My year in review

Subjects discussed: Every month, and how it went down

It was a long year. It was a good year, too, and I kept more notes than usual. In lieu of giving you my “year-end lists,” I wanted to share some words about my year in culture — the products and events that made an impact on me, whether they were released in 2023 or not. It ended up being very long, but that’s why it’s my newsletter. It’s also too long to read entirely in email, so if that’s where you see it, please click through.

One note: The date in parentheses is the day I associate with it. Sometimes, it’s the day I finished a thing; other times, it’s just the most representative day.

JANUARY

Roque Larraquy - Comemadre (January 4)

The most terrible fate of all, in our modern times, is to be accurately diagnosed as a particular “type of guy”; so do people bend and contort themselves, selling out their sincere beliefs with the smirk of the banal, in order to avoid falling into some cheap conception of how others are. It was several years after I finished reading all of Roberto Bolaño’s work before I discovered the caricature of the “Bolaño guy,” who chain smokes American Spirits, doesn’t own a headboard, and talks way too much about philosophy. (This is also just a “hipster,” or “someone who lives in Bushwick,” but these stereotypes are not original.) Immediately I wondered: Am I a Bolaño guy? Just another young man attracted to literature and the abyss? Maybe, but time passes and you default back to the truest of all stances: “Hey, fuck you.” After revisiting his work in my slightly more advanced adulthood, it continues to exert a profound influence on the way I think about reading and writing, and I think there are worse examples to have followed.

In particular, here is a quote of his that I read sometime around my college graduation, and have never forgotten: “The truth is, reading is always more important than writing.” The best thing about reading is that you’re not writing, but you’re not not writing. If I really enjoy a book, it makes me think like that author; the effect generally fades after a few days, once I remember that I am me, but over time you absorb and reconstitute these myriad influences into something that’s hopefully and recognizably yourself.

I completed 75 books this year, and made decent-to-significant progress on 30 others, and I don’t think I enjoyed anything more than Comemadre, a spiky and slim volume from the Argentinean writer Roque Larraquy about a 20th century sanatorium whose doctors stage some very strange experiments about death and the human body. Not to say too much, because you should read it yourself, but I was taken in by the clipped rhythm of the sentences, the mordant humor and moral imagination. It’s weird, but not prohibitively experimental. Larraquy and his translator, Heather Cleary, seem to have strip mined all unnecessary verbiage, leaving behind something gleaming and sharp and sexy. Reading it, I felt renewed by the power of literature to jolt your mind along some unfamiliar mental groove, forcing you to think at someone else’s pace. This isn’t “empathy,” because I didn’t want to empathize with these characters, but I felt a little changed by seeing the world through their eyes. (And bless the motto of Coffee House Press, who issued the book: “Literature is not the same as publishing.”)

The Conformist (dir: Bernando Bertolucci) (January 13)

Earlier this year, Film Forum was showing a remastered version of The Conformist, Bertolucci’s film about a weak man in ’40s Italy who casually collaborates with the fascist government because he doesn’t really believe in anything, and will do anything in order to avoid personal discomfort. Jen and I had never seen it, and neither had our friend Amy Rose, so on a frosty Friday evening we angled our way into what turned out to be a sold-out screening, and waited blankly as the lights went down. Well: I am not exaggerating when I say our minds were blown. The movie is so beautiful, so funny, so intelligent, so emotionally devastating, so wonderfully performed, filled with indelible images and weighty ideas — by the end, we almost literally skipped out of the theater.

This does not usually happen, honestly; more often than not, my reaction to a movie seen in the world is more tempered and reasonable, “that was really good,” “I don’t know about that,” “let’s find some dinner,” etc. But watching The Conformist felt like grasping a bolt of lightning in mid-air. The moody colors, the sumptuous locations, the perfectly drunk women — it felt heady and rich, a complete experience. I could not believe how good it was, how immediately I wanted to see it again. (And in fact, Jen and I went back a month later, and I did way too much Googling about whether my PlayStation can play a Blu-Ray made in Europe.) After we got out, we wandered into a nearby hole-in-the-wall red sauce joint where we described what we wanted to the waiters, and they brought it over. I think seeing an amazing movie and then eating a gigantic plate of pasta is a quality-of-life improvement that everyone should partake in, from time to time.

NFC Championship: Philadelphia Eagles d. San Francisco 49ers (January 29)

Tactically, I don’t understand football whatsoever; aesthetically, nothing about the game inspires joy; morally, I think it’s reprehensible. That said, sometimes you want to drink a beer and look at consenting millionaires give each other brain damage. I’m from Chicago, which means I’m fated to cheer for an indefinitely pathetic Bears franchise, but Jen is from the Bay Area which means I get to co-opt all of her teams for myself under the domain of “husband’s rights.” The San Francisco Giants had Barry Bonds and the Golden State Warriors have Steph Curry, but I particularly embrace 49ers fandom because of the glamorous red-and-gold uniforms, which captured my attention as a child. Their quarterback is a cornfed Iowan named Brock Purdy who is the real-life Matt Saracen, their coach both looks and behaves like Kendall Roy, and their tight end is too weird for Taylor Swift to date. All these are valid reasons to root for a team.

We watched this game in London, a few days after attending the funeral for Jen’s paternal grandmother, in a bid for some shared normalcy; befitting the territory, we picked up a case of Stella and a gigantic bag of shrimp chips. Sadly, Purdy got hurt maybe three minutes into the game, and the 49ers were blown out. San Francisco was so clearly not going to meaningfully compete without him, so we couldn’t even be too mad. It was like learning you’re about to be fired before walking into the meeting, you’re stunned but once you’ve had a second to process you’re just ready to get on with it. Jen, myself, and my English father-in-law just sat there, taking it in and already moving on in our heads. There were more entertaining games they played this year, like their revenge game against Philadelphia just a few weeks ago, but this was an object lesson in how sometimes you’re just going to eat shit.

