Saturday, September 12, 2026

Sara Bareilles, Good Grief (Epic Records, 2026)

It’s a demanding task to make something durable out of loss. That’s the central theme of Sara Bareilles’ immersive and instructive new album Good Grief, her first studio album (and accompanying tour) in seven years. Set into motion by the relatively early deaths of her close friends and career collaborators Gavin Creel and Chad Joseph, these fourteen exquisite songs chart Bareilles’ journey of mourning and healing; they also serve as a generous gift to her listeners worldwide who might be struggling with similar losses of their own and be grateful to find some redemption in what the Grammy-winning singer/songwriter has so carefully crafted and calibrated here. Last week, I watched Josh Alexander’s excellent documentary about the making of the album at a cinema in Boston, and in the film Bareilles mentions, lightheartedly but seriously, that she’s a total control freak. Having listened to the songs from Good Grief on a loop since watching the documentary, and also having heard her and her band perform the songs live at MGM Music Hall in Boston a couple of nights ago, it’s quite evident to me that the kind of control she’s referring to is what assisted her in creating the most mature album of her career so far, one with a totally clear-eyed vision which I’m certain will cut across all sorts of demographics and generations to help shape works of art that respond to human mortality, and furthermore, that guide us in navigating and transcending the levels of grief that our mortality ongoingly requires.

The album opens with “Home,” which Bareilles has explained was inspired by the Stephen Colbert episode of Anderson Cooper’s podcast All There Is, where Colbert recounted losing his father and brothers back when he was only ten-years-old. The song’s refrain, “So tell me your story / I’ll tell you mine,” is the very intentional heart and mission of the album, demonstrating how the pain and difficulty of grief can become “good grief” by relying on the human capacities for narrative and memory. That transformative power can only really be accessed through sharing with others our stories and recollections of those who have passed from our lives. In the midst of inhabiting the tale of Colbert’s own losses and the wake of silence that followed in his childhood home, lines such as, “You be the universe / Nothing to hide” show how Bareilles’ aim is to widen her specific thematic focus to include and embrace all of us. That thread of far-ranging truthfulness continues on the album’s second track, “Just a Kid,” Bareilles’ homage to her college soulmate and first manager, Chad Joseph, who died young at the age of 40: “You never got to get married / And I hate where you’re buried / You never got old / You were just a kid… / This one’s for my best friend and he’s everywhere.”

Other forms of grief enter into the album’s midsection as well, with the powerful “Hands Off My Body” reacting to recent upheavals surrounding women’s physical autonomy and right to choose, and “Ladies in a Line” movingly addressing visits to the fertility clinic and attempts to have a child just a bit later in life because of career obligations throughout one’s younger adult years. The former song cleverly interrogates political right-wing Christian fundamentalism, while also sharply critiquing the cultural notion that women should just be as submissive as patriarchal authorities expect them to be: “So if I whisper it in silence / And deliver it swiftly / If I can make it sound godly / Would you get your hands off my body? / If I call for it gently / While I’m burning up / Would it be enough?” The latter song, by comparison and counterpoint, quietly and contemplatively speaks to the women hoping to be mothers and grappling with infertility: “Empty arms / With lists of names / The cruel truth of starting late / Life was asking / Other questions until now… / The depths of this are changing / Reminds me of the ocean floor / I’m just swimming where they tell me to / Till I can’t swim no more.” In the documentary’s studio scene before and after recording “Ladies in a Line,” Bareilles and her background vocalist Butterfly Boucher bond and cry together since they’re both struggling through the exact same issues at that time, which of course lends the song and its beautifully consoling harmonies an even greater resonance.

Two of the album’s finest songs showcase the work of the late non-binary performance poet Andrea Gibson, who wrote unforgettably about their last few years before dying of metastatic ovarian cancer in July of 2025 at age 49, as documented in last year’s Oscar-nominated film Come See Me in the Good Light. Gibson’s voice is featured in a profound excerpt from their poetry on the song “A Love Story,” and the end-credits song from the documentary about Gibson, “Salt Then Sour Then Sweet,” is Bareilles’ astounding duet with Brandi Carlile that also should have been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song. It’s followed by the album’s penultimate track, “Forever,” which finds Bareilles taking on the tender posthumous perspective of her recently departed friend, Tony Award winner Gavin Creel, with whom she co-starred on Broadway and spoke on the phone nearly every single day, right up until his death from metastatic melanotic peripheral nerve sheath sarcoma at age 48: “And if you need me / And we’re not together / Close your eyes to see me better / I’ll be here forever… / If you are the bird I am the movement / If you are the words I am the music.”

