Since debuting on the film festival circuit, we’ve had some positive feedback on Letterboxd and a nice local blurb when we hit the Bay Area (not to mention winning the audience award for Best Picture at a Film Fest in Saulte St. Marie).
Also, not every day or even every decade I get referred to as brilliant:
“The Dinner Parting works thanks to a brilliant script by Luke Allen Hackney and director J.W. Andrew. Many writers go wrong because they aim for wacky and write weird dialogue for its own sake. Yes, this does get wacky, but a lie is rarely wasted. Like a never-ending improv sketch, every bit of information offered must be accepted as truth by our leads and cannot be denied. Hackney and Andrew then escalate the hell out of everything for the sake of rivalry, and when the bubble bursts, there’s an escape plan to take this story to another level.
The Dinner Partingis a well-executed comedy, which quite frankly is almost impossible to do in indie film. Yes, the film is mostly talking, but it’s hilarious and a clever take on a well-worn comedy trope.”
A friend has been going through what they are confident can be defined as a “midlife crisis.” I too have been thinking about a lot of the “big picture” stuff the last year or two, and have been trying to get better at living life. I do a lot of reading, offline and on, and a site always full of aspirational nuggets of wisdom at Maria Popova’s Marginalian. Took me over five months to get to this blog entry, but there is a lot worth taking in. She writes in her introduction:
“If we abide by the common definition of philosophy as the love of wisdom, and if Montaigne was right — he was — that philosophy is the art of learning to die, then living wisely is the art of learning how you will wish to have lived. A kind of resolution in reverse.”
I believe it’s all worth reading, but I really like the quote from philosopher, mathematician, historian, and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell on broadening your life as it grows shorter:
“Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.”
Also really like this thought on kindness from Tolstoy:
“The kinder and the more thoughtful a person is, the more kindness he can find in other people. Kindness enriches our life; with kindness mysterious things become clear, difficult things become easy, and dull things become cheerful.”
Again, it’s all worth reading and pandering, but I will end with this quote from Roman Stoic Senaca before getting to my final point:
“There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
“Midlife Crisis” sounds terrifying, but I think it’s the word “crisis” that scares us. Two definitions of the word, however, can give one hope:
The turning point for better or worse in an acute disease or fever.
An emotionally significant event or radical change of status in a person’s life.
I spent all of the Sunday after Thanksgiving watching Get Back, arguably not the most productive way to spend a day. But The Beatles’ productivity stuck with me, months and months later.
Unsurprising, their staggering output is undeniable proof of just how productive they were in such a short period of time. Former journalist Tom Whitwell had similar thoughts, outlining ten lessons from the film. It’s a good read – the first is something I have had to deal with and could also accuse myself of in the past:
The first rule of improvisation (and brainstorming) is “yes… and.” When someone suggests an idea, plays a note, says a line, you accept it completely, then build on it. That’s how improvisational comedy or music flows. The moment someone says ‘no,’ the flow is broken. It’s part of deferring judgement, where you strictly separate idea generation from idea selection.
As they slog through Don’t Let Me Down, George breaks the spell. Instead of building and accepting he leaps to judgement, saying “I think it’s awful.” Immediately, John and Paul lay down the rules: “Well, have you got anything? “You’ve gotta come up with something better.”
A small pop-up restaurant in Tokyo where “no one knows if what you ordered will come out OK.”
It is aptly named The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders, and all of the servers taking those orders have dementia. Founded by former news organizer Shiro Oguni, after he stumbled upon Yukio Wada’s group home for dementia care. From an interview with Oguni:
“We want to have a place where everyone thinks, ‘Well, it’s OK if there was a mistake,’ everyone there just accepts the mistake, and they all laugh about it and have fun… At first I had an image in my head of dementia being a little scary, one of aimlessly wandering about and of abusive language. But when I visited, it was a cozy place and completely different than I imagined. Wada thought first that before dementia, everyone is a person. So even if they have dementia they can cook and clean and do what they can by themselves. The job of the care home should be to support their ability to live their own lives until the very end. This group home was the implementation of that idea.”
