My mind, as a consequence, is now as constantly cluttered as my twitter feed. I can’t just make an albums of the year list now because that won’t be representative of my state of mind for 2012. I’m not obsessed with music, or movies, or TV shows, as much as I’m just obsessed with things in general. That’s the legacy of twitter, I think, more than anything: it’s making us less and less insular in our own little worlds.
Hence, my end of the year list for 2012 – a random hodgepodge of things that blew my mind in 2012.
10. RH Bill (historic legislation, sign of our country’s increasing secularism, what took us so long?)
I know we just made history and all that, but this can’t be any higher on the list since all we did was just basically legislate common sense. The fact that we had to debate the existence of this bill at all was absurd enough. Let’s all move on now.
9. The Carrie-Brody sex scandal (epic “Homeland” scene, safe hardcore porn)
The funniest TV moment of 2012 did not belong to “Louie”, or “Girls”, or even “30 Rock”. That distinction belongs to “Homeland” by a landslide. Just look at this scene for God’s sake: from the horror and visceral pain mingling in the faces of Saul and Peter, to the staff pretending that nothing’s awkward at all; if you do not find anything remotely hilarious with this scene, then you have no hope as a human being.
8. Mad Men season 5 song choices (Matt Weiner’s taste, vision, and general awesomeness)
After making us wait for an extra year, Mad Men finally returned on March to the tune of Mademoiselle Jessica Paré’s rendition of the obscure Yé-yé classic “Zou Bisou Bisou”. Rewarding his long-suffering viewers by going full on twee? That’s just how Matt Weiner rolls.
This clearly wasn’t the best Mad Men season (and not even in the top 3) but boy, was Weiner on fire musically this year. The series’ transition to the late 60s surely gave him enough ammunition but you still had to choose wisely and use wisely. The Beach Boys’ “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times” during Roger Sterling’s LSD trip was very apt, albeit a little too obvious. Nancy Sinatra’s “You Only Live Twice” sort of rescued an otherwise blah season finale, but was a little too populist for Mad Men standards.
Which brings us to the Beatles' “Tomorrow Never Knows” at the end of the “Lady Lazarus” episode. Holy shit. Now that’s how you choose and use a song.
Season 5 was essentially about the cultural upheaval that was transpiring under the noses of our 50s-era anti-heroes and their increasing anachronism as a result. One of the things that happen to longtime viewers of any TV series is that a part of you ends up perpetually inhabiting its respective milieu. In the 90s, I knew how cozy it felt to sit on Chandler Bing’s couch in Central Perk. I’ve watched “Friends” so many times that I feel like I’ve been in that coffee shop or in Monica and Rachel’s flat so many times. By their 10th and last season, I’ve already developed such an uncanny feel for those places and the rhythm of their banter.
That’s what was so genius about Weiner’s use of “Tomorrow Never Knows”: he disrupted that Mad Men rhythm we’ve all developed and was thus able to simulate how fucking mind-blowing that song must’ve been in 1966. We were so used to hearing Phil Spector and Brill Building fare in earlier seasons. The first Beatles references in the series were “Do You Know a Secret” and “A Hard Day’s Night”. One minute they were singing “Drive My Car”, and the next minute…what the hell…is this even music? What better way to show how left behind Don Draper and his ilk were than to use the single most brilliant and jarring shift in pop music history (the Beatles in between “Rubber Soul” and “Revolver”)?
(By the way, the clip featured here isn’t the one in the episode; this one’s a fan video, which isn’t bad either)
7. “Mid Air” by Paul Buchanan (ex-Blue Nile frontman's solo effort, after-hours album of the century)
We all probably knew, at the back of our minds, that this was bound to happen. Ever since The Blue Nile’s “Hats” came out and featured Paul Buchanan at his brooding best, it was clear that his destiny was to be an old-school crooner. So when it finally happened – the minute I put “Mid Air” on my CD player – the world stopped, closed its bars, and walked on the streets alone in the cold midnight with a cigarette on its hand and a jacket on the other, while thinking about a love that was so beautiful that it hurt.
