July Top Ten

1. Book clubs. Why I didn't join one earlier is beyond me. But thanks to a colleague, I am now part of a small but enriching conglomeration of bibliophiles who remind me to eat my fiction vegetables on a weekly basis. After having been involved for only a few months, I'm totally committed. I highly recommend the experience, especially as an antidote to the loneliness epidemic. We meet on Zoom so you don't need to reside in a densely populated area to join one. There's even a website to facilitate the process. Visit bookclubs.com today! The second book since I've joined is Borges' Labyrinths which we're about halfway through (new favorite story = "Funes the Memorious"). The first was...

 2.  Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice; Pride and Prejudice (BBC, 1995). I loved it more for its status as an ur-text than for any of its masterful narrative devices. One can feel the brusque-but-tameable hero of Harlequin romances gestating in Mr. Darcy, for instance. Austen was loathe to provide much description of place so the BBC adaptation was a welcome guide through the dialogue-heavy novel. I hope the forthcoming Netflix series makes Mrs. Bennett (Olivia Colman) less of a Chicken Little. At the very least, I think most of us share her confusion, if not rage, over entails.

3. Sally Rooney: "Misreading Ulysses," The Paris Review, December 7, 2022; Rebecca Romney: Jane Austen's Bookshelf - A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend (Simon & Schuster, 2025). Rooney's thesis on how Ulysses both dismantles and upholds the innovations of Pride and Prejudice is intriguing. Austen synthesized the masculine traditions of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding with the feminine traditions of Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood and there's a parallel synthesis of the masculine (Stephen Dedalus) and feminine (Molly Bloom) in Leopold Bloom. But this conclusion is predicated on the dubious, if not flat-out incorrect, characterization of Austen as "the author of the earliest novels in the English language still widely read and loved in the present day." Under the influence of Rooney, I was surprised to find mention of any books at all in Pride and Prejudice much less that the act of reading comprises a fair bit of the narrative ambience. This is where Romney's book helps. As a reading experience, it's not recommended - Wiki-style biographies of pre-Austen writers punctuated by recollections of Romney's rare-book exploits. But as a guide for What To Read Next/After Austen, it's indispensable. Onward to Frances Burney, Charlotte Lennox, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, etc.

4. Doug Rice: Blood of Mugwump - A Tiresian Tale of Incest (FC2, 1996). A slim avant-garde novel in which a character (more like a node, really) named Doug Rice morphs into and out of his sister and grandmother. The words "cock" and "cunt" appear with frequency. Rice quotes Joyce, Faulkner, and the Pointer Sisters. A line like "By carefully studying a videotape, he had learned a trick from Meryl Streep about different ways to alter x-rays" snaps you out of the miasma of permeable borders before plunging you back into the Imaginary "world without words, amen." Photos (some fin-de-20ème-siècle, some contemporary) purporting to depict Rice and/or his sister illustrate several chapters (called "routines" here). Subsequent works by Rice include Janey Quixote and A Good Cuntboy is Hard to Find.

5. Charles Baxter: Blood Test - A Comedy (Pantheon, 2024). Unfunny variation on Minority Report wherein a suburban nobody pays thousands to a shady Theranos-type entity which claims it can predict that he will commit a murder. Always trust an author who lards his novel with arch directions such as "just flip ahead a couple of pages after you've gone out to your kitchen for some popcorn and a beer, and the story will resume." Done, dude.  

 

6. Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Journey to the End of the Night (1932); Paul Bowles: Let It Come Down (1952); Graham Greene: A Burnt-Out Case (1960). Three Heart of Darkness variations that need to be put down for a nap. The best I can say for the Greene is that I excavated one handy apreçu ("As usual there was no silence [in a Congo leper colony]. Silence belonged to cities.") and a cranky but funny one-liner ("Perhaps it's His will that you should take a nembutal."). The worst I can say about the Bowles is that I highlighted only two lines of its 300-plus pages. Improbably, the Céline was the best of the lot even though it's the longest/hardest to take and the author was a widely read anti-Semite. The locales are far-flung (i.e., the hero escapes deepest Africa) which knocks some of the stuffing out of the colonialist existentialism. Céline has a feel for flânerie in New York City, Detroit, and Paris. And he mentions avant-garde films, supernaturally hip for 1932. But in case you're curious, know that the opening of William T. Vollman's afterword does a spot-on impression of all three authorial voices: “Reader, fuck you!...You think I give a shit whether or not you’ve read this book? Or that Céline’s ghost does? That would be the day!” So reader, make this the day you read something else. 

 

7. The Listeners (Janicza Bravo, 2024). This four-episode BBC One miniseries, adapted by Jordan Tannahill from his 2021 novel, concerns an English teacher (Rebecca Hall, superb) driven to despair by The Hum, a low frequency emanating from an undetctable source. She's relieved to discover a group of people who claim to hear it as well. But they soon display cultish tendencies, a fiasco only exacerbated by the fact that she's grown closer to one of the listeners - her teenage student. Inspired by real testimonials, The Listeners focuses too much on the interpersonal to the detriment of the intrapersonal, to how sound can reorient our relationship to our bodies. But especially under the tutelage of Bravo, who directed 2020's fantastic @Zola, it's a heartbreaking portrayal of how trauma and illness can destroy relationships while creating unforeseen ones, reminiscent of Fearless (Peter Weir, 1993), Away from Her (Sarah Polley, 2006), and Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995).  

