I haven’t sent out a status update for the last couple of weeks, and I haven’t posted on my blog in that time either (as I had intended).
There’s a simple reason for that – I’ve been going through stuff. For three weeks, I was busier than I’ve been in a good while, partly because work just lined up that way, partly because back pain slowed me down, and because sometimes you just have more work to do.
But after that period, for the last week or so, I’ve been … well, I’ve been kinda depressed. At first, I kept saying I felt “unmotivated”, but then I stopped feeling like watching any emotionally intense film or tv and just felt like bingeing shitty sitcoms, and that’s usually my alarm sign for depression.
You don’t need to worry about me there – my depression is fairly mild, usually follows a period of anxiety or intense work (I see it as a crash more than anything else), and I tend to be surprisingly functional in this time.
You see, like many Indians, I’m driven by shame, or, more accurately, the avoidance of shame. The first few times I had a period of depression – when I was a teenager – I came out of it feeling like I’d let everyone down because I’d got nothing done in that time. So by my mid-twenties, I’d prepped myself for … let’s call it a minimum viable depression. A version of a depressive period that I could accept once it was over.
Last year, I listened to a podcast where Arnold Schwarzenegger gave the advice: “If you feel shitty, don’t think, just do things.” That’s the idea here. You can’t help feeling bad, but if you do things while you’re feeling bad, then when you stop feeling bad, well, at least you got a bunch of stuff done.
So, when I’m depressed, my work doesn’t suffer – that’s the one thing in my life that has to get done whatever I’m feeling emotionally. But one by one, I let everything else fall away – cooking for myself, keeping a clean house, exercising, and then slowly, responding to emails and talking to friends. In my twenties, I’d occasionally sacrifice bathing too, but I don’t do that anymore. I used to feel bad about these things, but time has taught me to be kinder to myself, and I cut myself all the slack I need for this period. (Except when it comes to work – I’m sure that says something about me, but you know, everyone’s got their thing to contend with. This is mine.)
Usually, people don’t even notice, unless they’re someone I talk to multiple times a week. Even those, I used to lie to and pretend I was too busy to talk, but in my 30s, I’ve gotten better about being honest about my reasons for not being up for human contact.
I can recognise the period passing when I start wanting to do the dishes, and to go outside the house, and to actually do things (also, watch movies that make me feel things, instead of inoffensive slop).
The funny thing is, the period of depression is always much shorter than it seems to be from within. It feels like I’ve disappeared from the world for months and now everyone hates me for it, but it’s probably been a week or two at best. I remember when I had such a period last year (come to think of it, it was a exactly a year ago and it was last period of depression – I wonder if there’s a pattern), I apologised to a friend for not having reached out for ages, and he pointed out we’d met the week before. (I just looked to the top of this post, and noted that I thought I’d missed the last many updates, when I had in fact just missed one.) I wish I could go back in time and give my younger self this grain of wisdom, and maybe they’d have felt less shitty about it.
Anyway, that’s why I haven’t been blogging – I’ve just not been feeling up to it.
And now that I do, I’m looking at my backlog of films I wanted to write about at length, and everything I haven’t catalogued yet. A decade ago, this would have caused a paralysis – there’s too much from the past to catch up to before I can get on with the things I want to actually do right now.
But I’m older and wiser, and I’m going to give myself permission to half-ass it by writing capsule reviews, and leave myself the window to write about some of these in depth later, when I feel more up to it (in particular, I want to write properly about A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence – that movie was a revelation – and Beau Travail, and I want to make a structural comparison of the film and novel versions of The Prestige).
Work-wise, like I said, I had a busy few weeks. Finished a big tranche of Unnamed OGN, lettered Dawnrunner #3 (it’s so nice that I can say that now that it’s announced), Hellblazer: Dead in America #3 and the newly announced (see below) The Boy Wonder #1.
Release-wise, since we last spoke, The One Hand #1 has been released, and sent to a second printing already. The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos #7 came out last week, wherein artist Soo Lee joins the team for the first issue of a two-part telling of the origin of Adam Frankenstein, i.e. a retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein via a modern queer lens.
DC Comics announced a couple of days ago that Juni Ba is writing and drawing a new 5-part Robin series for Black Label, called The Boy Wonder, coloured by Chris O’Halloran, lettered by me, and edited by Chris Conroy. It’s been a blast to be working again with some of my favourite people in comics. You can check out the announcement here, with a coloured preview of the comic as well as a look at Cliff Chiang’s awesome variant cover.
