Summing Up 2022

1. What did you do in 2022 that you'd never done before?
I hooded my first PhD advisee. I took over for a colleague who left FSU, but it was a pleasure to be able to help my student in the ways I did. I love ceremonies like this. We don't have them enough. I don't know. This year, I did a lot of what I did last year. But I will say I feel infinitely more confident this year, as if I mostly feel like I know what I'm doing. I went to Detroit for the first time (and I really liked it).

Me and Mike Post Hooding

2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I didn't actually make any! I knew what I needed to do this year, and I actually accomplished all of it, which feels amazing. My GoodReads goal for this year was 125 books. I'm at 120 as of today. We will see if I can manage the other five before the end of the day on the 31st! Either way, I'm feeling pretty good about what I was able to manage. 

My resolution for 2023 will be to work less for the university. I need to become less of a workaholic and focus more on having fun and doing things that are not related to my place of employment. Teaching sometimes feels like a 24/7 job and I need to start making that less so.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
My cousin Angela gave birth to a little girl, although we aren't very close. I was, however, able to visit Daniel Sack and Alex Ripp's new daughter, Thalia Maeve, this summer.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
Not this year, thankfully.

5. What countries did you visit?
The Bahamas, but only in a manner of speaking. I went on the most obnoxious cruise to Grand Bahama in order to see my friend Jude perform on the cruise-ship version of Escape to Margaritaville. Jude was brilliant in the show. The cruise was very strange and sort of awful, though I was with my great friends Matt, Walt, Jeanne, and Katie. So that part of it was very fun.

6. What would you like to have in 2023 that you lacked in 2022?
Honestly, I'm not sure! More vacation time, I think. I need to spend more time reading and just generally doing nothing. I'm in a place right now where I work pretty much every day. This does not leave a lot of time for cooking (which I love to do), working out (which I need to do), or visiting cool natural spots in North Florida (of which there are many).

7. What dates from 2022 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
This was a very intense summer. I had strict deadlines related to finishing my book Love Is Love Is Love, and I stuck to them almost perfectly. The manuscript was due to the publisher on June 30, and I was six days late because of exactly six campus visits for new faculty members I helped to hire in my School this summer. But I love writing, and the time between the end of school in May and the deadline was really fun if pressure-filled in its own way.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
I'm very proud to have finished writing, editing, rewriting, and making the index for Love Is Love Is Love. The book comes out in the first couple of months of 2023, and I'll be excited to see it in print. The last couple of passes of the book were horrible: the copyediting process for these things is completely fucked and the copyeditor introduced hundreds of errors into my manuscript by way of "fixing" things. Still, I'm hoping it all turns out nicely. I think that's the biggest achievement. I should also say that my article "Infelicities" was given an honorable mention as the Outstanding Article in a Journal at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference this summer. That feels amazing, and I am so glad that people are finding this piece useful and provocative for their own thinking. Below is a video of me speaking about the article with Michelle Liu Carriger.

9. What was your biggest failure?
I did not work out as much as I could have or should have. I did not get up to Philadelphia to see my friends Matt and Jill this summer. And I'm underpaid, which makes a lot of things more difficult for me. The failure I feel the most keenly, though, is the stack of unread books my friends have written that is sitting on my coffee table. I did get to read a few of my friends' books this year, but the ones I haven't read really make me sad. Maybe I'll be able to finish one of them before the end of the year.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
No. And somehow I have also managed not to catch Covid still. I don't know how that's possible.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
I am obsessed with my Dyson vacuum, which I bought this summer. This is an absurd thing to be obsessed with, and yet here we are. I also love the new chairs I bought for my dining table. I need a new computer. Maybe I'll get one next year.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
My friend Chari, who directed a very well reviewed production of Rent this year at Short North. My friend Meredith, who is somehow doing three jobs at once in the College of Fine Arts. My many students who have graduated and moved off into the world to do good things!

