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For the first few minutes my mind is clear and a hope for a swift descent into the dreamscape is still alive. The temperature in my room is just right. I don’t regret the combination of PJ pants and tank top I put on after my shower. The last whiffs of incense roam the air and I sink into the joyous idea of the next morning, when I’ll awaken with the shining eyes of restfulness to take on my creative tasks with a full tank… until more time passes when my mind chooses the wrong turn at the fork between precious recharge and esoteric brainstorm. Now, it would be an entirely different story if the ideas I was churning out at the wee hours of the night were frivolous by a morning’s reflection. But to my dismay ;) much of the stuff keeping me up, typing sporadically into my notes app, actually makes it into the final draft. So the question becomes, are these sparks of ingenious exclusive to the dark bedroom hours? Could I just as easily reach such novel territory during my dedicated daytime writing sessions. Science says great ideas tend to “strike” at night because the prefrontal cortex that’s involved in everyday inhibition and control weaken during those hours, not to mention the heightened state of relaxation lowers anxiety (which is wildly disaffirming to the bubbling baseline levels of anxiety I feel at night about things spanning from the state of the world to “when is my cool new bag from Japan gonna arrive.”) I guess I’m far more adept at dealing with those.

Knowing the clear perks, my plan to regain a healthy slumber schedule must account for at least half an hour of half-asleep idea generating. Not in a calculated way because that would destroy the stress-free essence of the whole thing. But to do that, I have to address a few natural impediments: screen time at night, setting off the creative mind is notoriously hard to stop.

Lucky for me, there’s obvious solutions to both of these.

Writing manually unlocks swaths of processing potential and it removes the stimulus. It forces you to slow down, think clearer and engage the kind of meditative practices that make for a seamless transition to bedtime. I tend to be a google docs warrior during the day but diverting my efforts toward the modest notebook has been a rewarding shift. I’m itching to do it much much more.

Another excellent compliment to the zero-screens in the bed policy I’m chasing is an alarm clock—which doubles in functional value when you consider the honorable, worthwhile goal of staying off screens for at least 30 minutes after you wake up. I personally haven’t been the best disciplinarian when it comes to this, but we grow stronger and stronger every day!

On my search for the perfect alarm clock, several lines of mid-century vintage flip clocks from the 70s caught my eye, most of which are made in Japan. I went with this beautiful orange one from Lumitime which I found DEADSTOCK on eBay that’ll be a a nice, dichotomously cohesive pop to my mid-century modern decor predilections.

There’s also a lot of great ones made by Sankyo, Seiko and Copal. While they do run you a chunk of change, I think inviting a sense of analog whimsy into your life is worth the investment if you can. I particularly enjoy the model I got because there’s no am/pm on the dial, meaning every night you have to set the alarm for the next day, a welcome addition to my nightly unwind routine.

I’ve of course trodded the medicinal path for improving sleep and I must say, most of it plateaus after a relatively short period of usage and/or deters me with the drowsy side effects (I’m ofc talkin melatonin).

So instead, I’ve gotten into my herbalist bag and relied on another pair of tools that go hand in hand.

Like I hinted at earlier, a room that smells divine soothes the mind. I like to burn some incense while I’m doing my nightly rituals and burn it a good 10-15 mins before hopping into bed. Yes it makes a difference. But don’t ask me. Ask ur neighborhood aromatherapy aficionado. Read an article about it. For the sake of everything we hold dear, don’t ask ChatGPT.

While the synthetic melatonin most people are used to taking has diminishing returns, I’ve become a huge proponent of plant-based solutions, specifically the concoctions made by the folks at Wooden Spoon Herbs. I grew up with health freak parents who stocked up on this kind of stuff weekly so I’m afraid it’s my own fault for being this late to the party.

Last night I was rocking with the Magic Magnesium Blue Lemonade powder to sip during a movie. They also make a cherry Magnesium Glycinate version but a simple zero-frills capsule of MG is probably the most effective vehicle, if they’re all natural ofc. I’m taking them on a trial run at the moment to find out if their muscle relaxing, anxiety reducing perks prove resonant by the 4-6 week signifier. TBDDD!

Dive in for yourself if you’re intrigued!

You also can’t go wrong with a classic cup of tea, if you’re me, preferably something piping, minty or tangy to revitalize the senses. A cheeky lil sleep mask doesn’t hurt either!

I’m nothing if not a ravenous consumer. For more thoughtful recs of excellent artistry in watchables, listenables, displayables, readables and playables, check out the Great Creations page that I stay stacking.

Next up this week:

• Another bonus video as I figure out the recurring format for the series, this time with more happenings on the writing front!

I streamed the entire season of BEEF the minute I got through the OPPRESSIVE Netflix login code barrier and I am completely blown away. The first season of Beef hit me in the same way Get Out hit me in 2017, in no small part due to my connection to the tone and the sharp social commentary they both nail. The cinematic network of my brain grew two sizes when I watched them. Lee Sung Jin, creator of the show, notably writes from hyper-specific personal experience, which I think allows him to get as granular as he does to make something that is so incredibly pure of emotion, heart and revelatory humor. His writing is a conduit for the shadow self, the deepest, darkest conscious and subconscious impulses that have the potential to drive us farther and farther from firm moral ground. And it’s the same meaning-making mouthful I latched onto this season, which follows two calamitously intertwined couples wrapped up in the high stakes world that is working at a high-profile country club.

Lee Sung Jin is one of one, and because his work is so dialed into symbolic excavation and complex character study, I’ve taken a few days longer than usual to write this post.

I spent that extra time doing some much cherished research. Research involving the mechanisms behind human decision making. As my primary guide, I looked to Robert Greene’s The Laws of Human Nature. I found this an important step before starting this post because character is behavior and behavior is psychology. These are the thought processes that build character and, as as evidenced by personal screenwriting enrichment, build more complex, resonant characters than ever before. The book introduces 18 laws of human nature, each detailing the emotions that color our thinking, discerning the rational from irrational and exposing the invisible unconscious motor behind those moments we struggle to justify. Lucky for me, the structure of this book maps out nicely onto the characters from this season, the feature I’d like to focus on however the meticulous imagery of this season cannot be understated.

The younger couple is the first one we see but the second one we hear.

Ashley is certainly a self-identified charmer. She projects a humble, naive softness that not-so-easily wraps around an equal but opposite disposition of conniving and arrogant. Needless to say, the wrapping paper is low ply. She works at the country club with a boyfriend she’s so passionately in love with she can’t bear the mere 30 seconds they spend apart while he’s taking a piss. I’d guess, while not episode canon, that they do most of their pissing together. If I could assign her a law it would be the law of envy and the law of compulsive behavior, which individually encapsulate her formed behavior from childhood, the instinct to compare herself with others and solicit approval, living in constant fear of being cheated on.

Austin wears his heart on his sleeve and shares a complete, borderline sycophantic infatuation with his girl Ashley. He operates with a transparent sense of morality, the type that mopes around when they can’t save a dying bee with a pinky’s drop of water and good vibes. We later learn of his singed past with an abusive, emotionally exploitative mother who, in his adulthood, apologizes for how she treated him, which serves as great precedent for his willingness to forgive others that becomes ever so relevant to where this couple ends up. Meanwhile, Ashley’s origins point toward some real abandonment issues from parents who, in the present day, won’t give her the time of day whether on the couch or at a football game. As a conceivable reaction to this, she dreams of creating the tight-knit family she never had. But even before we learn these things about each of them, which is much, much later in the season, the insecurities, anxieties, and patterns of repression they’re subject to is palpable. It shows up in the small gestures. The extra contrived last word of glee Ashley punctuates every conversation with or the way she’s ready to deploy a moralizing dose of passive aggression to turn Austin to her side of the argument. Or the silent, almost imperceptible pain in Austin’s face when he can’t solve a problem and his conflict averseness getting him to eat his words.

Lindsay feels emptied by her work environment that she hares with Josh, her husband and verbal sparring partner. He and Lindsay work in somewhat of a partnership, him as manager and her the interior designer at the country club. Thankfully, they’ve developed their own coping mechanism for the reality that their relationship is so chalked full of resentment, they struggle to even pick up on each other’s obvious, consolable pain. She deals with it by chatting up other men to hookup with and he visits online sexual chatrooms. Lindsay likes to think of herself as socially superiority, so she needs the validation of those she finds more attractive, successful or happy than her, feeling threatened by their every win. She’ll also do anything to achieve that superiority, including blackmail which is a vibrant thread throughout the show’s moral depravity. Law of aimlessness suits her well as a woman who’s lost her greater sense of purpose in life, unhappy in her career and dreaming of missed opportunities.

Josh radiates feelings of inadequacy and unresolved trauma, the makings of many a great character. He’s swift to appease those whose good grace burgeons his status, or at least maintains it so it’s not hard to understand why he lets all the club’s members run him over with minuscule favors and special requests. By all intents and purposes, he’s a cuck… with a porn addiction to compliment. But you can tell he gains something from acts of service, even when it feels mildly exploitative. Maybe confidence or purpose. He’s a giver who’s lost his way in a job that forces you to confront your unhappiness. His character aligns with the law of grandiosity because often on the other side of an avid giver is a man who’s fallen prey to a natural tendency to overvalue their own brilliance, a self-absorption that leads to defensiveness and neglect of the facts.

The most alluring part of these two couples in chaos together is the way they hold a mirror to each other. They uphold the same patterns of behavior with a 20 year age gap. Despite me associating them with certain laws, given the same pattern of emotions govern all of their behavior, there is substantial overlap. The tagline for the poster could’t be more spot on.

