02/20

Persuasive account of how communism succeeded, then failed, in Central and Eastern Europe. To be a bit reductive, it seems that rising standards of living produced generally happy populations until the 70s-80s, when a noticeable gulf between the elite and non-elite strata made itself obvious.

I've begun to make a point of reading A.S. Hamrah whenever something of his becomes available (his Baffler write-up on this year's Oscar movies is just about the only thing worth reading on the subject), and while his Bookforum review of a dismal-sounding New Hollywood lament doesn't have much material with which to work, I did perk up at this accident of crossing currents, featuring Michael Eisner and Don Simpson:

Simpson I've written about before. Eisner I haven't paid as much attention, but considering the shape Disney has since taken, this statement of intent on his part seems like a prophecy that grows more powerful by the day. I'll have to take a closer look at his place in US film history soon.

I don't hate-read things anymore. But sometimes something I read will induce hatred in me, and unsurprisingly, The Baffler tends to do this pretty well. I got a lot of enjoyment out of the spleen vented toward IP that prioritizes "a well-written story" over style, politics, and morality. Also known as "content," as empty and interchangeable as that corporatized non-word implies.

Lately it just seems like there are just so many stories out there that so many people want you to read, and the thing is, I don't want to read (or watch) any of them!! I'm still reading even if I don't follow the @Longreads account on Twitter, I promise! Keep the true-crime documentaries, books, and podcasts far away from me, thanks. The essay also gave me the pleasure of throttling a question I recently asked of myself: whether or not it might be worth pursuing an MFA. Looks like the Iowan, CIA-funded, endlessly workshopped "quality fiction" model still predominates, so again, no thank you!

If anything, I'm surprised that niche film success is the jackpot to which most online magazines and content curators are aspiring. That's the world I know best, and film critics routinely describe it in just about the same language of terminal crisis as is used in this essay.

(Also kind of a relief to learn I can skip the Killers of the Blood Moon book, one I'd considered reading, and just watch the film instead, which will surely be a massive improvement on its source material)

Nice interview of Julia Reichert via Eric Hynes...though unfortunately I ended up disliking AMERICAN FACTORY very much. Between the Obama endorsement and the sinophobia, it gave off the air of state propaganda, which was the opposite of what I'd expected from a documentary filmmaker who'd come up through the labor and women's movements -- as this interview does a fine job of laying out. I have UNION MAIDS bookmarked for another time, because I like to think AMERICAN FACTORY was just one wrong turn after a lifetime of acclaimed work.

Haven't been following Reverse Shot much lately but there's some great stuff on last decade's best films: Violet Lucca on the incongruities and elisions of THE MASTER, Farihah Zaman on the interrogative sweep of CAMERAPERSON, Shonni Enelow on Joanna Hogg's grappling with privilege in THE SOUVENIR, Clara Miranda Scherfig on BOYHOOD (a film that I think has become rather uncool to like, but which I still love), Kelley Dong's sensitive examination of Lee Chang-dong's POETRY, Chris Wisniewski on the beautiful CAROL, and Julien Allen on Kiarostami's wonderful LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE.

(Eric Hynes also makes a good case for the bracingly defeatist INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS, a film I enjoyed forever ago, before my aesthetic sensibilities grew repelled by the Coen style. I think this one could still work for me, thanks in no small part to Delbonnel's textured cinematography.)

The problem with bringing back blogs...this is all, sadly, very true. Even blogging here feels like a quixotic attempt at preserving some lost ideal combining introspection and a publicly accessible database -- which is also why I haven't done that e-mail Newsletter/Substack thing other people are doing, because it seems too much like throwing my writing down a bottomless hole in vain hopes of someone seeing it on the way down. I don't begrudge other people for going that route, and in fact I subscribe to three Substacks from three writers I like a lot, but something in me just feels too attached to the blog form, imperfect as it is...

(I will say, though, that Letterboxd seems to me like a promising hybrid, in that it allows for sociality and the guilty serotonin pleasures of more established social media while also giving room for lengthier, more considered writing than Facebook posts or Tweets)

More magisterial work by Kate Wagner, this time on aesthetic pleasure and its relationship to "ruin porn," viewed historically, architecturally, and culturally.

Short profile of Jason Blum, whose thrift has triumphantly cut through the bloat of contemporary Hollywood and found a winning 'formula' for popular genre films. I scare-quote the word formula partly because it feels unseemly when applied to art, but the fact remains: unless you have a strategy for navigating a studio system polarized between micro-budget and mega-budget, it's hard to finance any kind of original work that stands a chance in theatrical release. Years ago I suspected Blum had the right idea, and time has borne that out spectacularly, although I wouldn't say I like all -- or even most of -- the films he's produced. Yet with A24 pumping out Yorgos-inflected pseudo-horror, I much prefer Blum's straightforward approach to genre. The easy money subsidizes occasional risk-taking, and it seems he wants to tilt further in the direction of artistic freedom, despite his skill lying more in the assemblage of talent than any personal auteurist vision (as he himself appears to acknowledge). Also, like with Soderbergh, I enjoy watching the ripple effects of a surprise financial success, something that only real experimentation can produce, and which has grown rarer and rarer as brand-based intellectual property devours US cinema.

Wikipedia, last and best outpost of a non-corporatized internet. Of course it's not totally utopian, as the article admits. Social hierarchies still reproduce themselves there, and if the page-top banners are any indication, they seem permanently in need of donations. Yet it's somehow gained critical mass where imitators have failed, and the engine has begun running itself, to the general benefit of humankind. Hard not to feel moved!

Corey Robin and the fast-growing danger of white minority rule. It's interesting that the Electoral College was apparently a non-issue for most of US history, only revealing its undemocratic roots recently. This also pairs nicely with Jamelle Bouie's look back at the Democratic South's authoritarian enforcement of Jim Crow, elements of which could resurface depending on the levers of power that Republicans decide to utilize in the 2020s.

I hate Piketty, but he's not going anywhere for now, and if I have to deal with that, I'd rather have Will Davies sizing up the new work than break it open myself.

The ambivalent nostalgia of Mike Leigh's CAREER GIRLS, which more and more seems just as impressive an achievement as its more-acclaimed predecessor.

Read everything Robin James writes. This Real Life essay flips the romanticized notion of artistic independence on its head, arguing that so-called independence represents the privatization of risk and thereby making artists the optimal neoliberal subjects. That alone would be a piercing insight, but James also suggests that the ideal of "interdependence" floated by some artists as an alternative is still too intersectionally exploitative, due to its incomplete emancipation from the private property relation. Wow. This is the type of work Terre Thaemlitz regularly produces, which is just about the highest compliment I can give.

Almost finished making my way through this massive look at Japan's pop cultural decline. What's written here ties in quite well with Hiroki Azuma's book Otaku: Japan's Database Animals, although this five-part essay is more like the base to Azuma's superstructure. Otaku may be dominating Japanese pop culture, but it's only because the rest of Japan has been suffering three decades of economic malaise, the effects of which have devastated its young generation (I worry more and more about my step-siblings, who'll soon have to confront this crisis). Less disposable income means less cultural production -- except for consumerist sub-cultures, which the essay somewhat oddly fingers as being maladjusted individuals spending their way to group identity. I wouldn't say I disagree with that generalization...but it seems too blunt to see it spelled out like that, so maybe I need to interrogate it a bit more myself. Anyhow, the rise of sub-cultural influence has led to groups like AKB48, powered by fandom and obsessive purchases into mainstream success. I hadn't thought to view AKB48 that way, probably because I never bothered to look beneath the surface of their popularity. But this is a point well worth considering, because I think the same process is underway in the US (Japan, as McKenzie Wark* has said, always seems to be several steps ahead of global trends). Stateside otaku are replacing popular culture with their own obsessive interests: Star Wars, Batman, Marvel, Disney animation and live-action.

