The One With All The Lists
My year was an alright one, with more bright spots than darkness, but I can’t help but feel like something better’s around the corner. I hope the same is true for you.
As far as this edition of the newsletter — I’m going to be upfront with you — I put this one off. December was weird for me. I found myself with a lot of off time and ended up spending it watching movies, reading, and hanging out with friends instead of chipping away at this thing.
When I finally sat down to gather it all together and shape what I’d read, watched and listened to over the past month and year into something readable I realized it was going to be very long … but it’s an end of the year blowout so I figured what the heck.
READS
— Brooks Barnes wrote a fantastic NYT piece on the streaming revolution, which has already fully happened a week or so ago. Did you know that there are 271 streaming services available in the United States?! I feel like if you sat me down and put money on the line I could maybe break 30 and there would be some guesses in there. What’s wild about that, besides the staggering amount of content available, is that some of the biggest competitors haven’t entered the arena. Disney+, of course, launched just recently and quickly racked up over 10 million subscribers. HBO Max — which will offer the entirety of Friends, HBO’s library, CNN documentaries, staggering amounts of movies, 50 years of Sesame Street episodes, and much more — will storm the internet next spring. Peacock, an NBC specific streaming service with much of the entire history of the network’s shows, is also set to go up in the near future.
— Alex Pappademas wrote this great longview on the shift of “nerd culture” to the present mainstream via superhero/comic book movies, tracking its rise to complete box office domination from the Lord of the Rings trilogy to Iron Man to Avengers: Infinity War. “Nerds won the war before anyone else realized there was a war on. We don’t yet know what kind of long-term effect the unprecedented dominance of a single pop genre is going to have on moviemaking and moviegoing and life on Earth in general,” the former MTV writer explained. He’s pretty sure the long-term effect isn’t going to be great. The argument for why we should be worried is anchored in the recent kerfuffle between Martin Scorsese and Marvel where he said comic movies “weren’t cinema” and compared them to theme park rides. Marvel fans responded rather unkindly. Pappademas continues: “The response to Scorsese is a populist groundswell in service of the status quo, of corporations, and of power … it’s a mass movement rising up to defend a Goliath against the impertinence of a David.”
— There’s apparently a hilarious wikiHow article on “How to Scare Your Friends With the Alien Movie.”
— As part of Slate’s annual TV Club series ruminating on trends and changes in the small screen world, Emily VanDerWerff pondered “the year the Netflix bubble popped.” There’s more shows than ever before so when we all latch onto something together it makes it that much more special. “It’s easy to forget how TV is this big background hum in the lives of most people, which makes it easy to miss how it shapes our lives. But we forget that at our own peril, too,” she wrote. “The more we silo ourselves off from each other, the less the conversation seems to matter. I’m not mourning the monoculture so much as the idea of a shared language, the idea that the version of pop culture I’m consuming isn’t so drastically different from yours.”
— GQ’s Gabriella Paiella penned this fantastic and hilarious deep dive on one of the most bewildering commercials ever aired: the Folgerscest commercial. For those unfamiliar, it started airing in 2009 and featured a brother and sister straight vibing when the bro comes back from Peace Corps work in West Africa. The strange ad has spawned parodies and an entire branch of fan fiction. Paiella is the GOAT for doing this.
— Letterboxd assembled a list of the “most divisive” movies of the 2010s — movies with the most reviews with the biggest spread between 1 and 5 stars. “Love On A Leash” topped it and the trailer is…..something:
— Kyle Chayka, one of my favorite writers when it comes to the internet’s relationship with culture at large, wrote about how we’re in the monoculture of the algorithm for Vox. “It wasn’t that everyone wanted to watch primetime Seinfeld, but that’s what was on, and it became universal by default.” This new monoculture is “both larger in scale and less human, more mechanically automated, than ever before.” The path of resistance, Chayka writes, is to “embrace obscurity, difficulty, diversity, and strangeness as just as important as recognizability or universality.”
— Christopher R. Weingarten put together this engrossing NYT digital feature on My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade, breaking down its influences song-by-song and charting songs they inspired in turn. Pro tip: when reading this be sure to click the “apply eyeliner” button off to the side. This was fueled by the band’s recent reunion show in Los Angeles.
THE BIG LISTS
I was a little overwhelmed this year (as I am most years, to be honest). What was once called the age of peak TV is now just the age of peak content. The speed of internet culture demands that you either run yourself ragged or concede to being quickly covered up and left behind as the daily discourse barrels ever on through the endless scroll of the timeline. You try your best to keep up with the times but you’ll inevitably get left in their wake.
I made an earnest attempt. I failed, but we all do.
Here are some of my favorite things from 2019.
Big Screen
Movies were a big focus for me this year. I started logging my watches on Letterboxd — basically a Goodreads for movies — and hit the ground running. If the count is correct, I’ll probably round 250 movies by the end of the year. I watched a lot of new movies but also focused on filling in blank spots in my film experience (Martin Scorsese, Bong Joon-ho, and presently Cassavetes). I really struggled between my top two. Parasite was one of the most unique thrills I’ve ever felt with a movie and Bong Joon-ho’s brilliance will shine far into the future, but Quentin Tarantino’s love letter to ‘60s Hollywood is a movie that I couldn’t stop turning over in my head. Ultimately, I probably should have flipped a coin or something, but ended up going with what will hopefully be a historic surprise at the Oscars in Parasite.
