A Black Letter

This is a Black Letter which I did not want to have to write. I wish I could say I am surprised at the outcome of yesterday's election, but in all honesty I had begun outlining something like this a week ago. I would say I am disappointed, but again that seems to imply a positive expectation of the electorate, which does not exist. Instead, I will simply say that I am disgusted. I know that is only one small word, and insufficient, but I am never going to be able to write out how I actually feel, both because I lack the skill and patience and most of all the energy, the wherewithal, especially now, but also because there are things I feel like saying that I do not permit myself to say.

But the feeling is not hard to define, even without adjectives. All I have to do is draw a comparison to another Tuesday night, eight years ago. By mid-evening on the west coast, it had become clear that things were not going well. At a certain point, my brother and I could no longer stand to watch the TV, so we absented ourselves to an empty Dairy Queen. When we had wrung all the cold comfort we could from wry, mirthless jesting, we returned home to find the balloons dropping on Trump’s first victory party, and the children’s chorale opening of You Can’t Always Get What You Want. Even at that moment, the Trump campaign’s talent and taste for artful mockery, rubbing salt in the wound, was clear.

For the last eight years, I have seen no end of this mockery. I admit that my impression has been skewed by my presence on Twitter, an increasingly vitriolic cesspool run into the ground by Trump’s wealthiest supporter. But the way in which people have treated others on there, before my eyes – and in many other contexts, too – is real. All I wanted then was for a reckoning, not for people to suffer, but to admit that they had been cruel and wrong and repent. And now it feels that will never come, in our lifetimes. I am confident that some of them, if they see this post, will immediately jump into the comments to mock me and jeer at my pain, because that is what motivates them, and what they like to do. Even now they are celebrating the ‘liberal tears,’ and citing that as what they wanted to vote for. It is beyond frustrating; but I don’t think the answer is to pretend to be all right, or to fake polite indifference, or to hide away like hermit crabs. We must live to spite the Devil.

I feel obligated to fret into this letter all manner of caveats about my own moral self-doubt, knowing myself to be overly motivated by pride in matters of politics, bitter, convicted of my unChristlikeness – and I have also done awful things, and I recognize that I write this partly in the wrong motive. I acknowledge it – but I do not want to silence myself because the magnitude of the outrage demands that we cry out over it.

What is especially hard about today is the fact that the electorate has actually moved toward Trump. Now, the writer Hannah Anderson made a good point a couple of hours ago, that there are proportional degrees of responsibility – Mitch McConnell’s decision to not hold Trump to account after January 6th was more consequential than any ordinary American’s vote, and the endorsements, the falling into line of the party-in-government signaled to longtime GOP voters that Trump was acceptable. I concur that these people are more responsible than some others. But what is also clear is that the voters who supported him have agency, and they made a choice. They are, one hopes, responsible adults, and as such they should not complain if I hold them responsible. Whole swathes of the Fourth Estate, the Punditeriat, the elected Democratic Party, many many faithful former Republicans who broke with Trump, have spent the last eight years bending over backwards to give these voters the benefit of the doubt, to sympathize with them, to try to understand them – and in the end, I feel that all that has been accomplished is to coddle and make excuses for them. One thing is clear: Trump was an unqualified, malicious, and ridiculous figure from the day he came down the escalator. Nine years have passed, in which this has only become more clear, and so I think today we can say the people are wholly without excuse. I don’t know the proportions of people’s motivations – what is ignorance (at this point difficult to excuse), what misguided selfishness, or willful malice – I only know that more than enough grace has been extended, and no repentance is in the offing. Enough then.

Political professionals are blaming Democrats for their messaging, their strategies, their keeping their head in a bubble. Much of this is sound political advice: clearly they do need to change tack. I’m not going to pretend they never made any missteps. But I am sick of people placing the blame for this on the Democrats, who at least tried to do the right thing, and not on the 51% of the electorate who should actually own the credit for what they have done. This is an indictment of that America. I know that people seem to think that Trump is somehow normal now. That has never been an acceptable view. We knew what he was in 2016, we know doubly so today, and I refuse to admit this type of politics to my view of normal and acceptable, any more than I did in 2016. Here I stand, here I remain.

That is the whole of my political advice, at this point, seeing as I clearly do not understand my country, and perhaps I no longer wish to understand it: however much they insist on it, for however many years to come, refuse to treat man, this movement, and this choice in the ballot box, as normal.

Elect Kamala Harris

At the beginning of 2024, I had planned to write a post on the election, perhaps around the Convention (though I know by now I will always be late). For a title I meant to reappropriate the text of one of the many pins I have laying around, this one picked up years ago from some older family member, supporting Nixon in ’72: it says “Re-Elect The President”. Well, that obviously isn’t something I can say now, but it’s worth mentioning simply as a reminder of what some have forgotten – that the Biden administration has been one of the best administrations of my lifetime. That’s not to say I agree with everything the President has done, or am not greatly frustrated by some things – but this is true of every Presidency, to varying degrees, and there are ways in which even valid critiques may miss complicated aspects of a decision. It’s difficult to think about the manner and aftermath of the evacuation of Afghanistan; it’s difficult to contemplate what is transpiring in the Levant, and the fact that we do not have clean hands. At the same time, it is difficult to imagine other modern Presidents managing these situations in a substantially better way (and many would be worse). It seems likely that there was no clean way out of Afghanistan once the decision to withdraw was made, and it is possible that the administration is currently maintaining the special relationship with Israel in part to preserve a degree of leverage and preclude additional escalation. We may not know until a later date. But what is clear is that the current administration has done more to aggressively invest in economy and our infrastructure than any in the last fifty years, and has drawn a clear line it is willing to defend between the liberal democratic western alliance and the increasingly shameless axis of authoritarianism that is testing its edges to see what it can bite off. In this Biden has in some measure improved on the foreign policy of President Obama, who I like, but who was perhaps too quick to assume the best in some actors, or perhaps not idealistic enough about certain fundamental conflicts - in many ways he inherited much of the policy orientation of President Bush, who went too far afield chasing the wrong enemies. And all of this of course follows Biden’s great public service of unseating his predecessor.

Why am I beginning an endorsement of Vice-President Harris with a paragraph about President Biden? For three reasons. First, because I struggle with knowing how to begin any post, and directly commenting on that creative process is my go-to shortcut into writing. Second, in order to answer the attempts at criticizing Harris by tying her to every decision the President has made. This is obviously specious given the relatively limited role of the VP, but it is also misguided because it only works if one views the present administration as more of a failure than what came before it – when it in fact has been significantly more productive than the average administration, to say nothing of the last one. Finally, I think it’s helpful to understand where I am coming from, and what the status quo is – and to understand that a potential Harris administration would exist in a context, and not simply fall out of a coconut tree. The Vice-President has done a lot of work to explain her own biography, which I will not repeat, because my interest is more in what the stakes of this election are for politics and policy. All I will say is that for years I never had particularly strong feelings about Kamala Harris as a politician either way; she was not my preferred candidate in 2020, and I had concerns (ultimately unfounded) about her electoral popularity on that ticket – so I’m not some longtime fan. I have, however, been fully won over and impressed by the way in which she has assumed the mantle in this impromptu campaign, and I think she will make a very good President.

But the coconut tree is much taller than just the last four years of growth, and there is a context more salient to this election than anything President Biden of Vice-President Harris have done or propose to do. I am of course speaking about former President Trump, who is not only an individual, but a symptom and synecdoche of a much larger illness in politics domestic and global. It occurs to me that an increasing number of people I consider peers and friends are now younger than me (a very troubling trend because it suggests I am getting older, which is something I must do something about). For some, the past near-decade of politics since Trump came down the escalator on June 16, 2015 may encompass the entirety of their adult awareness of politics. For me, it arrived after a decade of serious interest in politics, during which my views shifted several times in dramatic ways. I don’t want to re-commit the error others have made when waxing nostalgic about past eras of bipartisanship, which masked over ugly inequities, and I think there is a real extent to which Trump did not only change our politics, but also revealed things which were already present – in other words, I don’t want to mythologize the past or suggest that the present needs to be uniquely troubled (if anything, it is this sort of cataclysmic thinking about the present that has gotten us into this mess). But I do think that it is important for people to understand that for me, the last nine years are not normal – and I do not intend to accept them as such.

There is of course an extent to which I think political myth – in a very limited sense – is necessary. I want to be careful with this – even innocuous political myths, nationalisms which began as liberal reform movements to achieve independence for a subjugated ethnic group, have often become sources of violence against the innocent, and for much of American history the myth of our own national greatness has likewise posed this problem. But to the extent that nations and empires and polities are to an extent constructed fictions, I think that a myth can be necessary – as an ideal, a standard to rally to and unify around – as long as it does not overshadow the many inconvenient truths which interrogate it. In that sense, the notion that this decade must be made an aberration in our political history is not meant to suggest that everything was better before Trump, but rather to say that this myth of a past which had not fallen into its current state is helpful to articulating what we have lost and what we now aspire to. Of course no myth can contain the whole flavor of truth about a country, and there are many multiform political myths on offer from a whole host of minor players and fringes, with varying degrees of influence. What interests me is what mythic claims seem closest to those who would actually exercise power in the wake of the election, either way. And that is what is on offer in this election: two diametrically opposed mythic narratives about who we are as Americans.

And as I see it, the current vision of politics ascendent in GOP leadership is one which divides America along two axes: first, it frames politics not as a process of decision-making between all Americans, but as one theater of a war between the portion of citizens it feels count as legitimate, either because of who they are or because they hold the right views or cultural affiliations, and everyone else who are excluded from that legitimacy. Because of this difference in who is viewed as legitimate, the right, especially many of the younger activists who consider themselves intellectuals and who will staff the next Republican administration, already feel ready to take their ball and go home from the game of democracy if they can’t win a majority. If you think I am being unfair, I would simply point out that whenever the electoral college, or any other aspect of our electoral system which allows an absolute minority of the electorate to actually make policy over and against the will of the majority, is debated, they will tend to defend a counter-majoritarian system as a feature, not a bug. This may be grounded on the idea that small states should have as much representation as large ones, or rural areas should not be ruled by cities – but at the end of the day, this always comes down to a larger mass of individuals being ruled by a smaller mass of individuals in a way which flies in the face of the logic of representative democracy that justified the Revolution in the first place. If pressed, many will outright admit that they feel people who agree with or are more similar to them culturally deserve power more than others.

Now, I don’t want to ignore the argument that all political sides tend to seize every advantage and complain about unfair features that hurt their cause, while defending those which help it. Many have pointed out that many liberals had a sort of procedural fetish for the Supreme Court for many years, some of which was born out of sincere desire to believe in the process, but which obviously was aided by the legacy of the Warren court and the way in which SCOTUS had acted for many years – a tune which changed after the composition of the court shifted to the right. And it’s not exactly wrong, if one believes one’s political side to be morally right in a way that has high-stakes human rights implications, to want it to be in power even if some of those views are not popular with the majority. American history is full of movements in defense of civil rights which were not broadly popular at the outset, and which resisted in ways legal and illegal, and which are now justly valorized in hindsight. But I think are there two caveats to this which the new right is failing to see.

First, it is one thing to argue that the human rights of an individual or a minority may need special protection from the whims of the majority. That is, after all, the great insight of the Bill of Rights. Most Americans, right or left, would agree that there are certain things that governments, however democratic, should simply not be allowed to do to people in the name of the public. But it is quite another thing to believe that by extension all power should be exercised by a minority which is seen as more legitimately American than others. This is essentially a feudal or caste-logic, and it necessarily undermines the right of the people to govern itself and act collectively.

Second, it misses the point of democracy in general. The idea is not that 51% of people have the divine right of kings to lord over everyone else and do whatever they wish without limits; the point is that democracy is the best way we have of manufacturing enough legitimacy and consensus for a state of productive peace to exist between people who disagree. It is an agreement to try to effect change through the slow, frustrating process of persuading others, even if they are selfish, ignorant, or pig-headed, rather than resorting to violence or giving up on cooperative civilization. We have fought hard to get to the point in human history where there are alternatives to autocratic tyranny without recourse or means of change, or violent conflagration. But by attempting to embolden a section of the body politic to block or remove the means of the majority to win power, those ascendant on the right are pouring gasoline on our polity and then playing with fire.

I said that the political myth of the new right, which is not identical to everything every conservative believes and certainly not identical to all of the GOP’s historic positions, divides America along two axes. The first is between those with the right to rule, with or without a majority, because they have the ‘correct’ values, and everyone else who can be dismissed and scorned; the second is between ‘real,’ ‘heritage,’ legal’ Americans, and Outsiders. I want to be careful to note that I am aware that many of the people I know personally on the right, I know in the context of church communities that are very outward-looking, open, and welcoming to the stranger, and so people in those contexts who think of themselves as conservative may feel this is an unfair depiction of the right as it may not accurately describe their own motivations or experiences. But from the broader standpoint of the right as a whole, can anyone deny that the last nine years have not been defined, more than anything else, by the castigation of immigrants, migrants, various kinds of ‘others’, as well as calls for the wholesale abandonment of people around the world to whom we have commitments and obligations both diplomatic and human. One of the very first things Trump did in his administration was an attempt to implement what he had sold as a ban on Muslim immigration (obviously he had to limit this to a temporary ban on immigration from a specific list of countries for security reasons, because his administration was staffed with people who understood that nothing else had a chance of surviving in court – but we know how the former President referred to the executive action, and how he wanted the public to think of it). These divisions, between worthy and unworthy Americans, and between real Americans and all other people, are the animating spirit of today’s GOP, and the content of its national myth about who we are as a people.

The Democratic Party contains multitudes of competing views, but when we look at the political mythology in power at the top, we don’t see perfection, but we do see something that fights for our imperfect democratic republic to continue to breathe and function imperfectly as we muddle on through. It’s not very romantic, and it’s not apocalyptically or eschatologically satisfying in the way I suspect motivates some of the voices on the right; but what Harris is proposing to do, and what Biden has in fact done, is to try to rule by winning over the majority of the public through persuasion and shoring up a democratic process where coexistence between Americans of both parties is possible over the long-term, and conflict is worked through peacefully. And crucially, it is a national mythology which avoids the fatal sin of so many other nations mythologies: it is not exclusive. It is more motivated to see all Americans, and all people, as our neighbor, than it is to find reasons to disdain the Samaritan. This isn’t perfectly reflected in the platform or the party; I could rattle off a score of ways they fall well short of the ideal right now. But the content of the myth’s ideal and the direction of its aspiration are markedly divergent from the right’s, which turns its back upon others.

I am by necessity speaking in broad terms, because while elections have excruciatingly specific outputs for individuals affected, the voters only have the lever of the broadest input on what happens. This certainly does not seem like an ideal system – and indeed, it is not. The democratic process is often sluggishly frustrating and infuriatingly unjust in its outcomes, and it is always tempting, for a certain kind of person with an actively idealistic political imagination, to think ‘if only I could just run this or that for five minutes…’ – but of course we must choose between ourselves who would get that say, and the wise understand that they do no in fact understand the ways in which they would, untrammeled, abuse.