I guess now would be a natural segue into the legacy of Bob Iger, ex-CEO of Disney. For that I have an overview from Scott Mendelson, a writer with whom I have a strained relationship. There was a period of time in the mid-10s I read his columns nearly every day because I was interested in keeping up with Hollywood's evolution. Mendelson would zero in on case studies and suggest emerging trends and curtailed possibilities; this I found useful, and it kept me from actually having to see most of the movies. But after a while I found his authorial voice very annoying, heavy as it was on franchise lore and spurious meta-narratives of his own making (often based on some milk-and-water ideas on representation and social justice in mainstream cinema). Reading his work at such a high frequency became an enervating chore, so I jumped ship and have mostly kept away since. But I'll check back in occasionally when other box office articles aren't available, and if someone points me toward something like this, I'll give it a shot, because I know he can crunch numbers and throw together some crude media history if needed. So, circling back to the point at hand, Mendelson's thesis here is that Disney's current empire came about through acquisition, not any kind of pioneering successes Iger can call his own. It's an incredibly conservative legacy, which at first seems to contradict a winning streak one would guess is based on peerless expertise. But these qualities can in fact coexist. Craven calculation and shrewd marketing go hand-in-hand at Disney, and now other studios -- not to mention US film culture as a whole -- survive at the margins of this titanic branding exercise, so impressive in so many ways but always fundamentally dull and depressing at its core.

*Great little interview with her here, btw.

I enjoyed these two articles and think they play well together. There’s another one too that builds on these ideas from another angle, saying that socialism in the West has always been expressed racially, which is why top-heavy governments like Hitler’s Germany actually *are socialist* (even though conservatives misinterpret this point on purpose to discredit socialism/communism). Lotta good stuff!! I really like Mudede.

I've had some occasion recently to reflect on Frederick Douglass, surely one of the most fascinating figures in US historical, intellectual, and political history. As this Jacobin article suggests, there's no easy way to reduce his politics to a handful of agit-prop quotes, but even with the limited excerpts on inequality we have from him, how anyone fail to recognize the moral force of arguments made by a once-enslaved African-American? At the very least they deserve profound respect and consideration; really though, the beginner-level exposure to Douglass provided by the US education system should be deepened over years of intensive study, a lodestar around which all subjects of this infernal slave empire should orient themselves.

01/20

Fine-grained appraisals of a few Joe Pesci roles. Don't know about the films themselves, but Violet Lucca makes a good case for Pesci's work in them.

Utterly fantastic analysis of the feminist movement in Saudi Arabia. As the authors note, the situation is unique for a number of reasons. Islamophobes frequently point to genuinely terrible conditions in Saudi Arabia as proof of Western superiority, but this critique is not made in good faith, instead advancing imperial feminism in a way that continues the erasure of women's agency. The response must not be cultural reductionism -- viewing Saudi Arabia as a uniformly oppressive nation due to Islamic fundamentalism -- or dismissive universality -- ignoring the particulars of life for Saudi Arabian women to blur "all women" into an oppressed totality. The authors prove their point and then some by examining the contradictions, progressions, reversals, and ongoing struggles of Saudi Arabian womanhood.

And another characteristically excellent Viewpoint piece (I had a free day at work recently, so I spent it reading): context to Etienne Balibar's focus on immigration in the difficult years après May '68. This is more than just a deep-dive into one historical moment, worthwhile as such an endeavor might be. The author persuasively argues that Balibar recognized revolutionary energy was alive and well in immigrant worker movements of this transitional period. Though attempts were made at articulating a cross-sectional worker-led movement, old specters of French nationalism came back to haunt the movement, precipitating Mitterand-era austerity and weakened severely as a result. In talk of May '68, the student movement always enjoys pride of place, but I wonder if perhaps this has always been a mistake, if the burnout experienced by protesting students was not characteristic of the left uprising on the whole, as evidenced by impassioned worker struggles continuing well after that legendary anti-climax. It's a suggestive way to re-conceptualize established wisdom about "inevitable" revolutionary failures; I'd be interested to see what turns up in pursuing this angle further.

Japanese names will be written surname-first from now (and some context + history on why they haven't always been).

I've written before about how much I hate our Democrat-approved Republican Governor, but my bottomless hatred has somehow entered new depths. Pareene is right: Hogan is a fairly ordinary Republican whose overt corruption is most likely legal (our many horrible Democrats have happily led our state to national pre-eminence in that regard!). His theft of money designated for Baltimore's planned Red Line transit system was reprehensible enough already. And yet, somehow, it always gets worse.

A sad study about something very important: black boys' reactions to the deaths of their friends. I feel this is especially needed in a city like Baltimore, still dealing with the gun influx driven by the Baltimore Police Department's corrupt Gun Trace Task Force. Grief is complex and long-lasting. The full extent is rarely visible, as the ripple effects can spread widely and subtly. Definitely work worth a careful read.

I quite liked this brief glimpse backward by Dennis Lim at the now-gone 2010s, especially his noting the shift from elegies for capital-C cinema toward the heterogeneous, fragmentary, and overstimulating. Or, put somewhat differently, cinema to post-cinema.

The USA, unlike Iran, has no heroes. An incredibly perceptive generalization that, of course, isn't altogether true. I'd nominate Angela Davis as a living hero, at the very least, but she's the exception that proves the rule, in that most US Americans don't know who she is or, if they do know her, don't value her as a hero. Someone like Bernie Sanders could be described as enjoying widely-agreed hero status, yet even he could never unify this country behind him. The United States is a nation-state in eternal self-destruction, its heroes only ever speaking to the oppressed, often despised the oppressors, never recognized for their efforts in life -- and maybe not even in death, either.

I've been keenly interested in Spanish politics ever since that extraordinary Bue Rubner essay I've probably linked more than once here, so I was very eager to learn more about Spain's first left coalition in over 80 years. The linked essay points out several caveats: the Catalonia issue still festers, with left and right feeling slighted in this arrangement; the radical right, particularly incensed over this result, has been gaining in numbers for years now; and, really, as much as this is a good thing, it is also rather bad, in that Spain is basically catching up 40 years late to the social-democratic system once dominant throughout Europe. It's a moment of promise, but one that could easily be sabotaged from a number of directions, as the case seems lately to be in Spain.

My mind is reeling from this (uncharacteristically?) rigorous, astonishing Jacobin essay about the American labor movement's complicity with imperialism. It's far too comprehensive for me to really summarize, but there are so many people, political events, national histories that need serious scrutiny once you see how intertwined the AFL-CIO and other labor organizations have been with USAID, the CIA, and the US government generally. For now, all I can say is dive deep into what's unearthed here, and I'll look to do the same when I come back to it.

Isaac Asimov, serial sexual harrasser.

The cruel optimism of Star Trek -- and, really, fandom in general.

Really expressive UNCUT GEMS review from Brandon Soderberg, contrasting that film's web of oppression with the exceptionalism touted by oppressors.

