Rabbit Rabbit #12: What Happens at 3:15

9/1/23

Miranda July in The Future

On Thursday night last week, I was at work and received two photos in quick succession from two different friends. One was of Crugg with Molly, my best friend from summer camp, and the other was of Jessica with my childhood friend Casey and her boyfriend Dylan. Molly had run into Crugg at the East Village bar where she works, while Jessica was attending a surprise party Casey threw for Dylan. Five people I love from different areas of my life, meeting and talking and excitedly documenting it for me. Look who I’m with! Because I was working until eleven, I had to miss the surprise party, and I haven’t seen Molly in four years, but I wasn’t at all jealous not to be present for these moments. I think at another time in life I would have been. But now I could have leaped over the moon at the thought of them.

September 17th will mark one year since I moved to New York. I have always been obsessed with time –the passing/keeping of it, when it stops, its alleged ability to heal all wounds– and so cannot but strive for some reflection. Anyone tracking their progress as a person can attest to the fact that, more often than not, it feels like we’ve done nothing. Sometimes it’s only in talking with someone else that we realize we’ve done anything at all. It became quite clear to me after my first month here that things would happen at a much slower pace than I’d expected, despite my rapidly going about trying to make them happen.

I realized the other day that it took Jessica and me nine months to make our short film, and it’s nowhere near finished. We have about two months of editing, a premiere party, and a bunch of festival submissions left to go. On the third day of our shoot, we filmed at a photography studio for a scene where my character gets headshots taken. She goes on a rampage, monologuing to the photographer about a play she’d starred in during college. It occurred to me during a take that we’d written this wild dialogue whilst cackling after dinner one night in December at the Moxy hotel lounge, just before saying goodbye for Christmas. I missed the cold and the moody lounge lighting, markers of a time when this project was a tiny, inconceivable dot in the distance. Now here we were, in the middle of August with a crew of people we didn’t then know, willing it into corporeal existence.

I believe that the way one thing leads to another –the ways I find myself at the curious hand of fortune– are miraculous in nature. I don’t wish to knight my past experiences with a distasteful preciousness, but rather remind myself to trust my natural responses to situations and opportunities. If something doesn’t sound like a good idea to me, it’s probably not. (Last fall I narrowly escaped a few rabid talent agency scams.) Likewise, if something piques my interest, I ought to explore it with all my might. Our short film and forthcoming endeavors would not exist without this dance between control and spontaneity, chance meeting and deliberate connection. It’s not as simple as dominos, but is it that much more complicated?

The work of Miranda July comes to mind. How to describe her? Later this month I’ll see her give a presentation at the SVA Theater about her favorite pop cultural moments representing “uncertainty.” July’s books, films, and multimedia projects awaken in me the sense that people and the universe are not dissimilar to the cartoon waves we drew as kids (and adults if you lack drawing skills like me.) Two vast expanses of white meet at a squiggly line, ebbing and flowing into one another and informing how the whole picture comes together. July’s work has been described –forgive me, as I forget exactly where– as taking place “a few feet off the ground.” Not quite surrealist, but certainly not a mirror image of plain old reality either. It would be tricky to imitate a July character verbatim, but I frequently notice myself recalling an original gesture or a phrase of hers in my daily life.

It is a favorite pastime of  Sophie and Jason, the early-thirties couple at the center of July’s sophomore feature film The Future, to pretend-stop time. They do it on the couch, limbs entwined typing away at their laptops, and then freeze mid-sentence for minutes at a time. Whoever breaks first loses. One night, however, when their relationship turns tumultuous and a planned cat adoption goes astray, Jason accidentally stops time for real. Sophie (played by July with her singular-yet-expert literalness) is about to admit that she’s cheated on him when Jason puts his hand to her forehead and the whole room freezes. Then the full moon begins talking to him. “You can’t just keep switching hands forever,” it chides. “Do you think if I moved my hand it would be morning by now?” Jason asks. “Morning?” the moon replies, “It’d be Friday! It’s been 3:14 for days now. It could be okay. You don’t know what will happen at 3:15.”

In a way, the four-day shoot for my short film was like micro-dosing the year I’ve spent in New York, and it’s all defined by the fact that you never do know what might happen at 3:15. Sarah Polley says her job as a film director is almost entirely problem-solving. Things change so quickly, and last-minute decisions can turn out to be the best decisions. Much of the quotidian is predictable, but the in-betweens, who you meet and how you get somewhere, facilitate what Dickinson once called “internal difference– Where the Meanings are.” When we answer to what compels, we find that we are indeed a few feet above the ground. What to do then?

Katie Crutchfield, mastermind and voice behind the musical project Waxahatchee, has a song I adore called “The Eye.” The song tells the story of an artist in love both with her creative process and partner. “To possess something arcane, oh it's a heavy weight,” she lyricizes. The chorus goes, “As we wait for lightning to strike / We are enthralled by the calling of the eye.” In an interview with Pitchfork, Crutchfield stated that the eye symbolizes “the mind’s eye,” the call to be creative, but there’s a layering of storm imagery here that draws attention to the eye of a storm, the placid center inside a hurricane of ideas and big plans. One might presume the singer fancies herself a mad genius, burdened by the weight of her emotional and intellectual gifts. The song is not smug, however, due to a short, instrumental break exactly three minutes in. My favorite part: a gorgeous, wistful, six-note bass solo strummed out twice, like a massive exhale. The interlude serves as a reminder that words are inadequate to express internal difference when things are the most sublime. Within the arc of the song, it’s as though Crutchfield didn’t expect to stop herself, but finds she cannot go on before taking a pause to marvel.

Jason and Sophie fake frozen

That’s not to say I walk around all day constantly in awe of the world, struck dumb by every stoop, brick, and windowsill. More often than not I hurry, or panic because ants have invaded my living room (that actually stopped, or I would have moved cross-country by now.) Sometimes, though, I am paused, and it feels as though I am in the eye about which Crutchfield sings. It happened the other day when I walked around the 1/3-mile loop at Maria Hernandez Park a bunch of times. Something about running into the same people again and again was equally comforting and hilarious. I thought about waving to a greyhound dog walker I passed about six times. I didn’t, but the thought made me laugh. I suppose I haven’t returned to my opening anecdote about the photos of my intermixed friends I received when I was entirely happy and not wary of missing out. You sense the connection, no?

What felt stifling about high school and college, shuttling between here and there, was that I felt I occupied various closed worlds, locked up and stackable, never blending; dizzying, forced, and flukey whenever they did. Crugg’s friend from college, Jackie, now lives in Madison and I told them to meet my friend Jane from Oberlin, and now they hang out and text each other and have shared friends. It’s so fun. If I wanted, I could drop from a cargo plane into the middle of Madison and not feel unmoored. I think that’s what we’d like most, to feel a little at home wherever we are in the world. What a joy when our beloved friends fold into one another’s lives. It’s enough to make one wonder what will happen in another year.

P.S. Recommendations: Jessie Gaynor’s piece about TV grief for Dirt, this fantastic new Slow Pulp song, & a hilarious Kieran Culkin interview from 1993 (it seems he has not changed.)