My Year in Lists: 2022 Movies

on By

TOTAL: 222
New releases: 56
Rewatches: 44
Unseen: 122

Here’s some of my favs.
FYI my favorite movie overall I watched in 2022 was the donkey movie… no, not that one. I didn’t even see that one, I’m talking about the OG. (The fact someone even had the audacity to try and remake it still boggles my mind.)

JACKASS FOREVER

I saw it in theaters but had the chance in June while watching my friend’s cat to binge the entire franchise on Paramount+. Gained a lot of appreciation for the crew and what these movies do as a result. A bunch of dudes goofing around showing their dicks and abusing their bodies? *chef’s kiss* That’s the epitome of stunt cinema, right there. The Godzilla penis opener is spectacular, all the more once you learn the lengths and industry resources required to produce it after viewing 4.5. Ehren McGhehey can’t catch a break.

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE AT ONCE

Kyle Turner wrote the best article I’ve seen about this movie, it’s worth checking out. This is probably going to be The Terminator for multiverse movies going forward: new template, the touchstone. Which, if box office receipts, audience reception, and total global Marvel saturation is anything to go by, we’re in for a lot more of. *sighs* At least this is refreshing, even if I had weird annoying cognitive dissonance at the fact it almost feels lifted from Matt Fraction’s Casanova. (Maybe there’s only one viable narrative you can tell with this multiverse stuff…?) I gave up my nerdy gatekeeping and gave over to it wholeheartedly once the rocks started talking, though. Michelle Yeoh remains a certified queen but it was Stephanie Hsu’s swagger that got me most. I’m still boggled the guys who made the ‘Turn Down for What’ music video directed something like this.

I WANT YOU BACK

It’s a rom-com, it made me laugh, it’s got Charlie Day playing a weird little guy opposite Jenny Slate. I ain’t gotta explain shit.

NOPE

A couple people I know told me they didn’t really ‘get’ this movie. Enjoyed it more or less just fine, they confessed, but afterwards when the dust settled found themselves having expected something more; they couldn’t figure out what the point of it all was. I can understand the urge as well the difficulty. Despite the hermetic quality of his debut, if the three films under his belt are anything to judge, Jordan Peele’s work now seems characterized by eclectic screenwriting as much as they are social commentary. Us is a messy sophomore movie, an idea sketched from a metaphor that doesn’t quiet coalesce yet without resulting in a cascading failure, and if Nope gets accused of the same or worse, it’s only ostensibly because screenwriting by Hollywood accountants and Netflix originals seem to have damaged our critical faculties. (The people who complain about the monkey or how Steven Yeun’s character doesn’t add anything to the plot: congrats, you’ve shown your ass.) I actually think there’s a lot going on in here, mostly related to how media and spectatorship operate, blackness and film history, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to try parsing the ‘meaning’ when better, more insightful people than me have done so (go listen to Celia Mattison talk about this movie!). I wonder if it might even be beside the point anyways. This is a proper Spielbergian summer blockbuster, a Moby Dick monster tale of chasing a white whale, and on first viewing at least, it wants you to get swept up in these characters, their situations, and their psychology – Keke Palmer is a joy anytime she’s on-screen, Steve Yeun’s acting creates a fully realized side-character, Daniel Kaluuya continues to embed his roles with a nuance that is so compelling to watch– everything else becomes ancillary or emergent concerns to what is immediately at hand. At the core its drive is telling a story about metis in the classical sense, wrangling and wits, escalation kept apace with more and more of what the Haywoods learn and, by proxy, the audience, about Jean Jacket’s behavior: by the time we’ve arrived at that cool-ass AKIRA motorslide into Jupitar’s Clam during the climax, we’re in the final minutes of JAWS with the pressurized scuba tank and rifle. When Keke pulls off the one perfect shot? Pure triumphalism. THIS IS WHAT MOVIELAND IS ALL ABOUT!