8. "Boots" from 28 Years Later (Danny Boyle, 2025). The film is a solid B+. But the score, composed by Scottish hip-hop soundscapers Young Fathers, is one of the best I've ever heard. As usual, you cannot glean this from the soundtrack album (on Milan) although it's far less abstract than the norm, beginning with two surprisingly jaunty songs as opposed to limbs desperate to find their host bodies. But heard in the film, a track like "Boots" augments the horror of this third installment in the zombie franchise. The Fathers sample a 1915 spoken-word recording of Rudyard Kipling's harrowing anti-war poem "Boots" as if it were the reanimated dead. Recited by American actor Taylor Holmes with increasing terror, it appears on the film's soundtrack with no clear source such that we don't know if the sound is diegetic. It just creeps towards us, dragging along industrial groans and ululations. Then it disappears, and we're left fearful of its return.

9. Lola Young: This Wasn't Meant for You Anyway (Island, 2024). 23 when this second album was released last year, Young already has the makings of a supernova. And she seems poised to stick around if only because she comes off so tough. Pressed up against the fourth wall on the cover, she's in our face throughout. Ten out of eleven songs come with an explicit language warning, including the spoken-word "Outro." But because she's so tough, the men and women in her life think she can handle the ghosting, co-dependency, and assholism they throw her way. These time-wasting drips put her on the defense starting with the great album title and winding through each song wherein she tells them all precisely where to get off in her cigarette-cured South Londonese. So here's hoping her longest-lasting relationship is with producers/songwriters/musicians Carter Lang (SZA, the new Justin Bieber) and Buddy Ross (Haim, Travis Scott) because together with Young, they've conjured at least eight different ways to grab your ear - distressed bhangra, poppin' post-punk, open-spaced verses clashing against brickwalled choruses, whatever Lola wants. All of which is to prep you for the September 19th release of her next album, I'm Only F**king Myself.

10. Leaving...on the Criterion Channel. My new favorite genre! Almost 100 years ago, Walter Benjamin clocked collecting/hoarding as a method for denying mortality; can't die when I have twenty-and-forever-counting hard drives choked with films, music, and books to consume. But mere death isn't enough to help with prioritizing what particular text to consume. Each month the Criterion Channel mimics death with an entire category of films leaving the channel that month. It's a perfect way to move from collecting to consuming (yes yes with Adorno cackling at you from beyond). By July 31st, I downed all the Argentinian noirs (fave was Fernando Ayala's nasty 1956 The Bitter Stems), most of the Noir and the Blacklist titles (John Berry's unbearably intense 1951 He Ran All the Way deserves to be better known), and even some mainstream crap (1990's Blue Steel, one of Kathryn Bigelow's worst). And I look forward to filling in some Guiraudie and Chang-Dong gaps by August 31st.

January Top Ten

1. Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024). A film maudit was expected and a film maudit was what we got - a loony mess but an endearing one. So for me, someone who hasn't seen a Coppola film since 1992's Bram Stoker's Dracula because I've been busy and also, some of the titles didn't strike me, to quote Jiminy Glick, my only question is why does this feel like the work of a high school student? Coppola began conceiving of this in 1977, well past his adolescence. But the allegorical bedrock, the self-importance, the reckless spending all bespeak the habits of the Clearasil set. What happened (or didn't)?

 2.  George Michael: "Father Figure" in Babygirl (Halina Reijn, 2024). Unlike the Fifty Shades trilogy, there was less time here to lay out the rules of the S/M relationship between Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson (or ignore them altogether as in Some Call It Loving). So despite the bravest performance of Kidman's career, much of this comes off as rushed and underbaked. But every so often, a film will transform a song you think you've got down and that happens when "Father Figure" scores a steamy acquiescence scene. "That's all I wanted," the song starts, signaling not only a post-coital smokiness but a maturity rooted in Michael's openness to appear vulnerable. The skeletal track (mostly Michael on a Roland D-50) leaves no hiding spaces for his breathy vocal and the backup singers (Shirley Lewis and an inaudible-to-me Michael) take the chorus. He's as naked as Kidman in the scene and the amplified theatre sound leaves us too with no hiding spaces. It's an embarrassingly adult song, light years away from (though not necessarily better than!) than the teenpop of Wham! which fizzled out barely a year before. "Father Figure" has him growing up so quickly it forces you to reexamine if Kidman's submission is all that rushed to begin with. 

3. Matthew Restall: Elton John's Blue Moves (33 1/3). Riot. Exile. Forever Changes. Big deal. But when the 33 1/3 series editors chose to publish an entire book on Elton John's dreadful 1976 double album, I perked up. Restall posits several theories as to why Blue Moves "was a success that failed, and yet also a failure that succeeded," i.e., it sold as well as its predecessor (1975's Rock of the Westies) but felt like a turkey - punk, John's coming out as bisexual in Rolling Stone two weeks before its release, music so uncompromising it dashed expectations like Fleetwood Mac's Tusk (no), David Bowie's Tonight (closer), and George Michael's Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 (there we go), John's former publisher Dick James Music flooding the marketplace with reconfigurations of older product (in re-released singles, comps, live albums, K-Tel collections, a box set) and muddying the waters of new material, etc. All reasonable explanations except of the music itself where Restall does not convince - the album remains a bloated, marshmallowy tax on the senses.