FEBRUARY

Alex Katz: Gathering (Guggenheim) (February 19)

I hope this doesn’t sound weird, but I spend a lot of time thinking about my friends: their personalities, their feelings, the trajectories of their lives, the last time I saw them and when I might see them again. I love finding myself on the same wavelength as someone else; I think it’s a privilege to see the world from another person’s eyes, and hopefully have a good time at the bar. In New York, my friend group looks very different than it did a decade ago — most of those friends left the city and/or wandered off into different social and professional circles, and have been replaced with newer friends who just moved to the city and/or wandered into my current social and professional circles.

It’s just the procession of time and the way life unfurls, but I guess I am a little surprised when it happens to me; at every stage of my life, I’ve thought these are the people I will know forever, and sometimes it’s not true. What I appreciated most about this Katz exhibit, which was held at the Guggenheim and allowed us to walk upwards through a very linear staging of his career, was his attention to his friends, the way he captured their poses and outfits and general vibe, transcribing them for eternity. It’s overwhelming to consider how many of the people he painted are probably dead, since Katz is now 96 years old. I’d like to think my friends are a bit touched when they make it into my writing, but mostly it made me think I need to befriend more painters.

The Byrds: Notorious Byrd Brothers (February 21)

Speaking of friends, a text I recently received from an old Chicago pal: “I gotta say a memory I always look back on with you so fondly is that time we got probably the stonedest I’ve ever got and you played me loveless for the first time in your dorm room.” This is just what college is like, but smoking weed does brighten many of life’s sensory pleasures, among which is listening to music; if I were describing the effect to a teetotaler, I would say that the bass and drums root your body ass-first into the earth, and the right guitar or synth tone will set off fireworks inside your skull. I don’t think you need drugs for anything — I do enjoy Loveless while totally sober — but this relationship has worked out more or less fine for me.

As a teenager listening to the Byrds in the ’00s for some reason, I never gravitated to their woodsy and free-flowing fifth LP, recorded amidst great interpersonal turmoil and the backdrop of the shifting ‘60s, but I had the idea to pitch a Sunday Review to Pitchfork about their music and connected with this record like I never had. It’s an album about very serious life transitions, about escaping a bad dream into something new, about coming to terms with the whole idealistic hippie project. It also sounds fantastic on pot, as I discovered one bright winter afternoon while taking the train into the city, and felt eternally suspended inside the sun beam that hit me through the window during the guitar solo on “Change Is Now.” A very nice reader sent me an academic paper he’d written about the Byrds, where he adventurously made the case that their music had a significant influence on Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, which I’d never considered before. (A position that was backed up in Will Hermes’ excellent Reed biography, if I’m remembering right.) I like to think of moody Lou sitting with this one in 1968, softened up by its stance on life even as he really hated the hippies.

The Sorrow and the Pity (dir. Marcel Ophuls) (February 25)

You need movie theaters for the gigantic images and the novelty of going out, but also the shared experience of experiencing the same thing with other people, some of whom may be your friends and lovers. I do not have the kind of self-educating research brain that would ever lead me to watch a 4.5-hour documentary about Vichy France by myself; I needed the group experience for this one, so that we could talk about it afterwards. Amazing and important film, obviously, even as our concentration was momentarily broken at the end when my friend Dan started texting during the movie’s final minutes because (he claimed) another friend of ours was around the corner and he needed to let her know the movie was almost over. We love Dan but it was in such laughably bad taste (also, he’s Jewish!), and we referenced it multiple times over the new few hours just to emphasize how irritating it was. (I still reference it today, even.) But my reaction only cements how absorbed I was, how compelling and heartbreaking the movie’s subjects were, how it felt grander and more vital than cinema. Some people are scum, some people are allergic to scum, and sometimes the scumbags win, or at least get away with it. Different movie, but Roger Ebert didn’t put Shoah on his best-of-the-’80s list because it said it transcended the concept of listmaking. I do think Dan could’ve waited another 10 minutes.

MARCH

Samuel Delany - Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (March 3)

I have continuously lived in New York City for over a decade, and sometimes still feel like a Chicagoan in a foreign land even as I now openly yell at cars who cut me off in the crosswalk. It was already gentrified when I came here, but I’ve witnessed something I very wisely call “neo gentrification,” where a corporate (but occasionally useful) business is replaced by a corporate (but totally useless) business. Take, for example, the 14th St. Urban Outfitters transforming into a pop-up Titanic museum — I’m not defending Urban Outfitters, but at least you can buy a shirt there. Sometimes I think about how I may as well be living in another reality than the Manhattanites who think the subway is infested with fentanyl-toking leftists, and believe Eric Adams is just a victim of the media. Last month, we went to a charity dinner where we sat across an older woman who’s been living in Murray Hill since the ’80s, and was trying to explain how different her neighbors are now. “They have expensive clothes but no style,” I offered, with which she instantaneously agreed. I’m not saying I would’ve thrived in the allegedly seedy pre-Giuliani years, but I felt more than a pang of sorrow reading Delany’s masterful accounting not only of his sexcapades in the bygone Times Square adult cinemas, but the way that low-stakes vice can create community and the conditions for a spontaneous, interesting life. A lot of people, you eventually realize, are just afraid of being outside.

Slow Horses season 2 (March 4)

Jen and I don’t watch a lot of television; it’s not a judgmental thing, as we waste our time in plenty of other ways, but we find that many heralded shows tend to overpromise and underdeliver. What I like about Slow Horses is its neatly bounded purview: This is a spy thriller where every season is a self-contained story, every plot detail matters, and every performance is well-cast. It’s not a trauma plot, or the show we need in these times, or a murder simulator; it’s John Le Carré with the producer’s input of “could we pick up the pace a bit?” I know Gary Oldman is a Tory and many other things, but his performance as an uncouth, schlubby spy master — the opposite of his perfectly calibrated George Smiley — is a true example of termite art, as he does things with his face and body that most Oscar winners would avoid out of pure vanity. I don’t want to belabor it but there’s a shot in the new season where he’s viewed from the side with his shirt off, and his belly just looks so protruding and pale and sickly, and while I’m all for body positivity this is not a sexually charged camera angle — you think, “Jesus Christ, this man looks like shit.” A master at work.