When I say that democratic legitimacy is under threat, some will feel I must be exaggerating, and I admit that this is an area in which I would rather be over-cautious than be caught sleeping. You may also suggest that my motives for saying this are entirely driven by political outcome, a desire to shore up liberalism by any means – and I don’t want to discount that criticism out of hand. I do think, as in the bill of rights, there are liberal human rights which should be maintained even against a democratic majority, and I am as susceptible to the same outcome-derived biases where procedure is concerned as anyone. But I think that even if you are on the right and disagree strongly about desired outcomes, the potential abrogation of democratic legitimacy posed by the current direction of the GOP should trouble you.

Whenever this topic is raised January 6th is what immediately leaps to mind, but it is only the tip of the iceberg, and my concern over democratic legitimacy greatly predates it. The fact of the matter is that our particular political system, with the Electoral College, numerous veto points, a House which skews rural, and a Senate which bears little resemblance to the overall distribution of votes in the country, is already far from wholly democratic. Of course, in many ways we have made great strides in improving this system since the Revolution, and I am not arguing in favor of a pure non-representative democracy with every issue voted on a simple majority, with no veto points whatsoever. The danger is that our system increasingly skews things so that a minority of the population has been able to rule over the majority, to prevent necessary legislative reforms – not in the protection of individual liberty, but in all areas, bringing the process of legislating to a near standstill. This has crippled our ability to respond to crises and changing conditions in an effective way, and it has poisoned public opinion with the view that the state cannot operate, when it is in fact being sabotaged.

The public is growing increasingly aware of this gap between public opinion and votes, and actual power in government, which tends to trend overwhelmingly in a single direction, and this threatens to undermine faith in the Republic as an institution – faith without which it cannot function. But more troublesome is that professional political actors are increasingly informed about the ways in which the system skews right, and they are behaving accordingly. We see in the gamesmanship in the lead-up to January 6th around putting forward alternative slates of electors an openness by Republican strategists and staffers to attempting to cheat the electorate by testing the limit of the letter of the law, knowing that if such an argument about the rules were to break out, in our present polarized moment it would immediately collapse into partisan camps – in other words, it might be possible to get away with cheating simply by carrying along one side of the public and ignoring the other along with the principle of the thing.

This is beginning to bleed into an overt disregard for democracy as a principle at all; anecdotes are not good statistical data, and I think my experience represents more the way the algorithm promotes loud extremism over what is popular, but it has been hard to ignore the rising salience of voices in public discourse and online who are openly contemptuous of democracy, and who don’t really even try to deny that this is because it doesn’t vote the way they want. And I get it. When I was a teenager, I was an ideologically hard libertarian, and my perhaps OCD-propelled logic, from the emotional premise of the non-aggression principle, let me to my own lack of respect for democracy, because it seemed to consist of the public deciding how to apply force to individuals. But of course, following this to its logical end, I wound up being carried toward the waterfall of an anarchism that just does not work in this fallen world, which made me realize that the entire premise was flawed, and that government that collects taxes and works for the public good in imperfect ways is the best option available to us in this world. And most on the right today are not anarchists, and still believe in a government that collects taxes and enforces laws. The question, then, is on how the public good is determined, and what avenues are available to rectify abuses and promulgate reforms.

This, ultimately, is what the Revolution, for all its flaws, was fought over. And the danger we face now is the same of the 1770s. There are many who point to our Constitution, which creates the institutions I argue are skewed, and who say that they are simply playing by the rules as written – and that is the real danger. There is a distinct probability that the right will, if returned to government, exploit the technicalities of our system to entrench their power in a way that allows them to claim the fig leaf of procedural legality, while permanently denying the public the ability to govern itself in practice. This is not unlike the situation facing the Colonies: after all, the British parliamentary system was one of the most liberal and democratic constitutional systems in the world at the time, and backed by centuries of legal precedent as a font of legitimacy. But without representation, even this was not good enough; to maintain legitimacy, the state must grow with its people and remain responsive to the population as a whole. And the Revolution of course did not achieve this – as we know, the vast majority of Americans were excluded from power. But we have made many steps forward, and we can continue those now – or we can let a small clique wedge themselves into power to spite the majority.

If this occurs and is not corrected, then we will face two undesirable outcomes in succession. Either the minority will exercise a kind of tyranny over the majority, which will delegitimize the government, and frustrate the people’s ability to effect change. If there is no realistic democratic path for the majority of the public to ever change or correct a political problem, then they will either grow disengaged with politics, and rule will be by force by a stagnant elite, or they will feel forced to pursue other means of direct action to pursue their political goals. The ultimate danger is an authoritarian state with no accountability, or the collapse of the democratic social peace treaty and a return to general violence, which almost always resolves into an authoritarian state no matter which side wins, because avoiding that requires the commitment of the disagreeing wings of the public to honor democracy as the compromise to gain peace and legitimacy.

The danger is present now more than before, because the Republican nominee has already demonstrated an avowed willingness to abrogate democracy in favor of power, the party around him has acquiesced to this, and its intellectual leaders have decided that they are not going to even try to win majorities going forward, but that it is now or never for them demographically, which incentivizes them to ensure they do not lose power again. That is why it is crucial this anti-democratic politics be stopped here and now, and broken permanently so that it is replaced even on the right by a politics of persuasion.

Vote for Harris-Walz on November 5.

May 2024 in Music

I feel like these playlists are getting longer as I rotate through more music each month, but what I actually have to say about any of it is diminishing, so this will be a brief post.

St. Vincent is one of our most interesting artists working today, so it’s unsurprising that the tone of these songs is utterly ineffable and baffling. Kevin Penkin’s Pathway is distressingly portentous. Belle isn’t a real pop-star, she’s a fictional character invented for the film of the same name, and the music was written by a trio of composers, but the voice and lyrics belong to the great Kaho Nakamura. It is the final rising act of the song which really brings into shore a great wave of catharsis, which is always what I am chasing. It’s emotional twin is One by one by one, a collaboration between my favorite composer and Aqualung.

Dermatillomania is no fun as a condition, but it makes an apt title for a song which, like an untamable itch, I keep compulsively returning to. Free Cake For Every Creature was the brief musical project of Katie Bennett, and while I respect the decision to end on a high note, I wish the whispercore had continued its patter longer. Slow Pulp, Tomberlin, Julia Jacklin, and Tancred all feel as though they fit together even if I lack the vocabulary to quite say why. Wasted is particularly potent, while Pens is good old-fashioned alt-rock of the sort I’ve always enjoyed.

I included Mandinka because there’s something in the mesh of sound enfolding the chorus which has a flavor I can’t place or do without. Head Over Heels is a classic exemplar of perhaps my favorite period in music. Anly and PASSEPIED are both joyfully explosive J-Pop artists, too energetic to not feel messy (complimentary). I’ve included Hiroyuki Sawano’s score for Attack on Titan in these playlists before, but it’s such a consistent doorway into the melodic epic when I’m trying to be productive at work. And Basil Poledouris’ score for Conan The Destroyer resolves none of its mystery.

Negoto and Haru Nemuri are two other energetic J-Pop artists, the former’s music bouncing on a candyfloss trampoline, the latter’s urgently surging ahead, direct and serious in tone. Come Alive isn’t a typical track from The ArchAndroid, but there is a unique rough monstrosity in its dance.

I included some of James Horner’s iconic Wrath of Khan score, the best music ever recorded for Star Trek, as a point of comparison for the score to the third (and easily best) season of Picard, which borrows from it heavily – indeed, the whole season is in conversation with fans’ memory of the great film. This is all classic Trek, grand, noble, and soaring.

The Beths have a kind of warm fuzzy guitar in which they blanket sincere vulnerability, and I feel that Asobi Seksu’s album Flourescence has a similar quality. But there’s really nothing quite like the latter’s crystalline prism of late afternoon sunlight. Vangelis also has a fuzzy warmth to his work, albeit a synthesized one, and his version of Jerusalem is a beautiful example of arranging a venerable hymn in the most evocative way possible.

Lift a Sail is one of Yellowcard’s later and less-appreciated albums, but as such it possesses the peculiar melancholy of decline, which creates space for a kind of unpretentious openness. Datadata is quite similar to Sie Liebt Mich, both serving as calming interstitials. Sutechattene is a typically loopy clockwork from Daoko; Daienkai is a typically profound work of feeling from Humbert Humbert, marching to some great End. As for FAMILIA, I find this weirdly captivating, though the band’s name appears to be wholly inscrutable.

Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture has always been one of my favorite works of classical music, and this choral version hallows it, to my mind, into a beatific vision of the Eucatastrophe. It’s a long track, and great at every point, but the penultimate act of the song, when the choirs of angels arise from the descent of the strings, and cranky old Pyotr throws a whole set of tubular bells down a spiral staircase, is perhaps the grandest phrase of music ever written.

I defend The Killers, the soul of the Great Basin, against anyone who mocks them as corny or passe. I found Day & Age to make a perfect denouement after the climax – heartfelt, without taking itself too seriously. Goodnight, Travel Well seemed like the perfect ending to this playlist, but I decided to pin on Summer Road as a kind of postscriptive gesture toward the hopeful future we can’t yet see.

Vienna

From Bratislava, Vienna is only about 45 minutes by train. I arrived in the afternoon, which in November 2022 was clear, brisk, and ruddy, sun sinking quickly over the imperial city. I stayed in the southern neighborhood of Favoriten, and once I had dropped by bag at the Airbnb, I made use of the waning daylight to go for a walk and form some sort of impression of this place I had imagined for so many years.

At first I found myself among crisp apartment blocks and modern parks, all the hallmarks of the kind of walkable communal spaces that I wish we would zone for (although my understanding is that Vienna is not above criticism and could in fact stand to have a higher density). Still, there is something specific and esoterically charming, at least for me, about certain kinds of foreign cities where children play in the public green spaces between concrete apartment towers. But of course, the foreignness is perhaps ancillary, a greener shade of grass.

Just north of the station, I found the first jewel of Vienna’s many-crowned imperial past, Schloss Belvedere, glowing with the fading warmth of day. Its garden mazes were picked threadbare by November, but they overlooked the most beautiful twilit city, St. Stephen’s spire like a lone sentinel over the fields of palaces and galleries.

Beyond the gardens was the beginning of Schwarzenbergplatz, where I could glimpse the active leisure of the evening begin. Here I found a reminder of Vienna’s strange position during the Cold War, balanced on the knife edge between empires – the monument erected to the Red Army, which arrived at the end of the war but did not stay so long. Nearby was the baroque wedding cake of Karskirche, lit up like a joyous candle in the blue gloaming.

The next morning I wended my way North, again past Karlskirche, the Ring Road, the Opera, and into the historical core of what had once been a walled town. There, at the center, stands Stephanskirche, built from the 13th through the early 16th centuries, it’s South Tower almost 450 feet high. The religious center of an empire ruled by the great stalwarts of Catholicism, the Habsburgs, the roof’s panoply of tiles bears their royal double-headed eagle, a symbol of empire that has existed since the Bronze Age. In the alleys nearby I found Mozart’s old apartment building and a wealth of other gorgeous architecture, including the heavenly St. Michael’s, which was in the midst of celebrating its 800th year.

From there I made my way into the Hofburg, the primary seat of the Emperors. I glimpsed one of the famous Lipizzaner horses in the Stallburg, and then made my way into a section of the Hofburg dedicated entirely to showcasing the unbelievable extent of the imperial tableware. Room after room after room of exquisite cutlery, painted plates, napkins folded in a manner passed down in secret by generations of palace staff, who now deploy them in service of Austrian state dinners, a table service which was a part of the peace treaty settlement with Napoleon, and gilded tureens. Above this was more palatial museum, showcasing the former imperial apartments and explicating the life of Empress Sisi, the much romanticized and troubled wife of the penultimate Emperor Franz Josef. On my way out, I passed doors with signs telling museum visitors that they were for staff – specifically Austrian presidential staff, because the President’s office and much of the core of the Austrian government is housed in other parts of the same connected buildings that compose the Hofburg.

As night fell I strolled past immense colonnades, the monuments of a shattered empire; a solemn Holocaust memorial; the beginnings of a Christmas market popping up around the Cathedral; and the Café Central, whose customers included everyone from Theodor Herzl, key founder of modern Zionism, to Adolf Hitler, and Sigmund Freud, Josip Tito, Stalin, and of course regulars Trotsky & Lenin, plotting revolution in exile.

The next day I explored a changed city, smothered under a blanket of cold fog that reached all the way to the ground. A local friend of a friend was kind enough to show me around the city, pointing out the ornate flowering of architectural decoration that began in the restive final years of the aging empire, or the gigantic flak tower built during the War to defend against air raids. A section of the Danube, the Donaukanal, was captured by the city’s engineers several centuries ago and regulated into a domesticated waterfront, more conveniently proximate than the main body of the river. From here boats leave, going back and forth to other ports up and down the river, like Bratislava.

The final morning I spent in Vienna was dreary and heavy with rain, but I had to go outside nevertheless to see great palace in the suburbs, Schloss Schonbrunn. The site of this on TV earlier in the year, when it was hosting its annual summer concert, had reminded me of my desire to see Vienna and in doing so prompted the timing of this entire trip. When I arrived, I found that the palace itself was merely the frontispiece of an immense work of landscaping which verged into naturalistic hills and woods, cut through with regular avenues of precisely-cut trees. I could not take pictures inside the palace, but I visited the mirrored great hall, a room sufficiently grand to host Napoleon when he occupied the city and forced the signing of a peace treaty with the Habsburgs, and also to accommodate the famous meeting of Kennedy and Krushchev in 1961. But the gardens made a stronger impression on me, because they allowed me silence to wander and feel the fatigue and quiescence that comes at the end of a long journey. The next sunrise I saw from the aircraft, on my way home. This is the end of my trip to Mitteleuropa.

Music in April 2024

It’s a rainy day in August, Alaskans are already eulogizing our beautiful summer in the past tense, and I have a cold, so I am going to pretend that this is why I am just now getting back to updating my monthly playlists going all the way back to April. By this you are to understand that I have made excellent use of the intervening months, written half a novel, done five camping trips and a score of hikes, and eaten fifty watermelons. None of this has happened, of course.

Perhaps because it’s been so long, April’s playlist proliferated like a fungus in a forest, and is longer than I had anticipated when I began it. I may in turn abbreviate my coverage of its contents to compensate.

1999 was famously one of the greatest years for cinema, and the film from that year which made the greatest impression on me, Magnolia, owes not a little of that to its use of Aimee Mann’s soundtrack, which bookends the playlist. One just feels like the right place to start – it’s a musical approximation of a turn-of-the-century computer booting up, light by blinking light, fans spinning up to greet the uncertain future.

Also formed in 1999 was the band Saturday Looks Good To Me, whose honeyed guitar tracks all seem to stick together sweetly. From warm American music I pivoted to cool, rushing animecore, and to a synthesized screensaver of a song that recycles the same computer-generated lines incessantly like a hypnotic washing machine – and it hypnotized me. Yorushika, as always, is a return to the human and the emotionally quick and open, with superb background foley. While we’re in Japan, I slipped in another of Kanho Yakushiji’s versions of the chanted Heart Sutra, which I have already brought up on this blog, with the caveat that I’m not a Buddhist and that if anything, the beautiful form of the chanted sutra seems to me to contradict its message that form is emptiness, and emptiness form – but then, I think that beauty is substance.