4. Illeana Douglas: Connecticut in the Movies: From Dream Houses to Dark Suburbia (Lyons). I thought this coffee-table book by the fine actor (best remembered by me as the art teacher Roberta in Ghost World) would plumb the psychogeography of Connecticut, especially its status as a de facto suburb of New York City. Alas, it's comprised mostly of synopses of films set in the Constitution State. So if you see it in a bookstore, read the photo captions and find the movie/city pairing that jolts you most. As a frequent resident of Stamford, I'm looking forward to taking in Boomerang (Elia Kazan, 1947) and, um, The Horror of Party Beach (Del Tenney, 1964). 

5. Padgett Powell: Edisto (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984). I'd wanted to read this since 1989 when Spin deemed it one of the Top 10 Coolest Books in an issue that changed my life. Alas, this diffuse portrait of a white boy growing up in a largely Black community in the South gave me the mehs, yet another reminder that popular music will always goose my ass harder than literature. Unsurprisingly, the one line that snapped out at me doubles as a fine piece of music criticism. In a description of the Black voices surrounding him, our protagonist compares them to the Godfather of Soul: "Like these James Brown guitar riffs of five notes that run twenty minutes, then one of the five notes goes sharp and a statement is made. A whole evening hums, and then there's a new note — razor out."

6. Margaret Drabble: The Millstone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984); A Touch of Love (aka Thank You All Very Much) (Waris Hussein, 1969). Drabble's portrait of an unmarried pregnant woman in London who's made up her mind to keep her baby is equal parts harrowing and warm and all the more welcome for it. But it leaves a sour aftertaste, rendering childbirth/rearing an achievement superior to all other pursuits. One sentence toward the very end threatens to tank the entire enterprise. Rosamund, now the mother of baby Octavia, invites George, the gay man who unknowingly sired the child one night in a fit of heterosexuality, back to her flat to meet the infant. George is polite but, understandably, cannot share Rosamund's resolute love for Octavia, prompting Rosamund to opine, "George, I could see, knew nothing with such certainty." How she's gained access to the whole of George's existence Drabble never makes clear. The film version, starring Sandy Dennis as Rosamund, is better because Rosamund's state of mind is left open to interpretation. And Ian McKellen's turn as George opens up even more tantalizing possibilities for living life for oneself without ever becoming selfish. 

7. James McCourt: Mawrdew Czgowchwz (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975); Andrew Holleran: Dancer from the Dance (William Morrow & Co., 1978). Two revered, fabulously gay, gorgeously written New York City novels that proved a slog, akin to listening to someone recall their rather characteristic Saturday night. Dancer from the Dance follows gay men boogieing to disco, ingesting drugs, and lusting after sundry Adonises, activities that meet Holleran's disapproval: "They were bound together by a common love for a certain kind of music, physical beauty, and style—all the things one shouldn't throw away an ounce of energy pursuing, and sometimes throw away a life pursuing." This disco scholar who deems Patti Jo's "Make Me Believe in You," which makes several appearances within, one of the greatest singles of the 1970s says, "Pah!" McCourt's novel is a tougher read but lets in more air by keeping its eye on the millions of people who couldn't care less about the titular opera diva (pronounced Mardew Gorgeous) protected by a phalanx of worshipers with equally wacky names.

8. Gypsy, Majestic Theatre (January 3, 2025). It's simple. Every post-Merman diva who has taken on what may be Broadway's greatest role acts the part of Rose to the detriment of each number's song shape. Dramaturgy trounces melody as is the norm in a post-Method/Sondheim world. So while Audra McDonald acquits herself more than admirably, I kept hearing Ethel Merman in my head. And the event was definitely not worth the $368 I had to choke up to witness it. 

9. Meridian Brothers: Mi Latinoamérica Sufre (Ansonia/Bongo Joe, 2024). The Meridian Brothers was started in 1998 as a solo project by musical polyglot Eblis Álvarez who eventually formed a band to experiment more deeply with various genres -  the music of his homeland Colombia, for sure, but also "the golden era of ’70s Congolese rumba, Ghanian highlife and Nigerian afrobeat" to which this new album is a homage. As per the liners, it's also a concept album about Junior Maximiliano III, a young man of privilege who wants to study the folklore of Latin America but gets sidelined by taking a drug he calls "soma" and harboring criticism of his motivations by the artists in his ethnographic sightline. Even Spanish listeners will glean little of this from the songs; the liners merely clarify the satiric tone, reminiscent of "Common People," of the lyrics which include such translated-by-Google language as "Hey, how does rotten cumbia continue to advance?" and "Yesterday I cried while shitting." Álvarez's guitar lines sound like a kid brother toggling the radio dial just enough to annoy the crap out of you, needling where the African norm is more soothing or euphoric. If you're leery about swallowing such a jagged little pill, then check out the fervid, pulpy cover art by Mateo Rivan. It's a perfect depiction of Junior's bent journey which ends with him encrusted in self-pity and asking the government to subsidize his suffering.

10. Geordie Greep: The New Sound (Rough Trade, 2024). Former singer/multi-instrumentalist of feted London math rockers Black Midi Geordie Greep has such a goofy, onomatopoeic name, looks so much like a cartoon character, sounds so much like Donald Fagen, sambafies his music as satirically as Steely Dan did, plays up his virtuosity just like Steely Dan did, hires a orchestra of virtuosos just like Steely Dan did, and inhabits a cast of sketchy characters just like Steely Dan did that the man had to be grown in rock critic Petri dish. Greep's solo debut is speedier and shoutier than the Dan and you're right to wonder how much distance he's gained from the incels about whom he harangues over 62 minutes. But that's only because he's fashioned such an outrageous, ear-demanding platform for their toxicity.

