Yearnotes 2023

My year in perspective, full of new things, old things, and things unfolding and emergent…

Sounds:

• I bought more music this year, mostly on bandcamp. I’ve watched with dismay as yet another fairly ethical internet platform is being picked apart, but for right now, I think it’s the best place to buy music on-line.
• I bought digital albums by Neurosis, Sharon Van Etten, Joe Rainey, Parannoul, Anna & Elizabeth, Zeal and Ardor, X , The Sadies, SUNN O))), Songs:Ohia, and Alvvays. I also acquired IRL albums by Wipers, Lead Belly, and Rapture of the Deep.
• I was particularly taken with
  • Zeal & Ardor who somehow manage to combine gospel and scandinavian extreme metal into something intoxicating,
  • SUNN O))), who make sludge metal that is so abstract it ends up being transcendant and glorious, and
  • The Sadies, who make a spooky, mysterious roots rock that I can’t stop listening to
• Podcasts fill up a lot of my mental real-estate. My ongoing subscription list continues to be Pseudopod, Explorers Wanted, Know Your Enemy, Why is this Happening?, WTF, 5-4, Unclear and Present Danger, the Memory Palace, Weird Studies, Double Threat, Deconstructed, and Our Opinions are Correct.
  • This year, I added Slow Burn, whose discussion of the life of Clarence Thomas was fascinating and clarifying.
  • Though I’ve listened to it before, I have also enjoyed the newest season of What Had Happened Was, featuring the one and only ?uestlove. That show is a masterclass in Hip-hop history, creativity, and culture, and Open Mike Eagle and Quest bring out the best in each other.

Screen:

• I watched a lot of movies and TV this year. Some of this was due to some new services (thanks Mom and Dad, for the Criterion subscription), and some of it was just chance, good content and enthusiasm.
• I watched Poker Face, We are Lady Parts, Welcome to Wrexham, Glass Onion, the 39 Steps, The Net, His Girl Friday, Computer Chess, Cure, The Lady Vanishes, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Violent Night, Synchronic, Tower Heist, The Thing from the Factory by the Field, Something in the Dirt, Under the Silver Lake, The Lighthouse, Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse, Color of Night, American Born Chinese, Last Action Hero, The Sandman, I Am Mother, The Little Mermaid, Bringing Up Baby, Talk to Me, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, Clifford, Kill List, the Bride of Frankenstein, Wolf Walkers, Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me, Sneakers, The Sting, Wish, Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie, the Green Knight, Elemental, Four Brothers, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
  • Poker Face is as good as everyone says, as is Welcome to Wrexham.
  • I watched so many great films this year that it’s hard to pick favorites, but Alanna and I were charmed and delighted by the Hitchcock and Hawks movies we watched. They’re the DNA of whole genres of films I grew up on and still love.
  • I am still thinking about Clifford. What a strange and totally singular film, wrapped in a completely mundane package.
  • I also loved Cure, Violent Night (great job, Pat and Josh!), Synchronic, Something in the Dirt, Kill List, and the Sting.

Books:

• I read 38 books this year. This is a little low for me; I’m normally somewhere in the 40s or 50s. But several of the books I read were massive and intense works whose time commitment was in relationship to how satisfying they were.
  • The most eventful read for me this year was the luxurious swim I took through Ursula K. Leguin’s masterful and brilliant “Books of Earthsea”. I liked them so much that I immediately started reading them with my 10 year old, and that was an experience I’ll never forget.
  • I also hiked my way up the mountain that is “The Dawn of Everything”, which like all of the late David Graeber’s books, was problematic, complicated, beautifully written, and endlessly good to think with.
  • Shorter books that have stuck with me include Cherlie Dimaline’s “The Marrow Thieves”, Brian Evenson’s “A Collapse of Horses”, David Stradling’s “Making Mountains”, and Shirley Jackson’s “We have always lived in the Castle”

Work:

• I tried very hard to make big things happen at the Museum this year. Right now so much of what happened feels small, but the mightiest rivers all start as streams, I guess.
• I curated “Velocity and Position: The Human Figure in Motion and at Rest”, a major exhibit of artwork from the Museum’s collections dedicated to the moving, active human body. It’s a great exhibit and I’m very proud of it.
• I supervised the installation of a student-curated exhibit “A Deep Dive into a Large Ocean: Tourism, Tradition, and Transformation in Micronesian Culture”.
• I developed a draft plan for an update of the Museum’s archaeological exhibit, thanks to consultation we did with Indigenous Concepts Consulting last year. I’m hoping to begin installing it in the Spring.
• We acquired three pieces from Jason Medicine Eagle Martinez for the Museum’s collection, after the conclusion of his wonderful “Hybrid: The Kiva Show”, which came down in April.
• Hartwick’s Board of Trustees finally approved a new collections policy for the Museum, written by Doug Kendall and myself. It streamlines our acquisition and de-accession processes, and brings the Museum up-to-date legally and ethically. We held our first Collections Committee meeting under this new policy, and will hopefully use it to effect good things for the Museum in the future.
• I did a lot of work furthering the Museum’s repatriation obligations to Indigenous communities. We completed the legal repatriation of a scalp lock taken from a Ute person and in the Museum’s possession since 1914. I have also been actively consulting with several other tribes with cultural and lineal interests in the Museum’s collections, with the goal of collaboration, relationship-building, and repatriation. It’s slow, uneven, and emotionally fraught work, but I’m proud to be doing it.
• Once again, I taught Collections Management, and Introduction to North American Material Culture. I also gave a few great guest lectures in politics, art, and art history classes that challenged my communication skills in new ways.
• I coordinated or implemented some campus beautification, including decorating the President’s new office with artwork from our collection.
• Our Museum programming expanded quite a bit this year. With the help of some summer workers and interns, we put together a program for 4th graders which focuses on Indigenous history, archaeology, and general Museum-going, in a way that is fun and educational. In June, we brought in kids from Valleyview Elementary School, and it went so well that we invited the classes from the other two elementary schools. In November, we hosted students from Greater Plains Elementary, and we’ll be hosting Riverside (and Valleyview again!) in the Spring. It has been wonderful to have so many children’s voices in the Yager Museum.
• We also held our Summer crafternoons, several receptions, the Horror in the Museum, several concerts, and “The Search for Up”, a community event.