“EVERY COUPLE MEETS THEIR MATCH”

Josh and Lindsay cling to their youth. All the times they had and will never have again. Ashley and Austin feel the invincible allure of youth, naive in all the places J and L are jaded. Both couples shoulder the weight of the world and how to find a comfortable place within it. and all four’s dilemmas stem from the greed, self-interest and loneliness of capitalism.

There’s no doubt that a real love lies below the messy surface between both couples. And they’ve all given way to repression, shortsightedness and role-playing, rules that conceal the “dark side,” present curated personas to the world and seek immediate gratification, all things prone to upheaval. When you think about it, how could they not? Without genuine connection and emotional safety in their lives, they live in trepidation of the future. Although I didn’t mention them the 2 auxiliary couples, Ava and Troy, Chairwoman Park and Dr. Kim are powerful pillars to the same framework. This season was another hearty class commentary that illustrates with new clarity, the things that tear us apart are structural. They implant a loneliness as difficult to discern as it is corrosive to meaningful connection and economic security.

Read more

• A personal update of creative trajectory

• NEW Great Creation shout out

• Letterboxd reviews that tickled me

I spent the bulk of last year covertly preparing two applications. One to NYU and one to Columbia. I spent that summer, and change, prior to the application deadline in New York. I was there for an internship with, now institutionally depraved, Skydance Media, which swallowed Paramount (aptly) upon my exit and soon after opened its jaws to Warner Bros in another ruthless effort of cost-cutting and human-forsaking.

Some of my favorite industry publications covering calamitous mergers like these and more:

The Entertainment Strategy Guy

The best writing on entertainment strategy including a weekly "Streaming Ratings Report", unpacking what shows and films are winning the streaming wars.

The Industry

Daily Film & TV News Direct to You.

Hope For Film

We need a vibrant alternative to mainstream culture, especially a non-dependent cinema ecosystem. Let's build it together & examine what got us here in the first place -- including how we can each build our own sustainable & generative creative practices.

By Ted Hope

And if you’re into the robust and very necessary anti-film school attestation →

Too Much Film School

Studying films, old and new

By Matt Price

I decided around that time that New York City was where I had to be and (thankfully) that decision has been reinforced by a smorgasbord of fortuitous revelations like a) Every comedic genius I happen upon, love and adore lives in Brooklyn or b) this crazy good bakery I can’t get enough of is in Sunnyside Queens. And of course, a thriving cascade of yoked fellow filmmakers on the prowl… not to mention learning about the tried-and-true savant faculty belonging to each school.

I hit the submit button in December and what followed was a slow drip of copium.

Studying film in undergrad, I became privy to the overwhelming improbability of acceptance to one of the BIG 3 (NYU, USC, AFI_ _ _ Columbia) and while I believed it couldn’t be any more “improbable” than carving a momentous career out of the dust, I still couldn’t help but cozy up under the blanket of doubt. So I researched. I convinced myself of the many existing avenues toward a career as an independent writer/director beyond that of the film school pipeline. But none were as accessible to me as a applying, which would offer me the chance to do again what I got to do in undergrad, except on a much more dedicated, macro level: Make films, develop a gutsy slant on the form, and subsequently express the snowballing pile of thoughts I have about the world, expanding farther with every ounce of humanity stripped from those who need it most. Maybe it’s naivety, maybe it’s impatience, but as anyone keeping up with the industry knows, nothing is set in stone, everything is up for the capitalist slaughter and community is never as important as it will be tomorrow. Film school will never be a fast-track to a flourishing career. But for me it’s a dunk tank to a sprinkler… and I’d like to get drenched in the quickest way I can.

So I got into both NYU and Columbia! dubs in chat

As far as which school I will do such drenching in: TO BE DETERMINED. I’ll throw an update on this post by next week when I decide and I’ll “substack tweet” aka write a note on the SL page.

FINAL UPDATE - I’ve chosen NYU

On the plane to see apartments and campuses in the city, I finished a book I haven’t found the slightest urge to put down since I started it.

Luster is about a black woman living in NYC, working a mostly dead end job and getting swept up in an unprecedented relationship that causes a hemorrhage in every corner of her life, which does stretch itself far enough to include a literal medical hemorrhage. But even considering this and its many other magnetic events, what makes it a knock out is the sometimes depressing, sometimes spirited, always surprising ways she assesses it all, good, bad, trivial, monstrous disaster. That is to say, Edie, the protagonist, couldn’t bore you with a single thought, even if she watched paint dry for an entire chapter. A vibrancy owed to none other than Raven’s masterful incision, breathing life to the parts of young adulthood, artistry and love that are easiest to coast through.

Letterboxd thrives at the intersection of dribbling intellectualism and irony-pilled proclamation, but reviews as of late rarely throw their darts down the middle, at least according to my feed. On that note, and in lieu of a movie meditation this week, I’ve rounded up some of my recent favs, mostly teetering toward one end of the pole. Better assembly to come? For now:

Next week

• A brand new edition of the recently debuted dialogue meta of the Movie Meditation

• Film school selection final update

• First Bonus edition VIDEO post?

And more…

Quick sidebar: I caught this at the theatre closest to me (Flix Brewhouse, formerly an Alamo Drafthouse) but the hunt for my tried and true movie theatre continues. Suggestions are welcome! I’ll be starting film school in NYC this fall so throw some darts in that direction why don’t ya.

Before The Drama, I revisited two of Borgli’s formative films, the most recent, starring Nicolas Cage, Dream Scenario (2023), and the other starring Kristine Kujath Thorp, Sick of Myself (2022). The latter, my favorite, channeled a perverted take on the attention economy with a woman hell bent on stealing the limelight from her pretentious artist boyfriend to achieve her own fame. What I loved about this film was its willingness to go there when it comes to bodily disfigurement via volitional illness (spoiler, she takes dark web drugs to self induce skin disease). It really commits itself to examining the perilous physiological interplay of a woman wedged between insecurity and the twisted validation.

Dream Scenario mirrored many of these untethered cognitive extremes with the tale of a college professor stuck in the liminal space of other people’s dreams, presenting as neither friend nor foe but something in between, and perhaps even more freakishly imposing. Dream Scenario thrives off an emotional landscape as pernicious as the last, with a similarly daunting visual style. As a fan of both worlds, what imprints me the most is their weaponized mundanity, laying in the folds and waiting to dubiously unmask themselves as drivers of chaos. This quality emerges with particular force during meal times. In Sick of Myself, conversations are hijacked by Signe’s developing attitude of total social disgust. She struggles to hide her look of physical pain across the table from her boyfriend and his friends. Paul (Dream Scenario) is burdened by parallel career resentments and a gaping feeling of inferiority, made the clearest at an early dinner conversation with a former colleague where he asks pointed questions about her status before accusing her of scholastic fraud. Paul, too, is sick of himself and, will soon square his twiddling reality with the dreamed up projections of strangers and kin; just like Signe squares her insatiable need to be a sobbing headline story with a world who eats it up without hesitation.

Going into The Drama I expected the same caldron of dormant explosives, bubbling up forebodingly in a darkly comedic stew. I hopped on a phone call after the screening. Here’s what my friend Bryce and I have to say about it.

<SPOILERS AHEAD>

Alexx(Me): All right, dude. What a...

Bryce: How do we even start, bro?

Alexx: I want to start with a thematic statement. And it’s that... Well, more of a question. Do you think it’s possible for couples to start over after that kind of discrepancy in whatever it may be? I guess we should keep it to this. But, like, that’s obviously the question, the main question it’s posing. It’s stated, like, three different times, beginning, middle, and end. And I... I understand that ambition of, like, tackling that question in a different way, in a very unique way. I did not expect that reveal at all. Did you expect it?

Bryce: No, man. Oh, my God.

Alexx: Their relationship started off in a performative way.

Bryce: Definitely. Definitely

Alexx: And I feel like it ended that way, too. Maybe that’s the point. He literally met her with this idea of, like, seeking the perfect image of a meet-cute, under the pretense of pretending to know what she’s reading. Like, the fucking thing started off as a fraud.

Bryce: Oh my god dude yea

Alexx: But I do think that what it had to say about the way that we are desensitized to the school shooting phenomenon in this country was way more interesting than what it had to say about, like, relationships. But I also appreciate what it the discussion it foments about whether someone can truly change.

Bryce: Yes. I agree.

Alexx: Because it... Like, the complete lack of ability for... What’s his name? Charlie? For Charlie to exercise any empathy toward Emma is insanity. It is reactionary to the fucking tea, dude.

Bryce: What I thought about that shit is, like, you could tell, like, the difference in how they were brought up. I think... Okay, a lot of the film is talking about is, like, darkness and how, like, that type of, like, childhood trauma and hardship can, like, mold you into a better, more mature person later on in life. And you can tell he’s never encountered any sort of, like, anything.

Alexx: God. That’s an amazing point. He wants a pristine life that doesn’t exist. It’s a public image.

Bryce: Bro, because, like, he literally crumbled at, like, the fucking… at the prospect of, like, oh, like, this is so shocking. And it, like, can really, like, ruin his entire world. Like, it should not have gotten to that point.

Alexx: This is his primary traumatic event.

Bryce: Which is... It says a lot.