September Top Ten

1. Travis Baldree: Legends & Lattes (Tor, 2022). I'm stunned myself. This fantasy novel begins like countless others. An orc named Viv violently vanquishes her enemy. But that takes up only a two-page prologue. Viv puts down her sword and travels far to open a coffee shop. Instead of over-narrativizing with dreary world building, Baldree traces the everyday challenges of Viv's endeavor - introducing the townsfolk to coffee in the first place; expanding the menu; going easy on the freebees; figuring out how to deal with customers who stay for hours nursing one cup; rigging a primitive form of air conditioning; booking entertainment; etc. As more Lord of the Rings types become invested in the success of the shop, the story takes on a Mickey and Judy "let's put on a show" feel. For narrative tension, some of the landed gentry demand taxation. But overall, it reminded me of nothing so much as the delightful processual thrust of James M. Cain's Mildred Pierce. Low-stakes fantasy this subgenre is called and I was completely disarmed by Baldree's ability to hold the reader's attention by portraying people simply working together. As one critic put it, "it's sweet, beautiful, and, most of all, kind." And yes, I have the prequel, Bookshops & Bonedust, on my iPad right now.

2.  Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution (PBS series). Episode One - "Rock the Boat" is a fabulously insightful meditation on the origins of disco. Episode Two - "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now" marks disco's mainstream popularity and, predictably, hits all the beats of a Wikipedia article. Episode Three - "Stayin' Alive" is abject nonsense about disco's supposed comeback with nary of mention of where it's been for the last 45 years. Caveat saltator.

3. Jungle: "Let's Go Back" (Caiola). You all keep sleeping on this nu-disco combo. But you're missing yet another copper-plated dreamscape of the Stylistics, doo-wop, and shaky memories of dancefloors past.

4. The Bear Season 3. The most frustrating show on television today. Even though the first episode came off like an extended previously-on segment, I admired its drifty pointlessness. And Tina's (Liza Colón-Zayas) backstory was welcome and moving. But Donna's (Jamie Lee Curtis) presence always promises torture porn. Her Actors Studio scene with Natalie (Abby Elliott) had more give to it than last season's preposterous, feel-bad Christmas Eve episode. But it provides no narrative air ducts for the tension to pass through. And the final episode was a storytelling disaster making it impossible to determine Chef Andrea Terry's (Olivia Colman) relationship to half of the cast. Maybe the series' architects will put it all together in Season 4. Or maybe they'll figure out whether or not they're making a comedy.

5. Maria (Pablo Larraín). At lunch before the New York Film Festival screening, my friend Jody and I were discussing various forms of amateurism as a means of maintaining good mental hygiene - cleaning, baking, attending Lady Gaga dance classes, walking, working out for sanity rather than weight loss per se, Nailed It!, etc. During the Q&A after the screening, Angelina Jolie discussed her months-long preparation to become Maria Callas and explained that she broke down in tears the first time she sang. Singing is way to let out all that we hold in, Jolie noted, and she encouraged everyone in attendance to try singing for that very benefit. Both moments deepened what has now become Larraín biopic boilerplate. It's not much different from previous outings such as Jackie (2016) and Spencer (2021), spiraling out from one concentrated event, here the last week of Callas' life. She hasn't sung live in three years and is testing a comeback. But what she truly wants is simply to sing for herself and the tragedy here is that no one (sometimes including herself) will allow the diva to do so. Larraín gives us a glimpse of Callas as an amateur and the film constitutes a testament to what Christopher Small calls "musicking," the act of creating music free from recordings, command performances, and divadom, music as method to potentially save your life.

6. Miséricorde (Alain Guiraudie). Avoid the Wikipedia synopsis since it gives the entire film away. I'll keep it vague here. Jérémie (a terrifically blank performance by Félix Kysyl) returns to his small hometown to attend a funeral. But shiftless and pretty, he decides to stick around to both the annoyance and delight of various villagers. Awkwardness soon shades into violence and a hideous crime has to be covered up. Guiraudie keeps things tense by utilizing the narrative lacunae of art cinema. But he also resorts to some tired devices such as Jérémie frequently overhearing story-forwarding information as if he were a character hiding in a corner of Downton Abbey. And he has a priest deliver the film's big message in a fit of collegiate existentialism at the edge of a tall hill overlooking humanity below. Then again, Guiraudie isn't after any tight connections. He's a master of wielding Hitchcockian guilt such that the last third of the film becomes lighter as delight eclipses annoyance and we grow itchy over the attraction certain characters (and perhaps we the viewers) feel to an evil protagonist. Alfred would be proud.  

7. Melissa Kirsch, "At Capacity" The New York Times, September 28, 2024; Miranda Lambert: Postcards from Texas (Vanner/Republic/Big Loud). Kirsch asks a question that keeps nagging me as I age and my internal hard drive becomes overamped and lossy: "If we can’t remember the things we’ve read and watched and even loved, do they still 'count'?" Fortunately, she calls on Maryanne Wolf, a neuroscientist, to put us somewhat at ease: "The information you get from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more is there than you realize. It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it." Still, I gravitate towards pop and song doctors in particular whose job is to keep pressing our random recall buttons. Thanks to such architects, I can hum every damn song off one of my favorite country albums of the year. Lambert's latest has been accused of lacking the spunk. But to my cheap ears, I hear "Looking Back on Luckenbach" as a classic wedding song in the making, "Alimony" a classic karaoke song in the making, and "Way Too Good at Breaking My Heart" a classic ripoff of Foreigner's "Waiting for a Girl Like You" in the making. Granted, as one of the premier album artists of our era, Lambert's settling into a ho-hum eminence akin to, oh, Sleater-Kinney, sure to forever entertain but doomed to never risk a surprise. But I remain grateful for the meta "Dammit Randy" about a loser who broke up with a pre-fame Lambert and is now relegated to turning her up on the radio. As she sings most memorably and thematically, "I've got your attention." And authenticity fans take note: Lambert wrote the best song, "Run," all by herself. 

