Things I Liked in 2016
Mark O’Connell reviews a book of Gerry Adams’s tweets
Janet Malcolm profiles the pianist Yuja Wang
FILMS: The best things I saw in the cinema this year were old. Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour documentary about Holocaust is imperfect but essential. Four scenes that will stay with me for a very long time: the bartender pouring drinks (“Mr Oberhauser, do you remember Belzec?”); the letter about the trucks (“the following technical changes are needed”); the scene in the barber shop (“We must go on”); the final scene (“I’m the last Jew”). Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds is underrated, if it’s possible for a Hitchcock film to be underrated. I like Geoff Dyer’s take on the film – I don’t believe it for a moment, but I don’t think he does either. But more than these two films specifically, this should be taken as a general recommendation of watching old films in the cinema. | Of new stuff, I’d pick Arrival or Mustang or The Neon Demon or the one-shot Victoria
Citizen Khan is the best piece about a murdered Afghan Muslim tamale vendor in mid-century Wyoming I read all year
TV: O.J.: Made in America is about two things: OJ Simpson, and everything else. Here, “everything else” includes sport, economic inequality, law enforcement, television, celebrity, capitalism, politics, misogyny (although perhaps insufficiently so), drugs, journalism, the legal system, and, of course, race. It’s seven-and-a-half hours long, and it’s barely long enough. | By being the funniest thing I saw all year, Fleabag tricked me into thinking it wouldn’t also be the most tragic. | The “San Junipero” episode of Black Mirror | The last ever episode of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle was also the best. | The SNL “Black Jeopardy” sketch
I made this because I thought it was funny, although no one else did.
David’s Ankles (“The first thing to hit the floor is his bent left elbow, the arm that holds the heroic sling, and it bursts along the lines of its previous breaks, old scars left over from an incident in the 16th century involving an unruly mob and a bench. Then the rest of the marble will meet the floor, and the physics from there will be fast and simple: force, resistance, the brittleness of calcite crystals, the shearing of microscopic grains along the axes on which they align. Michelangelo’s David will explode.”)
MUSIC: Best album: Predictably, I choose Radiohead’s hyphenlessly-titled A Moon Shaped Pool (runners-up: Bon Iver’s 22, A Million and PJ Harvey’s under-praised The Hope Six Demolition Project) Joint award for best single/best video: six-way tie between Burn the Witch [above], Lazarus, Drone Bomb Me, Fuck with Myself, Voodoo in My Blood, Nobody Speak | Best thematically related (?) reissued albums: Illinois by Sufjan Stevens and Boys for Pele by Tori Amos | Best Eurovision song contest-winning song about the historical geopolitics (and obliquely about the current geopolitics) of the Crimea: 1944 by Jamala | Best musical sung in the style of (and by the cast of) a different musical: Hamilton/Sweeney Todd | a playlist
BOOKS: The Lonely City by Olivia Laing (excerpt) | When in French by Lauren Collins (excerpt)
PODCASTS: This American Life at a Greek refugee camp (part 1, part 2) | The Reply-All phone-in show | Short clips from The New Yorker Radio Hour: at a high-school mock election (part 1, part 2); meeting a bee-stylist | Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History on the Toyota acceleration scandal | The Slate Culture Gabfest: for example, this discussion of names (from 33:30), or Dana’s Bob Ross endorsement (from 57:00)
Christine Who Fed the Hungry: Emily Gould on volunteering in a New York soup kitchen, and the woman who ran it
“I Cooked Jeremy Corbyn’s Marrow Recipe And Had Some Thoughts About The Labour Party”
We didn’t start the fire
It was always burning since the world’s been turning
— #JAMWAH2017 (@JAM_WAH) December 18, 2016
New Yorker writers’ encounters with Shakespeare. (I think I’ve put too many New Yorker links in this list, but it’s too late now…)
OLD THINGS I CAME ACROSS THIS YEAR: Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (Some unrequested advice: read Appendix I in its original place, and don’t bother with Appendix II) | “Scorpio sphinx in a calico dress” | “Golden age” Hollywood films, which I”m arbitrarily defining to be sound films before 1965. Some favourites in approximate light-to-dark order: It Happened One Night (feather-light), The Philadelphia Story (James Stewart is funny drunk), everything by Howard Hawks, The Wizard of Oz (perfect), Casablanca (almost as good as To Have and Have Not), everything by Alfred Hitchcock, Double Indemnity (“There was no way in all this world I could have known that murder sometimes can smell like honeysuckle”), All About Eve (better than Sunset Blvd), On the Waterfront (Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint are excellent), In a Lonely Place (super-depressing ending). | A Manifesto from People Reluctant To Kill for an Abstraction
Notes on dancers by Zadie Smith
Found Sonnet: The Wig by Rita Dove | Elegy for Pedals (the walking bear) by Michael Robbins