Perhaps my favorite moment from Bareilles’ wonderful and memorable concert in Boston this past Thursday night, after she and her band had performed most of the songs from Good Grief and had expertly led the audience through that amount of thematic weight, came when she suddenly launched into a spirited and rousing rendition of Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)” and got the audience up on its feet to dance joyfully in unison. It was such a smart, unexpected move, and the perfect balance and antidote to everything that she’d played just before it. That particular and very precise song selection (out of the many upbeat, affirmative pop songs by other artists that I’m sure the band could have played instead) actively embodied what the closing excerpt of Andrea Gibson’s poem “The Nutritionist” from the song “A Love Story” exemplifies and rhythmically urges us all to do as the survivors:

“So let me say right now for the record,
I am still gonna be here
asking this world to dance,
even if it keeps stepping on my holy feet.

You, you stay here with me, okay?
You stay here with me.

Raising your bite against the bitter dark,
your bright longing,
your brilliant fists of loss.
Friend, if the only thing we have to gain in staying is each other,
my god that is plenty
my god that is enough
my god that is so, so much for the light to give
each of us at each other’s backs
whispering over and over and over,
‘Live. Live. Live.’”

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Tuesday, September 1, 2026

Cinematic Endgame from the First Two-Thirds of 2026

At the cinema that I go to a few times each week where I live up in midcoast Maine, they know me as “the guy who sees every movie.” They know me the same way at the cinemas where I watch films regularly near my workplace in Boston. It’s true that I’ll sit through anything or sometimes sleep through anything, and this year the sound of my own snoring has jolted me awake more frequently than in any other cinematic year of my lifetime. I always have at least some written comments to make about movies throughout the year and then again at the end of the year, but this year I’m starting to fear that it might be the year that I end up having nothing much to say at all, so I think this is probably the best point in 2026 for me to attempt to articulate why exactly that is. It’s a kind of cultural precipice (and, moreover, a critical precipice) that I feel like we’ve been approaching for a very long time, for most of my adult life to be honest, and now the fateful edge may finally have arrived. What’s the point of criticism if we ultimately reach the stage where there’s no longer anything that’s worth writing critically about?

I really kind of hate to invoke Kane Parsons’ mostly dreadful Backrooms, but it’s the most obvious thing to turn to after having rounded the bleak corner from that opening paragraph. It’s almost embarrassing to have to point it out: mainstream cinema (which quite rapidly devolved into the only sort of cinema we really access) has now largely become that endless labyrinth of grim indistinguishable rooms and hallways where everything looks deadeningly the same, a self-consciously horrifying prefabricated hedgework maze of disconnection and dissociation. Not that the film itself has some type of durable analytical framework to approach those ideas in any useful way. It’s simply (and overly simply) a blunt example and symptom of the selfsame cultural deadlock that’s produced it, or given rise to it, or rather, sunk and lowered it as far as it’s been sunk. Somehow improbably, an even worse example came out in American cinemas a bit earlier this year, a Japanese film called Exit 8, in which a guy walks around endless identical white tiled corridors trying to find his way out of a subway pedestrian tunnel. I don’t care whatsoever that these films originated as internet phenomena or video games or whatever. That very lack of any serious or meritorious or educated provenance, and the increasing distance from its own historical sense of echolocation that instead results in a form of infinite unfolding simulation, is exactly what all of the postmodern theorists theorized is where we’d now wind up, and so we have.

Each spring I teach a course on music lyricism, and the most difficult aspect of it is getting the students to listen intently to songs with some intricacy of thematic meaning, structure, or songcraft, and then to analyze even briefly what makes it intricate and how. They’re so accustomed to listening to and watching things only in brief snippets that I have to keep the pace moving swiftly in order to huddle them together inside the boat, which is fine by me since I can row us alongside and past more songs and lyrics that way. I encourage them to bring in whatever interests them in any way on the days that they present songs they’ve selected, rather than forcing them to stay within any sort of rubric, almost as a way to create formal contrasts that they might or might not notice. While any kind of immersion is good in these days of continual distraction (though sometimes it’s cleverly disguised as meditation), in the realm of cinema I think it’s even more important that it be worthwhile immersion, the kind that wakes you up as it envelops you because if there’s one thing that I can assure you of after watching pretty much every single cinematic release so far this year, it’s that our cohesion to forms in a truly generative sense is actively fading; I would argue it’s even willfully fading. The more complacent you are, the more they can continue to sell you at far too high a price.