8.  Mark Harris, "How Bad Can It Get For Hollywood?" The New York Times, March 1, 2024.  Finally - the rejoinder I've been looking for when superhero movie fans call me a snob for hyping art cinema and the avant-garde. Discussing forthcoming non-franchise titles such as Hamnet and Novocaine, Harris zings, "These are self-contained films that don’t demand moviegoers have a Ph.D. in previous installments or extended universes."

9. LL Cool J: The FORCE (LL Cool J, Inc./Def Jam/VMG). His first album in eleven years and, since you didn't know, fourteenth overall, The FORCE may improbably be LL Cool J's best ever. Produced by Q-Tip, it moves like trillions of microorganisms in your guts with Can and Gary Numan samples and an unexpected and affectionate evocation of Black family life in "Black Code Special." But there's a tree-falling-in-the-woods quality to its supernova appearance. It's an old man's hip-hop album so on the cranky "30 Decembers," he worries about who this album is for. "These kids don't even know who I am," he admits right after castigating them for being on their phones and computers instead of "readin' the papers." He brags about being postmodern on one track and calls another track "Post Modern" as if he finally downed all those late 1980s John Leland Singles columns in Spin. Even though The FORCE sounds more alive than most hip-hop has in years, is this youth music? And does it matter?

10. Criterion 24/7.  I should be all Old Man Yells at Cloud about this. For years before Karagarga, I would trade VHS tapes with people in Estonia and Japan for a chance to see an obscure art film in hideous quality. Or I'd have to wait literally months if not years for The End (Christopher Maclaine, 1953) to download on eMule (never happened). Now there's a gotdang spigot showering all manner of obscurities and classics into your living room. But as a film democratist, I love it. As I'm writing this, a film/director I've never heard of is streaming - Fisting: Never Tear Us Apart (Whammy Alcazaren, 2022) and yeah, that kind of fisting, of all things. Part of the fun is trying to guess a title. If you give up, then check out Criterion's What's On Now page for the answer.

August (But Really Summer) Top Ten

1. Christopher Saint Booth and Philip Adrian Booth,"Ulterior Motives," from Angels of Passion (Jerome Bronson, 1986); Who's Who with Christopher Saint: Ulterior Motives (The Lost Album) (Spooked Music Releasing). I don't believe in coincidences. But at the very least, this story should prove instructive. On April 28th, a group of NYC porn scholars, including myself, met for a happy hour and discussed, among many other things, the imperative to remove the stigma of researching, teaching, and enjoying pornography. That very evening, one of the holy grails of lostwave was finally found. In 2021, someone uploaded a snippet of an absurdly catchy new wave song "from an old DVD backup" (?) to WatZatSong. When pressed for more information, the user disappeared. After years of dead ends and impressive recreations, a Redditor discovered that the song was composed by two brothers for a hardcore sex scene in the X-rated film Angels of Passion. Clearly what happened was that the guy who uploaded the song was too embarrassed to state simply that it came from a porno. In a world with no stigma around the pleasures of pornography, the song would never have entered the annals of lostwave. Then again, the discovery was a joyous occasion indeed. And it compelled the Brit-Canadian Booth brothers to locate the master tapes and release an entire album of contemporary tracks. Most of it comes off as tepid Scritti Politti. But "Ulterior Motives" remains a (coughs) banger awaiting karaoke glory.

2. Jacqueline Susann: Yargo (1956; published posthumously in 1979) Susann wrote this a full decade before Valley of the Dolls became one of the best-selling books in the history of publishing. And as with Dolls, a turgid read starts to reveal a burgeoning feminist consciousness. Not particularly excited to be soon married, a young New Jersey woman gets abducted by a typically uber-rational alien race who introduce her to a world free of gender roles. After much resistance and many didactic discussions on the pitfalls of emotion, she opts to stay with the aliens and compels their leader, reportedly patterned after Yul Brynner, to fall in love with her. Along the way, she gets abducted again, this time by a race of 25-foot-tall bees. One harrowing scene finds her narrowly escaping a forced breeding with a snarling beeman. It’s all done up in an overly earnest style that bespeaks a longing to break out of one’s constrictions, a harbinger of the topsy turvy decade to come. 

