April 25, 2023
New York, New York
I was 29 years old
…until then: do the work. As depicted in Kelly Reichardt’s latest movie Showing Up. We saw it at Regal Essex. Michelle Williams plays a sculptor named Lizzy, living in a Portland apartment that’s been without hot water for a while, with a landlord—another working artist in town played by Hong Chau—who is too busy to get around to fixing it. It’s a “quiet” movie, as people insist on saying. But I’ll resist calling it “small.” Mostly because I recognize it all so massively. How beautifully the movie speaks to all the effort and energy and time it takes to be creative. Recognizing so much of myself in Michelle Williams’s character, who feels—resentfully—like she’s the only one who does the work, specifically the boring and necessary work, all the while surrounded by people who manage to just breeze through life. Verrrrrry me. I told Austin the many people in my life who are the landlord to my Michelle Williams, to which he said, “So, that makes me the pigeon?”
I adored it. It made me want to watch all of Kelly’s movies, and patiently. And it made me want to never give up on writing. To hold on forever and ever to how natural and necessary and fun it feels to sit down at my desk by 10:00 every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday morning. Of course, I would like some compensation. I’d even settle for praise. I want to make movies sooner rather than later, and I know it won’t just miraculously happen for me without working for it. But dare I say that those afternoons writing at my desk is the work. And how immensely grateful I feel to enjoy doing that. That I keep showing up to my writing, on my own terms, and feel so filled up by it. No day wasted. A better writer for every word written. I am blessed. Set in the right place at the perfect time.
December 30, 2023
Brooklyn, New York
I am 30 years old
My apologies for spoiling but Showing Up ends with Lizzy, like some Portlandia cowgirl, walking into the sunset. Broken wing healed and bondage undone, she’s out in the world, limitless and soaring—the pigeon, that is. But Lizzy’s not too far behind, searching for the bird alongside her landlord. With lofts beside them and smokestacks up ahead, tinged in the sherbets of day’s end, they inch closer and closer to an industrious horizon. Lizzy’s big art show is still ongoing however many blocks away, in a gallery running low on cheese but nevertheless full of well-wishers, and yet here she is—in the company of a foe and in pursuit of a burden. “A woman’s work is never done.” I can’t imagine it should come as a surprise just how often I say that. Let alone that it’s usually in reference to myself. Winkingly but still. Because, don’t mistake me, I do think about it, the work I really want to do. What it could be like if it all happens for me. When the movie gets made and the books get published and the carpet’s finally rolled out for the writer who toiled away in humble obscurity for years and years. And would you believe it, that even in fantasy, I find myself wondering how I might still be able to put in a day or two a month at the museum. Color me uncool, I guess, for I do dream of labor.
It’s not that I need to see myself in a film’s protagonist to enjoy it but it doesn’t hurt. For that reason, and then some, I loved Showing Up. It’s my favorite film of the year, easily. And while I’d say I love Kelly Reichardt, I’m hardly a completist. Especially when I’ve put off watching Meek’s Cutoff or First Cow until I’m surrounded by a discerning enough audience to collectively tip me off on when to laugh. I’m not a philistine, I think, but to me that’s half the point of going to the movies. Laughing at things that, all alone, I might not have recognized as funny. It can be too easy to miss the humor in films as “quiet” and “carefully observed” as hers. But, again, this movie felt anything but small to me. And maybe this time it is because I saw so much of myself in Michelle Williams’s Lizzy. Swap Portland for Brooklyn, sculpting for writing, and an emotionally-distant landlord for the more literal variety (mine lives in Australia, in case you didn’t already know), et voila—one and the same. She does administrative stuff at an art school and I lead tours at a history museum but, either way, we do the job that affords us, just barely, the time to do our work. And bringing with us a lunch we packed from home.
