A curious annual report from Albums, my iOS music player of choice:
Two obscurities that don’t have matching album art, a single, an album I played a few times in a row one weekend…
By definition it is an incomplete record of my 2022 listening, but I can definitely get behind some of it: Drug Church’s Hygiene was the soundtrack to several beautiful early-morning spring walks, and I’ve definitely piped Alex G’s God Save The Animals into my ears more than anything else since its September release. His accompanying Tiny Desk is worth your time:
Bartees Strange’s Farm To Table is a better album than his 2020 effort Live Forever, but I prefer listening to the latter.
I got an email from Spotify to say my Wrapped was available to view; upon clicking I was informed that my 0 minutes of Spotify listening in 2022 was not enough to generate a report. This pleased me! Kill all the bad platforms!
The list of books that I read in 2022 is depressingly shorter than previous years, and lacks any standout contenders for the year’s best. I started and abandoned so many. Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties helped me think in a different way about a decade that’s important to me; I would have enjoyed it more had I grown up in the United States. I am partway through Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus having been very keen to read it upon release, then leaving it on my bedside table for over a year. So far it’s excellent. (Here’s an excerpt.)
Two 2022 games spring immediately to mind. Kirby and the Forgotten Land was wall-to-wall charming. I enjoyed it on multiple levels—first playing through the story with my then-four-year-old son, latterly going back through it to find all the wonderfully hidden secrets. I’m running out of superlatives for Tunic, a game which will compel me to write about it separately—suffice to say it is exactly the sort of it’s dangerous to go alone, take this adventure I loved to play when growing up, but modernised in the most perfect ways. 10/10 both, no notes.
Other non-2022 games included Dead Cells, which I love and recommend unconditionally but am utterly crap at, and the twofer that was Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury. The junior part of the package was particularly great because all three members of my household played through it to the end concurrently, trading little tips to help each other. If that’s the blueprint for future 3D Mario games, we are all in.
I don’t track my film imbibitions in the same way as for other mediums, mostly because I’m less able to dedicate the time to watch enough of them. Licorice Pizza was good! Ditto Funny Pages and White Noise. I struggle to summon many others to mind—I don’t recall the last (non-children’s film) cinema trip I took. This is something I intend to address in 2023. I tend to look at my friend Clint’s year-end lists and use those as a resource for the following year’s viewing.
I enjoyed Freakscene, the Dinosaur Jr. documentary, but I was always going to:
I should also use this opportunity to say that I am back on my blog bullshit. I largely retired from posting on social media sites over the past few years—first Facebook, then Instagram, latterly Twitter—and the newsletter rug has been somewhat pulled out from under me. Preliminary plans are to kick the tyres on this site again. Expect some mix of short statuses, links and longer pieces here in 2023.
Let’s finish with some good links from 2022. I won’t describe them; you can use the headline as reason to click or not:
- Searching for Susy Thunder
- Burning CDs With Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes in the Basement of Madison Square Garden
- My Friend Goo
- An Essay About Watching Brad Pitt Eat That Is Really About My Own Shit
- The Best Way to Learn Online? Be a Lurker
- Sonic Youth and the Business of Keeping a Dead Band Alive
- Hoardiculture
- Who Is Steven Hotdog? Or, Untangling the “Braided Essay”
- Why Being Anti-Science Is Now Part Of Many Rural Americans’ Identity
- We Spoke With the Last Person Standing in the Floppy Disk Business
- Ruffled Feathers: How Feral Peacocks Divided a Small Town
- The All
- When My Husband Left Me, I Headed For The Kitchen – Here’s How Comfort Food Can Save The Soul
- On ‘Plant-Based’
- British Satire Is Fanning The Flames Of Fascism
- The Jon Brion Method
If you’re reading this, you surely know what I like and don’t like—do feel free to suggest anything in the comments. (I seem to have broken the comment functionality, which may not be a terrible thing.)
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