2022: My Year in Art
from the depths of monthly anemia, the art that broke me open this year
I grew up holding the movie theater as an essentially sacred place, but Ian grew up without any sort of attachment to it and also tickets are $57 for a matinee now, so for the past 10 years I haven’t gone to movies the way I used to, with the glorious exception of Ian’s finals’ week in Boston when I walked in the snow to the indie theater on the corner and saw basically everything all at once. That was the year Manchester-by-the-Sea premiered, and I’ll tell you, seeing that film in a crowd of working-class Bostonites was something I’ll never forget. I shared their broken heart because what an emotional wrench of a movie, I cried as hard as they did, but I didn’t feel seen in the way that they did, but I could certainly feel their feeling seen because it was that palpable. When the lights went up, I heard a girl behind me say to the guy she was with, “…you okay?” There was a pause, and he said, “…I think so. You?” and she said, “I think so.”
I felt something like that after I saw The Woman King, despite moments I had to look away because they were such an effective portrayal of physical violation and powerlessness. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a series of image-poems strung together like that for such a powerful purpose, and it’s the kind of story and experience I don’t feel equipped to put into words right now, not just because anemia is glomming onto my every thought and making sure it floats away but also because, I do believe words have their limits, and this film knocks right into mine. Highly recommended, however.
I can’t really put my feelings for Jordan Peele’s Nope into words either. I believe the first sentence I uttered when the end credits rolled was “How. the fuck. does someone DO THAT?!” Ian and I have had in-depth conversations in which we try and fail to disect the cultural reasons for the prevelence of monkeys in media during the portion of the 90’s where we were kids. The Incomprable Mr. Peele has also contemplated this topic, I feel it is safe to assume, and holy shit, I just wish I could thank him. I will some day. Being alive the same moment as he is has often kept me from crying about growing up in this day and age. Also, can we just put Keke Palmer in every story of every kind at all times? That might end all war.
Oh right, there’s also the film that altered my life, made me a fantastic new friend and artistic collaborator, connected me on a person-to-person level with one of my favorite actresses, and made me ramp up the healing process for reasons I can’t quite articulate it, but it has this affect on a lot of people, A Place Among the Dead. I won’t bother linking to my Substack about it because I highly doubt I did it justice, but it certainly deserves a place here, even though (maybe because?) I saw it in my own home on excellent headphones as part of a remote screening Event that turned out to be AN EVENT in many, many ways.
The books that made me keel over in delight this year: Addie Tsai’s remarkable Unwieldy Creatures, which I’ve gone on about at such length now I don’t really feel like re-gushing. I’ll just say that this adaptation of Frankenstein is sorely necessary for its utter fearlessness, and strongly recommended no matter what your relationship to the original, though like all brilliant adaptations, it’s especially satisfying when you know the original.
Elizabeth McCracken’s The Hero of This Book truly made me laugh and cry, and occassionally cry from laughing so hard. Her reading in the audiobook rendition was especially fulfilling, and felt like the voice of your most thoughtful, hilarious, no-nonsense and compassionate friend telling you about their truly remarkable mother, who, incidentally, is a modern icon for disability activism, not because she got all into activist lingo but because she lived her life in precisely the unfettered no-bullshit fiercely intellectual and gloriously sensory manner that They, the perpetuaters of bigotry and the institutions that run on it, don’t want you to know is TYPICAL of disabled people who have basic rights.
I also found myself moved and inspired by Francesca Lia Block’s House of Hearts, a dark, poetic, characteristically sensual and surprisingly disturbing story of love, healing, redemption, trauma, and life-bizarreness. I’ve been a reader of her work for most of my life. This one felt entirely new.
And I’m a few decades late to this party, but I’m in the middle of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, reeling from the high-impact realization that this is a truly character-based story. There’s so much he’s doing and commenting on that the movie either didn’t bother with or actually-opposed, and that makes me sad, but reading the book is making me incredibly happy, even when the viseral gore scenes from the perspective of the person dying are flatly out of control. This is the year I’ve owned the parts of myself that are incredibly fulfilled by such scenes, so there we are, there we are, there we are. Of course they have to serve a purpose besides sadisfying one’s inner Sick Fuck, but these scenes do!
I’ve listened to a lot of books on Audible this year but you know what? Those are none of your business. I’ll have to get very, very drunk if you want me to talk about what I’ve listened to on Audible in 2022 and why, and I very rarely drink and haven’t been properly drunk since 2018 so you might never know. I wish you couldn’t handle the mystery but I’m sure you can.
Television: Sadly, this was the year that Reservation Dogs went all abelist on my ass so I stopped watching it, and there are no other current shows I watch! Besides being abelist, it also got shallow in a way that too many shows that blew my mind in Season 1 tend to do. So I went ahead and rediscovered Buffy the Vampire Slayer despite an in-depth profile on Joss Whedon this year that sent all of us Buffy scholars into a severe exestential crisis. My justification for catapulting back into this suburbly put-together world is that Whedon himself is just one asshole, one man. It truly took a villiage, including one of writers, including one of women writers, to make that artistic achievement come together. I remain an inhabitant of that village.
(This does not mean I condone my personal trainer’s high school teachers, all of whom, he told me, were constantly talking about Buffy in class. This is what made him, a young man now in his 20’s, not want to watch it. I UNDERSTAND. Such is, I assume, the tribulation of secondary school in Los Angeles when one is of a certain age.)
Visual Art: Truly and without exaggeration, everything that my dear and extraordinary friend ReVerse Butcher touches. Turning the lead of conditioned consciousness into the multifaceted blinding-to-make-your-vision sharper gold of other dimensions, we’re not talking art, here, because that’s the root word for artifice: we’re talking portals.
I’ve also become fantatical about Ego Rodriguez, and bought this one for the wall above my desk.
Architecture: I’ve always been in love with the Golden Gate bridge, but this was the year I drew from the well of that love to not leave this city in the dead of night at multiple points.
Video Games: This is a brand-new category for me personally, brought to you by a life-altering connection deepend with a gamer in 2022 by which I essentially became one myself, if only on a philisophical level. I debated including this section, initially afraid I would be construed as that most diabollical of villians, the “TOTAL POSER!” in the parlance of my generation’s youth. But this is phenomenal interactive art that truly deserves accolades, so I’m giving these shoutouts with full disclosure that I am simply an awed observer, not a player. I cannot “win” these games myself, though “winning” as I’ve historically understood it isn’t really the point anymore?
My pixelated devotion goes to: Bloodborne, Overboard, and anticipating the unnecessarily sexy and out of its mind Life of P, which, contrary to its marketing copy, is no one’s adaptation of a damn thing.
Vintage appreciation goes to Zelda: Link’s Awakening, which is an impressively unhinged and imaginative game for its time, which is to say my time, though time is a lie.
There is at least one fourthcoming novel I’m chomping at the bit to talk about, but THAT will be out in 2023, so we’ll wait, we’ll all wait, and I’m sure I’ll be even weirder by then, because that appears to be the way this goes. I don’t know what category this Substack goes into but keeping it and knowing that I’m reaching you all has certainly been a highlight of my year. Here’s to the madness that is BEING ALIVE SOME MORE, let’s toast.
