Entry Eight: 2024 Year In Review
An imperfect account of what I watched, read, listened to, and learned.
What I Watched - My Favorite Movies Released In 2024
*Preface - I didn’t watch very many movies this year, and there are a few 2024 releases I’m excited about that I haven’t watched yet. Most notably, Nosferatu, The Brutalist, and The Substance. I expect those to challenge this small and mightily list of favorites.
Queer, Dir. Luca Guadagnino
Queer struck me in a way I wasn’t expecting. I wasn’t particularly moved by it, I was more intrigued by the various ways it explored loneliness and longing. It’s easy (for me at least) to write Lee off as a washed-up old queen, and simply pity the foolish way he throws himself at Eugne and move on. But the mass of his desire gawked at me every time I tried to. It was uncanny, It felt like an old photograph was being held in front of me. I didn’t recognize the picture but it was oddly familiar. Lee’s desperation is both exclusively queer and painfully universal, it’s a kind of feeling you see often but can’t ever name. The film doesn’t try to pin it down or name it either, it manifests in not only Lee but also Eugene in a variety of different ways. I think what caught me most was the recurring theme of disfigurement and disembodiment in dreams and altered consciousness. The phrase, “I’m not queer, I’m disembodied,” is a phrase repeated by both Lee and Eugene, in moments where they're confronted with desire in the most raw and ugly ways. It’s the idea that what you are, your identity can isolate you in such a way that you’re unrecognizable to yourself, that in the wrong climate, the wrong place and time, the thing that makes you most yourself can pull you so far from yourself that you never return. That’s what I most “enjoyed” about Queer. Though rooted firmly in Lee’s whiteness and privilege, there is something universal about both his and Eugne’s attempts to simultaneously escape and get closer to themselves.
Challengers, Dir. Luca Guadagnino
I’d like to think I enjoy challenges more than the average person. What makes it so fun for me (aside from the soundtrack and cinematography) is the fact that I don’t completely understand it. Each time I finish the movie I leave with a different conclusion—specifically about Tashi. I love characters who can’t be pinned down, whose motives and desires are known to them, and only then. I watch it over and over looking for lines and expressions from her I missed the last time. And each time I think I’m getting closer and closer to her, the movie ends and she’s gone. It’s masterful work. One of my favorite scenes is when Tashi, Art, and Patrick are on the beach as teenagers and she explains to them what Tennis is. The first time I watched it I was like, what the fuck is she talking about, but then the next time I was like wait…I think I get it. But then the third time (don’t ask me how many times this year I watched this movie) I was back to wondering what the fuck she was talking about. It’s a puzzle I have no interest in solving, I’m having more fun rearranging the shapes each time and making new pictures.
What I Listened Too - Albums I Had On Repeat All Year
Charm, Clairo
Casually Hypnotizing And Radiantly Magnetic is the perfect way to describe this album. In the sea of music that came out this year, this was the only album that hooked me. It’s an extremely malleable work, it adapted to every emotion and scenario I felt this year. No matter what I was going through, Charm found its place in my music rotation. What I like the most about it is all the musical references. The work is deeply steeped in so many influences and inspirations, yet feels so fresh and on the cusp. Clairo’s love for music of all genres and eras shines through each song. I just love it, and I’ll probably keep loving it for a long time. My favorite songs are Juna, Slow Dance, and Terrapin.
Girl, Coco and Clair Clair
In a world that tells girls to make themselves small, bad bitch music is nothing short of a necessity. I deeply underestimated Girl during its rollout—I wasn’t in love with the first single Aggy, and their first album Sexy was so good I didn’t think anything could compare. I was also struggling to see how their style would evolve long term, I expected them to just keep making the same music over and over again. Thankfully, I was wrong, while Coco and Clair Clair remain true to their essence on this record, they expand the horizon of who and what they are. For example, one of my favorites of the record is a cover of Our House, by Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Somehow it remains the sentimental and warm essence of the original while placing it on an exciting jungle/club beat. The song after that is called Everyone But You, where the pair dip their toes into soft rock by rapping over an electric guitar and singing about a shitty ex. The song following that is called Bitches Pt. 2, a follow-up to a song on their first album where they beg and plead with the aforementioned Bitches to leave them alone at any cost on a beat that sounds like it’s from a video game soundtrack. It’s insanity, and they pull it off almost flawlessly. My favorite songs are Martini, Our House, and Kate Spade.
A Seat At The Table, Solange
It amazes me how I keep getting older but this album still sounds brand new. Each time I come back to it I discover a new song to be obsessed with. Though I’ve loved it for a long time, I feel like I grew into it this year. It’s infused with an unlikely optimism that I constantly find myself gravitating towards. Its production is enchanting and evergreen, and Solange’s voice is so casual yet grounded in her confidence and joy. It’s probably my most spun vinyl record and my most consistent album of the year. I gravitated to it most in the spring and summer, but it follows me all year round. My favorites are Almeda, Way to The Show, and Sound of Rain.