Not sure about 50% of what gets said here but there's some things worth digging into, especially the subsumption of production into consumption. Maybe I got the wrong impression, but I thought normcore was coined by Fiona Alison Duncan? For K-hole, sure, but specifically by her? That was my first exposure to it at least. Maybe the linked dossier is the real originating source.

Feel like Jakarta will soon be one of the world's worst climate change disasters.

Definitely found things that correspond with my experience in Adam Kotsko's dismantling of Christmas falsehood. Also liked his account of status anxiety over tenure, which takes on many nuanced forms likely invisible to outsiders (such as myself).

August Wilson's Jitney, and the suggestive idea that fiction can be a better cognitive map of economics than mathematical models. (I really liked Denzel Washington's adaptation of FENCES, so this is just another reminder that I need to give Wilson a serious look.)

My only familiarity with Elizabeth Wurtzel is watching PROZAC NATION once a long time ago, maybe before I even knew I was depressed, but I did like what she wrote in this essay. RIP, an early death stings the most. (And chilling especially because she discovers here that the cancer gene which would take her life comes from the man she never knew was her father.)

Guy Debord's on my 2020 reading list, and a real encounter with Situationism feels like it's drawing closer every day.

Hard agree on Brody's preamble (less so some of his choices). Now that I've begun volunteering for my local video store, I actually have the joy of feeling like I'm doing something to counteract the torrential stream of anti-aesthetic non-art.

Rogue konbini!! Best of luck Mr. Matsumoto!

Africa's wealthiest man may fundamentally reshape Nigeria's economy in the 2020s.

A convincing argument from Adam Kotsko on why we should wish eternal damnation on our oppressors -- however, my counter-point would be that this wish still relies on an arbiter of justice who may well not exist, and that we shouldn't risk the chance that the powerful will get off scot-free. It is the inverse of finding hope in salvation; the possibility of damnation blunts one's justifiable moral outrage in the present, deferring proportionate punishment to some unspecified time after death, which may yet be the final deadline for justice being served. Do we really want to run it down to the wire like that? Shouldn't we mete out consequences now in the time we're given, just in case?

Very nice takedown of FALC by Gavin Mueller. I've cooled on it a lot since the heady Williams and Srnicek days, and I'll have to see if I can remember to link that critique of accelerationism + xenofeminism I read this summer. But in short: workers stand to lose the most in utopian left projects (quite ironic for an allegedly Marxist strategy). It's not so much that there can be no move past the nuts and bolts of labor, rather that things like FALC-adjacent innovation will always meet their match in employer exploitation, as Mueller argues above. A return to the Communist Manifesto helps: only a total worker-led overthrow of capitalism will generate truly liberatory conditions -- at which point we can mechanize whatever we so choose.

Bernie Sanders and his organizing tactics. I usually refrain from commenting too much on US electoral politics because I think their importance is over-emphasized, to the detriment of more urgent political struggles happening elsewhere (i.e. the Global South, but even within the US itself outside the changing fortunes of career politicians). Yet there are a few reasons I did want to check this out. Chief among them is the author whose Twitter account brought me to it, Ryan Grim, whose talk I went to see at the Radical Bookfair a few months back. I was skeptical, again, of the centrality of US electoral politics (he was presenting on his book charting the course from Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), but I figured at least I could pick up some background knowledge on past progressive struggles. To my surprise, Grim's argument was compelling and persuasive, highlighting the strokes of luck that had shaped the US neoliberal consensus. Two key examples: the legendary Reagan Revolution was far weaker than it's assumed to be, with most of the states that voted red only doing so by slim margins; and Bill Clinton's victory too was far from totalizing, languishing in the mid-40s due to Ross Perot splitting the Republican vote. For reference, that's around the percentage by which John McCain lost to Obama in 2008.

So if we begin shedding the conventional wisdom of Reagan and Clinton as two figureheads of a unified movement with mass appeal, instead recognizing widespread discontent with neoliberalism and a hunger for alternatives, what other possibilities might emerge? I gather that's the larger thrust of Grim's argument, but since I haven't read the book, I'll settle for what this lengthy essay puts forth. My major complaint with it is one I heard aired a while back -- maybe even from Gavin Mueller -- that left-wing organizing in the US will always face the danger of being instrumentalized for the purpose of electing Democrats. That's very much the case with Bernie, a non-traditional politician yet a nominal Democrat all the same, and there are glimpses of the harm this can cause in Grim's account of the Our Revolution ordeal, in which idealistic young organizers were put to work securing dark-money and billionaire donations. To his credit, Bernie shifted away from that model and towards the bottom-up one headed by the person whose efforts structure this essay, organizer Claire Sandberg. The results of such a paradigm shift should be apparent soon.

I do think there's value in uniting people involved in various movements under one cause, but when that cause's ultimate horizon is a single night's election, energy can dissipate quickly afterward, most of all when the endeavor fails. The recent example provided by Corbynism will be interesting to triangulate with Bernie's attempted revolution, whether it succeeds or not. For now, I want to shift focus downward and outward, following a link from Grim's essay onto a profile of an organizer from Lancaster County, my longtime home in PA. She's spearheaded progressive efforts elsewhere since leaving PA, but she was also involved with an effort to turn Lancaster blue, despite folk wisdom proclaiming Lancaster's eternal conservatism. It's in these smaller stories that the big successes of later years follow, as was the case when Bernie's national emergence spurred Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run her own campaign and become a progressive symbol for many young people. I personally may not need their example to motivate me now, but I know from experience how involving electoral politics can be, so even though I want to direct my efforts and attention elsewhere, I know that Bernie, AOC, and others yet unknown will be galvanizing forces for left-wing movement-building in the US, best observed in the organizing experience their political campaigns offer.

Excellent discussion of Nobuhiko Obayashi by Evan Morgan. I await the day Obayashi is perceived as more than a wacky Orientalized one-hit wonder, when his filmography is made widely available and given the respect it undoubtedly deserves.

Kentucky Route Zero nearing conclusion. I haven't played the game, and I gather it may be over-generating its own hype, but Walker's exploration of it sure makes it sound worthwhile.

Some sharp points about liberalism's inability to perceive its own failures, especially during the End of History that was meant to be its coronation. I've seen Malcolm Harris beat up on the Gopnik book too; it must be an especially symptomatic case.

Very nice writeups on some of the 2010s' best films, in particular Matt on #1's THE TREE OF LIFE. I would say I've seen a plurality of these, but as always, retrospectives like this help nudge me in the direction of catching up on absences (i.e. ALMAYER'S FOLLY, which I'm dying to see).

I never trusted cop shows, especially the cutesy ones like Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and this Color of Change examination gives good details on the exact ways TV crime shows launder copaganda through narrative sleights of hand.

Andrew Yang and the USA's New Money men, modeled after yesteryear's British Tories. Another unusually sharp view of a trend I otherwise wouldn't care to investigate.

Something that interests me about Mohammed bin Salman's hack of Bezos' phone is that it almost seems to suggest Bezos has strategic importance equivalent to any other head-of-state, as if he's a hostile foreign power that Saudi Arabia needs to directly target as a form of geopolitics. Like Amazon is its own sovereign nation. Eerie in a rather Gibsonesque way.

The writer of this 2009 story on Peter Thiel sabotaging ACORN recently spoke up on its predictive value -- and he was right. Thanks in no small part to Democrat cowardice, ACORN's death was just one early success. After 10 years and some change, Thiel is still hard at work entrenching conservatism and undermining left power. Hindsight's 20/20 and all (hah), but this is clearly a warning that should've been heeded, much to our current detriment.

