2024: The year in review – Part 1: Culture

December 30, 2024 by Leave a comment

Looking at my Tumblr I’m reassured to see that I did consume at least a little culture during the last twelve months; I’ll try to distill each category down to a top three.

Television

Despite subscribing to Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime I almost never have time for TV shows. Only Murders in the Building: Season 4 was the sole series I watched all the way through, so I guess it takes gold by default, though it was pretty funny, so it would probably have won even with competition.

Film

My favourite movie by a mile this year was ultra-violent live-action Looney Tune Hundreds of Beavers, with Perfect Days and I Saw the TV Glow also making the podium, and Werner Herzog biopic Radical Dreamer just missing out. The 50th anniversary reissue of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation was essential; his latest work Megalopolis rather less so, though it certainly had its moments.

Books

Paul Auster’s passing in April prompted me to catch up with his New York Trilogy, which turned out to be the highlight of a year when I mostly avoided more recent fiction; Jonathan Lethem’s Brooklyn Crime Novel was the exception and takes the silver. Bronze goes to non-fiction; Zeke Faux’s exposé of the crypto industry Number Go Up.

Music

I’ve listened to a lot of radio this year, mainly US college stations, which inspired me to compile a long list of new albums to get hold of, very few of which I actually got around to purchasing. Of those I did buy my top three are probably Fairweather Friend by The Umbrellas, News of the Universe by La Luz, and Manning Fireworks by MJ Lenderman, though on another day I might include Sierra Ferrell’s Trail Of Flowers, Rooting for Love by Laetitia Sadier, or This Is How Tomorrow Moves by beabadoobee. The best live shows I saw featured the aforementioned Umbrellas, Belle and Sebastian, and Jane Weaver. I even had a favourite opera – Marx in London!

That’s a brief run through the culture of 2024 as seen through my very limited lens; come back tomorrow for a look at the year in blogging.

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Euro 2024 final prediction

July 14, 2024 by Leave a comment

OK, I’ll take one more shot at getting this right; Spain to win.

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Euro 2024 update

July 6, 2024 by Leave a comment

Well, my tip of Germany to win Euro 2024 hasn’t worked out, though in my defence I’d note that they did run Spain, the form team of the tournament so far, pretty close, and a more favourable draw might have seen them go further.

Anyway, the evidence would seem to suggest that I should switch my prediction to Spain, but that’s too simple, so I’m going to go with France, who have had the most luck so far, which is often the decisive factor in these sort of fine-margin games.

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Euro 2024 prediction

June 13, 2024 by Leave a comment

The tournament kicks off tomorrow, so, buoyed by my near-success with the Superbowl, I’m going to stick my neck out and back Germany to win Euro 2024.

It’s true that the last time I staked my reputation as a sports guru on Teutonic triumph they let me down badly, but this year they seem to be hitting good form at just the right moment, and when you add in home advantage they look to be unstoppable. France, Portugal, and perhaps even England, might give them some problems, but all things considered I’m confident that it will be Ilkay Gundogan who’ll be lifting the cup on the 14th of July.

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Trump on trial

May 29, 2024 by Leave a comment

Prosecution and defence have wrapped up their final submissions to the jury, and the outcome of Donald Trump’s hush-money trial, and perhaps the fate of the free world, now hangs on the decision of twelve New Yorkers.

The proceedings, while not as exciting as the OJ Simpson trial back in the 90s, have been quietly gripping in their own way. The prosecution methodically laid out their case, backing it up with reams of documentation, compelling testimony from Stormy Daniels, and some rather less convincing testimony from Michael Cohen. The defence made only a token effort to refute any of the actual facts; rather their strategy was based on tacitly admitting that, sure, he may have done these things, but what of it? Is it a crime for a married man to try to bury the embarrassing story of that time he fucked a porn star? If he tasked Cohen with the job of making the actual payments, well, isn’t Cohen a lawyer, so can’t that be recorded as a legal expense?

It’s a superficially plausible argument, but the fatal flaw is the denial that the cover-up was primarily related to the election, and thus that the money spent on it didn’t need to be declared as a campaign contribution. This is obviously preposterous, and I can’t imagine that any member of the jury will believe it.

I don’t think the deliberations will take very long, so we should have a verdict soon, perhaps by the end of the week. My prediction? Trump will be convicted. What will that mean for the election in November? I don’t know. In a sane world it would sink him, but the world we find ourselves living in is some way from being sane, so I guess we’ll have to wait and see…

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Steve Albini RIP

May 8, 2024 by Leave a comment

Sad news about alt-rock legend Steve Albini, who died suddenly today, reportedly suffering a heart attack while working at his studio.

Albini engineered two of my all-time favourite albums, Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, and Pod by The Breeders, as well as Nirvana’s In Utero, which we mentioned just recently, and plenty other stuff I listened to in the late 80s and 90s, so he was definitely a major influence on the development of my musical consciousness in that era.

I was never hugely into Albini’s own music though, in Big Black or any of his subsequent projects; I did buy a copy of Songs About Fucking, but I don’t think I put it on more than a handful of times. That was at least partly due to his well-deserved reputation as an asshole; identifying as a fan wasn’t something I was entirely comfortable with. To be fair, in later years he did express what seemed like genuine contrition for the poses he struck back then, so I expect he will be remembered in a mostly positive light. His band Shellac are due to release what is now fated to be their last album later this month; I guess I could give him another chance. If nothing else it might unearth some fond memories of what I still think of as one of the more pleasant periods of my life.

