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A few words about energy
Hello! It’s been a while. I’ve only published one piece so far this year. You may have read it. When the New Year hit, I kept coming here to write, only to be stymied by something resembling depression. Not really depression, though. More of a weariness with the world. Not sure if you’ve looked around, but it’s depressing out there. I’d come here, and I’d begin typing something out, and within a few lines I’d stop, sometimes mid-sente—
Last night, Doug Ford and the Progressive Conservatives won another majority government in the Ontario Parliament, a long expected outcome, and a representation of too many political failures to begin sussing out here. I’ll leave that to smarter political writers. It’s much worse south of the border. We all know. I don’t need to take you through it. This is what the world is right now, and it feels like a thick fog. It’s a bit weird to blame my writer’s block on The State of the World™, but it hasn’t been writer’s block so much as an exhaustion with everything. The too muchness gets to you. Attention gets sapped away and all concerns feel trivial.
But this is not a newsletter about how everything sucks. You know that already. And anyway, not everything sucks. This morning, I’m off to Chicago for a couple days, to attend Filmspotting Fest, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Filmspotting podcast, hosted by Adam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen. I’ve been listening for just about twenty years, since not long after the podcast launched, which Apple added podcast support to iTunes. That summer, I worked as a lifeguard at Canada’s Wonderland, and on my bus rides to and from the theme park, I’d listen to Filmspotting, then known as Cinecast. It was among the very first film podcasts, and the fact that it’s still going strong impresses and amazes me. It also shocks me to think it’s been two decades since then. I was a teenager then, and now I’m very not, though I still feel like a teenager most of the time. Ahh, the nostalgia creeps in.
I’ve never been to Chicago, and I’m looking forward to it, even if most of my time spend awake will be in movie theatres. Not the best way to see a city, but I do plan on walking around a bit. Maybe I’ll take a stroll through a museum. I’ll bring my Canon AE-1 Program and snap some photos of Chicago’s magnificent architecture, as one does. Tourist stuff. It’ll be fun to be in the city where they shot The Fugitive, and all the other movies, but especially The Fugitive, and The Dark Knight, because I’m me. And of course I go to a city and think of it through the lens of movies. It’s my disease. Like when I visited Philadelphia and was over the moon at seeing the locations where they shot National Treasure—you know, places like the Liberty Bell or Independence Hall, which have no significance outside their relation to that five-star three-star masterpiece.
I won’t be taking my laptop with me, but be assured, I’ll have a report on all the fun once I’m back on Monday. And sure, I’ll throw in some Oscar reactions, too. We’re back to our regularly scheduled programming, loose schedule though it might be, and programming haphazard at best. If the world isn’t going to supply me the energy, I’ll just have to create it myself.
For now, it’s Friday, and while I’m not calling this a “Reading, Watching, Listening” post, here’s what I’ve read, watched, and listened to recently that might be worth your time.
Over at Mubi’s Notebook, I loved this piece, “Inside the Outside: Notes on the “Subjective” Camera,” by Lawrence Garcia, about POV cinema, which saw something of an unexpected resurgence recently with the releases of both Steven Soderbergh’s Presence and RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys. Garcia explores the history of the conceit, and how it’s been applied over time, successfully and not, revealing new ways of understanding the camera’s relation to subject, and the audience’s relation to the camera.
Last week, I had The Bridge on the River Kwai on my mind. I was introduced to the film as a teenager and hadn’t seen it since, and the unwatched 4K Blu-ray was sitting there burning a hole in my shelf, so I finally popped it on. First off, the quality of the restoration on that release is unreal. Just incredible looking. Was also delighted to find the film has only gotten better in watching as an adult. David Lean directs the hell out of the picture, and Alec Guiness centres it all with his sublime performance of a man maniacally bound to the order of things, refusing to accept the reality encroaching on his myopic world.
I’ve been reading Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, her 1913 novel about a family of Swedish-American immigrants out in the rural midwest at the turn of the century. It was recommended to me ages ago, and finally I picked it up. My discipline for reading has slipped considerably, so it’s taking me more time than I’d like to get through a fairly short book, but I’m happy to luxuriate in Cather’s evocative prose, vividly detailing a world so present and so foreign.
In Jewish Currents, professor of history at the University of Cambridge Arthur Asseraf has written what I consider an essential piece about Israel and Palestine. “The Algeria Analogy” was written and published back in December, before the current ceasefire—such that one can call it that—but its relevance extends well beyond the specifics of the current crisis. Asseraf provides an amazingly succinct history of Algerian decolonization, and relates it to the Palestinian struggle in order to understand the core principles at work in that revolutionary spirit and how they curdle or don’t over time. More than just a story about Algeria or Palestine, the essay is about the limits of decolonization movements, and their necessity regardless. A worthwhile read on moral grounds, with a lot of fascinating history as the icing on the cake.
See you next week!