He recalls lunch time on the day he did that report. He ordered a hamburger steak, but was served gyoza (pot stickers) instead. “I was surprised and thought, ‘the only thing that’s right about this is the ground meat.’ But I was the only one there that was about to point that out.”
No one among the elderly residents and the care workers said a word about it, and they were eating the gyoza with gusto. “Seeing this, I got so embarrassed. I wanted to correct a mistake. But if everyone takes it in in the moment, then it ceases to be a mistake.”
I haven’t spoken much about this the last two years, but I am pleased to announce that The Dinner Parting, a movie I produced and co-wrote with my longtime collaborator J.W. Andrew, will make its debut at the Cinequest Film Festival. It will start virtually April 1st, and there will be an event in-person this August. My production company, Arts & Cults, is now on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, if you would like to consider following.
“As the night wears on, stories turn ever more elaborate and the get-together goes way off its original three courses. The witty banter gets deliciously served up… in this black-and-white charmer of a throwback to films of yesteryear.”
– Randy Myers, film critic for San Jose’s Mercury News.
Since it’s my birthday and I haven’t really said hi in quite some time, I figured I would answer the same questions The Bustle plans to inflict on celebrities for eternity.
What’s your coffee order? No.
What are the saved weather locations on your phone? East Lansing, various other Michigan cities I frequent, the cities I have visited the most (New York, Chicago, San Francisco) and Austin, a city I wish I visited the most.
What’s your sign? I know it’s Pisces, but I admittedly don’t really know what that is supposed to say about me.
Favorite overused movie quote? “I once thought I had mono for an entire year, It turned out I was just really bored.”
What’s one movie or TV show you’re currently obsessed with?
A Brighter Summer Day. Saw it last July and still think about it often. A Taiwanese coming-of-age set in the late ‘50s that is as much a T.E. Hinton as the War and Peace one character compares their own life to. A slightly misinterpreted Elvis lyric gives this film its (American) title, a mistake by youngsters in the film attempting to translate and understand one of their many obsessions with U.S. culture. It’s such a beautiful, sad, claustrophobic movie.
I don’t watch too many shows, but my two favorites, which I believe are both ending soon, are back on. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is just as funny as always. Midge and Susie still kill and the B/C plots seem a lot better as of late (or I am less of a curmudgeon than I was during the lockdown when I watched the first three seasons. That’s very likely, too). And Better Things is still just the best.
Who is your celeb idol? It was Anthony Bourdain, and probably still is.
If you had to be on a reality TV show, what would it be? I have a secret desire to be a picker, so if it would catapult my career...
Go-to karaoke song?
I would love to belt out an old, melancholy classic, but as such I cannot and therefore do not belt anything. Do like karaoke, though.
What’s something that’s inspiring you lately? I finally picked up Maus last summer, and I (finally) started reading after this bullshit. I love that said bullshit brought more attention to this book and finally pushed me into reading it. I love the telling of such an incredible story in a unique way. Makes me want to learn more about the Holocaust. I am not jewish but it makes me want to learn more about my grandparents, about my mother, my and my father. I want to read more books, read more comic books, write comic books, and just write in general.
Probably doesn’t get much more inspiring than that.
What is something you would want people to say about you? That I always did my best.
Had a conversation last night about this video from Bill Maher that I saw via a tweet from Scott Adams on this year’s Best Picture nominations, which Adams calls, “feel-bad ‘entertainment’ that gives you brain damage.” I haven’t seen all of the films (yet), but I wonder if Adams or Maher have either, or why exactly any of them would give one “brain damage?”
Maher’s argument is that movies should be less dour. I would argue plenty of movies are less dour, likely hundreds that were released last year alone.
“I’m not glad Stan Lee is dead, I’m sad you’re alive,” Maher said not that long ago, chiding those that like comic book and comic book films, and asking that grown-ups should read books that make them think. “Read James Baldwin, read Toni Morrison, read Michael Eric Dyson,” he pleaded.
Can film not do the same? If a movie can move you, or make you think, does it not hold value?
He continues, and this is the real crux of his argument, that the movies made in 2020 were not about entertainment, but virtue signaling. You can make that argument for Promising Young Women (to which I would disagree), but I can’t see that argument about any of the other nominees. (Side note: I would also argue Promising Young Women and The Trial of the Chicago 7 were wildly entertaining).