How strange then, and strangely sensible, after making us essentially strangers to ourselves, that the outcome and ultimate downfall of it all would be a glaringly obvious cultural narcissism, wanting to see only your own face in something: that’s what’s funny enough to laugh at, or sad enough to cry about, because if I can’t see myself in this thing, then why am I paying to sit here? There has been almost no cinema this year for me that’s represented any kind of serious travel, intellectual or spiritual travel. As if seriousness or rigor or historical reference to form (or even an authentic challenge to that form) would too easily upset the simplistic tidiness of capitalist narcissism, which has reset the terms in such a way that the form can only function as you’ve come to expect it to commercially, no matter how ironically you title it Spider-Man: Brand New Day because there’s not a single fucking new thing about it, nor do you want there to be. Or maybe Avengers: Doomsday can just obliterate it all, set a continent of wildfires around the endlessly skull-numbing repetition, or you can just suddenly kill off James Bond at the end of the last movie if he no longer suits your purposes or your bankroll, who cares if he ever comes back or not, even The Odyssey isn’t worth reviving if all you have is a grand technician like a wizard of detritus to knock stuff around with bombastic drumming while sucking the poetry out of all of it since poetry’s not worth writing anymore anyway, but people sure will shell out $30 or more to pack every seat in front of the wall-to-wall IMAX screen to convince themselves that they’re inside Plato’s cave and it's art. Give all of that money to the small people out there who’ll still know how to take you on an actual journey, an experience that’s the psychological opposite of your own, one that’s not wrapped up in the blindly inherited narrative that you demand.

When I was in college back in the 1990s, I worked in the box office a couple of nights a week at a cinema in Cambridge that was at the time the largest art cinema in the country, nine screens that showed nothing but art films and independent fare all day every day. Now that cinema is showing only all of the same junk that every other cinema is showing, and for only about half of the day most days of the week. You still had over 200 cinematic releases per year that were indie films or more artfully crafted only 20 years ago now. This year you’ll be lucky to have barely 50 or so at the very most, and all of those I’ll have to watch at the art museum in Portland. So I don’t want to hear anything about how we’re in some cinematic golden age, or wow look at the young people returning to cinemas in bigger numbers because of something as comically dumb as Obsession or as much of a blatant substandard retread as Project Hail Mary, and don’t even pretend that to some degree the more artful and more culturally crucial films aren’t dying because “well they’re being made just not widely distributed anymore, you’ll just have to catch them at film festivals instead” since that’s clearly equivalent to some kind of death. People better start teaching future creators in the right ways again, and fast, yet even that’s too hopeful. More likely I’ll be back to scanning the underground, not for the exit, but for those rarer ways to burrow in more deeply. It’s still there in quick flashes, if you take the time and have the patience and insight to look for it. Robert Aramayo’s performance in I Swear. The opening credits sequence of Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. André De Shields setting the pace of heartbreak in the recent cinematic release of Hadestown. Seth Rogen being Seth Rogen in The Invite. Leo Woodall in Tuner, Rose Byrne in Tow, Paul Rudd in Power Ballad. So much that nearly nobody is seeing because we now live in a culture almost entirely devoid of curiosity and adventure, just sell sell sell sell sell, and so everything with a heart behind it gets missed.

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Monday, June 15, 2026

28th Annual Provincetown International Film Festival (June 10th - 14th, 2026)

I’m happy to report that this was a routinely strong year at the annual film fest in Provincetown, with documentaries again leading the pack for me, along with a variety of distinctive narrative features. I even laughed along with spirited audiences at the campy sex comedies on Friday and Saturday night; past audiences have sometimes asked for some lighter fare to be included in the line-up, and well, they got it. Even this year’s Filmmaker on the Edge award recipient, Ryan Murphy, fulfilled that request as the first recipient of the award to receive it mainly for a body of work in mainstream television rather than cinema, a feat that John Waters commented on in their conversation on stage at Town Hall on Saturday afternoon. If getting to ask Ryan Murphy some questions about TV shows like Glee and American Horror Story doesn’t appease the masses, then it’s unlikely that anything else will.

That pivot into the realm of television marks a particular moment in the current trends and evolution of cinema as well, perhaps. There’s plenty of discussion at the moment about the surprise runaway success of Backrooms and Obsession, horror films by young directors that have drawn younger audiences back to theaters. John Waters asked Ryan Murphy about that, too, of course, and they both agreed that getting a successful film made for relatively little money while exponentially increasing ticket sales at cinemas certainly must be seen as a commendable endeavor, though Murphy also remarked that a phenomenon like The Blair Witch Project turned out to be less an innovative pivotal point artistically and more of an inspiration for plenty of insipid copycat movies that simply ripped off its artisanal hand-held camera, perspective-based concept.

