Blog #4: January in 2024
When I’m not living through January, I remember it as a dreary month. Without the holiday glow, it’s the coldest and brokest month of the year. I look forward to at least four more months of cold weather in Salt Lake City. I am lucky to know many Capricorns and Aquarians, and I lament with them about how hard it is to plan a birthday in January, to ask other people to extend themselves for a proper celebration. Efforts to reign ourselves in are in full effect, and I think of it as a more isolated month. Historically I take less pictures with other people than any other month of the year. I feel different about January this year. I am in a less public but more satisfying rhythm with my friendships. We’re all locking in a little bit, 2023 felt like a grind and 2024 feels like a relief, a reaping of some that hard work and strain. I want to foster more intimate relationships this year. I don’t want to hold myself back from the unmatched pleasure of great conversation because I’m afraid I won’t be understood or simply because I don’t feel like leaving my house. It’s always been more comfortable for me to interact in a larger group of people, where it can stay surface level. I don’t knock those times either, but there are a lot of friends I hold in very high regard that I only really see when we’re drinking. I look forward to some new and deeper friendships in 2024.
The latter half of 2023 was challenging. I have felt aimless in my work life and dissatisfied about my life outside of work. I don’t care for the type of work I have experience in. I feel uncomfortable with the vulnerability it takes to really go out on a limb, to create something, or be a part of something I have a personal stake in. I also really need to push past this type of writing, saying in so many words that I have decided to write more. I need to be more comfortable exploring and exercising the muscle to make things and try and remove the pressure to make something excellent. The only thing I feel a real commitment to is to enjoy more time with my friends. I feel like I haven’t really developed past that since 2020. I want to create more with them this year, including creating more opportunities and good times to exist just between us.
My brain is wired to optimize shit-posting, and I think that is part of what keeps me from being to contribute to something more intentional. As I noted in my first post here, I was a Twitter girl. I love the short-form. I think a lot of Gen Z has a great understanding of the virtue of brevity and also the virtue of the banal. Life is funny, the little nothings that happen, the moments void of any romantic weight. It exists quite contrary to the over-explained and voyeuristic lense of the TikTok POV. I live to see and experience those moments, which is why I loved Vine. The time limit and its inability to ever pull a real profit was the same reason it was excellent. As time goes on, the more viral and over-circulated vines represent the legacy. I wish I had saved my archive of liked videos, because th ones that stuck with me most had very little impact. It was like a gift to see them, something basically unremarkable but hilarious and unique just in the fact that it had been captured on camera.
Even though I have lived in Salt Lake City for over three years, I have not attended anything related to Sundance until this year. I was too late on the draw to attend in Park City, and I was only able to snag one in-person screening. I am comitting to buying a full access pass next year and I’ll be joining the Salt Lake Film Society as well. I like to complain about the demerits of this city and I know it’s unfair considering the little effort I have made to enjoy it. Three of my favorite movies I’ve seen in the last year came from Sundance, and they really get to something special, something true. I ended all three movies feeling deeply jealous that I can’t or haven’t made something so original to itself. They also make me feel invigorated. Independent work and collaboration is exciting. I can feel the energy through the screen. I feel recognition in some of these captured moments. I think of this quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s essay, The Procession of Life:
“He whose genius appears deepest and truest excels his fellows in nothing save the knack of expression; he throws out occasionally a lucky hint at truths of which every human soul is profoundly though unutterably conscious.”
I feel this naive pang, that if only I had thought to do so, I could have made something like this. I’m going take this independent spirit into the new year. I want to write more and I want to capture, in my own way, what it feels like to be here in this time and in this place. Independent work is cool, and I want to work with my gorgeous genius friends to try and stamp something out together this year.
These are the films that haven’t been able to leave my mind. I’ll try and share some clips on my feed as well:
Slacker - I saw this right as the summer was ending. I didn’t know too much about the premise when I selected it. I had just scored access to a Criterion Channel login and selected it from a list of Criterion films by decade. The opening dialogue of the movie set the tone immediately. I am so compelled by a great conversationalist. It follows different pieces of conversation among aimless twenty-somethings in the the somewhat aimless and sprawling city of Austin. It felt comfortable, like a million conversations I’ve participated in or been privy to with my friends in the city. I read that it served as a big inspiration for Clerks, another one of my long time favorites. This type of scripting is so impressive.
Dig! XX - This year at Sundance they premiered an extended cut of the 2004 release Dig! for the 20th anniversay of its release. It follows The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols for seven years a the bands evolve apart from each other. This was the only screening I was able to see in person. I was smiling throughout the entire movie. I have been a long time listener of The Brian Jonestown Massacre, but in truth I really didn’t know too much about them. There’s a moment in the movie where Joel Gion answers the question of whether or not a record label ever actually benefits the artist by saying that he didn’t know of a single example, but he was “quite prepared for the eventuality.” I loved to see guys being dudes and to see their unstripped talent and true vision. These boys were very goofy. It reminds me a lot of Carbondale. Of course it’s tragic too, to see these young men take themselves to ruin, to get in the way of themselves. I watched the original cut (it’s free on Youtube at least for now) and the extended version really does bring a lot of great additions.
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One - I watched this just tonight. I picked it off of the Criterion Channel’s Sundance playlist. If I understood it right, although the understanding of it seems to be the axis of the entire film, it tracks a sort of film-within-a-film experience interlacing different takes with the actors and the discussions from the crew on just what it is exactly that William Greaves, the director, is setting out to do. I think what I really appreciated was the focus on the process, on seeing a completed project remain open-ended. I loved the crew’s discussion of the movie and the director. I felt a kind of lusting to be in an environment to have these types of discussions and to have a stake in a project like this.