It's very important to listen to the Top Gun: Maverick score at eight in the morning when you’re starting the work day and slamming back your first coffee. Trust me, it helps.

An eclectic group follows this. There are a couple tracks from Weyes Blood’s 2016 Front Row Seat to Earth album, hesitantly reverent in its gentle melancholy. Vagabon is an even more woebegone artist, whose In A Bind smells like camp smoke in cold morning fog on a leaden northern lake. But there’s also more straightforward British pop by Holly Humberstone and Foxes, which feel like the rejuvenating drop of cold rain; and of course, Chappell Roan, whose music is anything but cold, and whose talent cannot be gainsaid. And Fool’s Gold simply a fantastic banger – Jack River goes done in the books as another Australian with a warm, sandy voice.

In 2012, David Byrne and St. Vincent collaborated on a joint album, in what has to be one of the great passing-of-the-torch moments from one generation’s genius weirdo to another’s, cut from the same cloth. The upbeat-yet-aggressively-discomfiting Who unsurprisingly feels perfectly of a piece with both their oeuvres.

I included a number of tracks throughout from Cousin Tony’s Brand New Firebird, my new favorite product of Melbourne, beginning with Transient’s space-bound medley. CHAI and Mrs. GREEN APPLE are both good examples of frequently goofy Japanese rock/pop – goofy in this case being complimentary. MATCHA must have been written while snorting the green treasure, and the latter’s recent album, ANTENNA, is a typically saccharine affair where the balance of sentiment and silliness is perhaps a bit over the line, but in a way that’s cute. Sukima Switch is similarly emotional but without the glammed-up production. Mei Semones’ Inaka, on the other hand, seems deceptively muted and stripped down, while actually being deeply complex in a way that effectively mirrors the shifting gusts of autumn wind in the actual inaka, the part of Japan that is on the road to nowhere, gradually being overrun by boars, macaques, and wild hydrangeas and more and more houses go unoccupied. The best part of Japan.

The works I picked from the great French composer Maurice Ravel have this in common with Jerry Goldsmith’s eternal score to Star Trek: The Motion Picture: they both build in a slow, dreamlike fashion, spreading like a dreamlike oil over the waters. More is implied, in awe or in threat, than is made clear.

The next few tracks are all different old tunes I pulled off the Licorice Pizza soundtrack, which together create a blanket of warm, bouncy nostalgia. Beyond that, these are just really good, and I’m glad the movie brought these up to me. Dressy Bessy’s eponymous 2003 album is a much more recent slice of the same nostalgia, this time for the unpretentious fun of the alternative turn of the century.

Cécile Corbel’s 2019 album Enfant du vent only reinforces my sense of awestruck gratitude that this almost-too-good-to-be-true character exists. We must never forgive Paris for its suppression of Breton culture until the recent past. Corbel is working entirely in the realm of enchantment – a term which of course derives through French from the Latin ‘cantus’, ‘song’.

I pulled a number of tracks from an Alternative ‘80s playlist I picked up, but the one that really lodged in my head was the oddly-specific I’m In Love With A German Film Star. There’s just a specific ambience to the early ‘80s that I’ve been chasing for years, and The Passions have it bottled. And I paired another St. Vincent track with another ‘80s cultural ancestor, Kate Bush – two brilliantly strange artists.

Bubble was a pretty mid anime movie that is not terribly memorable, but it’s a good example of Hiroyuki Sawano’s ability to create a virtual cavernous space within a piece of music. We see this as well in his collaboration with Kohta Yamamoto on the final Attack on Titan score, which somehow manages to musically match the energy of an entire world trampled into gore under a cathedral of living bones.

I keep coming back to Asobi Seksu, but they deserve it. Their self-titled debut album cuts through a gloom like a sunshine buzzsaw. For me, this is the ultimate sort of comfort music, which nonetheless maintains its creative wit and cheeky charm.

Then we’re back to the ‘80s, first with Japanese city pop, one of the great rediscovered genres in the age of the internet. It is, of course, fully entwined with American music, just as the two countries had by this point become interdependent, as is right. And there’s just something wonderfully wistful about The Smiths, a poetry of the unfulfilled. Rise is at turns anthemic and awkward in a way I enjoy. And David Byrne’s Life Is Long is tacked onto his ‘80s association, actually released in 2008. It’s a reflection on the past and the purpose of life, one worth hearing.  

By this point, Cousin Tony’s Brand New Firebird seems to be solidifying its position as my favorite band I got into this year, and their best track is the rousing Best Face to London. Who else even sounds anything like this?

I’ve returned to Joe Hisaishi’s darkling score to The Boy and the Heron, and the coldness therein feels deliberative and inexorable. More moody orchestral scores follow, including Justin Hurwitz’s ethereal Sextant.

Lucky for You is a perfect example of a warmly melancholic marriage of harmonies dipping in and out of the stream of repeated notes. Bon Iver’s The Wolves is a similarly moody piece, which builds into a nonetheless hopeful resolution.

Tancred is not a new name to me; I’m familiar with both Tancred, King of Sicily and Tancred, Prince of Galilee. Apparently this Tancred is neither of them, confusingly, but her 2018 album Nightstand quietly has the same mailed fist and steel edge of her armored namesakes. Angie McMahon has appeared on my playlists this year already, but I returned for Serotonin, which builds a song around the rhythm of anxious hyperventilation. The sense of trying to slow down one’s racing thoughts and act deliberately is worked into this song in a way that is true to life. Flag is another cleverly-crafted gently constructively piece of encouragement from a Japanese singer.

Jon Brion’s Synecdoche, New York score pulls the very stuff of life out of my heart. It is heavy, yet resolved. Mark Orton’s Nebraska score is a twangy elegy for the silly sadness of growing old. And at the tail end of the playlist I slipped in a few Japanese songs which scintillate with a small, still hope.

As I mentioned earlier, the real standout of April was the Magnolia soundtrack, which I returned to to close out the list. Momentum actually stresses me, because it entertains the fear I harbor: that in pursuing my planned routine, I am making a fatal error, and wasting my life. I’m not sure that this fear is right, however – it can be necessary to disregard even a plausible doubt in order to do anything in life, and we are not the sum of our achieved ambitions. Still, it hits a little close to home. Deathly begins as a gentle case of that entanglement of joy and regret that I so adore, only to break into one of the most magnificent guitar crescendos I’ve ever heard. Save Me is a prayer for deliverance from our own self-doubt and selfish hearts. Its eye is fixed, rightly, not on our faulty stars, but on ourselves. I’m not alleging that Mann set out to write with a view to the Gospel, but I read it in. And Driving Sideways is the perfect ambiguous exit; nothing is finally resolved or answered – and that’s ok.

Bratislava

I arrived in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, on a crisp evening in November 2022. This newly-minted capital of a country created in my own lifetime is sandwiched at the center of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, on a bend of the Danube thirty-odd miles below Vienna, on the rail line directly between the Austrian and Hungarian capitals. For all its centrality, what impressed me most about Bratislava was its littleness – and I mean that in the most complimentary way.

I had begun my journey in Berlin, a throbbing chamber of the European heart, despite being perhaps more vivisected and re-sutured than any other city of the 20th century; I proceeded to Prague, the Paris of Bohemia, thronged with holidayers and partiers; in Budapest I found a great grey empire of broad thoroughfares unrolling itself like a carpet over the Hungarian plain; and I was set to end my travels in Vienna, the Imperial City of old-world Europe, barnacled with palaces and occupying the diplomatic nexus of east and west. But as soon as I ducked under the grassy railroad embankment to make my way into the center of the Slovak capital, I felt a great calm descend upon me. The sun waned, warm and yellow, and sunburnt leaves rustled in the autumn breeze, but despite the lovely day there were no great crowds, no clamor of traffic; only the comings and goings of a gentle city in the late afternoon. I passed a ruined house, abandoned long  enough for a tree to grow up inside it and burst through the roof two storeys up. The Presidential Palace was white, like our own, but it had no fenced-in rose garden; it sat on a rather ordinary public square, and it’s backyard was a park filled with people walking their dogs and pushing perambulators. Beyond this lay the old city, a little clique of pedestrian streets inside the city walls, in which a good schnitzel can easily be found. So much for the evening.

Like Berlin, Bratislava’s unfortunate history as a Soviet satellite has left it with the silver lining of Socialist Modernist architecture to compliment its medieval and rococo core, including a bridge which appears to be poised to launch its UFO saucer into the stratosphere, should its cables ever be released. It also has a church whose blue color reminded me so much of the frosting on one of my earliest childhood birthday cakes that I felt I could taste it from across the gap of thirty years, and developed a craving.

Up the hill to the northwest, past the old Jewish quarter (which was unfortunately largely demolished to build the strange bridge), sits the castle, which has watched over Bratislava since it was old Pressburg, and just beyond it perches Parliament, which has only been there since 1986. This has what must be one of the greatest views of any legislature in the world; unfortunately it is also too small for its current function. West of the castle is a suburb of palatial houses interspersed with trees; in the warm sun I felt it could not be beat by anything in our own California.

No longer needed for defense, as Slovakia is ensconced within the leaguer of both the EU and NATO, Bratislava Castle has been refashioned into a museum which carries one from the stone age all the way through to the student revolutions against Communism and the Velvet Divorce of 1993. Here there are nameless idols; the skull of an ancestor – not only of Slovakia, but probably of most humans alive today, if they managed to have any children; bronze swords and steel, withered and reproduced in modern replica; a Roman Galea from when the local garrison of Dowina formed a part of the great Limes, the northern border defenses of the Empire; and even some fragmentary icons depicting winged angels, which are some of the earliest physical traces of Christianity in this corner of Europe.

There is also a rich collection of medieval art, griffins, royal charters, the warding angel of the flaming sword, worm-eaten wooden saints, and Christ glorified. Outside, the air purples with dusk, as the calm city settles down to another night of pleasant slumber.

Alice Munro

Update July 10, 2024: This week, just a few days after writing this blog praising Alice Munro to high heaven, I learned along with a large part of the public that what I wrote below, that I did not know much about her as a person, was more true than I would have wanted to believe. Writing in the Toronto Star, Munro’s daughter Andrea Skinner revealed that as a child she had been sexually assaulted by her stepfather, Munro’s second husband, and that years later when she did tell her mother, rather than being a mother to her, Alice Munro swept it under the rug and remained with her husband while becoming estranged from her daughter.

Since this article ran, the literary community surrounding Munro’s sphere has been in chaos. I’m not a part of that sphere, but having just written so positively about Munro, I felt I should acknowledge what we now know. I have seen some writers and critics deploring that her stories are now unreadable to them; personally, I do not feel that an author’s iniquity necessarily detracts from the quality of their work, but I also respect that especially for people who are themselves victims of abuse, there’s no obligation not to respond in that way. I’ve also seen a few people defending Munro, and while I think it is Christian and consistent to empathize with the experience of everyone even when they do grievous wrong, attempting to minimize the harm done to her daughter is obviously unconscionable and flatly wrong.

Having said all this, I am going to leave up everything I wrote two weeks ago as I wrote it, with only this preface. I would have worded my feelings differently, had I known, so as not to praise Munro so personally - but I still stand by the rest of my endorsement of her writing, which I think must come with the clarification that it is in no way a defense of what she did.

I meant to write this soon after Alice Munro passed a little more than a month ago, but I was caught up in a whirl of travel and haven’t written a stitch on any topic since probably April. I’m comforted to know that, like my beloved Tolkien, Munro was another author who often felt encumbered from writing by the busyness of life – although for the moment I have fewer excuses. At any rate, Alice didn’t need me to promptly eulogize her, because she was known to so many; nor am I qualified to do so, having only read a smattering of her stories and little of her biography. Still, I wanted to take the moment of her passing to praise a writer whose work I hold above almost every other that I have read.

I had never heard of Alice Munro until a story of hers – which one, I strangely cannot remember for certain – was assigned as an exemplar in a creative writing course I took my sophomore year of college, two years before she won the Nobel Prize. While I already had a fairly broad taste in literature, her particular mode of quiet, introspective, realistic fiction had never been my favored genre, and I had almost no familiarity with either short stories as a serious form or twentieth-century literature at all, for that matter (I had grown up mostly on a combination of science fiction/fantasy and a strong bias toward very large 19th-century novels). I had even less knowledge of her recurrent subject – the lives and recollections of youth of women born in the Great Depression in Huron County, Ontario. That first story I read – whichever it was – was merely another assignment to efficiently dispense with in a semester where I had taken on too many credits at once. Once I had finished it, however, I found myself unable to leave it behind, like the pasts which stalk her protagonists. In time the specific story quite left my head, but the particularity of how it made me feel remained, fixed as if a real memory had been experienced and gradually forgotten, its outline fossilized in the mind. I did not immediately seek out more of her work; I would defend myself with the enormous syllabus of reading that followed in my junior year, but my sluggishness in finally following up with her belies that excuse. A few years after graduating, I stopped by the University Bookstore across the street from UW one night in winter, a season when I had been visiting the university library to surreptitiously research from books I could not actually check out. In the store, I recognized Alice Munro’s name on a collection of some of her best stories, which I promptly bought and began to read. The first story in the collection, Walker Brothers Cowboy, immediately became a staple of the syllabi I assigned in my English classes over the next few years, but embarrassingly my progress through the book slowed to a fitful crawl, and only picked back up last year, when I finally finished that one of her many collections of stories.

So, I am far from well-versed in Munro’s overall body of work, nor am I any kind of expert on her career. All I know is how the stories I have read felt to me at the time, a feeling which has not altered or dulled for any of them regardless of when I read each. Alice Munro had a way of creating a definite and palpable sense of a specific place and a specific internal mood and momentary inner consciousness of a person closer to my experience of reality than any other description I have ever read, fictional or otherwise. She did this consistently, in every sentence on every page of every story I read. In her stories, I saw a startlingly true reflection of the actual subjective experience of life and memory as a person, not because of any particular commonality with her subjects, but simply through her prose. Her work was quiet, a somber nostalgia without any romanticism – closer to actual human memory than to art. Here was no pressure to be showy or loud, to move with any speed at all through a plot, no hurry to get anywhere – there was simply consciousness in the lived moment of remembrance itself. There was not even a need to adhere to action or dialogue to maintain any sort of interest; instead, her narrator would simply describe thoughts and sensations to the reader. She told her readers in a way which showed them in the telling.

I don’t know much about Alice Munro as a person, nor have I read most of her works. But I’ve read enough to know that she will remain near the very top of the pantheon of writers I love, and I will surely miss her.

Here are a couple of quotations.

