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12 Things That Didn't Suck this Year, plus 12 Films I watched and Liked

For me, 2023 was a somewhat easier year than most in recent memory. In the wider scope, everything remains very demoralizing and bereft of even a shred of hope. With whatever motivation I can find, my aim in 2024 is to refine aspects of my personal life I'm currently unhappy about; outside of that, things feel pretty much unsalvageable. May the new year surprise us all and give us a few glimmers here and there, culturally or otherwise. In the meantime here are 12 points that brought me some sort of comfort or release in the past year -- and also a dozen movies as most would agree it's been a great year for those. Maybe just maybe I'll finally take a crack at writing a screenplay in the new year so long as the world doesn't careen completely off its axis:

#year in review #2023 #films #music #whatever

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CHARLES MELTON as Joe Yoo in MAY DECEMBER (2023) dir. Todd Haynes

#films #gifs #i think about this scene every single day basically #todd haynes the GOAT

10 Songs I’ve Been Listening to Lately

Listening to music started to become a struggle for me at some point early into the pandemic. It was a combination of having limited internet due to decamping to my grandmother’s before things go super serious, the general uncertainty at the time, and music being so closely linked to New York for me -- this last one has likely been the greatest factor, as I’m still trying to get my impossibly jumbled feelings over leaving that city into some kind of working order.

The last several months in particular have made listening to music very painful, but I’m slowly trying to reconnect. The past three years have led to one adjustment after another and I don’t really feel like the same person anymore a lot of the time. I really don’t know when I’ll feel on firm ground but am really striving to make something happen this year that will bring some semblance of my confidence and joy of listening back.

In the meantime, here are 5 songs I’ve listened to recently that either engaged me in some way or that I felt moved by. My writing skills aren’t really where I would like them to be, either, and I’m really too drained to even try, so all I’ll say is I hope these will move and / or engage you in some way too if you give any one of them a listen (and yes, two of them are called “Thrasher”). Cheers and love always.

* Lee Hazlewood - We All Make the Flowers Grow

*Kendrick Lamar feat. Sampha - Father Time

*NightNight - In Your Room (this is kinda a cheat ‘cos Yasmin is a good friend, but would firmly believe this Depeche Mode cover was pretty brill even if she were a stranger)

*Bernard Butler & Edwyn Collins - Can’t Do That (The Hoover) {sorry!}

*Neil Young - Thrasher

*Chapterhouse - Thrasher

*Flatwaves - Cygnus

*Tim Darcy - Still Waking Up

*Fast Car Slow Car - Bow

*Pilgrims of Yearning - La Mar (looking forward to playing with them at a fest in May!)

#music

10 Things That Somehow Didn’t Suck This Year (with a horror films sub-list).

2022 has been an unbelievably surreal and disparate year for me. On one hand, I achieved three long-running goals, visiting Barcelona, becoming a home-owner, and going on a mini-tour with my band. On the other hand, I was plagued by some of the worst periods of depression of my life and endured at least two solid months of virtually nonstop distress in which things got better for a little bit before going really hard on the mental strife.

Due to so much weirdness going on, I didn’t listen to much music this year and I feel pretty ashamed about that (if you’re a friend and you released music this year, I intend on listening to it very soon, I swear). I’m also a little put off by critical writing in general right now but I still wanted to do some sort of year-end ranking for tradition’s sake. So here’s 10...entertainments? I appreciated this year - whether TV shows, movies, or going to gigs, even though there were a lot of those I unfortunately missed as well. Also throwing in a sub-list of favorite horror films, as those are one of the few things I can focus on even when things are completely haywire elsewhere.

#year in review #horror #atlanta #the rehearsal #warren ellis #aldous harding #suede #the bear #the veldt #viagra boys #kendrick lamar

The Glamour of the Ordinary: Jane Savidge’s Here They Come With Their Make-Up On and Warren Ellis’ Nina Simone’s Gum

In the early days of the pandemic, a Facebook page appeared that consisted entirely of people around the world dressing in costumes and finery to take out their trash. The page was called Bin Isolation Outing and, at its close in December 2020, it had over 900,000 members. What began as a joke among a few Australian friends quickly spread into a worldwide phenomenon, a way of injecting some frivolity and flash into a very scary, often mundane period in time.