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Ron DeSantis. Honestly, Republican politicians everywhere. (I don't feel quite the same about Republican voters.) These politicians are just so awful. Why do they wish to create a fascist hellscape? Is it just because they hate freedom? What's so fascinating about Republican lawmakers and politicians – at least in Florida – is that they claim to be in favor of freedom, while incarcerating more people and taking more freedoms away from young people, women, teachers, voters, former prisoners, and people of color. It is insane to me that people who say they love freedom don't wish for others to be free. What's truly terrible about DeSantis, though, I think, is that they've rigged the system so blatantly, so terribly in Florida that even our votes matter less. They've gerrymandered everything so horribly because they know they're in the minority, and they don't actually care. Rather than trust the people to make decisions affecting ourselves, they have rigged things so that we can't. They literally are dismantling the basic functions of democracy. It's appalling and depressing to me.

14. This question used to be "Where did most of your money go?" but once I turned 35 the answer was always taxes. So I'm modifying this question to be: Which charitable organizations did you give to?
Wikimedia Foundation

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
The Rings of Power

Helping Lauren Abel finish her master's thesis

Every time I hung out with Michael Cleary

The American Society for Theatre Research conference

Finally seeing Dayne Catalano after three years

Some amazing retirements in my department

16. What song will always remind you of 2022?
Carly Rae Jepsen's "Beach House"

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
a) happier or sadder? Happier.
b) thinner or fatter? Thinner.
c) richer or poorer? Richer.

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Reading, watching movies, hiking

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Evaluating students, stalling before meeting guys

20. How will you be spending Christmas?
I'm in Los Angeles. I'll be at my sister's house. This year's dinner theme is Ghosts of Xmases Past, and none of the foods go together. I'm making a leek and potato gratin, a peanut coconut soup, and baba ganoush. 

21. Did you fall in love in 2022?
I didn't. Sigh.

22. How many one-night stands?
I didn't count this year. But it was a) more than usual and b) not as many as there should have been.

23. What was your favorite TV program?
The Rings of Power. I had a great time, and I literally stop people before they say anything negative about it to me. I'm completely not interested in anyone's negative assessments of that show. 

I also loved season 7 of RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars despite my total and complete disagreement about the eventual winner. The only other shows I watched in 2022 were RuPaul's Drag Race season 14 (ok), RuPaul's Drag Race UK season 3 (fine), RuPaul's Drag Race Down Under season 2 (almost unwatchable), RuPaul's Drag Race Down Under season 1 (actually unwatchable), Drag Race Holland season 2 (fun), and Drag Race España season 1 (very good). I still didn't watch all the drag race franchises that are out there. I'm trying to catch up, but tv is not really for me.

24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
I think I hate fewer people, actually.

25. What was the best book you read?
I keep track of this on GoodReads. Come join me over there! Cookbooks I loved this year were Eric Kim's Korean American and Rick Martínez's Mi Cocina. The best fantasy book I read was Marlon James's Moon Witch Spider King. It's an awesome sequel/companion to Black Leopard Red Wolf. I can't wait for the next instalment. But the best novel I read was Andrea Lawlor's Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, which I think everyone – and I mean everyone – should read. 

All the writing I did this year meant that I didn't read very much nonfiction, unfortunately. But I did start a little reading club (Early Modern Madness, we're calling it) with my friend Michelle where we read an early modern play that we haven't read before or have mostly forgotten. We started with witch plays and read Thomas Middleton's The Witch, followed by John Marston's Sophonisba and Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome's The Late Lancashire Witches. These plays are all astounding, and since then we've read some really strange gems from the period, including Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, John Webster's The White Devil, John Marston's The Malcontent, Tirso de Molina's La Venganza de Tamar, Marston's The Insatiate Countess, and Middleton's Second Maiden's Tragedy. This has been really fun, and I'm very grateful for Michelle's prompting in this direction. 

As for nonfiction, I'm currently obsessed with Sea People: the Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson. 

26. What was your greatest musical discovery?
Dave Malloy's Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812

27. What was the best piece of theatre you saw?
I can't believe I'm about to say this, but José Zayas's Romeo and Juliet at the American Shakespeare Center. It really stunned me.

28. What did you want and get?
A raise. A book contract.

Actually last year, for question 34, I said that I wanted "some retirements in my department. A few of those (six?) would improve my life exponentially." It seemed impossible, honestly, but I got that after all.