SMILE

I literally went into this in a packed theater on a date expecting nothing. The trailers looked horrible, the premise dumb; it seemed only degrees removed from the pedigree of something like The Bye-Bye Man. I figured I was in for nothing but jump scares. And yeah, it plods along almost exactly as you’d expect, occasional nice set-dressing and compositions working overtime to compensate for the requisite studio horror beats and trauma themes (uggggggggh). And yet… something happens about a little over mid-way through. It involves Kal Penn, an actor who I’d formerly thought lost his way back to Hollywood after serving in the White House with Obama a decade ago, walking into the room and looks horrified at the main character holding a knife over a bloodied body. He starts yelling hysterically… then proceeds to rip his fucking face off. I dunno, man! Just the imagery of that moment… Kumar peeling his goddamn face off with his fingers while screaming WHAT DID YOU DO AGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH…  it’s great, I was beside myself, I pepped up immediately after that. Same for the ultimate monster in this thing, especially how the lighting during those final confrontations works on the figures. Truth be told, if I’m affording this movie a spot instead of Barbarian, an equally fun theatergoing experience and overall much better movie that I’m sure I’ll rewatch plenty of times, it is only because… well, Smile is a bad movie I’m likely to never rewatch again but which nonetheless seems to have seared some of itself into my brain for life anyways. When it was over my date asked me afterwards if I wanted to go walk around and see the old town ruins on Douglas Island (…ok? lol). Tiptoeing around delipidated structures in pitch dark forest, I realized my brain was trepidatiously filling in all the shadows like a child with the gross entity I’d just seen on-screen.  Infesting your world like a dream: isn’t that the best thing you can hope for from a horror movie? (Well, I mean that and a rowdy-theater where 13-year olds run out screaming in droves.) I admit the charge, because I feel the quality.

THE MENU

We could talk about how this movie sorta talks about itself as a film (or works of art in general) in terms of its food content: contempt for mass audiences, artist versus audience relations, what we want out of art and why we come to it, yadayadayada. We could also bring up how, like so many other offerings lately (Glass Onion, Triangle of Sadness, a half-dozen TV shows), it belongs to a certain strain of popular entertainment enabling a form of consumerism Mark Fisher once called interpassivity: films and TV purporting to satirize or showcase how dumb the rich among us really are, thus making you feel smarter than them, enabling it to perform our protest toward the state-of-affairs for us while nonetheless making us complacent with its ongoing reality. We could, we could. We could! But at the end of the day… aren’t both of those things the exact over-intellectualization this film is deriding, much as it is the dregs with no taste seeking easily-digestible content? Alfred Hitchcock once joked puns are the highest form of literature, and when all is said and done, I think I gotta respect a thriller whose entire plot seems ultimately mediated on manifesting a well-worn proverb (there’s no accounting for taste, baby!) This movie is lean with no fat, it sits you down with a story of motley characters and ushers you out of the theater less than two hours later feeling like you got a full-course meal. John Leguizamo said he based his character on Steven Seagal and goddammit I might just like it for that alone. It’s not the greatest but it filled me up. I went back to the theater a week or two later for a second helping.

DECISION TO LEAVE

How can a movie so cold be so lush? Doomed and sexy, mmmmm. I wanted to keep observing these characters, watch their relationship unfold, become a romantic voyeur in perpetuity to their lives… right up until the waves came crashing down and then suddenly I didn’t. Shattered indeed!

BANSHEES OF INIASHIRN

As someone who lived around his inscrutably nice best friend every waking moment for the last two years and perpetually found myself annoyed at how much that could annoy me at times: too much, Martin McDonagh! STOP IT. But also: glad you’re back on track after your Three Billboards mishap. (Also: another donkey!)

ON THE COUNT OF THREE

A crazy-day-at-work/one-crazy night type movie in the manner of Mikey and Nicky. Two best friends acquire a gun and decide to kill themselves together – one out of trauma, one out of situation – and wind up going on a tear which, by the end of day, inverts reasonings and emotional standing. I liked how small, how intimate this thing is. I also like how it’s incredibly funny, despite the morbid content (because that’s often how absurd suicide’s razor’s edge actually is). “You can’t listen to music that exactly describes the emotional thing you’re going through. You know how cheesy that is? I don’t listen to Alanis Morissette when I’m going through a breakup, and I’m not listening to Papa fucking Roach on the day I’m gonna kill myself.” Slayed me. Henry Winkler has been getting a lot of work lately, hasn’t he?

BABYLON

I’m in a weird metastable state about this movie right now. Depending on what scenes you poke and prod me to reminisce about, I’ll either be giggling about it (the opener and everything during the movie-shoot in the desert) or scoffing at the inanity of it all (dressing up the plot as some grand statement about cinema by the last 45-minute mark). It’s an odd mess, basically, and for once, the divisiveness of the criticism surrounding a film seems somewhat earned. (Walter Anyone complaining of anachronism with the content would be better off just reading something like Crickets by Sammy Harkham – I’d take that comic about making movies over half the movies about making movies, truth be told! –  but nor should it be bestowed any pretense at being more than what it is. When it’s at its best, it has the playfulness of a food fight. If only Tobey Maguire had gotten more things to throw.

