The last stretch of the year will always feel like finals week to me. Everyone is rushing to wrap up their projects, and there’s a feeling of permissiveness in the air. In adulthood, the “holiday spirit” is the generosity that arises from the understanding that we’re all barreling toward the same artificial deadline, with many of the same emotional hoops to jump through. We’re doing the best with the time that we have, and that has to be good enough. In January, I’ll go back to being irritated about editors not responding to my emails, but right now, I appreciate the life lesson.
I’m going to share some small, good things from my year, but first I want to thank you all for reading this newsletter. I love writing it.
And now onto the things.
Bill Evans
I have used the Shazam app precisely once, and that was to identify the music that plays over the intro to Jerrod Carmichael’s 2022 comedy special Rothaniel. It was Bill Evans. I listen to him pretty much every day now. There’s jazz that makes you feel insane in a bad way, there’s jazz that makes you feel insane in a good way, and there’s jazz that rebalances your nervous system. Evans falls into the last category. If you’re naturally a little melancholy, quiet, and introspective, he is your guy.
I’ve discovered that Evans is also a cure for airplane nerves. Get some noise-cancelling headphones, put on the album “Undercurrent,” and try to forget where you are. When they come around with drinks, get a cup of coffee with cream.
Tonic water
I drank so much tonic water this year that my friends Phoebe and Dylan gave me a history of the beverage for my birthday. I love tonic water over ice with bitters, but my favorite application is a matcha tonic. Whisk the matcha with some water, then pour it into a glass filled with ice and tonic. Go slowly. If you dump it in, it will fizz up and onto your counter. Enjoy at 4pm on a sunny workday.
Le Labo Thé Matcha
Incidentally, my favorite man-made smell of the year was Le Labo’s Thé Matcha perfume. (Favorite nature-made smell: moldering leaves on the cold night air.) This spring, I took myself on the Georgetown House Tour, which is heaven for people who are nosy and interested in real estate. In the garden of someone’s beautiful home — they’re all beautiful homes, with historic facades and expensive renovated interiors — I found myself standing next to a woman who smelled great. I asked her what she was wearing, and as soon as I finished the tour, I walked over to the Le Labo store on M Street to buy myself a $7 sample. I wouldn’t rip off a friend’s fragrance, but I think there’s something lovely and magical about stealing from a kind stranger. Now Thé Matcha makes me think of spring.
New York City
On a recent trip to New York, Alex and I came to the following conclusion: We like New York more than DC, but we like our life in DC better than the one we had in New York.
This thought was, of course, born from a great deal of internal conflict. Every time I go back to New York, I feel like the best version of myself. I feel capable and confident; I know which stores have public restrooms. That city just makes sense to me. And it’s home to the things I love most in life: art and culture in their most glamorous, annoying, and self-indulgent form.
So what do you do? You go back to New York as much as possible. You start to cultivate a sense of self that doesn’t begin and end with the place you live.
Washington, DC
In many ways, New York offers itself up to you. If you’re at a loss for what to do with your day, all you need to do is take a walk. I’m learning that other cities demand more effort. I’m working on DC.
The Challengers trailer
Since Challengers got pushed to 2024 because of the SAG strike, I have been rewatching the trailer every 3-5 weeks. I am all-in on Luca Guadagnino, even though his movies can be very messy. (See: A Bigger Splash, a movie that was so much of a vibe that I had to see it twice in two days, despite its unbearably shaggy third act.) If I cut my T-shirts into muscle tanks, will I become hot, evil Josh O’Connor?
Movies that begin with the letter P
My favorite movie of the year is Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days, which I saw at the New York Film Festival. (It’s getting released next year. Go see it as soon as you can.) I have a hard time describing this film. It’s about the daily rhythms and habits of a man named Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) who cleans public toilets in Tokyo. But you need to understand that it’s not boring, and it’s not a saccharine tale about the dignity of the sanitation worker, even though it is life-affirming and Hirayama does approach his job with dedication and grace.
I loved everything about Perfect Days — the performances, the cinematography, the music — but I was most struck by its structure and editing. Like most of us, Hirayama goes through the same motions day after day. Every morning, he buys a can of coffee from the vending machine outside his apartment before getting in his van. He visits the same restaurant after his work shift, and he goes to the same public bath.
You’d think that this lather-rinse-repeat cycle would be mind-numbing, but it’s not. The editing is so tight and precise that you don’t have a chance to get bored, and yet you become so familiar with Hirayama’s routine that when it’s disrupted in any way, that interruption feels like a revelation. One day, for instance, he wakes up a little later than usual — he usually rises before dawn, but on this day it’s already light outside — and puts on a watch that has been sitting untouched until this moment. All of a sudden you realize, holy shit, he’s not getting suited up for work. It’s the weekend. Who is this man when he has a full day to himself?
Much bigger things happen in this movie than a guy putting on his watch, but I mention that moment because it shows how finely calibrated the script is. As a writer, I struggle with structure more than anything else. Perfect Days is something to study.
Other P favorites include Priscilla, which I wrote about for this newsletter, and Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’s feminist Frankenstein tale starring Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, a reanimated woman in Victorian-ish England. Lanthimos has had me in a spiritual headlock ever since The Favourite, but I think I like Poor Things even more. It’s gross, freaky, funny, and pretty uplifting. (A better Barbie, insofar as both are fantasyland tales of women discovering themselves in the face of male oppression.) I have just one note, which is that we needed way more of Bella’s Marxist lover and brothel colleague, who seems to be her most genuine connection.
Going back to instrumentals that makes you feel insane in a good way, I loved the final scene in Passages, in which Franz Rogowski bikes through Paris like a maniac to the ragged strains of a brass band. (This is apparently how the actor gets around in real life.) And on the topic of great conclusions: Past Lives. Endings are another aspect of writing that I find challenging (do I sound like a bad writer?), and it was thrilling to watch Celine Song land that plane.
Stephanie Danler’s newsletter
Simp alert: I’m a huge fan of Sweetbitter, Stephanie Danler’s debut novel, and a subscription to her Substack is the best $50 I spent all year. It’s cool getting to read your favorite authors in a more informal context. It’s also cool when your favorite authors are down to talk in detail about their writing process. I don’t believe that any one person possesses the secret to writing, or that there is a secret to writing, but, as stated, I’m nosy and find this kind of thing interesting.
If you want a taste of Danler’s writing, I recommend “The Unravelers,” an essay she published back in 2015. There’s a sliver that makes me smile every time I read it. See if you can find it.
(Another fun newsletter: My friend Kyle Chayka’s One Thing, for which I recently wrote a dispatch about “finished basement core,” a.k.a. what happens when you try to wear your cool city clothes at family holiday gatherings in the suburbs.)
Stories that I loved writing
An interview with Patrick McHale about animation, death, and productivity. Ottessa Moshfegh on her writing wardrobe and vintage addiction. Caroline Polachek on the visuals that surround her music. Molly Gordon on her creative community and directorial debut. A deep dive on the Glucose Goddess who has overtaken your Instagram feed. An essay about the best unintentional ASMR video of all time, and another about the many supermodel documentaries that came out this fall.
Sometimes I find it hard to define my beat as a freelancer, but lately I’ve come to the conclusion that I love writing about creative, artistic weirdos who are really into their thing. If there are any editors reading this, please assign me stories in that vein. For instance, I gobbled up Hua Hsu’s profile of the Maestro prosthetics designer Kazu Hiro. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.
Somehow I don’t want the Online Ceramics x Bill Evans merch,
Eliza