               “He tells me how the Great Lakes came to be. All where Lake Huron is now, he says, used to be flat land, a wide flat plain. Then came the ice, creeping down from the North, pushing deep into the low places. Like that – and he shows me his hand with his spread fingers pressing the rock-hard ground where we are sitting. His fingers make hardly any impression at all and he says, ‘Well, the old ice cap had a lot more power behind it than this hand has.’ And then the ice went back, shrank back towards the North Pole where it came from, and left its fingers of ice in the deep places it had gouged, and ice turned to lakes and there they were today. They were new, as time went. I try to see that plain before me, dinosaurs walking on it, but I am not able even to imagine the shore of the Lake when the Indians were there, before Tuppertown. The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquillity. Even my father, who sometimes seems to me to have been at home in the world as long as it has lasted, has really lived on this earth only a little longer than I have, in terms of all the time there has been to live in. He has not known a time, any more than I, when automobiles and electric lights did not at least exist. He was not alive when this century started. I will be barely alive – old, old – when it ends. I do not like to think of it. I wish the Lake to be always just a lake, with safe-swimming floats marking it, and the breakwater and the lights of Tuppertown.” – Walker Brothers Cowboy

               “So my father drives and my brother watches the road for rabbits and I feel my father’s life flowing back from our car in the last of the afternoon, darkening and turning strange, like a landscape that has an enchantment on it, making it kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are looking at it, but changing it, once your back is turned, into something you will never know, with all kinds of weathers, and distances you cannot imagine.” – Walker Brothers Cowboy

               “If I had been making a proper story out of this, I would have ended it, I think, with my mother not answering and going ahead of me across the pasture. That would have done. I didn’t stop there, I suppose, because I wanted to find out more, remember more. I wanted to bring back all I could. Now I look at what I have done and it is like a series of snapshots, like the brownish snapshots with fancy borders that my parents’ old camera used to take. In these snapshots Aunt Dodie and Uncle James and even Aunt Lena, even her children, come out clear enough. (All these people dead now except the children, who have turned into decent friendly wage earners, not a criminal or as far as I know even a neurotic among them.) The problem, the only problem, is my mother. And she is the one of course that I am trying to get; it is to reach her that this whole journey has been undertaken. With what purpose? To mark her off, to describe, to illumine, to celebrate, to get rid of her; and it did not work, for she looms too close, just as she always did. She is heavy as always, she weighs everything down, and yet she is indistinct, her edges melt and flow. Which means she has stuck to me as close as ever and refused to fall away, and I could go on, and on, applying what skills I have, using what tricks I know, and it would always be the same.” – The Ottawa Valley

               “What she never said to anybody, never confided, was that she sometimes thought it had not been pity or greed or cowardice or vanity but something quite different, like a vision of happiness. In view of everything else she had told she could hardly tell that. It seems very odd; she can’t justify it. She doesn’t mean that they had perfectly ordinary, bearable times in their marriage, long busy stretches of wallpapering and vacationing and meals and shopping and worrying about a child’s illness, but that sometimes, without reason or warning, happiness, the possibility of happiness, would surprise them. Then it was as if they were in different though identical-seeming skins, as if there existed a radiantly kind and innocent Rose and Patrick, hardly ever visible, in the shadow of their usual selves. Perhaps it was that Patrick she saw when she was free of him, invisible to him, looking into his carrel. Perhaps it was. She should have left him there.” – The Beggar Maid

               “She has written in her journal: I know nostalgia is a futile emotion. Sometimes I feel like tearing out some things I have written where perhaps I have been too harsh in judging certain people or situations but I have decided to leave everything because I want to have a record of what I really felt at the time. I want to have a truthful record of my whole life. How to keep oneself from lying I see as the main problem everywhere.” – Labor Day Dinner

               “No wonder she was feeling clammy. She had gone under a wave, which nobody else had noticed. You could say anything you liked about what had happened – but what it amounted to was going under a wave. She had gone under and through it and was left with a cold sheen on her skin, a beating in her ears, a cavity in her chest, and revolt in her stomach. It was anarchy she was up against – a devouring muddle. Sudden holes and impromptu tricks and radiant vanishing consolations.”  - Carried Away

Music in March 2024

March was the Month of Dune. I crammed myself into the lower rows of the theater on Friday the 1st, opening night, to stare up at Chalamet’s comically-exaggerated chin thanks to the curvature of the IMAX screen. I returned twice more, to see it from every vantage point over the course of the month. What stuck with me most from that first viewing was the overpowering sonic experience of Arrakis; when the spice harvester begins its percussive dance, I felt myself physically vibrate in sympathetic resonance. But far more than the sound design, I became obsessed with Zimmer’s score, which I think rivals Interstellar as his best work in a voluminous career. The music truly echoes the course of the story, synthesizing the disparate themes of the first film into a purposeful, majestic, horrifying concert. I’ve put several tracks throughout my playlist, but the final one, Kiss The Ring, opens such a vista as words cannot describe.

But I must move on. But the theme of overwhelming, mechanistic power continues in Sufjan Stevens’ album The Age of Adz, whose titular track sounds like a musical adaptation of Metropolis (although of course we’ve already seen that done, and excellently). And the eponymous refrain of I Want To Be Well expresses what may be the central tension in our lives: do we want to be well? Woodkid’s Iron continues the theme of fanatic, driving force, building and building an escalating tension as it plunges from the clifftops into the unknown.

There are a few other scores in this list besides Dune. Cho Young Wook’s baroque chamber piece tells you exactly what sort of spider’s web Sympathy For Lady Vengeance will be; Amine Bouhafa’s work on The Summit of the Gods haunts the mind and suggests within itself (though I have not yet seen the picture) the first of Everest’s many ghosts joining its spectral chorus; Kevin Penkin once again opens a cavernous eldritch space within a piece of music with his score for Tower of God; Joe Hisaishi, taking a fairly different tone for a very different kind of film than his Ghibli work, creates a fatalistic melancholia in scoring the incredible, bleak HANA-BI; and Carter Burwell demonstrates the worth of restraint and simplicity in his arrangement of What a Friend We Have in Jesus, used to wistfully reconcile the passing of a quarter century of life in the final moments of True Grit. Amid all these, we find the master of sentiment himself, the Great Ennio Morricone, at work on Cinema Paradiso, a film so utterly sincere in its sentimentality that, like its score, it overcomes every objection of trope or triteness and compels the audience to weep.

Sentiment is so often the key for me – I am in that regard, simple. For instance, I am not a massive Lana Del Rey fan, but these tracks she released last year are so fragile and openhearted that they cannot be denied. Returning to the forward current of the musical river, London Grammar’s album Truth Is  A Beautiful Thing rolls on like the Styxian Thames under the cold night fog. And We are the massacre, World’s End Girlfriend’s bizarre elegy, fuses the sense of dark fear (are those screams in the background?) with the somber catharsis of honest tears and a crescendo of noise which brute-forces its way into a kind of alien harmony.

Chick Habit, If You Should Try To Kiss Her, and Trailer Song all appear on the soundtrack of 1999’s But I’m a Cheerleader, and they have a particular mood and moment frozen in warm amber. Then there’s music from Necry Talkie, always upbeat and sunny, and Vaundy, similarly jaunty. Softcult, on the other hand, is a poison-tipped fragment of neo-grunge, whose gall is transmuted by Florence+The Machine’s alchemy into a frenetic spiral, dancing its way up from the dust and into the daylight.

And yes, I did put in ABBA, who I love. There’s nothing like some good old disco. Picking up that spirit of fun is clammbon, who spin it into a melody of gold. Hitsujibungaku are full-throated and warm, while DAOKO is sinuous and cool. Then, of course, there’s Takagi’s album Tai Rei Tei Rio, with joyful dances of life and folkish hymnodies. You And Whose Army? begins lazily, before tipping over into a waterfall of blood.

I stumbled onto Laufey’s album Bewitched, and was immediately captivated by this jazzy time-warp that sounds like it was recorded about seventy years ago, if not more. I’m not an artistic conservative or radical – I’m an artistic omnivore: I want more and more and more of every possible thing, and so it’s a shocking delight to find music that seemed consigned to a past era revivified with entirely new songs, sung by a young voice in an old mode.

Another artist that was new to me this month was Asobi Seksu, whose 2006 album Citrus has all the tart buzz of its namesake. There’s a kind of warm sonic bath created by the liberal dispensation of so much guitar, which reminds me a little of The Sundays, but with a very particular aftertaste. I like it. (<This is the caliber of criticism money can’t buy; you have to get it foisted on you for free, like a brochure).

Confess feels like raw sugar cut with pine sawdust, snorted entire. 2 Cool 2 Care sounds very Canadian (complimentary) for some reason – but it turns out Burch is from Detroit, which is almost Canada. In Losing My Mind, Montaigne’s usual raw vulnerability is set to an amazing souped-up tune, impossible not to move to. And Making It Through voices a proposition that I have started seriously considering – that perhaps “just making it through is the lesson” – perhaps the Gospel we’ve received is not one that demands glorious achievement, but simply living, as time runs out, as it should, could be enough.

Finally, I became enamored of the score for the video game Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (which I have not played). English composer Jessica Curry managed to create a haunting, elevating, and ultimately transcendent choral work, which adapts from scripture the lament of those who wait in suffering on the relief of the Lord, hoping in fear.  

Alaskan Autumn 2023

Now that the snow is weeping itself into the sod and spring is haltingly underway, it’s time to post some pictures of my first Autumn in Alaska. Seasons are generally either astronomical and exact, or subjective and circumstantial, and I prefer the latter. So in my reckoning, fall began in the last week of August, when the air first felt crisp on a grey day, and the grass began to attain a reddish tint. On that day I went to Reflection Lake, a modest pond ensconced in the naith formed by the confluence of the Knik and Matanuska Rivers. I must admit to a degree of nostalgia – the light and the weather so reminded me of North Bend.

The following week was Labor Day, and pressed by the lateness of the season, I forced myself to cross two things off my list, without which I would have felt anxious I was too cowardly to properly enjoy Alaska, but which were nonetheless occasions for some anxiety. The first was to camp by myself. Now, I have a great deal of experience camping, and am very comfortable in a tent; I am even quite comfortable in a tent by myself, including in places with large fauna like Yellowstone. But it's still difficult to sleep when you’re worried, and the middle of nowhere in Alaska is very much outside my experience.

Driving up the Glenn highway revealed a wilderness of sepia, exhaling vapors even on a sunny day. After turning North on the Richardson, the ruddy tundra grass leapt to meet the declining sun such that every field became a glory of color. The Gulkana River cut through the red like azure floss, and its Glacier attained an almost Tibetan cast in the saffron robes of fall. Yes I know – the grass is red, the rivers are blue, my prose is purple.

Rainbow Mountain is a whole palette, of course, and I arrived at exactly the right time of day to see it fully illuminated. I dipped over the pass just to see the Alaska Range up close, and it was wonderful how different the scenery looked from just two months before. A simple change in color, lighting, atmosphere, and a small lowering of the snow line, transformed the mountains into a country entirely strange.

I turned back south, and then west onto the Denali Highway. The tundra this road cuts through is BLM land, and can be camped on essentially at will. The first time I had driven it, in July, the road was enfolded in clouds down to the hilltops; but this first evening the gilded fields unrolled all the way to mountains whose only limit was haze and my decrepit eyesight.

I found a spot to camp just east of Tangle Lakes, on the north side of the road. Below, you can see the view from where I set up my tent. It was chilly on the tundra at night, but by carefully wrapping myself in a burrito of fleece and down I quickly became quite cozy and comfortable. The night was bright with moonshine, and I was mostly untroubled by fear of the bears (or drunk moose). I will say, however, that just before I rose, shortly after waking in the early morning, I heard a sound near the head of my tent, perhaps a few yards away in the bushes, that sounded like nothing so much as a large animal sneezing. I never did see what it was; I struck camp shortly after, and didn’t go poking around to find out.

The second thing I crossed off my list which challenged my comfort zone was going paddling. I love canoeing on tranquil sloughs and lakes, but I have always gone with other people. In the absence of anyone else, however, I had to content myself with a solo kayak rented from the friendly owner of Tangle Lakes Lodge, where I was also able to procure a plate of pancakes. I don’t have any pictures from the boat, but you can see from what follows that the day was grey and wet, and it was with trepidation that I allowed myself to be thrust onto the water. The worst part was the beginning, because to enter the main body of the lake I had to paddle through a gentle, but still noticeable current where the lake flows through a narrows. As you can surmise, I’m not used to being on water that moves at all. From there, though, I spent about an hour wending my way around the lake, enjoying myself more and more as I went. After returning to the lodge, I set off down the foggy highway toward Cantwell, chariot covered in grime from the road which snaked its way up and down fir-covered rises and above the braided Nenana River.

I had meant to camp some more, but between the tent and myself we were a bit soggier than anticipated, so I went back home from Cantwell that same day. On the next decent day, however, I drove up to Hatcher Pass, and scrambling to get some purchase on the crumbling scree, I witnessed the rapid passage of light and dark over the summit of the pass, as the clouds breathed their way around the peaks. Descending, I found that in Palmer there are pastures greener than I expected to find above 60 degrees of latitude.

Then, mid-way into September, my oil leak became much more pronounced. Because the places I wanted to take it were full up, and because I am sluggish about such things, for about a month I did not drive anywhere to speak of, but simply walked back and forth to work – which in my case is a pleasantly short and flat commute. I took the time to walk around my neighborhood in North Spenard, to see that my neighbor’s poppies were still in bloom even as the trees at Chester Creek were already browning.

Thankfully the only thing wrong with my car was a loose gasket, and once it had been resettled in place I headed back to Hatcher Pass to see what a month of Autumn had done to the place. The change, even in early October, was quite profound; the hills were already indistinguishable from the white fleece of clouds which hung above (and in cases, below) them. South from the pass, the sea was undergoing the same change, as the watery grey of the Knik Arm bled into the watery grey of the sky.

Over the next few weeks I stopped in Bicentennial Park several times, often after church, to observe the progress of the fall. Each day the sun rapidly declined, which only augmented the beauty of its angle while it remained up, and the birch trees and dead grasses glowed with the last of its yellow light.

Then came the frost. First, one morning my windshield was stenciled with crystals. That same day I drove to Girdwood, and saw that the snowline above Turnagain Arm was a sharp divide of ice. The valley above the town felt like something from a different continent, one higher and less green, now that the leaves were bare.

Exploring from Girdwood to Portage, I was astonished at the intensity of the frost. The veins of a leaf were replicated and exaggerated in ice; and the grass, even in the sun, extruded a forest of flat crystals, some an inch long, yet thinner than a sheet of paper. The ponds were not simply frozen: they were locked up in a way that preserved their layers of ripples as well as the brush strokes of their icy coat. Portage Lake was still unfrozen, but the waterfalls had changed from noisy white cascades to silent pillars.

On another day, leaving behind the forlorn, south-staring satellite dishes near my home, I probed round the corner of the Knik Arm, into a neighborhood fully shadowed by a steep mountain to its south. Here the frost had already accumulated so much that everything was desaturated, as if bleached. The air hung bitter, and the world seemed as dead as the abandoned cars which littered the woods. Only the patchy ice on the river moved, though it too would soon cease.

Finally, I returned to Bicentennial Park, and found that I could now walk on what had been marsh. Out on the surface of the pond, a child was skating with their parents. The sky above, even in mid-afternoon, already had the quality of watercolor that is too much water and too little color, so diminished was the sun. I did not know it yet, but this, at the end of October, was the terminus of Autumn. The next time I came to this park, it would be unrecognizable.

Music in February 2024

Even in a leap year February remains the briefest month, but I didn’t let that stop me from making by far the longest monthly playlist since I started doing this a year ago. As always, I won’t compel myself to go through every track, or force myself to come up with something insightful to say when I have nothing to offer – the point is that the music speaks for itself and is worth listening to.

