popsublime

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 92^nd 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 92^nd 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.

Thursday, January 1, 2026

Five Favorite Films of 2025

None of the five films that I’m including here as favorites from 2025 were movies that I ever thought that I’d be writing about for my year-end post, not even remotely, and three of them are contenders only because 2025 was the weakest year for cinema thus far in my 52-year lifetime. A couple of them I’ll be writing about only in part, one for its central performance, and another for its final twenty minutes or so. This was a year in which I saw Wicked: For Good twenty (yes, twenty) times in cinemas, a personal record that I doubt I’d ever have broken were 2025 not such an underwhelming year for cinema as art (vs. mere commerce). I’m championing these five films because in most cases they were ignored, not taken seriously, or even outright ridiculed. Audiences in general can’t be relied upon as any kind of critical barometer anymore at all, neither mainstream audiences nor critical audiences. Do the majority of people these days know cinema history and critical history well enough to do the actual work? No, they do not, which only makes me even more proud of how bizarre, eclectic, disparate, and surprising this list of my five favorite films of 2025 truly is.

Tonatiuh, who stunningly portrays Molina (and Molina’s imaginary, fictionalized counterpart) in Bill Condon’s spectacular musical version of Kiss of the Spider Woman, should rightly become a massive star, and I predict that he/they will. Tonatiuh acts, dances, emotes, and sings the hell out of this role, and the fact that this movie has been so unjustly overlooked is pure downright homophobia, y’all. Produced by the likes of Jennifer Lopez, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Diego Luna, this so-called remake is miles and miles ahead of its 1985 predecessor. (I mean, William Hurt got an Oscar for Best Actor for playing Molina? Get real, Academy! Give Tonatiuh EVERY DAMN THING, or I will simply lose my mind.) I’m totally convinced that the reason this movie has been cruelly and almost entirely ignored is because it’s a tender, moving, and somewhat unprecedented gay/trans love story. Watch it, and you’ll know exactly that I mean. This world has a lot of catching up to do.

Diego Luna’s performance as the Argentinian political prisoner Valentin is equally multifaceted and exact. He inhabits his role in a manner that’s both full of heart and replete with talent, in that he sings & dances expertly (while making it come across intentionally as semi-amateurish), menaces, becomes a heartthrob after first being a stubborn fool who cannot be loved but then finally is loved because he opens himself up to it. What a joy to watch the kind of character transformation that we so rarely see in cinema these days. Through to the film’s final image, Luna ably and fully carries the torch of understanding for both his own character AND Tonatiuh’s, to the extent that their relationship in the film bears the burden of real historical meaning, especially with regard to trans-identified individuals, their romantic and sexual desires, and their intimate relationships. It’s revealing that during their audition conversation via Zoom, Diego Luna told Tonatiuh (who’d prepared multiple elaborate scenarios for the occasion) simply to relax and have a conversation with him. That sort of humanity and mutual respect shines through both of their performances, ultimately, and buoys the movie in ways that very few films are successfully borne by their actors anymore. (And yes, Jennifer Lopez is excellent as the Spider Woman. Mindless detractors, please go away.)

Black Phone 2 is the film that I’m most perplexed ended up in this post. While I thought the first Black Phone installment (adapted from Stephen King’s son Joe Hill’s suspenseful yet sparkless story) was tolerable, it was kind of just an archetypal (yet intelligent enough) retread of the whole “abducted boy trapped in a disgusting basement dungeon who fights his way out and kills the killer” horror movie staple. Black Phone 2 is on another level entirely, and that’s largely due to its distinctive setting: a wintertime Christian camp on a frozen alpine lake in the depths of blizzard season. It’s an origin story on several levels (ho-hum), but no matter since the actors all get it and firmly lock in the narrative, especially the brilliant Mexican actor Demián Bichir as the longtime overseer of the camp’s employees and counselors.

Mason Thames reprises his role as Finney Blake a few years later, and it’s really his performance (played against the relentless menace of Ethan Hawke as the Grabber) that distinguishes Black Phone 2 from standard horror movies. (Horror was the ONLY film genre that actually grew in 2025 by the number of films released.) Whether Mason Thames was directed as such or made his own choice as an actor, it’s clear that there’s an atypical commentary on pedophilia threaded throughout Black Phone 2, from as early as a scene where Finney is smoking out on his front porch at night and imagines the masked Grabber, whom he murdered by strangulation at the climax of the first film’s finale, beckoning to him from beside some breeze-filled trees. Finney has a simultaneous flashback to an image of the Grabber gently stroking his fallen bangs from across his forehead, remembers what he said to defend himself, and quietly stares ahead into the distance as he takes a drag from his joint.