All of that industry-level talk aside, I was glad that my first film out of the gate at the festival last Wednesday afternoon, Matty Wishnow’s insightful documentary The Last Critic, was so enjoyable since it was the first time that the festival has held film screenings prior to the opening night feature. I wrote a weekly music review column for a newspaper a little over twenty years ago now, so it was fun to hear Christgau as the “dean” of American rock critics comment at length on the development of his own tastes and critical style. Famous for his Consumer Guide and its graded capsule reviews of significant albums, and equally infamous for his trenchant takes on albums that he deems insignificant, Christgau is more humorous and self-effacing on camera than the tenor of his reviews may imply. Because he’s a voluminous collector and a true music fan, the film works to boost the viewer’s trust in him as a guiding critical source. Christgau claims there are only two criteria to become a critic: you have to know what you like, and you have to be able to explain why you like it, no matter how "completely disgraceful" the reasons are. Therefore, the most useful commentators in the documentary are often other music critics such as Ann Powers, maybe even more than the musicians who are interviewed, from the great Randy Newman to Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore.

For instance, when the discussion turns to Joni Mitchell’s masterpiece Blue, for which Christgau knew to dispense the highest praise and an A on his graded scale, a female critic points out that it was Christgau's chance to demonstrate how deeply he understood Mitchell's aesthetic mission to prove that the material of women's inner lives could be the full focus and basis of art. He's still shrewd on camera, but not nearly as intimidating as the intricate concision of his playfully rude capsule reviews and D+ (and lower) gradings of albums by artists like The Eagles, Billy Joel, and Bryan Adams might suggest. Part of what makes the documentary enjoyable to watch and listen to is the true enthusiasm of the commentators for Christgau's decades of tireless, influential work. The film ends with Christgau contemplating his recent flashes of memory loss, and even more than his mortality, the potential loss of his intellectual faculties as he continues to age into his 80s. His closest supporter, reader, and editor is his wife, the music critic and novelist Carola Dibbell, who also movingly recalls her diagnosis and successful treatment for cancer via the lens of Robert Forster's contemplative song "It's Only Poison" in the film's final stretch.

The beloved poet and essayist Mary Oliver lived in Provincetown for the majority of her adult life, so it makes perfect sense that Sasha Waters’ new PBS documentary Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World screened to a packed house at Town Hall. As celebrated as Oliver’s inspirational poetry about the natural world and our human relationship to it has been, it also makes sense that plenty of celebrities (Oprah Winfrey, Stephen Colbert, etc.) comment on and read her work in the film. It’s to the movie’s credit that there’s a healthy focus on the poems themselves, which helps to prevent the documentary from devolving into a formulaic approach to a poet whom some critics have argued became somewhat formulaic over time as well. I always liked the darker, more mysterious, and less certain angles in a book like Oliver’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1984 volume American Primitive, which was the collection that ultimately helped her cross over into the mainstream.

After closely tracking that rise to literary prominence, the documentary then adds some openness to Oliver’s famed privacy, which it’s now more possible to do after her death. Dedicating herself to devotion and affirmation ran into difficulties for her poetry eventually, and so the film reserves the more challenging biographical details (sexuality, gender, childhood abuse, addiction, estrangement from her family of origin) for later in the documentary. Oliver’s partner and business manager of over forty years, the photographer Molly Malone Cook, remains intriguing as always, and the film also gives her due attention. I reviewed the collection of her photographs Our World (with text by Mary Oliver) for a magazine back when it came out, so I had less to learn about them as a couple, but the majority of Mary Oliver’s readers won't know about those aspects of her life, so of course there will be an audience for the movie regardless.

Since I loved Aaron Brookner’s documentary about his filmmaker guncle Uncle Howard in the festival a decade ago, I knew that I’d also love Keri Pickett’s new documentary Uncle Roy, which is about her photographer (and former figure skater) gay uncle Roy Blakey, who died in 2024 at age 94. Blakey grew up in Oklahoma and became a well-known photographer and celebrity portrait artist in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s. He captured some of the most iconic images of drag artists and performers like Divine and Candy Darling, in addition to taking headshots of many actors and actresses who were on their way up in the worlds of film and television into the 1980s. His prior career as a figure skater during the height of ice-capades shows was previously documented in Pickett’s 2015 film The Fabulous Ice Age, and his extensive collection of ice show memorabilia is now housed (along with his photography archive) in the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection of GLBT history at the University of Minnesota, the largest repository of queer historical materials of its kind in the Midwest.