Small Screen
TV exploded in two different ways, the amount of shows continued to shoot up as it has every year since the streaming boom began and the ways to watch continued to get farther apart as different paid platforms splintered off from the pack that was once so small. I think I mostly responded to that by rewatching old faves and trusting critics and friends for new stuff.
Books
For the first time in years, I didn’t read a ton. I definitely found some new authors to keep eyes on and buried my nose in more than a couple good books, just not my typical 40+. In the fiction department, I really enjoyed Sally Rooney’s Normal People, Iain Reid’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things, and Ted Chiang’s Exhalation. I mostly kept to nonfiction this year and found some real gems. A pair of essay collections — Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror and Brian Phillips’ Impossible Owls — are tied for my favorite things I picked up this year. Other great ones were Esmé Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias, Hanif Abdurraqib’s Go Ahead In The Rain, Mallory O’Meara’s The Lady From The Black Lagoon, Tom O’Neill’s Chaos, and A.O. Scott’s Better Living Through Criticism.
Albums
It should come as no surprise that I didn’t let up when it came to music this year. A lot of great records dropped: old favorites came out of hibernation, favorite songwriters teamed up, regular high achievers put in great efforts, and of course new talent shone out as well. Here’s my top 10 records, along with more than 50 other great ones I listened to this year:
There’s definitely some I left out, but what’re you gonna do. This is a free newsletter after all. Here’s a Spotify playlist with some of my favorite tunes:
If you want more recommendations, check out some of my favorite arts thinkers’ lists and year-end pieces:
• Aquarium Drunkard — my favorite music website for the last several years — always has a great end of the year list. Their decade list is 🔥, too.
• John Waters on his 10 favorite movies of 2019
• The New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich on her favorites of 2019 and the decade
• NYT’s music critics Jon Caramanica and Jon Pareles on their 2019 faves
• My favorite end of the year music project, 10x, returned. It collects a bunch of designers’ top 10 records and has them create their own covers to pretty cool effect.
• Music critic and AllMusic chief Stephen Thomas Erlewine’s The Year That Was post on So It Goes, his excellent newsletter.
• The categorically insane Vulture project ranking the over 5K movies released in the U.S. during the last decade.
• Emily Blake’s Ten Sounds that Shaped the 2010s piece for Rolling Stone is a great way to pick apart what the music of the last decade. Features entries like “saxy pop,” “the Millennial Whoop,” “distorted basslines in rap,” and “trap hi-hats.”
• The great jazz historian Ted Gioia assembled a list of his favorite essays from around the web in 2019. Covers wide range of topics from artificial intelligence and copyright law to linguistics and Anonymous, with some music of course thrown in.
• Pitchfork staffer Andrew Nosnitsky compiled a list of 2019’s best hip-hop singles on his newsletter LIGHT SLEEPER.
• Amanda Mull talked about the perils of ranking things at the end of the decade for The Atlantic. She also got into the concept of culture as homework, which always fascinates me. “In the attempt to tie up a decade with a pretty red bow, the web has buried itself under an avalanche of best- and worst-ofs, asking readers to judge virtually everything they interact with,” she wrote. “Understanding what matters and why in a culture is important, but going through life attempting to optimize your personal tastes and preferences to some faux-objective idea of ‘best’ or ‘most important’ is not. You won’t be docked any points. You are just a person, and no one is keeping score.”
• And finally — the antithesis — Elena Gorfinkel’s manifesto “Against Lists” for feminist film journal Another Gaze, in which she says to “torch your list” because “lists pretend to make a claim about the present and the past, but are anti-historical, obsessed with their own moment, with the narrow horizon and tyranny of contemporaneity. They consolidate and reaffirm the hidebound tastes of the already heard.”
TUNES
I’ve been really in on this Melbourne crew’s bouncy, strange, 80s-flavored brand of dancy punk. The whole record is a fun time.
I fell in love with this music video and it apparently it has nearly 1.5M views. It’s a darling little number, like something out of a late ‘00s indie movie.
Lili Trifilio and the rest of Beach Bunny were seemingly designed in a lab to break my heart. I feel for their punky, emotional pop out of Chicago after last year’s “Sports” and I’m really looking forward to Honeymoon, the group’s debut LP due out on Mom + Pop in February.
One of Pitchfork’s top music videos of 2019 and one of the dark horse alternative records of the year.
It’s wild the amount of money and time that probably went into this BLACKPINK record and music video.
For all you Nicholas Brittel heads out there, here he is breaking down how he wrote the theme song to HBO’s Succession. He DID NOT need to go that hard on this but he did it FOR US. The Pusha T rap over the song (“Puppets”) ain’t bad either.
Now that that’s over with. Thank you so much for sticking with me. I hope any of you that get this far in the newsletter know that I greatly appreciate the time you spend reading my ramblings. “It hasn’t been a good year, but things are alright here.”
January will probably bring some end of the decade thoughts/lists. They would have been here, but I already wrote/put together a ton of stuff. Plus, it seems to better to let the dust settle on 2019.