Weekend Reads (Dec 10): Year-End Lists, Sad Christmas Songs, Douglas Adams
Recommended weekend reading for December 10, 2022.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
It’s that time of year again, when critics and pundits begin publishing their year-end lists chronicling the best, well, whatever from 2022. Movie critic Justin Chang has published his list of the year’s best movie performances.
In trying to sort through my favorites, I was reminded of how many terrific performances this year were given in tandem, by two lead actors who forged the kind of on-screen bond that goes beyond mere chemistry or rapport. I was reminded of this further when the British Independent Film Awards recently instituted a new category, best joint lead performance. It’s an inspired decision that acknowledges just how often excellence happens in pairs — not that you’d necessarily know it from some of this year’s more ridiculous Oscar campaigns, which like to bend the definitions of “lead” and “supporting” to suit their own convenience.
Meanwhile, the Treble staff have posted their list of 2022’s 50 best albums.
At first glance, a year like 2022 can seem like the Big Albums are the story — when every blockbuster artist and living legend releases something new in a calendar year, it’s inescapable. But that’s not exactly what happened; though our favorite music of the year occasionally skews pop, what stands out most are the albums by underground talents that seem to reach ever higher. New releases from artist we’ve been watching for a while proved to pay off in big ways, while a few new favorites offered a solid foundation for great things to come.
And if that weren’t enough, they’ve also shared their picks for 2022’s 100 best songs.
Y’all know how much I love Bandcamp, so of course I’m going to link to their year-end recap of 2022’s best albums and most essential albums.
Polygon is in the middle of their year-end recaps, too, which includes lists of the year’s best video games, comics, and TV shows. Here’s what they said re. Severance, a series that I loved but haven’t been able to write much about:
Severance doesn’t seem like it should work as well as it does. Every bit of the sci-fi thriller — from its tightly tuned performances to the evocatively low-key score, even to the concept of the show itself — feels like a high-wire act, a series of plates spinning atop sticks and staying perfectly balanced. The world where Lumon Industries has allowed (or, more disquietingly, required) workers to sever their work and home identities is trippy and methodic, like an Escher painting come to life.
Kotaku’s Isaiah Colbert has released his list of 2022’s best anime.
The year 2022 hath blessed us with an illustrious catalog of anime, the best of which garnered their own dedicated day of the week among the anime faithful with the likes of Bleach Mondays and Chainsaw Man Tuesdays. Many of you probably wouldn’t put up a fuss if this list was solely comprised of that buzz-saw dude, but I’m not quite so bold to do such a thing. Outside of the usual suspects of returning and debuting shonen anime, this year brought a diverse selection of shows more than worthy of basking in the limelight as the best anime of 2022, according to myself, the Otaku of Kotaku.
Sadly, the only title I’ve seen on his list is Netflix’s Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, which I had mixed feelings about.
Stepping away from music, movies, etc., Kevin Hurler has put together a list of 2022’s biggest online scandals, including the “chili discourse,” the “problematic authors spreadsheet,” and the ratio between penis size and intelligence.
You can find plenty more “scandals” in this Twitter thread. God bless the internet.
One more thing re. year-end lists: Director Daniel Kwan, who co-wrote and co-directed Everything Everywhere All at Once (one of my favorite films in 2022), tweeted some wise words concerning the year-end frenzy.
I am so grateful to the fans who love this film and have made it their own. I know for many, this story and characters mean a lot so any slight towards the film feels like a personal attack, but lashing out does everyone a disservice (and is counteractive to the film’s message).
Always ask yourself, “What would Waymond do?”
Related: My review of Everything Everywhere All at Once, which I described as “ambitious and bizarre, raunchy and deeply moving, nonsensical and thought-provoking — and totally unlike anything else you’re likely to see all year long.”
As we near Christmas, we want to focus on the “merry” and “jolly” aspects of the season, but some of our most beloved carols urge us to consider the darkness and melancholy, instead.
It is almost as if we cannot allow ourselves to be sad at Christmas, as if we have a preternatural aversion to admitting that for many, the holidays are a reminder that the world is not as we want it to be. Any such admission becomes a sort of moral failure. So rather than dwell on the sadness, we look away and sing the merry and bright songs instead. But if we are attentive enough, we will see that many of our most beloved secular and sacred carols have sorrowful connotations intrinsically wrapped up inside them, which often become their most endearing characteristic.
