Things I loved in 2023; or, The Death Throes of Narrative in One Man’s Heart

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This year marks an ambivalent personal anniversary–it is ten years since the start of my career in the media. Ten years ago I was a fresh-faced journalism student undergoing an arduous transformation from aspiring musician to radio producer. In my previous life I’d internalized Walter Pater’s famous remark that “all art aspires to the condition of music”: that every creative person to one degree or another wishes to invoke the pure abstraction, the mathematical quality and the intrinsically non-figurative nature of music, which as Leonard Bernstein famously said to a packed hall of well-dressed children, isn’t “about” anything. This is music’s strategic advantage over other art forms. You can choose to produce a painting that doesn’t depict a specific form from the real world, or you can choose to employ language after the fashion of Hugo Ball in a way that signifies no meaning. But when you set out to produce a piece of music, absent of language, you are producing a meaningless thing by default. Music progresses through time in the same way that a story does, but it does not require narrative to exist, and it does not convey narrative implicitly. This is what Pater’s edict seizes on: music is humanity’s way of expressing itself the way that nature does, with a beauty that can be both studied and felt, but without intrinsic meaning. A Bach fugue has no more or less meaning than a sturdy old oak. Three or four hundred discourse cycles ago this notion was reduced and distilled into the slogan “no thoughts, just vibes.” 

But in journalism school I met a lot of very smart, creative people who did not aspire to the condition of music. In journalism school, I was introduced for the first time to the cult of storytelling. This was a moment in time when storytelling had not yet become a tedious LinkedIn buzzword–the lionization of narrative was perhaps at an all-time high. (“We’re all stories in the end,” said the Eleventh Doctor, defining my priorities for the next decade in the process.) We were told, with some justification, that humans are storytellers by nature, and that stories are the definitive way that people connect. We were taught to use narrative to bring humanity to systemic problems. We were told not to write if we had an “idea,” only if we had a story. I hesitate to even type out the following horrible notion, but we thought stories might save the world. 

This storytelling boosterism has not entirely persisted. Sniff around the edges of the media, and you may detect a whiff of skepticism beginning to drift in. In 2021, Invisibilia ran an episode about slow TV, the value-neutral concepts of strong-narrative (Disney movies) and weak-narrative (Beckett plays), and how a political candidate with science and data on their side is powerless if their irrational opponent tells a better story. In 2022, Decoder Ring pointed out how corporate and cringe the whole notion of “storytelling” has become. This year, the LRB suggested that Italo Calvino’s embrace of the “storyteller” label “invites suspicion”–and that reviewers have been suspicious of him on these grounds for much longer than I would have imagined. And Jason Farago’s viral repudiation of Hannah Gadsby’s Picasso exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum ends with the kicker: “There is room for story hour in the children’s wing.” Are four examples enough to prove a trend? If it’s a trend this specific, I say yes!

None of this should be surprising. Over the last few years, our highest-profile stories have become spectacularly tiresome. I could castigate Marvel here, revealing myself as just another tedious internet cinephile. But the clearest, most egregious example of what I’ve begun to observe comes from the small screen, in fact from Netflix: the most catastrophically disappointing entertainment institution of the last ten years. Once upon a time, Netflix offered filmmakers the tantalizing opportunity to stretch their stories out past the rigorous limitations of a two-hour running time. “It’s basically a ten-hour movie,” we all said about every new series that appeared. If this practice ever seemed promising, the illusion was finally broken in 2022 with the fourth season finale of Stranger Things. 

On its surface, Stranger Things adheres to the traditional wisdom that every scene in a story should progress the plot. A scene must either drive the narrative or establish character, otherwise it should be cut. Stranger Things is a conventional genre story in this respect: every scene is present to do some kind of narrative work. But, in deference to Netflix’s central metric of “minutes watched,” every single one of these plot-critical scenes goes on for too damn long. So what we end up getting is a sequence of scenes that were chosen on the basis of their narrative indispensability rather than any intrinsic interest they might convey. But because of their undisciplined length we don’t get any of the taut efficiency that this approach should lend. It’s the worst of both worlds. 

There are alternatives to this. There are alternatives to the kind of storytelling that demands ruthless efficiency in the first place. The filmmaker Mike Leigh has made a career out of opposing it. His films reflect the mundane aimlessness of actual human experience, which, far from being boring, is enormously more varied and unpredictable than storytelling structured around tension and catharsis. At the end of a Mike Leigh film, you don’t usually get the sense that you’ve sat through a coherent story, exactly. But also, nothing you’ve experienced over the previous three hours has been included because it’s necessary for you to understand the next scene. Each scene is its own justification. Leigh’s Mr. Turner is the finest biopic ever made specifically because it doesn’t depict the turning points in its subject’s career. I agree with Jesse Thorn that dramatic television would be better if more television writers and directors would take on Leigh as a model.