Roy Blakey, as presented in the film, was a beacon of positivity throughout his youth and adulthood, even into very old age, with nearly every photograph we see of him in the documentary showcasing his beaming smile. He comments on his bright disposition himself in the film as well, an attitude that he maintained during an era when where he grew up in the middle of the country was a time that was often unkind and sometimes downright hostile to visible gay men. Being drafted into military service for two years took him to Europe (and eventually to Japan as a figure skater), and he expresses gratitude for that fortunate relocation many decades later as he reflects back on where his life had taken him. Escaping to New York from the middle of the country as a gay man might not be such an unusual story anymore, though what Roy Blakey did in the city distinguishes it, not only for the vast archive of celebrity portraits that he preserved, but also for the lunchtime entertainment that he provided as a figure skater on the ice rink at Rockefeller Center. He found ways to pursue all of the things that he enjoyed and integrated them into who he was as a fun-loving and hopeful person.

His niece Keri Pickett’s engaging and heartfelt homage to him in Uncle Roy invites the audience as close as it’s possible to get to the subject of a documentary. Since they shared photography as a profession, they opened a large studio together in Minneapolis, a space in which they both lived and worked together well into Roy’s later decades. She helped him to place his archives at the Tretter Collection, a deal that he signed just five weeks before he died. Although Roy remains sharp and alert right up through to the very end, Pickett does bravely document his decline across the border into memory loss as well. Late one night at 3am, she films him opening up a door to another room, and he says he’s looking for the entrance to the arena, in a sadly moving flashback to his figure skating days. She helps him through the moments of his transition on his deathbed in difficult scenes that we are also right there for. Halfway through the film, Roy mentions that he had never found a partner and so never knew love in that way. A few times when he thought he had, “it turned out to be only lust,” he recalls, in a scene that reminded me of a nearly identical moment in a documentary about the gay street fashion photographer Bill Cunningham. When I told Keri Pickett that I’d definitely be writing about her movie after our screening’s Q&A, she gave me a very kind hug, and I said that even though her Uncle Roy hadn’t found a longterm romantic partner, her beautiful film will now offer a way of giving the entire world a chance to love him in memory.

A couple of summers ago, I enjoyed writing about Jane Schoenbrun’s film I Saw the TV Glow, so I was excited to watch their latest movie Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a cleverly deconstructive send-up of the slasher genre, with specific reference to Friday the 13th and its many sequels, not to mention even trashier movies such as Sleepaway Camp. In a bold and immersive performance, Hannah Einbinder (of the TV show Hacks) plays a writer/director named Kris who’s been hired to re-boot the Camp Miasma franchise, setting off into a moody wintertime wilderness to find Billy Presley (an all-in bewigged Gillian Anderson, with a lilting Dolly Parton accent), the actress who played the final girl in the original film from the series and who lives at Camp Tivoli where the first movie was filmed, complete with an empty snowbound cinema that Billy also hauntingly inhabits. Instead of the dreaded hockey mask worn by Jason Vorhees, the killer (who’s slyly named “Little Death,” portrayed by Jack Haven from Schoenbrun’s last film) in the Camp Miasma movies wears a comically large square air vent over their head, an eerily disjunctive symbol that makes them no less menacing. From the brilliantly referential opening credits sequence onward, the film is an intentionally extreme jumble of symbols and horror-related “Easter eggs” that are meant both to make the audience laugh and also to question the stereotypical slasher tropes and signifiers within the genre that has relentlessly produced them, particularly with regard to sexual twists and gender identities. We hear several times that the movies come from “the hole at the bottom of the lake” where Little Death seemingly dwells.

Despite the chemistry of its leads and their obvious investment in their roles, the film didn’t quite match for me the daring synergies in the first three-quarters or so of I Saw the TV Glow, nor was there as much of an analytical payoff. This new film is well-made overall and looks great as it swerves from outright macabre horror to dark fairy tale to the crazier lesbian underside of a classic like Sunset Boulevard, but something about it felt to me both underdeveloped and overwrought, which I suppose is part of the point. Transgender motifs again emerge through the figure of Little Death specifically as the movie progresses, and the character’s name circles around and around the orgasmic fear and desire captured in the original Camp Miasma film’s pivotal and violently transgressive moment, which is recreated in a way in the reboot-in-action as we’re watching it that’s excessively over the top, so that what this movie imagines to be its core audience can then simply just laugh it all off and feel like things worked out just fine. The first half of the movie is very carefully structured, whereas the second half loops into some obvious redundancies just as I was hoping that it would move into deeper or more illuminating territory, which gets kind of shrugged off for an easily pleasing sort of resolution (though I loved hearing the voice of Paul Buchanan of The Blue Nile singing a new song “Pain Is the Heart” during the film’s emotional climax).

