Watch 🎥 📺 (/visit!): Sundance Film Festival
I attended Sundance for the first time this weekend: a long time wish. It combines some of my favorite things: films, Park City, UT, and people who love creativity and stories. It’s been a blast, and you can see all my reviews on Letterboxd.
I’d encourage going if you’ve ever been interested. We only used the waitlist (a few tricks to learn, but ultimately not too much trouble) and I saw about a dozen movies. It’s a special treat to see movies with little to know preconceptions going in (aside: this is why I don’t watch movie trailers and neither should you). I can’t imagine what it was like when Before Sunrise premiered here 30 years ago (!) this week. I love movies, and these days I am especially grateful for them as I seek deeper quality of attention. They’re one of my favorite ways to do one thing at a time.
As for specific movies: I’m eagerly awaiting tonight’s premiere of Alex Russell’s Lurker. He wrote one of my favorite TV episodes ever — The Bear, Season 2, Ep. 7 — and it is his feature and directorial debut.
Otherwise, I enjoyed Twinless, Bunnylovr, and If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, but my favorite was Max Walker-Silverman’s Rebuilding, starring Josh O’Connor (keep buying stocks, btw). It’s a graceful, slow, and moving story about a Colorado cowboy whose ranch burns and who must figure out how to keep going. Obviously, this comes at a painful time for the people of Los Angeles, but I am hopeful that it will be a part of the healing and hope-building process for many of them and many others.
The director in the Q&A after:
That it will burn again does not diminish—and in fact only fertilizes the present.
Listen 🎧🎼: Dialectic #7: Toby Shorin - The Shapes of Culture
Toby Shorin has spent his career studying culture, how it forms, and where it might be going. He writes about how we search for search for, make, and share meaning. In this conversation, we talk about how that theme runs across his half decade+ of work and discuss the various social forms, practices, and shapes of cultural production. I hope this conversation inspires you to explore of Toby’s incredible writing. My two personal favorites are Squad Wealth and Life After Lifestyle.
This episode is available on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube. Transcript available here.
Read 📖📄: It's authenticity all the way down by Spencer Kier
I’ve been thinking about authenticity a lot lately, in part because of a complement from a friend on my birthday this year. She said that I’m one of the most authentic people she knows, and that I make her want to be more of herself in my company. I have always been confused about authenticity, and whether it is real, or something to aspire to. But she was clearly on to something—a few years ago, I wrote down a WIP personal mission statement: to help people be true to themselves.
Spencer wrote about authenticity in a way I find quite empowering. It starts with distinguishing between internal (authenticity) and external (integrity):
Internally, regarding our understanding of and relationship to self, we call this alignment with The Truth “authenticity”
at the border where our interiority meets the external world, alignment with Truth is what we’d call integrity — or where self-understanding is aligned with external expression and actions.
In this sense, authenticity and integrity are both attributes to seriously aspire to. And based on that definition, authenticity must come first.
He writes about where and how to seek it—by not lying to yourself and following energy. Stuff I’ve written plenty about here. Often, this process needs to begin with finding signal in a world of noise, telling you who or how to be:
In reality, most people don’t know who they are because their sense of self is like a compass surrounded by a bunch of closer magnets, distorting their sense of true north.
To find authenticity, you have to shed these weaker signals and tune into that singular one (seemingly) far off, deep inside the depths of your being.
And of course, it is about inputs, not the external selves we have ideas of being. This can be fuzzy, and is what leads to so many misconceptions about authenticity. We often don’t know who it is we actually are. Its about about becoming our ideal self by attuning to what is internally true.
Authenticity is about input alignment — not the output and reception. It’s about pure, unbridled self-expression — not the result.
“You have the right to work, but for the work’s sake only. You have no right to the fruits of work. Desire for the fruits of work must never be your motive in working. (…) Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work done without such anxiety, in the calm of self-surrender. (…) They who work selfishly for results are miserable.” — Bhagavad Gita
Authenticity is a purpose unto itself. It’s complete and self-fulfilling. It’s detached from what follows. The alignment is enough.
May alignment, self-expression, being true—be enough for each of us.
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