Better restaurants in Tallahassee. We actually have quite a few now, and I am grateful.

29. What did you want and not get?
To go on a date with my bartender non-boyfriend Tyler. (Also go on a date is mostly a euphemism.)

30. What was your favorite film of this year?
So far it's Jerzy Skolimowski's Io.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I had dinner with Chari and Tenley and Meredith and Jason at a farm-to-table place I like in Tallahassee. I turned 41.

A Lucien Gaudin I made recently

32. What new recipes did you make this year?
Many new things! The highlight, I think, was the Cajun turkey breast I made for Thanksgiving courtesy of Donald Link's book Real Cajun. I made my own boudin (i.e. boudin blanc) at home, and then I rolled it in a turkey breast to make a roulade before cooking it in the oven. It was incredible. The other thing I made that was amazing was Claire Saffitz's fruitcake. It's just so good.

33. What were your cocktail obsessions?
My drinks of choice lately have been an Old Barrel (2 oz. rye, 1/2 oz. Amontillado sherry, 1/2 oz. Benedictine, 3 dashes Angostura) and a Lucien Gaudin (2 oz. gin, 1 oz. dry vermouth, 1 oz. Campari, 1 oz. Cointreau or Beauchant).

34. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Gosh, I don't know. This has been a very good year. 

35. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2022?
Boots are the new dress shoes. I wear boots when I teach about 50% of the time now.

36. What kept you sane?
The Criterion Channel. My friends at Bar 1903. I honestly love having a local bar where I know everyone. (Whenever you see me make a bunch of cookies, just know that I bring a whole bunch of those to the staff at 1903 because they're awesome.)

37. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Haaz Sleiman

38. What political issue stirred you the most?
Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. This is further evidence, I think, of the fact that Republican lawmakers and jurists have completely stopped caring about what actual people in the United States think. It's tough for me to blame the Supreme Court for this completely because, in fact, the current makeup of the Supreme Court is the fault of political maneuvering and outright fraud on the part of Senator Mitch McConnell. It is also the fault of the legislature that we don't already have federal protections for female bodily autonomy in this country. The laws that specifically affected me in this country are the fascist policies that Ron DeSantis is promulgating in Florida related to education, queer, people, and the teaching of history, but the work of the Supreme Court this year when they overturned Roe is really and truly insane.

39. Whom did you miss?
Dayne and Jordan. Justin and Elizabeth and Ashley and Danny and Wahima. Katie and Viktor and Yasser and Jonathan. Patrick and Jessica and Michelle.

40. Who was the best new person you met?
Ryan Travis. Clara Nizard.

41. Tell us a valuable life-lesson you learned in 2022:
Every moment does not have to count, despite what the bad WordArt in AirBnbs wants to tell you. I was asked to give a speech at our School of Theatre commencement ceremony this December, and I made it a point to tell the students that not every moment needs to be filled with meaning. What I said to them was "It seems to me that once we leave college and have good jobs or are out there hustling or even are just like hanging out in our parents’ basements, we oftentimes look back on the time we spent in college as if it were wasted time. The time we’ve spent learning and practicing comes to feel like so much a part of who we are that we forget we actually spent it usefully and fully. I don’t think it’s important that you make sure that every moment counts. I think that’s too much work, actually, and kind of impossible. But I do think it’s important that you remember that even the moments that feel like they are throwaways, that feel like they’re not important at all, are actually the vibrant stuff of being. The silliness of gathering together in a space like this, the hilarity of cheering for a dragon carrying sour cream during a theatre-night performance: these things actually matter a lot. They’re the very material of life, of friendship, of presence." (The dragon carrying sour cream was from an excellent production the School of Theatre did of the children's show Dragons Love Tacos.)

42. Share an important quotation from 2022:

This is a mantra that I heard from Eric Kim that I have started repeating to myself: Don't yuck other people's yums. If someone tells me they like something but I don't like that thing, my job is to shut the fuck up. There's no reason to ruin or even slightly taint anyone else's enjoyment of something.