Frontier #20 by Anatola Howard

on By

In The Name of Love
Anatola Howard
Published by Youth In Decline

A collection of vignettes showcasing love in various guises: otherness, crushes, music, bodily image, artist-fan relationships. The situations range from straight-up outlandish to perhaps coldly familiar, but what each more or less share in common is a variegated understanding of love as an elevated experience of action, an operation, something that does something to something else. Whether it’s a dude getting in a one-night-stand with a literal alien or a teenage lesbian going through a rollercoaster of emotion, love becomes affective passion, an occurrence or positing verbed upon the transference of energy; being in love generates, it electrifies, imbues a bodily vigor—with cartooning becoming a kind of aperture to witnessing this dynamo at work.

There’s a story in here called ‘Stop! In The Name of Love” concerning a reticent guy who, drinking out on the town with his male coworkers (including his self-assured crush), eventually ends up pressured into performing drunken karaoke. (Guess what song he picks!) And… it’s sort of amazing, it’s literally just a salaryman throwing off the chains of self-restraint to fucking dance and sing in a visual tangle of microphone cords and belted-out lyrics swirling across the page.

Likewise in my favorite story among the bunch, “A 4D Romance,” which crafts a similar affect but inverted, building bottom-up from emotion into a blush by utilizing a few whispered word bubbles and keen color choice.

 Annnnnnnnnd so on and so forth.

Like many past artists in Frontier, I didn’t know Anatola Howard or her work before this collection—pretty stellar! Especially considering the tightknit theme: to focus on collating representations of the myriad contexts in which a feeling of love can emerge or sustain itself is a daunting task for an artist, because truth be told, it’s a daunting subject. Love has a primality to it but there’s also a fuzziness, too, a state of mind occupied by boundless energy continually threatening to dissipate at any time for whatever reason, yet merrily carrying on within an inner space oscillating between a process and being – it’d be so easy to halfass and not do it proper justice (just ask your ex!)! It’s a type of feeling totally universal to human experience, yet somehow always specific in its envelopment. Details and factors change, but the fall into love always starts out with a series of gestures or acts unfolding coextensively across complex thresholds of accumulation and incubation, escalation and descent, duration and suspension, highs and lows: if the speeds matchup, if they all ultimately culminate together, it’ll resonate into a perception. How such generic uniqueness gets instantiated within any particular relation of love is always an expression of this complex act, a singularity of bonds whose only commonality among separate cases is bestowment of a new sensibility: palpable intensity, blissful celerity. You can always tell when somebody loves something because their body tattles, their behavior becomes stimulus-dependent and internally motivated by its very presence! They quite simply do something about it, even if it’s the wrong thing entirely.

And that’s love, in its overwhelming simplicity: praxis, positivity, a mode of expansive performativity seeking out joy, earnestness, openness. Anything else isn’t necessarily bullshit, just far less potent.

Anyway.

If it seems like I’ve lost the plot taking a pretentious detour, pontificating upon a subject so often degraded by meddling designations or gatekeeping claimants, well, it’s only because… I mean, shit, how do you draw that? To not so much evoke love towards a situation or character on the part of the audience in reading a work, but rather successfully capture at a glance in a drawing how being in love feels: I’m interested in that, it’s not easy to pull-off. We’re talking about a complicated notion with an energy entirely its own, recognizably distinct from easily identifiable feelings like sadness or happiness or anger.  I suppose comics storytelling perhaps has the leg up over traditional visually ‘inert’ pictorial spaces such as painting or strict illustration in this regard—love is a complicated series of gestures; every series always has a component of time, which requires a sequencing of events; paneling is nothing but drawing sequential slivers of space to create time (I don’t know if I even fully believe this imaginary argument I’m constructing on the spot here about fine art versus lowly comics, but hey, I DO know Alex Ross has never painted a single comicbook whose photorealism took time to make me feel anything!)—yet, given the short breadth of pages here, you’d be hard-pressed into believing Howard somehow relies on narrative ploys or clever pacing as some ‘cheap’ shortcut towards simulating such visceral affects. No, if I’m overly impressed with Fronter #20, it’s in the fact Anatola Howard really seems to comprehend the full diversity of matters properly pertaining to such dynamicism without gimmickry, the multifaceted yet singular essence of an earthy concept becoming the idea her drawings seemingly stride towards in technical form.

