Tuesday Update - January 2nd, 2024
Struggling more than one should to look back on the last year
My intention here was initially to do something like a year-end review -- I've done it before, my joke in the past has been that I give it a different name each year: The M.O.F.Y.A.F.G.A.s, The Perennial R.A.P.H.E. Awards, the Joetys -- Typically something that gave me the opportunity to try to put together an unnecessarily lengthy acronym, come up with a reference to an obscure but funny part of the human anatomy, or, ideally, combine both. I'd then go through my favorite works from music, film, video games, et cetera, from the preceding year as sort of a bookend, not just to entertain you, the reader, but also to provide a helpful bookend for me, the writer in the moment, and me, the writer-made-reader several years in the future to provide something of a sense of the person that I was at a point in the past. For instance, when I was twenty, I named Halo 5 the fourth-best game of the year. I have not had a single thought about Halo 5 since 2015, so only my praise of said game crystalized at that time presents proof to me that I had indeed, at one point, played that game, and not only had I played it, but I apparently really enjoyed it.
I would've liked to have done that here for 2023, and I'm going to try to do so, but as I try to do so, I’ll also try to illustrate a different point about my relationship to contemporary popular culture:
Best Movie of 2023: The First Hour or So of Avatar 2
This is the winner by default, as I didn't see any other movies released in 2023. I also didn't really see Avatar 2, as the 3D/IMAX combo reawakened a deep-seated motion sickness that I thought I'd outgrown. Said motion sickness pushed me out of the cinema and into the parking lot, where I dry heaved out of the driver's-side door of my Toyota Camry. I did not particularly care for the part of the film that I saw, either.
Best Video Game of 2023: Dangeresque - The Roomisode Triumvirate
This is a charming little deal, nice little game, a lot of jokes here and there and about. I'm not gonna name my son after any of the characters or anything. It's between that and Castle Tintagel on the PlayDate. I may have purchased and played five games released this year, enjoyed two fo the five, was neither here nor there about two of the remaining three, and was fairly disappointed by Slayers X.
Best Television Show of 2023: Good Morning Football on the NFL Network
It is a good thing that YouTube TV doesn't do one of those year-end accumulation Spotify Wrapped deals, as I am certain that I spent at least a week of the year watching Good Morning Football on the NFL Network. In-season, of course, I'm a sucker for the Cool Plays Bro and the Angry Runs and the new segment in which Jason McCourty emulates an outfit that a player wore walking into the stadium the prior Sunday, but paradoxically, I find that it gets even more interesting in the offseason. After the draft, they really have to put effort into to coming up with stuff to talk about, so we end up getting Kyle Brandt and three guest hosts (as the other three main hosts are on vacation) ranking which tight end would make the best villain in a new Rocky movie.
Truthfully, this year, I watched GMFB, I watched Morning Footy on the Golazo Network if GMFB wasn't on, and I watched MLS Wrap-Up on Apple TV on Saturday and Wednesday nights. I watched the first episode of "Bel Air" on Peacock out of curiosity as well but I didn't care for it. I liked what they did with Geoffrey and Uncle Phil and Hilary but the new Carlton was just too mean for my liking. Also saw the first couple of episodes of "Reboot" on Hulu when I was dogsitting at my parents' house, perfectly fine, waaaaay different from the original with the CG Canadian cyborg guys.
YouTube Video of the Year: "The Kennedys" - Vids From the Site1
Hopefully that illustrates the point there: I just haven't really kept a finger on the pulse of the culture as of recent. No longer using a smartphone led to me severely diminishing my social media use, and that left me without a real sense of what was going on in the zeitgeist if it wasn't getting discussed on the NFL Network from 6am to 9am every weekday. This is not to say that I have experienced no creative works this year, I just haven't actively kept up with very much that is new. This is not that much of a problem for me as it is, as hardly anything makes a significant-enough cultural dent that my ignorance to said thing creates any real difficulty for me in most social situations, but I worry that I'm at the risk of missing something that speaks particularly well to me or to a current moment in time. I miss what I had when I played Shardlight and watched Minding the Gap.
This is a resolution of mine for 2024: I would like to be more aware of what's going on in the popular culture. This is part of the reason why I'm bringing back the weekly Update posts here on the Substack. With these posts, I'll be able to document what I've experienced, what I'm thinking, and what I'm working on, in what I hope will be a relatively concise fashion. I'll also try to narrate what I've done to keep up with that. To my knowledge, there is not an equivalent to my watertight music discovery system (Subscribe to a bunch of labels on YouTube and listen to whatever they post on their channel) for other types of arts, but finding those in-roads will be a part of the journey as well.
Speaking of music, I feel that I can speak to new music at a decent clip and I find that I have unique tastes, so I will do my best to go in depth about my favorite music from this year:
Best Album of 2023: Magazine Beach - "Constant Springtime"
Also For Consideration: Tanukichan - "GIZMO", PLIGHT - “plastic sun”, Ratboys - “The Window”, Palette Knife - "NewGame+"
Emo's made something of a comeback with me here in my late twenties, which coincide with the early twenties, in a conundrum that I now realize will be with me for half of every decade that remains in my life. It is the confluence of the complicated little troublesome stuff like that with the recognition that there remains a disconcertingly high amount of time left in my life during which I can deal with troublesome little things like that, which has brought me back to this sort of music in the recent past. "Constant Springtime" does not necessarily reflect that specific conundrum, but there is a sort of time-worn perspective reflected lyrically and sung so beautifully by the lead frontwoman whose name I have been unable to find anywhere. I love the frequent shout-chorus from the four men in the band as well.
Best Song of 2023: Ducks Ltd. - "The Main Thing"
See Also: HOT TRAXX 2023 - A YouTube playlist consisted of my other favorite songs from the year
I briefly lived in the province that brought us Ducks Ltd., and it was one of the worst periods of my life, which coincidentally was when I first heard their most recent album "Get Bleak". That album had almost deleterious effects on me. I had to stop listening to it when I was there, and when I heard "Under the Rolling Moon" at a cafe a few months ago, I had to step outside for a moment. Frontman Tom McGreevy's first lyric in "The Main Thing" encapsulates what I appreciate about them -- "Living like a middle reliever / Innings eater on a losing team" captures with terrible specificity a state in life that I know too closely. I believe that this is a first single off of an upcoming album for next year, so look for me to write about that in a future Tuesday Update when it comes out.
Perhaps another good resolution for 2024 is to learn how to write about music sensibly. But there you have it - 2023 has finished, and we move on to the next one! I’ll see you next Tuesday.