#book review #jane savidge #warren ellis #suede #nick cave #collecting #music #art

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Maria Joanna Bohemia · Playlist · 33 songs

MWE 2022 preamble:

I’m a bit late in posting this, but all the same I wanted to share what I listened to for MWE on Twitter this past February. It’s a little pointless that I still participate in this, as I don’t really write about music regularly (or even semi-regularly anymore) and I didn’t have much insight in my time of tweeting, but I find it beneficial in a lot of ways -- it never fails to get me out of musical ruts and it allows me to think about music in ways I normally wouldn’t. Also -- and I’d rather not go into detail but it’s plaguing me so I need to get it out there -- but I’ve been having agonizingly bad mental health issues recently, and focusing on activities like MWE really helps me. Would be great to have monthly exercises such as this year ‘round.

Here’s a very loose ranking of the albums I listened to. I got super lucky this year, in that I really liked almost everything I listened to, but even if I didn’t care for something, I still added a track to the playlist linked above (in some cases, if I really, really loved the record, I added more than one). Check out the playlist if you want, although, since it’s Spotify, it’s understandable if you don’t.

Albums listened to for MWE 2022:

1) Prince - Lovesexy (1988)

2) Gil Scott-Heron - Pieces of a Man (1971)

3) Sun Ra - Space is the Place (1973)

4) Bruce Springsteen - The River (1980)

5) Viagra Boys - Street Worms (2018)

6) Tim Booth & Angelo Badalamenti - Booth and the Bad Angel (1996)

7) Solange - A Seat at the Table (2016)

8) Missing Persons - Spring Session M. (1982)

9) Thin Lizzy - Shades of a Blue Orphanage (1972)

10) Frank Sinatra - No One Cares (1959)

11) Slick Rick - The Art of Storytelling (1999)

12) The Church - Starfish (1988)

13) French Police - Haunted Castle (2020)

14) CHAI - PINK (2017)

15) Patti Smith - Gone Again (1996)

16) Rachel’s - The Sea and the Bells (1996)

17) John Prine - Sweet Revenge (1973)

18) Popul Vuh - Einsjäger und Siebenjäger (1974)

19) Divine - My First Album (1982)

20) Martika - Self-titled (1988)

21) Lady Gaga - ARTPOP (2013)

22) that dog. - Retreat from the Sun (1997)

23) Soda Stereo - Self-titled (1984)

24) Kid Cudi - Indicud (2013)

25) Manic Street Preachers - The Ultra Vivid Lament (2021)

26) Metric - Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? (2003)

27) Billy Preston - The Kids & Me (1974)

28) Sufjan Sevens - Illinois (2005)

#MWE #music writer exercise

Maria Joanna Bohemia · Playlist · 30 songs

A Memory Lane Playlist.

It was my birthday recently so I’ve been reflecting. In particular, I’ve been thinking about the music that has made me who I am today, and what songs have defined each decade of my life the most. So, inspired by those thoughts, as well as my favorite podcaster Mary Wild’s recent Patreon episode on her favorite songs decade by decade, here is a playlist of 30 songs that have made some sort of impact on me, from the decades of my life thus far. Some words on what I chose and why are after the cut. It’s good luck to gift someone on your day of birth, so please enjoy this belated birthday gift from me to you!

Maria Joanna Bohemia · Playlist · 21 songs

2021 wasn’t my favorite year, both in terms of music and in terms of things that happened during it (mostly the first half, things are better now). I guess I’m being a little unfair about music here, because I spent a lot of this year too stressed out and anxious to listen to much of anything beyond podcasts. Still, tradition is tradition, and there were some things I listened to in 2021 that I genuinely loved, so I thought I would cobble something together to commemorate another year gone by. Due to not really listening to or liking many 2021 releases, this playlist is by no means limited to very recent past, although it does somehow include more 2021 tunes than throwbacks.

