October Top Ten

1. Jungle: "Candle Flame"(featuring Erick the Architect) (Caiowla/AWAL).

Single, video, and choreography of the year. As the oft acid jazzy duo Jungle, Brits Josh Lloyd-Watson and Tom McFarland seemed some of the least likely candidates to create music worth holding dear. But with "Candle Flame," they lay claim to haunted house, a specter of soul moaning above a post-disco beat. The apparently unsampled vocals sound like a dream of records past with all identifying marks fried out of distinction and twinkling doo-wop patterns hovering around the edges. It's such a raw, arresting sound that the duo felt it necessary to add Erick the Architect's raps as a placeholder more tethered to the earthly here and now. They needn't have bothered given how much presence and humanity the miraculous video, directed in one shot by Charlie Di Placido, returns to the song. Shay Latukolan's astonishing choreography uses the flow of gossip to activate his dancers. Individuals form canons as others pick up and spread the news. They attach to one another with copycat precision in a parody of bitchy clubgoers. But at the song's climax, the entire ensemble breaks free from the robotics and move together in looser-limbed ebullience. It's one of the most euphoric rejoinders to the idea that music organizes time. Here, music forges relationships and the dancers unhaunt the song, the emotional gibberish of the vocals finding a moment of articulation in their synchronized bliss-energy. 

2. Vladimir Sorokin: The Queue (NYRB, 2008; originally published 1985). 

Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone: What It Felt Like to Live Through The Collapse of Communism and Democracy (Adam Curtis, 2022).  

Tetris (Jon S. Baird, 2023).

Save for 21 blank pages intended to represent sleep, Sorokin's novel is comprised entirely of dialogue. 33 pages are devoted to a roll call. Several pages of oohs and aahs stand in for sexual activity. But mostly, people in the former Soviet Union chat with one another waiting in a series of lines for unnamed goods. With no other enunciative force in place, the novel forces the line to encounter itself as Sorokin makes clear in an incisive 2008 afterword: "The collapse of the line was much more painful for the collective Soviet body than the collapse of the Soviet Union...Gray and boring, but inescapable, the line dissected the body into pieces, pacified and disciplined it, gave people time to think about the advantages of socialism and about the class struggle; and in the end they were rewarded with food and goods" (261; 257). 

Curtis gives viewers seven one-hour episodes to think about socialism for his latest Molotov documentary. As with The Queue, TraumaZone abjures similar enunciative functions such as voiceover and non-diegetic music, using only occasional explanatory titles over undeployed footage from the BBC's Moscow bureau. Less sanguine than Sorokin about the line, Curtis nevertheless mourns the loss of any ability to think collectively. How even Francis Fukuyama could view the subsequent slide into capitalist kleptocracy as utopian destiny defies belief. 

For a more triumphant narrative, Tetris, an Apple TV+ production, recounts the struggle to wrest the licensing rights for the evergreen video game out of the Soviet union just before its collapse. Given Hollywood's inability to think collectively (or to collectively bargain), the story is told via car chases, last-minute reversals, and characters partitioned off into Good and Bad categories. When the principal players (to name them would go against the spirit of this entry) finally get the game in proper capitalist hands, the Pet Shop Boys' "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)" plays over their triumph/the closing credits with no apparent irony.

3. Assassins, Kweskin Theatre, Stamford, CT (June 17). And at the same time that Fukuyama was proclaiming the end of history, this is the democracy he was celebrating. In what is quite possibly Stephen Sondheim's greatest achievement, all the Americans who attempted and/or succeeded to assassinate a president come together to sing "Everybody's got the right to be happy/to their dreams" as each points a gun at the audience. Also, please allow this entry to serve as a reminder to support local theater since this production was a far more unforgettable experience than Sweeney Todd on Broadway.

4. Pierre Leguillon: The Barefoot Promise (Triangle) A coffee-table book of film stills of the human foot in various forms. And far less cheap than that might seem. It sometimes takes a good scan to see how the foot signifies in certain photos - a renegade toe from Ozu's The End of Summer or a recessed Cinderella. Which means this is a gift from a true scholar of cinema, one who knows that much of the art of mise-en-scène lies in pulling your eye away from the main action.

