This month has been an improvement over the last overall, despite some health stuff at the start of the month due to side-effects of a new migraine medicine I was trying and some sort of illness during the week of Christmas.

Overall, though, there was more energy and ability to focus. More than I had all fall by a lot, which made me realize how much I had been impacted during the last 3 months when I was trying a different migraine medication.

So I’m going to try and see if I can manage frequent migraines without medication for a while.

What is coming

  • Definite things:
    • February-April I’ll be doing a residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, Nebraska. I’ll be doing this residency as a composer. I have a few projects in mind for it, but still currently in the stage of figuring out what I’ll be focusing on and proposing some collaborations to friends which I could be working on during that time as well.
    • The album I recorded with Whozyerman? will be released. It is being mixed right now and we may be adding a few more little bits and parts to it in the next month. Release date TBD.
    • A piece of music and an accompanying essay will be included in an academic text on the work of Italo Calvino to be published by Bloomsbury Academics. More details in the future.
  • Possible things:
    • April/May: my band Perfect Hair is looking to book a short (3-5 day) tour in the Northeast of the US with our friends in the band Vervain. No dates confirmed yet and very subject to change.

More things to come too.

What I read

Exodus from the Long Sun, vol IV, the final, in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the Long Sun [1996]

Excellent! I really love these books. Part of the joy as always is in how clever Wolfe is with perspective, narrative, and character. But most of all I love his love of mystery. He was Catholic and this no doubt informed his appreciation for mystery. He also was a writer of the Modern and Postmodern epistemes with all the attendant interests in temporality, spatiality, memory, sensation, and identity. The result is work that is just very sincerely thoughtful and thinking.

Also, Wolfe is so good at making thoughtful and beautiful works that are also fully rooted in a love for early genre fiction. I’ve seen these kinds of comparisons made a lot but they are spot on: Proust and Vance and Woolf and Bester and Melville and Le Guin and Nabokov and Chesterton and Borges and Wells. Just so satisfying to read.

Absolution, Jeff VanderMeer [2024]

The fourth addition to the Southern Reach books. I have read every one of VanderMeer’s novels (except his recent-ish YA-ish novel A Peculiar Peril (I’ll certainly get to it someday) and his early-career-he-clearly-needed-the-money Predator film-franchise tie-in which I’ll probably never read) and find him always to be a writer of smart, interesting, weird as hell and bizarrely poignant work that, like Wolfe, is so deeply in love with genre fiction while also so deeply committed to making really careful and thoughtful writing.

(If you haven’t noticed by now, “thoughtful”, along with “careful” and “attentive”, is really the highest possible praise I can give anything. When you see one of those three words, be assured I’m referring to something which I found to be exceptional, admirable, and worthy.)

Absolution is a very fitting return to Area X in that it is really quite fucked up, raises so many new questions while resolving little, and above all remains as urgently committed as ever to de-centering the Human in our thinking about the Nest of our World, our Environment, our Climate, our Ecologies, our Selves, our Systems, and the far-flung devastations therein.

Two recent, related pieces on Big Tech streaming (namely Netflix and Spotify)

I urge anyone reading this to read these and share them with friends. The issue is not so much that bad, low-effort work is being made (there will always be bad and uninteresting work). The issue is that these profit-seeking corporations have been working hard to find ways to draw ever more of our precious attention towards their services while, paradoxically, demanding less and less of our capacities to care, discern, and think. Netflix doesn’t want us to watch, and Spotify doesn’t want us to listen.

They want us to continue our subscriptions month by month and they want us to have these services on in the background. They want us to engage with TV, Film, Music, and Podcasts only at the level of “vibes” because this will allow them to continue to produce low-effort and uninteresting works “in-house”. The long-term outcome is that these corporations will save money by spending much less on acquiring the rights to distribute interesting work made by real working artists and less money will be needed to pay out royalties and residuals to actual working creators, performers, technical production crew, songwriters, etc.

There will always be bad art and that is not the problem. Below are some of the problems:

  • Our capacity to care, discern, and think about what we listen to and see gets less and less practice. These capacities are muscles that need to be exercised regularly in order to stay in good shape.

  • It will become even harder for actual trained and experienced professionals in the fields of TV, Film, Music, and Radio/Podcasts to make a living as their work is replaced by in-house content factories and “AI” generated garbage. This includes not only the “creative” people we’re accustomed to noticing like actors, directors, performers, and producers. This also includes the myriad highly technical and unsung trades that do the lion’s share of work to make any production possible (scroll through this Wikipedia article on the various jobs that comprise a “film crew”–there are a lot of jobs).

  • More child- and forced-labour, more energy, more fuel, more plastic, and more electronics made out of more toxic chemicals and rare-earth minerals powered by Lithium-based batteries will be consumed to make more shit that nobody pays attention to.