Charles Mudede on the how socialism can be corrupted by racism, exemplified by Hitler's National Socialism. An argument prone to bad-faith weaponization by the disingenuous ("Aha! Socialism IS the pathway to fascism!!"), but in Mudede's careful elaboration, a lucid clarification of what went wrong in the past, and how we might avoid those mistakes in the future.

Last: the indispensible Chuang supplies yet another definitive account of China's place in the world, this time by addressing the Hong Kong crisis. It's a towering work of cognitive mapping that conceives of a late capitalism in bloody turmoil beyond anyone's control, ceaselessly tearing itself apart and regenerating, a process to which Hong Kong is only peripheral now that China no longer relies on its long-time Special Administrative Region to access foreign capital. This doesn't mean Hong Kong doesn't "matter," that its turbulence is of little importance, but just that China's newfound autonomy and fusion with the US economic system has marginalized Hong Kong. The dynamic is reminiscient of the remora feeding off a shark's underside, and wherever a shark goes, the remora goes too. Hong Kong's people will, of course, resist their own subjugation, as they have done most impressively for almost half a year, yet in Chuang's analysis, the way forward is one of intense struggle and no guarantees of success, because such a situation is altogether without precedent. Again, I intend no disrespect to Hong Kong or its people in fixating on their difficulties. I love this city-state with a bottomless passion, and I will watch closely, in enduring solidarity, as the growing crisis articulates itself across the 2020s.

(Okay, P.P.S. with Chuang: the introduction on China's transition from socialism to capitalism. A superb primer that will surely be matched by equal excellence whenever I follow up with Part 1...)

Favorite, Best, Most Influential/Personally Affecting Books

Number one is the respectable one I default to whenever I'm asked what my favorite book is, but the point of this list is to explode the notion that any one book reigns supreme over the others, because all of these have shaped me in some way, and I'm thankful that each of them has come my way:

1. The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James
2. Cities of the Interior, by Anaïs Nin
3. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
4. The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison
5. No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism, by Steven Shaviro
6. The Prince of this World, by Adam Kotsko
7. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, by Mark Fisher
8. Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism, by Robin James
9. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek
10. Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
11. The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene
12. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
13. Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin
14. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
15. Consider the Lobster, by David Foster Wallace*
16. Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace
17. The Pale King, by David Foster Wallace
18. Girl with Curious Hair, by David Foster Wallace
19. The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir
20. Suttree, by Cormac McCarthy
21. God's Bits of Wood, by Ousmane Sembène
22. Red Sorghum: A Novel of China, by Mo Yan
23. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, by Elizabeth Hinton
24. The Informant!, by Kurt Eichenwald**
25. The collected works of William Shakespeare***
26. Eskiboy, by Wiley
27. Anti-Semite and Jew, by Jean-Paul Sartre
28. Blindsight, by Peter Watts
29. The Ethics of Ambiguity, by Simone de Beauvoir
30. Post-Cinematic Affect, by Steven Shaviro
31. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, by Shulamith Firestone****
32. The Border Trilogy, by Cormac McCarthy
33. Platform Capitalism, by Nick Srnicek
34. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
35. Hell is Round the Corner, by Tricky
36. Pale View of the Hills, by Kazuo Ishiguro
37. Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf
38. Cosmopolis, by Don DeLillo
39. The Heart of the Matter, by Graham Greene
40. Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
41. House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski
42. Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television, by Adam Kotsko
43. Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment, by David Bordwell*****
44. Confessions of a Mask, by Yukio Mishima
45. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, by Annette Lareau
46. The Shining, by Stephen King
47. The Coast of Chicago, by Stuart Dybek
48. Dreaming in Cuban, by Cristina García
49. Otaku: Japan's Database Animals, by Hiroki Azuma
50. General Intellects: Twenty-Five Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century, by McKenzie Wark
51. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
52. Kindred, by Octavia E. Butler
53. A Personal Matter, by Kenzaburō Ōe
54. Kitchen, by Banana Yoshimoto
55. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
56. Glamorama, by Bret Easton Ellis
57. Superdads: How Fathers Balance Work and Life in the 21st Century, by Gayle Kaufman
58. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
59. The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by Max Weber
60. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë
61. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures, by Mark Fisher
62. Too Much Happiness, by Alice Munro
63. Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami
64. Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen
65. Awkwardness, by Adam Kotsko
66. The Burden of Sympathy: How Families Cope With Mental Illness, by David A. Karp
67. Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, by Malcolm Harris
68. The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home, by Arlie Russell Hochschild
69. Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantánamo, by Murat Kurnaz
70. The Communist Manifesto, by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx

Some honorable mentions:
1. Justify My Love: Sex, Subversion, and Music Videos, by Ryann Donnelly
2. Falling Man, by Don DeLillo
3. Homo Zapiens, by Victor Pelevin
4. The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too, by James K. Galbraith
5. The Parent App: Understanding Families in the Digital Age, by Lynn Schofield Clark

*I've soured on David Foster Wallace over the years, largely due to his grotesque behavior toward women. I chose to include him, though, because the books I've listed are foundational to me, in fact some of the first "adult literature" I took on and felt changed by reading. His imprint still marks me, but I don't think I'll be returning to his books (or reading any new ones) for quite a while.

**This guy's a real weirdo, and I don't even know (or want to know) what went down with that whole hentai thing. I Followed him on Twitter for a well before his conspiratorial rants and bizarre style of abbreviation made me give up and Unfollow him. But The Informant! remains on this list because its mix of surveillance, corporate evil-doing, and individual eccentricity is truly mind-boggling. I bought this in a Thailand airport in 2010 to prep for Soderbergh's adaptation, and the week I spent at my uncle's home in Texas reading this over winter break 2011 has stayed with me quite vividly.

***I know this looks laughably pretentious, and it is, but hear me out. As a college freshman I had no understanding of credits or course levels. I saw a 400-level course on Shakespeare with no real pre-requisites, and I thought to myself, why not dive right into the bibliography of this world-famous playwright? So I did, reading play after play usually in the span of a week and keeping pace with the advanced-level class surprisingly well (it wasn't a challenging year otherwise). By the end I found I quite enjoyed Shakespeare, but it's a full ten years later now, and that time has dissolved into wisps of memory. I can't rightly say which works I prefer to others -- or even which ones I read and which I didn't -- so I'm just listing them all generally as a way of saying I liked almost everything I read and would be happy to re-familiarize myself with any of them.

****I absolutely adored this book when I read it and probably still would, yet I feel compelled to mention Angela Davis' disapproval of Firestone and her sexualized understanding of race. It's a very valid point, and a reminder that I'm well past due to seriously read Davis myself. Again, this is book is fantastic, but I can't recommend it wholeheartedly without paying respect to Davis' critique.

*****I've seen this book criticized for being glib and condescending at times toward the cinema it claims to love, and I agree, that bothered me quite a bit too during my reading. Bordwell's a sharp intellect, but he can be very obnoxious. Still, there's enough salvageable material to mount serious challenges to Eurocentric conceptions of film and art, so I consider it a personal favorite despite my grievances.

Quick summary I guess....this list is all more a reflection of where I've been than where I'll end up going. I see a lot of old favorites, cult authors, and Western hierarchical standards of important literature. I want to read more poetry, more short stories, more critical theory, more work of all kind from women, LGBTQIA2S authors, and the Global South overall. This isn't really a disclaimer or admission of guilt or anything like that, just a gesture in the direction of where I want this list to go as I update it and keep on reading.