Alexx: Yea. And it becomes about everyone else reckoning with this thing that happened to her, without really flipping the mirror back to ask how the fuck she’s dealing with it or where she’s at now. Oh! My theatre’s biggest laugh was the knife moment. And the computer recording where Emma’s like “you’re ass is gonna die first.” There were so many awesome comedy moments. And I couldn’t get over her joining an activist group against gun violence. Second swings like that, that’s what being human is about.

Bryce: snickers yea for sure

[Break]

Bryce: Rachel was so fucking annoying.

Alexx *laughs* Yeah, yeah. And let’s talk about the DJ and the heroin.

Bryce: The same way Rachel was judging Emma for her mistakes, I feel like that’s... Like, they were kind of projecting their, like, own insecurities onto the DJ who was doing heroin. Like, why does it matter she does heroin? Like, it’s had nothing to do with you and your wedding.

Alexx: Exactly. I feel like they were projecting their own insecurities onto her and, like, just being judgmental for no reason. Like, not for no reason, but just to... as a way to escape from things that they’re hiding from each other. Good character there.

Bryce: Dude, a lot of it worked. It’s just I have a problem with the fact that like, the revelation of what she did or what she didn’t, almost did, it just didn’t warrant the response that it got… It just felt kind of like, it felt kind of forced. But they still made it work?

Alexx: But like, the absurdity of that reaction, I feel like, is the engine for the whole thing. And, you know, like them freaking out about something she did when she was 15. When the other couple was talking about some shit they did a minute ago. The different ways they qualify stuff. The selective understanding. I think that was a really interesting conversation that the movie was having. But the ending...

Bryce: Yeah. It’s just that ending. But everything else pretty much worked for me. The performances were really great.

Alexx: Yea I was disappointed by it a bit. Like those tidied up rom com endings I hate. But I really enjoyed what it did visually. I enjoy that he’s still playing with surrealism. And the ways that it kind of blurs temporal lines when they’re having these arguments in the house.

Borgli definitely followed through on what I think he does best: eerie, squeaky contradiction, caught in the act through conversations with misaligned people whose primary concern is the optics of their actions. And it milks its comedic absurdity with some seriously great laughing moments, my favorite of which involve flashes of the past, child, version of Emma imposing onto her present self in ways that feel both disconcerting and uncomfortably revealing of the general collective numbness on mass shootings in America (particularly the causality of them) Despite our qualms about the ending, what resonates with me symbolically is Emma’s radical honesty and willingness to put the darkest parts of herself on display, even as it ostracizes her brutally and unceremoniously. Even as everyone around her chooses to present sanitized versions of themselves. Charlie is thus forced into a dance of discovering the empathy below the noise, what truly lies underneath his polished façade. It becomes a question of whether he is capable of change. The ending, of course, offers a potential yes… even after you’ve coped in the most eruptive, emotionally close-fisted ways possible just like the world around Charlie defaults to.

Nevertheless, a world without the kind of romantic vibrancy these people exude is not one I’d care to live in, much like the bleakness of world without peanut butter, rap music or trans people. Those who grant the rest of us license to be bold, seek oneself fully and refuse to settle.

Then there’s those outside of the maximally inclined. A distinct group of people, hermetically sealed from all noise, who genuinely prefer it simple. These people, which I tend to identify with, are the outfit repeating, probs vanilla sex enjoying lot that find confidence, calm and satisfaction in abstaining from the flashy and new while celebrating the lowest common denominator of things that they enjoy. Things that require little resistance to indulge in tastefully. Unconcerned with the frills or trends. Instead, they focus on what matters most to them: practicality.

They hold on to the things that fulfill that standard for dear life and scoff at the mere suggestion of switching it up. They relish the getting dressed in the morning, unburdened by extensive choice, and the reliance on the knowing is, in its own way, a source of excitement.

Speaking from personal routine, I love the frictionless experience of waking up every morning and throwing on one of seven pairs of pants that all go with every single shirt, sweater or jacket I own, with few exceptions. It looks exactly how I want it to, by its very design. Knowing that everything I own and might acquire in the future can adhere to an organized standard of things I enjoy in small quantities, unlocks a sense of freedom for me.

For those freaking out over the seven pants thing, I raise to you this question:

Why would I need more pants than there are days of the week?

The particular few I describe aren’t as extreme as say, Phineas and Ferb. Rather, they adhere to outfit formula in varying combinations over and over again (guilty), and perhaps even one hairstyle to accompany it (also guilty).

Like 2 of my favorite fellow low bun loyalists, Grace Wales Bonner (left) and Robby Hoffman (right), who rock the style without no fail.

Robby Hoffman swiftly became one of my favorite comedians last year for her fired up counter-culturally opinionated style. She’s also a force in tv comedy, with recurring roles on Hacks, Rooster and her own series that’s soon-to-come.

Grace Wales Bonner creates incredibly dialed in clothing out of vibrant juxtaposition. She’s a fashion designer who captains her legendary namesake brand, Wales Bonner, and was appointed the creative director of Hermès as of October 2025. Her eye is thrill seeking, focusing in menswear, and draws outside the lines with the influence of her Jamaican roots and European tailoring.

These two artist’s outputs are anything but formulaic. Their work has a nonconformist quality that pushes itself further and further into tonal upheaval. The question I beg is whether people like Grace and Robby have happened upon a cheat code for creating without bounds, eliminating monotonous aesthetic choice in favor of surplus brain power toward much more important efforts of creating. Or does an innate sensibility, leading them toward simplifying certain matters of self, make them keenly equipped to churn out work that speaks volumes.

I’m no scientist. And they say it takes three to form a pattern, but the precedent for the innovating uniform guy isn’t exactly unspoken for…

Outfit repeating scrutiny has survived decade after decade, but real ones know its a special sauce indicator. MIND SAUCE. Keeping your most loved, reliable garments in consistent rotation is a sign of mastery in my book! I also find it profoundly human to return to the things we love for comfort and renewed pleasure.

I talk about matters of style more “creative exploration newsletter” implies for reasons I often expound. I’m obsessed with style not only as an access point to expression, but as craft that’s poured into by individual hands at every step. I enjoy riding for brands with a sustainable ethos as much as I love a good vintage hunt because that fast fashion company sending you targeted ads for a below average baby blue tank top that’ll fall apart within the span of a year keeps finding ways to amplify their conniving and seductive tactics.

Second hand shopping is as accessible as it’s ever been. So why settle?!

I am in fact wearing my newly beloved, vintage Margaret Howell MHL cardigan as I type this… which I copped for wayyyy lower than retail and have been wearing the shit out of, as the previous owner(s) did with thoughtful care before it was bestowed on me.

P.S for any doubters, 20 bucks is an immense steal for those whose senses stay attuned to things like natural fibers and design detail.

Thanks for your time this week!

Today,

• Words on the manic loop of taste making

• A brand new Movie Meditation on an underrated work of German comedic ingenuity.

• A refreshed look at the Best Picture winning One Battle After

But FIRST some prideful shoutouts

Monday night’s Oscar ceremony was a mixed bag, but if you’re a sentimental value head like myself, you came out smiling ear to ear . YES JOACHIM AND THE FAM! Not only that but Michael B Jordan was bestowed his long awaited (and deserved) Best Actor award for his smashing performance in Sinners, which, from a record stomping 16 nominations, SWEPT up a grand total of 4 oscars! <Big day!>

I take offense when a movie, book or song slips under my radar, especially when the thing plants its seeds of bliss into my soul. I can’t help myself from asking why I couldn’t discover it on my own. BUT this affliction comes from a place of what I call insatiable tastemakerdom. I picture it as a castle-ish structure within my mind that’s always sparsely furnished with the things I’ve seen, read and heard, the rest strewn about in boxes like they’d be inside the home of a fervid traveler, stuck in a transitory state of arrival and departure. Just outside the cave are unclaimed discoveries, accompanied by the restless hunger to find what’s next before even opening the boxed and putting things away. The good news though is when I manage to pitter-patter down the winding stairs of this castle into the great outdoors, I recognize the beautiful, communal qualities of taste making. I can interpret, with total clarity, that the cultivation of meaningful insights and stimulating knowledge, those yummy qualities of taste development, are contingent upon the generosity of others who point our attention toward what we might never have noticed alone. It’s why apps like letterboxd are dear to my soul, where I can take in the palettes of my reputable homies and touch noggins through an invisible wall of artistic investment.

Speaking of…

I am often in search of films to catch up on that deploy comedy with delicacy and tact. Not downright comedies but inter-genre comedies (comedy dramas, comedy thrillers, comedy horrors… comedy romances, if I’m forced). Sure, my palette for drama is always open to those meditative, zero-frill works that offer mere sprinkles of levity, if anything. Like last year’s Train Dreams or a recent horror I caught by Damian McCarthy Oddity. Those films that are coal black in tone and justifiably so, not relenting due to virtue of impact. But as far as my core cinematic appetite is concerned, I like a little sugar with my medicine. The films I love contain punchlines to be traced, but not in a gratuitous way. When the comedy is baked into things as intrinsic and circumstance and structure, I’m on board. Those “life throwing the gnarliest shit straight into your eyeballs and forcing you to make heads or tails of it” moments.

Toni Erdmann, a Maren Ade joint, is one of those films that manages to capture lightning in a bottle: absurdist comedic recklessness that preserves a raw, visceral humanity. It tells the modest story of familial turmoil between a prank-loving father with spontaneous eccentricities and his emotionally distant daughter who’s more invested in her career than matters of relationship—across the board.