  • More child- and forced-labour, more energy, more fuel, more plastic, and more electronics made out of more toxic chemicals and rare-earth minerals powered by Lithium-based batteries will be consumed to make more smartphones, smart TVs, laptops, and tablets which people will use to spend an increasing amount of their precious time not paying attention to what’s on.

  • More child- and forced-labour, more energy, more fuel, more plastic, and more electronics made out of more toxic chemicals and rare-earth minerals powered in part by Nickel-Cadmium, Lead-Acid, or Lithium-based batteries will be consumed to build and maintain the IT infrastructure that stores and distributes audio and visual media which nobody pays attention to.

What I watched

淑女は何を忘れたか (What Did the Lady Forget?), 小津 安二郎 (Ozu Yasujirō) [1937]

I’ve never seen a pre-WW2 film from Japan before. Quite an experience. This is a funny and charming and interesting, though slight, early Ozu film. It is good, but it is also from early in his career and so in many ways it is Ozu in his nascent stage.

Being made before WW2, before both Atomic Bombs, and during a period of Japanese imperial expansion projects (like the second Sino-Japanese War), this movie has a very different feel compared to Ozu’s post-war movies. The attention paid to class, gender, and “modernity” is very characteristic Ozu. But things are less subtle. And some people, or some perspectives, get much shorter shrift here than in his later films.

千年女優 (Millenium Actress), 今 敏 (Kon Satoshi) [2001]

I hadn’t seen this since college, I think then probably at the behest of my friend Dan who was a massive Kon fan. Having watched so much more Japanese cinema since then, this movie is all the more appealing and charming and interesting to me. Some say you could never do a film adaption of Gene Wolfe’s writing because Wolfe’s usage of prose itself to render complex, oft ambiguous and oft over-determined perspectives could never be done in a visual medium where such ambiguities and tensions would be immediately resolved by being able to see what’s going on. But I think Kon could have done it. The way the narrative here shifts seamlessly (literally without any seams showing!) between being an elder actress’s memoirs, scenes from the films she worked on over the years, her present-day recounting, and the making of the documentary about her life is exhilarating. Really smart and moving. I will be revisiting the rest of Kon’s tragically small body of work in the coming year.

もののけ姫 (Princess Mononoke), 宮崎 駿 (Miyazaki Hayao) [1997]

We watched this one of the eves before Christmas. So cool, so beautiful, so thick. This time around I was thinking about how in a movie like this there are characters who have a relationship to “fate” that you don’t really find much in, e.g., Hollywood movies. There are characters in Mononoke who perceive some kind of inevitable end, and they acknowledge and accept it, but they also keep doing their thing until such time. They don’t deny or avoid their fate, but neither do they try to overcome it or defeat it. A fatalist character in a Hollywood film is usually someone who needs to be convinced and shown the error of their ways or else overcome by someone else who defies those odds. That kind of thing happens in Miyazaki films too. But I like the diversity of deep and real relationships to fate.

It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra [1946]

I wrote it off as a child, assuming it was an overly sweet and sappy Christmas movie. I revisited it around 10 years ago and found it much more interesting and dark. Seeing it now on the big screen at the Irish Film Institute was a real pleasure. It is a brilliant and very moving, though very dark, film.

It is fascinating to see the ways that whiteness, capitalism, patriarchy and masculinity were in operation (nearly) 80 years ago and how little has changed. It’s sad because Bailey’s life’s ambitions really have been systematically thwarted by the demands and claims of (heter-normative patriarchal) Family and (white supremacist liberal (as in Liberalism) capitalist) State. But it is also beautiful because he really did make for himself a life where he loved and was loved by so many people–an entire Community (in the real sense of “community”, not the way it is often used nowadays to denote subreddits and subscriber lists).

くるみ割り人形 (Nutcracker Fantasy), Takeo Nakamura / SANRIO CO. [1979]

Bizarre and scary and a bit too unintentionally weird and uncanny. It’s a stop-motion film based on the Nutcracker story made by the people who make Hello Kitty. We thought it would be weird and cute. It was just weird and fucked up and boring and was not, to me, particularly interesting or worthwhile.

Conclave, Edward Berger [2024]

The sound design is amazing, the music perfect. The costumes are beautiful and you will find yourself wishing you could have a well-tailored set of Cardinal’s robes just to try on and maybe admire yourself before a mirror in and maybe wear out and about on special occasions.

The acting is top notch and the mysteries are intriguing. As an entertaining film it is really excellent and this is the kind of movie that The Movies are for. Immersive, sumptuous, and thrilling.

This movie also has something to say, or at least, real live questions to raise, about what it means to be holy, to be religious, to be Catholic, to be faithful, and to be subservient to Powers and Ideals beyond yourself–whether they be God, or The Truth, or The Church, or one’s Community (again, the real sense of “community”).