As with having less interest in new music this year, I also have had less and less time (read: tolerance) for music writing, but my attempt at explaining what these 21 songs meant to me in 2021 is after the cut. Cheers, and may 2021 be kinder to us all!

Veda Rays have announced plans for a second full-length album to come out later in the year. The Brooklyn band are teasing the release with the

My band put out a song last Friday. Check it out here!

#new music #new music friday #post-punk #goth #new wave

28 Albums in 28 Days

Last month, I participated in #MWE for the first time. In short, it’s a 28-day long music writer / music lover exercise in which you listen to an album you’ve never heard before and tweet a few thoughts on it. A longer explanation of its genesis can be found here. I really enjoyed it for the most part but, as with all things Twitter, there were some pros and cons.

Pros: I’ve had a real lack of desire to listen to music since the pandemic began, so this exercise really got me out of that rut, at least for a month. It also pulled me out of my comfort zone of listening to the same 10 bands over and over, and I discovered some things I really loved! However...

Cons: I fear I chose poorly / just don’t like much music because most of what I listened to left me lukewarm. Somewhat surprisingly, a lot of the albums I listened to by indie artists I flat out did not like / found completely forgettable. Also, some shit went down in our home about halfway through the month, which made active listening incredibly difficult.

But these are just my poor excuses, and all this said, I flat out loved the first 10 records listed below. The rest ranged from “pretty great” to “very meh,” but I’m glad I listened all the same. And, yes, it’s ridiculous to judge an album on one listen, so I look forward to revisiting a lot of these, just probably not the Foxygen record (sorry).

28 Albums I listened to for #MWE, in very loose ranking:

Alice Coltrane - World Galaxy

Jarboe - Sacrificial Cake

The Leather Nun - Force of Habit

Ought - Room Inside the World

Handsome Boy Modeling School - So...How’s Your Girl?

Gazelle Twin - Unflesh

Mos Def - The Ecstatic

Danger Mouse - The Grey Album

Madonna - Confessions on a Dance Floor

The Time - Ice Cream Castles

Tyler, The Creator - IGOR

Muddy Waters - Fathers and Sons

David Sylvian & Holger Czukay - Flux & Mutability

Wipers - Youth of America

Miley Cyrus - Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Pets

Billy Nomates - Self-titled

John Foxx - Metamatic

The Whispers - Self-titled

Ryuichi Sakamoto - Thousand Knives

Special Interest - The Passion Of

Mike Viola and the Candy Butchers - Falling Into Place

Kool Keith - Sex Style

The Stockholm Monsters - Alma Mater

Sweet - Desolation Boulevard

The Apples in Stereo - New Magnetic Wonder

Foxygen - We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic

Swamp Dogg - Rat On!

Ezra Furman - Perpetual Motion People

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On Mariana Enriquez’s Wicked and Wonderful “The Dangers of Smoking in Bed”

If anything has ever made me believe that reality is a projection, it was reading Mariana Enriquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire. The short story collection, with its tales of the horrific and macabre, Latin American culture, and Manic Street Preachers references, felt eerily like something that was dredged from the recesses of my brain and brought forth into the “real” world. In short, I really vibed with Mariana’s style and some of the stories -- particularly “Spiderweb” and “The Neighbor’s Courtyard” -- still unsettle me years later.

Enriquez is back with her second short story collection to be translated into English, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. Originally published in 2009, its stories precede those found in Things We Lost but follow similar beats. Structurally, I found the books pretty similar -- both have subtly supernatural teenage reminisces, a woman who becomes obsessed with something untoward, and lots of disappearances (Enriquez, after all, grew up at the time of Argentina’s Dirty War, in which 30,000 people disappeared).