3. Michel Tournier: The Erl-King (Le Roi des aulnes) (Éditions Gallimard, 1970); The Ogre (Volker Schlöndorff, 1996). I read non-fiction pretty quickly which stokes my sense of accomplishment whereas I've been trudging through, say, Henry Roth's Call It Sleep for years now. So Tournier's 1967 Friday (Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique) skyrocketed into my top ten favorite novels list because it's as much a work of philosophy as fiction. He intended to "correct" for the relative paucity of story in Friday by injecting more narrative sway into The Erl-King, his follow-up, and the result is a slog. At the dawn of WWII, Frenchman Abel Tiffauges is wrongfully imprisoned for inappropriateness with a young girl (although he evinces a decided attraction to children) but soon gets conscripted into the army. After Germany invades France, he becomes a prisoner of war but soon rises within the ranks of the Nazi party to the point where he accompanies Göring on hunting expeditions and is tasked with recruiting ever-younger children to enter combat as the war draws to a close. Tournier is after more than a simple equation of Nazism with pedophilia, linking it instead to a drive to conquer every aspect of human existence. As such, it could be read productively with Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment. But the dance between concept and story puts a strain on the novel that Tournier fails to successfully navigate. Schlöndorff's film version (starring a miscast John Malkovich as Tiffauges) breezes through much of the backstory. But it necessarily misses the interiority Tournier has etched for Tiffauges, who is as prone to philosophizing as Crusoe is in Friday, rendering the film a bit simple-minded. So I'll be putting off Tournier's third novel, Gemini, for the time being. 

4. Pierre Christin and Olivier Balez: Robert Moses: The Master Builder of New York City (Nobrow, 2014). As for non-fiction struggles, I'm still making my way through The Power Broker and I assumed this graphic novel condensation would help speed me along. But boy is the publishing company well named because it's a hilariously awful retelling which skips over crucial information and focuses on bizarrely inconsequential moments as one can glean from the pic below. Perhaps there were translation problems from the French original. But even there, the obsession with naming designers in this scene is baffling. 

5. Joël Legendre performing "M'en revenant de Sainte-Hélène" on Soirée Canadienne (1978). Legendre is gay and you can instantly feel his queer spin on this folk song performed for a television show dedicated to the preservation and celebration of Québecois music. He went on to do voice work (he's Leonardo DiCaprio in the Québec versions of his films). And yes, a few years back, he was arrested and fined for exposing himself in a Montréal park which gets a handshake from me. But this number is just so ebullient and disarming - fabulousness incarnate. One of the refrains is "ferme donc ta boîte, laisse moi donc chanter" which means "shut your mouth, let me sing." So let him! Watch here. 

6. Beyoncé featuring Shaboozey: "Sweet ★ Honey ★ Buckiin'" from Cowboy Carter (Parkwood/Columbia). Renaissance romps all over this still generally terrific follow-up. But "Sweet ★ Honey ★ Buckiin'" epitomizes what Beyoncé has become for bohos like me - an eccentric keeper of songs and disseminator of weird sounds. I still can't catalogue everything I'm hearing here. What's that gospelly glossolalia that accompanies Bey's interpolation of "I Fall to Pieces" at the start? What are those Oval-style record skips that kick in during the last third? She makes time for Shaboozey to do his jaunty party shtick, for a doo-wop section to sweeten the pot, for herself to vocalize in soul, rap, and wha? modes as the entire edifice gallops off with your brain sizzled into ceviche. After "Countdown," her greatest track.

7. Post Malone featuring Morgan Wallen: "I Had Some Help" (Republic/Mercury). Billboard has deemed this song of the summer, a sobering thought for those of us enjoying a gal pop Renaissance (see next entry). Spirited number. But who the funk would date either of these knuckle draggers after lines like "I only hit the curb 'cause you made me" or "Don't act like you ain't help me pull that bottle off the shelf"? Instead of two men ganging up on a woman (or Women), what would have made it work is if Malone enlisted one of the myriad female country artists who have been outclassing their male counterparts over the last decade-plus. Carly Pearce, for one, could set Malone's truck on fire for blaming his alcoholism on her.

8.  Chappell Roan: The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess (Amusement/Island, 2023); Sabrina Carpenter: Short n' Sweet (Island). This is a lesson in the merciless temporality of pop success. Rise and Fall is the best album of 2024 and the damn thing came out almost exactly a year ago. A 2017 EP on Atlantic went nowhere and, as the graph below traces, her rise to pop aristocracy has been sleepy indeed. But because her album is so me (vivid, eager to please, brash, funny, going for and ripping out the pop jugular, oddly reminiscent of one of my fave Neil Young albums, Living With War, etc.), I want to focus more on my surprising adoration for Short n' Sweet. I was on flagship single "Espresso" early and found it a fluffy bauble, nothing more. An entire album of similar baby-voiced (cf. Pouty's tough but taxing Forgot About Me), attenuated dance cuts promised little. Turns out Short n' Sweet is Carpenter's sixth [sic] album which, if you didn't know that, places you, with me, in what Carl Wilson deems in his terrific Slate piece the first and lowest circle of Carpenter consciousness (click through for Wilson's useful take on Carpenter's even tardier rise to stardom). Turns out also that the thin production houses intricate pop constructions that are super easy to obsess on and the baby voice sings lyrics that evince an acute country wit albeit one too filthy for Nashville. Every single track comes with one or more quotables but the most trenchant is stated sedately in "Lie to Girls": “You don’t have to lie to girls/ If they like you, they’ll just lie to themselves/Like you, they’ll just lie to themselves.” That restatement of "like you" refusing to let guys off the overemotional hook is genius worthy of Dolly and, in pop, it matters not a whit if it derived from Carpenter, producer Jack Antonoff, or songwriter Amy Allen (profiled here in the New York Times for more tales of tardiness). Now the trick is to tame temporality in order to stay on top. If she can inject some of Roan's spritz into her beach-read sound, she might be riding her very own Come on Over next time out. What's Mutt Lange up to nowadays?