This is pure cartooning, in other words. Howard’s expressive figures, line weight and careful coloring transform drumming, or listening to poetry, or even a kind word spoken aloud into a direct current crystalizing passion(s), style fluid as the subject matter, compositions emitting the emotion animating embodied motion – look, I’m probably talking in circles at this point, do you understand what I’m saying? What I mean is you can actually see the love emerge right there on the page, that is, Anatola Howard is somehow able to capture in some way that incandescent dynamism which underlies our most intricate human feelings and… distill it into a drawing. She makes complex acts of emotion manifest byway of a dozen showcases, sometimes in the span of a single image, without suffering any loss to the original sensations, which… to me, that’s like making a smell visible through a painting? Perception of the imperceptible, baby. Very keen!

You might claim I’m exaggerating or engaged with giddy hyperbole. If not merely overthinking. Because this is just what Art in general and comics in particular are supposed do, right? Eliciting sensations, producing connections, conjuring percepts… or whatever else abstract platitudes can be made. This isn’t anything unique, quite possibly this work isn’t even the best exemplification of what’s being talked about.  And yeah, sure! Totally. Maybe.

But it still doesn’t answer the question: how the heck does Anatola Howard make love look so easy?

A Bleeding Cut by Hellen Jo

on By

A BLEEDING CUT
Hellen Jo
Self Published

A short poetry comic on tiny 4”x5.5” riso pages in an 8-fold pattern layout. Hellen Jo remains one of my favorite illustrators working today, her prints and portraits featuring young women—sometimes solitary, other times in groups, occasionally nude, always of salamandrine gumption— carrying an air of cool detachment which nonetheless exudes a magmatic warmth like few I’ve seen: cigarettes, blood, tears, skateboards and iced drinks distributed among girls posed in gang huddles, whispered gossip, selfie squats, knees in faux-prayer. To see her figures is to experience a queer tension like loitering around loose lava (softly exposed, vulnerable to the surrounding air but don’t stare too long: unless you can flow with them or their own, if you fuck around and aren’t naturally made of the same stuff, they’ll kill ya).  I missed Frontier #2 when it initially came out, so the notion of digging into a proper comic from Jo, however short, was exciting to say the least.

A Bleeding Cut is so simple it’d be easy to feign it as decorative. At six pages it opens and reads quickly, not so much a story or even a tale but operating more like some in media res poesis about a vague state of affairs. We have our nameless quintessential Jo lady contemplating a wound: a deep gash across her palm (was it caused by her own hand or no?). The bleeding doesn’t heal naturally nor crust over; she tries nursing herself back to health by licking it as needed, although dwelling upon it in rather somber and half-heartedly terms: ‘but I live inside it.’ There feels like an unspoken implication this whole thing has gone on for some time, frustrated resignation, a vicious cycle.  I doubt there’s any sleep until she’s exhausted herself stanching the blood at night – then the next day it’ll reopen and start all over again. The blood droplets fall like slow tears. Jo’s imagery is concrete, juxtaposed with narration abstract enough you can reread and read into it as much as you want.

What’s notable is the strange choice of kirigami format. It loans the act of reading this a fitting quality of peculiar materiality: there’s no manner of stapling, only a single piece of paper with everything printed on one side – it can be unfurled, depending on how or where it’s held and pulled open, even unfolded outright entirely. Like this:

Each number is a page (functioning as a panel) meticulously creased then folded into (sequential) existence: exterior pairs 1-2 and 6-5 remain connected by a paper hinge, while the inner pairs 8-3 and 7-4 have been cleaved into flimsy separation by a horizontal incision down the middle of the page. The physical result is something tactile, which shifts and opens upon wounded contortions, narrative structure pivoting around a gaping shape at the heart of everything: “it tastes bitter / emits gas / the foundation is cracked / & the resale value is worthless.” 

I can’t speak to intentions (maybe this choice of format is just cheaper than buying staplers, natch?). But it feels impossible to touch, see, grasp this real gap in physicality without drawing parallels to the titular cut mentioned within… and that really gave me a jolt. I found myself complicit with A Bleeding Cut by design. At its most basic this is simply a mourning comic about living inside the worry of your wounds, a feeling I’d pick at constantly throughout the year it came out; eventually it’d lodge itself in the storage compartment of my car’s armrest, something to be glanced at or paused over nonchalantly in long-drawn traffic jams or parking lots. What I needed specifically was how it delivered it: the terseness of it, the strange nature of its folding (the frustration of being unable to put it back together properly, too, sometimes), the poking around inside whatever it was gesturing towards. A little backpocket lodestone to sorta nudge around and play with during your most empty thoughts, until it instigates something else.

