Announcement: The Joy Factory is on Medium!
For those who follow me here or on Medium direct, you’ll be pleased to know that I’ve put together a space for The Joy Factory content in the form of a Medium Publication. This will create a central designed space for all of the joyful content! It also means that following me there and my personal Medium page will go a long way to supporting the content I create for this project. Content will still show up here and on the Patreon page for The Joy Factory, but you’ll see a bit more thought going into their placement on Medium going forward. Also in the works: a newsletter. More on that later. So there you go. Go follow me on Medium. Support my stuffs!
Musicals Made 2020 Bearable; Long Live the Musicals
If you’d asked me in 2019 whether musicals were “my thing,” I might have said something like “well, I do enjoy musicals from time to time, but I wouldn’t say I go out of my way to watch them.” If you’d asked me the same question by July 2020, the answer would have been something like “oh my sweet mother of god I absolutely love musicals they are keeping me from going mad.” Throughout 2020, I consumed what to me was an absurd number of musicals for someone who had only dabbled in the genre previously. And the world was happy to oblige my desperate need for the joy a good musical can bring. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Show Must Go On YouTube channel joyfully screened some of Webber’s classics, including Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Phantom of the Opera. Other music institutions also happily aired operas, symphonic performances, and even professional productions of Shakespeare and other plays. And Spotify’s music catalogue gave me even more to enjoy, from Gilbert & Sullivan to walls of EDM and symphonies I’ve never heard before. But it was the musicals that gave me an escape.
Ape Lincoln: The Beauty and Terror of Planet of the Apes (2001)
As Palpatine would say: long have I waited to discuss this film! A film reviled for its infamously confusing ending, its gleeful presentation of punk apes and other humanistic ape-eries, and its attempt to convince us that Mark Wahlberg earned his way onto an expensive Air Force ape research space station while still getting away with calling apes monkeys every ten seconds. A film that shockingly made a decent chunk of change and almost got a sequel. It’s Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes (2001)! Call it a remake or a reboot or a reinterpretation, Planet of the Apes has rightly earned its place as one part visual marvel and one part disastrous narrative — beauty and terror fused into one glorious package. Its position in the Planet of the Apes oeuvre has, alas, earned it additional and unfavorable comparisons to its more successful and narratively compelling predecessor and successor. Have the twenty years since this film’s release helped its perception?
New Year’s Resolutions: No More Intentional Misery
2020 is over. It’s dead. Time killed it. Thank the maker. Bye bye, 2020. Go die in a fire. Now that 2021 is here, it’s time for that magic tradition that many folks following: declaring New Year’s resolutions! I’ve declared these in the past, but there have also been years where I felt disinclined to do much of anything about the new year. But 2020 was an absolutely horrific year for a lot of people, and it exposed a lot of the activities and behaviors that don’t, for me, make life particularly excited. While I can’t control a lot of the miserable activities happening around me, I can make changes (or continue existing changes) that will make life less stressful, more purposeful, and more joyful. That’s why I’ve decided that 2021 is going to be the Year of Deliberately Manifesting Joy, continuing the mission I began in November 2020 with The Joy Factory and extending those actions across the spectrum of my life as much as possible. So what does that mean in New Year’s Resolutions terms?
Holiday Miracles (or, How I Tried Something New and Learned to Enjoy Christmas Novels)
I’ve never read a Christmas novel for adults before. In fact, I never considered reading one until I got bored in my local Target and decided to give one a try for the hell of it. And then I spent about a week reading and livetweeting the experience. If you were to ask me why it has taken this long to actually read a book like Jenny Colgan’s Christmas at the Island Hotel, I might have given you the “it’s not my thing” excuse. In many ways, that’s technically true, but given my love of certain types of Christmas movies, it would be technically wrong, too. So the question remains: What did I think of Christmas at the Island Hotel, and did it change my mind about Christmas novels?
Nostalgic Paris: Misery, Imagination, and Nostalgia in Midnight in Paris
Perhaps the most potent problem of our modern era is its obsession with nostalgia. In its least malignant form, nostalgia becomes an excessive love of art and fashion playfully removed from the socio-political conditions of its creation. In its most malignant form, nostalgia turns people into cult-like fascists who desire a return to a time that never really existed. Most nostalgia travelers rest somewhere between: fantasizing about going back to something that felt more familiar, even at the expense of the present. And then there’s Midnight in Paris (2011), which seems to relish in misery, imagination, and nostalgia at varying points and for varying purposes. What ultimately does the film say about nostalgia, then?