Finally, my constant collaborator James Tynion IV announced his new production company – Tiny Onion – along with key personnel. I’m (very) tangentially involved in this, since I’ll be lettering some of the comics coming out via Tiny Onion, but I’ve been watching James build out his plans for the last couple of years, and I’m just in awe of the man’s drive, ambition and talent. Check out James’s thought on it here.
Links for the week:
- I’ve been on a short story binge recently, so I decided to have another go at Raymond Carver (whom I don’t rate very highly). I stalled out on that quickly, but I did enjoy this Paris Review interview with editor Gordon Lish, and the New Yorker’s publication of Carver’s “Beginners” – the original version of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” – and Lish’s edits to it.
- A sobering article on how the gig economy is messing up the mental health space.
- I was excited to watch American Fiction, particularly because the trailer made it seem like Jeffrey Wright was the perfect actor to pull off a part like that, but then I read this wonderfully written article that eviscerates the film, and found out that it was based on a Percival Everett book called Erasure, so I’ve been reading that instead. I might still watch the film once I’m done, to make up my own mind about it.
- This week’s earworm has been Sampha’s “Blood On Me”, which Ram sent over as part of a playlist for something he’s currently working on. A gorgeous song, with a wonderfully paranoid vibe.
“The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger” – this is an article by a financial advice columnist who fell for an Amazon scam. I found it very interesting, so I posted it on BlueSky and sent it to a couple of people, and then I went online and saw that people are either making fun of this person for thinking herself to be the kind of person who’d never get scammed (which is the central irony of the article), or they’re claiming that she clearly spent $50,000 on something shady and couldn’t tell her husband and committed to the bit. And those are the more charitable posts.
That’s all possible, of course. But I found this article interesting because I’ve had people close to me get scammed for vast amounts (one using a similar government agency-based stratagem), and most of these are people who should, stereotypically, “know better”. I’ve seen the self-recrimination that comes after, and how stupid they feel for having fallen for something so “obvious”. Two of these people, in fact, called me while they were in the middle of the scam. I talked them through how it was clearly a scam and they shouldn’t give this person their money, and they did it anyway, because they didn’t want to risk it being true.
The thing is, as you can see from the article, these scammers make you doubt your reality. They use cult-like tactics to temporarily isolate you or make you doubt the people that care about you, and they convince you that whatever’s wrong, you can solve it by giving them this money.
And thinking that you’re too smart for this is going to make you more susceptible rather than less. I wish, rather than immediately clowning on this specific person, or deriving things from their class location that, again, might be relevant for this specific person but which don’t invalidate this kind of scam, people could look at this and prevent themselves or their loved ones from falling for it. Not everything needs a dunk.
(I am, of course, prepared to eat some of those words if it does turn out that this article is part of the lady perpetrating fraud on her own husband.)
TARDIS Eruditorum Vol. 3 by Elizabeth Sandifer – as always, enjoyable, but there’s no point me trying to tell you about an Eruditorum book. Decide for yourselves. I will take a break after this one, though – I’ve read four of these in a row, and I need to read something that’s not about Doctor Who for a while.
H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars by Kunal Purohit. An incredibly well-researched and well-written bit of reportage about the rise of Hindutva-based pop culture – music, poetry, publishing – and the role it has played in the spread of hate politics in India till now, and what it might mean for us in the future. I wish it was better copy-edited (for a HarperCollins publication, it has too many grammatical errors), but other than that, it’s immaculate.
The Prestige by Christopher Priest – picked this up after Priest’s passing, realising that I’d never read anything by him. I do like the film a lot, and I enjoyed the book’s differences from the film – the nested structure works better in prose than a non-linear one would have, and the gothic horror framing sequence is also subtler and more haunting than the film’s crime fiction trappings. If I had a complaint, it would be that by the time you get to the fourth narrator, it feels like a loss of momentum to once again start with their biography, but I suppose this was a problem with no real solution, since that particular character would’ve otherwise felt thinner than the others. I think I have a post in me comparing the book to the film, but suffice to say I adored this novel.
Skullbelly by Ronald Malfi – a short horror novella. Nothing remarkable, but it moves at a nice clip, doesn’t overstay its welcome, and has a fun monster design at the centre of it, though it doesn’t do much with the design.
I also read a play – The Unfriend by Steven Moffat. In fact I read this in January, just forgot to note it down here. I enjoyed it well enough – Moffat’s talent for farce comes through, and the characters, while certainly fitting into types, are lively and entertaining. I’d love to watch it someday, hopefully with Reece Shearsmith and not Lee Mack in the main role.
