2021 Favs

These are items I encountered in 2021, not necessarily released in 2021. Items are listed in no particular order.

Jump to: Books, Articles, Screenplays, Movies, Music, Podcasts

Books

• "If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English" by Noor Naga (ARC, April 2022). Deep ambiguity. Intercultural/interclass conflict with some good fomal tweaks and a killer final section (tho maybe a little "inside baseball" re: Capital-L Literature.)
• "Among the Thugs" by Bill Buford (1990). Male studies / stunt journalism. An American journalist living in England embeds with football hooligans at the arguable height of their violent severity. Keen-eyed reportage of terrifying situations and emotions.
• "Amateur" by Thomas Paige McBee (2018). Male studies / stunt journalism. A transmale reporter for the Wall St. Journal takes on a boxing match, and struggles with embodying/embracing violent masculinity as he trains for the match. (I also read "Professor in the Cage," which is similar but not as good.)
• "No One Is Talking About This" by Patricia Lockwood (2021). Heavily stylistic; seems to be a love-it-or-hate-it book around the shop. I loved it -- a perfect mix of prose & poetry. Sudden curveball halfway through. Deeply emotional.
• "Enter the Aardvark" by Jessica Anthony (2019) A kooky metamodern yarn about a politician whose life unravels spectacularly over the course of a day. Half the book is written in 2nd-person.
• "Rebecca" by Daphne DuMarier (1938). Dreamy and slo-ow, exploring a kind of "social horror" genre. Unusually, I listened to this on an audio with a solid 10/10 narrator, Alexandra O'Karma, available via SFPL's Hoopla service.
• "The English Patient" by Michael Ondaatje (1998). Lovely book -- subpar movie adaptation, skip it.
• "Black Wings Has My Angel" by Elliot Chaze (1953). Classic midcentury noir. It has some structural issues, but parts of it are transcendentally good. Here's a review I wrote earlier with more details:
  
• The first half of this book is amazing. The voice is killer, and the pacing is absolutely perfect. The narrator's backstory and his plan subtly drip-drip-drip into the story without much fanfare or digression, and the tension between the two main characters keeps ratcheting up. The plan's nuts-and-bolts are handled easily and without obvious expo-dumps; but the real meat is sitting with the leads while they bide their time, simmering and impatient.
  
  The structure is unusual: The plan is executed in the middle, and what would typically be a short denouement extends into 100-pages-or-so. This back half is uneven; it covers a lot of ground rather quickly, and the pacing change makes these sections feel less grounded, the plot more happenstance.
  
  In the final chapters, when the leads are once again in dire straights, the golden tone resurfaces, and the ending hits dead-center. Even though I intuited where the thread was going, I still audibly gasped when I saw how it unspooled on the page.
• "And the Band Played On" Randy Schiltz (1984). Despite its imposing size and scope, the reportage is clear, precise, and punchy. (There's apendicies describing the roles of the diff. government agencies, and a cast of "characters" for reference.) An important document of missed opportunities and the slow-motion unfolding of a catastrophy.
• "Golden Gates" by Conor Doughtery (2020). Covers the SF housing crisis from the end of the RDA-era through present-day. Large focus on the birth of the YIMBY movement.
• "Columbine" by Dave Cullin (2009). Definitive book on the subject by a Denver-based reporter. It's uneven. Details:
• Cullen's book does excellent work in placing the 1999 attack in its proper context, straightening out common myths (many of which I had assumed were true), and tracking the aftermath over the ensuing decade. In 2020, with school shootings now depressingly commonplace, this book is an important, thorough account of the beginning of this particular phase of what the author terms "spectacle violence." Journalistically, it's a testament to the power of sticking with a story long after everyone has moved on to the next cycle.
  
  However, I would have a hard time recommending this book to a general audience. The writing style has not aged well. In the postscript, Cullen likens his work to method acting: He writes each scene with an eye toward getting inside his subjects' heads, trying to understanding exactly what they were experiencing during the events. Particularly with the two shooters -- but also with several of the victims' scenes -- this leads to a magaziney writing style I might describe as punchy, exciting, or action-packed. The cognitive dissonance of this aesthetic choice was difficult to process.

Articles

• "Sun Gods of the LBC" by Jeff Weiss for The Ringer. On the last days of Bradley Nowell, frontman of Sublime.
• "The Millenial Vernacular of Getting Swole" by Emily Contis c/o Ann Hellen Peterson's newsletter. Male studies, body image messaging.
• "Lest Ye Be Judged" by Jon Moolleam for ESPN. Wild yarn about a pastor for baseball umpires.
• "The Hegemony of the DAW" by Michael Terran for Disclaimer. This is a little inside-baseball for audio/music producers, but it's a semi-academic take on the ascendant influence of Digital Audio Workstation software on composition and listenership habits. Unusually, this article generated an extremely solid discussion online, particularly on this message board for audio nerds.
• "Queen of the New Age" by Mark Oppenheimer for NYT mag, 2008. Profile of Louise Hay.
• "The Fourth State of Matter" by Jo Ann Beard for The New Yorker, 1996. C/O Eileen (I think?). Personal journalism. Fantastic writing.
• "This Is Your Brain On Peleton" by Amanda Hess for NYT Mag. Fun read on social compartmentalization and parasocial relationships in the context of Fitness Capitalism.
• "For Dot" by Albert Berneko for Defector. Short, beautiful ellegy for a dog.