Nonetheless, it was fun to hear Jane Schoenbrun and Hannah Einbinder interviewed on stage at the festival by legendary producer Christine Vachon the day after I saw the movie. As I’d anticipated, Jane was cool, quirky, and also clearly very knowledgeable industry-wise from doing film production work themselves in their twenties. Jane was also hilariously honest about the business. When asked how it feels to get to spend the funding for their movie, their half-joking reply was, “It's always like a bank heist.” And when the subject of “new queer cinema” arose, Jane again half-joked, “I think I’m done with queer cinema.” Still, Schoenbrun is also very conscientious about making an emotional connection and enacting social change through their body of films, which again, I feel I Saw the TV Glow did a bit better than their latest film, even if this one will obviously be more popular in riding the current cinematic horror movie wave.

Finally, since I’ll always watch at least one love story about gay men at the film festival in Provincetown, I was moved by novelist-turned-filmmaker Helen Walsh’s film On the Sea, which was especially moving to watch in a historical gay seaside town. While waiting in line to enter the venue, attendees were buzzing about how it’s a version of Brokeback Mountain set on the northern coast of Wales, or more appropriately, a version of God’s Own Country set on the Welsh coast instead of in the Yorkshire Dales. Jack (Barry Ward, ruggedly handsome and telegraphing everything with a gorgeous pair of eyes) harvests clams and scallops from the cold ocean shallows in a family business that’s been handed down to him through three generations of mussel farmers, and he’s trying and somewhat failing to hand it down to his own son’s generation as well. Married to a woman and closeted for his entire life, Jack hesitantly falls under the spell of an alluring itinerant worker named Daniel (Lorne MacFadyen, fittingly alluring), who’s thirty-ish and therefore more adept at cruising and signaling interest, and relatively open about being gay in light of his fortunate youth and enough cultural change that’s reached even the northernmost outskirts of coastal Wales, apparently.

In spite of those societal shifts, traditional masculinity (alongside religion and heteronormative sexuality) still reign in Jack’s time and place, though Daniel’s subtle advances and flirtations gradually wedge their way inside of Jack’s closed-off spaces. What works best in their characters’ interactions is what’s silently suggested since their eventual physical surrenders to each other must take place in quieter far-flung locations: out on a boat in the ocean, swimming together in a secluded tidal pool, or inside Daniel’s rented caravan with the curtains drawn. Daniel notices a surgical scar on the side of Jack’s abdomen that he asks him about, and we see Jack’s examinations at his doctor’s office at intervals throughout the film. Luckily, therefore, the looming tragic ending is built into the narrative and not simply a punishment for the two men’s secret once it’s uncovered. Ultimately, though I was worried at first that things might get clunky or sentimental, what unfolds in the film’s final stretch is handled quite sensitively. Sure, the wife kicks Jack out of their home, Daniel moves on to his next destination, the town turns on Jack, and then he moves into a local hotel while trying to keep his work going as his health devolves. Yet everyone comes around in ways more quiet than dramatic. When his wife shows up to let Jack know, “There’s someone here to see you,” cue the audience’s tears as Daniel snuggles up behind Jack in his bed. Sometimes a man, regardless of who he is or what he’s been through, gets the tenderly bittersweet happy ending he deserves.

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Sunday, February 1, 2026

Some Thoughts on the Demise of Class

What did it ever mean to be classy? I wasn’t alive until 1973, a few years into the most aesthetically ugly, unclassy decade in human history, so that question takes on a certain sharpness for me. I hate every single thing about the 1970s, truly all of it. My feelings about that have never changed, and they never will. There was no sense of refinement then, and a totally false sense of style. Plastic had begun to overtake actual substance, a dangerous move on so many levels, environmentally, culturally, materially, facially, and otherwise. That’s not to suggest that much has changed at all since then, and of course since the advent of cell phones and other devices (just another extension of plasticity), they’ve gotten exponentially worse in various other ways. The manifold densities of internal wreckage this has caused in societies globally, which people continue to try to cover up with a deranged smile (I mean, really pause to think about that for a few seconds), amounts to nothing less than an actrocity, as destructive in the long-term sense as any war, and even worse because of how unconcentrated and absolutely widespread it is. Despite the tone of this opening paragraph, this isn’t in any way a kind of negativity. It’s a critique, one that I type while hoping that the jerk sitting next to me in the first-class car on Amtrak ends up getting sucked right out of the emergency exit window next to us at some point during our journey.

