That Was 2024

I was hopeful, if not naive enough to be confident, that enough people were sufficiently fed up with That Fucking Guy to keep him from returning to the White House. But he will, of course, be returning, and while this time his victory isn’t the shock to the system it was in 2016, his popular vote win, a hair shy of a mandate, still stings plenty. The Democratic Party’s subsequent soul-searching might be morbidly comical if it had any possibility of a reasonable outcome, but it’s now clear that there simply is no reasoning with this electorate. I won’t pretend the Democrats fielded an acceptable presidential candidate in 2024, but the fact remains that even if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were both dead and buried, either one would be an objectively better choice than That Fucking Guy. Every single person who voted for him is a fool, or a degenerate, or both, as is every single eligible voter who declined to participate, regardless of their allegiance. So now it’s perfectly clear that that’s what we are: a nation of fools and degenerates. And the consequences will be dire.

Projects

Plus Equals

My algorithmic art zine turned an annual profit for the first time, thanks to a speaking gig at University of Delaware and my failure to produce a new issue, thus avoiding the cost of a print run. I was rejected from five events (including one I had tabled at previously), and accepted at five others, in Boston, Providence, Philadelphia, and Berkeley Springs, WV. The rejections were discouraging, and the acceptances were comparatively small potatoes. The annual revenue was the lowest yet, and that unprecedented annual profit came in at just under $36. My overall profit margin for Plus Equals is still deep in the hole, and given my ever-slowing publishing trajectory, I’m removing the word “quarterly” from the project.

But hey, it’s not all about profit, prestige, or volume. Issue #8 is almost ready to emerge from my sketchbook, and my first event for 2025 is lined up for February. Onward.

Once in a Lifetime

This was a first for me: To introduce a screening I curated for the Philadelphia Psychotronic Film Society, I designed, produced, and hosted a little game show exploring the weird world of Lifetime movies, which was a ton of fun (for me, at least, and hopefully the players and audience as well). The game isn’t playable online, but my detailed case study will give you a good sense of the experience.

Stripes

After filling an entire sketchbook with symmetrical-but-not compositions of reflective, interwoven, horizontal and vertical stripes, I made an app to allow me to automate aspects of these explorations (and cut down on the Sharpie fumes).

Robtober 2024

This year’s month-long horror movie marathon opened with some deliciously evil responsive display type (a modified version of DJR’s Fit font), befitting the satanic theme of the Exorcist and Omen films that dominated the lineup.

Beyond Tellerrand

My second opening title sequence for a Beyond Tellerrand conference had a connect-the-dots theme, for which I created every last element, including the music and the typeface (which I intend to make available as an actual font in the coming months).

Art

It was a less frenzied year for art absorption than the past few, and for some reason I stopped cataloging my museum/gallery visits in the second half of the year. Of the stuff in the first half I did note, these were the highlights, especially the first and third:

• Edna Andrade: Space Dreams (Locks Gallery)
• Richard King: Drift (The Artist Studio Gallery at Park Towne Place)
• Josef Koudelka: Industry (Pace Gallery)
• Mary Cassatt at Work (Philadelphia Museum of Art)

Books

My long-form reading habits, though still not quite where I want them to be, improved in 2024, and I took in 14 books, half of them by Patricia Highsmith, who I’ve wanted to revisit ever since reading Those Who Walk Away years ago, and since seeing Carol, Todd Haynes’s beautiful 2016 adaptation of The Price of Salt. Other highlights included a collection of short stories by old favorite Dashiell Hammett, a biography of Sol LeWitt, a long overdue read of Dostoevsky’s essential Crime and Punishment, and Daniel Kehlmann’s mind-bending horror novella, You Should Have Left. A full accounting of the books I read from 2024 forward will be included in my forthcoming redesigned site’s new reading diary.

Film

I watched 146 films in 2024, and unsurprisingly, nearly half of them were provided by Criterion Channel and PhilaMOCA. I also started taking more advantage of $6 movies on Mondays at the Philadelphia Film Society, which I hope to do a lot more of in 2025.

Of the new films I saw, here are three that stuck out, in alphabetical order:

Anora

Acclaimed director Sean Baker’s winning streak continues, focusing on yet another sex worker in a Safdie-esque dash through both the toniest and the seediest corners of Brooklyn.