Related: My reflections on Sufjan Stevens’ “Christmas Unicorn,” a bizarre holiday epic that acknowledges the season’s contradictions and encourages us “to acknowledge them, find the sublime in them if possible, and yes, laugh at them, and our own hubris and falsehoods.”
If your family’s looking for a new Advent tradition, K. B. Hoyle suggests watching Andor.
[T]here’s no Luke Skywalker without Cassian Andor — no joyous turn of victory for the Rebellion (against all odds!) without the work of hundreds of shadow operatives who make the ultimate sacrifice. Not for themselves, but for their children. And their children’s children. Andor depicts how desperate, dangerous, and lacking in glory the Rebel life really is.
Like Severance, Andor was another TV series that I really enjoyed — I called it “the best thing to happen to Star Wars in years” — but haven’t been able to write much about.
30 years ago, Warp Records released Artificial Intelligence, an influential electronic music compilation featuring the likes of Richard D. James (Aphex Twin), Autechre, and Richie Hawtin. To celebrate its upcoming reissue, The Quietus presents an oral history of Artificial Intelligence that looks back on the early ‘90s electronic music scene as well as the compilation’s production and impact.
30 years on Warp are reissuing the compilation, with its status as a document of a burgeoning and pioneering new strand of British electronic music now firmly embedded in history. Here, artists that featured on the album such as Autechre, B12 and the Orb, those involved in the album’s design Phil Wolstenholme and Ian Anderson from the Designer’s Republic, journalists Simon Reynolds and John Doran, Planet Mu founder Mike Paradinas and the co-creator of the IDM list Brian Behlendorf, all discuss the making, impact and history of the record. As well as debate the legacy of IDM both in terms of its arguably problematic meaning, as well as the culture that came with it.
Douglas Adams’ sci-fi classic Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy was released here in the States 42 years ago. 3 Quarks Daily asked authors, comedians, journalists, professors, and others to weigh in on what makes the “five-book trilogy” so special. Gregory Morgan described the series’ approach to sci-fi:
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy showed me that science fiction did not have to be serious. Most science fiction I read, and I read a lot, had humor on the fringes, but HGG had humor and silliness at the core. That is not to say it did not have social commentary too. In fact the use of comedy made for a more effective critique of 20th century society.
Via Kottke, who has returned from his months-long blogging sabbatical.
Heather Williams was an intelligence officer for 13 years, and reflects on the various ways that agents can be traumatized by their work in the field, as well as various ethical and professional quandaries that they experience.
Intelligence professionals adhere to a strict code of ethics, which includes remaining neutral when informing policymakers about issues. This makes them party to life-and-death decisions, but without the agency to determine their outcomes. They must defer to policymakers about whether, for example, the U.S. will act to prevent atrocities they anticipate. Missing something, too, can bring on a sense of guilt and blame.
Intelligence professionals can also experience moral injury, a less-understood form of trauma. Moral injury stems from failure to prevent, or bearing witness to, acts that violate their deeply held moral beliefs and expectations. This can happen when intelligence programs overstep their authorities and violate civil freedoms, or even when those in a position of political power fail to protect secrets obtained through great risk and sacrifice.
Via The Dispatch.
The headlines are filled with accounts of religious and political leaders who fall into scandal because of ethical or moral failure, apologize, and then go right back to the positions they once held. But what does repentance really look like, especially for those in position of authority?
The request for trust and forgiveness pulls at Evangelical heartstrings. After all, have we not all sinned? Do we not all need forgiveness? Are we not obliged to forgive? But at the same time, there’s a difference between forgiveness and trust. We can forgive, but we can’t see inside a man’s soul. We don’t know who is truly worthy of our trust.
I’d like to suggest an alternative approach, one that doesn’t ask churches or pastors to peer into the hearts of men who’ve gone astray. Here’s the idea: Repentance doesn’t look like “restoration,” it looks like resignation. The best thing that a minister or a leader with a “changed heart” can do is to go away.
Requires a free subscription to read. To make his case, David French references the fascinating story of John Profumo, an English aristocrat and soldier who fell into moral scandal in the 1960s.
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