I’ve been going down a Middle Kids rabbit hole for several months, so I was delighted when they started 2024 by releasing a new EP, and Terrible News has some of the fiercest energy yet, and seems almost defiantly depressed. In almost the same vein, I’ve fallen under the power of The Beths, who have a scratchier and more diffuse edge but a very similar spirit. Both of these are bands that emerged in the last five or six years, and I feel with them the alt-rock of twenty years ago has been fully reincarnated.

I had never heard of the delightfully-named Cousin Tony’s Brand New Firebird, and the song Bluestone came to me unannounced on the river of the Algorithm and left me feeling like the fisherman who finds a golden lamp inside the mouth of his catch. There’s something innocent and pure about the wonderful chorus of brass that accompanies this song I don’t understand, yet still feel warmed by.

In much the same way I stumbled across Angie McMahon’s song Letting Go. Perhaps it’s a bit on the nose, but these lyrics cut to the quick as I struggle with accepting the gradual loss of dreams and control that comes with time. And the reassuring chorus enjoining the hearer to ‘make mistakes’ is perhaps what I need to hear. Melbourne has once again produced a wonderful talent.

The Last Dinner Party is yet another young band with a brand new album from 2024, filled with dynamism and melodic drama boosted by a multiplying crescendo of layers of accompaniment. On the other end of the new young artist spectrum is country artist Jess Williamson’s Hunter, which seems to tapdance on tiptoes, following its own lyrical advice to give the listener space.

I had a Shakira phase in college, but I hadn’t really listened to her since, but I was not sorry to go back in time to repair that. She’s simply inimitable. Going much further back, Dexys Midnight Runners are mostly remembered for Come On Eileen, but the rest of the 1982 Too Rye Ay is well worth recalling. Plan B is a perfect example of their jam-packed sound, exploding with sounds you’d never mistake for anyone but them.

I moved forward to some of my beloved ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION’s  more recent work this time, and found it increasingly meditative and melancholic, but in that warmly satisfying way that brings a kind of peace, especially their 2018 song UCLA. Their 2022 album Planet Folks has songs that soar into a kind of benedictive choir, where the guitar sounds like the sparks of lightning bugs that flit by the highways in July.

Enigma Variations 9: Nimrod is the first thing I think of whenever I think about Edward Elgar – not only his magnum opus, but the ultimate perfection of what an adagio can be. It achieves a grandeur that can only be put on slowly, like a coronation robe; then, having achieved it, the music immediately bows and gently recesses.

Belle is not a real artist, despite what Spotify says, and we must give credit to the actual singer-songwriter who plays the character in the eponymous film, Kaho Nakamura, who is fantastic in her own right. I don’t think Belle is one of Hosoda’s stronger films, but A Million Miles Away demonstrates that even so, it contains a wellspring of feeling.

The New Pornographers’ 2007 album Challengers has been one of my favorite albums for most of its lifespan now. It’s the perfect encapsulation of the manic pixie dream music of these voices of Vancouver. And Dawes’ I Can’t Think About It Now is just one of many great songs from All Your Favorite Bands. Like so much of their work, it skulks down the bleak desert highway of the Southwest of the mind, lighting flashing on the horizon. Ruby is a typical banger from Charly Bliss – a word I’d apply to almost everything they’ve released.

Andrew Orkin’s score to Cathy Yan’s directorial debut Dead Pigs is as gorgeously odd as that film. It’s got big toybox energy. I’m not familiar with Orkin, nor with Laurent Dury or Dascha Dauenhauer, but I shall have to acquaint myself with them more going forward.

There’s loads of Daoko songs I could pick, but I went with one of her most villain-core works, delightfully devilish dances up and down the ivory keys, and one that is almost the opposite – breathy and light.

Flogging Molly are wonderfully on brand with a song that makes even me, no fan of boxing, want to grab a time machine and head back to the 1890s to shake The Hand of John L. Sullivan. And while we’re on the subject of Celtic music, last year the Breton composer, singer, and harper Cécile Corbel graced us with a new album that could only have been made by someone from Finistère, who was raised on the road by parents who ran a traveling marionette show (I am not kidding).

I’ve posted excerpts from Shiro SAGISU’s fantastic score to the last Evangelion film before, but I’ve been remiss to not include Voyager – Gravestone Without Date, whose repeated chorus seems to embody the elegiac catharsis of the film, the laying of one’s life’s work and passion and trauma to rest.

I had to put Silver Rainbow and Black Rainbow together, admittedly because of their titles, but they are also both otherworldly creations of two of our most original musical minds. And I believe I have posted from Sufjan Stevens’ wonderful Illinois album before, but The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us! brings the reverence of a whispered prayer and the astonishment of a sudden sunrise to an insect encounter that seems to be much more than it appears.

Lizzy et Marco is just a fun tune to swing back and forth to, and Come to Atlanta is incredibly infectious for sounding as if it was recorded by whispering in one’s ear over a jazz set. Then I included two tracks from musicals. In February I had the unexpected opportunity to see the music SIX, about the unfortunate wives of Henry VIII, and of course Anne Boleyn’s song was just too cheekily catchy for me to leave out. Having included one musical number, I threw in 30/90 from the film tick, tick… BOOM!, in which our most consistently sympathetic leading man, Andrew Garfield, sings about the existential terror of reaching 30 at the end of history without having achieved anything. I realize this sort of thing sounds just as silly to people older than me as the other day when I heard a panicked 22-year-old bewailing their age and the rapidity of life relative to their dreams, but I really do relate to this more and more – the distance between what I expected to do and what I have actually gotten done keeps widening in a way that seems to daily ratchet up the anxiety that I am falling further behind even as I become more productive (but with too slow a delta-V). Ultimately it’s all a matter of dealing with the acceptance of death and having the right view toward eternity – easier said than done.

The modern synth-fantasies of CHVRCHES probably owe something to Kraftwerk (or maybe they don’t, I don’t know much about musical history). It seems like a stretch, but the bones are there. Grand Island’s score for Arctic Space Odyssey sounds like something in the wind on a sub-zero day, when the sun-dogs are loose. I think I’ve previously mentioned Jóhann Jóhannsson’s final work, his adaptation of The Last and First Men, but The Navigators is a perfect example of it’s deeply unsettling approach to deep time. The navigators of the title are humans – but humans of such a remote future, billions of years hence, that they are completely unrecognizable and utterly alien.

I love The Killers but I wish they wouldn’t ask me how I know that I’m right if I’m not nervous anymore – that’s a little too close to home, to be honest. As for Ricochet, Bowie himself called its gait ungainly, and one critic described it as an artistic low point – and fifty years later I have to say that these are deranged things to say about what is clearly a haunting and monumental work.

Perhaps this makes me basic, but I do find U2’s Stuck in a Moment to be profoundly encouraging, and have done so since I had it on my iPod mini back in high school. The next track is a bit long, but its sprawl is well-deserved, as a part of Masaaki Yuasa’s fantastic anime movie musical Inu-Oh, which fuses traditional medieval Japanese storytelling ballads with rock and roll, both in the music and the narrative. It’s a terrifically playful and original twist on the story of the narrativization of the Genpei War, and it’s a ton of fun.

The last two songs are both examples of what I call Japanese Gentlecore, the sort of music that reminds you of raindrops striking the surface of a clear pool in the afternoon sunlight.

Music in January 2024

So I begin another year  musing on whatever music I happen to stumble across (or what is fed me by the great Algorithm – so named for the ninth century Persian mathematician Al-Khwārizmī). As always, I make no promises and follow no rules.

Strong Hand is a typical cool drink from CHVRCHES, a band I like to start work to in the mornings. Crisp synthesizers crash like waves against a sonic breakwater. Sleigh Bells have a warmer sound, but no less energetic – End of the Line has an overcranked, rushed clicking running throughout, like a rotary sprinkler on speed. But if the metronome is fast, the melody feels slow in contrast, which creates a lovely sense that there are two aspects of the music, one part pulling forward, the other lolling behind.

Chatmonchy’s joyfully cymbal-crashing 恋愛スピリッツ (Love Spirits) feels like someone shouting as the only release valve for a geyser of heartfelt affection. Knees Deep is another minor theme in a major key from The Beths, wryly melancholy as ever. They seem to shrug and say “oh well” to life’s missed opportunities – which we often have to do to move on.

I’ve never watched Fullmetal Alchemist, but Akira Senju’s score rises like a butterfly caught in a sunny updraft; Masaru Yokoyama’s work, in contrast, is cool to the touch and smooth as blue glass.

I’m almost embarrassed to put Sabaton on here, because they aren’t really that good musically, and if you listen to more than one of their songs you begin to realize that they tend to constantly repeat the same lines, as if they can’t think of anything else to say. But sometimes I want a rousing metal anthem, and if I’ve got to pick one of their oeuvre, The Last Battle is the most exciting – a song about a real action that took place in the final week of World War II in Europe at Castle Itter, which was being used by the Nazis to hold political prisoners, including two former French Prime Ministers and Charles De Gaulle’s sister. With Berlin fallen, Hitler dead, and the German lines in full collapse, the priorities of many in the German army swiftly shifted to surrendering to the Americans without getting killed before the end of the war. However, there were SS units in the region that were on a suicidal rampage toward some sort of perverse last stand. In the midst of this, the prison guards fled and the prisoners took control of the castle. With a detachment of the SS closing in on the castle, the prisoners sent messengers for help. One reached an approaching American column, and the other reached a small German unit which had defected and joined the local resistance to protect surrendering civilians from the SS. Together, the American army, the German Wehrmacht, and the political prisoners successfully defended the castle from the Waffen-SS in one of the strangest moments of a very strange war.

Moving along, The Cranberries’ The Rebels begins with a low, wistful remembrance, only to leap into a full-throated anthem of simple nostalgia. Next are two pieces from Sufjan Stevens’ 2015 album Carrie & Lowell, named for the artist’s mother and stepfather. Both pieces have an urgent and beautiful sting to them.

But nothing here is as emotional as Vladimir Martynov’s The Beatitudes – a piece of music which brings peace to all who hear it. This sort of peace can only be achieved by facing our sorrow and breathing slowly through it, and the rise and fall of the strings carry the listener through into a sunlit glade.

Next are two songs from Middle Kids’ album Today We’re The Greatest – the first with a riptide riff that’s sunk its claws in me, the second a sort of playful hopscotch laugh-cry for help. Following are three songs from The Killers’ Imploding the Mirage (I am a late Killers defender). I’ve always felt The Killers are one of the most shamelessly sincere and unpretentious bands, and their sound echoes with the vastness of the southwest in a way that makes me nostalgic for college in Arizona.

Dexys Midnight Runners are mostly remembered now for Come On Eileen, but their other music is also excellent, with the same sort of piercing, upbeat sound that I can’t quite pin down in words. And Sylvan Esso’s Coffee is a dark-roast carousel; I get on it, and am borne off into the dark.

Budapest

I’ve seen many grey cities – Berlin, London, Vienna, Tokyo – but Budapest feels like one of the greyest. Perhaps my perspective is skewed by my arrival in early November, on a long bus ride from Krakow over winding hilly roads, crossing the border into Hungary through a light fog.

I say Budapest is grey, and in the gloomy shade of autumn it certainly felt it – but I don’t mean that as a pejorative in the slightest. I am, after all, from one of the greyest places on earth; I love grey. And Budapest is certainly a rich shade of grey.

I entered the city from a bus station on the southeastern side, and then walked for what, with my heavy pack, felt like an endlessly self-replenishing row of blocks to get to my airbnb. Like so many European apartments, the building looked like some communist afterthought mouldered by time, and probably not up to fire code; yet the actual flat was spotless and new.

The next morning I set out across the city. Budapest is a compound city: the ancient capital was actually Buda, on the fortified hills on the western side of the Danube, while Pest is a much broader and flatter sprawl – but the towns have grown together like commingled trees, to the point even the names have merged.

Not a block from my flat I was surprised to see a mural depicting a saintly refugee mother and admonishing support for the displaced. I am embarrassed to say I was surprised, as I have caught myself stereotyping, which I usually warn against. In America in recent years, in certain very online political circles, Hungary has become flattened into a sort of avatar of a certain type of nationalist right-wing politics. While these certainly do dominate the country’s government, it was helpful to start with a humbling reminder that countries are large and complex and contain multitudes.

Proceeding west toward the river (for I was staying in Pest), I passed the Dohany Street Synagogue, the largest such house of worship in Europe, and then passed on down a street bustling with cars and lined with buildings that ranged from modern minimalism through to art nouveau.

Then I was crossing the Danube, the biggest river I had yet seen in Europe, pea-green under the cloudy sky. This is the legendary waterway that so often marked the northern frontier of Rome, that links ex-Habsburg capitals with the Balkans and empties into the Black Sea, and from there flows past Constantinople and Gibraltar before it can join the great world-ocean.

On the west bank of the river I passed a famous chapel hewn from living rock, a statue of St. Stephen (not the Martyr but Hungary’s first king), and then proceeded up a forested hill decorated with lovely mansions, including the home of the heroic Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands of Jews from the Nazis only to be disappeared by the Red Army at the end of the war, dying at an unknown time in Soviet custody. Above this neighborhood towers a Hungarian statue of liberty, holding aloft a branch, and from the muddy trails around it, the river unrolls toward north and south until it vanishes in the mist.

From there I walked north toward another hill, the old citadel of Buda, with its blocky castle (which is now being expanded and reconstructed as a sort of nationalist project). Atop this hill sits one of the great churches of Budapest, the Matthias Church, so named for the 15th century king Matthias Corvinus, with its beautiful roof and soaring bell-tower.

Behind the church is the Fisherman’s Bastion, a cone-roofed balustrade which overlooks the city, complete with another inevitable statue of Stephen.

Inside, the church is a heaven of vaults, glowing with light, and throughout are scattered treasures of silver and gold and glass, including what I think is a replica of the Holy Crown of Hungary, complete with bent cross (or possibly the original – I’ve read contradictory things), and a statue of Austrian Empress Sisi, beloved in Hungary for her advocacy of the Hungarian side of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The citadel outside the church is a series of narrow lanes lined with colorful old buildings, from which I descended by many stairs through the gathering dusk, to glimpse the stunning neo-Gothic spikes of the Magyar Parliament just across the river.

The next day a little blue sky broke through the clouds, so I could see again the red in the remaining leaves, and I returned to the citadel to spend a few hours acquainting myself with Hungarian artists I had never heard of, like the wonderful Mihály Munkácsy.

I then wandered my way around the north side of town, through a sort of mall, past decaying pink facades, over the great yellow bridge on the Danube, and past Hungarian Parliament, as the light faded into desaturated lilacs and periwinkles.

South of Parliament, I came across an amusing juxtaposition: in the same square stands Ronald Reagan, a liberatory figure to Hungarians under Soviet domination. He smiles, hand outstretched, toward another monument only a few yards in front of him: a Soviet monument to their army’s liberatory moment against the Nazis. Now they stand nextdoor in a strange new world.

On this last evening in Budapest, I decided to stop into St. Stephen’s Basilica, and I’m glad I did: the Basilica is a vast universe of gold and red marble, and a dome painted with a depiction of God. But the most interesting and strange thing I found was the Holy Right Hand of King St. Stephen. Tradition says it is the mummified hand of the founding king, one thousand years old. Whether or not this is true, it is certainly a person’s hand in a glass box, and you don’t see that every day.

