Vignettes #1

Originally sent via Tinyletter on July 13th, 2023

I saw Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse twice in theaters and felt the excitement of a child on a roller coaster each time. It’s an astounding achievement, and one a great many people suffered to make, according to this Vulture interview with four animators who worked on the film. I worry often about how many people work so hard to create beautiful things a very few people then receive the money or credit for. I also think about how the people who receive the money and the credit are often cruel or callous to the people under them who will never be compensated in the same way. But the things they’ve all made are then still beautiful. I have trouble holding these truths at the same time. Mostly it also calls to mind this tweet:

Speaking of, the WGA is still striking and SAG has now joined them. The DGA’s leadership is full of cowards, and the AMPTP, those cartoon villains, will get what’s coming to them.

I finished grad school recently with a degree I’m proud of but which will likely never gain me meaningful employment. Bittersweet.

Succession stuck a landing, but not the landing I wanted. Which wasn’t its job, but I can judge it all the same. It ended the story how it had to, and in a way that satisfied. The Roy children are still just that, children hoping for approval they’ll never get from a father who was always gone, aware on some level of their failures, their lack of skill, and their makeup of bullshit, with little hope except a trace of a smile over a martini that any of them will overcome. However, I think back to the ending shot of that very first episode -- the Rolex in the poor family’s apartment, a consolation prize for their silence on Roman dangling a million dollars over their child’s head – and I find in it that the show strayed from that first promise. At first, the effects of this rich, ridiculous, bored thrashing giant of a family on the society they treated as a playground seemed to matter. NRPI, and then everything explodes. But by the end, the show cared more than anything about how this family affected itself and their equally rich, bored, and incompetent peers.

An Emmy for Ewan, though. I will fund the campaign myself. His funeral speech had even skeptics of television spellbound. James Cromwell is nominated in a stacked category, but I’m still rooting for him and only him.

In a rough emotional time this past month, a friend advised me to do only what is pleasant and easy for now. The idea has been a guiding light in an otherwise misty and unnavigable sea. I can’t always follow it, but I do find myself asking better questions about where I’m directing the boat when I don’t. Do I want to do what I’m doing right now? Is it pleasant? Is it easy? If it isn’t pleasant or easy, is there a reason I have to do it? If I don’t want to be doing this and I don’t have to be doing this, what would I rather be doing? Who and what will bring me joy? If I’m listening to a song and I liked it, I wish it hadn’t ended, then I play it again. As many times as it takes until something else feels nicer for listening. Thankfully, there are many pleasant and easy things for me to do. (Often these days, it’s playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which I will be writing about in-depth at a later date.)

I regret to inform you all that I’m reading Infinite Jest, and further regret to say I’m enjoying it. It’s shockingly prescient about certain things and laughably wrong about others. I’m thinking specifically of how it predicted a phenomenon like Zoom fatigue and then invented the most intricate physical solution to a digital problem. Did you know Infinite Jest is a work of science fiction? I didn’t know either until I started. If any of the many DFW fans I met in college had mentioned that when trying to sell me on it, their pitches might’ve worked better.

Links and things:

• I have a Bluesky account now. I’m @stellarine.bsky.social. I haven’t done any setup on it other than it exists, but I plan on trying it out. Let me know if you’re over there too.
• My fun fact for the day is that the titles of all the season finale episodes of Succession come from this wonderful poem by John Berryman. Give it a read.
• One of the songs I’ve been playing again and again is Animal by Noah Kahan. I saw him perform at the House of Blues in Chicago a year and a half ago or so and everybody figured out how to sing along to this one whether or not they knew the words coming in, including me.
• My friend Myle Yan Tay has a book out! I’m reading it now and can’t put it down. If you live in Singapore, you can pick up a copy of catskull in bookstores, but if you’re not you can buy the ebook here. Yan also has a newsletter called Read It Backwards where he sends out his reviews. I heartily recommend his opinions, even if I can’t support his undying love for Tom Cruise.