5. Rectify (Created by Ray McKinnon, 2013-2016) A rewatch of The Sopranos is in order. Until then, this is the greatest serial of the Peak TV era I've ever seen. After nineteen years on death row, Daniel Holden is exonerated with the help of DNA evidence. But his return to small-town Georgia is far from Edenic. In Daniel's subsequent quest to keep meaninglessness at bay, we're forced to confront the decisions we make on a daily, even hourly basis. No other series and few films have glimpsed so penetratingly into quotidian existence. And while I've been known to make condescending remarks about the art of acting, the performances here humble me. Aden Young as Daniel is damn near extraterrestrial in his portrayal of Daniel. But Abigail Spencer, J. Smith-Cameron, Adelaide Clemens, Clayne Crawford, Luke Kirby, Bruce McKinnon, Jake Austin Walker, and J. D. Evermore (I need to list their names) all dumbfound.

6. To Leslie (Michal Morris, 2022)

The Lost King (Stephen Frears, 2022)

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret (Kelly Fremon Craig, 2023) Three absolutely fantastic middlebrow films. Believe the hype re: To Leslie, a tale of redemption told with such simplicity, hell, such purity that I was crying buckets at the end when a clear line communication between the principals is finally opened up. Frears is the finest middlebrow director extant so the high quality of The Lost King is no surprise. A biopic on Philippa Langley's quest to exhume the remains of King Richard III, it has trenchant things to say about urban planning and the victors of history. It's a measure of the freshness of Judy Blume's 1970 book Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret that it took such a criminally long time to make it to the screen. Hopefully, this consistently inventive adaptation, along with the terrific 2023 documentary Judy Blume Forever, will inspire more Blume-authored projects.

7. Jason Farago, "Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill," The New York Times, October 10, 2023, p. 38 This bullshit again. It's a fool's errand to pick apart each nugget of wrongness in this venal thinkpiece on why "ours is the least innovative century for the arts in 500 years." For the real goal of articles like this is to assure the Times-reading landed gentry that the world is not changing.

8. Hugh Hodges: The Fascist Groove Thing: A History of Thatcher's Britain in 21 Mixtapes (PM) As a catalogue of popular/semipopular musicians' response to Thatcherism, essential; as a reading experience, numbing. "I knew I was never going to get everything and everyone I wanted into these pages" (155), Hodges rues. But boy does he ever try. Organized around 24 mixtapes (not 21 since 3 come in two parts), his pedantic, rockist prose cries out for pruning. And that's without mentioning the ten pages of recommendations for further reading and the 39-page annotated discography. In a footnote listing songs that addressed nuclear war, he admits/threatens, "I could go on" (137). Oh, we know, Hugh, we know. 

9. Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay: Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan (University of Texas Press) The rare book that deepens the mysteries of a discography. Pappademas respects the abyss at the center of Steely Dan's music. Seizing on the inexpressive codes of Brill Building pop, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker disappeared themselves behind lyrics knotted with proper nouns and a sound besotted with jazz heard from a suburban afar. "The music tells you nothing about the people who made it," (3) Pappademas tells us early on. So with the help of LeMay's wry illustrations, he provides exegeses of damn near every lifeform populating the Steely Dan songbook. Dr. Wu, Kid Charlemagne, Josie, the Gaucho, Third World Man all get a chapter. Fagen and Becker too - they're the most prominent aliens on board. It's the most trenchant analysis of the Dan extant. And still you close the book knowing that you will never get to the bottom of this parallax view of an oeuvre.

10. Olivia Rodrigo: Guts (Concrete/Motown/Quality Control, 2023) Album of the year. Some may welcome the insight Rodrigo's lyrics provide into the travails of dating while famous. Me, I'm in it for the music, man. Not since Lady Gaga has an artist evinced so much joy in the sheer craft of songwriting. She rocks, she pops, she Fleetwood Macs, she raps some. Even her parlor ballads exude variety and inventiveness. Two great albums already and she's not yet 21. So to all potential suitors, I have this to say: Dude (or gal, cf. "Lacy"), don't bother! You'll probably just bore her and, even worse, keep her from writing songs.