December 29, 2024
# 1693
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Cover and Story
New Year's Eve and New Year's Day generate excitement and anticipation: they encapsulate hope, renewal, and the joy of shared experiences. They provide an opportunity to connect with loved ones, set goals, and look forward to the possibilities of the new year.
The transition from one year to the next represents a fresh start, a chance to leave behind the old and embrace new opportunities. This idea of renewal and fresh beginnings is universally appealing, often marked by parties, fireworks, and various festivities. I wholeheartedly embrace the optimism inherent in New Year’s resolutions.
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Commentary
Being alone on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day
sucks because you’re all alone.
is great because you’re all alone.
is a screaming reminder that you have failed in your relationships.
is an opportunity to indulge yourself.
inhibits dining out, unless you don’t mind being an object of pity.
opens an opportunity to order in, and going for extravagance.
means losing out on group hugs.
gives you an opportunity to focus on something you love without interruption.
deprives you of communal joyful moments.
protects you from family dramas.
deprives you of presents and other happy surprises.
saves you from spending money on gifts.
deprives you of the conviviality of a group dinner.
provides you with the opportunity to watch a favorite movie or sport while you nosh on a great meal.
Being alone on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day is an opportunity for self-reflection, indulgence, and peace.
Being alone on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day is aloneliness.
Zustand vor der Restaurierung
Caspar David Friedrich - KwEv_TMiJhn5kA — Google Arts & Culture
A single figure, dressed in a long garment, stands on a low dune sprinkled with grass. The figure, usually identified as a monk, has turned almost completely away from the viewer and surveys a rough sea and a gray, blank sky that takes up about three quarters of the picture. It is unclear whether he is standing on a high rock or only on a gentle slope to the sea. The dune forms an inexpressive triangle in the composition, at the farthest point of which is the figure. Contrasting with the dark ocean there are several whitecaps of waves sometimes mistaken for seagulls.
Heinrich von Kleist wrote, “How wonderful it is to sit completely alone by the sea under an overcast sky, gazing out over the endless expanse of water. It is essential that one has come there just for this reason, and that one has to return. That one would like to go over the sea but cannot; that one misses any sign of life, and yet one senses the voice of life in the rush of the water, in the blowing of the wind, in the drifting of the clouds, in the lonely cry of the birds ... No situation in the world could be more sad and eerie than this—as the only spark of life in the wide realm of death, a lonely center in a lonely circle... Nevertheless, this definitively marks a totally new departure in Friedrich's art..”
More famously, Kleist also wrote, "since in its monotony and boundlessness it has no foreground except the frame, when viewing it, it is as if one's eyelids had been cut away."[11]
The painting was too minimalist for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who had been a supporter of Friedrich by introducing his work to the duke of Weimar and gaining prizes for him at an 1805 exhibition. Goethe said the painting "could be looked at standing on one's head," making a criticism that would be levied against abstract artists a century later.
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Kat’s Gen Z Corner
Back in Boston
How lucky am I visit Mexico City, New York, Boston, and Arizona — all in the same month?
The first night in Boston included a delicious dinner at Duozo, my dad’s favorite lovely sushi spot. We tried uni (sea urchin) shots with raw egg yolk — honestly fabulous.
And we also wore matching jackets to the restaurant. How cute.
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Tucker’s Corner
A Complete Unknown
How do you make a movie about an artist as unknowable as Bob Dylan? If you’re Todd Haynes, you don’t try to find the man’s center at all. You splinter him into pieces of his persona, with different actors each playing some fragment rather than attempting to represent Dylan in his entirety. If you’re the Coen brothers, you sidle up alongside Dylan with a narrative set in his world but also in his shadow, ending with your also-ran of a musician-main character going outside to meet his beatdown destiny while the future star performs on the stage he just vacated. But if you’re James Mangold, whose 2005 Johnny Cash biopic was one of the main texts spoofed in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, and you have Timothée Chalamet lined up to play young Dylan — a role that was guaranteed to get the actor an Oscar nomination as soon as it was announced — well, you’re not going to make something that breaks wildly with convention.
The wonder of A Complete Unknown isn’t just that it manages to be good anyway but that it finds an angle on Dylan as unexpectedly electric as his amplified Newport set. The film works its way through plenty of expected biopic beats, but Mangold’s epiphany is that he doesn’t need to come up with a set of hackneyed explanations for why Dylan is the way he is — the reliable bane of this subgenre — to show what it was like in the Greenwich Village folk scene when Dylan crash landed there. Instead of treating him like a protagonist, A Complete Unknown approaches the musician like a force. Its best sequences aren’t about Dylan so much as they are about what it was like to be in his orbit when it felt like he could remake the universe. I’m not talking about the escalating audiences he plays in front of, most notably the riled-up crowd at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, which ends the film. (The script, which Mangold wrote with frequent Scorsese collaborator Jay Cocks, is based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric!) It’s the faces of those more intimate with Dylan that carry the film — the collaborators, colleagues, and lovers around him as he makes the ascent from gifted upstart to rock star.