It’s as though the filmmakers are suggesting that teenage Finney is somehow, on some level, slightly now more at peace in himself with what transpired through the mundane abduction plot of the first film, or at least he now has a grasp of the Grabber’s carefully planned motives that younger boyhood Finney did not. The subdued tension brought about by that smoking-at-night-on-the-porch scene in particular feels uniquely innovative to me in the horror genre, and for me it tilted forward the entire balance of the movie in ways that I hadn’t anticipated whatsoever. Re-emphasizing that aspect of the film is the central plot device of three young boys whose ghosts are trapped under the thick sheet of ice atop the frozen alpine lake, who were killed by the younger version of the Grabber long ago (hence the ho-hum origin story), and whose unburied spirits are restlessly urging Finney and his sister to save them.

Ryan White’s profoundly moving documentary Come See Me in the Good Light should win this year’s Oscar for Best Documentary, full-stop. The film focuses on the final years in the life of the celebrated non-binary performance poet Andrea Gibson, who died of complications from ovarian cancer in July of this year at age 49, just one month prior to what would have been their fiftieth birthday. Gibson’s brave partner Megan Falley is equally a part of the film, both as the foundational heart that keeps their relationship together through the very hardest of times, and often as an initiator of some much-needed humor to buoy them through things that young couples should never have to endure, though I’m sure that plenty of people do every day. I just want everybody to stream this film on Apple TV, so I won’t say much else except that 1) I cried about seven times while watching this film at the IFC Center in New York City, from like three minutes into the film until all the way through the heart-stopping closing credits song “Salt Then Sour Then Sweet” by Sara Bareilles and Brandi Carlile (which should also receive an Oscar for Best Original Song, to be honest), and 2) I downloaded every single one of Andrea Gibson’s e-books the very moment I walked out of the cinema. Like their inspiration Mary Oliver, Gibson aimed to make their poetry a mission of redemption and a gift to other human beings, a way to try to help them through their lives and survive.

Jacob Elordi’s indelible physical and vocal performance as the Creature in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein will stay with me probably for the rest of my life. By the end of the movie, I wanted to walk around every day in his character’s awesomely ragged, burnt-out, “I’ve survived every kind of catastrophe” shredded black ribbons streaming backwards in the arctic winds costume like some kind of gangly Gothic matinee idol. Jacob Elordi should be, will be, and is one exactly: a matinee idol for the ages, and this performance absolutely cements it. As much as I appreciate online commentaries by those in-the-know about the deep significance of the physically masterful elements that Elordi brings to his role (since the Creature begins as an infantile semi-being and advances through the gauntlet of every tragedy that the world can possibly throw at him in a nonstop onslaught of violently desperate bombardment), I was even more taken in by Elordi’s voice, a voice that learns as it goes, that philosophizes and grapples and soothes and eventually understands, or attempts to. Whoever marries this man someday will be a very, very lucky person. He’s the real deal: a reader, a scholar, a tall kind heart, and one hell of a phenomenal actor.

Finally, I loved the final twenty minutes or so of Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, and I could probably watch Noah Jupe’s face as Hamlet in that scene at the Globe Theatre for most of 2026, to be honest. What makes the scene work is how it captures Shakespeare’s genius (in part via Paul Mescal’s performance as the Ghost and as Will himself). Rather than having the ghost of his dead son Hamnet appear in the play, which would have been the logical choice for any other playwright, of course William Shakespeare would write Hamlet’s father as the ghost, since grief in the wake of Hamnet’s death has made a ghost of Will as Hamnet’s own father (and obviously of Jessie Buckley’s often too over-performed character as Hamnet’s mother). Art abstracts the truth, a lesson that even Zhao’s film doesn’t quite learn, unfortunately, for the vast majority of it leading up to its final scene. And just as sadly, the vast majority of films released throughout 2025 didn’t learn that vital lesson either, and so on we go to 2026.

