. But even though I know this is how songs are supposed to work, the pocket Mk.gee finds at the start of this song’s second verse feels isolated from time and space, inhabitant of something eternal. We call songs timeless sometimes when we mean they could be from anytime, but here I mean that in a totally different sense, because “Alesis” is timeless in that it’s bottomless. I also know many songs are secretly in search of the lowest common denominator, but “Alesis” moves in the opposite direction. It’s not that it can achieve the illusion of personal parallel; instead, it seems to excavate emotions that I might never have had.
I saw Mk.gee play earlier this year at Elsewhere, as stripped-down of a presentation I’ve ever seen at a venue that typically is flashing strobes and trickling neon, even for bands. He and another guitarist fronted a drummer, backlit by two floodlights behind them, their silhouettes surreal and distorted, projected atop blazing cones of light. In the couple months since that set, that image has been indelible, a moment of total overlap between what I saw and what I heard — light stretching infinitely into the void, only the roughest shadows remaining of the substance within.
And of the rest:
A.G. Cook - Britpop, esp. disc 1 i am a sucker for the classics
Adrianne Lenker, the most wrong I have ever been about an artist / group
amaarae - “wanted”
aespa - “Supernova” which is unfortunately better classic dance sampling bait than the NewJeans music this year which is missing some juice
Bladee - Cold Visions, my hero
Cassandra Jenkins - “Omakase” which is a truly unhinged title for a song that’s ostensibly the title track here
Charli XCX - “360” / “Sympathy is a knife”, probably the 2 best Charli songs since like 2021
Chuquimamani-Condori, Eera, Purelink @ Nowadays, Eera set changed my life especially the Pi’erre flip
Clairo - “Juna” (Clairo & Leon Michels)
Eiko Ishibashi @ LPR and Eiko Ishibashi on EVIL DOES NOT EXIST and really just EVIL DOES NOT EXIST [Ryusuke Hamaguchi] in general whewwwwwww
EvilGiane - “What She’s Having” feat. Lucy, incomprehensible and unplaceable
Julia Holter - Something in the Room She Moves
Kelela - RAVE:N, The Remixes, I have always said that unintuitively Kelela’s music is always better loud and this is case in point
Khadija Al Hanafi - “Throwsom$”
LAZER DIM 700, unfortunately for my brand “Asian Rock” still my favorite
Lelo - Nightingale
Lucki - GEMINI!
Nicolás Jaar - “sobres”
Nourished by Time @ Bowery Ballroom
NxWorries - “Daydreaming”
Playboi Carti singles this year are u kidding?
Porter Robinson - “KNOCK YOURSELF OUT XD” I think in some senses this is the Asian music I love the most because sometimes the NewJeans stuff is more Euro than it is Asian lol
Everything Rylo Rodriguez and Veeze are on together especially the Lucki song and the “Everlasting Bass” leak
Learning that Lovers Rock is the best Sade album truths are immutable….
Skee Mask - Resort
Shabason, Krgovich, Sage
Vampire Weekend
Wednesday, Hotline TNT @ Brooklyn Steel