My favorite album this year was LUMP’s “Animal.” I’d never really listened much to their first album or Laura Marling’s solo stuff, so this came out of absolutely nowhere for me. I’ve written before about my affection for sad lady bands, and I’d say LUMP splits the difference between Metric’s electronic rockers and Emily Haines’ softer solo critiques of consumerism and modern alienation.
I also listened a lot to Justin Townes Earle’s 2019 alt-country album “The Saint of Lost Causes.” In the title song, the lyrics Throughout time, between a wolf and a shepherd/ Who do you think has killed more sheep? stuck with me during a year I wrote a lot about animal welfare. I suppose he meant it as a metaphor, but taken literally it feels like a fair indictment of animal husbandry.
So was Gunda, a black & white documentary that wordlessly tracked the life of a single pig and her piglets from the gritty moments after birth as the piglets search for their first taste of milk to their journey in the field to learn to forage. The humans in their life are never directly shown, but their impact implied. This film helped me reimagine what cinema could be in a way I hadn’t felt since Boyhood, another film that in its patience created something magical. Where Boyhood ended on a note of the youthful sense of limitless possibility, Gunda revealed the opposite inevitability.
I took Pig, the year’s other swine-inspired film, as an extended deconstruction of macho films of the sort Nicolas Cage often appears in—replacing external rage with melancholic vulnerability. I do wish, however, that the film featured more pig.
I also found My Octopus Teacher remarkable, but couldn’t shake annoyance the repeatedly stated theme that the octopus in the movie “taught” the narrator to a better father—dubious, given that the narrator seemed to spend the entire film neglecting his son to follow an octopus around and didn’t learn any obvious parenting lessons.
The best podcast episode I listened to this year was actually released late last year. Briahna Joy Gray speaking with Boots Riley (the complete interview now released for non-subscribers) about his film Sorry to Bother You, and the mistaken pivot in the liberal base from focusing on developing union power and class solidarity to the concerns of the highly educated professionals. I’m most excited by podcasts willing to bring on folks they genuinely disagree with to have respectful conversations, which made Joy Gray’s podcast chats with Andrew Sullivan refreshing.
A podcast that worked much less for me was Jon Stewart’s—imagine a podcast with the Daily Show’s worst impulses without the humor that could make that show fun. I only listened to the podcast episode with the CEO of JP Morgan Jamie Dimon, and Stewart basically let Dimon provide a well-informed, detailed quintessential Captain-of-Industry view with only vague liberal slogans as pushback. The whole time I long to hear Boots Riley sparring with Dimon instead. Perhaps Stewart hubristically thought he could represent the liberal view, suggesting he didn’t learn the lessons from that time John Yoo came on the Daily Show and made waterboarding sound reasonable. Stewart’s five-minute appearance on Colbert earlier this year tearing holes in lab-leak-theory skepticism was far more edgy, funny and impactful.
I’ve valued the rapid emergence of substacks in response to groupthink on both the left and the right. I hope they figure out a way to do more longform journalism. I’ve been encouraged by Matt Taibbi’s recent four-part series into events at Loudoun County’s schools, but I’m skeptical that the model will ever be able to replace the deep-dive journalism that can be done by deep-pocketed establishment media places like the Atlantic or the New Yorker (which I still also enjoy).
I’ve been inhaling the Expanse series—an escapist space opera consisting of something like 9 books and 6 seasons total book and TV series. I’ve just finished the third book and the third season. So far, the authors treat the menace of alien life like a traditional zombie flick: yes, the outside threat is terrifying but humanity’s failure act in its collective interest is what always ultimately dooms us.
What We Do in the Shadows, another Amazon show, manages to add something original to the vampire canon: the energy vampire—a new strain that drains your energy by droning on office cubical by office cubical. I loved a season one moment where he takes the crew to a Staten Island local community board meeting and sits in ecstasy as he sucks in the room’s negative energy. The scenes recall Office Space and the Office, and actor Mark Proksch is perfectly cast as he once seemed to be an informal energy vampire when sneaking onto local TV stations pretending to be a yo-yo master hawking environmental messages.
In terms of other fiction, Piranesi created a picturesque lived-in world with breath-taking visual descriptions and wry humor in the space of a novella—a conciseness in sharp contrast to Susanna Clarke’s prior (and also enjoyable) epic tome Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Klara and the Sun was also a fast read that returned to themes that have obsessed Kazuo Ishiguro his whole life—including his focus on the powerless common folk who struggle to exercise agency in the face of greater forces. The story struck me as what Toy Story would have looked like if Kafka and Stanley Kubrick had collaborated.
I’ve also been stuck in the 1970s. In Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980, over 1,200 pages, Rick Perlstein dives deep into the era, revealing the many eerie parallels between then and now: high inflation, ideological controversies over school curriculums, backlash against rapid cultural changes, and a high crime that led to a wave of right-wing electoral victories from NYC mayorships to California ballot initiatives to Congressional seats around the country and, finally, Reagan. Taking note of liberal missteps then might provide lessons for those who wish to avoid further parallels.