I attempted to make a list of my favorite records of 2023 for another publication: by the time I gave up there were six on the list, which seems, by traditional list standards, either four too few or one too many. No opinion-based EOY list can be considered definitive, of course, but I've been too checked-out this year to give any kind of useful assessment, and most of the music I have been listening to is stuff to play in my yoga classes, stuff that hits a certain sweet spot of cool and inspiring and easy to ignore.
I was considering this when I read this piece by Jessa Crispin, from her newsletter, The Culture We Deserve. It’s her own somewhat casually constructed year-end list, prefaced with an interesting complaint:
“As soon as you hit your Substack dashboard,” she writes,
“ you are confronted with metrics. Here is how much money you are making, here is whether that number is going up or down and by how much, here is how many people delete your fucking emails without opening them, here is how many people open everything you send them so if you want to alert your local police station about a burgeoning parasocial obsessive attachment go ahead. The blogging platforms had metrics available, of course, but they didn’t rub them in your face the way Substack does.”
All of this, she argues, is part of our larger societal obsession with optimization. “Substack rubbing your stats in your face constantly turns something that was mostly fun, casual, and born out of a desire to create community and conversation into work with a built in, eternal performance review like God’s unholy stairmaster.”
Honestly I hadn't thought much about this in regard to Substack, which as far as I'm concerned is far from the worst offender WRT optimization. I’ve lately become overly fixated on my hate for the Apple Watch, which I've always found both repulsive -- conceptually and aesthetically -- and baffling: barring some serious health issue, why are you so obsessed with your heart rate?
This is a concern for some (usually older) people in the yoga biz: Whether you're gently encouraging an hour-long "digital detox" or outright banning phones on the mat, it's hard to get students to leave distracting technology outside the studio, and the presence of the Apple Watch is as pervasive as it is insidious. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes the smartphone as a "non thing," it's pure information. “The flood of stimuli that comes from the smart phone fragments our attention,” he writes in his 2022 book Non-things. “Where the transitional object stabilizes the psyche, the smartphone destabilizes it.” The Apple Watch is a non-thing masquerading as an object, constantly feeding back one’s own stats, along with the external information of text messages, etc.
While I was reading Non-things I was also reading Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus, which explores the nature of smartphones and social media (which are distracting and addictive by design, but don’t have to be designed that way) but the environmental forces that make us extra distractible to begin with. My mind hasn’t felt clear for awhile now, and I think a lot of that has to do with taking in too much information, compulsively reading/watching/scrolling/listening. Year end lists now feel like an extension of this compulsion.
ON THE OTHER HAND! EOY lists are also an acknowledgement of how time has been spent (time that I keep track of with a $20 Casio watch) and I still have the urge to reflect on the things that held my fractured attention in 2023.
The following list isn’t so much a best-of list as things (old and new) that made an impression, or that I spent a lot of time thinking about, mostly in the latter half of the year because that’s what I can remember. I’ll elaborate a bit about most of these things, but not the records, for the most part. I’m tired of describing music. Just take my word on those.
Patricia Highsmith — Edith’s Diary
I read a lot of Highsmith this year and this was by far my favorite, and probably my favorite read of 2023, and the only thing on this list that isn’t actually from this year. A creepingly unnerving, fantastically detailed slow-burn of a novel about secrecy, delusion, domestic isolation, booze, and how news junky-ism can turn you strange.
One of my most-listened-to. most thought-about records of the year, read more here.
Lasky’s 33 1/3 entry about Britney Spears’ 2007 record Blackout is a moving exploration of the artist and the larger historical moment, namely the cruel misogyny of celebrity culture in the mid-aughts. Unlike too many of the books in that series, it’s also incredibly readable, and excellent in tandem with Britney’s blockbuster memoir, which I also loved.
