2024: Perfect Days. An Imperfect Year.
2024 was a difficult year. Changes happened to my life.
Hard changes. Strange changes. Good changes.
The year was focused on maintaining constancy in life, in work, while facing change.
My mom passed away on April 14th. It was sudden, but not unexpected. She lived an incredibly full life — it’s inspiring. You can read about it here and she would love it if you did, as would I.
We had a good relationship. Her life sets the foundation for mine. I’ve tried to make sense of some of that in a reflection I’ve written here.
The world grew stranger. In crucial ways, it feels like the year a lot of promises were broken. About valuing things like “all men are created equal” or “inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” About “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” or “this land is your land, this land is my land.” About “truth, justice, and the American way.”
Folk song promises. Comic book promises. Declarations.
Of course, those weren’t promises. They were never made.
I haven’t made sense of this yet.
Technology keeps coming for me. Midlife keeps coming for me.
I take pride that I’ve been able to shape a life, a studio, and partnerships in search of a full and honest life. As the tides keep coming, I try to be present within this act. But in truth, I think about the next act, and the act after that, as well.
I’ve been enormously impressed and proud of Erin crafting her next acts, in thoughtful, artful, and inspiring ways. In 2024, finding us both in a UHaul on a late summer morning, an accidental tour of life in Brooklyn, and then out into those amber waves of grain, settling into an isthmus between two lakes and a PhD program in Madison, Wisconsin.
Where Otis died and Nevermind was recorded.
Ending the year with an extended respite. Much needed.
Under the influence of women who know their minds.
Drink sangria in a park and then later when it gets dark we go home.
Through a challenging year, finding richness in creative relationships, time with friends, movies, music, art, travel, and food.
Theater & Movies
The year was bookended by two terrific theater experiences in Brooklyn.
In January, Shayok Misha Chowdury’s Public Obscenities — a funny, thoughtful, and inventively staged exploration of a second-generation Bengali-American returning to Kolkata to explore interconnected themes of family, culture, history, art, and identity. As a first-generation Bengali-American who is perhaps too concerned with culture, history, art, and identity and still feels, somehow, that Kolkata is a spiritual home — this was a little gift.
And in November, post-election, Tiago Rodrigues’ Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists, performed by an excellent Portuguese company as part of BAM’s Next Wave. For two hours, smart, probing, funny, with winking refernces to Brecht.
And then a finale like I’ve never seen — a thirty minute harangue, embodying all the absurdity, logic, illogic, violence, and banal hatefulness of our political moment — a challenge to the audience, leading to walkouts, chanting, singing, jeering, rushing the stage, everything short of killing fascists. Ultimately, perhaps, confusion, rage, despair. Incredibly powerful. Brecht renewed.
Movies
Let’s be honest. I’m watching too many movies. Sometimes two per day.
Weekends with Cinema Rodrigo continues to be something to look forward to. And our studio’s collaboration with new found friends at the Climate Film Festival was a high point creatively of 2024.
Jules with Ben Kingsley is a beautiful, delightful little movie. Everyone should watch it. Godland on Criterion Collection is strange and wonderful. The Quiet Earth is the best New Zealand post-apocalyptic scifi I’ve ever seen.
My patience for TV has become limited — but I loved Scavengers Reign. Psychedelic in all the right ways. And Fantasmas — wishing Julio Torres only unlimited budgets.
1971’s Bushman was a revelation. Los Colonos brutal, but terrific. Totem elegaic, lyrical. The Seed of the Sacred Fig first a tightly wound drama, unraveling into allegory, and then a wild, mythic end. Io Capitano heavy handed, perhaps, but I found it powerful.
Girls Will Be Girls and All We Imagine As Light both wonderful, really exciting to see a nuanced, thoughtful Indian cinema coming to the fore. And the overall insanity of Thangalaan’s mythmaking and visual spectacle was an unexpected suprise.
Eno, a perfect formal experiment to capture his inventiveness and contributions to conteporary culture and creativity.
And my two favorite movies of the year.
La Chimera — magic, funny, weird, artful, feeling natural, other worldly, mundane, and profound. Inventive and lovely from Alice Rohrwacher. And a rakish turn from Josh O’Connor.
