December 2020

I spent all of December in the US, home with my family, and it was perfect. I’ve never been so happy to stay mostly confined to one small area, and I loved, loved, loved being with them.

Best Of The Month

I’m not kidding, I really love my family. I was nervous about all of us being at home all the time, but actually it was great fun. We just constantly make each other laugh.

My parents’ house has a big soaking bathtub, and it might be my favorite thing. Spending cold evenings soaking in a hot bath never got old.

My sister and I spent the month swimming laps at an outdoor pool two or three times a week, and WOW I missed swimming. I wish my pool in Istanbul could reopen.

Worst Of The Month

Watching the pandemic get worse from the US was surreal. While I was in California, Turkey released its real (or at least, more realistic) Covid numbers and quickly instituted a curfew and weekend lockdowns. Around the same time, cases in California got really bad and all restaurants and cafes were shut down.

The only place I really felt sad about was Calicraft, the brewery my sister and I love to go to. They had a solid pandemic system in place (everyone was always outdoors and seated at a large distance from other groups) and we managed to visit twice before it was forced to shut down. I’m glad the state put in the restrictions, but I was sad to lose our boozy afternoons.

A week before my flight back to Istanbul, Turkey finally decided to require negative PCR tests within 72 hours of flying. Objectively this is great (especially since I’m one of those people who caught Covid on a plane). Realistically, it was a nightmare, because it was almost impossible to find a place that could guarantee RESULTS in 72 hours. Spoiler for January, but, of the three tests I took at the end of December, only one came back in time for me to fly. Luckily, that’s all that I needed, but it was a massive stress during my last week with my family.

What I’m Loving

Reads: Last year, my family did a December book club (we read Pet Sematary, everyone’s first Stephen King) and we meant to do it again this year… but I’m the only one who started and finished the book. (My mom started but did not finish.) That’s okay, because I enjoyed Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler so much that I didn’t really need an excuse to read it. I was hoping to get my hands on the sequel before I left the US, but no dice— hopefully sometime soon.

I also read Frankenstein for the first time, which was interesting in ways I wasn’t fully expecting. I knew so much about the backstory— Mary Shelley wrote it when she was 18, during the Year Without A Summer, etc— but little about the actual text outside of its presence in pop culture.

Music: I’ve loved the live album of American Utopia, and have been jamming to all things Talking Heads since watching the movie (see below). I’ve also loved the songs “Small Island” by Firestations, “Wildfires” by Sault, and “Wichita Lineman” by Glen Campbell.

Movies/TV: Before I talk about the visual stuff I loved, I would like to give a very special shout-out to a movie I hated. We had high hopes for Mank, because we love Citizen Kane and stories about Old Hollywood, but oh my god I LOATHED the movie. It was meandering and pretentious and boring and felt truly like a waste of time. Every time someone in the family said “Mank,” we would all mock-writhe in agony. The silver lining is that we re-watched Citizen Kane and The Third Man, which are wonderful movies. Mank is not a wonderful movie. Fucking MANK!

What I loved was American Utopia, the David Byrne stage show that was filmed by Spike Lee, which somehow transcended being a filmed stage show. It was cinematic and joyful and exuberant, the whole family was buzzing afterwards. Highly, highly recommended.

We also had Fosse Week, during which we watched the TV show Fosse/Verdon (pretty good!) Cabaret (which I’d never seen before, wonderful!) and All That Jazz (which I’ve seen many times, and is also wonderful). And then Ann Reinking died at the end of the week, which was cosmic and sad and a sign that Fosse Week was over.

We watched a few episodes of Song Exploder, which is a podcast I enjoy that transitioned quite well to TV. My favorite was the episode about “Losing My Religion” by REM.

And serious shout-out to TCM, Turner Classic Movies channel, which always had something strange and interesting playing.

Podcasts: I listened to fewer podcasts in December because I was out of quarantine and constantly surrounded by people, but what I listened to was excellent. Three episodes I’d recommend: “The Great Vaccinator” from Radiolab, about the man who singlehandedly invented the mumps vaccine (and many others), “The Trail” by Ear Hustle, about the a crime and a victim and the justice system, and “The Shop Around The Corner” from Decoder Ring, about the movie You’ve Got Mail and the history of Barnes & Noble that informed it.

The Film Files

I bought some new fresh film, I shot some double exposure rolls with my sister, and I gave a long talk about my photography to a group in Singapore, in conjunction with Nadas in Istanbul. I don’t love Zoom, but the fact that I could do that from California is pretty cool!

Ephemera

Once I got out of quarantine, I started cooking my whole family a shakshouka brunch every Sunday. It was a nice little tradition for slow Sunday mornings, and I will miss it!

Upcoming

January means I’m back in Turkey! And likely not going anywhere else anytime soon, which is completely fine.