Schwarzfaherer (1992) dir. Pepe Danquart

Winning the Best Short Oscar must be a little like winning a few grand in the lottery. It’s a great experience, gives your career a positive boost, but it probably isn’t going to fundamentally change your life. No exception for Pepe Danquart, winner at the 1994 Oscars ceremony alongside Stephen Spielberg (Schindler’s List), Tom Hanks (Philadelphia) and Nick Park (The Wrong Trousers; short-subject animators seem to have a slightly better trajectory post-win). Luckily, the advent of the Internet means your accomplishment can find life beyond Oscar trivia.

That paragraph (originally broken unnecessarily into two) is the opening text of the very first Lunch Link, then cheekily called The Ploughman’s Lunch Link, which appeared exclusively in the comments almost exactly eight years ago. I was rather silly about the career of Danquart who had a number of additional credits to his name and has added three more features since I wrote that. I was also writing from a confused malaise a month out from the notorious 2016 election, musing on the way the silent bus passengers in the short both allow the woman’s awful tirade to continue, then use their silence to damn her in the end. I’m getting over my naive assumption that with patience racists would disappear on their own, consumed by the silent crowds, when I write “Well, 1994, I’d like you to meet 2016.”

Now meet 2024. And I won’t dwell on the most depressing historical parallels, but rather on the weight of the years, the process of unearthing this missive from the archives of The Solute, hundreds of pages each with a dozen article titles, collected over the past decade (it wasn’t for another five months after this that I made my first above-the-line post, luckily I remembered my second Lunch Link in the comments was “The Junkie’s Christmas,” narrowing down the month I started). I shuffled past an astonishingly eclectic collection of articles and thousands of conversations and jokes (we all seem to have had more time to post back then, even before the pandemic). I saw names that haven’t appeared in ages. I felt that old bastard Nostalgia on my shoulder, but I know the truer lesson of the search, that we’ve been through change so many times we forget how often it happens. The influx of new blood (including yours truly) when the Dissolve went away, the establishing of the daily schedule which formalized the regular morning threads (happened a lot later than you’d think). The features and writers that started and finished definitively or more often trailed off… I suppose there’s still a possibility I’ll put a tag on that Fit to Print series.

And, as time spent sifting through the pages looking for one specific comment can attest, it’s all still here, and come Hell or server failure it won’t disappear, not entirely. And this won’t be the last Lunch Link. Luckily “the advent of the Internet” – as a writer who could use several more years of practice might call it – means your thoughts, opinions, tastes, and your friendships can find life beyond what you might expect on a panicky December morning when you sound your voice, simply hoping to hear one in return. Thank you for the voices, and I’m looking forward to hearing them more.