Things I Liked in 2017
FILMS: Many good ones! #1: Tower, a documentary(ish) about a shooting at the University of Texas in 1966: the most interesting documentary of the year, the most formally inventive art film, and the most thrilling thriller. #2 Lady Macbeth: it’s formal and austere except when it’s extremely not; Florence Pugh is very good. #3 and 4 in some order: Call Me By Your Name (the Michael Stuhlbarg speech! the Sufjan Stevens song at the end!) and Elle (the self-consistent reading is “Paul Verhoeven thinks this is all a joke”, so you have to go for inconsistent readings). Also very good: The Handmaiden, mother!, Raw, Toni Erdman. Also also good: Dunkirk, Get Out, La La Land, Manchester by the Sea, Moonlight. | I saw five films in a day at the Watershed’s Cinema Rediscovered festival; my favourites were Daughters of the Dust (not really like any other film I’ve seen; you should watch it) and Sweet Smell of Success (“I’d hate to take a bite outta you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic.” I slightly embarrassingly gasped out loud at cinematography at one point.)
A delicious profile of George Osborne, of all people
Reporting from Puerto Rico in the aftermath Hurricane Maria
In memoriam: Maryam Mirzakhani | Adam West (and Adam West’s Batman)
Mark O’Connell reviews a book about sleep
On sandwiches and the business of sandwiches The specific vocabulary here is delightful: Carriers and barriers! Goblin cave! Skillet! The drop! Mouth feel! Day parts! The fragmentation of the evening occasion!
A journalist visits North Korea – I’m not sure if this left me less worried or more worried
MUSIC: Best album: My favourite album this year is Dirty Projector’s self-titled – although despite how much I enjoy its inventiveness, as a break-up album it’s somewhere between bitter and just unpleasant. (Carl Wilson writes about this beautifully and insightfully but, for me, too generously.) Perhaps best enjoyed alongside the sort-of other half, Amber Coffman’s City of No Reply. Also liked Room 29 by Chilly Gonzales and Jarvis Cocker – I admit (slightly sheepishly) in both cases to having preferred their broadcast work to their music in the past, but this is very good. Also also good: Arca’s self-titled (far better than the Björk album, on which she worked); the new Feist, whose post-making-catchy-pop-hits career is underrated. | Best song: Sober II (Melodrama) by Lorde or Dangerous by The xx | Best review: Laura Snapes on Ed Sheeran | Most first-four-seasons-of-The-West-Wing in-jokes: Lin-Manel Miranda’s What’s Next? | The Radiohead section: OK Computer is best (and most underratedly funny) reissue, Lift [above] is best video, Man of War is the old song I’m most pleased to see finally released (although I’ll eat my hat if it was recorded more than a couple of years ago). Radiohead live at Old Trafford was my favourite anything of last year, although it’s hard to say why – I’ve seen them play about eight times, and this was not the best (indoor gigs are better than outdoor, for starters!), but something about it was important to me. Cried three times – at old songs, which is bad for my hipster cred. | a playlist
“They change your words, the New York Times/They may not need to, but they do”
Aisling Bea: “Then, on the 10th anniversary of my father’s death, my mother sat us down and explained the concept of suicide.”
Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah on Dylann Roof
TV: Black Mirror, although I haven’t seen them all yet. The Last Week Tonight YouTube page?
I can’t honestly say that everyone should want to read a 17,000-word article about the Texas state legislature, but if you do, this, by Lawrence Wright, is a very good one
PODCASTS: Many good ones again! Radiolab on jury nullification and playing the Oliver Sacks tapes | Sporkful: In search of the Aleppo sandwich | Heavyweight in general, and the Isabel episode in particular | Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History: Golf is bad! | Reply All tracks down a phone scammer (part 1, part 2) | Surprisingly great interviewer/interviewee combination: Adam Buxton/Zadie Smith | Unsurprisingly great interviewer/interviewee combination: Ezra Klein/Tyler Cowen | This American Life has, all year, had the best sideways-on coverage of US politics | Short serieses: S-town, Jon Ronson’s Butterfly Effect | Slate’s Culture Gabfest, as always
Kathryn Schulz on losing and loss
BOOK: Dreaming the Beatles by Rob Sheffield is whatever the opposite of impartial, well-balanced biography would be. It delighted me as much when it was outrageously wrong as when it surprisingly (and equally outrageously) right. Tyler liked it.
What happens when the Queen dies?
On Weinstein and related matters: Asia Argento (quoted by Ronan Farrow), Lucy Prebble, Ellen Page, Salma Hayek, Lupita Nyong’o, Dahlia Lithwick.
hey i just met you
and you’re a white whale
but here’s my number
so call me ishmael
— dave coates (@davepoems) December 16, 2017
Sam Anderson profiles the nonfiction writer John McPhee
OLD THINGS I CAME ACROSS THIS YEAR: Films of the French “new wave”. The best: Breathless/À bout de souffle – if you’d been, say, twenty in 1960, I don’t see how it wouldn’t have changed you life. Other favourites: Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Jules et Jim, Hiroshima mon amour, Contempt/Le mépris. | When it was on Channel 4 in 2013, the main thing a remember hearing about the French series The Returned was that it’s about zombies. Turns out that is not at all true, and it’s very good. | The 9/11 memorial, although I’m not quite sure what to say about it | OLD THINGS I RE-CAME ACROSS THIS YEAR: My favourite reading experiences this year were re-reading experiences. We remember Nineteen Eighty-Four for the politics and vocabulary stuff (although I forgotten “down the memory hole” was from here), but it’s also great as a straight-ahead genre thriller. Roald Dahl’s The Witches, which I read back in my childhood bedroom with nothing else to read, remains excellent, especially the ending.