This is where he really loses me: “They used to know how to make a movie that was about something… that was also entertaining, and not just depressing,” he says while a list of films are shown on screen cherry picked from over 80 years of cinema, including Grapes of Wrath, 12 Angry Men, Look Who’s Coming to Dinner, Do the Right Thing, Schindler’s List, and 12 Years A Slave, all of which invalidate his “argument” and makes me ask:
“…the person who emerges from quarantine doesn’t have to be the same old you. Scientists say that people can change their personalities well into adulthood. And what better time for transformation than now, when no one has seen you for a year, and might have forgotten what you were like in the first place?
It was long thought that people just are a certain way, and they’ll remain that way forever. The Greek physician Hippocrates believed that people’s personalities were governed by the amounts of phlegm, blood, black bile and yellow bile that flowed through their bodies.
Modern science, of course, has long since discarded notions of bile and humors. And now,it appears the idea that our personalities are immutable is also not quite true. Researchers have found that adults can change the five traits that make up personality — extroversion, openness to experience, emotional stability, agreeableness and conscientiousness — within just a few months. Much as in Dr. Steffel’s case, the traits are connected, so changing one might lead to changes in another.
Changing a trait requires acting in ways that embody that trait, rather than simply thinking about it. As Richard Wiseman, a psychology professor at the University of Hertfordshire, put it in “The As If Principle,” you can behave “as if” you are the person you want to be. Pretty soon, you might find that it is you.”
This year thousands of people turned their homes into floats for Mardi Gras, capturing so much of what makes New Orleans great: creativity, positivity and resilience.
“I’m not familiar with the scene of skateboarding. At the same time, I had the feeling, yes, that’s kind of my people… You have to accept trial and error…”
You’re coming off the holidays. It’s cold outside. It’s snowing. Not suggesting be outright lazy for a month, but lean into the new year. You’re much more likely to set goals and keep them if you formulate a game plan.
I keep a planner and in the back pages run monthly tasks that I use as a reference as I fill in my “free time” week to week. This year I decided to be realistic and, outside of a few time-sensitive tasks, combine my “to-do” list for January and February.
I know Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow today and that means six more weeks of 2020. But if you’ve seen Groundhog Day, you know the final act is when Bill Murray decides to become the man he wants to be.
“He gets to know everybody in the town,” writes Austin Kleon. “He sees what problems there are in the town to solve, and how he can use his powers to help… He also throws himself into his work: he crafts a super eloquent speech for Punxsutawney Phil, which he presumably gives every day. He learns French. He learns how to play the piano. He learns how to sculpt ice. And it’s when he finally masters these things, when he’s turned himself into a person worth loving, it’s then that Rita notices him, and they live happily ever after. Phil learns, as Hugh Macleod says in his book Ignore Everybody, ‘The best way to get approval is to not need it.'”
If you are down on yourself for not getting shit done during the lockdown, or surprised life hasn’t gotten magically better because it is no longer 2020, or embarrassed that you have yet to start your resolutions (or never set any in the first place), I will just say this: Fuck that.
He fought mental illness his entire life, and by my estimation was at best a serviceable guitarist, decent pianist and awful singer. One that wrote simple, often naive lyrics. But there is a reason even the most mainstream of alt-rock-kingpins (Cobain, Veddar and Cornell) loved him so dearly. In their simplicity, his songs were haunting and moving. His story and songs will always have a spot in my heart.
Last year, Built to Spill released a cover album of Johnston material and got a bit chided for playing it safe, but I enjoy listening to it and think it serves as a good introduction for those that might not be able to look past Johnston’s rudimentary skills and lo-fi recordings. It ignores some of the obvious choices (notably “Story of An Artist,” previously recorded by M. Ward and used in an Apple advert, and “True Love Will Find You in the End,” covered by both Beck and Wilco), but it’s a solid collection of some of Johnston’s more melancholy and beautiful songs, including “Bloody Rainbow,” “Fish” and “Heart, Mind & Soul,” the latter a retro doo-wop ballad that manages to break my heart every time I hear it.
Happy Birthday, and Rest In Peace, Daniel. Let it be said you killed the monster.
