I thought I had changed: I had started talking to Joe, the guy on the margins. I had asked his name and even brought him lunch. For a moment, I patted myself on the back, sure I was not one of the “cold ones.” On the way home, though, something felt off.
How do we fall in love with the countries we ran from? What is the strange alchemy that turns distance into longing, and absence into affection? Distance is not impartial. It decides what to soften and what to sharpen. For some, absence polishes memory into a shining gem; for others, it preserves the edge of the blade.
When we are up against the inevitable limits of human invention and our capacity for patience, it is the music that matters most.
“Haunting” is the first word that comes to mind. The melody’s ghost lingered, changing the very air. The Gymnopédies, a word I now know means “Three Nude Dances,” were indeed bare: simple, vulnerable, tender, wistful, melancholy.
Do these people not know that now is now is now is NOW?
One of the reasons I like the term “novelistic” for these sorts of documentaries is that it stresses how they deal in the mysteries of creation, its meaning, and its emotion. Joel has a song from 1977 called “Vienna,” with the refrain, “When will you realize / Vienna waits for you.”
The War Game and Threads have no time for dramatic trifles of characters dealing with nuclear war from afar, or even the relative safety of a military bunker. Instead, both films plunge us deep into their dreaded, adrenaline-soaked horrors.
The air shifted. Some smiled with relief, others looked away. In that moment, I realized what the “model minority” concept protects is not me, but the comfort of those around me. Politeness asks us to trade particularity for harmony, difference for calm.
For a moment, I caught myself thinking: this dancefloor is the happiest place on earth. Not in the saccharine way Disney markets happiness, but in the way fugitive joy exists—imperfect, defiant, and fleeting. The kind of happiness that knows how precarious it is and yet insists on itself anyway.
James Gunn’s Superman gives his film’s Man of Tomorrow three notable speeches—one about kindness, one about respect, and one about honor—that, in any normal year, would make every eyeball in the theatre roll back into its socket.