Bonus '19 MVs

Playa Gótica (2014 - 2019)

It appears Playa Gótica, the Chilean alt-rock band, have called it quits. I won't lie: I haven't listened to most of their music, and their other singles have left me cold. But this post exists for one reason and one reason alone: Fuego. This is one of the best pieces of music I've heard in the last several years, otherworldly in its head-spinning beauty. Complemented well by a smeary, lo-fi music video, the song manages the stupendous trick of blending shoegaze with a dance-influenced drum rhythm, something that would pay similar dividends in the then-unknown future. Most music acts will never make anything close to this good -- including, it seems, the band who made it. But for a period of time it all came together just right, and Fuego was the result. Thank you, Playa Gótica, and goodbye.

Last Year of the Last Decade Top MVs

Urias & Maffalda - Rasga

Alright let's just get down to it!! I just watched this video for the first time today and think it's absolutely amazing! Over time my enthusiasm may cool, but as of right now I feel pretty comfortable calling it 2019's best. Not for lack of competition either! Plenty of treasures soon to come. However, Rasga gives me so much of what I want from MVs. Its acid-drenched filters recall BRTHR's videos for Travis Scott and Kali Uchis, while the overexposed whites in dark places tap into some of my deepest, longest-standing aesthetic predilections. That grungy, sweaty, libidinal energy is like shorthand for the animating spirit I often cherish in art. Less charitably, I've seen it described as "heroin chic" (in reference to Gaspar Noe's cover art for Sky Ferreira's Everything is Embarrassing), and I can't deny there's some truth to that. But emphasis is key: the style here isn't stylish squalor, it's overcranked euphoria. Images bleed into each other like synapse-fried memories of last night against a beat that clangs, throbs, gallops its way into your ears. Urias' punchy Portuguese provides the barest structure, though even her voice gets swallowed by the uproar much of the time. There's simply no containing the riot Rasga unleashes: once it's loose, you're caught between bass and syncopation in an audiovisual assault. This MV and its accompanying song are something rare and special, a distillation of why dance music is the kind I love the most.

Twice - Fancy

So here's where I stand with Twice. I really liked Like Ooh-Ahh way back when it first came out, really disliked Cheer Up, and have struggled to get onboard with them ever since. Their other songs are, for the most part, fine; some are even quite good. Yet I could never work up the innate excitement that came naturally for me with WJSN and Red Velvet. I never felt any attachment to their immense success, least of all when groups like my beloved Dal*shabet were falling apart in the background. Thus they've never had a place on MV lists until this year, with the undeniable Fancy. Watching the video now reveals that it's a little lackluster, but there are some nice moments, like that final post-cinematic rollercoaster ride. The customary K-Pop charisma is also rather lacking (except for the shot of that member above, whose ambiguous affect is strangely compelling). Really though, all they had to do was not drop the ball with a song this good. 

GWSN - Pinky Star

This, on the other hand, gives me a lot to enjoy. Although there's an abundance of visual information communicated in Pinky Star, several motifs stand out. The staccato rhythms of the (brilliant) chorus are mirrored in the video's exacting formalism. While the first verses are constricted by a tight aspect ratio, the more delicate bridge gets an expansion, which also allows for a better view of this fantastical environment. I hate to just call everything CGI "post-cinematic," but I do feel it's worth considering how the visually impossible worlds of K-Pop videos create a new reality of magic and artifice. This castle in the clouds reminds me of Super Mario games -- or, even more specifically, Wario World, though I can't recall exactly what level. The connection is no coincidence: post-cinema draws heavily on the spatial infinitude of gamespace. Where analog cinema focused on the indexical recording of time, post-cinema acknowledges the alterability of everything contained within moving images. Time can be lengthened beyond the camera's "recording," and space can be elaborated through entirely digital environments. In Pinky Star, the GWSN girls' movements serve as explorations of their computer-generated stage. Most often we see them framed within the frame, performing stereotyped actions, or navigating spatial dislocations exaggerated by the camera's rigidity. They are at their freest when singing the chorus on the castle's platform, an endless horizon stretching out behind them.

P.S. While I don't like this MV quite as much, both the video and its song are still quite good, and the MV's clear similarities with Pinky Star seem to suggest this is a house style.

(Also, I just found out GWSN has no relationship to WJSN, despite the very similar names? I'd assumed they were like a sub-unit who performed in other territories...also also, the pink-haired rapper gives off intense Faye Wong vibes here)

Suboi - CHO KHÔNG

Here's another "almost" who finally made it onto the year-end list. Suboi got a lot of heat off her song/MV Đời, which certainly makes an impression but, I feel, showcases Suboi less than that crystalline beat. CÔNG was the more complete package, matching an even steelier beat (note the MV's factory setting) with tightly controlled verses and a ferocious chorus. I think that one only missed the list last year because I didn't see it in time...But, it's 2019, and Suboi's taken a left turn that's somehow ended up her best work yet. Over a pleasant house beat, she sounds both warm and weary as she reflects on life so far. She's proud of her success, but she recognizes how fleeting it is, both day-to-day and on a cosmic scale. "Are you happy, baby?" Though phrased in the second-person, one gets the sense that this question is not only directed towards Suboi primarily, but may also be one she asks herself often. The MV, although still full of bright colors and eye-catching objects, is appropriately toned down from usual V-Pop maximalism, opting to visualize Suboi's verses in a more functional way. Together with the song, it makes for a low-key triumph that expands on past work in unexpected new ways.

Chemical Brothers - Got to Keep On

Not much to say about this except how well it all comes together. At first it just seems like we'll be enjoying good dancers doing their thing for a really nice song. Then things start changing, and that break comes, and it becomes strange, unsettling even....until, suddenly, all is normal again, the pleasure principle back in operation. Nothing groundbreaking, just a well-made MV that pushes its boundaries enough to excite, all conducted with Michel Gondry's tactile touch.

A$AP Rocky - Kids Turned Out Fine

I love this, but I don't love it all evenly. Let me see if I can explain what it does to me. In the song's first minute, that chiming guitar line and the singer's gentle voice stoke a warm glow inside me. It harkens back to some now-distant but very fond time in my life, maybe to do with childhood but in addition, almost certainly, a drug-induced state of mind. Some time when I felt affection for all the things and people around me, friends, lovers, maybe even family...That soft assertion, that the kids turned out fine, feels like a corrective to all the worrying, the disapproval, and the challenges we young people faced growing up. It was never a sure thing, but we're here now. Dexter Navy's visualization acts like a scrolling tableau over times of love and friendship, but it's not all poems to youthful freedom. There are moments of abjection too, like the girl lying dazed as she sparks a bong hit, and the other girl crying alone in her undergarments. Starkly underlit, seemingly with a single light source, these feel like flashbulb memories of the worst times of your life, emotions as vivid upon reflection as they were in the raw. A$AP Rocky's reminiscence at the end, of love cut short by changing preferences, speaks to the pain counterbalancing those happy days spent in the sun. Violence and police misconduct also intrude upon the reverie, suggesting that the kids may be alright, but the world around them sure isn't. There are definitely some larger suggestions percolating about altered states, ways of seeing, and how images affect us, but none of that really connects with me. The zoetrope and meta-filmic breakdown, for instance, just feel like grasping for meaning. But every time I start the song again, I fall into a fugue of comfort and melancholy, grieving the way things so precious to me have faded away, yet somehow finding peace in reconciling the distance between who I was and who I am now.

