I’ve been slacking so badly it’s an embarrassment, but between the looming writers’s strike and my don’t-have-a-job situation, I don’t feel all that horrible about not keeping things up on here. I have been focusing on my own projects though, and through that — the process of writing without any expectation for compensation or praise — I’ve come to, dare I say, enjoy writing.
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I first watched Kelly Reichardt’s latest film, Showing Up, at the New York Film Festival. Months later, I caught it again, and found myself enamored with what people are calling her lightest endeavor (it’s comedy doesn’t make it any less serious or profound). It’s a meandering sort of project, a Kelly Reichardt speciality, where you don’t fully know if you’re getting anything out of it until the credits roll and you find yourself incredibly moved by ~the little things people do.~
Michelle Williams plays Lizzy, a disgruntled sculptor who is about to put on an exhibit of her work — delicate clay models of women in motion, à la Degas but creepier. She spends her days balancing a fragile work-life situation and barely makes ends meet with an administrative job at an arts school. When she’s not at school, she’s in her basement studio working on her pieces, trying not to be distracted by her friend, landlord and fellow artist Jo (Hong Chao), her needy cat, and her dysfunctional parents and mentally ill brother. The art of art, after all, is the focus and time and care given to your expression.
As her show begins to come together, there’s a greater understanding of what Reichardt means through the title of her movie. There are the obvious people who Lizzy expects at her show, but then there’s a general feeling that one must perpetually be present for fellow artists, the group of people who spend day in and day out creating. Reichardt frequently cuts to other works throughout the film — video projects, Jo’s own impressive work sculptural works, painting, and drawing — as if to force the audience to reckon with the fact that a community of people who have no choice but to do this exist. They may never be seen, they may never make money, and they may never be emotionally fulfilled, but they continue to create because something in them moves them to. Sometimes being an artist feels like being a version of Sisyphus who possesses the ability to stop rolling the boulder up and down the hill for eternity but choose to continue with it anyway.
Showing up is just continuing, day after day, week after week, year after year, to generate work.
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This is a working writer’s cliché too. Whenever times get tough, there's always someone — an agent, a manager, a therapist — telling you that all you can do is continue to write. It’s true in that it’s often the only thing you have control over. It’s true in that, hopefully, if you write enough, one of your projects could see the light of day. For me, it’s mostly true in that I don’t know what the fuck else I can do.