monday 12.12.22
Saw Bardo this weekend, plus a Q&A with the director Alejandro Iñárritu and most of the department heads. To be transparent, it wasn’t my idea to go see it. My friend switched our dinner plans to seeing the film, but I’m so so happy she did. The first scene pulled me in right away. It’s almost 3 hours long, but once you lean into the idea that you’re seeing a lengthy art video, you can give into the experience. It is Iñárritu’s personal meditation on aging, managing success and grappling with the meaning of home.
One exchange in the middle of the movie really stuck with me. Silvano, the main character is talking to a respected figure in his life after running from a crowd of admirers.
The figure asks him, what do we do with success?
And Silvano replies, we take a swig and swirl it around, then it spit it out before it can poison us!
During the Q&A, Iñárritu was asked about the critical response to his films. He shrugged it off, pointing at himself. He said, we are all our own harshest critics, we know this.
It’s always a revelation to hear someone who has accomplished so much and is so enmeshed in their art, is still so hard on themselves. The struggle always seems to be finding a balance of molding exactly what is needed with the right amount of strength, but not using so much force that you crush the shape of your own creativity.
There was so much to the film that I need to see again, cozy at home, being able to bathe in every moment.
Took a personal sabbath yesterday, refrained from the phone and tech in general. I read Eve Babitz as the rain fell, we put up a shelf in the kitchen and took a walk to the farmers market when the skies cleared. Around 2 in the afternoon we went into the garage to get something and found the heavy rains had pushed through the ceiling, leaking all over the mess of boxes we’d been putting off organizing. I don’t have that much stuff, but I had some boxes of clothes, whose fate I had yet to decide. Chris has a fair amount of keepsakes from family, books, hard drives with old projects, etc etc. We had to ruthlessly tear open all the melting cardboard boxes, just to see what we could and toss the rest. A lot of things were just junk, or papers that held no real use. We barely noticed the sunset, unconsciously flipped on the fluorescent bar of light to replace the golden hour.
However overwhelming, the flooded boxes got us to brutally assess what we really wanted to keep and how to store our truly loved belongings with thought and care. We have more work to do, but I feel so much lighter knowing that we don’t have a massive tangle of neglect sitting in the garage.