For a period, this year, I tried journaling. I’m low-key embarrassed to admit this, in part because, well, my friends are assholes and together we spent much of grad school throwing a found notebook back and forth at one another and insisting – at any sign of maudlin behavior – that someone transcribe it in their ‘cry-cry journal.’ There’s the other part, though, too: The way I’ve long equated keeping a personal record as something too inherently self-centered, too ‘woo woo’ and apart from the writing I needed to do, and well, yes, I suspected it would also be inherently boring.
So, the process was covert. A very trusted friend, M., in her descent into, perhaps, some search for peace in the tumultuous facts of 2025, somehow picked up with both Buddhism and The Artist’s Way. Her mention of this triggered some Baader-Meinhoff sequence. Suddenly, The Artist’s Way was everywhere: in Bella Freud’s Fashion Neurosis interviews, in the idle ramblings of YouTubers now invested in locating meaning through artistic practice, casually mentioned in books I was reading. Against my better judgment, I gave in to M.’s assertion of unlocking and bought a copy of the book as I began what its author refers to as the ‘daily pages.’ The two events were concurrent but, I’d like to pretend, not entirely connected. I needed to write, I needed to sort through a confusion of global political chaos, work frustrations, familial detonations and was trying to return to a project I’ve long struggled with. So I did it, in a way, writing things blunt and bland along with a record of something else entirely, just at bay in the margins.
The thing about The Artist’s Way is, of course, I haven’t finished it. My temperament can approach only the stripped down practicalities of continued purging and I stop short at the strange tie-ins with concepts of god, of placement in the universe. I tripped up – as one might expect – on the notion this was one of Scorsese’s ex-wives, fell down a rabbit hole of reflecting more on his Catholicism in relation to The Artist’s Way than I sussed out my own routines. Still, though, something came of it, I supposed: a long-empty notebook is now mostly filled with ramblings from the end of Western Civilization, a penning of thoughts and experiences at another decline of empire. And, well, the fact of being able to push through the handwriting of those thoughts and the way they began to become much more a cluster of considerations on culture or reflections on taste has made me think about the fact of how tripped up I’ve been when it comes to trying to maintain and curate this site.
There’s no reason to review a film in a straightforward manner. There’s no reason to make myself write about something I typically would have immediately forgotten (see: Babes, one of the last posts on this site and a 2024 movie literally no one saw). Frankly, with a full-time job and no consistent weekly ability to force myself to use that AMC pass, I just can’t even keep myself to a regular calendar. And yet, of course, I’m scribbling away nonsense on the daily, shooting off texts to my friends recommending albums and books and films happened upon or finally seen. I make lists incessantly and, well, I paid for this fucking site so why don’t I combine the two?
Anyway, that’s it, that’s my whole thought, a big, fucking overblown way of saying, like, guess what guys? I think I’m going to start using this as an old school, run of the mill blog, but, like, about culture.
love + squalor 