9. Doechii: Alligator Bites Never Heal (Capitol/Top Dawg). "Yucky Blucky Fruitcake" will likely end up as one of my top ten singles of the decade. But it's difficult to fill an entire album of such perfect discharges unless you're the New Pornographers of Mass Romantic (and even they couldn't sustain the mania, e.g., final and worst track "Breakin' the Law"). While albums aren't exactly narratives, many of the songs that comprise them occupy what literary theorist Peter Brooks calls the "dilatory space" of stories - moments of necessarily muted delay between opening salvos, bracing twists, and slam-bang climaxes. On her first official full-length, Doechii lets too many of the tracks slip into that space in order to create the kind of gestalt that makes popists like me grow impatient. Strong album, though. Discharge fans should proceed directly to "Denial is a River," a giddy check-in that toys with the distinction between rapping and talking and ends with a rhythmic breathing exercise. And stick around for "Fireflies" which charts the supposedly unchartable female orgasm.

10. Apple Music. I've gone over to the dark side. Yes, it's despicable what they pay artists. No, I'll not stop amassing my beloved 320s. No, not everything is there, an impossibility anyway; compilations especially are difficult to come by. But apart from mere convenience and the ability to hear an album the nanosecond it's released, the best aspect is clicking on the three dots next to a song to reveal credits and the lyrics, the latter extremely useful to someone like me who flunked Lyric Deciphering in Rock Criticism 101. As a consequence, I've been listening to more music than ever. What am I listening to next? You tell me.

February 2024 Top Ten

1. May December (Todd Haynes, 2023) Terrific film. But this entry is about the pitfalls of democracy. I cannot stand when moviegoers need to signal how well they're grasping a film's irony or ineptitude by laughing out loud. It's happened at screenings of Bloodthirsty Butchers (Andy Milligan, 1970),  Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017), and select avant-garde films. And I hear it happens every time a NYC theatre screens a Sirk film, an experience I have so far gratefully avoided. I caught May December on Netflix thereby being spared waves of self-aware snickers. Yes, of course, it's funny (or "funny") when, over dramatic piano music, Julianne Moore's Gracie stops at the fridge to wonder if she has enough hot dogs for a barbecue. In a film about a 34-year-old teacher who engaged in sexual relations with a 12-year-old student, this moment is supposed to cocoon us from becoming too wrapped up in a melodrama that threatens to devolve into a Lifetime Scandal of the Week episode. But is it laugh-out-loud funny? Are you laughing out loud because the humor of the line leaves you no other choice? Or are you laughing to signal to others that you know Haynes is employing some sort of distanciation effect? However annoying I find the resultant laughter, though, it's the chance I take when taking part in the democratic act of moviegoing. As a fervent (albeit sometimes wavering) believer in democracy, there's nothing I can do about this nor, more importantly, would I want to, if only because I'm a hypocrite on this matter. At a recent home viewing of Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997), I snickered out loud at Lynch's propensity to ridicule (or poke gentle fun at?) his characters. I snickered to signal to my partner, whose attention was flagging, what Lynch was up to. But he didn't ask for any lesson. And in that moment, I was no better than any smarty pants whose throat I wanted to punch for pulling the focus away from the film onto their erudition. But again, this is democracy. I have a right to bitch and complain and be hypocritical about it all. Hence, this entry.

2. Kleenex/LiLiPUT: The Diary of the Guitarist Marlene Marder (Thrilling Living, 2023) Published in a run of 1,000 in 1986, Kleenex/LiLiPUT: Das Tagebuch der Gitarristin Marlene Marder is a mishmash of flyers, reviews, lyrics, and diary entries from Marder, the guitarist for the landmark Swiss post-punk band LiLiPUT (née Kleenex). I'm one of the lucky few in America to own a copy and while some of the reviews are in English, most of the book is in German which I cannot read (although years before I got my hands on a copy of the book, a German friend wrote down and translated the German lyrics to Kleenex's 1978 "Nice" which I can still sing auf Deutsch to this day). Tons of cool pics. But it just sat on my shelf as a curio from a band I adored so much that I used their name as my first AOL handle. Now, thanks to publisher Grace Ambrose and in a translation by Jen Calleja, it appears in English in a gorgeous coffee table edition. It's not a translation of every word and review from the German edition so LiLiPUT completists (all 100 of you?) will require both books. But the most fascinating aspect of finally getting to read Marder's work is how, well, workaday it is. LiLiPUT’s music seemed to come out of nowhere (aka Switzerland?), a joyous but alien thing rife with squelches and sax blurts and nonsense syllables and whistles and shouts expressing little about the particular women who joined together to make these sounds. But Marder, who died of cancer in 2016, never explains how something as singular as, say, 1981’s “Eisiger Wind” came to fruition. She simply chronicles the typical highs and lows of life on the road/in a band and then it’s over as decisively as “Eisiger Wind” stops after three-and-a-half variable, ass-pinning-back minutes. And perhaps that’s apt. They came to earth and then vanished leaving so little an impression even in their native country that the Swiss arts council which funded the translation had never even heard of the band. 

