The One Where I Waited Too Long To Write Much About The Decade That Just Ended
Hello e-people.
Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends. The newsletter lives on in the new decade. I’ve been a-okay this January, mostly dealing with weird weather swings, keeping up with the new season of The Bachelor, reading Uncanny Valley, and watching movies.
Other than that, I’ve been working. My favorite piece I’ve written in the past month is, without a doubt, this feature on Scary Movie — a 1991 cult classic starring John Hawkes, directed by Daniel Erickson, and produced by Paducah native Keith Brunson. The film was recently plucked from obscurity by the American Genre Film Archive, given its first physical release, and nationally broadcast on Turner Classic Movies.
As always, many thanks for coming over to my digital abode and letting me rant to you about all of the things. If you know someone who would dig this newsletter, please share it. If you’ve come here without this thing winding up in your inbox, please subscribe.
Let’s get down to business.
READS
— Music writer Grayson Haver Currin spent five months on the Appalachian Trail this year. During that time he mostly listened to audiobooks and no records. The experience helped him reframe the concept of the year-end list, which he considers “an easy way to check in with other listeners, to step out of your headphones for a moment and get a glimpse of what other people have liked, of what has dazzled them in their area of interest.” They’re little “field guides,” neatly packaged tours of an individual’s listening year. Tastes and favorites change over time and constraining yourself to picking one before the calendar turns over isn’t that important (though I find it an enjoyable process).
— Manuel Lazic’s take on the star-making year Florence Pugh had in 2019. Between the talent Pugh displayed in Midsommar, Fighting With My Family, Little Drummer Girl, and Little Women I think we’ll be seeing her name in lights for a long time.
— Molly Lambert, one of my favorite online people, wrote about The Zone — a pop-up museum experience in Los Angeles that offers a retrospective of Britney Spears career in the form of music video set recreations — for the LA Times. “The Zone, I came to realize, is Britney’s Graceland. It allows fans to pay worship to her image and idea, or just indulge in their own nostalgia for what now seems like simpler, more innocent times.” Lambert is one of the three hosts of Night Call, the best podcast about spooky stuff, erotic thrillers, and deep sea creatures in the whole podcast biz.
— I really appreciated Amanda Mull’s Atlantic piece on decades and how the spiritual ones matter more than the literal ones. “Let go of the restrictions of the calendar, though, and it’s a decade that never began in the first place, because the 2000s never really ended. Instead, whatever distinct era we’re in now has been going on for nearly 20 years as a single, lurid blur, shaped by a media landscape that has changed how Americans perceive and understand almost everything.” This theme of a digital disconnect with the flow of time goes on: “The proliferation of smartphones and social media has done, though, is unmoor people from the sense of linear time,” she writes. “Entertainment has broken from the rigid logic of time that once governed Americans’ ability to consume it: Netflix, Spotify, and DVRs have extricated us from television schedules, changed how movies are released, and shrunken the familiar album promotion cycle for new music down to nothing.” Catherine Miller wrote an equally fascinating piece on the same subject for Buzzfeed in October.
— Aisha Harris’s NYT op-ed “The Cultural Canon Is Better Than Ever” puts together a great run down of how the dust has settled in the culture and curriculum wars over the last two decades. She thinks we’re in a better place with the recent democratization of the canon instead of the past deferral to traditional gatekeepers.
— Jenn Pelly contributed to Pitchfork’s Sunday Review, taking a look at Carole King’s Tapestry. “The songs of Tapestry are like companions for navigating the doubts and disappointments of everyday life with dignity,” Pelly wrote. And she couldn’t be more right. King’s masterpiece, just her second record, has always had a special place in my heart. It’s my maternal grandmother’s favorite album. She would often put the CD on in the living room while she would read, the strains of “Home Again” and “You’ve Got A Friend” washing over me as played blocks at or read a book of my own at her feet. When I started getting into records, Grandma Gloria gave me her copy. It’s one of the perfect Sunday afternoon records and I love it so.
— Helena Fitzgerald’s griefbacon newsletter is coming to a close and while it’s sad I look forward to whatever she does next. I’ll always love this one she did on Jenny Lewis: “If Sad Horny Girl Online were a Western Literature course, Rilo Kiley’s “A Better Son/Daughter,” off of 2002‘s The Execution of All Things would be Crime and Punishment. It’s not the whole foundational text, but it’s still hard to understand where we are and how we got here without it.”
— The ever-reliable and hilarious Jon Bois put together a list of the ten least consequential athletes of the decade for SB Nation. It’s required reading.
— The Guardian’s Simon Reynolds on the 2010s, the decade that warped popular culture: “All that remains are faint after-images of things that were utterly absorbing at the time of listening or watching, but seemed swiftly to vanish into the void of the recent past.”