Monday, December 29, 2025

Edge of the World: An Anthology of Queer Travel Writing, edited by Alden Jones (Blair, 2025)

I’m in London right now, as I’ve been for the past decade or so of Christmas seasons, because I’m an odd sort of traveler who travels solo and returns to places that allow me to repeat my daily routines in relative peace. I watch movies at cinemas in the daytime, and I go to theatre shows in the evenings. As I’m walking around between venues, I can appreciate how no place on this planet is better lit for Christmas and New Year’s than central London is. It’s totally decked out in fairy lights from street to street to street. Some friends have asked me why I always return to the same place for the winter holidays lately, rather than trying new places. Well, I won’t ever be disappointed if I know that it’s a place that I like. But moreover, as I’ve gotten a bit older, most places I visit just feel to me like other places where I’ve already been. While some might argue that people and cultures make the places, that simply isn’t true for me. I’m a poet, and a very solitary one, so I tend to find that I have a one-to-one relationship with the actual physical place itself. People and cultures, at least to me, feel somewhat incidental.

As a counter-argument to my particular stance, I enjoyed reading through the diversity of voices and places in Edge of the World: An Anthology of Queer Travel Writing, an important new book which was beautifully edited by my friend Alden Jones. Alden and I taught together when I worked at Emerson College, where we also co-taught an Honors Seminar in the early aughts. Alden is an awesome and celebrated travel writer herself, one whose unique perspective on the world has altered and opened how I approach such things myself. At the close of her insightful introduction, Alden posits that the essays in the book are “meant to raise questions around the centering of one’s own culture” and to “undermine the idea of cultural centrality.” The fifteen essayists gathered here all do a consummate collective job of that as they criss-cross our country and the globe, while also exploring and blurring the various boundaries of their own sexual identities.

Andrew Ellis Evans’ “My Cohort,” which opens the anthology, is well-placed and remained my favorite piece after I’d finished reading the rest of the book. It’s wide-ranging, a kind of heartfelt survey of the many places the author has traveled with his Zimbabwean zoologist boyfriend Brian, whom one woman along the way refers to as Andrew’s “cohort,” being unsure what else to call him. One truth about queer lives abroad, still today, is that others aren’t quite sure how to regard us. Even in a city like London, my being alone at the theatre with my rainbow bracelets and my “Queer & Goth” button pinned to my scarf can draw some unusual, curious stares. The majority of the world surrounding us daily remains straight, unfortunately, and ongoingly uncertain of how to fit us into its picture. I could list the places where Andrew and Brian traveled together, but the more important aspect is the reality of their love in the world, and their trajectory through those places side-by-side through time: “I have loved a man all over the world. I have woken up next to him on all seven continents. He is my constant. He is my opposite pole. My dive buddy in dark seas. The man who holds my hand when the plane bumps too hard. The man who followed me across the ocean, around the world, across a lifetime.”

From there the book spelunks from Edmund White’s semi-historical overview of the remote queer artists’ enclave of Key West, to lesbian family dramas in Senegal and Cambodia, to Garrard Conley’s post-gay conversion therapy Peace Corps service tutoring a masculine hottie in Ukraine, to a search for queer utopia in contemporary Berlin in trans Jewish writer Calvin Gimpelevich’s “Future Past,” which finds the author by its end revelling at the Hello Daddy party: “I am in a dark room pressed with bodies, and we are dancing, dancing.” It’s one of many moments in the book where the oneness of individual identity gets blended into the people surrounding you, the same way the map of the world gets swirled together by the moving travelogue of an anthology such as this.

Closer to home, sometimes that effect occurs on a smaller scale. Sara Orozco’s “Lessons in Digging and Replanting,” for example, finds its author in a harrowing scenario of getting arrested and sentenced for drug possession, only to be assigned to do 200 hours of community service via hardcore landscaping (planting ferns!) at the Billy Graham Center in Asheville, North Carolina, where her evangelical host David proclaims to his queer mentee, “I believe that we are both children of God, Sara. That is enough. It has to be.” Religion darts in and out of these essays pretty much continuously, which annoys me to be honest (as a truth about the world, not about the essays themselves), but it’s sure a fucking statement on why queer people still struggle to gain traction in cultures around the planet, given what a stranglehold religion has on most of them. But I can read the book and then go right back to ignoring religion almost entirely.

The truth for me, my own truth, is that I don’t even really want to “visit” places at all. I want to drift through them and tunnel into them at once, by tunneling into my own mind while I’m drifting through them. As externalized as these essays present the world and the authors’ intimate relationships all around it, they also make a clear case for how much the internalized world matters for each of us. What we contemplate privately within the confines of our own public solitude is just as significant, ultimately, as the physical, worldly spaces that surround us at any given moment.