2023: The year in review – Part 1: Culture
December 31, 2023 Leave a comment
Here we are at the end of December, time to look back on the year that has just passed. I’ll summarise our blogging output, such as it was, in the next post, but first up a run through of some of my personal cultural highlights of 2023.
Television – after a peak during the pandemic, my TV-watching has reverted back to being practically non-existent. The only new programme I took in was the third season of Only Murders in the Building, and even that I binge-watched over a couple of evenings. I do occasionally dip into back episodes of comedies like Arrested Development, or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but otherwise the medium is essentially dead to me. I’m not sure if that will change in the year ahead, though I’ll probably keep my various streaming-service subscriptions going just in case something good comes out.
Film – I did make much better use of my membership of our local art-house cinema this year, going more or less weekly for a spell, though that did tail off a bit more recently. Highlights included a Wes Anderson season ahead of the release of Asteroid City, anniversary revivals of classic films I just about remembered from the first time around, like Variety, Dazed and Confused, Gregory’s Girl, and Stop Making Sense, homage to the noughties NYC music scene Meet Me In The Bathroom, and of course summer blockbuster Barbie (though I skipped Oppenheimer, which I was not in the mood for at the time; I guess I should try to catch it before the Oscar nominations come out). My favourite film of the year was Anatomy of a Fall, an intriguingly ambiguous exploration of whether it is ever possible to really know another human being.
Books – My top read during 2023 was Richard Ford’s original Frank Bascombe trilogy, particularly The Sportswriter; the story of a middle-aged white guy navigating existential uncertainties unsurprisingly struck a chord at this point in my life. Other fiction I enjoyed included some more volumes of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, Nathanael West’s lurid LA nightmare The Day of the Locust, and a re-read of Sacher-Masoch’s classic Venus in Furs. In non-fiction there was Haruki Murakami’s Novelist as a Vocation, various works by Bertrand Russell, and, balanced somewhere between philosophy and fiction, Benjamín Labatut’s meditation on the implications of Artificial Intelligence, The Maniac.
Music – I finally got with the times and signed up for a Spotify account this year, and I’ve been relying on their algorithm to supply my general background soundtrack. I’m still undecided on whether this is a good or a bad thing; it has introduced me to a few new artists, but mostly plays my old favourites. I do still read the music press, and listen to the radio, which I hope is enough to steer me towards some fresh albums; here are my top ten from 2023:
- War Poems, We Rested – R. Ring
- Longtime Companion – Sonny and the Sunsets
- This Stupid World – Yo La Tengo
- Everyone’s Crushed – Water From Your Eyes
- Rat Saw God – Wednesday
- Bird Hour – 7ebra
- Rabbit Rabbit – Speedy Ortiz
- Cousin – Wilco
- In Times New Roman – Queens of the Stone Age
- Blondshell – Blondshell
Compiling this annual retrospective, and comparing it with entries from previous years, I’m unable to escape the conclusion that the breadth of my cultural horizons is inexorably shrinking, in terms of the absolute number of books, movies and records that I consume (as enumerated in our Tumblr), but also in my willingness to look outside of my habitual preferences (which were probably always more fixed than I cared to admit). In my more pessimistic moments I consider this an inevitable consequence of advancing age, but every now and again I feel a spark of enthusiasm for some new experience, which is enough to reassure me that I’m not ready for the scrapyard just yet. Perhaps 2024 will be a year of personal renaissance, I guess we’ll see.
So much for my internal world; what of my engagement with external reality through the medium of this blog? Read our next post to find out…
Second Life Shrink 