Music in 2023

When I began writing about the music I have enjoyed listening to, I started by saying that I did not know how to speak intelligently about music. That is not to say that there aren’t intelligent ways of speaking about music, only that they are strange to me. In the end, I experience music as a beauty glimpsed but not understood. I would like to pretend that this is quite different from how I experience film and literature, two art forms I have studied enough to speak about intelligently – but of course it’s not really any different at all. I can pass myself off as having an intellectual understanding of these things, because I am able to notice and describe patterns and details and employ the correct words to do so, but in the one area that counts – the intersection of truth and beauty, or the uncertainty of the gap between them – then I am as mute as ever. You can only experience a feeling – you can’t really describe it, except by creating something that creates a similar feeling in someone else.

I’m saying all this as a way of recognizing that I shouldn’t say more, that in fact there is no need to. I have already written about all of these songs, in too many other posts, and none of those words really matter much. But the music speaks for itself. So instead of attempting to recap these highlights of my listening in 2023, I will simply do the thing I was trying to do from the beginning: I will share them, and you can listen, if you will.

Books I Read in 2023

I did not read that many books in 2023. Sometimes I worry that my reading seems to have declined greatly from what I remember as a child and then a student, and I’m sure that it has – though to be honest, many years of books compress together and densify in the memory, and in college I did not necessarily fully read every book I claimed to have read, or did not read it with the patience to appreciate it. And I did begin to read more regularly again by the end of 2023, and I believe I read more than I did in 2022. I’m going to work my way up the list of the ten books I logged that I count as having read last year (with a somewhat liberal definition of ‘2023’), ending with the best – but each of these books was good.

10. Red Mars

I have a complicated relationship with science fiction. Sometimes I have started a book, suckered in by an ingenious premise, only to discover that the writing, narrative, and characterization are utter dreck. On the other hand, it’s been one of my favorite genres since childhood, and, crucially, one of the ones that reliably keeps me entertained and reading if I am otherwise lacking the discipline. It’s for that reason that I downloaded Kim Stanley Robinson’s classic Red Mars (1991) onto my phone to have something to read on the long train rides across central Europe at the end of 2022.

Initially I found the characters off-putting – they seemed petty and small in their intrigues and interpersonal conflicts, and I felt that the human narrative seemed to be a lower priority to Robinson than the technical fantasy of terraforming Mars, or Marxian social analysis. However, once I had gotten used to the kind of book it was, I began to appreciate the characters and the human narrative more. Robinson is a more interesting socialist precisely because he so clearly understands that humans are flawed and selfish in ways that persist even among his heroic scientific elites, and even under radically changed and even utopian material conditions. There’s a kind of honesty there – the desire to improve what can be improved, with the frankness to acknowledge the unbridgeable gap between that and perfection.

9. Idylls of the King

Alfred, Lord Tennyson is of course the institutional British poet par excellence, and he has written some of the poetry I find most moving and profound (In Memoriam A.H.H.). This retelling of the Matter of Britain has all his impressive strength as a poet on display; but it’s difficult to make the poem consistently sing at the emotional heights Tennyson is capable of elsewhere, when you factor in the constraints of the narrative form, the formalism of the verse, and the sheer length of the work. There are parts of this that aren’t really representative of how great Tennyson can be. But there remains a great deal of human depth in the work, and the final Passing of Arthur is beautiful.

As an aside, I took seven years to finish this book, partly because I insist on reading poetry aloud, but mostly because I had set it aside for a long time. My bookmark marks the day I believe I started – it’s my train ticket from Taichung to Taipei on April 30, 2016. I recall walking back and forth across Taipei reading the book out loud under my breath on the sidewalk, probably looking thoroughly insane to passersby.

8. Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall

I am trying to read more history and nonfiction, and it seems more important than ever to understand Russia. Of course, Andrew Meier’s journalistic travelogue memoir is a snapshot of its time – published in 2002, it reflects his experience living in Russia during and after the final years of the Soviet Union, but mainly it represents a series of journeys through Russia in the decade of chaos that was the 90s. This is no systemic analysis of what went wrong, and I don’t know how much it reveals about Russia now, after twenty years of Putin’s regime. But it opens a jarringly vivid experiential window into a few of the different Russias that existed in the opportunistic chaos of its day. It is not an encouraging book.

7. Green Mars

The second book in Robinson’s trilogy, published in 1993, is far stranger than the first. The degree of social imagination and the desire to explore alternative ways of living expand dramatically, and the characters’ experiences grow further away from the world we recognize – and yet I found this to really grow on me. This book follows through on the premises of the first, and pursues a bizarre but interesting line of thought.

6. The Future of Nostalgia

Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia (2001) is a book I have now read three times. The first time, ten years ago now, I was writing a paper that involved nostalgia as a theme, and I wanted a source to talk about it, but I was in between college and grad school, so I couldn’t check anything out of academic libraries. I found Boym’s work on the shelf in the Suzzallo-Allen library at the UW, and read it at a desk in the library. In the end, it wasn’t actually that relevant to the paper I wrote, but the book helped me recognize my emotional obsession with longing and nostalgia simply by dissecting and delineating the concept in such detail. I read it the second time for the purpose of selecting excerpts to assign to my unfortunate students, who I am sure had other things they would rather be doing, and then I returned to it this last year out of, I suppose, nostalgia.

Far from simply being a theoretical discussion of a concept that was originally categorized as a medical condition, a literal homesickness, this book is specific and deeply personal. The late Professor Boym, who left us too early, immigrated to the United States from her hometown of Leningrad, and the book is replete with interesting cases of the nostalgia of displaced eastern European dissidents and artists. It’s also a reflection on the decade immediately following the collapse of communism, which left Warsaw-Pact cities struggling to discover and invent their new relationships to their past, sometimes by deconstructing all previous ideological and aesthetic regimes, sometimes by rushing into an artificially reconstructed traditionalism, and sometimes by actually engaging in half-ironic, half-sincere nostalgia for their recent communist past. At the same time, the work is universal, and it ably demonstrates the dictum that general truths are apprehended best in specific instances.

5. Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers

I wasn’t sure exactly how to evaluate Gentle and Lowly (2020). I did not necessarily enjoy the experience of reading it, because some of the encouraging things it says seem basic and not particularly revelatory to someone with a long history in the church. More importantly, like much theological and ministerial work that attempts to justify the ways of God to men, or in this case, to explain the heart of God, it will often say something that is meant to be reassuring, only for me to immediately recognize that there is still some kind of caveat or condition for resentment and anxiety to latch onto. I’m not sure that’s so much an issue with the book itself, as it is a struggle I have with orthodox evangelical theology. The prose is also not particularly impressive, and is more sincerely sentimental and stylistically successful. I also am not sure what to make of Dane Ortlund, the author, who it seems may not always embody the gentleness he writes of, although there isn’t really enough to draw a strong conclusion from here: https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2022/december/illinois-investigation-eeoc-employment-ortlund.html.

Having said all that, at the end of the day, whether or not one is fully comforted by it or feels it lives up to its promise, the book does make a strong and encouraging case for the primacy of love in God’s character and attitude toward people, and in that core message I think it is both correct and encouraging, my issues notwithstanding. I would recommend this, perhaps not as something that answers all doubts or objections, but as a helpful corrective to our tendency to feel antagonized by God at various times for different reasons.

4. Blue Mars

The final book in the Mars Trilogy, published in 1995, is also the strongest. As I said at the start of this post, I began the trilogy feeling put off by its characters and the entire human social dynamic of the story. I felt convinced that, like so much science fiction, that would be the series’ Achilles’ heel, with the technical details taking priority. In the end, I couldn’t have been more mistaken. Blue Mars is first and foremost about the human experience of wonder at the beauty of the world, colliding with our experience of mortality, aging, and the collapse of memory and mental identity on which we have relied for ourselves. By the end of the series, Robinson has almost pulled a bait and switch on me – I thought I was getting a treatise on how to terraform Mars, but it ended up focusing on the tiny details of human life, and on those people. There are moments of description in here which are actual poetry.

3. Sounding the Seasons: Seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year

Malcolm Guite’s 2011 volume of poetry focused on the liturgical calendar doesn’t just have one of the most beautiful cover designs of recent years – it actually achieves what it sets out to do, poetically. I realize this is a pitch clean over home plate for me, since it appeals to all my vague aesthetic affections for a sort of imagined Oxford Anglicanism, but I think the substance here is real and moving. Most of all, these poems actually changed how I felt about God in a positive and marked way, as I was reading them – while also simply being beautiful poems.

2. The Thirty Years War

The great historian C.V. Wedgwood published her masterpiece on the great German conflagration of the seventeenth century in 1938, when she was only twenty-eight years old, in the longed-for land of Oxford in the 1930s, a place and time where scholars didn’t even bother translating French and Latin because they assumed the reader spoke them. The book is a gripping account of the complicated causes of the war, and ways in which it became a self-perpetuating entity, which would find replacement combatants as nations dropped out. There’s a focus on the horrible suffering of the German peasantry at the hands of nearly every other country around them, as the Holy Roman Empire shattered in the wake of the Reformation and opportunistic mercenaries and princes rushed into on all sides. But this book is not simply a fascinating piece of historical narrative; it’s an ominous and freighted portent when read in its own context: a book about a war of unimaginable human suffering in Germany, fought for no good reason at all, and written in the aftermath of the First World War, and only the year before the outbreak of the Second. With that in mind, I’d like to quote two excerpts from the final pages of the book, where Wedgwood reflects on her context – painfully conscious of the First World War, and perhaps unconsciously anticipating the next. Here they are:

"After the expenditure of so much human life to so little purpose, men might have grasped the essential futility of putting the beliefs of the mind to the judgement of the sword. Instead, they rejected religion as an object to fight for and found others.

As there was no compulsion towards a conflict which, in despite of the apparent bitterness of parties, took so long to engage and needed so much assiduous blowing to fan the flame, so no right was vindicated by its ragged end. The war solved no problem. Its effects, both immediate and indirect, were either negative or disastrous. Morally subversive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its causes, devious in its course, futile in its result, it is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict. The overwhelming majority in Europe, the overwhelming majority in Germany, wanted no war; powerless and voiceless, there was no need even to persuade them that they did. The decision was made without thought of them. Yet of those who, one by one, let themselves be drawn into the conflict, few were irresponsible and nearly all were genuinely anxious for an ultimate and better peace. Almost all - one excepts the King of Sweden - were actuated rather by fear than by lust of conquest or passion of faith. They wanted peace and they fought for thirty years to be sure of it. They did not learn then, and have not since, that war breeds only war."

And reflecting on the unbelievable reports of mass death in the war:

"Yet this exaggeration is in itself significant, for at least in official documents, it would not have been possible without some element of truth to bear it out; and if contemporary writers wail in too long-sustained and high a monotone, that is significant, if not of a fact, at least of a mood which must have had root somewhere in actuality. Whether Germany lost three-quarters of her population, or a small percentage, it is certain that never before, and possibly never since, in her history had there been so universal a sense of irretrievable disaster, so widespread a consciousness of the horror of the period which lay behind."

1. Selected Stories (Alice Munro)

For about a semester or two in my sophomore year of college I flirted with the idea of being a creative writing major, and in one of the only classes I took in the subject, we were assigned one of Alice Munro’s short stories. At that time I was not a great reader of short stories, and I did now know who Alice Munro was – she did not win the Nobel Prize until two years later. But that one story made such a strong impression on me, not for its plot or characters or themes even, but for how it was observed, written, and how it felt, that I left that class with an eternal attachment to Munro and her work.

This selection, which I picked up in the University Bookstore in Seattle on one of the rainy nights I had walked to the library to research one of my papers, was compiled in 1996, though the stories were written between the mid-‘60s through the early ‘90s. There is a remarkable consistency to Munro’s work: each story has the same feeling of quiet, faded memory. The characters all resemble each other and are often reminiscing about lives in the same rural corner of Ontario, yet somehow that never for a moment feels old. To the degree that Munro is thematically repetitive, it’s a good kind of repetition, like how a symphony will repeat a musical theme in different movements. But instead of the sound of music, here there is an audible silence, a present absence, as Munro traces the shadows of lives like faded rings left by cups on the surface of a table. Alice Munro is one of the greatest writers of all time, and I believe any collection of her work would automatically be one of the best books I’ve ever read.

TV I Watched in 2023

I watch a lot of movies in an average year. But I probably watch less television than the average American. I used to watch more, but I think I have increasingly traded that time in to spend on movies instead, where I can cover a lot more ground in the same time. Still, there were a number of shows I watched in 2023, some of which were quite good, and I thought I would sort of do a wrap up of them, starting with a few I watched that were fine, and ending with my favorites.

I have basically dropped out of closely following the MCU since the central nexus of relationships and stories that held everything in orbit has been retired, and I have especially not felt obligated to watch all the shows Disney has been cranking out – at a certain point it just becomes a chore. But I started the year with She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, because people seemed to like it and it seemed like a change of pace from the standard Marvel format. And you know what – it was. The show isn’t a masterpiece or anything, but it was genuinely fun and goofy in a good way, in an era when Marvel has become too self-serious and enamored with its own lore. Tatiana Maslany has terrific charisma – and the other good thing is the show is short.

I watched a couple of fantasy shows, both of which were fine but not really what they could have been. The first was The Rings of Power, the Amazon Lord of the Rings prequel. Now, you might expect me to have very strong feelings about this show, since LOTR are my favorite books, some of my favorite films, and Tolkien is a personal hero. It is therefore perhaps an indictment of the show that I actually don’t have any strong feelings about it either way. I think a younger version of myself, inculcated with a nerdy negativity from countless online takedowns, might have hated this, but I’m no longer that person. But I don’t love it either – the writing is a snooze, the pacing is strange, and while the production design looks impressively expensive, it’s too clean and shiny to match the films it’s imitating, while being too small in scale to really measure up. One part that did work for me were the Harfoots, who seem to be some sort of Hobbit ancestors. And Bear McCreary’s score is truly epic, and does manage to match the tone of Howard Shore’s without simply aping it.

The second fantasy I saw was Netflix’s Sandman adaptation. This show featured a number of excellent performances, notably Tom Sturridge in the lead role, Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Death, and of course I am always happy to see my beloved David Thewlis in anything. Beyond that, there are a lot of interesting ideas, and one episode in particular stood out as excellent. But the show is mired by two issues. First, the pacing is very uneven, and because the season splits apart into a couple of different arcs of differing pacing and quality, it loses momentum partway through. The second issue is that the entire show has that washed-out Netflix look, with flat grey lighting, everything reduced to a digital soup. What’s the point of creative and fantastical art design if you’re not going to light and shoot (or animate it) to be vibrant and beautiful.

In the summer I watched a couple of anime shows, starting with the long-awaited second season of the often disturbing Made in Abyss. The show continues to be a dark and perverse journey through an eldritch world, with excellent animation and a great score by Kevin Penkin, but it’s not as propulsive or good as the first season, and is a bit bogged down. Then I watched Toradora!, which is a fairly normal high school slice of life/romance, which was perfectly fine but nothing to really write home about. I think I may be getting too used to the tropes at this point, or I’ve been spoiled by watching too many great shows.