Movies

• This year, we watched several Claire Denis movies, which were all good. These are my favs in order:
• "Beau Travail" (1999) is a simmering homoerotic thriller set in a French Foreign Legion camp in the desert outside Djibouti. Bold colors and studies of the body in motion. Owing to the remoteness of the location, this film was shot without daily rushes, giving it a really unusual visual quality.
• "White Material" (2009) follows a white French colonial who decides to say "fuck it" and try for one last coffee harvest on her African plantation, even though the country is actively collapsing into civil war. Tense, violent, furiously acted, just amazing overall.
  
• "35 Rhums" is a take on Ozu's "Late Summer." Slow and sensitive.
  
• Prior to Jean-Paul Belmondo's passing this year, I had actually watched a bunch of his mid-career action-romance-comedy flicks (Underrated genre! shoutout to Jackie Chan). These are not typically good movies, but they just hit the spot when I needed a mindless escape.
  
• "The Man From Rio" (1964) has some great "Romancing the Stone" vibes. A schlubby pulp-schlock author keeps pulling the rug out from under his fictional hero (both played by Belmondo, naturally), as he falls for the girl next door.
  
• "L'Apageur" (1976), "Le Solitare" (1987), and "Le Marginal" (1983) are all basically the same movie. Quickly-made popcorn fare.
• "Le Professionel" (1981) is a little more serious, in that it deals with Françafrique, but still manages to throw in enough goofy scenes to keep the vibe light.
• "Stray Dogs" (2013) Korean slow film about a homeless family. Heartbreaking and beautiful.
  
• "The Act of Killing" (2012). A hard-to-watch experimental documentary concerning the now-elderly executioners of Jakarta's notoriously violent mid-60s revolution. (See also "The Jakarta Method," on my TBR but not read yet.)
  
• "The Square"(2017) is a straight-faced parody of the High Art world. Come for the "flawed-but-basically-good protagonist stumbles into moral quagmires" plot, stay for the unbelievably next-level Monkey Man scene.
• "The Silence" (1998). Iranian writer/director. Beautifully photographed in Tajikistan. Poetic, utilizes elements of Sufi mysticism.

Screenplays

• "The Long Kiss Goodnight" by Shane Black, 1995. (Haven't seen the movie.) It's so 90s -- The nonchalant swearing, über-violence, the whole bit. But I'm listing it specifically because the action scenes were much easier to visualize than most screenplays I've read. I often find action scenes confusing to read, and this one just nailed it for me.
  
• "Jurrasic Park" by David Koepp, adap. Chriton & Malia Scotch Marmo. I re-read the book (movie was waaay better... although you do get the Dodgson backstory in the book -- "Dodgson! We got Dodgson here! See? Nobody cares."), and wanted to see the in-between phase. It's solid and quick, followed quite closely in the final film. Excellent handling of the expo dumps re: Dino DNA (though a little dated & trope-y now). A few scenes include alternate dialog or action for the dir. to select.
  
• "Bringing out the dead" by Paul Schrader, 1997. (Saw the movie several years ago.) Unhinged and nihilistic. Nic Cage plays the lead, and it was interesting reading the dialog and imaging someone else in the role.

Music

• "Head of Roses" by Flock of Dimes, 2021. Solo project by Jenn Wasner. Beautiful, folk-rooted charts with futuristic production and soaring vocals.
  
• "Titanic Rising" by Weyes Blood, 2019. Brill Building Core. On Repeat forever. Basically Laura Nyro but real sleepy.
  
• "Pink Noise" by Laura Mvulu, 2021. Punchy throwback 80s pop from a British rnb singer. Short, sweet, very fun.
• "Daring Mind" by the Jihye Lee Orchestra, 2021. Solid 3rd-Stream big band jazz. Lots of novel choices, some unusual Alice Coltrane influence in the solo vamps. RIYL Maria Schneider.
  
• "Honeymoon" by Beach Bunny, 2020. Chicago-area Pop Punk. 10/10 ALL KILLER NO FILLER!!
  
• "The Marfa Tapes" by Miranda Lambert & co, 2021. Lo-fi album, solid-ass country songwriters hanging out by a fire.
• "Infernal Decadence" by Spectral Wound, 2019. Canadian Black Metal. They dropped a new one this year ("A Diabolic Thirst") but I didn't like it as much.
• "Moon is the oldest TV" by Luzius Schuler, 2019. C/O Sara Wiggleworth. I've listened to this probably > 100 times. Soothing.
• "Essentials" by Erika. Throwback 90s rnb from a Dutch artist.
  
• RADIO PROGRAMS:
  
• NTS' "Sounds of the Dawn" radio program, generally -- but this episode in particular, focusing on the somewhat unusual corpus of ambient/esoteric music produced on the Yamaha DX7. Wall-to-wall 80s digital bangers.
• Generations Funk, Lyon, France.
• Dynamo Discoteque, Istambul, Turkey.
  
• AMY'S PICKS:
  
• " Balejé Siseko - Drourou" Malian Kora player. Lots more stuff on his bandcamp.
• "Overview on Phenomenal Nature" by Cassandra Jenkins, 2021. Poetic spacey jazz-folk.
• "Cool Dry Place" by Katie Kerby, 2021. Same.

Podcasts

Note: I don't listen to many podcasts, but here's a few that stuck with me:

• "Long Shadow: 9/11's Lingering Questions" -- A 9-episode series looking into common questions / misunderstandings about the attacks. It's kinda sensationalist in a bad way, but there's one episode that covered something totally bonkers from a procedural standpoint: The FAA's decision to ground all air traffic in the US, which had literally never happened before. "Was there a fifth plane on 9/11?"
• "Between the Covers interview with Jorie Graham" -- Jorie Graham being her typical bananas self. Love it.