6. “The Higgs Boson: Steaming Particle of Bull$#!%” by Bruno Maddox (GQ feature, ball-busting CERN critique, foul-mouthed meditation on modern science)
2012 was a busy year for me, more so than I was previously accustomed to, which explains my lowest 12-month book consumption in years. But while I wasn’t able to get my usual amount of literary fix in print, my newly forged love affair with twitter opened me up to a universe of excellent feature and essay-writing on the internet.
Those who still say that the internet is not a place for high art need to check out pieces by Kara VanderBijl of thisrecording.com, Brian Philips and Alex Pappademas of Grantland.com, and Laurel Fantauzzo of basically everywhere, among others. Yet, what stood out the most this year as the best-written internet piece was Bruno Maddox’s feature on the God Particle for gq.com.
It is everything that contemporary feature writing should be: irreverent, myth-shattering, well-researched, personal, insightful, intelligent, humorous, and most importantly - accessible. Maddox is basically able to do the impossible: to write a commentary on advanced physics that is laugh out loud funny and highly literary. It explains something extremely erudite through the lens of a potty-mouthed simpleton without dumbing the subject down one bit.
If you haven’t read this piece yet, you should, like right now. Seriously, it’s insanely good. You will want to kill Bruno Maddox afterwards, I promise.
5. Moonrise Kingdom (movie, an achievement in cinematic fetish, the most Wes Anderson movie of all time)
To me, “Rushmore” will forever be Wes Anderson’s best movie while “The Royal Tenenbaums” will always be his most polished, most sprawling, and most ambitious. But “Moonrise Kingdom” is definitely his most quintessential: the literary otherness, the sweet and awkward adolescence, and the hyper-fiction that has characterized Wes Anderson’s work are in full pop-up-book display here. It’s Wes Anderson on acid, basically; if the acid was served on a tea cup by a French chanteuse from the 60s.
The movie is ostensibly about cinematic loneliness and young love. But like all Wes Anderson movies, it’s also “about” the details: about the preciousness of make-believe New Penzance, about Ed Norton in Boy Scout shorts, about Tilda Swinton’s cartoonish “Social Services”, about a pubescent John Lennon hooking up with a pubescent Francoise Hardy and the arbitrary cuteness of it all, about ultra-serious boys who live in giant dollhouses, and about the 60s being some sort of a default timeless setting. It’s mostly fluff but it’s the most substantial fluff that’s even possible.
4. Jonathan Franzen’s essay on David Foster Wallace’s suicide from “Farther Away” (tribute, confessional, milestone in literary honesty)
The highlight of Jonathan Franzen’s mostly uneven collection of non-fiction, “Farther Away”, was definitely the eponymous essay. What starts out as a detailed account of Franzen’s attempt to live alone in the wild a-la Robinson Crusoe unravels eventually and almost helplessly into a movingly honest confessional on how he hates his friend David Foster Wallace for taking his own life.
As someone who devoured Franzen’s novel “Freedom” and loved every page, it was extremely enthralling to read about his complex relationship with Wallace as it became, in my mind, a sort of a behind-the-scenes featurette on how he wrote Richard and Walter as characters and as extensions of he and Wallace. I couldn’t help but admire Franzen more as a writer for being willing to be the lesser man – for admitting his “I-knew-him-when” bitterness over Wallace’s rise to fame, his jealousy over his superior talent, and his hatred at seeing him waste it all away for immortality, and as a consequence, further superiority.
This essay, and Jonathan Franzen’s body of work for that matter, is a testament to the artistic rewards of unbridled honesty. If you are willing to undress yourself, humiliate yourself, make yourself small in an attempt at gleaning any amount of truth, then you are capable of great things. “Farther Away” may be charged with Franzen’s bitterness and unresolved pain, but it triumphs in the end as an elucidating explanation of suicide and a moving tribute to life and those who decide to keep living.
3. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart/Death Cab For Cutie/Morrissey trifecta (landmark Philippine concerts, once-in-a-lifetime experiences, Pinoy hipster conventions)
Seeing these three musical acts in a four-month stretch was the highlight of the first quarter of the year where Manila suddenly turned into Singapore, and maybe Hong Kong (but certainly not Tokyo; it’ll take an improbable My Bloody Valentine concert for us to get there). I was the most psyched for Morrissey but his actual performance paled in comparison to his video intro that featured Nico, the New York Dolls, and some of his other more obscure heroes from older decades. But just to hear the dude sing “I Know It’s Over” live, in his voice that apparently hasn’t changed in four decades, was already worth the price of admission. So I’m not complaining. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, on the other hand, was exactly what I expected them to be: exuberant, sheepish, and perfect for small venues.
Little did I know that the best performance would come from the most “uncool” of the three. I came to the Death Cab For Cutie concert mainly as a favor to my 27-year-old self, the self-pity-wallowing ball of misery who truly believed that Ben Gibbard could understand what he was going through. I really don’t miss that guy at all, but I thought a lot of DCFC’s stuff are still listenable. It turns out these guys can really play. Their songs, which I’ve long shelved in forgotten nooks in my mind, were resuscitated that night at the NBC Tent through hundreds of decibels of sap, and for a moment there, it felt like 2005 again.
2. The 2nd Parker Posey episode in “Louie” (masterpiece television, Manic Pixie Dream Girl classic, holy shit that was fucking awesome)
The internet already burst out in effusive praise upon the airing of this episode, so I won’t go into detail anymore on how and why this is so amazing, since redundancy is I think the biggest crime you could commit in cyberspace. Instead, I’d like to mention something that I think this episode, or that the entire endeavour that is “Louie” signals: let’s do away with this notion of “giving the people what they want”. This phrase is completely antithetical to the creative process.
What we, the people, wanted once this episode started was to laugh and fall in love. But that’s not what we really want; that’s what decades of formulaic, risk-averse pop culture has conditioned us to “want” and Louis C.K. isn’t interested in any of that shit. So instead, he gives us 20 minutes of free-flowing unpredictability, making us worried, weirded out, moved, uncomfortable, genuinely terrified, and then fall in love, before fucking with our minds for the last 60 seconds.
For art to be truly relevant in the 21st century, I think it has to take this direction – not screwing with conventions just for the heck of it, but doing so in pursuit of truth, warmth, and earnest humanity. This is what Christy Wampole missed in her highly reductive “How To Live Without Irony” piece: sincerity doesn’t come cheap in our world today; we’ve produced too much baggage and clutter that we cannot possibly ignore. To achieve real, non-hokey earnestness, you have to be willing to get down and dirty and confront all this shit we’ve accumulated. Louis C.K. is our patron saint of shit.
1. “Europe” by Allo Darlin’ (indie pop album, not on anyone’s top 10 list, I don’t care)
Real, non-hokey earnestness used to be a staple of indie pop, until the genre grew a little stale during the aughts. That’s all behind us now because Allo Darlin’ has come to save us all.
At the end of the day – or the year, in this case – no matter how many books I weren’t able to read, or how many news or links were able to distract me on my twitter feed, I always gravitate back to music. It remains to me as the best art form there is, mainly because it’s the most abstract, but partly because it makes any rational analysis of it self-defeating, like, as they say, dancing about architecture. This is the reason why I have completely abandoned conventional music criticism and have reactively moved more towards extremely personal confessionals as a way to write about the music I love. That’s the only form of music review that I consider to be even readable in this day and age. Stop describing to me what I can hear anyway; tell me what this music does to you, says about you, or says about the world in general.
I cannot describe to you the pleasures that listening to Allo Darlin’s “Europe” gives me. I’m not that good a writer; I’m not sure anyone is. All I can tell you is that there is hope in the way we continually reach out and fill our lives with more clutter and shit, that love and happiness are earned in this way, and when they come, everything else stops mattering. And that these are the things I think about every time I play this CD.
On that note: happy New Year, everyone.
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