Creed + Creed II + Creed III + Rocky (March 17)

Rocky Balboa is one of the great American characters, better than Bruce Wayne or Tom Sawyer, and his extended relevance into the 21st century settles all debates about who was the best meathead action star of the 20th century. Jen tells me a story about seeing the first Creed at the now-closed Court Street Regal, and when Sly gives his big monologue to Michael B. Jordan that climaxes with the first needle drop of the classic Rocky theme, the entire theater really did stand up and applaud.

Jordan is, I think, almost a little underrated as an actor — not that our collective cultural rankings ever really matter but it’s interesting when a public figure is suddenly seen as corny and then it’s open season on their actual work, which is why lots of people now pretend they never liked Chance the Rapper. But he is a beautiful and sincere man, just like Sylvester Stallone, and that the Creed franchise has put out three good-to-great movies in an era of over-mined IP hinges entirely on the connection he creates with the audience. We didn’t mind the third one at all, which cut out Rocky over a contract dispute (sad) and brought in Jonathan Majors for a frankly magnetic performance as the villain, a performance that now feels cheap to mention given all of his well-publicized legal issues. In the moment it captivated us, and many others, so perhaps we have some shared lesson to learn about the perils of easily marketed charisma. Jordan has the less glamorous role, because he can’t preen or sneer like a total shithead, but he centers the whole film and makes us care. Sometimes, you have to be the serious person, even if people think it makes you a cornball.

APRIL 

John Wick: Chapter 4 (Chad Stahleski) (April 1)

No other piece of art repulsed me this year like the bloated fourth entry in the John Wick franchise, which began simply (a retired assassin seeks revenge for the dead dog given to him by his dead wife) and morphed into a hodgepodge of ballooning lore and truly relentless, dreary gun violence. I teared up at the posthumous stories from Keanu but what an insult to the great Lance Reddick, frankly, that one of his final performances was a throwaway death in the opening minutes of this stinker. I can’t think of the last time I sat in a theater getting angrier and angrier at how my time was being wasted, over an excruciating 2.5 hours.

All good things come to an end, as they say, but the real insult came afterwards, when Jen, our friend Jeremy, and I sat down in some terrible Lower East Side bar to kill time before dinner. Within minutes I was approached by a drunk Zoomer who asked me if I was… you know… that comedian, and when I said no, she told me she’d think about it before returning a moment later with a very unflattering photo of an unnamed celebrity on her phone. What a fantastically new way to feel bad about oneself, right? “You should think before you talk to people,” Jen shot back in my defense, one of the many reasons I love her.

***** ********* at ********* (April X)

I don’t mean to be mean about it, which is why I chose to grey out the names, but in April we attended a concert by a band I think is still doing interesting work, and observed with some horror the passivity that the uniformly elder millennial crowd showed re: “the new stuff,” which sounded great and tight but didn’t evoke more than courtesy applause. Ten years ago, I saw this band perform in a sweaty, sold-out room before a white-hot crowd ready to light a school bus on fire; today, it felt like half the people there would rather be talking about their favorite episode of The Office. And, sure, I wasn’t hurtling myself into the center to start a one-man pit, but I cared about them as a performing entity right now — I wasn’t trying to relive my 20s by pounding beers until I remembered the words. Not to sound like Thomas Bernhard, but sometimes a night out makes you think about the moment when people give up on experiencing something new. Well, whatever.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (John Francis Daley + Jonathan Goldstein) (April 19)

MAY

Bushwick Country Club reading for Drew Millard’s How Golf Can Save Your Life (May 11)

At the end of April, Drew had joined me and eight of my other best friends at a house in Woodstock for my bachelor party, where we cooked a lot of food, drank a lot of cheap beer, and enjoyed the rejuvenating effects of positive male friendship. At some point, late in the night on our second night, he asked if I would participate in the upcoming launch event for his book. I said yes, of course, and thought of the perfect thing for a sports-themed reading: an essay about Margaret Court that I’d written for the first issue of Still Alive, a new magazine about the people who are — you guessed it — still alive. A couple of weeks went by, during which I practiced reading the piece out loud so I wouldn’t go over five minutes (I take the audience’s time very seriously). But the day itself, May 11, turned out to be more consequential than I’d expected. On my lunch break, I went to a jewelry store in lower Manhattan to purchase my wedding band, a thick silver ring that called out to me the moment I saw it in a gigantic ledger of silver rings. While I was waiting for my receipt, I checked my phone and found an email from my literary agents informing me that an editor at Harper Perennial had made an offer on my debut novel, See Friendship, following what had felt like an extraordinarily lengthy submission process (it wasn’t so long, all things considered, but when you’re waiting for good news every day is an eternity).

I’m no Marianne Williamson supporter, but I believe in paying attention to positive synchronicities, and that I’d received this good news at the exact moment I’d purchased a physical symbol of my love and commitment for my upcoming nuptials — well, message received. Later that evening, Jen and I went over to Drew’s reading, where we met up with plenty of friends old and new, and enjoyed a night of wonderful readings in this unconventional reading space, a bar backyard filled with unkempt putting greens. I didn’t want to steal Drew’s thunder, but the people I told about the novel were congratulatory and sweet, and the night itself was a mini-reunion of the people we used to see all the time in our early 20s. Drew wasn’t the first one of my friends to publish a book, but he is the first person I met when I moved to New York in the fall of 2012, so I felt an ascendent pride holding his collection of essays in my hand — not only had he done it, but the book itself was quite excellent, and suddenly all those late nights we’d spent at Vice parties seemed worth it.