But Smoking’s stories disturbed and captivated me in many new ways. Reading the stories in this time of travel restrictions and bans brought forth an emphasis on being trapped, sometimes within a community (”The Cart”) and other times a whole city (”Rambla Triste”). Of course the stories are about much more than this, and perhaps more closely speak to traumas ranging in scale from personal to cultural, and I look forward to reading them again when we’re all able to move about more freely.

Although each story is haunting in its own special way, there were two that discomfited me so much that I had to put Smoking down and step away for awhile. I don’t really know why, but few things unsettle me more than all-consuming, possibly debilitating obsessions and flayings, and this book had both - and back to back, no less! That said, “Where Are You, Dear Heart” is possibly my favorite story in the collection, a tale of a woman with a very specific fetish that is so intoxicating in its prose that you don’t realize how fucked up its gotten until the distressing final sentence. Rather than just being a shocking or weird tale, the protagonist is painted with great passion and sensitivity, and Enriquez gives much attention to the psychology of fetishes. The way she writes about the narrator’s fixation with a particular character in Jane Eyre, and the part it played in the development of the fetish is particularly moving:

That final night, Helen and Jane slept together. Today, when I remember that chapter...I understand everything: when Jane gets into the dying girl’s bed and Helen says to her, “Are you warm, darling?” Darling. Darling. It was a love scene...That chapter: every night, every one, I lay down and hugged my pillow and pretended it was Helen, but I didn’t fall asleep like that idiot Jane, oh no. I watched her die, held her hand, and she, who was expiring with her gray gaze fixed on my eyes as she fought for breath, allowed me to see something of that other place where she would spend eternity.

I hate to use such a dry word for such vibrant stories, but I always appreciate the economy of Enriquez’s writing. Just enough information is given on characters and situations, and the slight ambiguity allows these stories to live on beyond the page. Translator Megan McDowell has done a tremendous job; having written back and forth with Enriquez, I can easily detect her voice in all these tales.

If I have any criticism for The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, it’s a niggle about order: I would have liked to have seen its longest story, “Kids Who Come Back” as its last. With its first story (”Angelita Unearthed”) being about a dead baby who haunts its narrator, and “Kids” being about missing children mysteriously reappearing, the collection would essentially begin and end with kids who come back. But again, this is a very minuscule criticism, and I, for one, will be coming back regardless.

2020 Releases that I listened to more than once / stuck with me in some way.

Excuse my pessimism, but 2020 was a year in which finding solace in music was of little use to me. I also had less time than ever to listen to music. I spent the worst of the pandemic displaced and with limited internet access, then moved to another city and switched careers, two changes which I still haven’t fully comprehended. I also spent 98% of my free time feeling too anxious about the future as a whole to do any sort of listening, focused or passive.

Things eventually got settled enough that I could at least check out what various music publications were fussing about in their year-end round ups. Not the most ideal avenue for discovery, but this has been a hard, tiring year and, despite some very promising releases and trends, I still feel a bit hopeless. I can’t even really be bothered to do any sort of ranking or make things even with a “20 for 2020,” so instead here’s a summary of some music that stood out to me. I can promise there are at least 15 releases mentioned - you can do a “choose your own adventure” and rank them as you wish.

#year in review #best of 2020 #protomartyr #algiers #roisin murphy #jessie ware #einsturzende neubauten #closed circuits #nothing #korine #fontaines d.c.#dehd #sparks #prima primo #bob dylan #fiona apple

The True Grit of Mark Lanegan’s Sing Backwards and Weep

Mark Lanegan’s 2020 memoir, Sing Backwards and Weep, is possibly the easiest hard read I’ve ever read. A warts and all - sometimes literally, like when he recounts freeze-burning warts off his privates in a Seattle health clinic - approach to the rock bio, it goes deep into the shadow world of drug addiction with few traces of light. Sing Backwards and Weep is also, and pardon the pun, an addictive read and I found it hard to resist Lanegan’s many misadventures, no matter how dire they became (and boy do things get harrowing!).