I read online that people were complaining about a “twist” at the end of the film. I won’t spoil anything. I will say that I was confused after leaving the theatre as there wasn’t really any “twist”. There was a “revelation”, but this revelation was hinted at all along and I think a second watch would reveal many more subtle hints.

It’s a terrific movie.

The Fellowship of the Ring, Peter Jackson [2001]

I watched this one twice. First, I watched it with the French audio dub and French subtitles as a way to practice my French listening comprehension. It turns out this was not a super helpful exercise since, interestingly, the scripts for a voiceover dub are often quite different from the scripts for subtitles. The reason for this is that the script for the dub must try to match up better with the lip movements of actors as well as the rhythms and durations of the original dialogue. Meanwhile the subtitles will often be closer to a literal translation of the original dialogue, even if doing so means lots more (or lots less) words/syllables to do it. So, this means that the French audio and the French subtitles are almost always completely different for this English language film. It was still useful for me in that I got a lot of listening practice as well as reading practice, but there were certainly lots of occasions where I simply couldn’t catch what was being said and instead just focused on the completely different text of the subtitles.

The Two Towers, Peter Jackson [2002]

We watched this one on New Year’s Eve. It used to be my favourite, and I still do really quite like it, though I think I prefer Fellowship now. This time around, I was very much aware of how quickly time passes in the film. Journeys which should take days or weeks are often rendered with a simple quick cut, so that someone might get the wrong impression that, for instance, Saruman’s massive Uruk-Hai army marched from Orthanc to Helm’s Deep in an afternoon. This is all fine and makes sense for a movie. But I did find myself wondering what an LotR film that focused more on the journey and which gave more attention to the timescales and logistical operations of all the main players would look like.

Interior Chinatown, Charles Yu [2024]

A really charming TV series. Very smart, funny, and clever. There are lots of meta-textual games afoot but it all serves a real story. I wish this was how stories were made fantastic. It isn’t fantastic, to me, to have elves or dragons or made-up kingdoms or magic blood and magic, grandly destined bloodlines. It wouldn’t be fantastic to simply have made a meta-textual riff on US television crime procedurals. It is fantastic, however, to tell a story about Who Gets to Be Noticed and Who Is Put In The Background, and to set that story in Chinatown (which specific one I shan’t reveal as it counts as a spoiler), and to tell this story not by having a show within a show, but by having a show and a show. That’s fantastic.

What We Do in the Shadows, [2019-2024]

I told a friend recently that I think sometimes that this series were made for me. It is absurd, silly, and takes every joke far beyond the point where you would have expected it to be dropped. It is the kind of thing where every episode is stuffed with what could have been random, throwaway gags and yet nothing gets left out. One character has a run in with the ghost of her past self (it’s a long story) who somehow is inhabiting a little doll that looks exactly like her (a long story). In any other show that would have been a single episode with maybe a few call backs in future seasons. In this show, that doll appears and has things to do in nearly every episode going forward. And the doll always has the exact same outfit as her real-life counterpart, and the same hair, and if one of them is reading from a book, then the other is reading too from a (doll- or human-sized as appropriate) book.

I love the commitment to making a show that looks good (so many practical effects!) and is filled with interesting and hilarious and preposterous things and where, instead of trying to impose rules or structures on the performances and the worldbuilding and the lore, everything is just continually added-on-to and every new idea is followed by several simultaneous and contradicting yes-ands. And, magically, all these simulataneous and contradicting yes-ands do not drag the show down or overwhelm it with absurdity, but instead elevate it to, in my estimation, the highest kind of storytelling where the story world is most like our own world: fucked up and contradictory and overwhelming and too much to keep up with and equal parts scary, hilarious, unsettling, preposterous. Yes. It is a fantastic show and it ended well.

What I listened to

I listened to a lot less music this month than normal, and I really didn’t have the energy to keep up with any new releases. I have dozens of open tabs now of new releases to listen to, but I don’t expect I’ll get to them for a while. Here are some of the things I did listen to, usually on our turntable.

Amaryllis, by Mary Halvorson [2022].

Stateless, by Tashi Dorji [2020].

NO SCARE, by Health & Beauty [2016].

It’s just one of the best [art] rock records I’ve ever heard. Brian Sulpizio is a brilliant guitarist and songwriter. Frank Rosaly is a lauded drummer and improviser. Ben Boye (who was in bands with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and Sun Kil Moon, among others) is a stunning keyboardist to behold. This trio version of the band (Sulpizio’s project) is special. I had the tremendous fortune to spend a few days with them when my old band Family Planning played two shows on the tour they did when this record came out. Those performances are burned into my memory–one of the best bands I’ve ever seen.

The First Book of Ayres, songs by John Dowland recorded by The Pro Musica Antiqua under the direction of Safford Cape [1956].

A really marvelous recording. I found it on LP at a second-hand store in Portland, ME, USA many years ago along with a trove of other early music gems.