The reckless abandon, emerging via circumstance and character, was by far its most captivating quirk and it kept me thoroughly captivated for its entire 2 hour, 43 minute run time, which I watched on a plane mind you.

<SPOILERS AHEAD>

For one, the movie is truly thrust into chaos when kooky father Winfried adopts an alter ego to disrupt his daughter, Ines’s rigid corporate world and pierce through her shield against closeness. This is a moment that unlocks a world of embarrassment for Ines that puts their central conflict, the struggle between genuine self-expression and societal performance, at the forefront. The humor that ensues refuses to pander to easy catharsis.

The complexities of their individual characters are to thank, as diverse in motivation as they are temperament, which seems to drive the film’s dependably unpredictable energy.

Ines’s socially self‑conscious disposition is wielded as a barricade against vulnerability, She measures every interaction by its professional stakes and resists anything that threatens her composed exterior. So, when she’s forced into excruciating situations engineered by her father, a reckless abandon manifests, in both of them, that can only come from extended periods of deep repression.

These moments happen in unorthodox ways.

On the tamest end, she uncharacteristically explodes into a vivacious karaoke performance in a stranger’s home

On the extreme, she strips down to the nude during a work party when she feels trapped in a tight dress.

But the extreme case isn’t immediate. It’s built up to periodically, after each moment plants a crack in her carefully manufactured persona and watching it felt like an invigorating release, which is swiftly escalated by the total inconceivability of the act to the everyman.

These stand-out moments of absurdist comedy have the distinct emotional resonance that many quirked up comedy-dramas don’t have the complexity to hold.

On OBAA

When I first saw it, I was an undeniable fan of One Battle After Another. Admittedly, as a socialist and film obsessive who’s regularly starved from scraps of progressive promise in film, I came out of the theatre with heart eyes and warm tingly feelings of optimism. Those feelings though have since been tempered by a few important structural and material reflections, the most pressing of which was triggered on Monday night when the movie won the coveted Best Picture award, subsequently hurling all qualms I had been ruminating on to the pressing surface. I owe this enlightenment, largely, to wonderful reads like this one, doing the thoughtful dissection, and to my anti-establishment predilection compelling me to reckon with the inevitable fact that a movie with this much institutional acclaim more than likely fails at acknowledging the grittier, less glamorous truths of its story. As it turns out, its sidelining of Black characters, its choice to then prop up white figures off the backs of those characters, and its glossing over the systemic injustices at the heart of the story are evidence enough for such skepticism. And in light of recent PTA interviews surrounding the film, his blatant circumventing of political conviction is equally off-putting. While the movie was a total blast, thanks to its energetic direction, striking visuals and electric cast, I would be speaking out of naivety to ignore the shortcomings of its revolutionary message.

Read Brooke Obie’s wonderful piece here:

Black Girl Watching

One Fetish After Another: PTA Exploits Black Women and Averts Revolution

*Spoilers for the plot of One Battle After Another…

Read more

7 months ago · 2845 likes · 11 comments · Brooke Obie

Good riddance! Reflection and dissection is a beautiful thing. Let us all be stirred with emotion and compelled to sit with films long after they end. Cheers to more bangers in the new year, which we will go see in a movie theatre alone or with the homies.

It’s hard not to acknowledge my grandma’s interrogative efforts as part of her evangelistic duties. She’s no casual woman of faith but a full-fledged co-pastor and founder of a decades old, well attended church, where I spent many hours of my childhood. Her questioning continued with “would you consider yourself a Christian?” My answer was one she likely recalled from my quasi-dissertation, No. I softened some of my words in that essay to things like non-religious and secular, but reality lies in a term as stern as atheist. My strongest creative, political and existential convictions envelop this egalitarian, humanist understanding of the world, unbound by religious doctrine and its wide-ranging social implications, good and deeply bad. It’s important to recognize both, and while my essay might have taken upon the thesis of the bad, there are many thoughtful advocates of the religious persuasion I find to be stalwart allies of unfettered compassion and social good, none of which shift my worldview.

In this position, I diverge from every single member of my family and I was well aware of the invisible contract this deviation would sign. An indefinite series of persuasions, lobbied by all members of kin, siblings excluded. But the pros of the contract far outweigh the cons. Lingering in the abyss of the unspoken has never been a strong suit, nor instinct, of mine. I’d rather sit in the fumes of my dirty laundry, letting it waft through all the spaces I inhabit, than sit silent, clean and principally unaccounted for. Since writing that piece I’ve not only enjoyed the bountiful catharsis that comes with self and value advocacy, but also a world opening itself up to me, a confidence in community, and the quiet reassurance of witnessing others you’ve long revered championing the same values, alongside the transformative effects of more and more principled work ringing out around the social landscape.

I’m not a stranger to contentions of identity. Since coming out I’ve traversed seemingly endless roads of misunderstanding, dismissal and distortion, the most vivid being the time I defended not shaving my legs… and not dissimilar to that, dressing according to my own personal style. As discomforting and cornering as situations like this are, they remind me of why the hell I keep it pushing. Why I want to make films that shape these discussions in a nuanced, radially inclusive, irreverent way. A conversation I had with some friends in the tech sphere fluttered me with the same sense of urgency, wherein they boldly rejected my every claim that the billionaire class is the fundamental obstacle to a functioning society, even after arriving at the classic contradictory sentiments such as advocating for rich people to become as rich as they want for “taking the risk,” while simultaneously reflecting on the ways that their parents were stifled economically as immigrants in this country. What was most stunning though was the nature of our discussion, ending with enmity set aside and congeniality preserved. I believe what made our “debate” a healthy one was the slant of curiosity underlying it. Sure our disagreements were, are, severe, but I didn’t approach them with the audacity of believing I could change their lens on a single thing, and they carried that same regard. What I find just as important to a healthy approach to debate is refusing to give credence to a debate status at all. A debate implies a winner and a loser. The form is completely siloed from the complex reality that people can, in fact, hold diverse opinions and still arrive at the same conclusion. Moral alignment is not a strictly logical framework. Emotion plays a crucial role.

There’s a spirit of radical optimism about Christians who constantly pitch themselves to atheists that I can’t help but marvel at. Frankly, I try to channel that same juice myself to “keep the faith” amidst the authoritarian consensus. My greatest wish is for every person, religious or not, to direct their beams of judgement toward systems of oppression and exploitation and their beams of acceptance toward the diverse humanity struggling within them.

In further spirit of Scribbled Loose, I want to recommend a book with the express mission of roaming the rich tapestry of America, religious communities included, and unraveling the many profound ideological divides and cultural legacies with a sharp, sensitive style of nonfiction storytelling.

I really enjoy Sullivan’s writing style. It’s irreverent, introspectively so, with an adventurers tilt that keeps on giving.

For more recs for Watchables, Readables, Listenables and MORE, visit the Great Creations Catalog.

In an uno-like fashion, if you don’t have a tile to play, you must pull from the scrap pile: “the boneyard.” The player who runs out of tiles first wins the round. THAT’S IT. The rules are muchhhh simpler than I imagined and also much more snappy. This quick stint of bias-bunking turned my original stance all the way around. Stacking tiles now feels juvenile, entry level, a short lived dopamine hit while a classic game of dominos has SAUCE beyond compare. Was this mini-investigation trivial? Maybe. But I believe these small, willful gaps in knowledge are stacked with abundant whimsy, a value of primary social interest.

I judge just about every interaction I have with someone new by three metrics. The first one being whimsy. I’ll tell you the other two, eventually, but without whimsy, they drastically lose their effect. Nothing excites me more than a humorous slant and there’s nothing quite as relieving as enduring an awkward encounter and soon after discovering that the person you endured it with doesn’t take themselves seriously. The natural angst dissolves with their easy self-deprecating jab, or even a gentle tease in your direction, like a needle pricking a balloon. The energy they exude is that of most honorable high vibration, rendering the whole exchange an effervescent blip so it doesn’t linger in your brain grooves for several days after, forcing you to gawk at the myriad of ways that person finds you pathetic. This is a simple example of whimsy saving the day but it’s this kind of levity that turns almost every “difficult” encounter upside down. The person who refuses to take themselves seriously is, more likely than not, the person who doesn’t jump to judge. They wait for the perfect opportunity to sprinkle their humorous flavor into the mix, even the eerie political discussion mix whose organic squabbly flavor begs for a jolt of clarity. The disarming kind of clarity that only humor can provide (especially with the progressive groundedness to match). Worth clarifying however, you don’t have to be as funny as Chris Fleming to be humorous. The waters between humor and comedy are often muddy but humor is confined to sensibility. Inseparable from whimsy, humor is a predisposition to plucking out the absurdities of the everyday whereas comedy, the funnyman’s craft, is a strategic toolkit deployed to express one’s humor, often resulting in more laughter versus the smirking recognition humor begets. The other two qualities happen to also personify comedian extraordinaire Chris Fleming— loose hinges and radical empathy. This mouthful of qualities are the cornerstones of engrossing conversation ;)

But first, some praise from Marc Maron

He’s right. And also happens to vindicate all three pillars for unboring interaction. Chris is the dude that breaths new life into your soul when you’re fed up with facade-induced internet bullshit. He lifts your spirits by shaking up your whole way of thinking. But his takes aren’t inaccessible. He poofs up images you’ve probably never heard of but you’re certain to have felt. The parallels he draws are wildly unifying yet born from an unruly specificity he wields like a wand. You don’t have to understand his references be seen by them and his attitude is everything but exclusionary. He’s inviting and disrupting all at the same time and he does it “in” a character unbound by gendered expectations or behavioral uniformity (if you’ve seen somebody move around a stage like him I’ll give you 50 bucks). The Chris Fleming playbook is having no playbook at all and putting yourself in the shoes of every community on the planet to stir up something real and provoking.