David Grann - Killers of the Flower Moon (May 21)

A little more than two years ago, Jen and I boxed up and transported several hundred books to a Gowanus storage unit; today, I’m sad to say, our bookshelves are once again unmanageable and unruly and it’s a pain to find anything in under five minutes. I’ve made my peace with this. Most people have some kind of consumer vice, and buying books is cheaper than drugs, fashion, or restaurants. There’s nothing I enjoy more than killing time at a bookstore before meeting someone, and showing up with a bag of stuff that seemed important to purchase at that exact moment. I’m a big believer in kismet, as I just wrote, but especially when it comes to reading — there are some books I haven’t read because the feeling hasn’t struck me, and I’m waiting for the day when I’ll wake up and think, “I need to read The Recognitions or else I’ll burst.”

This happened earlier this year with Grann’s book, which somehow feels like a book my dad used to lug on childhood vacations even though it was released in 2017. Jen and I were traveling to our friends Meher and Ali’s wedding in Minneapolis, and when we were packing our stuff, I surveyed the books in our apartment before declaring, “I think I’m going to buy Killers of the Flower Moon at the airport.” The first trailer for the Scorsese movie had just come out a few days before, and I’d already watched it several times, and the moment felt right. After checking in and finding food, we had a small amount of time before boarding that I used to beeline towards the Hudson News, pick a copy off a prominent display (just as expected), and purchase it along with a Diet Coke and gum. We intended to explore Minneapolis during that long weekend, but our own wedding was in a few weeks, so what happened is we spent almost all of our time inside our hotel room, reading and watching television and indulging in some much-needed relaxation. Killers really is as good and chilling as advertised — I finished it just before we had to check out, brought it back to Brooklyn, and tucked it into an already-obscured row on our bookshelf. But I’ll always think of reading it inside that hotel room, stowing away from the world in anticipation of the celebration to come.

The Dare - Sex (May 25)

Earlier this year, a good friend of mine was spending a lot of time in the six-block radius of downtown New York called “Dimes Square,” and I’d typically wake up to a barrage of texts describing some kind of vaguely titillating and hedonistic night out that would usually conclude along the lines of, “This is not good.” I did feel some sort of jealousy, at first. I was starting a temporary full-time job, and deep into wedding planning, and feeling that the convergence of these responsibilities had firmly brought me into my mid-30s. Yet I also knew that I didn’t want to be out there, pretending that I was interested in cocaine and bad art just to avoid accepting my age. Yet I also didn’t want to sound like some old asshole bitter about young people enjoying themselves. It’s complicated to live in the same city as other people, is what I mean. During this time I listened to the Dare’s debut EP a few times just to see what the fuss was about, and found myself deeply unimpressed — how dare a buzzy New York band force me to think, “This is no LCD Soundsystem” — but I did, eventually, see the charm of “Girls,” which is less of a song than it is an electroclash “Mambo No. 5,” a novelty track meant to make drunk people throw their hands up. It’s not “it’s so bad it’s good,” but closer to “it sucks so much it’s funny” — and, sure, sometimes you’ve had a few drinks. People my age pretend they like Post Malone, I can’t be offended.

JUNE

The Velvet Underground - “Sweet Jane” / “I’ll Be Your Mirror” // Rush Hour (dir. Brett Ratner) (June 4)

I could type 1,000,000 words about my wedding to Jen, but I’ll save it for a more formal piece of writing. To say something brief, it was a soup to nuts perfect day that seemed to unify and celebrate everything good in our lives. I hope everybody gets a day like that, at some point.

Two things, though:

1. I had never consciously thought of the Velvet Underground as one of my favorite bands, because that always felt like identifying as “a big fan of water” — too obvious to say out loud. But early on we decided that “I’ll Be Your Mirror” (one of my favorite songs ever) would be our first dance, and just before the wedding, we decided that “Sweet Jane” would accompany us down the aisle after we exchanged vows. Unconsciously gravitating towards two songs by the same artist on the biggest day of your life — yeah, they’re one of my favorite bands. To quote Ellen Willis…

   

2. At the end of our night, we went back to the hotel room to undress and go over how the day had been. As we were winding down, we turned on the gigantic television mounted to the bed and ended up watching the middle part of Rush Hour on cable. I can’t really mythologize Rush Hour as part of our wedding, except to say that Chris Tucker is so funny you sort of forgive him for all the Asian jokes. Your favorite post-left podcast host could never!

Mieko Kanai - Mild Vertigo (June 10)

Consumer choice is overrated — sometimes, it’s fine to let someone else make the decision for you. I don’t want the algorithm to locate the perfect movie for me to watch, I want to turn on cable and watch the middle hour of Goodfellas because it’s on. You sense what hearing “the customer is always right” has done to a certain stratum of Americans when you look at the comments section of a TikTok where Jacques Pépin makes the most delicious thing you’ve ever seen in your life using a two-inch knife and a half carton of chicken stock, and find it stuffed with idiots who are like, “That’s not how I’d make it.” Shut up and let grandpa cook (literally)! It’s my fault for using TikTok in the first place, but these people are out there, and they vote. Horrifying to contemplate.

Anyways, this year I enjoyed twelve straight months of the New Directions book club via Jen, who gifted a subscription to me for Christmas; it’s wonderful to receive a package in the mail when you have no idea what’s in it, and it was something to look forward to at the start of every month. Every selection was excellent, and never redundant with something I’d read, save for when Jen independently bought Robert Plunket’s reissued My Search for Warren Harding and it ended up being the subscription pick of the month. (In case anyone in New York wants one of ours…) It was an embarrassment of riches, but my favorite of the year might have been Mieko Kanai’s Mild Vertigo, a taut and dizzying novella about Natsumi, a Japanese housewife who slowly loses her mind while contemplating her daily routines. “The inner monologue of a disturbed person” is one of my favorite genres, and Kanai’s prose is tightly interwoven with Natsumi’s escalating mania and diminishing sense of self; it does, actually, feel vertiginous. It has 3.5 stars on Goodreads, so you know it’s worthwhile.