What I Read - My Favorite New Reads of 2024
Near To The Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector
I’ve tried to write about this book a few times but I struggle to put it into words. Lispector completely destroys the bounds of first-person narrative and paints a picture of someone so full of life that they can never truly be captured. But it’s the inability to capture its protagonist perfectly that makes the book so raw and stunning. It’s committed to realism in a way that makes it surreal, and sometimes even meta, it truly pushes the bounds of how we experience the reality of characters on the page, and even that of our own. It was so immersive and so impressive, that at the end when (spoiler alert) the protagonist Joana is having this strange revelation/mental breakdown, I felt what I could only describe as I kind of revelation. For a moment, her struggles were mine, and I was entrenched in this awful feeling Joana (and Lispector) couldn’t find the words to express. It was insane and terrifying, and it almost drove me crazy. It was daring and painfully real. It was almost unbelievable.
Big Swiss by Jen Beagin
I’ve learned from both writing and reading experience that writing about depression is one of the hardest things to do. Since it’s so personal yet to some degree universal it almost always reads like a hyper-real journal soppy journal entry with the character as a stand-in for the author. Somehow, Big Swiss caught lighting in a bottle. It’s unbelievably funny and accurate to its time, yet harrowing in a way that pins down feelings of self-sabotage, loathing, and grief. This book gets grouped into the “I’m a depressed white girl who’s an asshole and reveling it” Book Tok genre but it’s so much more than that. It’s a strangely complete and moving picture of how depression and desire are almost always working in tandem. It’s an anti-thesis to the TikTok genre it’s said to belong to, the dangers of feeling comfort and pride in your shitty-ness are what eventually move the protagonist Greta to change. I loved every moment of it. It patched the hole My Year of Rest and Relaxation left in my heart.
No Telephone To Heaven by Michelle Cliff
This book came into my life at the perfect moment. I’d been meaning to read Cliff for a while but just never got around to it, but after visiting Jamacia this summer and feeling my own feelings about homeland and resistance, it was exactly what I needed. It taught me so much about myself and my history, it was a snapshot of a Jamacia I never lived in or knew. But it was also so much larger than that. The protagonist Claire’s transcontinental search for herself and her true identity highlighted the various ways our identities affect and manifest in us. This book gave me hope in a strange unlikely way. It doesn't end on a high or happy note, but it left me with a feeling of possibility. It reminded me that change and action are always possible, and that alone is reason for hope. Whether the drive is found within yourself or those around you, once you find it anything is possible.
What I Learned
I’ve tried to tell you things in a way that is honest. I wanted to tell you the truth, as close to it as I could get. I wanted you to know my life in a thorough, meaningful way. I felt that only then you’d understand me, for everything I am, because my life in pieces is not accurate or worthy enough. In trying to create accuracy of an objectively subjective truth, I’ve told you what might be real, but not quite true. True in the sense of accuracy but not true in the sense of myself. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, I love to tell a story as much as you love to listen. But it’s not necessarily true, because I’m not accurate, or even understandable. I thought this would bring the both of us closer to understanding each other and ourselves. In the moments after writing and reading, it felt like it did. But then something else would happen, another wave would wash over me and it’d be gone.
I realized that the closest I ever get to the “truth” is through what I feel. The most accurate parts of myself are the ones you will never be able to see, yet they color my world in ways I feel I could never get across to you in words. My heart is my largest organ, much larger than my brain. What I feel is what I know and what I know is what I feel. There are problems with this because what I feel is never consistent. It changes with the brush of a breeze or a drop of rain. And if what I feel is always changing, so is what I know. And if what I know is always changing, I don’t really know anything. In my head, I know that believing what I feel with as much conviction as truth isn’t a “good,” thing, but I already told you my heart is my largest organ. My sensitivity is as innate as my intellect. I ask you, what does it even mean to know something if you don’t feel it’s truth?
This year flipped a lot of my expectations about myself and those around me on their heads. The things I used to know are now mysteries to me, and people I used to love are now figments of my past, existing only in imagining. I can’t remember the last time I was sure about anything. I can’t remember the last time I knew. I’m telling myself this swaying feeling of unease is a good thing, it’s a starting point. But truth be told it feels like a soft ego death. I spent a lot of time waiting for change to happen. Waiting for others to act, for my mind to change, for the other shoe to drop, for a feeling to push me in the right direction. But none of these things ever came, and so I end this year in the same spot that I started it in.
Yes, it might be confusing when your reality is intertwined with what you feel, but it’s also a kind of blessing. As long as what I feel I can change, so can everything else. Who I am, what I know, what I want, it’s all malleable. And though I spent the year stuck in the same rut and not doing much to claw my way out, I learned a lot about myself sitting at the bottom of it.
Next year I’m going to move.
