HAPPY MID-YEAR.
I have a blog now.
I have a blog now.
Jul 10 2023
I’ve been meaning to find a space for myself to write publicly for some time now, but I’ve always needed less reasons to be on Instagram and I can’t keep up with the pace and intimate dedication required of twitter. Only recently did I feel that starting a blog seemed fitting. Not quite a newsletter or something for people to regularly refresh their page to, but a space that exists without requiring whatever part of the brain is needed for that. Hopefully if anyone is reading this often, it’s something they’d sporadically check over long intervals of time and not short ones, because I’m definitely going to get lazy about this, very quickly…
It’s the middle of 2023 right now. I’m 2 years into college with 2 years left to go. I’m also in the middle of editing a handful of shorts and revising my first feature-length script. Like probably a couple other 20 year olds, there’s an unfounded voice in my head that’s concluded I’ll be long gone by age 40, so I might as well throw “I’m in the middle of my life” in there too. It will probably be a terrible, foreseeable, yet currently indistinct tragedy that will make everyone in my life very very sad and alter the trajectory of their lives forever. Once the summer ends, I’ll be studying abroad in Europe and I’m assuming I’ll come back “changed” to some extent. Plus, by the time I’m back, I’ll immediately have to find a new apartment and my mom will have moved out of Orlando, so I won’t have my hometown to go back to when it feels like New York is choking me, which can happen. I’m on the cusp (or possibly in the midst) of constant change, which is fine, nothing new, but undeniably true of this moment in time.
If I’m going to start a kind of public personal record of sorts, a blog makes the most kind of sense to me. I’d like to be able to look back on this after a couple years and see how my life has changed. I constantly reference back to Bucky Fuller’s Dymaxion Chronofile as a template for something I’d like to accomplish in my life one day, but I doubt I could commit even a twentieth of the amount of time that he did to personal record-keeping. I’ve kept journals on and off since I was a kid but in recent years, I’ve found myself unfulfilled writing privately about art I’ve consumed or the state of my life and films. On top of that, I’ve noticed a genuine drop in quality in my clarity as a writer since high school. I find myself very rarely practicing “good” writing in film school, surprise surprise. Knowing that a massive audience will regularly read what I’m putting out there, I assume this will force me to maintain a semblance of cohesive, “writerly” thinking, which I’ve been missing from free writing privately.
My memory has also weirdly been shoddy since quarantine began a couple years back. I have no idea why, and though its weirdly gotten a little better in the last month or so, I’d like to do everything in my power to reverse that. These are supposed to be the best years of my life and I spend too much time trying to remember them. I have considered going to the doctor for this, but best case scenario, they will say “it’s nothing, you’re fine” and worst case scenario I will be diagnosed with early onset _ which I’d happily prefer to put off until later! So here goes…
Scholars Abe Dassa, Nora, and Zachary pictured at what is probably Carmelo’s
Last weekend I released HEY MAN, PLEASE DO THE DISHES, a (very) short film I shot with Abe and Matan. The edit had been locked for a couple months but I think the humor wasn’t clear enough without sound or music. It always came off a bit too cold for me, the sardonicism muddy. Though Gary Wilson’s track is pretty disturbing, in context with the goofiness of his persona and records, I find myself finally laughing at the film instead of being preoccupied with the nihilistic aura the timeline initially reflected. With my own narrative films, I’m not interested in trying to perfectly match whatever I was trying to say when I first wrote the script for a project. If what I feel in reference to it, and what it means to me changes by the time we’re shooting, or even after that, I try to follow what feels true to me as I go on. I’m still figuring out what I get out of making some of these narratives conclude so despondently. It’s definitely not something I’m doing on purpose, I just more or less always end up there. Maybe a better word for despondent is uncomfortable. I’ve also had the poster ready for some time, which I made pretty quickly by printing select frames and text onto construction paper and scanning them on the 9th floor at Tisch. Whenever I hit a bumpy road or dry spell on a film, whether I’ve written one word of a script or am nearly done editing, I try to re-excite myself about the project by making a poster. For one thing, it feels a lot easier than everything else required of filmmaking, and I spent just as much time in my childhood sorting through DVDs as I did actually watching them, so it’s naturally something I find satisfying.
Regarding other projects, I’ve been lacerating an edit of WHY’S EVERYBODY ACTING FUNNY?, a short we shot last summer that I’ve gone back and forth about over the last year. I get closer to figuring it out every editing session, but I’m still having trouble making it as tight as it can be. So I’ll keep chipping away on sound for that until I feel stuck, then re-focus on color until I’m motivated to get back to doing more sound/music work. Of any film I’ve made, it’s definitely the one I’ve slacked on the most, and the last thing I want to do is take more time editing than I already have on one short. Granted, I’ve been busy with school and a handful of other films, but none of this is worth breaking my back over if I don’t get the films finished and seen. Plus, I owe it to everyone that helped me shoot it. Meanwhile, I’ve sent my documentary final THEY GOT ME GOIN’ IN ON MY DAY OFF out to a handful of festivals and am waiting to hear back from them. Knowing the competitive nature of most New York festivals, my hopes are high but expectations purposefully low. At the very least, if the film isn’t selected, I’ll be putting my name on the map to festival programmers and giving myself a better shot for future submissions. That being said, I’m quite proud of that film and look forward to getting it seen. If there’s anything I can be doing more of right now, it’s sending it out to more fests before deadlines pass, but I want to pester some more people for advice before I spend any money on submission fees for festivals who hire pre-screeners to decide the fate of my film before any actual programmers get their eyes on the film. Funds are running too low right now to let the Film Freeway vacuum suck my cash away forever.
