The Aggregate

I’ve been working on something for a few weeks now for this blog slash newsletter (slash bloogslettog?), but it’s not ready yet. Over the past while there have also been a few things that I’ve read, which might have made it into the links and recommendations section in a normal post, but I wanted to say a couple of things about them. So why not do it like this:

Miranda July on blowing up your life

A couple of my significant exes have been on my mind lately; not for any direct reason, I don’t think (like, it wasn’t their birthday recently or anything). Maybe just the mood in the room.

It was a good time for me to find my way onto this piece by Miranda July via my friend Malcolm’s newsletter; it’s a good read, for both its explicit and implicit ideas about how we weigh, create, and move on from massive change. The actual change in question being “ending your relationship,” although, some of the ideas extend a bit further than that.

There are a few passages I wanted to call out specifically.

It might have just been a fling if they had known who you really were and what you wanted. (For example: you’re really, not just a little, bisexual. You’re devoted and consistent but not monogamous. You see yourself primarily as a solo adventurer, not in terms of a couple. Etc.)

That last bit there — the solo adventurer bit — well, I just want to thank Miranda July for putting better words to the sensation of the last six years of my life than I’ve been able to put, myself. It has been a peculiar mode-change for me to process — I was very partner-focused in my twenties and thirties, not just in terms of life goals, but my whole thinking about myself. (“I will never be happy unless…” “I would be lonely if I don’t…” “I am my best self when…”)

Put another way, I used to hate travelling alone. I don’t just mean “didn’t like,” I mean I had a real, deep, completely-beyond-my-control emotional problem, whenever I had to do it. I would get really, really fucked up. It was a sensation that I recall as being FOMO-adjacent — I was Missing Out, and the experience of being somewhere else as a solo adventurer distilled all of those feelings down into so precise a point that the point actually hurt.

In 2018, entirely intentionally, I said fuck that noise and booked a multi-week solo trip to the U.K. to do some things I’d always wanted to do and deal with some shit I’d always wanted to deal with. And I was like, what if we just deal with this problem head on and try to learn a few things about it — basically, about how to be well with myself; to listen to what my body (and my heart) was telling me.

It was like a switch flipped. It wasn’t easy, per se; the listening and the learning was hard and it took time to process some of the things I came to in those weeks. But process them, I did. And now, not only do I prefer travelling alone (and watching movies alone, and a bunch of other things alone), I think I also came to an understanding with myself that finally wiped away whatever fears and graspings kept me so partner-focused, lo those twenty prior years.

Now, another person feels like… another person. They could be there; they could be not there. I’d still be here.

The idea of “soulmates” was very big in my early teens and twenties but honestly that is not how I would describe any of my relationships.

A long time ago my friend Jessica told me (or told Rebecca, who told me) that she thinks people actually get seven soulmates and that one of hers was Kraft Dinner. To which I add, heartily same; and also, if I have a soulmate right now, I am pretty confident it’s my couch.

In fact, this passage of July’s piece (and my overall feelings about my couch) made me realize that if I were to advance a theory on the premise of soulmates at this point in my life, the premise would be: yes, we all get many soulmates (even seven seems too arbitrary and irrelevant a number); and probably, none of them are human beings, because the idea of a person being a soulmate feels nuts to me. Food; books; pets; the ugliest piece of furniture in creation, sure. The colour of the sky on the first day in January when it is officially no longer “ugh, winter” and finally “spring, a long way off, is coming.”

Keep an eye on death and who you want to be as you near it.

This is the whole thing, huh. And note, lest ye misread it (as I did) on a quick scan: it’s not “who you want to be near you as you near it.” It’s just, “who you want to be.”

Look, I think about death a lot these days, not that I intend on trying it anytime soon. Being a single person who is content to stay that way, I’ve contemplated the question of who will be in my circle in my final years, since it won’t likely be a spouse or children.

Unrelated to those questions, I wrote a passage in Enneaka about how I hoped to feel about death at the moment of its arrival, and that was the first part of unlocking (I think, for the first time) this premise: the idea of who I want to be at that moment, and how much I hope I will be able to have preserved these senses of myself and my own place in the order of things, and how (I hope) I don’t abandon all that and become a mean and frightened bastard as, I guess, I have every likelihood of becoming. The world is scary and disappointing (I’m beginning to see the effects of this on my parents) and death comes for us all. I hope she doesn’t come tomorrow. If she does, I hope I have just a moment’s peace with the normalcy of the whole thing, before everything I’ve been blinks out forever.

Brave New World

There’s a new Marvel movie out! And like every other Marvel project in the last ~2.5 years, it is being made to serve as a final* referendum on whether Marvel, as an entity, is even viable anymore!