Toro y Moi - Ordinary Pleasures

This is hardly the best video on the list, but its focus on process makes for a nice little snapshot of creativity in motion. I've never listened to Toro y Moi before and don't feel like I need to start now. Being more interested in MVs than music proper means developing a touch-and-go relationship to things you don't usually sample. But you know I can't resist a song whose key lyric is "maximize all the pleasure" -- and which does, in its own way, attempt to do so. 

(It also pairs well with Kids Turned Out Fine as an exercise in laidback charm)

Red Velvet - Zimzalabim

Extremely satisfying as the kind of thing people let Red Velvet get away with as they keep churning out hits the rest of the time. I don't know what to say; you're either with this or you aren't. Some say it's haphazard/obnoxious, but for me the song's chaos and the MV's indelible images are a big part of what I love about Red Velvet. That they can balance their Russian Roulettes with their Zimzalabims is what makes them, still, the most essential girl group currently active.

Bích Phương - Chị Ngả Em Nâng

V-Pop can be a little frustrating sometimes. While I love its sleek, crisp productions -- and am deeply thankful to it for keeping alive the maximalism that'd leeched away from K-Pop during the Bieberwave years -- the scene seems to advance in fits and starts. Tóc Tiên, its crowning gem, isn't without flaws; Bảo Thy is wonderful but prone to disappearance; and the one-hit wonders promise great things, then never follow up. With that said, Bích Phương has stealthily emerged as maybe the most dependable V-Pop purveyor. Though not as hard-edged as some of her peers, Phương's softer presence is more than capable of unifying her body of work, often allowing for a more sorrowful tone than that of the many (great) party anthems. Take this one, for example. The video commits to excess from the start and just keeps piling on, yet underneath its theatricality is a lament for something unclear, true to her downbeat style but elusive in its specifics. One of the year's subtlest enigmas.

Sampa the Great - Final Form

What could I add that isn't already in the MV? She earns that superlative and then some.

Rinne Yoshida - Mu

Right from the beginning, this was a powerful contender for best of '19. While there's plenty going on in this MV, its ingredients are fairly simple: spinning wheel, sunglasses, squad of dancers, speckled skirt and floor; swooping synths, soft voice, syncopation, and sublime piano melody (alliteration mostly unintended!). The relative simplicity may seem out-of-place compared to the intensive post-cinema of other MVs present. But I'm just absolutely transfixed by this one. It's a special kind of MV where every word, every note, every image and cut build into a rhythm that I come to know by heart over obsessive rewatches. Producer Kenmoshi Hidefumi strips away the fussiness of his Wednesday Campanella productions and goes straight for rave-inspired rhapsody, attaining ecstatic release in the segment running from that piano line to those yelped vocal samples. Easily Top 3 of the year for me.

Hatchie - Stay With Me

Watching and listening to this MV feels like being set head-to-toe on fire with all the love lost in your life. Scalding infernos of anguish, loneliness, and sorrow you thought had sizzled into ash long ago, the concentrated despair of all those bygone nights spent lying in pools of your own tears (I had to hold back tears just watching the MV now, months after first seeing it). A shotgun blast of every fading memory made suddenly ballistic. Bleeding desire and yearning for someone who can never know how much love you felt, blistered by the heat of it but holding on anyway, because letting go would hurt even more. A throbbing heart that beats for no one, or the shadow of someone you used to know, whose shadow you only see from the corner of your eye, hiding in the back of your mind, years/miles/lifetimes away but momentarily close, closer than the people you know best, perhaps better even than you know yourself, there in all your most precious remembrances, in all your bottomless regrets, impossible then as now to turn away from, a face more familiar than your own, where all the world's magic and mystery once seemed to reside, whose smiles and giggles and whispers of love have outlasted near every image and word and sound that you've come across in your life before and since. And you the frozen planet slipped out of orbit from this beautiful shining star. 

Where does our love go when we're no longer here to hold onto it? Does it fall away into entropy, like stardust clusters in zero gravity? Or will it keep flickering in obsidian blackness, light-years away but still visible to other galaxies across time and space, illusions of past realities yet to dissipate? Will anyone remember, or care? At least we remembered, and we cared.

Tierra Whack - Unemployed

I think Whack World is another example of something I missed or didn't process fully enough for last year's list. It's a lot to take in, and repeat viewings have helped, so mea culpa on neglecting that in '18. Well it's '19 now, and Tierra Whack returns with another disturbingly visualized rap experiment. Švankmajer feels like the operative influence here with its LITTLE OTIK couch potato, and the commingling of domestic and reproductive labor feels simpatico with OTIK's surreal portrait of motherhood. It seems like every year reveals startling new dimensions to Whack's artistry, so I greatly anticipate seeing what she has in store for 2020.

YG - Stop Snitchin

Big CW for anti-black slavery and violence...this is one of the year's more challenging works, I'd argue moreso than clipping's entry below. That one at least directs righteous anger toward white oppressors, an understandable target. Stop Snitchin articulates a miserable congruence between snitching, weakness, and lack of masculinity, drawing a line all the way back to enslaved Africans who informed on their peers. I'm unsure whether or how often that happened, but YG's video depicts it like an original sin still manifesting itself today, the most contemptible betrayal he can imagine. There's not much more I can say, other than describing the troubled currents that course through this MV. It's pretty clear as is.

Björk - tabula rasa

I've yet to really get into Björk. I listened to her first album a while ago and found some songs I liked there -- Crying, There's More to Life Than This -- but there's a lot more about her that I don't know. What I do admire is that she's managed to become an artist with few limits, so committed to evolution that a grassroots following will treasure (and subsidize!) all her audio and visual experiments. It's only right that she end up on this list with this post-cinematic self-portrait. Yet the MV's CGI isn't its sole noteworthy element. Behind the graphics, Björk vocalizes a moving and fairly direct plea to end the patriarchal drama of sons and fathers so that women can build something new instead. I don't think it's hyperbolic to suggest that, through her art, she's shown us how wonderful that could be.

Björk - losss

Two disembodied faces circle each other in constant metamorphosis, voices overlapping, singing a dialogue in the dark chamber that surrounds them. It's mesmeric where tabula rasa was outward-directed, and while there's no need to determine the "better" MV, I'm won over by losss' intimate beauty.

Don Toliver - No Idea

It's 2019, and therefore quite a while since Young Thug broke out onto the US rap scene with his eccentric and varied vocal style. And though his stardom remains an interesting development in and of itself, I believe we've reached a point of oversaturation, both in Thugger's own prolificacy and his string of imitators. I clearly remember the day I first listened to Skepta's 2019 album, heard a stateside rapper guest on one of the tracks, and thought to myself, "This sounds like any-and-every other late-10s US rapper." Skepta's voice and flow are instantly recognizable on any song featuring him; the guest sounded like his main two influences were Young Thug and Migos, two of this decade's biggest and most influential rap acts. 

If I were more familiar with US rap, perhaps I'd have a more nuanced understanding of how it's evolved over the past 10 years, helping me to better contextualize that juxtaposition. But to my untrained ear, I could only hear a style I've grown to like less and less by the year. No disrespect to the rapper himself, of course. I just have my own particular biases in this area. So, wrapping up this preamble, I was quite surprised to find how much I responded to Don Toliver's No Idea. Toliver's falsetto is especially beautiful, but I really like the R&B psychedelia enlivening his raps, all fluidly layered over a beat that's both flighty and rhythmic. Jesse Kanda's woozy video draws on Toliver's heavy-lidded, barely-there, stumbling presence to suggest a whirlwind of mixed emotions, smartly realizing there can be as much expressive value in fluorescent lighting as trendy neon. An attractive package that's familiar enough in broad strokes yet well above-average in its stylistic choices.