Self:

• At the suggestion of my good friend Dan Andrlik (and with his substantial and invaluable assistance), I migrated my personal website over to a static form, using AWS. This is technical, but it allows me a lot more control over the look and feel of things, and means that I own my own content. You’re reading it right now!
• I made myself more of a presence on Mastadon, which seems to be less of a complete sewer than most other social media platforms. Follow me @whenelvisdied@wandering.shop
• I continued doing things to take care of my body and my heart. I started biking again, and have been carting Hazel around with the help of a new bike trailer. My visits to the gym have become a regular habit anchoring my week, as have my conversations with my therapist. I lost around 17 pounds this year, and though this didn’t help my cholesterol (hello Statins), I feel a lot better, more able and stronger.
• I spent some more time on the Black Trowel Collective’s Microgrants committee, which, along with the rest of the Collective, remains an inspiring and humbling association in my life.
• It wasn’t a great year, for a lot of people, for a lot of reasons. I looked away from many of the dark forces tightening their grasp on this world. That’s a privilege, I know; many people don’t have the luxury of looking away from politics or violence. I’m aware of this, and thinking about how to act differently and more assertively to intervene in the world next year.
• I still try and write when I can, and I have been playing some electric music with a group of academics in Oneonta. I am fairly satisfied that writing and making art is something I do for myself, so this year I let myself off the hook a bit for not making more headway on any particular project.

Friends and Family:

• I celebrated 20 years of having Alanna Rudzik in my life. I’m so lucky that we met, and fell in love, and made a life together.
• I watched my son turn 10 (double digits!), and grow and mature in a number of astonishing and inspiring ways. He grew up such much this year, taking a solo-trip out to Iowa, another year at sleepaway camp, and growing more skillful on the trumpet.
• My daughter will turn 5 in a few weeks, and her humor, energy, and enthusiasm are endlessly infectious. She also started ballet this year, which remains a source of delight for her and me. I also spent a wonderful morning at her pre-school playing the banjo and the guitar, which was a great old time.
• I lost three of the great teachers of my life this year: Francis McMann, Paul Mullins, and Bob Paynter. All three profoundly shaped how I think about the world and how I try to act in it. All three were also, in their own ways, my friends, and I feel the lack of them in my life all the time. I was honored to eulogize Bob at his memorial in August, and the event itself was a beautiful coming together, connecting me with old friends and colleagues and comrades, across time and space.
• We took a few good trips this year:
  • We visited Six Flags Great Escape, in Lake George, NY. I’m not the theme-parker that I used to be, but it was exhilarating to be there with my two kids, who at up every minute.
  • We made a wonderful return trip to Gloucester and the North Shore of Massachusetts. We also visited Mountaintop Arboretum in the Catskills, which was beautiful and fun to explore, as well as the breath-taking Kaaterskill Falls. We also took a brief trip to the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca.
  • Earlier this year, we finally made a long-planned trip to Montreal, Kahnawake, Wendake, Quebec City, and Burlington, VT. It was my first time in several of those places, and despite an intense snow storm, we had a great time.
• We hosted a visit from our beloved Toronto cousins and, later on, my cousin Greg and his partner Kristen.
• My folks came out to stay with us while Alanna spent two weeks in Mexico. I’m very proud of her for tackling a big new project, and it was a nice excuse to spend time with my parents, and have them spend time with the kids.

Part of making a yearnotes forces me to reckon with things in process, undone, or unfinished. I let all of those things that I can’t definitively conclude weigh me down, and fill me with guilt. It’s easy to condemn myself for this, but it also necessarily simplifies and diverts from what is a more complicated truth; that life has no firm breaks or finishing points, the sun inexorably rising and setting, as Baldwin said. There is always more on the horizon.

It’s also an easy way for me to look past all the things in my life that are constant and embedded: being a great parent to my kids, being an attentive and supportive partner and husband to my wife, making a family out of far-flung relatives, forging and strengthening friendship and comradeship to the many threads of people that make up my social fabric. Neither lists nor years can capture or contain these vital, subtle moments and forces.

So, here’s to another year of small and hazy moments, of not finishing things, of walking towards a horizon we can’t quite see, hand in hand with those we love and with care and hope for everyone on the journey with us.