All Elite Wrestling: Forbidden Door (June 25)

[NOTE: If wrestling just totally bores you, no matter what’s said about it, please skip ahead to July.] I felt my wrestling fandom ebb in the last few years, a casualty of New Japan Pro Wrestling’s creative slump, and the obnoxious sniping between fans of WWE (the more traditional, storied American company) and the upstart All Elite Wrestling (the first mainstream challenger promotion to WWE since the ’90s). But also I just cared less about the wrestling itself. I started missing the big shows, and never turned on the weekly TV even as passive background viewing. Many modern fans are quick to think their disinterest indicates something fundamentally wrong with the product, but enthusiasm is not necessarily continuous, and sometimes you’re ready to move on for a while.

Still, I very much enjoyed watching Forbidden Door, a crossover PPV between AEW and New Japan where Kenny Omega (one of the three wrestlers who got me back into wrestling) wrestled a jawdropping match against Will Ospreay, one of those contests where you start to seriously wonder that these guys are going to kill each other. Wrestling is predetermined, but gravity is real, and sometimes a guy just gets dropped on his neck. And New Japan’s Kazuchika Okada and AEW’s Bryan Danielson (the other two guys who got me re-invested) faced off for the first time ever in the main event, a match that was… honestly, a little underwhelming, both because they had to follow the killer Omega-Ospreay match, and also because Danielson fractured his fucking forearm during the match and had to tough it out to the end despite having a FRACTURED FUCKING FOREARM. Both of these matches — one of them an all-time barnburner, the other a bit disappointing following months of hype — felt like appropriate codas to my modern fandom.

JULY

John Mulaney on Hot Ones (July 1)

Back in the pre-internet days, it was easier to believe the fiction that a celebrity embodied a set of communal values when there were fewer celebrities to pay attention to, and you could think of someone like Elizabeth Taylor as a royal figure. Today there’s a billion of them, and they’re picked apart everyday by the fame machine; there’s no glamour or mystery, just a bunch of hot millionaires we secretly want to feed into a wheat thresher. The celebrity I’ve interviewed who was most openly self-aware about what “celebrity” had done to his life, good and bad, was Daniel Radcliffe — he talked directly about the financial freedom afforded by the Harry Potter movies, which essentially grants him the privileges of a small nation-state. The tradeoff is that until the day he dies, strangers will obsess about his inner life and invent tall tales about why he’s meant to end up marrying Emma Watson. The money is great, but I can understand the distorting effect on your sense of self.

Hot Ones is easily the best thing to come out of my industry’s pivot to video — apart from the novelty of the concept, people really are more transparent about their thoughts and feelings when their face is on fire from ingesting some kind of weapons-grade, pepper-based anti-freeze. We particularly enjoyed the episode with John Mulaney, who’s done so many drugs that his pain receptors don’t register heat in the extreme way, and munched his way through the offending wings with the stoicism of a war veteran. Mulaney has perfect timing and a smart-aleck face only a newspaper cartoonist could dream up, but I’ve never jibed much with his formal comedy save for his old bit about the Salt and Pepper diner (which is near where I grew up in Chicago). But he’s weathered some public controversy in the last few years, during which he appeared to have shed the expectations placed on him to be a non-problematic fave, so in this interview he just seemed to be less “on” and more casually funny, a naturally sharp person riffing at their own pace. May we all find ourselves at that level, eventually.

Oppenheimer (dir. Christopher Nolan) (July 17)

My embrace of poptimism is rooted in my commitment to living in a society; everything about modern culture is increasingly subdivided, so when a piece of serious art does catch some chunk of public attention, I’m interested in observing what ideas and feelings are being successfully (or unsuccessfully) communicated at scale. This makes me a lesser critic, but a better dinner party guest. There’s plenty of silly things about Oppenheimer — reciting the Bhagavad-Gita as Florence Pugh does cowgirl, the MCU-ass name-drop of John F. Kennedy at the end. It’s a Christopher Nolan movie, through and through. Yet I’ll never forget the meticulously constructed sequence where Oppenheimer and his team successfully detonate a nuclear bomb in the desert, and specifically the feeling of silently sitting in the theater, watching everyone around me watch those terrifying pillars of flame shoot to the top of the screen. The end of the world was on my mind a lot in 2023, for the usual reasons — politics, climate, war, I don’t need to go into it. That shared contemplative moment of what it really means, to open that Pandora’s box of unprecedented destruction… art certainly isn’t made for changing people’s minds, but this resonated with me.

Daniel Clowes - Monica (July 31)

I either read or re-read nearly all of Clowes’ work in 2023, and better observed the evolutionary softness of his withering cynicism; his early stuff feels so authentically caustic and judgmental, and stereotypically “Gen X,” but he lightens up after marriage and fatherhood. Monica merged many of the hopeless, well-meaning women he’s written about and pushed her along each step of life, in a quest to find some meaning (and, also, her parents). She’s trapped between embracing the present and solving the past; she copes for a while, but then it doesn’t turn out well. Clowes is a master of short fiction, he makes these intuitive narrative leaps that don’t feel “vibey” or obscure. But it’s also not just writing — his cartooning is sharp and evocative, and easily the best it’s ever looked. I talked to him for a piece and found his attitude to be just as thoughtful as his work; as with Martin Scorsese or Michael Mann, it’s inspiring to see someone’s work deepen and improve with the passing of the years. “As I get older, I’m now aware of all the things I can do,” he told me when we talked about Monica, which I think is good advice to follow.