*until the next one, which in this case is on, like, Tuesday

As usual, the critical consensus on Captain America: Brave New World is overblown — the latitude between a “good” Marvel movie and a “bad” Marvel movie is much narrower than the pundits would have their readers believe — but overall I found Bilge Ebiri’s review the most worthwhile. One of the reasons that I like it is that, while still excoriating the entire state of the nation at Marvel Studios right now, Ebiri still sees what is possible with this kind of movie, which makes his analysis (of what BNW is not) more useful.

Also last week, Will Sloan (ESQUIRE!) took to Twitter to wonder aloud why film critics are being made to cover Marvel movies anymore anyway. There’s some sense in this. Surely, film writers who have long since given up on this entire genre, and have further had that exhaustion curdle into outright hatred by having to keep doing it, can be exempted at this point.

Except, I suppose, the question would be: whom does a stalwart film critic (ESQUIRE!) ask for such relief? Marvel’s publicity department probably doesn’t want them there in the first place; and entertainment news sites aren’t likely to want to stop covering the biggest game in town, financially speaking. The whole industry’s hanging by a thread, after all. Bit of a pickle.

And hey, lest anyone think I’m being over-kind on the Marvel project: it’s true. Phase 5 has been an astonishing series of QA misses, ones which Marvel, even five years ago, would not have allowed into the world. We are indeed in Deadpool’s proverbial “low point,” regardless of whether The Marvels was unfairly shit on (it was) or Agatha proved unexpectedly delightful (it did) or Deadpool vs. Wolverine was lucrative garbage that proves nothing (indeed).

Per my own Letterboxd entry, Brave New World is machined and coherent and bears all the hallmarks of having been worked on to death, but I’m still frankly astonished the movie was released at all, and not Zaslaved into nowhereland after the first test screening. They threw a lot of good money after bad on this one, for no actual narrative or strategic reason that I can intuit. It’s time for Disney to start seriously thinking about installing a Zaslav button, in cases like this one where the brand reputational damage of releasing a poor project is in fact greater than the loss of capital of taking the write-down. I’ve written in the past about how the long time-to-market of Marvel projects makes it next to impossible for these behemoths to respond to their own maladies in real time, but there are short-cuts.

I liked Van Lathan’s description of the current moment in the Marvel project, as he put it in last week’s Midnight Boys podcast (here’s a link to the actual moment, but the whole episode is great). Just getting over COVID himself, Van talked about how after an illness, there’s a protracted period of all the gunk being coughed out before the body’s back to full health. That’s where Marvel is, right now: the last of the gunk. (I’m excited about Thunderbolts, though!)

Hey, while we’re here

Oscar predix:

Picture: It’s probably a dead heat between Conclave and Anora at this point and while I’d personally vote for the latter, I can’t shake the suspicion that the pope drama will win. (I mean shit, look at how hard they’ve pushed the marketing… the pope might literally die by Sunday!)

Director: Anora has this one

Actress: Moore

Actor: Brody

Supporting Actress: Saldaña

Supporting Actor: Culkin

Screenplays: Furthering the dead heat, this will go to Conclave (adapted) and Anora (original)

Animated Feature: Good bet The Wild Robot takes this but I suspect Flow has a better-than-expected chance of pulling it out.

International Feature: I’m Still Here

Documentary Feature: Honestly no idea, but it’d be a treat if No Other Land improbably managed to score.

More links, more recommendations

• I’m making an earnest effort to read more short fiction and this story, by Scott Lynch, rules. It’s long-ish… take the time, it’s so much fun. (Uncanny Magazine)
• I love Star Trek and I hate kicking a dying dog but holy shit, this was funny. (Rikerish)
• While we’re on YouTube, here’s me uncarding Anakin Skywalker. (Giant Green Space Hand)
• The Bondy McBondface news had me revisiting my old James Bond reviews, and I still think they’re great. (Me)
• Compelling piece about a park ranger who works with unhoused persons in Golden Gate Park, which further delineates the scaleability problem of this kind of outreach: each case really is its own unique, particular case. (San Francisco Standard)
• On “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and its brief appearance, a couple of weeks ago, in Severance. (Anxiety Shark)
• The idea of there being a 9-hour documentary about Prince by the guy who did O.J. Simpson: Made In America, that we will never see, is maddening. (New York Times Magazine)
• And finally, A Theory of Elons. This whole thing is great, but the working model it puts forth — that, among other pressing problems, we really need to think about making adhering to regulation easier, much easier, than the alternative — is great. And reminds me of the early days of streaming, when everyone was like “whoa, look how piracy drops when you make it easier for people to do this legally!”