Eo (2022)

I have really flipped for Jerzy Skolimowsksi's Eo. This is a film about a donkey who works in a circus and an odyssey that takes the donkey from the Polish circus through a range of experiences. It's deeply moving, and I fell in love with it. Eo is quite obviously based on or a retelling of Robert Bresson's wonderful Au Hasard Balthazar, but Skolimowski's film is designed as a kind of portrait of modern humanity that feels deeply unnerving and sometimes confusing if frequently beautiful. Eo contains these amazing interludes – occasionally lit red – in which we watch the world upside down or backwards, or we watch a robot dog hunt something. Skolimowski is insisting that we look at the world differently, that we don't settle into complacent ideas about the world's beauty or the purity of animals or clichés like this. He is using film to ask us to see differently, to unsettle our typical ways of watching and thinking. 

Eo is a film about our relationships with animals, the complete unimportance of our very high melodramas from their perspective, and our total disregard for animal welfare. It's fascinating and beautiful and totally compelling, and Skolimowski's writing is impeccable.

One note on the title. I really don't understand why the distributors changed the title to EO instead of the original Io, and I absolutely do not understand the commitment to capitalizing it – I am equally baffled by people who keep writing TÁR, too. These are names. The donkey is called Io (pronounced eee-oh because we're in Poland), and the Todd Field film is named after its main character, Lydia Tár. The caps make no sense. This isn't CODA. Part of Eo/Io takes place in Italy, as well, where Io, of course, means I – the implication being that the donkey is all of us... 

But more importantly Io is a classical reference that I would expect many people to get. Jupiter's moon Io is even named after the mythical figure! Io was a mortal woman, beloved by Zeus, who was transformed into a cow. To my mind, the resonance here is unmistakable. Skolimowski is asking us to look at this donkey from a different perspective, and indeed asking us to look from the donkey's perspective, but one of the points here is that a donkey is not so different from a human, and yet we treat donkeys as if they are. Is Io a cow or a young woman? And do we treat her as if she's a cow once we know she was once human?

Terence Davies' Benediction

I always want to love a Terence Davies movie. And they almost always have amazing ideas behind them, as if they're going to be headed in a beautiful direction. Somehow, I am always disappointed. I hate this because he's my friend Anthony's favorite director, and I always feel like I'm betraying him by being bored by Terence Davies.

It's his style. It's just not for me. Davies films all of his indoor scenes as if they're theatre. This is by design, at least I think it's by design (???). They're scenes that are supposed to feel haunted, not quite real, as if they're taking place in a character's memory, or perhaps Davies' own memory. But I just don't understand. Often when we are blessed with a scene that's set outdoors this goes away completely and one feels as if one is in the real world all of a sudden – there are one or two scenes like that in Benediction. But mostly I just felt as if I'd stumbled in on a scene in an acting studio.

The unfortunate thing is that the idea behind Benediction is so powerful and superb. It's also an attempted portrait at decadent gay life between the wars in the UK, a period not very well documented on screen. And yet, Davies has chosen in his protagonist – the poet Siegfried Sassoon – a kind of stick in the mud, someone who dislikes his contemporaries and can't seem to understand or live with the gay people in his life. 

And then he gets married...

It's a choice I find difficult to understand or forgive. This is bad morality on my part, of course, and I don't really feel superior to a gay man who decides to get married, but I also stop being interested in him the moment he does. He feels lost to me forever, gone from someone I could possibly identify with, someone with some hope for the future, to someone who has chosen to capitulate to a society that wants to crush him. This is, as I say, a bad moral position to take, and I don't approve of my feelings. I'm just being frank about them.

Anyway, the point isn't my questionable moral stance toward Davies' film, it's that I just found Benediction so oddly disjointed and distant. Even when Siegfried is supposedly in love or happy we seem to be granted only a stilted portrait of that, as if he never was really happy, and we are to be given no access to the fantasy that he might have been.

Davies has spliced footage and photographs from the Great War into this film, and almost all of that works very, very well. The film is at its best when it's about WWI. But mostly, actually, the film isn't about WWI. Instead it's a sort of exercise in frustration, a stumbling portrait of midcentury homosexuality, and one that seems to blame the midcentury homosexual himself for the unhappiness he inflicts upon himself and his family rather than the homophobic society that gave him that misery to begin with.