Rules, rules, rules. What’s funny is that I grew up without any at all. Not quite as bohemian as Lizzy’s artist parents but just as boundaryless, my mother and father didn’t “rear” us so much as “house” us. Soda, television, sarcasm—it was all up for grabs, sans supervision, let alone discipline. Barring an episode or two of Real Sex I watched at eight years old, I don’t think I was harmed by any of this, not necessarily. I struggle with authority figures but that’s the coolest thing about me. Especially when such a childhood left me with no other recourse for rebellion but something I like to call, too fondly and too frequently, “my nun’s life.” Think: thrift, and lots of it, without much of anything else. It was a must, this approach, back when I was making $12,000 a year during the leanest stretches of my mid-twenties. I’m hardly making that much more money now, I assure you, but still—it’s getting harder to pretend it’s anything but my choice. But what this nun’s life lacks in the material, it makes up for in virtue. Which is just about as fun as it sounds. After all, I can’t remember Lizzy smiling in Showing Up, not even once. But I did. Anytime her baffled frustrations over a backyard tire swing or burnt statues in the kiln pulled down the corners of Lizzy’s lips, I felt a kindred spirit pull up at mine.
On the day of Lizzy’s show, rather than busying herself with last minute perfecting, she paces around her apartment, all alone. Worrying about her unstable brother and the injured pigeon she didn’t choose to nurse. Weary with the weight of the righteous. And so, she leaves angry voicemails. Calling her landlord, Lizzy says, “You know, I’m so fucking sick of not having hot water! It’s such a total drag! It’s such a shitty thing to do to a person and I’m sick of it!…Have a great night.” Her landlord was too busy hosting a party next door to pick up the phone. Lizzy can hear it through the walls and see it through her window. Joy, in great abundance—and it’s right there! But she won’t allow herself a lick of it. Because if she did, then what? Who’d be there to feed the cat? Or clean the break room, for that matter? Subjecting ourselves to real life so we can indulge in play pretend, and begrudging them in equal measure. From across the room, all this time, Lizzy’s sculptures stare at her. Women at rest and women in motion. They’re glazed, and fired, and finished—and yet.
“That’s not real,” I want to say, anytime I hear about a job that’s fully remote, or an office with an amply-stocked snack kitchen, or the merest mention of the museum’s board members. Clocking labor from charade, real work from the noisy click-clack of the over-educated, it comes all too naturally to me—a 30-year-old who’s successfully managed to avoid ever working a full-time job, who’s writing this on one of his four days off a week, from the secluded comfort of a sleepy block in a brownstone Brooklyn neighborhood that boasts a median rent of $3,925 per month. Not that I’m spending that much. How could I, of course? This willfully starving artist whose greatest work hasn’t so much been his words on the page as the pinched pennies in his wallet. For about as long as I’ve been renting, I’ve been telling people how little I pay. $475 in Allston, $560 in Bushwick, and, best believe it, $625 in Clinton Hill. It is kind of astonishing, honestly, how I’ve stepped in it. Keeping a low enough overhead for my high, high hopes, time and again. A cash poor embarrassment of riches. I should smack myself—but not at the risk of waking up from the dream. Especially when I’ve had all this time, all the time in the world, and the jury’s still out on if that dream might ever come true.
Austin and I were down in Wilmington all last week, our relationship’s politics electing Thanksgiving as my family’s and Christmas as his. It’s still kind of novel to me, a Southern Christmas, even if New York’s increasingly sub-tropical climate means the weather is more or less the same there as it is here. Plus, I’m always on my best behavior. We may be approaching five years together, me and this son of a preacher man, but it still feels as crucial as ever to be good. Dutiful and agreeable, always “oh my goodness” and never “oh my God.” Insisting I’m happy to do it each and every time his mom says, “Brian! Stop loading that dishwasher!” I just can’t help myself. We were there for eight days. Eight days—anywhere, with anyone—can be a lot. And there was this one morning in particular when I felt very cooped up, desperate for something to do. Austin, poor thing, rattled off some ideas, suggesting we see a movie, or take Wren bowling, or go on a tour of The USS North Carolina for all he cares. And knowing me, all too well, he also said I could go up to the guest bedroom and write all day long and that no one would think it was weird. And so—I went on a six mile walk. He dropped me off at this place called Poplar Grove, a historic plantation that I pretended was just a park ground. Squatting down more than once to pull, as his family would say, “pine straw” out of my socks, I wandered around its dirt paths—perfectly content. I called Shannon on the phone and we talked about Christmas being hard and how badly she wants to move and everything that might happen next, for both of us. We laughed and laughed. Smiling, I said “hello” to every passerby and didn’t care whether they said it back. This wasn’t what I wanted to do, not really. But it gave me something to write about.