Doon Kanda - Polycephaly (EPILEPSY WARNING)

SECOND WARNING: EPILEPSY RISK: A nice song by a music act that features Jesse Kanda, accomplished director of many great MVs. The video gives a partially-submerged view of the sun, rippling like the song it visualizes. I didn't find the flickering light too unbearable myself, but obviously that's not my call.

Chung Ha - Gotta Go

Lovely follow-up to the unbeatable Roller Coaster. The video's pleasant if unremarkable, but it's just so nice to see Chung Ha again. If later single Snapping is any indication, there still exists a real risk of a prolonged sophomore slump, everything falling far short of the early peak...I hope she continues in this vein instead.

Normani - Motivation

An ideal pairing of director and star. Dave Meyers'* camera is matched beat for beat by Normani's inexhaustible charisma, their interplay choreographed to perfection as if this all were just another day in the big city. I missed what looks like a small fatphobic joke the first time around, but otherwise this MV is about as faultless as they come.

*I'm unfamiliar with co-director Daniel Russell, so I'm writing about the video in the context of the director whose work I know better. But I also don't want to write him out of his own work, so let this stand as an acknowledgement that he was surely a big part of this tremendous success.

Perfume - Future Pop

I downloaded Perfume's newest album to take with me to Japan this summer and, regrettably, fell asleep the only time I listened to it there. I've loved this group since a transformative experience with their song GLITTER in 2012, one which was instrumental in winning me over to the poptimist cause. They've only gotten better with each successive release; 2016's COSMIC EXPLORER has an incredible string of hits lasting almost the entire album, about as consistently great as pop albums can be. I'll be sure to check out Future Pop more closely sometime soon. Until then, there's this excellent video, which lightly animates the Perfume trio into a digitized world befitting the title. It was hard to pick just four frames from this one! The whole MV is meticulously designed, a near-future (2030) speculative diagram of what Japan could someday become, all straight lines, hard edges, and gadget-saturated. The (p)optimism is notable in a time when trite dystopias have degraded the very idea of future-oriented thinking, taking perverse comfort that things will always be as bad as they are now, our present misery just slightly enhanced by new technology. Leave it to Japan to actually find the joy of living in an advanced urban environment, for remembering the future as a place in constant, active construction (neatly visualized in Future Pop's evolving digital landscapes). Buoyed by Yasutaka Nakata's pop-DnB production, this MV charms me more and more every time I return to it.

James Massiah - Natural Born Killers (Ride for Me)

On the flipside, there is one future dystopia that can't be imagined thoroughly enough: climate change. I'm fond of using Tim Morton's term 'hyperobject' in my writing as an evocative, poetic way to describe things larger than words really capture. But returning it to its place of origin for a moment, the hyperobject rightly belongs to climate change, or global warming specifically. There are so many people who have no idea how bad things are going to get -- including me, and I consider myself more-than-usually concerned with this unavoidable future. Climate change is perhaps the fullest expression of my negative outlook on life. Conditions are actively being worsened by people with power, against all noble ideas of collective responsibility and human goodwill. There is no reason to think that this will stop, or even that things won't get worse than they already are. It's a rapidly cascading disaster that will unspool itself with gargantuan pressure in wave after wave (literally, probably) upon the face of a collapsing planet. Denial is ubiquitous, but not in the sense of denying that catastrophes are imminent. People know this, they expect the worst, yet they don't act, because a hyperobject is too enormous to confront through individual action, and thus it demobilizes the supposedly rational actor. Climate change outscales the human imagination by multiple orders of magnitude, the proverbial elephant that can only be measured through one's tiny hands. Again, I say this not to exempt myself as the lone observer who truly understands the severity, but to implicate myself in a species-wide complacency that seems impossible to shake off. While the onus is not on people without power to make structural changes far exceeding their abilities, changes in consciousness must also occur if an existential threat of this nature is to be somehow faced.

James Massiah's Natural Born Killers MV speculates about a future already lost to humankind. The tipping point has been passed, and life is melting away into nothingness. A blazing white sun radiates its heat onto a city filled, pointedly, by people of color, who will be the real victims of the capitalist West's predatory delay. Sweat drips off flaccid bodies in desperate need of relief, but indoors is only a smaller chamber of the furnace. Like in some cursed Tsai Ming-Liang film, the city's rusted infrastructure acts as a relic of a disappeared civilization. We follow one man's stumbling progress through this hell as a hypnotic groove gives illusory momentum. James Massiah's echoing verses drift through the haze and back out again, leaving us in thrall to a looping instrumental as insistent as the sun's rays. The tone is almost wistful, perhaps memorializing these last stragglers and their futile struggle, perhaps acknowledging a better world that never arrived. We only have this one now, and everything's dissolving into a hot primordial sludge. We won't even have ourselves anymore by the time the sun's through with us.

Clipping - Blood of the Fang

This feels like the only possible follow-up to the terror evoked by James Massiah's. Densely allusive, Blood of the Fang takes on a painful legacy of black suffering and rebellion, calling on names of leaders past to give fierce urgency to the present. Some of the citations invite scrutiny -- Eldridge Cleaver feels like an odd inclusion on a list featuring Angela Davis -- but the volley has an aesthetic force that's hard to deny in the moment. Over thumping beats and roiling waves of low-end, Daveed Diggs raps to establish a hard-won clarity under the looming threat of bloody darkness. His commanding presence recalls the force and focus of his superb contributions in BLINDSPOTTING, a film made in tandem with Clipping collaborator and MV champion Carlos Lopez Estrada. I was a big fan of that one last year, and the Clipping project has produced some outstanding music videos as well. Maybe 2020's the year I start exploring their discography more seriously.

Travis Scott - Highest in the Room

Travis Scott's low-key persona meshes interestingly with the tripped-out MVs for which he's become famous. Here as in Goosebumps, Scott seems like a mere observer to the hallucinations happening around him, drifting through a series of strange visions that feel as if they've come from unknown corners of his mind, perhaps even a reality altogether different from our own. As good as the song was, much of Goosebump's success owes to BRTHR's direction, which proved to be more than a one-trick feat in Kali Uchis' Like a Stranger. But it would be a mistake to write Travis Scott out of his own aesthetic predilections. None of his MVs would exist without his input and approval, and this is most evident with Highest in the Room, co-directed by Scott himself with the seemingly infallible Dave Meyers. If not quite as inspired as Goosebumps, Highest in the Room still offers an engaging variety of digital trickery for fans of Scott who've come to expect nothing less from the dazed, recessive affect created by his music and MV forays.

Ross from Friends - Epiphany

One of this year's great musical pleasures was catching up with one of last year's: Ross from Friends, a producer whose ironic moniker belies the vast wells of feeling summoned up by his music. 2018's Family Portrait, Ross' debut studio album, is just one miracle after another of warm, rhythmic, reverberating production that lights the listener up from inside. He has some kind of preternatural skill at making electronic music organic, at making complexity intuitive, at distilling emotion from stray snippets of sound, melody, and vocal samples. Listen to the voice billowing through Epiphany and feel how it hints at some nameless, mystical state of being for just one example among many. The MV itself is an accomplishment of extreme subtlety, built out of realistic environments just a bit too perfect, a bit too smooth to exist in our world. The camera charts a course through Epiphany's mysterious complex on an unknown mission, arriving at last in a glowing, forested mountainside that's also just too beautiful to be real. It's telling that this deceptive MV is more attuned to the post-cinematic present than most 2019 feature films; for those paying attention, the reward is a delicate sublimity that seems impossible to describe, but sweetly enveloping all who are open to it.