 3. Steacy Easton: Why Tammy Wynette Matters (University of Texas Press) The ultimate rejoinder to "it's all about the music, man" types. Easton enlarges what counts as popular music by taking seriously such possible apocrypha as the controversial October 4, 1978 kidnapping and Wynette keeping her beautician's license current long past her first success. Precisely because these stories might not be true, Easton analyzes them as a "hermetic and seamless, rooted in the domestic...kind of art"(14). Their thesis: "Wynette crafted a persona, and resisted that persona, and that this kind of persona-crafting is difficult work, work we should recognize" (13). Where more traditional studies would focus on producers and musicians, Easton honors the women who helped Wynette with her clothes, hair, and makeup, women who were more consistent and loyal than any of the men in Wynette's life. So allow me to name them here: Nanette England, Jan Smith, and Jan Howard, the latter of whom enjoyed a substantial recording career of her own. And fret not, music-only types - Easton is an excellent textual analyst, especially in discussions on camp and kitsch. 

 4. Barbra Streisand: My Name is Barbra (Viking Press). At almost 1,000 pages, an offense. A predictable offense, given the subject matter, but an offense nonetheless. There's a fine autobiography lurking within, though. She's erudite on the song choices for her many albums and revealing on the sexism she's encountered in various industries, e.g., Nick Nolte requiring her to sit on his lap so she can give him direction while filming The Prince of Tides. But perhaps a tougher editor could've eliminated such Streisandian wisdom as "1929. Not the most wonderful year, frankly, because that's when the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began" 

5. Daniel Clowes: Monica (Fantagraphics). In the first issue of Eightball, Clowes ends a comic with hipster Satanists certain of an eternity of glory upon entering Hell. But Satan deems them suckers for their lifetime of devotion and dumps them into a lake of fire. His latest graphic novel ends with a similar eleventh-hour reversal. Despite all the voices from beyond or attempts at reconciliation or the quests for the meaningfulness of life that pepper this epic tale, nothing but nothing can prevent the unleashing of apocalyptic forces hellbent on (potentially? ineluctably?) destroying life on earth.

6. Fargo, Season 5 (FX) Previous seasons trafficked a bit too much in the near-supernatural character of the principal villains, a drawback that severely afflicts the Coens' No Country for Old Men. This season features a Michael Myersish bad guy as well. But he's disarmed in the end with kindness in a more humane twist on the Final Girl scenario of slasher films. Now that the superb Ted Lasso has found a way to make niceness interesting (and popular), perhaps we'll get more shows where conflicts are resolved with a plate of biscuits instead of violence. Added attraction: Jennifer Jason Leigh's Sandra Bernhard accent.

7. The Curse (Showtime) A Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie creation about a well-meaning white liberal couple (Emma Stone and Fielder) who star in a HGTV show meant to help disenfranchised locals in Española, New Mexico but who wind up gentrifying the area instead. After nine uncomfortable episodes, the titular curse voids the laws of gravity for Fielder. What starts as a hilariously demented take on Fred Astaire's ceiling dance in Royal Wedding quickly becomes harrowing before ending on an oddly comforting note as he gets sucked into space. I don't want an explanation/second season because I want to cherish this solitary moment of peace in an unbearably itchy series.

8. The Crown, "Season 6, Episode 6: Ruritania"(Netfix) Apart from the one about the abdication, this was the best episode of the entire addicting series. Under public pressure to economize, The Queen takes stock of the many people in her employ and we're granted a glimpse into what it takes to run a palace. The Warden of the Swans. The Queen's Herb Strewer. The Queen's Guide to the Sands. Yeoman of the Glass and China Pantry. Astronomer Royal. Piper to the Sovereign. Lord High Admiral of the Wash. All are interviewed by Her Majesty as she learns that "few have truly mastered the Dutch bonnet napkin fold." To the chagrin of anti-royalists, no positions are cut. But it makes for a wonderfully synchronic deep dive/pause before moving on to the Kate Middleton dénouement. 

9. Matthew Solomon, Méliès Boots: Footwear and Film Manufacturing in Second Industrial Revolution Paris (University of Michigan Press) One of the most eccentric books of film scholarship I've ever read. Solomon traces Méliès' career as a theater director and filmmaker to the earlier Méliès family success as a manufacturer of boots. He links the artisanal and industrial nature of shoe production and the international flow of commodities necessitating such a commercial endeavor with Méliès mode of creating films. As such, he places his filmmaking activity in a wildly expansive context, even getting down to the material makeup of celluloid: "The material substrate of cinema was constituted from vegetable matter (cotton, wood) that was chemically treated to yield sheets of celluloid that were cut into strips and emulsified with gelatin made of pulverized animal bones to which crystallized silver was added" (8).

10. JPEGMafia & Danny Brown: Scaring the Hoes (AWAL, 2023) Danny Brown alone is enough, the most sonically generous rapper of our time. I know little about JPEGMafia. But whatever his profile, together with Brown he's created a phantasmagoria that invites a lifetime of exploration. JPEGMafia brings the politics with references to Matt Gaetz, Kyle Rittenhouse, Marjorie Taylor Green, and kicks off the album with "First off, fuck Elon Musk." Brown is the sybarite rapping about sex, drugs, and rap (and politics, fear not). They dis/honor R&B, jazz, and, especially, gospel via samples that they rap against, like magnets stuck haphazardly on a fridge. Titles include "Orange Juice Jones," "Run the Jewels," and, the best, "Jack Harlow Combo Meal." It's all given a glistening, high-register sheen reminiscent of the PC Music aesthetic. The overall effect is akin to being bounced around a pinball machine, scary for the milquetoasts they parody on the title track but exhilarating for those of us who never mind getting our hair mussed. And if somehow all of this isn't enough for you, proceed directly to the Scaring the Hoes: DLC Pack EP which includes another gospel trash compactor number called (thank gawd for copy and paste) "No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No!"

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.