The View From My Desk for January 19th, 2025

The date is January 19th, 2025, and the weather is cold but clear with occasional pockets of wind. The city feels languid in the midst of the current cold snap.

The big news item of the week is, of course, the inauguration of Donald Trump tomorrow. For the second time, America has collectively decided to roll the dice on an obvious lemon in hopes that they’ll save a few bucks as a result of it. Of course, any used car salesman would tell you that to begin with, but it’s still disheartening to see it on the national level. I will, as I have since the election win in November, not be checking the news as a result. Normally I would still read my international papers to stay up on my news, but The Guardian is breathlessly mentioning Trump in no less than twelve separate articles as of the time of this writing, and Le Monde is crawling with articles about him as well. Even the French dispatch of Le Monde, normally better insulated from American political intrusion, is discussing le protectionnisme, une histoire politique des Etats-Unis, de George Washington à Donald Trump. Normally I’d find this an interesting read, but of course it namechecks the Dullard in Chief in the article title and first proper paragraph, so it’s probably best to skip all the usual sources for the next few days as well.

On the local level, this week offers the monthly South Jordan City Council meeting, although a precursory glance at the agenda shows nothing more intriguing than an update to our water conservation programs. Good for our local officials, but likely a bit of a snoozer for everyone else.

Speaking personally, this week is going to be something of a slow one for me as well. I have a potential date lined up for some time midweek, although it’s been scheduled off and on a handful of times over the last two months, so I’m not confident as to whether or not it will actually happen this week. The benefit of taking the long view on such things is that I’m not especially bothered either way; not that I wouldn’t like to meet up with someone I’ve spent weeks talking to (I most certainly would), but I prefer to think in the long view rather than the short one, and if it happens it happens, and if not, well, that tends to happen too. I somewhat expect work to be unseasonably slow this upcoming week as well; I’m not accustomed to the holiday lull lasting this far into January, but I think election uncertainty and the mishigas surrounding the inauguration is making people a little hesitant to commit to anything long term. Ideally that will wear off soon — while I appreciate the slow days, boredom is a slow and insidious killer, and I’d prefer to be steady rather than hit or miss the way we have been.

This last week in movies, I screened four films: Queer (2024), Flow (2024), The Boys In The Boat (2023), and Obit (2016). I enjoyed all four to some extent, although there were definite favorites. I thought Queer was a really fascinating movie — Luca Guadagnino is a talented and deeply interesting director, and I don’t think I’ve been disappointed by anything in his output. This movie especially notable to me given that Guadagnino also directed 2017’s Call Me By Your Name, a film about gay desire and loss but from a slightly more optimistic perspective. If CMBYN was a movie about the bittersweetness of transient (and inappropriately placed) love, Queer feels less bittersweet and more resigned. CMBYN says that love means losing someone, and that the loss hurts, but that there is value in that hurt. Queer is a little less optimistic on that note; love means losing someone, and if you don’t get over it, it’s going to limit you for the rest of your life. CMBYN posits that you should use your loss to shape you into a better man; Queer cautions that if you don’t, you’re going to spend the rest of your life chasing something that’s never going to fill the hole in your heart. Neither is a refutation of the other, but Queer does feel like the refinement of a theory that started earlier. I do think Call Me By Your Name is the superior movie, but that’s simply personal choice. Daniel Craig (and indeed, the whole cast) is excellent here, and it’s a fine movie that not enough people are going to see primarily because of the title and the… robust amount of sex in it. In some ways it reminded me of another movie I quite liked, a criminally underseen 2015 film called Departure, which is another queer cinema work about accepting personal loss. Both feature surrealist dream sequences, although Departure plays them more poetically compared to Queer’s heavy abstraction. But really, any chance to shout out Departure (and lead actor Alex Lawther’s performance) is worth mentioning.

Queer does have the issue of meandering around a little (just like the Burroughs work it adapts) and suffering from severe tonal whiplash. The first third of the movie is unexpectedly funny, the middle segment somewhat somber, and the final third surreal and artsy. This isn’t a fault, but rather a convention that’s far more common in international film (especially Asian cinema) than American releases. Directors from outside the United States don’t have a problem swerving between genre and tone, where American directors typically prefer to play it a little safer; subsequently, I don’t think any ‘high profile’ director working today except Guadagnino would have produced something with a funny -> serious -> surreal arc like Queer had. The soundtrack from Trent Reznor, and the many anachronistic songs in a period piece, were a special treat as well. I don’t know what it is about out-of-time songs appearing in the wrong era, but it always tickles me as a filmgoer, so hearing plenty of Nirvana in a film taking place in South America in the 1950s was a delight.

I have less to say about the other three: Flow was an exceptional animated work, and will likely clean up come awards season here in the states. It’s a family-friendly movie that isn’t aggressively family friendly (there’s plenty of cute animals here, but also plenty of cruelty and injustice), and it’s a visual delight. The Boys In The Boat was more paint-by-numbers, which is to be expected with period pieces about strict historical events, and I watched it primarily for sartorial reasons. It was somewhat forgettable, but as a sucker for period costuming and set design, it was spot-on there. Obit was an especially interesting watch; a documentary about the people who write obituaries for The New York Times, it’s enlightening and funny and deeply engaging, should you be able to track a copy down. One of the more interesting things that stuck with me is the way that throughout the documentary, many of the writers mentioned talk about how ‘distasteful’ or ‘unpopular’ the job of writing obituaries is perceived to be by the public. I think the contrary — I find it immensely interesting, and could easily see it being a full time vocation that I would enjoy. Of course, this is said with the knowledge that I’ve written a handful of obituaries for friends and family over the years (and one slightly higher profile one that it would be impolite to discuss), and I found the process to be a deeply lovely and reverent one. Folks, if you need your obituaries written, hit me up, not only do I enjoy it but I promise I’ll do an adequate job.

My coffee is getting cold, so I should probably wrap this up, but thank you for checking in with me this week. Best wishes, stay curious, and call your parents (if you can).