But none of this fodder does it justice. Go watch his new special on HBO max, Chris Fleming: Live at the Palace, and then watch the one before that. He’ll get you right. He’ll treat you you real nice. He’ll shake your whole shit up.

For more recs and obsessive chatter on ideas, makers and moments, you know what to do:

My brain burrows into this dichotomy often, mostly because of a burning desire to remain authentic at all times, except the mere act of thinking about the measure of my authenticity eliminates that possibility altogether. For a long time, I questioned which behavioral coding was a truer reflection of me— the chaotically outgoing embracing all spontaneous bursts of energy or the stoically introspective speaking in measured, deliberate fragments. I thought maybe the me rested somewhere in between the outgoingly chaotic and stoically introspective. The balanced version that is the least encumbered by insecurities, obligations, pressures etc… but that’s a mythos, a transitory image. We will forever be affected by our influences and the varying degrees to which we are is not a gaping hole for falseness. Pursuits of the “truest” you are MOOT without the anchors of an ethical value system built on accountability, moral uprightness, awareness, and compassion. The rest tends to fall into the trappings of self-indulgence which is…

I see the self as always two degrees from the surface, above it or below, repressed or released, oscillating between becoming and being, never truly known but always present. Like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle but for consciousness, kinda.

Turning the dial to the cinematic frequency, “swing” characters are some of the most exciting to write (and watch). Nuanced, psychological complexity is extremely difficult to crystalize on screen for a number of reasons, mostly because you can’t pin down their behavior. A recent favorite example is Sonny Wortzik in Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, introduced to us as a high-strung opportunist bank robber that slowly unravels into a man confronting the collapse of his masculine ideal and his fantasy of rescue as the consequences become out of his control. They don’t operate on sound logic and in a screenplay where actions are behavior, you can’t exactly follow a single motivational thread. And why would you want to? Single-minded characters fall flat, regardless of how intricate the worlds they reside in are. A character who comes from an environment where they had to fight to get their needs met doesn’t have to be passive. They could actually be aggressive. People are far more complex than the easiest conclusion. I’ve been making a more focused effort to map out the inner worlds of my characters and it brought me to a few focal points.

• Avoid Over-Categorization:

Emphasize the why behind actions not the broad strokes of superficial labels in order to avoid surface-level stereotypes and instead delve into the underlying psychological mechanisms.

• Understand Drive and Personality as two distinct things

Every character represents a strategy developed to meet psychological needs, often rooted in early experiences which shape personality and drive in conscious and unconscious ways

• Focus on the core issues and motivations and let that trickle into outward behaviors.

Build from the inside out rather than from observable traits inward.

I re-watched Parasite this weekend alongside the storyboard book and it was absolutely invigorating.

There’s something about tracing movements and compositions, shot for shot, that really unlocks the kind of conceptual momentum Bon Joon Ho was building off of. What makes it feel even more multi-dimensional is how even with the blueprint in front of you for every shot, the cuts still feel invisible and I found myself having to rewind several times to witness the translated glory.

I wish storyboards were as widely available as scripts because watching a movie with both on hand is an especially illuminating experience that I recommend to all, film junkie or not. But just don’t do it on the first watch!

Thanks for reading the newsletter! I beg you to subscribe in a super chill, champion of independent media kind of way :)

Today

• Reflections on making art in crisis from a designer and a film director

• What does a political film even mean?

• 6 Rules I abide by for filmmaking with cultural cause

Check out these 6 Rules for Style I wrote a while back!

I read a short reflection last week from an architect in Minneapolis named Anne McDonald. She talked about her experience resisting, community building and exercising solidarity, the latter of which is nonnegotiable unless you feel comfortable being placed in the category of outright fill in the blank (white-supremacist, fascist-apologist, absolute goon). At the start of ICE’s escalating violence in Minnesota, she was scheduled to attend a design-related trip to London and after wrestling with her feelings of the complex timing, she decided to go.

This inner tension, between urgency and practice, is shared between artists across mediums. A hesitation brought about by the feeling that the work we toil over is frivolous, impertinent to real efforts of advocacy in these dire times. What Anne McDonald realized on her trip to London, while maintaining correspondence with her family under threat in Minnesota, is the same understanding required to harness works of art and craft as powerful resistance efforts, which they are and are destined to be.

“That’s the duality. The work and the witness. The beauty and the resistance.” — McDonald

As a filmmaker, the act of using my voice loudly against overwhelming bigotry and normalized cruelty is inseparable from my engagement with and investment in the form. As such, the stories that pull me in are ones that confront harsh social realities. But not every filmmaker confronting political matters sees it in such a way.

In a recent roundtable of European filmmakers, Jafar Panani, director of the marvelous It Was Just An Accident, said he doesn’t consider his filmmaking political *GASP*. If you’re familiar with Panani’s work, you know they circulate the subjects of injustice and oppression and center the diverse landscapes and communities of Iran (and they’re all excellent). He doesn’t see himself as a political activist though. Instead, he considers himself a maker of “social films with political subjects.” If that distinction isn’t exactly clear, he elaborates by saying his definition for a political film is more of a federally-dosed propaganda piece that divides people along ideological lines, the good and the bad, stripped of all empathy. His films, on the other hand, ruminate on the interior worlds that make a person do good or bad things, believing every ideology should be “respected” to contribute meaningfully to the emotional landscape of a film.

You can watch that interview here.

There’s part of this sentiment that I undeniably concur with. Movies with lofty political ideals must always commit to the opposing perspective, which actually strengthens the impact of the message it’s touting. BUT, I align much less with his thoughts on applying a mutual respect to every ideology. Yes, I think a good film must apply the same sensitivity to all of its perspectives (I mean that’s just strong character); however in my brain respect decrees compromise, a capitulation to the standards set by indubitable oppressors. Respect and sensitivity function as distinct in my ideation process and when I’m dreaming up a character that represents a significant ideological obstacle for a character or their world, I do it with all the empathy I can muster and not an ounce of bothsidesing repute.

But Movies don’t have to be historical relics to be politically evocative and they sure as hell don’t have to be about politics.

Some films aren’t as subversively political as Pillion (Harry Lighton) or staunchly as A Hidden Life (Terrence Malick), one about a timid gay chap living in a quaint borough of London finding solace in the sexually liberating embrace of a biker gang’s seductive head honcho, and the other about a conscientious objector during WWII that’s based on the true account of Franz Jägerstätter.

These kinds of culture-resistant works, defying classic queer tropes and oppressive political trajectories, got me thinking about what things I consider immutable in the pursuit of making beauty and resistance, which led me to this list.

1. Give your audience more than they’re prepared for

Everyone is conditioned by norms in some way or another. Go into every project with the intention of challenging them.

2. Ask ALIVE questions

A film is as alive as the questions it asks. Ask ones that warrant grand, complex discoveries.

3. Find the levity

People are more than their suffering. Uncover the joy, and in my case, the lens for comedy because I am a big believer in droplets of comedy as a framework for drama, smuggling in truth under the hood of laughter and allowing a message to land deeper and linger longer.

4. Make no compromise for neutrality

Art that tries to appease everyone often ends up saying nothing at all.

5. Trust the tension

The unresolved is what shapes the soul of a story. Let moments linger, unsettle, and compel you to reckon with what you’d rather resolve too quickly.

6. Depth over Range

A film that boldly reaches beneath the surface and connects with a discerning audience does much more cultural excavation than a film that reaches millions and delivers a message of convenient consensus.

Your readership is a gift and today I present to you, in return, your twice weekly gift back.

JUMP on board if you haven’t. Artist Interviews are cooking, weekly explorations of various luscious topics are cooking and as always, the super-swelling list of great works that should be on your radar are sizzling.

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First post of Feb you know what that means… its Black History Month and there’s so many ways to celebrate. If you were me, you’d be diving back into the works of black intersectional advocates like Audre Lorde, reading plays by black theatre pioneers like Ed Bullins, and watching movies like Killers of Sheep (Charles Burnett 1978), The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye 1996), Dahomey (Mati Diop 2024) or my favorite Diop film, which I dive into later. Lastly, if you’d allow me to plug a fellow Substacker, Eric Morrison-Smith writes a hell of a read on revolutionary history.

Notes from a Black Revolutionary

Enemy Force #4: Failure to Study Revolutionary Theory and the Experience of Other Revolutionaries

Recently, I came across a thread where someone argued that studying revolutionaries of the past isn’t necessary. The claim was that it’s up to us to become the revolutionaries of the moment—to rely on creativity, intuition, and new thinking to build something entirely different…

Read more

3 months ago · 1 like · Eric Morrison-Smith

In today’s newsletter we’ve got a Movie Meditation and more

• Hopecore films, their opposite, and what they give to each other

• A movie that puts the ghost in a gripping cultural tapestry

• A clothing production shop of environmental innovators making swag from landfill waste

Plenty of films succumb to the weight of cynicism. Their endings compel you to sit, wet-bottomed and exposed, in a puddle of the foreboding. They dissect many not-so-dystopian topics of the world. The imminent annihilation of the planet, the once (seemingly) universal tentpoles of humanity being slaughtered by the thrusting fascist MAGA movement, the collapse of hope in the face of relentless capitalist slumlords making every outlet of human consumption a life or death game of penny-pinching. Plenty more films, however, present a hopeful vision for the future. They defy the odds of every calamity and betrayal to stir up the faintest feeling of hope, perhaps even painting the fine-stroked vision for a new kind of world. A future that promises the conditions for every person to thrive and communities that uplift each other in astounding ways. I think it’s important to acknowledge that both cinematic forms are equidistant to ignorance. They both carry the potential to fall on deaf ears, leaving us audience members feeling:

#1 Satisfied with the watch but feeling disaffected and uninspired.

