Three Fun Things for December 31, 2023

Visualizing density, a divisive film, and a museum for a provocative Southern artist.

1. The New York Times’ national desk may be studiously ignoring America’s slow-walk toward apocalypse, but their visual storytelling continues to break new ground. Case in point: This week’s feature on what it would take to accomplish Mayor Eric Adams’ “moonshot” goal of 500,000 new housing units in New York over the next decade.

The piece efficiently explains its premise before getting to the good stuff: New York (and cities generally, I would add) is great not “because of its buildings,” but “because it provides people with the opportunity to build better lives.” Then, using a series of map layers, it explains where this new housing could be built, zooming in on a particular block, then another, to show not just what “density” would look like on a map but what housing would look like on specific streets. The result is a visual argument—one that I find at least as compelling as a wordy (but still photo-packed) op/ed making the case against preserving cities in amber.

These visuals are revelatory for 2023. They’ll probably look silly, even amateurish, in a few years, which is actually what’s most exciting: Visual storytelling will not only get better rapidly, I believe it will become more accessible to smaller publications that lack the NYT’s massive data visualization staff (this piece alone includes a dozen credited authors), making it easier for people with less technical expertise to tell similar stories in other parts of the country.

2. I suspect the Venn diagram of people who absolutely loved May December and those who absolutely loved Saltburn consists of two adjacent circles that touch but don’mt quite overlaps, because the sensibility of these two films, which have both been described as “camp,” is fundamentally different. I’ll tilt my hand here; I loved Saltburn, and found May December hard to watch. Going into May December, I expected to laugh, or at least cringe through parted fingers, based on reviews describing it as (for example) an “uncomfortable” film that was nonetheless “light on its feet” and left audiences “cackling.” More power to those viewers, I guess, but I found it joyless and a little obvious; the brightest spot was actor Charles Melton, who plays Gracie’s (Julianne Moore) husband Joe like an adolescent in a too-big suit, smoking weed on the roof with his kid and shambling around in a life he didn’t ask for.

Saltburn, in contrast, was an absolute riot from start to finish, with Barry Keoghan perfectly cast as Oliver, the vaguely menacing fish-out-of-water character who latches on to Jacob Elordi’s Felix, an aloof, wealthy Adonis whose family’s estate, Saltburn, is at the center of this extremely eventful film. I don’t want to give too much away about the moderately twisty, very twisted plot—just know that you may never look at bathwater, or bulimia, the same way again.

A voiceover-style framing device throughout the film leads to a reveal at the end that may or may not be shocking, depending on how much the class warfare, abundant bodily fluids, and constant sexual provocations have inured you to Saltburn’s vibe. The final scene reminded me of an equally decadent (and delightfully perverse) TV show about a certain 18th-century Russian ruler, but with full-frontal male nudity (for a change!) Saltburn may lack a coherent message, and it certainly has no heroes, but it’s fun as hell.

3. This is admittedly niche—as in, only accessible to anyone who happens to be visiting the Southeastern US—but if you are within 100 miles or so of Ocean Springs, MS, there’s a museum you absolutely shouldn’t miss: The Walter Anderson Museum of Art.

Billed (by the museum) as “The South’s Most Elusive Artist,” Anderson was a painter and sculptor who, though a married father of four kids, was largely itinerant, cycling and boating his way around the Gulf Coast, from New Orleans to the islands off Mississippi and painting the nature he saw around him. While his proto-psychedelic paintings of Horn Island are probably his most famous works, I fell in love with the watercolors he painted on ordinary 8-by-11-inch paper, including an alligator gar (pictured above) that swims confidently across three offset sheets and a series of composed dead-wildlife portraits that almost spill off the page.

Anderson sounds like he could be a real pain in the ass—his father-in-law forbade him to paint murals on the interior of the “great hall” in his family home, so Anderson painted murals on paper and tacked them to the walls—but his work is otherworldly, and this museum is an unmissable Gulf Coast gem.