Flipside

This quasi-sequel to Chris Wilcha’s debut documentary from 2000, the minor hit The Target Shoots First, delves into how his subsequent career as a filmmaker was dominated by a disappointing mix of commercial work and unfinished passion projects, one of which is a profile of Flipside, the New Jersey record store he worked at as a teen. But as one review puts it, this film is “about a record store like Moby Dick is about a whale,” and its scatterbrained and poignant portrait of a Gen X artist’s midlife crisis gave me a lot to identify with.

The Substance

Like last year’s Barbie, this is a fun feminist satire with a bad habit of saying exactly what it means. Unlike last year’s Barbie, it’s stuffed to the gills with delightfully disgusting body horror, and features bold, fearless performances from Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley.

Music

I went to just 11 shows (Amanda Mole, Snooper, and Slowdive were the standouts) and bought 23 records. Of the new ones, here are three favorites:

Maya Shenfeld: Under the Sun

Electro-acoustic compositions forming ambient soundscapes and retro-futurist scores for imaginary arthouse sci-fi films. Makes me yearn for a whole ecosystem of composers working exclusively with choirs and synthesizers. It’s haunting, fascinating stuff, an excellent followup to 2022’s excellent In Free Fall, and after many replays, I have yet to tire of it.

Julie Christmas: Ridiculous and Full of Blood

Female vocalists in heavy music are relatively rare, and the ones who can complement the music’s inherent aggression with a broad expressive range and a uniquely authentic voice are even rarer. So I’m not sure how Julie Christmas, who’s been active in various underground bands for 20 years, is only just now storming onto my radar, but I’m glad she is. This is only her second solo offering since 2010, and it grabbed my attention effortlessly.

Whores: War

Atlanta’s noise rock stalwarts doing what they do best and once again begging the question: Are men OK? Ever since “Baby Bird” from 2013’s Clean declared “Nothing works out like I planned / I don’t know what it takes to be a modern man,” Whores’ surgical sonic assault has been shaped to a large degree by a spiraling frustration with the conflicting expectations of 21st century masculinity, and War is no different. While it’s got more pep and less sludge than previous outings, it’s every bit as loudly cathartic.

Ambitions for 2025

Revisiting my 2024 goals:

• Prepping for grad school applications: My 2024 began with a renewed daily sketchbook habit, which stayed strong for nearly five months. Some good ideas came of it, but none have yet developed enough to contribute to a portfolio sufficient for application to an MFA program.
• Painting: I didn’t put down paint on a very regular basis, and after January, I’m not sure I put down any at all.
• RobWeychert.com V7: The aforementioned daily sketchbook habit hit a wall in mid-May, and that wall was my long-running website redesign. For whatever reason, both things couldn’t happen at the same time, as my recommitment to the redesign was all-consuming, and for the remainder of the year, I gave countless hours to it (and in the process, mostly stopped posting on V6). I had hoped to launch it today, five years to the day from when I started it, and it is so close, but not close enough. If there’s any justice, it will finally meet its public this month.

As a result, here’s what’s up for 2025:

• Finding a job: I’m hitting pause on grad school plans to let my artistic ambitions continue to percolate at their own pace, and in the meantime, freelance life is eating me alive, as is its wont. Maybe someday I’ll will into existence a knack for running a business, but that day is not today, so it’s time for me to once again seek full-time employment. I’m not eager to discover how that will play out amid my diminished enthusiasm for my profession, but for now my adorably naive plan is to launch my site redesign and see if it catches the attention of any kindred spirits with employment opportunities befitting an idealistic dinosaur like myself.
• Painting’s out, printing’s in: For a number of reasons, much of my work that’s been slowly taking shape these last few years makes more sense as prints than paintings. It’s more practical from a production standpoint and I like that the multiples inherent in printmaking allow the work to be more affordable and accessible. So I’m refocusing my priorities on building an exposure unit and establishing a sustainable screenprinting process. That said, I don’t want efficiency or accessibility or anything other than what’s best for the work to be the primary motivation for this move, and I don’t want to lose the meditative benefits of spending hours alone with acrylics and good music, so I aim to find a way to make this a process in which I can lose myself in a similar way.