It’s probably telling that I accidentally dated last week’s issue 2020 instead of 2021, as the first few weeks of January were a rather unfortunate appendix to a rotten year. In the past week, though, we finally saw the departure of Trump (“Have a good life. We will see you soon!”), the brief life of the 1776 Report (a brochure for Trump’s insane sense of history, which I wrote about earlier), and the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Sure, the whole thing felt like a retirement party or a silent auction, but I found myself so starved for banality that it was almost exhilarating—less because I believed that democracy had finally been saved and more because for once a federal ceremony wasn’t going to be some grim hybrid of Jim Bakker and Leni Riefenstahl.
Yesterday the US passed 25 million coronavirus infections and today it is snowing in New York. One of my favorite poems is a one-liner by William Matthews that goes:
SNOW
The dead are dreaming of breathing
ben tapeworm
on the turntable
Here are five more tracks from my end-of-year song list that I started last week.
on the screen
I watched Cédric Ido’s short film Hasaki Ya Suda the other day, a genre mashup of chanbara, western, and sci-fi that, while delightful, felt more like a proof of concept than a film unto itself. I know that many shorts are just that—from the stuff of Oats Studios, Neill Blomkamp’s high-end sci-fi/horror outfit, to films like Whiplash (2014) and Atlantics (2019) that were shorts before they were features—but I don’t know of many filmmakers committed to the short the way some authors are committed to the short story. Perhaps I’m just jaded, having grown up in the age of Vimeo, cheaper equipment, and proliferating film festivals, which has led to a glut of slick-looking shorts clamoring to make it big. Or perhaps the short-filmmaker just isn’t as celebrated as the long-filmmaker; so many of the most revered films—especially documentaries—are also feats of endurance, from Frederick Wiseman’s hours-long observational docs to Ken Burns’s attempts at history-textbook comprehensiveness to Claude Lanzmann’s much-lauded Shoah, a Holocaust film that clocks in at nearly ten hours.