#2 Unsatisfied with the watch and feeling disaffected and uninspired.

These feelings become much more likely when films commit to one, whether it be cynicism or optimism, without attachment to the other or without a “take” on said commitment. For example, a film that proclaims an optimistic lens, through characters, plot, theme etc., but never presents or even hints at an alternative. It’s a simple principle that spreads to nearly every creative vehicle. An argumentative essay without a counter argument is bullocks (forgive me for harkening back to my writing tutor days). While I am of the mind that films are intrinsically argumentative, I’m certain a great class of filmmakers see it a different way. Maybe the intention is to inundate the audience in one strong, unceasing flavor. But…I think the best movies sprinkle in some umami in that bitterness.

Because this is SCRIBBLED LOOSE and not some posh ad-driven critics forum (this is a Movie Meditation damnit!), I’m not just gonna hit you with a list of movies that tread this line well. I’m gonna zone in on one movie. The most recent experience that led me to discover these dichotomous qualities at their most profound.

As far as recent box office slammers go,

Yes, Sinners accomplished this well, transfixing us in a world where becoming a vampire is the compelling alternative to living a life of sanctioned violence, humiliation, and powerlessness, boiling us in the beak truth soup of both cost of resistance, even after escape; and the cost of complacency.

Yes, One Battle After Another accomplished this well, portraying resistance as an endless cycle where every victory is a sacrifice of self, every failure vindication for the enemy and hammering home the moral and generational consequences of choosing endurance over escape (and vice versa)

Even Eddington and Bugonia with their nihilistic slants had the gumption to confront the consequences of warped senses of truth, Eddington by holding a mirror to pandemic polarization and the absence of standard moral vantage points, and Bugonia by unraveling the human cost beneath paranoid conspiracy delusion rather than offering easy villains or answers.

But the movie I want to talk about today is Atlantics.

<<SPOLERS AHEAD>>

I must preface that for today’s Movie Meditation, I’ll be somewhat circumventing my anti-movie review style where I dial into a singular element of movies rather than paint a holistic, prosaic image because… I want to. And this one warrants it.

This feature directorial debut by Mati Diop blew me away. I became accustomed to her through her documentary Dahomey which, similarly, approaches culturally significant subject matter from a brilliantly anomalous angle. As a viewer and a filmmaker, my senses are attuned to a few things. How films interrogate power structures without resorting to polemic, how they balance interiority and spectacle, how they center marginalized perspectives without scrapping complexity, and how they illuminate contradiction and moral ambiguity without sacrificing emotional truth or grittiness. This sensibility guides not only the stories I choose to tell but also the way I collaborate, edit, and construct cinematic rhythm. A commitment to ethical clarity, even in the smallest creative choices is really important to me. It’s the reason I’m drawn to work that is politically aware but not didactic.

Ada is a young woman in Dakar, whose lover, Souleiman, disappears at sea, escaping to find stable income in Europe. A lively prologue situates us in the unstable world of Dakar’s construction workers, immediately framing the stakes of migration, labor and longing in Senegal.

Atlantics is a movie that does it all, but what it channels so jarringly well is a scrappy groundedness that, amidst high-stakes and supernatural interventions, finds heart in a character on the outskirts, ushered into arranged marriage and embroiled by the very same structural failures that drove the men to sea (a lens unlikely in itself considering the diminished value of women in this portrayal of Dakar). Ada’s grief becomes inseparable from collective struggle and the vanished workers’ absence is felt throughout every corner of Dakar. She is the release valve. The supernatural twist that emerges about halfway through was an intense revelation the subsequent intertwining of tangible human struggle with a haunting ghostly presence made it a profoundly affecting, almost otherworldly experience. It took my understanding of the film to a whole different level.

Every film lives and dies with character and Ada holds the weight of her desires and her familial expectations with a load-bearing repressiveness that feels spiritually possessed even before the supernatural reveals itself. I felt drawn in by her in a cagey cousin kind of way but I also felt disquieted by the resilient confidence she carried after being tossed around by various authority figures for nearly the entire movie. Her lens made this what it was. She carries the hope forward while carrying the sorrow too.

Diop sees cinema as the most “powerful tool to tell the story of these people.” And she found it important to bring forward an “individual dimension” to the migration phenomenon in Senegal which has been “approached by a very cold and abstract, statistic and economic angle” which she simply couldn’t stand any longer.

She is a director with a pronounced power to reckon with abstract, the individual and the concrete conditions a misrepresented country endures and her directorial presence throughout the film is felt through the thematic boldness she champions and the sensitivity of spirit she holds for the nuances of a vibrant and disparaged community. Her documentary sensibilities remain clear as day and I don’t think a film like this is even possible without those stylistic impressions.

Diop made a short film engaged with the same subject matter before developing this feature and she chose to make it on a larger scale because she had to. It was a mission she was called to by her own Senegalese roots and the lack of substance with which the country was being characterized. Mission-oriented filmmaking is special, especially when it holds two truths, tells a story only you are equipped to tell, and gives an audience more than they’ve been equipped to handle.

I recently got put on to an LA based clothing production shop that makes all their garments from a thoughtful mix of consumer waste, deadstock materials and organically grown fibers sourced locally.

Their small and mighty team of garment savants whip up some super dashing, diversely classical pieces and their initiative, which started in 2017, has made a 6 million pound impact on textile waste. Every item is entirely unique, each bearing the mark of various discarded fabrics spun together to form a whole new beauty. Oh! They also make home goods (of particular interest to me as I plan my move to NY for film school).

For more ethically made, artisan executed works, checkout the Great Creations page.

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I’m starting a movie examination series, NOT to be mistaken for movie reviews.

My opinion on the traditional movie review is pretty straight forward. I lay it bare here. I find them to be an incomprehensive form deployed for comprehensive conclusions on film, a confounding contradiction when the only conclusive thing about a movie is the moment it finishes playing, which coincides with the moment it leaves its lasting imprint on you. I think their outsized focus on evaluations of plot, cinematography, acting, direction broadly flatten the holistic, experientially inclined dialogue movies foment, painting them as something unidirectional, to be interpreted as worthy or not in review-classic terms. And perhaps the most major pity of all is the way they uplift a formulaic approach to filmmaking that falls at the feet of the same set of standards probably espoused by 3-5 of the most influential critics, all aged 45 and above.

NOT ROUND HERE PARTNER!

My favorite “reviews” are the ones that dive head first into what stuck. The ones that preserve the indelible two-way dialogue between audience and movie by discussing their most personal effects . I wanna hear someone talk about their unique cultural and thematic attachments to a film, narrowing in on the minute details they became obsessed with and the lived context that shaped that experience. That’s why Letterboxd is goated to me. Ratings are valued along the lines of individuality, not average. It’s the same difference that stands between flashy headlines and real journalism. I think these kinds of personal vignettes operate on a totally different scale than a movie review and aid in a deeper, more incisive absorption of movies as a whole. A true celebration of a film’s ability to morph what we think and how that dynamic plays out in reverse.

Today I’ll be carrying that torch forward with “Movie Meditations” here on SL.

Read a Movie Mediation I did on Panopticon here, a film by my undergraduate directing professor that has bestowed infinite wisdom upon me.

I’ll use them as an opportunity to ruminate on the granular elements of movies that really get me going.

Today, we’re talking cars and horror.

A late night drive I took the other day motivated this topic. I drove past a car pulled to the side of the road, probably innocuously checking for directions or finding the optimal playlist to blast on the rest of their drive. But those rationalizations made it no less creepy when I encountered it. It sparked an immediate memory of that white car at the beginning of Jordan Peele’s Get Out: malicious in intention but, at first, seemingly unimposing.

Countless movies prey upon the elusive spookiness of cars and the reasons they are spooky might seem obvious to you.

• The almighty chasing power every vehicle contains.

• The eyeball headlights resting right below the human eyeballs seating inside, definitely staring at you through that opaque windshield.

• The general heinous heist-ly endeavors committed with cars, infamously white vans.

And you’d be right. All of those things contribute to our natural fear of still cars, especially at night. But a handful of movies have preyed on this fear, implanting images beyond what natural caution and experience can embody. I’d like to highlight a few that really did it for me. Not in the overt “car gets possessed and develops a jealous, murderous obsession with its owner kind of way.” – Christine (1983). But in the insidious, delicately fashioned kind of way.

<<SPOILER WARNING>>

Dead End (Fabrice Canepa, Jean-Baptiste Andrea, 2003) – There’s nothing quite like the suffocating elusivity of inviting a stranger into your car, no matter the circumstance. In Dead End, that feeling is compounded by the woman’s sheer strangeness: refusal to speak, dubious forehead scar and conspicuously swaddled baby in her grasp. The family rides down an inescapable road for the majority of the film and it becomes a kind of safeguard against the unpredictable elements of wandering women with bloody babies and violently cannibalistic make out sessions.