AUGUST

Faust (dir. F.W. Murnau) (August 1)

We watched the silent film Faust at Light Industry, an excellent repertory theater not far from where we live, where it was introduced by the author Mary Gaitskill. Gaitskill’s prose is icy and exacting, and she has this very sincere interest in other people’s bad behavior — but what people might not know, if they haven’t seen her speak in person, is that she’s tremendously warm and funny, and possesses that inborn charismatic quality that makes you think, “I want to keep looking at this person.” Right before the pandemic, I saw her read from her novella “This Is Pleasure” at the Strand. “This Is Pleasure” is, to be reductive, “a Me Too story,” and during the Q&A someone asked Mary if she’d drawn on any articles or done any research when writing it. Her answer: “Yes,” with a big smile and no explanation. She doesn’t bend to her audience, whether in print or in person, and I really respect it.

Before Faust, she read from something she’d posted to Substack, and halfway through was heckled — HECKLED! — by someone in the front row who told her to stop spoiling the movie. First of all, imagine the concept of “spoiling Faust.” The heckler was one of those archetypal New York Bastards™ who’s probably lived in the same rent-controlled apartment since 1973 and eats a plate of boiled ham every night for dinner. Everyone around him, self included, was a bit like… “are you fucking kidding me?” But Mary didn’t miss a beat, and said she’d be finished soon; when he kept it up by yelling that he wanted to know how the movie compared to Eisenstein, she said she didn’t know about that because she’s not a film scholar. As a great American poet once sang: “You got to roll with the punches to get to what's real.” Best crowd work I saw all year.

The Righteous Gemstones season 3 (August 4)

Part of what makes Danny McBride so funny, and in turn what perhaps sinks him with a snootier class of critic, is his embrace of the ribald and prurient — his shows have sophisticated punchlines, but they also want you to laugh at a guy getting punched in the dick. On some level, it’s like “what if Jackass was a narrative show?” The Righteous Gemstones is a masterpiece — it’s just as hilarious as Eastbound and Down and Vice Principals, but the character work and world-building are deeper, and I think McBride and his collaborators get at something profound about the contradictions of religious belief and man’s inherent weakness. “Misbehavin’” is a great gag song, but the way it’s deployed — first as farce, and then as tragedy — makes me genuinely sad. Also, there are dick jokes. The third season pushed the Gemstone siblings along something resembling a character arc, earning its emotional beats while giving us phrases like “Uncle Baby Billy’s Bible Bonkers” and “Damn ass little daddy, I’m so sick of you.” It’s the better HBO show about a trio of fuckup siblings trying to inherit their father’s empire, IMO.

Isle McElroy - People Collide / Maya Binyam - Hangman / Bryan Washington - Memorial / Jordan Castro - The Novelist (August 22)

Earlier in 2022, I felt temporarily disgusted with reading American and English authors, and very bravely declared that I would only read translated novellas for a while. Eventually the pendulum swung back, and while I read a lot this year, August felt a bit more distinct because I consumed four excellent books from English-language writers aged 35 and younger. Isle and I became friends in the winter, and were born on the exact same day (a connection we share with Julio Cortazar, James Harden, Macaulay Culkin, and… John Mulaney) but these biases aside I truly loved their second novel, a sexy and playful look at a married couple who switch bodies, and grapple with some attendant feelings about gender, monogamy, and ambition. I’ve admired Maya Binyam’s nonfiction for a while, and greatly enjoyed her debut novel about a man who returns home to Africa after several decades away, and wanders feverishly through his old haunts while trying to piece together his identity; there’s a sustained elegiac tone that reminded me of the translated novellas I like the most.

Bryan Washington’s Memorial felt like a radical leap forward for what I think of as “modern fiction” — I am a grand believer in the multiracial coalition, but not in a corny way, and Memorial integrated so many cultures and perspectives with warmth, depth, and humor. His characters are real, his emotions are true, and his jokes always kill me; I think he’s as good as it gets. And though Jordan Castro’s extended Twitter posts about modern dating can make me go “huh?” I really enjoyed The Novelist, which is Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine by way of an overly online laptop worker. There’s always some anxiety in publishing about “the emerging stars” and “the it girls” and “the big deals” but I don’t know or care about any of that, and I was grateful to read and sincerely enjoy this much work by people in my general age range. Millennial culture isn’t all cringe.

SEPTEMBER

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (dir. Chantal Akerman) (September 2)

Before the lights went down in Metrograph, I leaned over to Jen and made a dad joke about how I couldn’t wait to watch the greatest movie of all-time — and, then, some guy introduced it as such. I wouldn’t say it’s the best movie of all-time, but I don’t feel that way about Citizen Kane or Vertigo either, and as any online content creator knows, list making is primarily a rhetorical device — placing Jeanne Dielman on top is simultaneously an argument for “slow cinema,” for stories about the lives of real people, for political art. It’s worth sitting with for the next decade, before the next Sight and Sound poll. And it’s still transgressive: A row of people behind us walked out about halfway through, maybe because they didn’t check the runtime and had to make their dinner reservation, maybe because they were bored. Their loss, as I’ll never forget how the whole theater gasped at that scene, this shared moment of taking in something new.

Thurston Moore - Sonic Life / Kim Gordon - Girl in a Band (September 22)

In college, I probably would’ve said that my three favorite bands were the Replacements, Guided by Voices, and Sonic Youth. I was drawn to Sonic Youth’s aesthetic freedom, the contrast between their aggressive riffs and free-form melodic improvisation, the way that Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo would stand next to each other in a line — guitar music as a battle plan, but also as a mutual support system. Lee’s songs were my favorite for their tenderness but I loved Thurston’s preening rock n’ roll spirit, Kim’s deadpan cool girl mysteriousness. Their divorce pumped the brakes on my fandom for a while because Thurston’s adultery seemed like a betrayal of their driving ethos, the way you could integrate your family life and your artistic life.