Perfect Days — Wim Wenders and Koji Yakusho’s meditation on art, music, architecture, design, truth, and finding depth of meaning in a quiet life. A weighted counterpose to the accumulated detritus of modern life. And watched with a lovely group of people on a rainy March day with Cinema Rodrigo, with afters at Botanica, an old haunt.
Books & Music
The algorithm continues to be a problem, swaddling me in the warm guitar tones of 90s inspired indie rock, itself insired by 80s new wave and 60s psychedelia and pop. Too often finding myself wrapped in this autumn sweater.
Live I enjoyed seeing Mdou Moctar in Greenpoint and Shintaro Sakamoto and Tura Tura Teikoku at Pioneer Works.
I dig the Mk.gee record Two Star & the Dream Police and the overall vibe of this collab with Dijon, once it gets going. Craig Finn’s A Legacy of Rentals broke through. I always enjoy his writing.
Hurray for the Riff Raff’s The Past is Still Alive. And the perfect echoes of Nation of Language’s Strange Disciple.
I read a lot this year, but wedged between flights, car rides, and naps.
James by Percevel Everett was a funny, smart run down the river (of American history, you racists!).
Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo got two of the recommended three readings from me — to untangle it’s layers — plus watching the new film. The novel deftly navigates between dirt and air, darkness and light, poetry and folktale. It’s wonderful in its own right and feels like a counterbalance to almost anything written from the southern tip of the Tierra del Fuego to the icy shoals of the Hudson Bay. Giving voice to the land, to the people, to the spirits, and to the demons.
Two novels in, I’ve become a huge fan of Mathias Énard and enjoyed the sweep of The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild.
And Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith paired with the show on his life at the Whitney — a biography of an outsider with an obsessive intellect who became an important documentarian of American folk culture.
Art
Opened the year with Today’s Yesterday, Yesterday’s Tomorrow by Sung Wha Kim. Playful and moody.
Spent a wonderful day immersed in Toshiko Takaezu’s Worlds Within at the Noguchi Foundation, courtesy of Erin’s obsession.
Enjoyed quietly exploring the wondrous and necessary Art Preserve at the Kohler Center outside of Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
And finished the year with the terrific The Way I See It: Selections from the KAWS Collection at the Drawing Center in SoHo.
Food & Travel
A few good meals. Summer studio dinner at Cafe Mars in Brooklyn. A terrific warm evening with Joe & Margaret at Sawa in Park Slope. Deciding Boston’s alright at the downstairs sushi bar at Temple Records. Enjoying the comforts of Le Deliciouser in Madison. Sitting at the counter for the Classic at Hamburger America.
Quiet beers on moody afternoons at The Scratcher. Saying goodbye to Ray at Commonwealth, my first home bar in Brooklyn, who embodies the indie ethos that I hold dear.
Erin’s Corner
Perfect Days, Conclave, Don’t Look Now, Evil, Somebody Somewhere
Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within at the Noguchi Museum
The Alice Kagawa Parrott papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
Oh, Mary! (preceded by dinner at the Grand Central Oyster Bar)
Travel & Making
The year opened in Brooklyn. A visit to Hollister with Erin before Mom passed. Seeing friends in San Francisco for the first time in many years.
A sudden return to California and a week spent at the hospital in San Jose.
Five weeks in California between Hollister, San Jose, and Folsom.
Return to NYC, and time split between Brooklyn and Rhode Island helping my dad find his footing.
Visits to Cold Spring, Providence, Boston, Maplewood, NJ, and Newport, RI.
Renting a U-Haul and driving out on 80 to Madison, WI. Manitowac, a ferry across Lake Michigan. Ann Arbor. A visist to Taliesen and Spring Green, WI. Eating sausages on Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, seeing Calatrava’s wing and parking lot. Driving through fields of grain, first bucolic, then angrily festooned in red placards to the Kohler Art Preserve in Sheboygan, WI. Christmas in Ann Arbor. New Year’s in New York.
As always: https://www.instagram.com/rdholakia/
2025: Here We Come
25 years in NYC. 25 years since graduating college.
Half a life? A quarter of a life? Too little or too much?
Looking forward to taking walks, watching movies, writing, building community, making art, making friends, making trouble.
Going to make this year sacred and profane. Come find me.