This has as much to do with Lanegan’s knack for storytelling as it does the actual content of the book. My interest in grunge doesn’t extend much beyond my general fascination with trends of the ‘90s, but I still loved reading of Lanegan’s many encounters with some of the genres greatest personalities. In terms of his own history within the genre, Lanegan refrains from giving making of stories much of the spotlight, not surprising considering his outspoken dissatisfaction with pretty much everything surrounding his own grunge band, Screaming Trees. That said, I do wish Lanegan had imparted a few words on how he developed his velvet rasp singing style, especially given how well-loved a vocalist he is.

Lanegan is masterful at humanizing the people in his life, and very few of the major bandmates, peers and enemies he writes about come across as two dimensional. I found myself feeling a great reverence for the same people he did and a disgust for those he didn’t (looking at you, Al Jourgensen). It’s quite a feat to pull this off when discussing someone who has been as deified as Kurt Cobain, but Lanegan brings the same realism to this friend as any other, especially in this passage about turning down appearing with Nirvana for the band’s legendary MTV Unplugged performance:

“He was always looking for ways to shine light on my talents and lift me up, but his ideas often struck me as slightly embarrassing, inappropriate charity, if you will. It just felt weird to me as a relatively unknown singer to come out and do a song with the biggest band in the world during a taping of what was a very popular show.”

This trend of turning Big Things down leads to some of the most low-key depressing moments in the book, such as when Lanegan ghosts on an offer from David O. Russell to have his solo songs provide a crucial soundtrack to the mega-director’s debut, Spanking the Monkey. It was more convenient for Lanegan to stay in the 10 block radius of his Seattle apartment and shoot heroin, so why bother?

This surrendering to narcotics only worsens as the book progresses and includes graphic withdrawals, desperate scores in hellish weather conditions, beating bait and switch dealers to a pulp, and ultimately homelessness. This is about as far from heroin chic as one can get, and it’s pretty miraculous that Lanegan is still with us today, although his portrayal of himself as a rough dude from a shitkicker town provides some elucidation as to why and how.

Sing Backwards and Weep may be gritty, but Lanegan’s eloquence imbues even some of the most dismal situations with a kind of poetry. Following an incident that involves inadvertently having sex on fiberglass, Lanegan sums it up with the grimly elegant, “That was my life in a nutshell: a stolen moment of desperate pleasure, an assful of tiny daggers, then an eternity of agony.” Some rock memoirs revel in hedonism and dismal situations just as much as in moments of glory. In Sing Backwards and Weep, even flashes of pleasure are undercut with assfuls of fiberglass and genital warts. It’s not always pretty, but there’s something irresistible about it nonetheless.

Rating: Would quarantine with again.

*We watched Spanking the Monkey recently and it features lots of great Morphine songs instead of Lanegan solo and one scene features a nice shout-out by way of a Mark Lanegan poster on Jeremy Davies’ bedroom wall. So recommending this as well.

#mark lanegan #reviews #memoirs #grunge #'90s #nirvana #kurt cobain #screaming trees #alice in chains

Why Protomartyr’s “June 21″ is 2020′s Song of the Summer

Protomartyr’s fifth full-length, Ultimate Success Today, is an extraordinary work. So extraordinary that I’ve aborted writing about it three times now, because I just can’t quite put how special Protomartyr’s music is into decent or illuminating words. I can, however, try to single out one song and write about how awesome it is, so here goes:

Consolation, the EP that preceded Ultimate Success Today, showed some hints of where Protomartyr were headed. It serves as a perfect bridge between preceding full-length Relatives in Descent and Ultimate Success Today, with the more traditionally Protomartyrish opening songs giving way to new additions to the band’s musical lexicon on the final two tracks. Consolation’s closing track, “You Always Win,” features a cello, bass clarinet and backing vocals from Kelley Deal. As Joe Casey sings in Ultimate Success Today’s “Bridge & Crown,”“only the end can claim ultimate success,” something which “You Always Win” elaborates on.