There are other alternatives. I spent a massive chunk of lockdown watching voice actors play Dungeons & Dragons on YouTube. I’ve spent hundreds of hours playing it myself. When a story is improvised on the spot and governed by rolls of the dice, it can’t adhere to conventional screenwriting standards. It will inevitably surprise you the same way that life does. Likewise for video games, whether played as-intended, or creatively re-framed by players with their own agendas. (A cursed thought I’m obliged to burden you with: “All art aspires to the condition of software.”) 

There are older alternatives. Look to the comparatively languid blockbusters of generations past, or to the theatre of past centuries, or to my forever novel, Moby-Dick. I am tired of a certain kind of storytelling and I am looking for something new, or very old. Why have I become this person? Did Stranger Things make me into this? Have YouTube and video games short circuited my brain? Or did they simply remind me of something I knew in my music school days, but managed to suppress? 

I’m not about to suggest that storytelling is The Enemy. I’m not proposing that we should Ban Narrative. Allow me to moderate my position with the following two dictums: 

  1. Narrative is one of many effective ways to be expressive and reflect the world, not necessarily the definitive one; and
  2. The practice of focussing a story on its most essential, momentum-inducing elements and character beats does not necessarily improve it.  

Here are ten things I loved this year, in five categories: a winner and a runner-up in each. (I’ve managed three honorable mentions per category as well, so you can either think of this as ten things I loved, or twenty-five things I at least liked.) It feels ungenerous to reduce these beautiful things to cudgels that support my argument. Many of them apply to it only glancingly. Some contradict it altogether. Nevertheless, I’m struck by how much of what I’ve loved this year challenges contemporary notions of narrative, so it feels only right to frame them this way. 

Movies

Runner-up: Aggro Dr1ft

In October, the New York Times critic Jason Farago wrote about how “culture has come to a standstill” over the last twenty years. He writes about how the modernist impulse to “make it new” exhausted itself after a century of feverish innovation and that even the postmodern project of the late 20th century feels retrospectively less like “the end of history” than an extension of modernism itself. He wrote: “To any claim that cultural progress is ‘over,’ there is an easy and not inaccurate retort: Well, what about X?” (Not the website formally known as Twitter, mind. He’s using the letter X like we used to.) He goes on to cite several X’s that feel novel to him, asserting that they don’t undermine his claim that “cultural production no longer progresses in time as it once did.” At this, I could not help but wonder: has he not seen Aggro Dr1ft? 

Harmony Korine’s whole career as a filmmaker is a confrontation with conventional narrative. His latest film is nominally a crime story, but it’s told with the familiar aimlessness of Gummo, in voiceover composed of mantras and intentional clichés. Korine filmed it entirely with infrared cameras, producing garish colour fields where there would normally be faces and landscapes. It’s tempting to call it “painterly,” except that it’s incredibly ugly. It owes less to modern art than it does to the Sega Dreamcast. Aggro Dr1ft is the long-threatened wedding of Korine’s “liquid narrative” with video games: the natural home of post-narrative entertainment. It is fascinating to behold. 

Perhaps there’s really nothing new under the sun. It’s been suggested that Korine is only doing what legions of experimental filmmakers have done in near total obscurity for generations. (I had the privilege to see newly restored films by the German filmmaker Dore O. this year: a frustrating and unsatisfying experience that nevertheless demonstrated the length and depth of the lineage to which Aggro Dr1ft belongs.) But I’ve never seen a filmmaker dedicate himself to these experimental practices with so little preciousness and so much energy. Some will protest that Aggro Dr1ft is empty: a meaningless provocation for a shallow, streetwear-obsessed audience of young white edgelords. The fact that Korine’s new production company is literally called “Edglrd” supports this, as does the composition of the TIFF midnight audience I saw it with. True, Aggro Dr1ft has the aesthetic of the early aughts, proto-edgelord internet. But it leaves out the annoying nihilism. This film cannot countenance a thing like nihilism, because it doesn’t have a single thought in its beautiful empty head for all 80 minutes of its slim running time. It fucking owns. 

Winner: Menus-Plaisirs–Les Troisgros

It wasn’t inevitable that cinema would be built around narrative. At the inception point of filmmaking, the Lumiere brothers used their new tool to convey the world around them in a constellation of moments. It is possible to use film not to construct reality, but to observe reality–in a manner mediated only by the placement of the camera and the timing of the cuts. If we accept this mission as the apogee of film, then Frederick Wiseman is the greatest filmmaker of all time. 

Everything Harmony Korine does as a provocation, Frederick Wiseman has been doing as a matter of course for more than fifty years. Each new Wiseman film selects a new location or institution to explore, and simply allows the audience to see what transpired in front of the camera. I’m not naive: these films are not entirely without artifice. They are miracles of editing. But Wiseman does away with almost every other technique that other documentarians rely on for clarity or narrative thrust. He uses no non-diegetic music or sound. There’s no onscreen text–not even captions to let you know who the people you’re looking at actually are. He doesn’t interview his films’ characters. Everything you see in a Wiseman film is an interaction that would have happened regardless. And there are no talking heads to give you their opinions about what’s transpiring. 