There’s a certain grace to having an object like that in your life. A poem can often function like a kōan or a prayer—if not a scab. And sometimes the best zines are no different, which is exactly the quality I like best in them. I had a head like a hole for most of 2019, large swaths of time spent agonizing over a single mistake I’d made and wishing I was someone better. A Bleeding Cut didn’t fill it, but Hellen Jo at least helped me to visualize the echo.  That’s nothing to scoff at.

Telling the truth can be dangerous business…

on By

Howdy, y’all. I’m Trent. This is my blog: a cartography of talking about shit I really really like (or don’t and why).

I’m not sure how you’ve arrived here exactly. Or at what point in time you’re reading this, since the initial posting. Or even what or how much of the site you’ve read before discovering it.

I suppose it doesn’t matter. I suppose that’s half the fun of an archive (how it folds or unfolds a history of things, depending on how you approach it)…

Why make a blog? Now there’s a question. “Oh geez a blog… why the dumb hassle?” What’s the point anymore in this day and age, when everything needing to be said can be seemingly sequestered onto user platforms: a neatly packaged Letterbox, a Medium-sized newsletter, a pithy tweet? Why not monetize your hobby properly? Why make a land claim in the island chain of the Internet, if the attention span and dopamine receptors aren’t there long enough among the population to spot or stick with it? If it’ll all just inevitably filter and fall under the heavenly mandate of Meta anyways… why do any of this? Why bother at all, really?

I dunno! I guess the simple fact of the matter is the idea of this has been in the back of my head so long, I can’t imagine not doing it—it seemed like a foregone conclusion as soon as I discovered what a blog was or how it could instantiate a real way to do… something.  I can only speak from experience. I grew up exploring and learning how to use the internet in that brief yet special 2000s/early 2010s era of being online, a window of time I’ll try avoiding actively romanticizing but which nonetheless will be emphasized here as an odd period with its own particular sensation or logic of onlineness (a uniqueness worth mentioning, if only by dint of the fact there’s probably an entire generation born after mine nowadays who might read that and recognize nothing of the sensation or even what the fuck I’m going on about).  Social media was gaining ascendence, yet still hadn’t been fully embedded into society and thus remained curiously distinct from the everyday: corporatization hadn’t smoothed everything out into a homogenized network of lock-in nodes and platform capitalism, so the Net still resembled a place where chancy discoveries or community connections formed a bit less algorithmic, more open-endedly. Forums still had advocates, every porn site trawled still risked destroying the family computer. The frontier was coming to an end, sure, but you’d have never known it for all the possibilities. Or poor HTML code design.

Anyone could write or collect or showoff about any number of things. And they did. And it was great. Like a sightseeing expedition between icebergs: you could climb or dive and explore one mass, then hop to another! It was all rather mundane but it felt like an adventure.

There was something wonderful about that, y’know? With comicbooks in particular, I remember discovering in high school and college how there was a whole slath of onliners with their own websites engaging in the exact kind of comics criticism and discourse I’d been chomping at the gums for—Factual Opinion, 4thLetter, Supervillian, Savage Critic, Jog the Blog,  Alec Berry, Graphicontent, besides a dozen or so more lost to time—people engaging with my favorite medium in a manner seemingly unobtainable among conversations attempted with close yet disinterested IRL friends or the socially awkward mouth-breathers huddling around the LCS counter every week simply to bitch incessantly about superhero continuity or taking Marvel vs DC partisanship too seriously. What I discovered instead was what I thought needed discussion already existed, and then some: pointed pontifications about craft; looooong essays codifying aspects of artistic canon and the history of an industry; passionate tracts about brightly colored, long-forgotten artefacts encountered in childhood; explorations into unfamiliar zines, roundtable conversations about anthologies, odd yet informative dissections of style between cartoonists, capsule reviews old and new…  basically, new manners of composition, new ways of conceiving or receiving ideas about things… all of which lead to wasting hours each day for a few weeks or months, anytime I discovered some new site to unpack… cycling through older posts to uncover what’s already been covered or where someone’s possible interests may life, trawling new posts to see how their voice continues extending, branching out in conceptions… shit, OK, now I’m probably romanticizing.