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Out of juice

April 14, 2024 by Leave a comment

The passing of OJ Simpson last week prompted a flurry of media reminiscence about his 1995 murder trial. The contrast between the 1990s, when the internet had yet to become a mass phenomenon, and our current social-media-saturated time is stark; back then the wall-to-wall TV coverage, with its lurid storyline and celebrity cast, was a novel experience, able to capture the attention of a worldwide audience for months on end, whereas today it seems likely that it would be just one more piece of transient clickbait.

I do remember following the case at the time, and not being particularly surprised when OJ was acquitted; the evidence certainly suggested that he was guilty, but the shambolic performance by the prosecution, along with the defence’s exposure of the racism and incompetence of the LAPD, was more than enough to give the jury grounds for reasonable doubt. He did end up in jail eventually, in circumstances that seemed very much like a fit-up, and lost a civil case to the victims’ families, but it’s difficult to say that justice was served.

It will be interesting to see if the trial due to start in Manhattan tomorrow will seize the public imagination in quite the same way. On the face of it it should, featuring as it does an ex-President of the United States, an actress best known for appearing in pornographic movies, and various shady financial dealings, but I wonder if we are now so inured to such tawdry spectacle that it will merge into the general air of decline that besets what remains of the ideal of liberal democracy.

Perhaps the real significance of the OJ trial was that it marked the beginning of the end for the concept that society could agree on a common set of facts and values, and that guilt or innocence could be determined by impartial examination of objective evidence. Now everything is seen through a partisan lens, and anything that contradicts our preconceived narrative is dismissed as fake news.

Of course I like to think that I am above such petty prejudice, so I’ll wait to see how the case pans out before I predict the verdict. Whatever happens, I doubt it will have a significant impact on the result in November, since I’m sure that nothing will be revealed about the defendant’s character that we didn’t already know.

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Kurt Cobain RIP

April 7, 2024 by Leave a comment

It’s hard to believe that thirty years have passed since Kurt Cobain was found dead in Seattle. I recall that I heard the news via a tabloid headline stating, with the questionable taste characteristic of the time, something like “Rock Star blows his brains out”, which I initially assumed was a figurative reference to Cobain’s well-known drug use, before reading the story and finding out that it was horribly literal.

I like to think that I was one of the earlier fans of Nirvana, in the UK at least, having picked up an imported copy of Bleach, mainly on the strength of it being on Sub Pop. I was moderately impressed, enough anyway that I bought Nevermind in October 1991, before the hype really took off. I had recently acquired my first car, and for the next few months I had a tape of Smells Like Teen Spirit and the rest on more or less constantly as I drove around town, imagining myself a fine arbiter of alternative taste.

I saw Nirvana play live once, at the Reading Festival in 1992. Kurt came onstage in a wheelchair, wearing a hospital gown, a reference to rumours of a recent near-fatal overdose. I remember it as a great show, though at that point I had been continuously awake and high for around 72 hours, which may have influenced my critical judgment a little.

That appearance, their last in the UK, was probably the peak of my fandom; I liked In Utero well enough, but it wasn’t the ubiquitous soundtrack that Nevermind had been a couple of years earlier. Still, I was shaken up by Kurt’s untimely demise, which seemed like a dark reflection of Gen-X apathy. The following week the NME featured a sombre portrait of Cobain on the cover; I carefully cut it out and framed it, keeping it on my wall in numerous apartments, before it got lost during a move.

Looking back now, it all seems part of some previous life, though one that somehow feels simultaneously recent and distant. I guess it’s because I have no frame of reference for those events other than the experience of my younger self, and I haven’t remained 27 in the way that Kurt always will be. It’s bittersweet to be reminded of the relentless passage of time, but it’s good to have some things to look back on fondly.

Oh well, whatever. Nevermind.

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Crypto justice

March 29, 2024 by Leave a comment

I’m not sure whether Sam Bankman-Fried will be feeling that his 25 year sentence for authoring the FTX debacle means he has got off relatively lightly; it was suggested at one point that he might be looking at something closer to a full century, but with time off for good behaviour he might yet be out before he turns 50.

Bleeding-heart liberal that I am, I can’t really see the point in locking him up at all; there must surely be some way he could be obliged to work in the service of the community, though I guess it would take a lot of highway litter-picking to pay off a debt to society that runs into the billions. Perhaps it is for the best that he serves as a cautionary example to those tempted to accumulate wealth by any means, but, given that the financial world is otherwise entirely organised to incentivise such behaviour, I suspect the only lesson aspiring SBFs may learn is “Don’t get caught”.

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Oscar predictions 2024 revisited

March 12, 2024 by Leave a comment

So, the Academy agreed with two of my Oscar picks, which reassures me that I’m not entirely out of touch with popular cultural opinion, but, as expected, Oppenheimer was the big winner on the night. Anatomy of a Fall, my favourite film of the year, did at least pick up the award for Best Original Screenplay, and its canine star Messi was undoubtedly the star of the red carpet, so I’ll take that as further confirmation of my critical acumen.

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