Sounds kind of unclassy, right? But not when my particular worldview has been continually prompted by the pervasiveness of uncaring attitudes that have permeated every aspect of everyday life. Every person in this train car is staring at the screen of their own pointlessly expensive little device only ten minutes into our four-hour ride. Almost none of them will speak to one another, unless they’re sitting next to someone they already know. Trust me, I don’t want to be spoken to by any of them either, yet when that sort of behavior extends culture-wide, you know that you no longer have a culture. You have a prison, the type that Jeremy Bentham (and then Michel Foucault) envisioned and predicted. And thanks to individuals like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, that’s the world we live in now. None of us will be escaping it anytime soon, and none of it will be getting any better either. It will only get worse. The stark truth behind all of this is a plain and rock-bottom reality about the endgame of capitalism: turn people into money and the pawns for money, and they will begin and continue to resent one another. They will no longer even see each other as people. I think that in our current era, there are very, very few exceptions to this rule. I witness it all around me throughout every single day.

I feel it most keenly, of course, in the realm of art. What can you create in the face of a cultural facelessness that’s entirely unprecedented in the scope of human creativity? The dread and depression that this fact provokes in me are of the variety that there’s no possibility of erasing personally, nor of eradicating socially. One can look back to branches of philosophy like existentialism and nihilism, certainly, but it’s hard at this point to take those guys seriously because they were living in a time when the problems hadn’t even yet been compounded nearly to the extent that they are now. I don’t know. Perhaps people always hated each other as much as they do today.

But back to how all of this affects the movies that I see, the music that I listen to, the books that I read, and the theatre that I watch. (It’s so easy to stray away from that focus.) Again, 2025 was the worst year for cinema in my 52-year lifetime, by far. The bottom line of profitability became one that we, collectively, cannot cross back over again. The redemptive qualities of cinema, and the creative forces that craft it (and I’m talking about true cinema, not trash), will exist now only in tiny, isolated groups of islands that you will have to work very, very hard to find (not that anybody else really wants to, or even cares at all anymore). And so it will all come down to individual artistic visionaries (even more than collaboration) who somehow endeavor, against every odd, to make their vision seen, as they wish it to be seen.

Yesterday I attended a pop-up film festival at the 92nd Street Y in New York, programmed and hosted by the Turner Classic Movies channel. One of the celebrity guests was Michael Douglas, who attended to help to introduce a screening of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. Douglas seemed like a gentleman, though I tuned him out fairly quickly. What can he say about his Oscar-winning performance as Gordon Gecko? That he “did the work” to understand the character and his extremely distinctive, exclusive, toweringly deaf and destructive cultural milieu. I have no interest in the film past its first 45 minutes. Once the audience’s curiosity about (and the erotic tension between) Michael Douglas’ bad yet shrewd man and Charlie Sheen’s shrewd yet naïve boy wanes and ceases to sustain the narrative, it’s just another boring tale of bad people doing cruel and inane things, and that it’s about Wall Street makes it even worse. And of course it was directed by Oliver Stone, who’s often lavishly bestowed the imprimatur of bad taste and total human stupidity upon whatever he “creates.” A man of exactly Stone’s age was sitting next to me at the screening, talking loudly to some annoying people standing beside him before the event had started. He was rattling on about how great it is to come to see movies on the big screen because “we go to the cinema to watch people with faces that are more beautiful than our own.” True and not true. He’d make a knowing harrrumph sound when a character like the ones played by Daryl Hannah or James Spader or Terence Stamp in the film shot some object of affection or competition a desirous look. What did he see, versus what I saw? Better just to leave it at that, I think.

What can Michael Douglas do in the film beyond demonstrating how consummately he understood his character Gordon Gecko and people like him? It’s a form of astronomical precision, but a precision that rather rapidly runs out of rocket fuel. The reason? Because the screenplay and all that surrounds it are built to comment (and yet never really comment) on an essentially empty theme: greed. Douglas tosses off some lines about the centrality of greed and the pointlessness of democracy. Drawing connections to our current political predicament would be unnecessary for anybody who has even a fraction of a working brain. But it was always this way. We all want things that aren’t ours, and too much of them, for our own appetite or comfort, and we all know that human impulse from early childhood. It’s exactly what brought about the demise of class, which is about understanding and fostering, continuously, the comfort and ease of others. (Of course, that’s also what manners, yet another lost human behavioral art form, were also about.)

