2025: The year in review – Part 1: Culture

It’s not been a vintage year on the cultural front; I have just about kept up a steady pace of consumption, but my appetite for seeking out novel experience is definitely not what it was. That said, there were some highlights I feel are worth noting; they are listed below.

Television

For various reasons I have completely given up on watching TV in recent times, but I made one exception this year; an old favourite, Twin Peaks. Inspired by the sad news of the passing of David Lynch in January I acquired the box set of all three seasons, and proceeded to view it in a properly nostalgic style; one episode at a time, at more or less weekly intervals. I threw in Fire Walk with Me after finishing season two, then left a gap (though not 25 years) before starting season three, which I haven’t quite completed yet, though I should wrap it up sometime next month. I hadn’t revisited Twin Peaks since it originally aired, so I was a little worried that it might not be as good as I remembered, but I’m glad to report that it did not disappoint in any way, retaining its capacity to intrigue and shock in equal measure. Even if I had caught some other shows this year I’m pretty sure that none of them would have topped Lynch’s beguiling masterpiece.

Film

I did quite well with cinema-going in the first half of the year, then fell off a bit after the summer; I’ll have to catch up ahead of the Oscars. Of the movies I saw this year I particularly liked Nickel Boys, A Real Pain, A Complete Unknown, The Phoenician Scheme, and Die My Love. For my favourite I’m oscillating between One Battle After Another and Nouvelle Vague, with the latter just winning out.

Books

I didn’t get through much new fiction this year; far too much of my reading time was taken up by staying current with the news, though I can’t say much of that left me feeling particularly informed. Of the books I did read the most memorable were Death Valley by Melissa Broder, The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits, and my favourite, the dreamlike and unsettling An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth by Anna Moschovakis.

Music

I bought a respectable number of new records this year; here are my top five:

• Uncollected Noise New York ’88-’90 – Galaxie 500
• Instant Holograms On Metal Film – Stereolab
• Tunnel Vision – Beach Bunny
• Double Infinity – Big Thief
• Snocaps – Snocaps

I didn’t see much live music, but the shows I caught were pretty good; the best was courtesy of the reliably energetic Beach Bunny.

Come back tomorrow for our review of the year in blogging…

2024: The year in review – Part 1: Culture

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.

2023: The year in review – Part 1: Culture

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…