That brings me to my five favorite shows I watched last year, presented in ascending order:

5.    The Last of Us

It felt like everyone got into this show as soon as it came out, and I thought I’d give it a try as well. I’m not a huge zombie fan, but there have been enough good works of art that use zombies that I thought I might enjoy this, and it turned out to be a refreshingly measured and terse look at the post-apocalypse, with two megawatt stars at the center. I do think that the way things are going, Craig Mazin’s next show is likely to be shot entirely in an abandoned concrete bunker filled with leaky pipes – between this and Chernobyl, that seems like his aesthetic.

4. Star Trek: Discovery

I have now caught up through season 3 of Discovery, and it has grown on me, getting better with each season. Admittedly, I am a sucker for Star Trek, and as the show has progressed it has leaned more and more into affection for the ideals and world of Trek, without simply throwing out references for their own sake or repeating the old hits (it does that a bit at the beginning, but quickly moves on to variations on old themes). I know the show is divisive among Trekkies, but you have to credit it with restoring Star Trek to the small screen where it belongs – and this looks fantastic.

3. Chainsaw Man

Chainsaw Man is a deranged anime about a world filled with devils and people with bizarre and frankly goofy powers and characteristics. In many ways it’s willfully puerile, gross, and immature – but it’s got incredible style and energy, and you just can’t argue with that.

2. Review

Andy Daly’s Review might be the best comedy show of all time. His depiction of a man who proceeds to totally self-destruct in every way possible, all for the sake of a dumb TV show, is a train wreck I cannot look away from. In any given situation, whatever thing that could happen that would be worst and funniest always does happen, and there’s an edge-of-your-seat sense of gleeful anticipation waiting for those anvils to drop. James Urbaniak’s Producer Grant is one of the all-time great villains of television. I give Review five out of five stars.

1.    Cowboy Bebop

The only show that could somehow take first place over Review  is one of the great classics of sci-fi anime, Cowboy Bebop. This is so much more than a space noir, though it is that – it’s a masterwork of atmospheric engineering. There are two points, one in the middle and one at the end, where the music kicks in, and you actually feel as if you are drifting off into space, in a way that is unfathomable and transcendent.

Also, there’s a hyperintelligent space corgi.

Films of 2022

Decision to Leave

Yes, you did not read that wrong – I said 2022, not 2023, not 2024, but 2022.

Ok, a little background. I’ve always loved movies – I thought I was going to be a film major when I started college, which is the only reason I bought the first (and only) Mac I’ve ever owned. But around four years ago when the world shut down for reasons we’d all rather forget, I started getting more serious about watching movies. A large part of that was simply taking the time I would have spent watching several seasons of a tv show and realizing that with that I could watch twenty or thirty movies. What’s more, I became very interested in cataloguing the films I had watched and planned on watching. This took two forms: first, I discovered Letterboxd, which is sort of like Goodreads for movies, only if Goodreads was actually well designed. Second, I had gotten really into the Blank Check podcast, which goes deep on directors and filmographies, and one of the hosts would frequently refer to his spreadsheet of movies, in which he recorded what films he would have nominated and awarded for Oscars for every year going back decades. This appealed enormously to my list-making brain, which will seize on any pointless procrastinatory project possible, perambulating & pettifogging pro bono, profitless, but, peradventure, pleased.

Which is to say, I immediately made such a spreadsheet for myself.

Now, I had planned to post a blog about the films released in 2022 a year ago, right after the end of that year – but then, I was still catching up on them. For one thing, I go by the Letterboxd release date, which in the case of foreign or festival films often predates their actual date of accessibility in the US by many months. And for films I don’t see in the theater, I tend to catch them by slowly rotating through different streaming services, so I don’t have to pay for a bunch of them at once, which takes more time. And then, in the middle of the last year, I packed up and moved to a new state, and my attention was wholly focused elsewhere for several months. But now I’m finally getting around to it, a year late – though I think I will simply continue to do these a year late, in order to allow time for me to see more movies.

So, here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to run through an overview of the movies I would nominate for my own personal awards that came out in 2022, along with some other notes and asides, and then I’ll post my overall Letterboxd ranking list for the year. A couple caveats: first, as I mentioned, these are films dated 2022 in Letterboxd, which means there will be some that didn’t really come out until 2023. Second, I’m not holding myself to any rule or limit about how many things I mention or exclude. Finally, I’ll leave this post up, but the list will change in the future, as I reconsider and watch more films. And of course, this is only drawing on the movies I happened to see.

As of this writing, I have seen 76 films from 2022. Here’s what I think of them.

Worst Picture

Not to be obnoxious like a certain horrible mock-awards show which I won’t name, but if I’m posting a ranked list of movies, it’s always interesting to see what the bottom looks like. Now, I have lists for most of the years in the past century, but because most of them are quite short, and I tend to only bother watching older movies that I suspect I will like, very often there are no bad movies on those lists at all. And, in fact, even on a list 76 films long, the vast majority of them are pretty good. But there is still a bottom.

Don’t Worry Darling

71: Don’t Worry Darling – I mention this simply because it was a trainwreck that had film twitter rubbernecking all fall, but that wasn’t really about the movie, it was more about the gossip about the mess of a set. At the end of the day, the movie is simply flawed, but interesting. It falls well short of the potential of its themes, but Florence Pugh gives a typically good performance.

See How They Run

72: See How They Run – This movie is o.k. You’d think I’d love a movie starring Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan, both of whom I’m quite fond of, but this simply put me to sleep. The most enjoyable thing in the movie is Adrien Brody’s film director character, who honestly would have directed a more interesting version of this given the chance. I’m happy for Rockwell that he got to make a movie in which he gets to nap the whole time, but I with Ronan would get some better material than this.

Thor: Love and Thunder

73: Thor: Love and Thunder – I was very ready for this to be good. I generally enjoy Marvel movies, I liked Taika Waititi’s two previous films, including the preceding Thor movie, and I was hoping this would be a fun, loose, and energetic picture, with some of the energy of Guardians of the Galaxy. Unfortunately, while the movie was certainly loose, it was also flat, both visually and narratively. Somehow this movie, which cost a quarter of a billion dollars to make, looks like a cheap TV show from twenty years ago, and it constantly undercuts any emotional beat it might have. I also think that the direction the story takes is fundamentally misguided and wrong, both for the characters and the MCU (although the universe has already been fumbled at this point). I wish this was fun.

Moonshot

74: Moonshot – I like rom-coms, I like space, I should like rom-coms in space, but I think my standards for rom-coms are kind of high and hard to articulate. Rocketships work because of chemistry, as hydrogen oxidizes into fire and heat – and that chemistry just was not there.

Moonfall

75: Moonfall – Funnily enough, another lunar portmanteau. I’ve got no beef with big stupid movies, but this manages to be as stupid as humanly possible, while having no redeeming qualities or entertainment value whatsoever. At one point our protagonist utters the completely unironic phrase “What would Elon do?”, and that’s the level the film is operating at.

Pinocchio

76: Pinocchio – Once upon a time, Robert Zemeckis made good movies. What happened? This movie is the only actually loathsome picture I saw that year; it’s utterly charmless and off-putting. People said that Tom Hanks gave a bad performance in Elvis (not true) – this is Tom Hanks actually giving a bad performance. Truly cringeworthy and repugnant, with writing as didactic as an after-school special or one of the worst preachily bad Christian movies made by an asylum director hired by a megachurch – only this was directed by the man who made Back to the Future with the full resources of Disney behind him. Pinocchio himself is utterly creepy to a degree that breaks any ability to empathize with him.

Pinocchio, Pinocchio, Holy-smokey-oh

Pinocchio, Pinocchio, Holy-smokey-oh

please kill me

Miscellany: So, I don’t promise to follow the Academy in all things (nor do I wish to), so I’m going to leave out some categories I’m ill-equipped to speak to, like editing, or which I simply didn’t see enough of, like documentary or short, and throw in some random extras. So:

Women Talking

Best Ensemble: Women Talking – I basically wanted to nominate every single person in the movie. As its name suggests, this is a film centered on a conversation, and it’s exquisitely cast and acted. Even the smallest supporting players are superb, and it truly is an ensemble picture.

Decision to Leave

Best Romance: Decision to Leave – Yes I realize this isn’t a straightforward romance in any sense, but it’s still the strongest and most perversely compelling encounter between two characters that year.

Flux Gourmet

Best Makeup & Best Costume Design: Flux Gourmet – Gwendoline Christie’s terrifying appearance in this is so strange and memorable that I have to award this odd little movie. Her performance is also terrific. On the costume front, I want to give a shoutout to Colin Farrell’s blue sweater in The Banshees of Inisherin. I would like one please.

Avatar: The Way of Water

Best Visual Effects: Avatar: The Way of Water – There’s no competition here. There were other great effects movies that year; of the Marvel crowd, Wakanda Forever looked particularly good. The Batman used the Volume in a better way than I’ve seen yet, and seamlessly integrated locations on different continents to create a uniquely gothic Gotham. And Nope achieved a level of day-for-night cinematography that has to be heralded as a technical breakthrough. But Big Jim remains the king of VFX with his return to Pandora, which looks simply astonishing. Most of the movie is in, around, or under water, while also being almost fully computer generated, and it looks absolutely gorgeous.

The Batman

Best Production Design: The Batman – This movie manages to somehow still visually differentiate itself from all the other versions of Batman and Gotham city. By placing stone gothic buildings from Europe on top of American skyscrapers, flooding everything with amber sunsets, and giving everything from the costumes to the cars a sort of timeless elegance, The Batman is a pleasure to look at.

The Eight Mountains

Best Locations: The Eight Mountains – I’ll say more about this movie later, but I wanted to acknowledge the tremendous Alpine locations used in this. The movie is largely about place, and where one puts down roots (or doesn’t), and so much of its poetry is in the silent grandeur of the mountains.

Godland

Other great locations this year: Decision to Leave’s rocky beach, No Bears using the real border between Iran and Turkey in a way that approaches documentary, the hotel in The Eternal Daughter, the rock-walled islands of The Banshees of Inisherin, Pacifiction’s sultry Tahiti skies, and, of course, Iceland, which appears to great effect in The Northman, but even more so in Godland.

The Batman

Best Original Score: The Batman – Michael Giacchino has really come into his own on this one, and delivered a score that can sing along with Elfman’s work on the Burton films and Zimmer’s score for The Dark Knight. It weaves a beautiful, plaintive melody throughout, while seamlessly slipping into dark and percussive rumbling. I’ve never been a huge Giacchino fan, to be honest, but I will be paying more attention to him going forward.

Other great scores: The Northman, Wakanda Forever (the title track is incredible), Suzume, Babylon, The Eight Mountains, Living, Three Thousand Years of Longing.

Turning Red

Best Animated Picture: Turning Red – I love animation, and there were a few fun movies this year. As many people noted, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish was very well done, even for someone like me who really, really does not care about Shrek. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, so titled to distinguish it from the awful Zemeckis picture, was by contrast a well-crafted engagement with both the beauty and ugliness of life, diverting creatively from the original story into a confrontation with Italian fascism. Suzume was another sumptuous otherworld journey from Makoto Shinkai, and Henry Selick finally got to make another crazy and ghoulish stop-motion story in Wendell & Wild, which was terrifically energetic, heartfelt, and off-the-wall. But the best of the lot was easily Turning Red. Many people have talked about how well the film’s narrative themes are designed, and just how smart it is, which is all true. But I want to point out something else, which is that this movie has finally cracked how to make 3-D animation of people look worth doing, by abandoning both the lazy blob-people of early Pixar and attempts to be photorealistic, in favor of what all animation should have done from the beginning – simply being a cartoon, with a stylized, not a realistic, view of the world. The pastel color palette used in this is the cherry on top – there’s something about it that I find so rich and rewarding. This is also director Domee Shi’s first feature, and I can’t wait to see what she does next.

The Fabelmans

Best Cinematography: The Fabelmans – Even if you didn’t know this was an autobiography of Steven Spielberg, you can tell it’s his movie because of the unique quality of the light in it – it’s just so hyperlucid and warm, and every shot is beautiful and creative. You don’t necessarily expect a movie which takes place entirely in suburban America in the mid-twentieth century to look breathtaking, but this does. And of course the film ends with one of the wittiest cinematographic jokes of all time.

Decision to Leave

Best Director: Park Chan-wook, Decision to Leave – All of the films at the top of my list had great directors, but Park’s signature innovation and dynamic flair stand out. He just has incredible verve, and he has mastered the incorporation of the smartphone into the visual language of cinema.

Everything Everywhere All At Once

Best Supporting Actor: Ke Huy Quan, Everything Everywhere All At Once – This is the exception where I actually align with the Oscars, because Ke is not just the heart of the movie, he also gives a performance I don’t think anyone else could have given – it’s so specific and so charming, and it’s really several performances to boot.

Others: Best Supporting Actor was the longest column on my spreadsheet this year, there were simply far, far too many great performances. To mention only a few:

·        Andrew Scott is such great fun in Catherine Called Birdy

·        Tenoch Huerta Mejia is an immediately dominant presence in Wakanda Forever

·        Michael Stuhlbarg is quite unsettling in Bones and All, and Mark Rylance in the same picture is thoroughly unhinged and hilariously hammy

·        Barry Keoghan is heartbreaking in The Banshees of Inisherin

·        Nicholas Hoult is such a specific type in The Menu, and I love him

·        Don Cheadle is hilarious in White Noise

·        Ingvar Sigurdsson is the key to Godland

·        Claes Bang came out of nowhere for me in The Northman

·        And of course, Paul Dano in The Fabelmans is so exquisite and precious

The Fabelmans

Best Supporting Actress: Michele Williams, The Fabelmans – I went back and forth on who to give this to, because there was some stiff competition, but the thing about this performance is that the plot of the film literally depends at various points on Williams’ facial expression shifting slightly. I think it’s also very difficult to give such a big performance and have it go well, and she pulls it off with aplomb.

A few others:

·        Gwendoline Christie is haunting in Flux Gourmet

·        Burcu Gölgedar is utterly tragic in Three Thousand Years of Longing

·        Nicole Kidman had a great year between the AMC video and The Northman

·        Lashan Lynch is intensely compelling in The Woman King

·        Judith Ivey is fantastic in Women Talking

·        Ida Mekkin Hlynsdottir is essential to making Godland work as well as it does

The Fabelmans

Best Actor: Gabriel LaBelle, The Fabelmans – Yes, I’m saying the best actor was essentially a debut performance. LaBelle plays the fictionalized version of the young Spielberg, and the movie lives or dies with how he looks at things. The key scene of the film, in many ways, is simply LaBelle reacting to something with no dialogue, but he’s absolutely captivating, and he runs away with the whole picture. I’m looking forward to a long and fruitful career from him.

Others:

·        Colin Farrell is so perfect in The Banshees of Inisherin

·        Daniel Kaluuya gives a very soft-spoken and effective performance in Nope

·        Austin Butler becomes Elvis

·        Luca Marinelli & Alessandro Borghi are both deep pools of emotion in The Eight Mountains

·        Bill Nighy successfully wears the mantle of Takashi Shimura in Living

·        Diego Calva really holds his own against A-list movie stars in Babylon

·        Paul Mescal is heartrending in Aftersun

Decision to Leave

Best Actress: Tang Wei, Decision to Leave – This is one of a number of films which hang their entire narrative on the premise that Tang Wei is the most compelling woman alive, and some man goes out of his mind being obsessed with her. But she’s not a passive ideal – in this movie, she’s an instigator, even a troll, on a grander scale than we’ve ever seen before. And the thing is, she is the most compelling, charismatic, and mysterious woman alive.