I wrote about some of this for New York when Thurston’s memoir came out, which led me to simultaneously read Kim’s book for the first time. It’s not often you get to read dueling memoirs from a divorced couple that go over some of the same events; I’m not interested in taking sides, but Kim is more honest about her feelings (and thus her book is more interesting) whereas Thurston frequently tries to write around himself. Also, he misremembers something (which Kim gets right) that’s frankly so unbelievable it makes me wonder how much you can trust his memory. (Too long to explain here, so just ask me if you’re curious.) Still, I did find myself listening to Sonic Youth’s music for the first time in a long while, and appreciated them anew; it was such a shameful ending for such a consequential band, but the music endures and that’s all that matters.

The Exorcist III (dir. William Peter Blatty) (September 29)

Our friend Clyde programmed a killer collection of underrated horror movies for the Criterion Channel, which we eagerly took in just ahead of spooky season. Another great quality-of-life improvement is befriending people who are interested in things you don’t know about. I know I’m always saying “we used to live in a society” but Patrick Ewing —near the height of his basketball relevance — cameoed as the Angel of Death in the surprisingly fantastic third Exorcist movie from 1990, and I just don’t see that type of thing happening today.

OCTOBER

Amarcord (dir. Federico Fellini) (October 1)

We took our honeymoon at the start of October, and prepped by watching Fellini’s coming-of-age story set in ’30s Italy — a movie about the rot of fascism, and the way it traps people in a series of juvenile delusions about human behavior, is maybe not the most romantic introduction to the Tuscan sun, but we’re adults. Many Fellini movies feature the archetype of the “life-changing woman,” a vision of beauty, grace, and sex whose existence sticks with his male protagonists; Amarcord is most explicit about how boyish and reductive this fantasy can be, how these women seek something the men can never provide and how their own lives are powerless within patriarchal society. The elegant Grandisca sleeps with a prince, and is the subject of the teenage Titta’s burning daydreams, but she’s eventually married off to a grumpy fascist policeman who steals her away from her family and friends, an ending that pushes her to cry though she can’t explain why. Titta charms his way into fooling around with the busty shopkeep, but he’s so sexually inexperienced she tells him to get lost, after which he catches sick — like his body is rebelling against itself for his inadequacies. There’s a running thought of, “Did this really happen, or is it just the version I tell myself?” Magical movie — it reminded me of Annie Ernaux’s The Years, another swirling recollection of how things used to be.

Creedence Clearwater Revival - Chronicle (October 12)

No one is insulated from reality, and to read about the events of October 7 during our honeymoon produced a drastic incongruence between our own private world, and the world outside. The horror of the initial attacks gave way to a terrible anticipation of what was to come, and what has continued to happen, and the livestreamed images of death and destruction, combined with the ongoing reporting about the human toll in Gaza, remain appalling. Conspiracies abound about why the antiwar movement among young people (and young leftists, in particular) has been so strong, but I think an innate, instinctive revulsion at the horrors of war is one of the most uncomplicated reactions possible. It’s not virtue signaling, or smugness. Strangers are not my enemies; the unfamiliar is not the other; I feel this pure, unequivocal rejection of the idea that one can logic away the mass killing of innocents through some game theory calculus of “us vs. them,” and what they’d do to us, and an anticipatory paranoia about the necessity of violence in the proper cases. If this makes me naive, then so be it — but I don’t think I’m being naive.

Jen and I spent a lot of the backend of our honeymoon talking about this, particularly when we were on the road in our rented car. We played a lot of music throughout these drives: Kraftwerk, Springsteen, T. Rex, the Replacements, Creedence Clearwater Revival. During one of these discussions, the gale force of “Fortunate Son” hit us as we cruised along the Autrostrade, and I was reminded that regardless of how many crummy period movies have used it as a needle drop, the anger of Fogerty’s singing, and the moral clarity of his lyrics, still resonate. Some people suffer, and other people push them into suffering, and there’s only one side I want to support.

Passages (dir. Ira Sachs) (October 20)

Passages is about the type of shit people are willing to put up with from their artist lovers, though the movie Tomas is directing at the start is so obviously bad, and so maybe it’s also an exacting satire about a particular type of pragmatically tasteful urban aesthete and their mutual delusions. Anyone who always has a restaurant they want to go to — they’re fun, but not serious. Everyone in this movie is believably screwed up; obviously I like the writer character, Ahmad, who tells Ben Whishaw that he’s a coward and all of this is going to work out terribly. The movie’s stuck with me even though I didn’t quite love it, and maybe it’s because it’s the type of sexually confused, well observed indie drama that I tend to enjoy across micro-generations. Tomas is hot but he sucks; Martin is sweet but weak; Agathe is in her 20s, caught between what she wants and what she can (or can’t) take for herself. I’ve seen it before, and I’ll see it again.

NOVEMBER

Percival Everett - Telephone / Dr. No / James (November 5)

Though Percival Everett’s novels often share a common narrator — a bookish and melancholy type (usually a professor, sometimes an artist) coming to terms with the polite fictions of his life — his prolificness is still astonishing. Yet for all his work I almost only hear his writing discussed in terms of Erasure, which was recently adapted into the film American Fiction. Perhaps because Erasure still seems so bold, especially to members of my generation deluged with DEI speak and the beaming tolerance of the well-intentioned — but there’s much more. In November, I purchased a copy of his 2020 novel Telephone in a used bookstore, and momentarily found myself “Everett-pilled,” leading me to finish five of his books (with four more on my shelf) in the last couple of months. I love his narrative experimentation: Dr. No is a Bond movie as a campus drama, and James (out next year) rewrites Huck Finn from the slave’s perspective. He weaves in high-concept academia, but is never afraid to make the easy joke; his writing is erudite without being showy, and frequently hysterical. How fortunate for me, to enjoy one book and look forward to twenty others. I hope the movie leads to a surge of interest in the rest.