Funny Games (Michael Haneke, 1997) – When Susanne Lotha’s character Anna escapes the house of visceral horrors, she finds herself on a vacant road. When a car appears, making its way down and toward her bruised and battered body, she does what many could argue reasonable, flags it down for a ride as far away as she could get. The composition of the moment makes the detriment all the more inevitable, with the headlights lighting up the dark, long path toward her.

It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014) – In one of my all time favorite horror films of all time, cars bear witness to a huge portion of the trauma but primarily as a getaway. Jay (Maika Monroe) is under constant threat of death by a villainous entity taking on various physical forms, but the entity travels by foot. Vehicles present an obvious life-extending opportunity for safety but also, by nature, only offering a temporary shield to capture.

Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018) – This occurrence happens inside the car and it’s Hereditary’s major bone shilling shift. Cars can be modes of escape and rescue, Peter certainly thought so as he raced to a hospital with his sister enduring anaphylactic shock in the back seat. But in typical horror fashion, the most horrendous thing that nobody thought could result from a blindsiding deer in the road, did. His sister Charlie’s decapitation was a single shot blow from a telephone pole and in one of the most visceral uses of POV, the camera takes on Peter’s perspective as he wills himself to look at the fallout through the rearview mirror, then jerks his gaze away.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras, 2022) – This a provocative, energizing documentary traversing the works and experiences of Nan Goldin. Nan was frequently subjected to threats and violence throughout her career, specifically during the peaks of her activist efforts. There’s a moment in particular where Nan’s friend Meg details a menacing stalker, car-perched and lurking outside her home. He began taking pictures of her from inside the vehicle, every night when she arrived home. The same little punk was found creeping outside of Nan’s home shortly after.

I like narrowing in on symbols like this not just for symbolic purposes but for utility. For the filmmakers in the room, you know these particulars are the apparatus from which we pull from to land a message in a way that’s grippingly tactile. For the enthusiasts, they help us to lock in and build stronger connections with what’s on screen.

These meditations will come in different forms. Sometimes I’ll lasso a handful of films to call out a shared motif or memorable quality, and other times I’ll explore a topic through the lens of a single film. I like to follow the whims of my inquiries and scratch till the itch goes away. You can certainly count on all of them functioning as a watchlist, if you gleefully come across any movies you haven’t seen.

I’ll see you in the next one (newsletter’s dropping twice a week)! - ASJ

The community is growing by the day and you’re to thank. If you’re a newcomer and like the idea of conversations about making that don’t look like commercial summations, hop on board! The goods will be delivered straight to your inbox for your enjoyment during your morning cuppa, tv ad-break or squat on the pot.

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As I engage in the joyous, comprehensive project of artist interview acquisition, I find it absolutely imperative to continue providing you with value.

NEW SERIES ALERT. Movie Meditations are cooking as we speak, not to be confused with movie reviews which I have my gripes with. Instead I’ll be focused on what I find much more interesting: the productive rumination on the abstract, personally specific elements that breathe life into films, imbuing them with individualized meaning. The specific residue of feeling, memory, and association that rotten tomatoes score leave on the table. I wanna talk about why the idle car in that one movie was so terrifying, then unpack that as a motif found in other films. A true web of stand-out morsels. That’s what truly makes a movie “good” but not in any truly quantifiable sense.

I’ve dedicated many a tidbit to taste.

I’m a big fan of that inner compass that guides artists toward strong convictions and meaningful risk. The non-negotiable field guides.

My various musings tend to circulate topics of taste-accumulation by way of stuff you put on, stuff you watch and stuff you surround ourselves with, and so on. These are all interconnected outlets of personal investment, excitement. They’re things that bring you closer to and build networks of an ever-evolving you. My entry point happened to be movies and clothes. And so, the unexpected thrill of connecting to writers, directors, designers and makers that share a vision of breaking the mold, championing worker rights, prioritizing the environment and aligning their dashing sense of style with an exceptional commitment to the craft is a one I cherish endlessly.

A major assist to my explorative taste development has been keeping a tight catalog of everything I resonate with and everything I own, clothes, outfits, records, home goods, tech, blu-rays etc. , even snacks and recipes I accumulate across mad craving sprees. I do this on Pinterest, mostly because I’ve found the interface to be the most friendly. Other options include the notes app or google drive! Trust. The Pinterest knock off apps have yet to convince me, but if you use one you like, drop a comment below or send me a DM.

If you care to see me putting that shit on, for credibilities sake, here’s three of my favorite fits recently.

And here’s one of my crappiest from 4 years ago for double cred.

Now for an honorable mention! Finding new approaches to styling is one of my favorite parts of keeping track of friends with taste that tickles me! It’s how I became acquainted with tucking in unexpected garments into pants. Fleeces, chore coats, cardigans and in this case, the simple crewneck. What a find.

I believe taste is a progressive force. Any and all “rules” can be proved inexact to your metamorphosing standards and fly away. Let it happen. I talk more about style here, here and here if that interests you.

As a practitioner of singling out swag garments and garment makers, a strange spell of expressive symbiosis sharpened my capacity for critical aesthetic attention across my other interests (film, writing, and music).

Watch my most recent short film below.

In the name of providing value, I’ve directed my penchant for curation toward a new feature for the newsletter.

Every time I come across a beautiful thing, made by excellent hands, I’ll be shouting it out on the Great Creations page.

With extra respect to underground, under appreciated works, you’ll find weekly updates to this expanding list of greatly made goods.

Check it out for yourself and as always, my line is open for suggestions! Put me on to somethin you love🙅‍♀️ - ASJ

And enjoy the NEW Great Creations catalog of TOP notch goods made with heart, updated weekly, sometimes daily!

Yesterday, I watched Alex Honnold complete his gnarliest feat to date, no-rope climbing the 1,667 foot Taipei 101 tower in Taiwan. After free-soloing El Capitan in the historic documentary Free Solo 8 years ago, he decided to take on the largest urban climb in history, live on Netflix1. He’s a true marvel of physical and mental fortitude and his irreverent lens on fear is a reminder of the obligation for courage, at a time when resistance is our most powerful weapon.

You might be shaking your head in angst and fear at the mere thought of someone doing such an “unnecessary” thing, I certainly did while watching. But Alex Honnold sees that instinct as a sign of society’s lack of risk comprehension. Climbing Taipei 101 was his longstanding objective and thus intensely necessary, despite the obstacles, and it’s one he approached with so much joy and optimism you could’ve told me he was going on a family camping trip.

When discussing his thought process before the attempt, he called upon a simple parallel: vehicular danger. Every time we step into a car, we are opting into risk of death or severe bodily harm, yet we hardly interrogate those costs before we get behind the wheel. Monotonous risks like these are infinitely more likely to materialize, especially because the activity is far more frequent. A highly preparatory endeavor like Alex’s might have high consequence, but it also comes with extensive pre-reckoning. After all, he scouted Taipei as a potential dream climb over 10 years ago and leveled up his training to meet that challenge ever since. Pre-conceived risk like this is highly underutilized. Comfort is cool. It’s steadily reassuring and tends to transmute into deeper and deeper levels of comfort seeking. The opposite is also true and it’s exactly what cycle carried Alex through the journey, with the intense calm required to complete something so unprecedented.

Watching the stream was a terrifying, conflicting experience, but remembering Alex’s optimistic sensibility about the whole thing made that easier to temper. He’s not concerned. He’s ready. He’s capable. But in a different case, these human instincts of trepidation can’t help but pierce through. It’s the feeling that overtakes me while watching ICE commit heinous, unconscionable murders in the streets of Minneapolis as I sit in my childhood home in Texas feeling useless. The rage pacing through me is aimless, until I remember my resources.

These sickening images coming out of Trump’s racist slaughtering troops impose a cognitive alignment of abilities and responsibility. On the same devices we watched Renee Good get shot 3 times and Alex Pretti get pummeled and shot even more while exercising their right to protect their neighbors, we have access to a network of organizers and points of action. Organization that is the difference between business as usual and imposed transformation.

Here’s just a few: Artists Against Apartheid, Party for Socialism & Liberation, Democratic Socialists of America, BLD PWR.

The fight doesn’t start or stop with organizing and coalition building, but pressure and collective power is built in the in-between and it’s sustained with the same resilient optimism that keeps the wheels turning after every fascist blow. Doing what we can with what we have grants us control where there is none and it’s everything our communities need in the here and now.

By the end, seeing Alex standing on the top of the summit, with his wife waiting euphorically below to meet him, I began to weep. I thought about what things humans can accomplish when motivated by ambition and restless agency and the sacrifice those things demand. The general protest in Minneapolis is another promising proof. With everything to lose, Thousands of people played hooky from their jobs to use their voice against an ongoing and boundless misuse of power. Solidarity is one of our strongest tools. If your head is turned the wrong way, it’s easy to think of anger as immobile. Remember your channels. Fight with the tools you have then seek more.

This post is an official introduction to the publication, which has undergone a slight production pivot that I think you’ll be just as thrilled about as me. As I’ve yapped about before, my most incessant point of interest is what empirical and imaginative fuel goes into the most piercing creative works. Not the cut and dry stuff that saturate the press-cycles, but the genuine reflective nuggets of experience that reach back to the ideation process itself, their everyday fixations, their experience of the world, their construction of meaning all the way to the life-living minutiae involved in bringing something so bold and impossible to life. With a focus on filmmakers, Scribbled Loose will henceforth operate as a forum, dedicated unearthing deep creative truths by transforming dynamic conversation into quality reflection. Lots of quality, courageous interviews are coming down the pipe so jump in!