Wiley - My One (feat. Tory Lanez, Kranium, Dappy)

I feel like ending this big long post on a high note. Not out of any reflexive need for positivity or Christian-derived uplift, but just because I want something thrilling to round out everything I've rounded up here. I'm also disappointed this is the only showing grime has on this list, and not even a proper grime song at that! But Wiley's earned enough grime cred to last several lifetimes, and I can't argue when the results are so wonderful. It took me a few watches of this joyous video to realize the second guest artist isn't actually in it, that his verses are artfully supplemented by shots of that great dance crew. More conspicuous is the title credit absence of the female vocalist singing My One's chorus, as the Jukebox writers pointed out a while back. She's the secret weapon who shouldn't be secret, the jubilant center that holds all the other parts together. But taken as it is, My One is still a welcome gift from Wiley, even if the Caribbean-styled album it seemed to be announcing hasn't yet materialized. He can take his time though. I'll be happy whenever it gets here.

(Little personal sidenote: in the MV, Wiley looks as if he's at the indoor waterfall in Singapore I visited this summer! I can't guess where this place actually is, especially if it's somehow in the UK, so I like to just project my memory and imagine it is Singapore after all.)

But wait! There might be more! Not only has the Jukebox brought out a big batch of new year-end entries, but Shaviro has also posted a list of his favorite '19 MVs, including a bunch I haven't seen. Already my primary sources when it comes to finding current MVs, I thought I'd try to scan those new arrivals for any late contenders worth adding to my own list, but time's running out, and the prospect is rather daunting. So let's consider this one a wrap, and I'll put up a place-holder post where I can add any new discoveries if I feel the motivation. For now, enjoy! By the time another year passes, so too will an entire decade have ended, with another well underway; see you then and there!!

12/19

THE IRISHMAN is a truly exceptional film, in no small part thanks to Robert De Niro's carefully modulated performance. But let's remember that films get made in the real world, and real people have to deal with this kind of behavior from De Niro. As the film deservingly earns more and more acclaim, I feel it's important to remember that it's still very much a product of the male-dominated film world, and that, while Scorsese uses the film to reflexively comment on the consequences of unchecked masculinity, his own inner circle is responsible for some of the abuses safely abstracted into film art. It's all well and good to lament the flaws of a passing generation, but we're the ones who have to do the work of fixing the world they've left us. So while I cherish THE IRISHMAN, I'd like to at least make space here for critiques that will only grow more urgent with time.

In other Scorsese news...I just got around to reading this widely-approved essay defending cinema against corporate art. There's not much I can say that he hasn't, other than voicing my confusion about the prominent Ari Aster shout-out (presumably he needed a representative of the new generation, but was that really the name that stood out above all the rest?). Cinema has an X factor that commercial entertainment is missing, and it's felt everywhere from the MCU to TV in all its many interchangeable forms. The gulf between THE IRISHMAN and just about anything else you could watch this year -- or, indeed, the last several years, maybe since Scorsese's own SILENCE -- is wide enough to fit any number of propositions about what makes cinema cinema. 

Richard Brody offers up his own interrogations: classical Hollywood vs. current Hollywood, fantasy vs. superheroics, public domain vs. private property, the open-ended potential of streaming vs. corporate curation, home viewing vs. the big-screen's unequally-provided pleasures, vertical integration pre-1948 and its functional equivalent in streaming's emergent model (Netflix, Disney+, etc.). As Nick Pinkerton said before in an essay of similar intent, cinema has survived like a rose in concrete through plenty of inhospitable conditions, but it's hard not to feel like something's gone fatally, fundamentally wrong this time around.

Here's a really good interview of Adam Kotsko by Patrick Blanchfield on the former's book The Prince of This World. These two guys are among my favorite Twitter presences, perhaps because their training in theology gives their antagonistic relationship to the US social order a moral clarity that others only fumble toward. While the interview I've linked helps elucidate the concepts and discoveries of Kotsko's book (which I highly recommend, just to be clear), one tangent of thought that came to me while reading this came from considering Kotsko's also-great Why We Love Sociopaths. Kotsko speculates that the anti-hero trend in narrative art is a way of reinvesting belief in individual power to meaningfully succeed in this world. I think this is dead-on, but I also think there may something specific about the Trump phenomenon that went unexplored in his claim. I wonder if maybe Trump represents a perversely hyperbolic form of triumph, an against-the-odds victory that 'proved' you don't have to abide by political correctness to access the spoils of white men past. From this angle, Trump functions as a rejection of meaningful sociality, acting instead as a kind of anti-social symbol of individualist dominance freed from cultural or political constraints. Total freedom to do as you please, indulging your worst tendencies without punishment -- in fact, being rewarded for that very disregard of other people and their pesky demands for respect. A fantasy to be sure, but perhaps a compelling one for people who correctly deduce the system is rigged but incorrectly attribute the imperilment of their status to women, minorities, LGBT individuals, etc.

Short but affecting piece on the parallels between domestic violence and the abuse of state power. Ukraine seems to be on everyone's mind, and if Natalia Antonova is right, the US might find itself becoming Ukraine before long.

I liked PARASITE well enough, but I've found that it's left a frustrating blank in my mind, revealing neither flaws nor virtues over time. Though Kelley Dong's critique is perhaps stronger than mine would be (I usually accept despair, hopelessness, and resignation as meaningful engagements with the present world), I agree with much of their criticisms. One of the critiques I like best is also one of the most succinct, courtesy of Neil Bahadur: for all its supposed anti-capitalist fury, PARASITE's indictment is a fairly standard liberal one. It's all just a little too safe, and that's the last thing I really want from a project like this.

Finally some good news for Maryland: Mike Miller, a not-so-secret conservative Democrat who's been Senate president for over three decades, will be succeeded by a more progressive president. It appears other progressives are cheered by this, but from my point of view, the struggle over the Kirwan Commission seems the most telling. Although Ferguson will most likely back the funding increases, Maryland's wings are still clipped by our inexplicably popular Republican Governor, who will fight back just as hard, if not harder. A leftward shift in Maryland's Senate is good; getting Hogan out of office for someone who can implement progressive policies is even better. 2022 feels like a long way away.

Lots to consider in this impassioned overview of the anti-TV movement, with which I have more than a few sympathies, but for now let me offer some slight pushback by highlighting the special disgust reserved for women in this line of thought, from Fahrenheit 451's Mildred Sontag to Public Enemy's She Watch Channel Zero?! up to Pulitzer-winning TV critic Emily Nussbaum, with her approving citations of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Tina Fey. I suspect there's a long established dichotomy at play here, the passively feminine mainstream vs. the rebelliously masculine underground, which maps itself particularly well onto the questions of agency and pacification raised by TV skeptics. While there are, of course, plenty of men responsible for television's hegemonic rise (many of whom are also mentioned in the Baffler essay), I'm feeling wary of the ways that sexism might get laundered through an argument I generally find convincing.

Nice interview here of Francis Ford Coppola by Adam Nayman, the occasion being Coppola's then-new TETRO, which I just watched and quite liked (with certain reservations).