Ultimate Success Today is about failings both bodily and systemic (and so much more). Woodwinds, courtesy of saxophonist Jemeel Moondoc and multi-instrumentalist Izaak Mills, and cello (Fred Lonberg-Holm) play a key factor throughout. Nandi Rose, aka Half Waif, offers vocal accompaniment on four tracks, although her contribution is most prominent on “June 21,” which begins with Rose singing of a dead ballerina. A sad image, and the rest of the song gets sadder from there, but the specificity of the sadness is what elevates it from being your run of the mill gloomy tune.

“June 21″ belongs to one of my favorite sub-genres of sad songs, that of the sad summer song (although as I type this, I can only name two other sad summer songs off the top of my head -“Die in the Summertime” by Manic Street Preachers and “Summertime Sadness” by Lana Del Rey). Summer has often made me feel strangely melancholic - if you’re prone to staying indoors, there’s a constant nag of feeling as though you’re missing out, even moreso when you’re stuck inside and suffering from any manner of infirmity or illness. “June 21″ excels at distilling a sort of stasis and despair specific to these hot, slowed down months, and in a more beautiful way than Protomartyr is generally known for. Protomartyr has certainly done “beautiful” before (perhaps the most apparent example here is “Night-Blooming Cereus” on Relatives in Descent) but Rose’s addition to “June 21″ adds a certain degree of sweetness - as Casey has said in a recent interview, “I sound like a dying dog sometimes. I think I like a sweet voice mixed with a dying dog.“ Casey is not exactly at dying dog level here, but when his and Rose’s voices join together on the refrain, the result is a bit like an ice cream headache (and I mean that as a 100% compliment).

The song begins with a saxophone hum, presaging the field recording of crickets and other nighttime creatures that closes the track. It also reminds me of the buzz of an air conditioner that’s seen better days or the hum of electricity in the air on humid summer nights. Protomartyr excels at tension building, and here that sax buzz sets the tone perfectly, making way for a guitar that nags like a single gnat before exploding into a swarm of them around the minute and 30 mark (as always, guitarist Greg Ahee, bassist Scott Davidson and drummer Alex Leonard are insanely on the mark here). The song offers a number of deft sketches of summertime city scenes, and the tension of the music works quite nicely in conveying the disorientation of speeding cars and sirens cutting through balmy summertime stillness.

In the general scope of things, no summer has felt quite as maudlin for so many as summer 2020. With its references to cops on the prowl and “mass for the shut-ins,” “June 21″ seems particularly relevant in the wake of police brutality and a pandemic forcing so many indoors. It has also felt weirdly reflective to me personally, and a phrase from “June 21 - “across the fields of my memories” - feels almost painfully poignant to me at times. But, so much has changed for all of us in these last six months. In a lot of ways, our lives may never quite be the same way again. If this is the summer of staying in, reflecting, and feeling anxious, at least we have an exceptional soundtrack for it.

#protomartyr

20 Favorites from the 2010s

Happy New Year! I could only rescue 20 albums from the 2010s, there are the 20(ish - I doubled up on some) I would carry into the 2020s with me. May this act as your soundtrack on the lazy, hungover day that is January 1st.

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Minor Disappointments’ 10 Least Disappointing Releases of 2019

I wasn’t going to compile a 2019 year-end list for a number of reasons (lack of time to listen to new music, general malaise, little time to write), but I’ve read so much bad end of year music writing that I feel like I must either stoke the embers or assist in extinguishing it. I don’t think I’m doing either here, but everyone likes list so here’s another.

I haven’t had time to really think about 2019 in songs but my favorite this year was, no kidding, a Tindersticks song featuring Robert Pattinson. Speaking of...

#best of 2019

For Halloweem, senior departmental technician Maria Schurr discusses some of Watson Library's books on ghosts and spirits

Wrote this for my day job. Check it if you like ghosts, art, or especially ghosts in art.

#ghosts #art history #ghosts in art #libraries #paranormal #halloween

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