(And it probably goes without saying this notion of blogs never entirely went away, they continue to exist—they’re just seemingly perceived as something niche or unviable with the rise of user platforms and thus gotten less prominent as a result. Hence: this entire superfluous apologia of an opening to a post. Anyways.)

I like how metamorphic blogs seem. They can remain personal, yet always shift focus; you don’t necessarily have to be bogged down by professional strictures or writing formats. That’s half the reason I’m attracted to the idea. The other half is more simple: how writing is always about communication, somehow in some way. And sometimes a blog feels like my best hope for achieving that. I suppose form follows function. Or personal (dis)function sought a proper form. I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD since I was five and it shows: no sense of time management, poor executive functioning, an inability to find anchorage in immediate surroundings and goals unless stuffed full of legalized meth or traumatized into anxiety-laden behavioral change, etc. My manner of being is perhaps not so conducive to writing. I tend towards tangents, I prefer to ramble in conversation and thinking. I still prefer longhand in notebooks, if only because it’s better at forcing me to retain focus than a screen.

An urge to get by in life in some capacity by just writing always seemed undermined by an inability to follow through on promising starts, ever since I was a teenager. There was a point in my life when I was all ego & driven by nothing but an immolating desire, never spoken, to prove how much ‘better’ or ‘smarter’ I was than everyone else. Never mind how moronic that is, I simply ‘knew’ it was the case… and yet, as you can imagine, nothing ever actually got done during that long stretch. 

 It’s hard to know what came first: frustrated inability or the arrogance to prove something?

Nowadays I don’t feel that way much at all anymore. I’d much rather get to know somebody and what they like, or how they’re better at one thing than another, or where they apply their own smarts and why. There was a series of moments where my own life spiraled into control with a discovery of sleep, emancipatory politics, a possibility for love and an accumulation of knowledge & experience. Probably I could redirect my desires elsewhere now and be happy, but still: I want to write.  I need to talk about what enthuses me, to converse with myself about why something I encountered felt fascinating or meaningful or significant, whether there’s an audience to chime-in or not. Praise is mere sugar in the gas tank nowadays; the only person I have to prove anything to is myself.

I know my problems pretty well at this point: if I can’t motivate myself to do something, if I don’t care about something, I’m going to just procrastinate or lose interest and… end up sorta smoldering, listlessly. To mention nothing of how the everlasting issue of burnout management ties into everything. (Good things happen to those bestowed proper work-life balance, and making people grind for it until such a luxurious dynamic happens to them, well, that’s just a delicate dance of a spiritual style…nah I’m just kidding, fuck capitalist platitudes, seriously, GIVE US OUR TIME & ENERGY BACK).

I also know I like to dwell intently upon things. I like philosophy, I like critical analysis. I enjoy learning and making sense of abstract theory, contoured concepts, mathematical logics, metaphorical structures, descriptive deepdives. And I equally enjoy those modes with which such ruminations take shape: meandering rants, anecdotal spirals, academic scientism, poetic analogy, hilarious waves of aphorism, fictionalized fragments blurring with reality. I find as much joy getting caught up in those types of movements—figuring out how stuff works until it clicks in place while staring off into space, lost on an inward propulsion—as I do art itself. Probably because it stems from the same process: creative. To create is to trace an outline of what you wanna say, discovering it as you say it.

Maybe that’s the key.

I think my current living situation has finally helped me realize (and this is basic writer 101 shit, very silly it took so long!) the only way I can do these things I feel like I need to do is if I indulge a yearning to speak about them earnestly. And what I’m discovering is… what gets me most motivated is to creatively connect whichever process keeps me most excited about something with what I want to convey. To find the lines. To just throw out expectations and flow. To experiment with what works and what doesn’t.

To play with what I wanna say. Until one day, maybe, it becomes effortless. Or time-poverty is no longer a thing.

I’m going to try and carve out a space here, a realm of movement between language and ideas—that’s the most important part, that’s the ultimate goal. More than reviews, essays, journaling or interviews, I want this to be a space where I can trace snapshots of thought as they occur to me and constantly calibrate how I communicate them. A flux of learning crystalized as a receptacle of instants: calibretto platonia.

There’s a haste to create, even if it’s for something trivial as formulating a few random inconsequential thoughts. I don’t know what I’m accelerating towards but holy fuck do I have my foot on the pedal.

It’s gonna be dumb, it’s gonna be fun, maybe it’ll turn out inconsistent but I can assure you: it’ll never be boring.

Aight. Let’s do this.