Read more about the project here.

Our very first installment was with the game-making legend himself. Check out the Eric Barone interview.

Amongst interview drops, you’ll find handfuls of essays (tidbits as I call them) and short stories on a variety of topics, all imbued with the same probing, energetic interest.

Interviews are free now, as we build and develop the goods, but they won’t always be! (Independent media needs YOU)

Don’t miss a beat!

A good while back, 5-7 years ago by my approximation, I became fixated on streamlining the creative process. To me that meant dreaming up the visual you see below as a “way of seeing” the ideation process, across mediums. As engrossed as I, the humbly overzealous speculist, was by the thought of sketching up and philosophizing a one and done approach to making things click, I hadn’t yet touched the grass I needed to understand how fragile the premise of creative premeditation truly was.

A chase like this one is squarely pinned to a lack of confidence. Not the kind of confidence that appointed me the fix-it-force capable of engineering the ultimate creative sauce machine, but the kind of confidence rooted in fear. These jitters presented themselves as what I consider today to be the most creatively bankrupt approach to any craft: formula. It’s the dreadfully corroborated list of mainstream mush lining the pockets of number-driven studio executives, in between fat wads of cash shmoney. These formulas don’t simply prioritize the limited framework of success defined by monetary quotas, they flatten the most viable of concepts into sweetly resolved, audience-tested Wonder Bread bullshit stripped of the personally unveiling, adventuring work that only comes from doing things Dora-style. A movie example of this that stokes my frustrations, albeit less flagrantly than say a Regretting You, is last year’s The Long Walk, a movie with strong socio-political underpinnings that felt like it left its meatiest character through lines on the bone in favor of a neatly dressed plot and thematic message. Not to mention its complete overindulgence in the flaming violence inside the concept itself. It was a gripping ride though, I will give it that and it accomplished exactly what it promised.

The concept of a formula is not so bad in its retrospective, post-mortem context and I say that not only to validate the Scribbled Loose media initiative, which is awesome and you should hop on board. There is real value to be pulled from looking back on a project through a lens of methodology.

But whatever you once applied to a project as a functional strategy, whether it be shorthands, tools or structures, you must throw away immediately. Inherent to the creative process is a relinquishment of fixed notions. However you achieved some creative vision in the past becomes entirely void as soon as you’re met with the unpredictable, boundless fragments of a new idea. It’s how the best directors look at it too.

“You have a certain moment to write something and let it come out of you and it’s fleeting. It just it always is. No matter where you are in your life, you you can’t go back. That film was something that came out of me that I…I couldn’t do that again.”

—PTA on making The Master

There’s a seed of selfishness to the creative spirit that I believe requires nourishing in one of two ways. You can strive for the optimal ratio of profit/execution and make the thing “proven” to perform or you can strive for something that’s yours. A full bodied rejection of the standards that box you in at every corner and a commitment to a vision that you nurture to its very last breath. These seeds might not outgrow the option one’s but they always live longer. The profit-motive will always exist and it will always offer the same reward, but the more option two’s entering the fold, refusing to give way to the gatekeepers, the more possible it will be for their seeds to demand the attention they deserve.

Before my pre-planned backwards fumble onto the stage where I pretend someone pushed me against my will, I took a peak through the red theatre curtains to preview the audience. It’s a typical looking crowd. If anything, a bit drab. Swaths of white men with receding hairlines and the kind of style you’d find inside a Vineyard Vines catalogue. Then sprinkles of women, very few of color, most not accompanying the men but by themselves. At least no one I knew was there. Still, I was disappointed. I always anticipated an audience of, mostly, people I could see myself becoming friends with or even dating. That includes men to account for the fantasy world where I’m straight and the purely aesthetic regard I’ve held for them up to this point suddenly turns sexual. But mostly friends. I reminded myself that I was performing at one of the many bastions of White America, Lumberton Texas. I still don’t know why I’m doing this. Driving nine hours from my home town to the first open mic that would have me isn’t exactly the kind of cool-factor I strive for. Plus I’ve always been afraid of this kind of public performance. The kind where I have to recite something from memory and demonstrate a talent in exchange for immediate feedback. There was no hiding or benefit of the doubt. I knew exactly what failure would feel like. When they called my name, the freckled and energetic act before me left the stage. The size of the room made the crowd appear much more vast. Fifty and something, maybe. I fell onto stage as planned, strategically eliminating the fear of unintentional embarrassment. Then my face got hot, I clenched some part of my body, I think my jaw, and I stumbled into a start. “I don’t think I have pretty privilege.” I was pleased to get a decent amount of snickers at my opening line. I shifted back to steady my nervous swaying and tried to ignore the vibrating eyes taking me in with questionable resolve. I took them in too, but only as part of my act. I met their looks with a face of deep contemplation, like I’d actually believed I’ve been led astray about my looks this whole time. Then I jumped back in. “I know I don’t have pretty privilege… right? No, definitely not. There’s too many Pedro Pascal’s in the world. I know I don’t because people don’t hold the door for me when I’m 40 feet away. That shit happens to hot people. One time, I was an arm’s reach from a door…nothing. I followed the guy inside and I just said it… “Are you racist?” This was on my Catholic college campus and he turned around, suspiciously slow, and said, ‘No, homophobic mostly.’ I said ‘Just homophobic? You’re good.’ There’s worse things you can be at a Catholic university.” At this point the room reverberated with a confident dose of snickers. I was just relieved not to choke on any words. My mind kept nudging me with the reminder that my set-ups were far too drawn out, and that the handful of stone faces in the audience were only sticking around for the chance to murder me at the end of the night. “And let’s be real, you can’t tell I’m gay. You probably just thought I’m a girl who lost her way. But you’d be wrong on all accounts. I’m actually a they/them who found themselves… Don’t worry: she/they. The set would only become gayer from here, so the few laughs I got from this were my smoke signal. I took a pause, a sip of water, and a glance at my notes on the stool beside me. This was when the last face I expected to see snuck her way into the back row and locked eyes with me. Erin and I met Junior year and up until a month ago, were each other’s number one confidants. I forgot that I had mentioned the show before our falling out. It must have been at that graduation dinner. It’s all jumbled details to me now, but something about not visiting when I said I would. She didn’t sit down but leaned against the back wall. I returned to my paper, not to reference but to settle myself. I’ve had this thing memorized for a month. I recited it only once in front of my mom. I considered doing it in front of Erin but I wasn’t nearly ready for a peer-level critique. But suddenly, I felt the weight of the chance I’d now been given to impress her and prove… something. I decided not to look at her until I powered through. “I actually didn’t become a readable lesbian until I developed a friend group of all men. Not by choice. They’re just easier to convince. And really you don’t have to try, like at all. When you tell them something like ‘I never learned how to be a friend because all my quote on quote friends turned into my bullies’ they’ll kinda just nod at you and ask what kind of pizza you want later. It’s weird how quickly you lose the gay element of surprise when you roll up to the function with 7 dudes and you kinda just look like the twink who doesn’t go to the gym with them. It wasn’t like I chose this life, like to get girls or something… I’d never even talked to a girl like that before I met them. I was just a little gay Mowgli from The Jungle Book and they were the pack of wolves that raised me. They taught me everything I know, if you couldn’t tell.” I paused, hoping that they would come to some appropriate conclusion about the masculine qualities of my appearance and behavior. The blank stares promised nothing of the sort. “I used to think being deflowered meant losing my virginity but I quickly learned it actually meant getting the rose colored glasses ripped from my face and seeing women for what they truly are…. objects.” I’ll let you guess how the crowd responded to that one. I wasn’t totally displeased, whether my irony was received or the laughs came from discomfort. “I definitely assimilated to their behaviors at the beginning. I started saying the word “bet” which never once entered my vocabulary prior. But at the end of a copy, you find yourself. That’s what a great designer named Yohji Yamamoto once said. And when I found myself, they actually started learning from me. At that same time I was becoming very politically radicalized. I was deep into leftist theory. I was correcting them when they said “I don’t have a problem with trans people.” I let that sink in before the kicker: “I don’t know, it just didn’t feel like radical support to me.” The laughter that followed this one caught me kind of off guard, but I think it was mostly read as a vindication for an ostensibly right of the aisle audience. I suppressed the smile curling up my face. I read somewhere that indulging in your own jokes cheapens the effect. “After a while I looked around me and I started to wonder, where are all the women? I got a little tired of the nonchalance.” Serendipitously, after this line was when I realized Erin had left, or at least wasn’t where she once was. “I needed someone I could wail to about women stuff. Like periods and… you know?! So I started going to the library more…to meet women friends… I would either open with, ‘If you were a book, you’d be a bestseller.’ or ‘You must be a bestseller, because I can’t stop reading you.’ Both of them … failed. But I was saying the last thing they were expecting. So in that way it worked. I got my element of surprise back! Somehow they were shocked when I told them I was gay. And when I started hanging with women is when I really learned how to flirt. That’s like 60% of female friendship. The rest is... I’m figuring it out. And that’s the one thing I can’t really teach my guy friends. Cause you either have pussy privilege or you don’t. After this final line, the host took their sweet time returning to reclaim the microphone. It was just enough time to overanalyze the volume of claps and scan the room for Erin. When I spotted her, she was near the front of the stage by the exit doors. I checked my texts before making my way to her.

“Not a single joke about me. I should’ve known.”

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