Jack Lowden is very good in this, and I rather loved Calam Lynch and Tom Blyth, as well.

The House on Telegraph Hill

Robert Wise's The House on Telegraph Hill is an excellent film noir. It's filled with surprises and it manages to be sexy and scary and suspenseful. It is, in many ways, a kind of riff on Rebecca and Gaslight, but it has new things to say and new ways to say them! Valentina Cortesa is great, and Richard Basehart is magnetic and attractive and rather disarming. The whole thing is actually quite disarming. Robert Wise's films noirs from this period are excellent. And this one is made richer and much more interesting by its link to survivors from the genocide of European Jews. This is, in other words, a post-Expressionist noir that's in many ways about both its German aesthetic roots and its U.S. American criminal subject matter. I loved this.

Crimes of the Future

I really don't understand why David Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future is as boring as it is. There's really no excuse for it. It has a good cast and a cool premise. Crimes of the Future even has a good score (by Howard Shore)! But this movie is filmed like it's half asleep. It's filled with oddly stilted scenes and oddly tame imagery. It's as if the whole thing is merely on the surface of its idea and it never gets to the heart of things.

Tár (2022)

Tár kind of blew me away. This movie jumps right into the story it's telling with almost zero exposition. And its characters are throwing around terms related to conducting and Gustav Mahler and Edward Elgar and the Berliner Philharmoniker without bothering to explain any of it to us. We have to learn the power structures in this movie while we watch, and we have no one to help us understand them. This is entirely appropriate, to my mind, but it creates identification problems – who are we here to love and like and whose side are we on, after all? I know that many of my friends experienced a great deal of distance from this movie, despite how beautifully made it is and how intriguing the story.

What we wind up watching with Tár is a Harvey Weinstein story – although I don't even need to watch the upcoming She Said to know this is very different from that narrative. Still, it is that to a certain extent. It's also not. For me, Tár follows precisely the structure of an Athenian tragedy, and it carried with it all of the aspects that attend one of those ancient plays. In other words, we are waiting for violence throughout the narrative. We know we are leading up to violence – this is how an Athenian tragedy is structured: we move toward atrocity, and we all know it is coming. This creates an enormous amount of tension in Todd Field's movie, and I watched Tár mostly in terror at what was coming. (Enjoying every moment.) It's worth noting that this film, like a Greek tragedy, is deeply haunted, as if there are ghosts around every turn, others watching, mysterious forms coming to get the characters and make them pay for the things they know they've done. I loved that about Tár.

The other thing to say about this ancient Athenian structure is a question of character. No one learns things in Athenian tragedy. That isn't the point of them. They're not teaching tools: they're ideological propaganda for the Athenian city-state. But often a character in a tragedy will do something that he or she feels he can get away with. To do something as if no one will punish you, to dare others to punish you just to see them cower, the ancient Athenians called this hybris. Lydia Tár, this film's central character, acts as if she can simply get away with anything she chooses to do. It's terrifying because for the whole film it feels as if we know retribution's coming but she doesn't see it. 

I want to say one more thing about Tár and character and identification. I know folks who have objected to the way this movie treated its central figure, punishing her, destroying her. And it is a dubious move to translate a sexual exploitation narrative into a story about a lesbian instead of telling this story about a man. (It's always made me very mad that Arthur Miller's The Crucible transferred the hysteria of the House un-American Activities Commission to the little girls in his play. It was grown men, in fact, who were hysterical fascists. And he made a play about little girls being hysterical fascists. Let's place the blame where it belongs.) Anyway, this film punishes her and brings her low. This was a problem for a few of my friends. It wasn't a problem for me, and I realized the reason while I listened to them speak about the movie. We had watched it very differently. They weren't identifying with Tár's main character while they watched. The distance and difficulty of the film meant that they did not see themselves in the main character. While I watched Tár I identified with her completely. This film made me think about my own hybris, the decisions I make out of ego and the things I believe I can get away with doing because of privilege. This is why, I in fact, loved the film. It's a difficult piece, and she's a difficult character to love, but I identified with her very fiercely, and I didn't feel self-satisfied by her punishment at the film's end; I felt unsettled and accused. For me this is what makes the film so great.