Others:

·        Rebecaa Hall is so tortured in Resurrection

·        Andrea Riseborough was nominated for the wrong movie, she was so funny in Please Baby Please

·        Zoe Kravitz gives one of the most realistic and uncomfortable depictions of acute anxiety in Kimi

·        Park Ji-min is inimitable in her debut film role in Return to Seoul

·        Frankie Corio gives one of the most nuanced child performances of recent years in Aftersun

·        Michelle Yeoh is given the scope her talents deserve in Everything Everywhere All At Once

·        Keke Palmer is so charismatic and energetic in Nope

·        Cate Blanchett’s Tár became a meme for a reason

·        Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, and especially Rooney Mara are all transcendent in Women Talking

·        Viola Davis is so weary and yet so strong in The Woman King

Best Picture:

Living

10: Living – I was surprised when this held up, because it’s a thing I usually dislike – an English-language remake of one of the greatest films of all time, Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru. While Living doesn’t equal its predecessor, the film’s restrained touch, gently beautiful imagery and fantastic score create space for Bill Nighy to give possibly a career-best performance in one of the most emotionally powerful existential stories around. I don’t think I can say this is as creatively crafted as some others, or as impressive on a directorial level, but the sentiment just moves me so.

Aftersun

9: Aftersun – Speaking of sentiment, this film sings with a special kind of nostalgic pain. It’s so simple – just a father and his daughter on vacation – but there’s a whole lifetime in that short span.

Godland

8: Godland – Iceland is place of haunting beauty, and it’s photographed with such awe even in a film which apes the style of early, flawed photography, a gimmick which actually works atmospherically here. It’s a sort of reverse Heart of Darkness, where journeying further into the strange land reveals the evil we bring with us.

Return to Seoul

7: Return to Seoul – A kind of antinostalgia, or rather, a film which lives in the complexity of searching for a lost home, trying to approach it, while simultaneously being repelled and rejecting it, in a way which seems incredibly truthful.

Babylon

6: Babylon – Equally hilarious and brutal, a big old sweaty masterpiece that actually did need to be three hours long because it simply holds on things for as long as it needs to. Also, one of the boldest endings to a movie ever.

Women Talking

5: Women Talking – This screenplay is like Shakespeare, and its perfectly performed. The only thing I didn’t love about the film was the desaturated colors, which I think do sort of work thematically, but it still makes the world ugly to look at – but that is also the point of this very painful film.

The Fabelmans

4: The Fabelmans – The most incredible heart-baring work of slightly-fictionalized autobiography (more of it is real than you’d expect) from the great king of the cinema, Steven Spielberg, at the height of his powers. It looks like magic, every performance hits like a meteor, and the whole thing comes together in a symphonic synthesis.

Tár

3: Tár – Speaking of symphonies, this character study in human arrogance and the destructive and self-destructive evil of pure blind selfishness – not even seeing others as people – is as masterfully directed as its orchestra is conducted. A vivisection of a fully-realized character.

Decision to Leave

2: Decision to Leave – Park Chan-wook can’t actually direct an uninteresting shot. I watched almost all of his movies this last year, and I can attest that he’s physically incapable of ever being even slightly less than fascinating. This film is a vortex, centered around Tang Wei’s mysterious smile, and it’s perilously easy to get pulled under.

The Eight Mountains

1: The Eight Mountains – This movie snuck up on me at the last minute and jumped to the top of the list, but it would be hard to dislodge it. Every image is vivid, beautiful, and gentle, and the camera drinks in reds better than anything since Ozu. Beyond that, this is the ultimate film about friendship, about the relationships we miss or try desperately to cling to, amid the current of mortal life. I felt acutely that I was experiencing a sort of emotional crisis about the course of my own life as I watched it.

So those are the highlights, but there are many other good and interesting films which came out in 2022. My full list, which will go on changing as I watch more in the future, is below: https://boxd.it/fV492

Zakopane

After leaving Krakow in early November of 2022, I took a bus about an hour south, to the town of Zakopane, in the Tatras Mountains on the southern border of Poland. This is just about the only place in Poland which has mountains, the rest of the country being essentially pancake-shaped. Dismounting the bus, I walked about a mile up a long road lined with all sorts of shops and cafes, crowded with people who had come up to the hills to hike. In winter, Zakopane is a ski town, and already it felt like one. I stayed in the smallest Airbnb I’d seen – a room built as an annex on the side of a stone house, which, including the bathroom, was probably about ten feet long and five feet wide. But I actually found this incredibly cozy, especially since it made the place easier to heat, since it was already getting quite cold.

The next day I went for a walk. The first thing I noticed about Zakopane is the peculiar local architecture – a style which is now known as Zakopane style, pioneered by architect Stanislaw Witkiewicz, who inspired the region to shift away from Swiss- and Austrian-style chalets and toward a style of architecture inspired by the more local traditions of the Goral people and the Carpathian Mountains, of which the Tatras are an extension. As a result, Zakopane today is a wonderful collection of tiered-roofed wooden houses that don’t quite look like anywhere else.

As I headed uphill into the wooded foothills of the mountains, and saw the rotting bracken and the dripping moss, the dark firs spattered here and there with bursts of rain, breathing out fog, and everywhere the drip of water on every surface, I realized that if I were dropped in this place with no context for where I was, I would absolutely believe I was back in Washington. It had exactly the same character and climate, and immediately I began to feel a hospitable comfort, a kindred warmth brought on by the gloom and the rain.

As I proceeded, I passed the old habitations of people who once lived in the forested hills, before it became a national park. Amid the dark firs were blanched larches, gold fading into the fog. The trail quickly climbed into the clouds, up a long stair of stone that made me feel like a hobbit on the way to Mordor. Then as I clambered up a slope, there was a sudden break in the fog, and sunlight revealed an immense and craggy escarpment on the other side of the defile.

From there, it was only a short walk through the woods until I suddenly popped above the clouds and into winter. I rounded a corner and without warning was in a world of white mountains and snow-capped Christmas trees, as far as the eye could see. The trail became a gentle stroll through this garden of snow, until I came to a high valley dotted with tiny cabins, ringed with an amphitheater of proud peaks. There I rested and stared, until I finally became too cold and retraced my steps to the town below.

The next day I had thought to get a local train or bus into northern Slovakia, assuming that would be feasible because the distances involved were small – but I soon discovered the transit system was not oriented toward getting people into the middle of the Slovakian hills. After a tiresome morning lugging my gear from one bus station to another and back again, I finally caved and decided to return to Krakow for the night, and catch the bus to Budapest the next day. But I’m glad I went back to Krakow after all, because that night I took a stroll around the great market square in the darkness, and found it transformed into a study in contrast, inky sky above, warm lights below, and everywhere the gentle babble of relaxed voices from the cafes, like ripples on the strand.

Music in December 2023

The final monthly playlist of 2023 is bookended by Joe Hisaishi’s score for what seems like Hayao Miyazaki’s swan song, The Boy and the Heron. This score repeats a few themes at critical junctures in the story, when everything goes silent, and suddenly the first piano chord announces itself like the Last Dawn, and all the shadows of every cloud and tree dance over the green.

In another original score to an anime film, RADWIMPS once again transform themselves from a rock band into a gentle and stripped down musical chimera, and also collaborate with yet another singer, to great effect. Suzume is all about the strange otherworld spaces that lie just beneath our own world, and its score perfectly evokes that sense of vast, mystical hollow space, with all its strange beauty.

The inclusion of the next few songs are all symptoms of me being chronically online: Amour plastique featured in a series of memes about Napoleon coincidental with the release of the film (I love it when the humor of the youth latches onto something historical); Duvet popped up in a set of even more obscure memes that I’m not even sure I fully understand; Crystal Dolphin was one of the many contemporary remixes based off ‘80s city pop to feature in a specific genre of youtube film edit that I am obsessed with; and Necromantic is pure meme fuel, where the meme is essentially just about how darn catchy it is. But that’s the thing – all of these are genuinely good.

Strange Conversations takes its time to work up to a sort of reverential musical alchemy that successfully evokes the feeling of sacred space. And No Surprises  has a similar sort of powerful rip tide current, driving inevitably through a beautiful melancholy. Whereas Wake Up injects its own melancholy into the body of an uplifting chorus – yet still manages to come out strangely sad. I remember back when I first heard this a decade ago, I was fully obsessed with it.

I had never really spent a lot of time listening to Springsteen, but after hearing an excellent podcast about him, I’ve come round. Dancing In the Dark feels particularly appealing to me, because it’s a musical expression of frustration at one’s own inability to get anything done – which is something I feel almost every hour.

New Order’s Ceremony seems to creepy and mumble its way shyly by, to the degree that it almost doesn’t fully arrive – you might miss it as it goes past, but that would be your loss.

I listened to Michael W. Smith’s classical album Freedom a great deal in the first decade of our century, and now I’ve returned to it after a long break, to find it as great as I remembered. There’s a wonderful musical clarity and urgency to its melodies, like rivulets of cold water over rocks, and it does a far better job of being ‘epic’ than most modern orchestral music that goes out of its way to try. It is at turns sweeping and domestic, vast and close.

I have a whole playlist of choral carols I like to hear at Christmas. There’s nothing quite like the dignity of an English choir, proceeding with a steady old hymn, and playing on both the beauty of the cold snowy night and my own incredibly sharp longing for England.

Then, more ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION, the old reliable rockstars of my year, bringing the warmth of the summer sun to darkest winter. And after, more Japanese film scores: the wonderfully fluid and rippling work of Umitaro Abe, and more of the brilliance of Hisaishi, in all his imaginative sonic diversity. There’s nothing more peaceful and calmly beautiful than Summer.

A rougher note is struck by Great Grandpa’s Rosalie, a raw nerve exposed to the cold grey rain I know so well. This is masterfully done.

I got into Kenshi Yonezu and Kensuke Ushio’s work for the show Chainsaw Man, which has both the aggressive energy its title implies, but also a muted quality – which extends to Ushio’s other work as well, which is always beautifully deflated.

Finally, I end the year with The Boy and the Heron once again, which is itself the perfect sendoff. The entire film, right down to the score, is about reckoning with a life already lived, and the impossibility of legacy – or at least of controlling it. There is no perfect way to say farewell, to set all things in order as we planned – as I learn again and again, day after day. But in that great collapse, there is a kind of ultimate release, like splitting an atom, when the veil of reality is rent, and the possibility of eternity shines through.

Music in November 2023

The most recent album from The Mountain Goats, Jenny From Thebes, has a fresh, rain-washed feel to it. Darnielle’s work is often lo-fi, but this is crisp and clear, shining like a freshly-washed car, and like all his work it’s an exquisite entanglement of melancholy and optimism. This sort of music is perhaps better calibrated to the actuality of life than any other – but there’s also a sort of inexplicable mystery, because I can’t explain quite why it’s so profound.

Jo Yeong-wook’s score for the 2016 film The Handmaiden is a quivering tapestry of trepidation and anticipation, which weaves itself into ever greater splendor, like a silkworm spinning its thread. Meanwhile, Martin Dirkov’s score to last year’s Holy Spider is oppressive and ominous, a soundtrack that wears a hard grimace.

Then we have two great songs from the ‘80s – Randy Crawford’s One Day I’ll Fly Away and Vanessa Paradis’s Joe le taxi. Both create a sort of warm and dreamy cloud upon which carries the listener away.

I was really into Mae back in high school, and I think their album Singularity still holds up really well, especially its pitched-up synth lines.

Rainbow after tears is exactly what its title suggests. Just as the original rainbow of the Noetic flood, Saho Terao’s song has the feeling of life springing back into bloom, shaking off death’s torpor and greeting a surprising new tomorrow.

Next are three more ‘80s songs, all with the feeling of being simultaneously within and without – under and endless low ceiling of grey clouds, off which the music echoes endlessly. This is exactly what I love about this period of music.

I don’t really play video games aside from Civilization VI, so I have no familiarity with Cyberpunk 2077 or it’s soundtrack, but I stumbled across this track from musical duo Let’s Eat Grandma, and I just really enjoy it.

As for The Perfect Girl, ok, I admit it, this one I am familiar with strictly from memes – but after hearing a few seconds of it enough times in various memes, I decided to find the actual song, because it’s so magnetic.

Bitter Sweet Symphony is a classic for a  reason – there’s nothing quite like its iconic, endlessly-looped melody, which builds and builds and processes through time and space, and carries with it an indomitable, improbable positivity.

The last three songs are from ELO’s fantastic 1977 album Out of the Blue, which explodes like fireworks crackling across the night sky. This entire album is indescribably wonderful – or at least it is for me.

Music in October 2023

October’s playlist begins with clammbon’s ultimate power-up song, which I would play to wake up in the morning at work. The next song is a similarly swinging piece from the same 2003 album, and yet like much of clammbon’s work, it pairs upbeat and even jazzy instrumentals with heartfelt, at times almost whispered vocals.

Following this are a rollicking rock song from Chatmonchy, Kaho Nakamura’s strange agitations, and The Dø’s windswept Sparks, which sounds like the Aurora Borealis. Then there’s another warm hug of comfort from Hitsujibungaku, another aching and heartfelt songbird’s delight from Yuta Orisaka, and another kinetic lo-fi piano delight from Masakatsu Takagi.

I am going through songs fast today, partly because I don’t have a great way to describe them in words, and partly because many of the songs on this list share similarities, especially as we go on.

Otto Totland’s Solêr sounds as if it was written to be the score of a film where one is waiting in melancholic anticipation, waiting to arrive at a station for a funeral.

I keep slipping ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION songs into these, often from the same albums, and that’s how you know I’m consistently listening to all of them, again and again. This track has a particularly fantastic melodic line sawing up and down between the verses.

After this point in the playlist I enter what some might argue is my ‘bad taste’ era. I wasn’t attempting to  be contrarian, and I genuinely think all this music is pretty great, but I have learned that some of the more poppy tracks from the ‘70s and ‘80s that I’ve included are regarded as cringe. Well, what can I say – it was a silly era, and I’m a silly guy.

And that’s what much of this playlist is: everything from a Bond movie song to prototypical yacht rocker Christopher Cross; Roy Orbison’s soft-mouthed reveries to downbeat Madonna; even Kenny G! Of course I’ve got the great Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel, but I’ve also included Charlene’s I’ve Never Been to Me, a song that apparently has been voted one of the worst hits of all time. Well, I beg to differ.

Leaving the Cold War, I return to my beloved Humbert Humbert, who has put all their power and gentleness into a song about a lunchbox. Next, a haunting score to metanoia from Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s score to Living. Then, I actually broke an informal rule and let Long Time slip in a second time after already including it in the July playlist – but it fits here. And Yorushika always fits anywhere, ready to explode with a combination of aggressive guitars and sweet vocals. Finally, we end where we began, with two songs from clammbon, only this time one is slow and blue, and the other feels benedictory; both seem fitting for an exit, a happy funeral procession in the rain. And isn’t that exactly what October is, after all?