Sleigh Bells - “Crown on the Ground” (November 11)

There is a phylum of pop songs from my college years that I only hear at weddings, that feel like some of the last common musical ground I found with a true plurality of people around my age — not just the ones who “listen to music” but anyone who did a lot of indiscriminately omnivorous consumption as a young person, when you’re immersed in culture you care about and culture you don’t care about whatsoever and regardless of what you paid attention to a strangely large amount of it ends up clinging to your memory. Songs like Flo Rida’s “Low,” Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance,” and of course, “Paper Planes.” Partly it’s because none of my friends were married before they turned 30, an age at which one would have been considered an indefinite spinster and/or incorrigible bachelor not so very long ago. The purpose of a wedding playlist is to locate the songs that might galvanize a majority of the crowd into action, and so you have to go back to the time everyone was paying attention to the same stuff.

Nostalgia’s maybe not so bad when you’re with the people who inspire it, and this year we went to more weddings than ever, all involving people our own age. The apex of this phenomenon, for me, was a wedding in Palm Springs where they played “Crown on the Ground” by Sleigh Bells — the first time I’d heard it in over a decade — and something eldritch and gin-accelerated activated within my brain. Suddenly, the recent memory of a Zoomer innocently asking if I was “the oldest gentrifier” in my neighborhood (my reply: “Excuse me?”) no longer felt like death sentence. If I could see all my friends tonight, indeed.

André 3000 - New Blue Sun (November 29)

After leaving OutKast, André 3000 tried his hand at a few different creative pursuits — acting and fashion among them — that didn’t stick, in terms of reshaping his public image. Perhaps that’s something to do with the stratospheric highs he accomplished at a young age — like the members of the Beatles, he wasn’t even 30 by the time his group broke up, yet he’d made several records that established and still represent a creative standard in the eyes of fans and critics. It’s hard to get people invested in your Jimi Hendrix biopic after “Bombs Over Baghdad,” and a memory of him as a Gillette spokesman is coming to me too. The release of his experimental flute album prompted some side-eyeing about his celebrity and reputation giving some people the excuse to celebrate an album in a genre they don’t otherwise care about — and, it’s true, I don’t listen to much flute music. But apart from the nice story of watching a famous musician pursue a genuine second act, I think people actually did like the record — its curious and inquisitive melodies, the way it seems to flow outward like a series of tributaries. They’d rejected his prior excursions too many times, to pretend otherwise.

DECEMBER

May December (dir. Todd Haynes) / The Holdovers (dir. Alexander Payne) (December 4)

The principal actors on Riverdale all seem very invested in pursuing a film career, so it was certainly a surprise to see Charles Melton, who portrays the C-tier bully Reggie (re-imagined by the CW as… Asian), suddenly outpace the pack in the new Todd Haynes movie. He and Da'Vine Joy Randolph, who portrays a grieving mother in The Holdovers, seemed to grab this year’s “wow, who knew!” trophy from the admiring, unsuspecting press corps, and what struck me about both roles is their quiet portrayal of someone who is absolutely, totally fucked up but can’t admit it out loud. It was painful to watch Melton as the taciturn abuse victim Joe, and feel how speechless he is to describe what’s inside of him. And The Holdovers underwhelmed me, partly because I wanted much more from Randolph’s character — the scene where she gets too drunk at the Christmas party, and weeps to herself in the kitchen, is bedfellows with Joe smoking a joint with his son and becoming suddenly overwhelmed by everything his life has become. Sometimes one hit of weed will really reorganize your entire emotional world, which not enough works of art are willing to say out loud.

The Boy and the Heron (dir. Hayao Miyazaki) (December 20)

I was very moved by The Boy and the Heron, and here I’ll steal Jen’s observation: It’s a movie about choices, not lessons, and taking action is what makes Mahito grow up. Here’s a small character wrinkle I come back to. Mahito has that grieving young person’s self-assuredness that he now sees how the world works, and thus can’t be fooled. He knows the heron is just pulling his string about reuniting with his mother, he says, but he wants to proceed on this adventure just to see for himself. So for everything to turn out as it does… it’s just a great movie, a truly all-ages film that would be a rightful coda should Miyazaki finally hang it up.

Christmas Eve Eve at Alice’s Lounge (December 23)

Though I don’t regret any part of my life in New York, sometimes it seems silly that I ever moved away from Chicago. Because I’m only there a few times a year, my impression of the city remains static even as it continues to change — businesses close, rents go up, my friends become parents, and mostly I process this at Christmastime when I’m running between neighborhoods trying to meet up with people. My favorite bar in Chicago, a dive bar called Alice’s that does karaoke on the weekends, has even bent to the way of things: It was sold to a new owner not so long ago, and featured on The Bear. Both of these events were reason to expect something vastly different, when Jen and I went with some friends right before Christmas. But it was, to our surprise, a perfect night. The new owners have kept everything about the same. It wasn’t too crowded, with the right mix of karaoke barflies and drunken amateurs. Some of our friends got to sing twice, because it wasn’t so slammed. And the DJ, this ornery elder man named Fred, always seems to understand what the song requires: When I started singing Fleetwood Mac’s “Say You Love Me,” he gestured for Jen and our friend Laura to assist on backing vocals, because some songs just need a woman’s touch.

Christmas looked different for my family this year, and the world looks different than when I moved away from Chicago over a decade ago, and I suppose you make your peace with this change, and try to make things work for you. Lord knows I don’t have the personality required to force the world to bend to me, instead. Every year I’m reminded that what matters most to me is spending meaningful time with people I care about — a simple and sentimental thing, but it’s the holidays, and it’s the truth. I hope anyone reading this is in a position to say the same.

A couple of final thoughts:

• I am finishing up edits on See Friendship, the novel I sold earlier this year, which will be out in 2025

• My favorite thing I wrote this year was a profile of Steve Albini, which was the Guardian’s 9th most read long form piece

• The best thing I ate this year was a plate of tagliolini al tartufo nero at L’Brindellone in Florence, on our honeymoon

• If you made it to the end, I love you