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence: Might be my favourite film of the year. We’ve got a while to go, but this is a strong contender. A strange piece of absurd comedy, or an artistic comment on life, this pulls from theatre, film, sketch comedy, and using its veneer of artificiality and visual distance as cover, reaches right to the heart of what it’s like to be human.
Beau Travail: I watched this film because someone posted the final few minutes on BlueSky. For some reason, I thought it was a French urban movie about an assassin. It isn’t. It is, instead, one of the finest movies about masculinity I’ve ever watched. It has three incidents, and each of them takes a long time to happen, but by the time the third has happened, you realise the story was in all the other scenes, the ones that seemed like they were marking time. Hopefully more to say about this one, but an unabashed recommendation.
Godzilla: This is the 1954 original. I wish I’d watched it before I watched Shin Godzilla, because I didn’t know at the time that it was basically a remake of this one. (Directed like an episode of Evangelion, my friend Juni informs me.) This was great though. Like Shin, this is Godzilla as a natural disaster more than as a monster. The film is tense, atmospheric, clearly high-budget for the time. The creature effects are great too. The characters are thin, but usually fun to watch.
Cobweb: A pointless film, and ill-conceived on every level. I’m shocked someone liked this screenplay enough to put it on the Black List and then turn it into a movie. I’d make a comment on what it says about disabilities or ugliness, except I refuse to put more thought into this film than the writer did. Dire. Just dire. I rated it 1.5 stars on Letterboxd: one for how well-shot it is, and half because Anthony Starr knows how to do creepy. (I was recommended this by a friend last year, and the most charitable thing I can say about that is maybe they meant the Korean film by Kim Jee-woon and not this one.)
Dream Scenario: There are lots of bits to like in this one, and Nicolas Cage turns out a charming performance, though he’s doing the kind of conscious understatement that Jim Carrey was doing in Eternal Sunshine – this yearning for respectability. I wish it was stranger, like the movies it’s aping, and it is too intent on straightforward allegory to fully work as a story, but, like Mark Kermode, I enjoyed it till a little before the end.
Another Round: Starts well and ends well – in fact, the last ten minutes or so are magnificent. But the rest of the film is wobbly, and doesn’t come close to earning the catharsis of the ending. I don’t think most of this film is good, but I might say it’s worth the price of entry just to get to the end (yes, that’s the dance clip that everyone posted online when the film came out).
The Prestige: Rewatched this after I read the novel and then read the screenplay. It’s a great adaptation in that it changes the story to suit the medium. The Nolans recognise what they couldn’t translate to the screen – the gothic horror elements, the subtle characterisations, the biographical scope – and instead choose a non-linear structure that affirms and intensifies the central story of the rivalry. Constructed with an almost clockwork precision, still probably my favourite Nolan movie.
Dead & Buried: Pleasant schlocky eighties horror movie. The plot ticks along surprisingly fast, the central male performances are great, and some of Stan Winston’s makeup effects are excellent (while others are … less excellent). I don’t think it holds together by the end, but I don’t think that’s the point of a film like this. Here’s a great review of this by comics writer Joshua Dysart.
The Evil Dead: I wanted to show K this film, since she liked Evil Dead Rise and hadn’t watched it. To be more accurate, I showed K this film because I want to show her Evil Dead 2, which is my favourite of the lot. I think it holds up great as an example of gonzo cinema. K liked Rise more, but she had a good time.
Starship Troopers: You know, I’ve been having a conversation about this with people for the last couple of days, but I can’t for the life of me understand how someone finishes this film without realising that it is satire, as several reviewers in the 90s and some people on Twitter now have been doing. Sure, it’s got the veneer of a gung-ho military science fiction film, but by the time you get to the “why democracy failed” scene, or the “infantry made me the man I am today” scene, or Neil Patrick Harris in full SS regalia, how do you miss that? How do you miss that the final scene is a literal, textual military recruitment ad? Or that the characters are a takeoff on white-picket-fence American stereotypes, or, hell, fucking Archie comics. (Rico is Archie, Dizzy is Betty, Carmen is Veronica, Zander is Reggie, Carl goes from Jughead to Dilton.) In fact, this might be a better piece of “Archie but grownup” pastiche than Brubaker/Phillips’s Last of the Innocents.
I mean, this was made by the guy who made Robocop. Oh, people missed that one too? Huh.
That’s it for now. I have a few blogposts written that I might post individually, or integrate into status updates (probably the former). Bide well, folks!