As for films I’ve been watching, I finally got around to seeing Joachim Trier’s LOUDER THAN BOMBS. I’ve been a fan of his since I saw the Oslo trilogy at Lincoln Center, though BOMBS takes place around Westchester (hilarious) so naturally it wasn’t included. But it’s fantastic, and possibly my favorite of his films. His trademark sequences where characters narrate under correlating visuals strike me as very obvious, but I always find myself submitting to their corniness. And as always, you can rely on Gabriel Byrne for a grounded performance. Also Norwegian: I’m nearly through volume 1 of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle,” which I don’t have anything to say about that hasn’t already been said besides that I find it endlessly moving. I embarrassingly hadn’t heard of the series until Jeremy Strong mentioned it as “one of the # things he can’t live without” but since then, I’ve been seeing copies everywhere. On my radar now (thank you Nora) is Prefab Sprout’s “Swoon”, a band I’d somehow never stumbled upon but should have years ago given their adjacent-ness to The Smiths. I think no matter how hard I try, my senses will always drag me back to pop music. Finally, I saw my first of hopefully many Nagisa Ōshima films at Anthology Film Archives: 1969’s BOY. It’s been on my watchlist since high school and I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting it to be as concentrated and direct as it was. It’s an extremely unique film, both in visual and sonic style, while always managing to remain unpredictable. Despite the flashiness of the newspaper/reporter segments and the tense construction of car accident sequences, it never felt like Ōshima was trying to entertain me, and the film was all the more gut-wrenching for that reason. I’m sure I’ll be revisiting it often in the years to come.
BOY (1969)
And finally, some lists (in keeping up with the theme of “middles”):
Favorite films of 2023 so far…
-THE LEMON TREE (dir. Rachel Walden @ Cannes)
-BEAU IS AFRAID (dir. Ari Aster @ Village East)
-ASTEROID CITY (dir. Wes Anderson @ Angelika)
-A THOUSAND AND ONE (dir. A.V. Rockwell @ Regal Essex)
-HAPPER’S COMET (dir. Tyler Teorema @ BAM Rose Cinemas)
-ONE FINE MORNING (dir. Mia Hansen-Løve @ Film Forum)
-MASTER GARDENER (dir. Paul Schrader @ Lincoln Center)
-GODLAND (dir. Hlynur Pálmason @ IFC Center)
-SKINAMARINK (dir. Kyle Edward Ball @ Carribean Cinemas)
-JUST KIDDING (dir. Ben Turok @ Roxy Cinema)
-TOWNSEND’S LAST NIGHT (dir. Rhys Scarabosio @ Roxy Cinema)
-STILL: A Michael J. Fox Movie (dir. Davis Guggenheim @ IFC Center)
-DISCO BOY (dir. Giacomo Abbruzzese @ Lincoln Center)
Standout Repertory Screenings of 2023 so far…
-THE LADY EVE (dir. Preston Sturges @ Film Forum on 35mm)
-SUNSET BOULEVARD (dir. Billy Wilder, 1st rewatch @ Columbia University on 16mm, projected by Shane Fleming)
-GOOD MORNING (dir. Yasujirō Ozu @ Film Forum on 35mm, part of “Ozu 120”)
-THE ERRAND BOY (dir. Jerry Lewis @ Roxy Cinema on 35mm presented by Owen Kline)
-FAIL SAFE (dir. Sidney Lumet @ Gene Siskel Film Center, post-screening discussion w/ Daniel Holz)
-BOY (dir. Nagisa Ōshima @ Anthology Film Archives on 35mm)
-MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ (dir. John Cassavetes, 1st rewatch @ Roxy Cinema on 35mm)
-THE LONG GOODBYE (dir. Robert Altman, 1st Rewatch @ Museum of the Moving Image on 35mm)
-GANJA AND HESS (dir. Bill Gunn, 1st rewatch @ Columbia University)
-JAWS (dir. Steven Spielberg, 3rd rewatch @ Metrograph on 35mm)
-MANHATTAN (dir. Woody Allen, 1st rewatch @ Roxy Cinema on 35mm)
-THE WARRIORS (dir. Walter Hill @ Film Forum)
-RAGING BULL (dir. Martin Scorsese, 2nd rewatch @ Film Forum)
-COME BACK TO THE FIVE AND DIME, JIMMY DEAN, JIMMY DEAN (dir. Robert Altman @ Metrograph on 35mm)
-ISHTAR (dir. Elaine May @ Roxy Cinema)
-BRIAN ENO: IMAGINARY LANDSCAPES (dir. Duncan Ward and Gabriella Cardazzo @ Spectacle Theater w/ Q&A)
-MANHATTAN BY NUMBERS (dir. Amir Naderi @ Film Forum on 35mm, part of “The City: Real and Imagined”)
-THE SON (dir. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne @ IFC Center w/ director intro)
-TWO LOVERS (dir. James Gray @ Roxy Cinema on 35mm, presented by Sean Price Williams and Nick Pinkerton)
-LISTEN UP PHILLIP (dir. Alex Ross Perry @ Cinestra w/ director Q&A)
-UNCUT GEMS (dir. Josh and Benny Safdie, 7th rewatch @ Museum of the Moving Image on 35mm)
-THE CATHEDRAL (dir. Ricky D’Ambrose @ Paris Theater)
“The Art of Subtitles” presentation by Bruce Goldstein @ MOMA
Standout Concerts of 2023 so far...
-Horse Jumper of Love (Solo) + Community College @ The Broadway
-Horsegirl + Donkey Basketball @ The Sweatshop
-Zachary Galsky + Anastasia Coope + Autobahn @ Bonzo
-Wilco w/ Horsegirl @ Capitol Theatre
-The Lemon Twigs @ Irving Plaza
-Ethan Beck & The Charlie Browns/Toothache Charley 7/4 show in East Village
Photo by Kalliopi