Having a sense of class was also about having a continual interest in the mysterious habits and pleasures of others, when others were still worth having any interest in. That was one aspect that made watching Wall Street at the 92nd Street Y particularly resonant for me. Just downstairs from us on a frigid Saturday afternoon at the end of January, when it was far too cold to be doing anything outside for very long, talented and generous adults were volunteering their time to guide children through arts and crafts projects in neatly ordered, minimalist basement rooms. After the movie, those kids were buzzing around the stairwells and the lobby, the complete antithesis of the energy that we’d just dozed through in that film. If the opposite of greed is giving, why does every form of charity remain “tastefully” hidden, when greed always remains so unabashedly unhidden? The moments of generosity, kindness, and hopefully gratitude persist, but they persist in snatches of time and in silence, because there’s too much to sell, too much money to throw away and to take and to be made, which is, in contemporary life, the baseline of human survival. It’s not a world that’s worth surviving in, and I’ll believe that, staunchly, until the day that I die. My only remaining, ongoing aspiration is to be The Gardener from Jenny Erpenbeck's brilliant and important novel Visitation, though I very much doubt that I'll ever have the patience and forbearance to achieve that level of humane and otherworldly equanimity.

Later yesterday evening, I took the subway back to midtown to watch a concert at Radio City Music Hall, singer/songwriter Gregory Alan Isakov performing his music with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra. It was my first time ever seeing a show at that venue. The gorgeous and sprawling Art Deco lobby was crammed with stanchions for concertgoers to queue up and purchase WAY overpriced cocktails and (mostly) pointless merchandise made available to acquire and further support the artist. There wasn’t a single chair or bench for anybody to sit down or rest upon in that gigantic lobby before the show, during the intermission, or afterwards. First, you’re herded through the metal detectors at the front doors, so that nobody who hates the system even more than I happen to hate it myself will have much chance to shoot everybody or blow everybody up, and then you’re herded through the benchless rows of stanchions in the overtly pushy football field-sized lobby, then you're herded into your assigned seat (with some guy’s enormously entitled winter coat already propped up on it, of course), then you're herded back out onto the frigid street after the show since your money has now been securely taken. You won’t be getting any of it back, but at least you have a bunch of unnecessary photos on your cell phone, the very device that has now replaced your own memory where you used to store your photos. Every single thing about the past two hours of your life experience had just one singular money-making intention. Were you moved by the music? Did its beauty make you cry as you sat there alone in your seat? Hooray for you.

Hence, all of the bodies in everybody else’s way, the loud coughing during the show when one could just quietly clear one’s throat instead, and the undimmed cell phone screens held aloft to record songs in their entirety, which are available to purchase in the exact same arrangements on CD and vinyl out at the merch booth in the lobby for one-tenth of the ticket price. The breathtaking performance space and the lobby itself, in terms of its architecture, have clearly changed relatively little over time. The human beings inside that theatre and lobby, in terms of class, could not be more diametically different from those who peopled it nearly a century ago now. What must they have been like, in a more polite and considerate time (not to overly romanticize it) when people were desperately struggling, socioeconomically (Radio City Music Hall opened in December of 1932, during the Great Depression), without nearly the vast comforts and amenities that almost all of us today enjoy on a daily basis? Wanting to live then instead of now is the main reason why I always identify specifically as a living suicide. I haven't wanted to be alive at all for well over thirty years now, and the many reasons why, every day that I move through the world, never fail to make themselves abundanty clear from the moment I step outside of my front door.

Finally, let’s not forget the two attendees somewhere out in the middle of the audience (one female, one male...and wouldn’t you just love to know what they must have looked like??) who shouted, “WE LOVE YOU, GREG!” and “WE LOVE YOU GUYS!” right at the two most pensive moments of silence between songs as the orchestra’s conductor rallied his players to shift gears and refocus. Not only is that sort of interruptive interjection, when others in the audience just might be listening or feeling something deeper in that silence, utterly classless and totally clueless; it’s also, I’m entirely convinced, a way of intentionally ruining the experience of the concert and the sacredness of music for everyone else by rudely screaming out and monopolizing that moment for your own impolite and useless cell-phone and social media-addicted generation’s blind and unfeeling purposes. Because of who you are, and when you came of age, and what you obviously represent, nobody cares what you love, least of all the artists on stage who don’t respond to you whatsoever because they don’t care either. Art and class require deep respect and courtesy driven by silence, attention, and focus, both from the creators and from their audience, a respect that’s now trapped within an infinite eternal loop because it’s dead.

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