Lana Del Rey — Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd
As a birthday present my dear friend Rachel bought me a sample set from this niche perfumery (helmed by perfumer John Biebel) which also came with a record, Gong, which Biebel composed and recorded to accompany a perfume, also called Gong. I’m usually sort of gluttonous about sample sets, putting as many dabs of scent along my arms as my nose can stand, but these perfumes are too wonderfully outrageous and baroque for such greedy behavior. Gong, just for example, features the following notes: lime, bergamot, blueberry, galanga, ginger, violet, daikon radish, green pepper, musk, amber, sandalwood, and leather. As with any rich indulgence, I’m forced to take my time.
PJ Harvey — I Inside the Old Year Dying
Alexandra Auder — Don’t Call Me Home
Auder, daughter of Warhol Superstar Viva and filmmaker Michel Auder, chronicles her bohemian Chelsea Hotel upbringing. The memoir has all the thrills of a gossipy celebrity tell-all (rarely has such a sympathetic picture of Vincent Gallo been painted) but at its heart it’s a story about the complicated pain and fierce love inherent in mother-daughter relationships.
Earl Sweatshirt/ the Alchemist — Voir Dire
Dead Ringers
The series, starring Rachel Weisz as twin gynecologists Elliot and Beverly, is based on David Cronenberg’s 1988 film – Jeremy Irons plays the double lead – which is based loosely on Bari Wood and Jack Geasland’s book Twins, about Stewart and Cyril Marcus. I like the movie better in some ways, but the gender reversal of the Amazon Prime series works extremely well. It’s a well-worn joke that any man who pursues gynecology must be a pervert, and in a big win for gender equality the Mantle sisters are perverts of the highest order. Seriously though, the dominance of women allows the show to go places that the movie couldn’t, giving space for an unflinching focus on the body horror of pregnancy, and the vast range of (sometimes taboo) feelings people have about childbearing and parenthood.
Natasha Stagg — Artless: Stories 2019-2023
I think of Natasha Stagg — fashion writer, cultural critic, novelist and person-about-town — as kind of a steelier, East Coast Eve Babitz. Artless showcases Stagg’s skill at writing about impossibly prismatic topics: #metoo, Covid, cultural decay of all stripes, etc. She lures you in with gossipy blind items and fashion talk and ephemera and then suddenly you're elbow deep in some real thought-provoking shit.
Einstein on the Beach: The genius of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys
Whenever I think I’ve lost faith in music writing I remember the piece Charlotte Shane wrote for the newly resurrected Bookforum and I feel buoyed.
Blonde Redhead – Sit Down for Dinner
Master Gardener
I went to see this by myself one afternoon after work. The young man at the ticket counter asked me, "What IS Master Gardener?"
“Oh, um" I said. “Do you know Paul Schrader? This is supposedly his third in a kind of trilogy, following the Card Counter, and First Reformed. I don't know how they all fit together …” blah blah blah. He smiled and nodded. “Oh, cool!”
As I walked away, I heard someone buying a ticket for the same movie. "Ah," I heard the attendant say, knowingly. "Paul Schrader."
Universal Flowering — Death of a Ladies Man
Everyone loves Universal Flowering and with good reason. I blind-bought Death of a Ladies Man on the strength of all the other scents I’ve enjoyed from the Canadian niche perfumery, and because it seemed like maybe I wasn’t a true Leonard Cohen fan if I didn’t. The contrast between bright green astringency and deeper resin smells like soap and incense, and something slightly dank; it’s like getting cleaned up for church after staying up all night.
Priscilla
Boring and beautiful in that delicious, meditative way that all of Sophia Coppola’s movies are boring and beautiful, this really got under my skin. Pricilla Presley is physically isolated, of course. But more viscerally painful and isolating, and maybe more universal, is the experience of loving, and needing more from, someone who is fundamentally unreachable. It would have been easy to make Elvis into a simple villainous abuser, but the tragedy here is more complicated, and we see him through Pricilla’s eyes. In the end she escapes her cage; Elvis dies in his.
The Curse
As of this writing Paramount+ has yet to air the final episode, but I’d be remiss to leave out Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s series about a married couple (Fielder and Emma Stone) who are filming an HGTV show called Fliplanthrapy. The Curse is about a lot of things, sort of primarily about what it means to be a Good Person, but that doesn’t begin to explain it. The best tv I’ve seen in a long time.