I Like Things That Look Like Mistakes

“Can You See My Brain Open Wide Now?”: 23 from 2023

Posted on February 8, 2024 Updated on February 8, 2024

It’s still chilly enough to warrant at least a few layers and a winter jacket, and the grey skies that diffuse the sunlight into nature’s fluorescent office bulbs muster what energy they can to emulate something like daytime. It’s February 8th and I’ve put off writing something about my favorite films (or culture, if we want to be inclusive) of 2023 for a month and a half. The urgency wasn’t there, I posted the list naked and alone on Instagram, shorn of the usual faux essay prelude and PhotoShopped collage of images from the works in question. Not even on my Medium nor on the WordPress blog that I’ve had since I was 13. I was shirking an excuse to write, but also avoiding the temptation to contrive some connection between the art I had consumed in the last year, the trajectory of my career, and their collision with current affairs. So I just sat with the writer’s block or the laziness or whatever you can call it. 

The hope of experiencing art and culture, with each new or new to you work, is that it will remind one of humanity, be it the audience’s or the artist’s or the people outside the venue or whatever permutation of recognizing flesh and blood and feeling. Both essential and maybe harder to come by these days, even in the most formally adroit and challenging works, as our humanity writ large is a pawn of any number of forces, systematic and oligarchical and political. Digital technologies make it easier to flatten humanity, and artificiality is now a vessel through which to better understand the authentic. My therapist recommended I read Naomi Klein’s Doppleganger. Ironic. 

I wrote a book last year with the express purpose that hopefully it would be a useful and fun resource that people could share with their friends, loved ones, and communities. I saw my own community shift and contract and expand and deepen. I was interviewed by one of my heroes. I had my heart broken. My book got recommended by the New York Times coincidentally (?) on my late father’s birthday. I made new friends on Fire Island.  I tried shrooms for the first time on the beach in Provincetown. I went to Critics Camp in Connecticut and learned new things about writing and myself. I went to LA and talked with a cute boy until midnight in a pizza joint. I got kicked out of an Alamo Drafthouse. I lost my job. My book was named one of the best books of 2023 by NPR. I went to Vegas and realized I will never go back. I found new reasons to be politically engaged and committed. I saw through the illusory and transient moment of professional success so that it could be a vehicle to deepen my friendships. I am living through a US funded genocide.

I watched dancers rush and barrel on stage as if their life depended on it. I watched the former First Lady of the Philippines make the discotheque a political theater. I watched Anne Hathaway tweak her persona into pulp lesbian vibes. I watched Julio Torres queer Kafka’s labyrinthine bureaucracies. I watched performance art about wanting, wanting, wanting. I heard the soft, juicy sounds of the steelpan during the “High School Mambo”. I saw the tension between politics and plot play out in the desert. I felt transported, by scent, to the time when I found out my parents were people too. I watched the return of the mean teen comedy. I watched Rachel Weisz and Rachel Weisz pull themselves apart from the whole. I saw an Afghani woman slowly come to terms with her own alienation. I saw a French Korean adoptee shed the illusions of her identity. I watched Todd Haynes shatter another prism of the self. I witnessed Beyoncé in the flesh. And on-screen. Three times.

But the image that stands out to me in all the things I watched, felt, and experienced is of Alexandra Tatarsky, that versatile, elastic mad clown, stuffing their face full of onions. In their solo show Sad Boys in Harpy Land, their artistic paralysis in times of empire and war and atrocity reaches a nirvana like catharsis. Describing an excised Goethe piece (from Faust, Part II), Tatarsky talks about how Hell is a room where you’re forced to press your face into chopped onions to release the cries of all humanity. Up until this moment, Sad Boys revels in the manic, strange, and unhinged, articulating artistic block as wildly gestural and crazy and beautifully formless. However resonant their early wails about the world falling apart may be, it is the humor that drives these moments. But as the show careens to the end, Tatarsky pauses, overwhelmed by the roles and identifiers that she has been cast in and the ones she wants to grab hold of on her own terms. After the audience has migrated from their seats to the stage, she stops the show dead in its tracks. Each half of an onion in hand, she buries her eyes into them. She feels just when one thinks one can’t feel anymore. 

They don’t wail, not in the comically exaggerated way they did at the beginning. Not like the meme of that dog engulfed in flames. They let out a whimper, a gasp. A whisper of despair that’s much louder than any scream. 

The art and culture that made this year’s list made me feel alive and human. It’s the kind of criteria that certainly is imbued in nearly every list that anyone makes. But these moments of grace, humanity, divinity, and the complex ties they have with horror, cruelty, and atrocity have begun to mean more to me with each passing year, month, day. 

It is that aliveness that I will continue seeking out in the loved ones around me and the art that I am grateful I get to share with them. 

23 from 2023

23. Afire/Aguá 

22. The Lesson

21. Barbie/American Fiction

20. Oppenheimer/Here Lies Love

19. Poor Things 

18. All of Us Strangers

17. The Holdovers/Joy Ride

16. The Killer/Magic Mike’s Last Dance

15. A Haunting in Venice

14. La PRÁCTICA

13. De Humani Corporis Fabrica/Problemista

12. Das Sofortvergnügen/Rotting in the Sun

11. Kokomo City/West Side Story (2021) in Concert

10. No Hard Feelings/Fallen Leaves

9. ANSELM in 3D/The Boy and the Heron/How to Blow Up a Pipeline

8. A Thousand and One/The Five Devils

7. You Hurt My Feelings

6. Bottoms/Blue Jean/Eileen

5. Dead Ringers/ birth/rebirth

4. Return to Seoul/Fremont 

3. The Renaissance Tour/Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé 

2. May December/Wolf Play

1. Sad Boys in Harpy Land