And no face more eloquent than that of Edward Norton, who as Pete Seeger has that expanse broadened by a hairline swooping up toward his crown. A Complete Unknown benefits from an array of worthy supporting performances, among them a bell-voiced and increasingly exasperated Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, a vulnerable Elle Fanning as girlfriend Suze Rotolo (named Sylvie Russo in the film), and Boyd Holbrook doing a swerv-y rendition of Johnny Cash. But as the torch carrier for the folk-revival movement, Norton embodies the scene that births Dylan’s career, and that he eventually outgrows. The movie begins with Dylan washing up in Manhattan early in 1961, on a pilgrimage to see Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), who’s been hospitalized in New Jersey. Seeger’s visiting his friend when this guitar-toting fanboy comes in declaring that he hoped to “catch a spark” off his idol (“before he’s dead” is left implied). Guthrie, left nonverbal by Huntington’s disease, and Seeger feel indulgent enough to ask him to play a tune.
As Chalamet croons “Song to Woody,” the amusement drops off Norton’s face, replaced by an assessing look, as wary as it is excited. The next morning, when Seeger wakes to find the kid who slept on his couch noodling away on what will become “Girl From the North Country,” Norton’s expression flickers through an astonishing mix of admiration, envy, and calculation in less than a minute. Something similarly complicated is reflected on Barbaro’s face after Dylan takes the stage after Baez. He stops her from walking away by describing her voice to the audience as “a little too pretty,” then gives a performance of “I Was Young When I Left Home” that she takes in with as much caution as appreciation. These are the faces of people who understand that the artist they’re watching is about to exert a gravitational pull over their world. As the object of this scrutiny, Chalamet is suitably magnetic, doing his own nasal singing and emanating an untested certainty in the spotlight that gradually solidifies into swagger. But his part is all about providing hard surfaces for the other characters to bounce off of. He goes from deflection to aggression as Dylan grows restless and begins to feel penned in by the expectations of the folk crowd and the pressures of fame. It isn’t a mere impression, but it’s a performance made viable only by everyone around him providing humanity and softness.
A Complete Unknown is a good movie about talent, and about how it feels to be around someone who has the kind of genius that feels like they’ve been touched by the divine. The comparison it brings to mind isn’t Walk the Line at all — it’s Amadeus, only instead of a single jealous Salieri it has a crew of earnest folkies, many of whom are hugely gifted in their own right, hoping to hitch their movement to Dylan’s rising star until he shakes them all off in frustration. A Complete Unknown gives a cluttered, tactile texture to a Greenwich Village that’s become the stuff of myth, but its Dylan hovers above all of it. Late in the film, he swings by Suze’s apartment on his bike, and despite the fact that they’re no longer together, she hops on and heads with him to Newport, because who wouldn’t? It’s the stuff of an album cover. And yet, once she’s there, you can see the fizz in her go flat, as she realizes she’s become an accessory in the latest outfit he’s trying on. A Complete Unknown doesn’t attempt to offer up a solution to the enigma that is Bob Dylan. It does something more achievable — shows us what it’s like to float around the wake of greatness.
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Chuckles and Thoughts
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Six Word Stories
Rain fell; flowers bloomed, love grew.
In the six-word story "Rain fell; flowers bloomed, love grew," the author is conveying a powerful metaphor about growth and transformation. The rain represents challenges or difficult times, while the blooming flowers symbolize the beauty and growth that can arise from such challenges. Love growing amidst these circumstances suggests that, even in difficult times, there is potential for new and beautiful things to develop.
This story highlights the idea that adversity and struggle can lead to positive outcomes and that love can flourish even in challenging conditions. It speaks to the resilience and strength of the human spirit and the transformative power of love.
Monet’s work at Orangerie is a wonderful expression of love.
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Last Comment
This has been my most happily Christmas season in decades, topped off with a 5-day solo trip to Lisbon, Portugal, leaving on Christmas Day. The idea of taking a trip on a major holiday is to obfuscate the aloneliness I might feel on this particular day. As per the morning of the 25th December, 2024, it’s working. I am occupied with checking off the flight-preparedness and almost oblivious to the celebrations taking place around me.
Happy Christmas, to Dom, that’s me, and to the entire world.
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