BEST PICTURE CHECK-IN
Probably my biggest culture project of the year is trying to work my way through every single Academy Award Best Picture winner in order. I’m going down this lengthy road so that I can hopefully learn a little something about movie history. I will be watching every single one (rewatches where necessary) and documenting my progress as it happens in this Twitter thread. Otherwise, monthly progress graphics here and regular Letterboxd reviews.
By the time I get finished there’ll be 92 winners to get through (the Oscars are this Sunday night! GO PARASITE!). My intention was to push as hard as I could in the first month so that there wouldn’t be a mountain in front of me come June. That push was productive (and difficult) and I’ve found myself with 16 under my belt at the end of January. That’s a little over 17 percent and I imagine I’ll slow down a bit after I hit the 1950s.
The dullest things without a doubt have been the musicals, both The Broadway Melody and The Great Ziegfeld. Nearly a third have been related to war or war movies of some stripe (Wings, All Quiet on the Western Front, Cavalcade, Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, and Mrs. Miniver) which is understandable because, ya know, WWII was going on.
My favorites have definitely been the Frank Capra pictures (It Happened One Night and You Can’t Take It With You). Casablanca and Rebecca also won me over in a big way.
THE BIG ‘10s
The end of the decade hit me like the end of a sitcom episode — I was laughing and then it ended before I thought it would. I started it in college and found myself at the end of it with a steady job in journalism, the career path I originally wanted to pursue but ditched out on majoring in because I thought my advisor was an idiot.
Sidebar: He was by the way! He told the entire freshman class of 2009 that we should leave if we wanted to write news and features for the internet. He also, memorably, laughed at an 18-year-old for not having read Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. He wound up in quite the ordeal that resulted in his being stripped of his teaching duties in 2019 for, among other things, “stealing from students” by requiring the purchase of his book for his 101 course and violating UK’s discrimination and harassment policies.
Anyways, I didn’t see the end of the decade coming. It still feels like I’m going to wake up and realize I have a term paper due in my Gothic lit class with a year left in college.
I contemplated doing something exhaustive, but wound up not having the mental bandwidth over the last month to really get down to it.
The three records that most sum up my 2010s are probably:
Even though it dropped in 2017, I bet I listened to Phoebe Bridgers’ Stranger in the Alps more than any other record released in the decade. Sad. Happy. Whatever. That thing was locked on and I was a sad boi. All the songs are sad bangers.
Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange was a college constant for me and it’s stuck with me since its release. Ocean’s curious, introspective brand of R&B still transfixes me. “Thinkin’ Bout You” is one of the best love songs of the millenium.
I loved the first Father John Misty record but damn it if I Love You, Honeybear wasn’t a game changer for me. Brimming with glorious cynicism, strange love songs, references, and meta-humor galore, Josh Tillman’s second record under the FJM moniker is one that’ll always sound sweet on my turntable.
A list of albums I loved that didn’t get enough praise wouldn’t be productive and it would fill up another couple thousand words, so we’ll stop with what I think are my top three and move on to films.
Probably my ten favorites (in no particular order and with no repeat directors) were:
In addition to these ten, some of the other stuff I thought about including: Happy Death Day, The Social Network, The Souvenir, Mad Max: Fury Road, A Bigger Splash, The VVitch, I, Tonya, Phantom Thread, Personal Shopper, Green Room, Sicario, Obvious Child, It Follows, Under The Silver Lake, Snowpiercer, The Lighthouse, and Frances Ha. Most of what I saw in the last month or so of the decade (Little Women, Parasite, Knives Out, Marriage Story, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire) was out of the running just because I couldn’t mess with the recency bias.
TUNES
I get a big old Weepies vibe from this Ethan Grushka single and I can’t wait for the whole album. Phoebe is great on this, too.
I feel like I’ve been waiting for a true Hayley solo record for ages. This is not a let down in the slightest. All of the great things about the newer Paramore records distilled into a great pop single.
Stumbled on this. She makes me think of St. Vincent and I dig it a lot.
Tyler, The Creator’s showstopper performance at the Grammy’s last week is a must watch if you haven’t seen it yet. Every ceremony should have a performance this wild.
Hype for the new Lilly Hiatt record. Trinity Lane was one of the finest LPs on the block when it came out a few years back.
I finally got to the Hovvdy album that came out in the fall and it’s damn good. I also love the art direction on this video for “Mr. Lee.”
And that concludes this edition of my overlong, overloving, overwrought, and overwritten newsletter. I hope you found something you love. Catch me on Twitter or wandering around in the real world. Read, subscribe, share, and be happy.