In 1960, Dixieland soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy joined the jazz legend’s band for a tour with John Coltrane. Young, wide-eyed and starstruck, he absorbed all he could, eventually writing down Monk’s words of wisdom. Applicable in jazz, so too applicable in life:
Just because you’re not a drummer, doesn’t mean you don’t have to keep time.
You’ve got to dig it to dig it, you dig?
Avoid the hecklers.
Always leave them wanting more.
Stay in shape!
When you’re swinging, swing some more!
(What should we wear tonight?) Sharp as possible!
Whatever you think can’t be done, somebody will come along & do it. A genius is the one most like himself.
They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along & spoil it.
“The film-maker and documentarian was known for films such as Gorillas in the Mist and Coal Miner’s Daughter, as well as his long-running series of Up documentaries. His death has been confirmed by his agency to the Hollywood Reporter. No further details are yet known. Apted’s career started in the 1960s on the small screen, and in 1964, he assisted on the the show Seven Up! as part of the current affairs show World in Action. He helped the director Paul Almond interview 14 seven-year-old children, and continued to independently revisit them every seven years over the course of their lives. The most recent, 63 Up, was released in 2019 and the director referred to it as ‘the most important thing I have ever done.'”
In a piece from The Nation, writer Susan Pederson notes that while the first few installments are flawed, reducing the subjects to stereotypes, there was a profound change in the films, heightened in my opinion by the longevity of the project:
“28 Up (1984) was the tipping point. The first film of the series widely screened in the United States, it was the one Apted considered a breakthrough. Only then did he realize that he wasn’t making ‘a political film about Britain’s social classes,’ but something much more unusual: an ongoing inquiry into how individuals from a wide range of backgrounds sought out meaning and happiness amid the rapid social change of postwar Britain and all the random incidents and accidents that life threw at them.”
Each film is relatively simplistic in structure, short interviews with each subject cut with footage of what they’ve been up to recently. But with each new installment, we see entire lives unfolding. Their lives force us to examine our own. It seems impossible not to watch the Up Series and not think about where you were when you were 7 and 21 and 28, or where you think you will be, or who you want to be, in seven years, in fourteen years, in thirty-five years.
And with the passing of Apted, if you will be.
Profound words: “I want my life to have meant something.”
These words on the (likely) last in the series sum things up nicely:
“The latest installment, 63 Up, is one of the series’ best, in part because the subjects are aware they’re moving into their sunset years, and in part because they also know the 78-year-old Apted may never make another one of these films. He and the people he’s been tracking for more than half a century now interrogate each other in 63 Up, speaking with undisguised emotion about what they’ve all learned from stopping every now and then to publicly take stock of their lives and their desires.”
Pretty fucking funny. The Gods of Carnage turn a routine, man-made avalanche into something that at least looks scarier. Scary enough to knockout assumptions of security and a few gender stereotypes. Scary enough to forever scar some yuppie Swedes and ruin their bourgeois week on the slopes. Like I said, funny. You probably think you’re a better person than Tomas. Maybe you’re not.
Cutting a jazz record is usually done so either live or by “getting the band back together” in a little room and ripping it up. This album, named after the clause in contracts that allows events to be cancelled due to an “act of God,” speaks of that struggle. A compilation of weekly online performances recorded in their Harlem apartment on a single microphone, partners Brandee (harp) and Dezron (bass) make the most of the circumstances, inadvertently highlighting the versatility of the two instruments in the right set(s) of hands. They cover John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders, The Jackson Five, Kate Bush and “Sing” from Sesame Street, improvising with their limited resources in very interesting ways. In between songs, they crack wise, seemingly a knee-jerk response to the situation they were in (that so many of us were in), and speak of the uneasiness of now in a very off-the-cuff, honest way. Fiona Apple’s Fetch The Bolt Cutters became the quarantine album, but this is a close second, a true representation of 2020.
Was on the road a lot for work the last week, and found myself on country roads in thick fog while listening to Michael C. Hall read Pet Semetary on Audible. Now it is late on this rainy autumn evening, just on the heels of Halloween, and I find myself home alone, as is Louis Creed. Even though I know what happens next, I am still terrified, for him as well as myself.