Wiseman’s latest film, made at 93 years of age, is about the Troisgros family and their Michelin three-star restaurant in the French countryside. The paterfamilias, Michel Troisgros, is beginning to pass on his responsibilities to his two sons César and Léo. César, the elder brother, is responsible and ambitious: a chip off the old block. Léo is a renegade, piling flavour on top of flavour until his front of house staff can’t figure out how to describe his creations to the diners anymore. But these are my own impressions of the brothers Troisgros. A more conventional documentarian would have used a talking head interview as shorthand to introduce them exactly as I’ve just done. Wiseman simply positions the camera in front of these three men and lets them talk to each other for ten minutes in an unedited shot, letting their character emerge for itself. 

Truth is stranger than fiction, but today even non-fiction strives for the orderliness of a three-act screenplay. Menus-Plaisirs–Les Troisgros is Wiseman’s forty-fourth attempt to do the opposite, and it succeeds in revealing more about family, passion, work and obligation than any voiceover narration could convey.

Honourable mentions: If Menus-Plaisirs is the best movie of the year because it accurately reveals human character, May December is the third-best because it critiques Hollywood for failing to do the same. It is a distant cousin of Mulholland Drive: an unsympathetic examination of the practice of acting from Todd Haynes, the greatest filmmaker about film. At the risk of unduly focussing on movies about making art, I also adore Showing Up. Kelly Reichardt’s quiet, deadpan humour is at its best here, and it’s rare to see such an unsentimental film about the lives of struggling artists. Also, in spite of what this list actually says, the best movie of the year is probably Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron. I need a few more watches to get a handle on it. But it is magnificent to see a crotchety old Prospero breaking his staff and drowning his book with such confidence, after the most magical filmmaking career of the last fifty years.

Books

Runner-up: I Hear You’re Rich (Diane Williams)

It’s hard to describe what kind of stories Diane Williams actually writes except that they’re very, very short. The shortest story in her latest collection is only one sentence long. On average they’re two or three pages. I’m pointing this detail out first because it’s what everybody points out first about Diane Williams. But this isn’t useful. To understand what Diane Williams does, you need to read a story. I recommend this, probably my favourite story collected in I Hear You’re Rich. 

I encountered Diane Williams on a shelf at Toronto’s TYPE Books labelled “PLOTLESS FICTION.” This description can only be so accurate, but it’s true that Williams’ stories are more concerned with revealing the details of a single moment or a fleeting thought than with a sequence of events. “Zwhip-Zwhip,” the story linked above, contains more action than many of Williams’ other stories. But what sticks with you is the implied relationships between the characters, the atmosphere of desperation, and especially memorable lines like: “Blue jays in the pine tree let loose their unmusical jeer calls and in some other more ingratiating atmosphere elsewhere–say, where cardinals live–the locale is heavenly.” It’s tempting to sit down and blaze through twenty of these miniatures in one sitting. But every time I’ve tried, I find myself revisiting details and losing myself in thought such that it takes me almost as long to read each story as it would to read one of a more standard length. 

Most of Williams’ earlier collections have been compiled in a single volume that’s been my definitive reading experience of 2023, though I’m not even halfway through. But this exceptionally short new collection contains some of Williams’ most shocking and brilliant work. Sexual epiphanies occur. Relationships stay together when they ought to fall apart. A lady flies. On the whole, Williams conforms to realism, but it is realism expressed with the speed and strangeness of human thought. 

Winner: The Wager (David Grann)

Usually when a nonfiction book reads like a novel I get my hackles up, for exactly the same reason that I don’t like talking heads to tell me how to feel in documentaries. It makes me suspect that the author is manipulating reality: rendering it down into convenient narrative shorthands. There’s nothing implicitly wrong with that, and it’s inevitable to a certain degree. But in The Wager, David Grann demonstrates how little it’s possible to do this while still telling a Hollywood-worthy story. 

The Wager tells a story of derangement and depravity in the Age of Sail. It’s the story of how the British Empire sought to impose its will on the world, and how it maintained its civilized self-image in spite of its brutality. It is also a workplace comedy about how an overzealous boss turns his own subordinates against him. Grann’s book operates on two different scales: a zoomed-out view of impassive weather systems and geopolitics, and a close-up view of three characters who might resemble people you’ve come across in your own workplace. Captain David Cheap will be familiar to anybody who’s worked for a promotion-hungry boss willing to ruin your life for their own advancement. Gunner John Bulkeley is the reluctant union man: hesitant to hold power, but willing to do it in order to represent the interests of the many. And seventeen-year-old midshipman John Byron is every inch the starry-eyed intern who’s slow to recognize the brutal reality of his new industry.

The fact that these characters come to life as vividly as they do is not a product of Grann’s imagination, but his research. Byron and Bulkeley left detailed journals of their time aboard HMS Wager. This obviates the need for standard non-fiction contrivances like fake dialogue or speculating on motivation. The Wager begins with an author’s note: “I must confess that I did not witness the ship strike the rocks or the crew tie up the captain. Nor did I see firsthand the acts of deceit and murder.” That is the last time we’re made to worry about the truthfulness of this story, until the lies belong to the Empire itself. 

Honourable mentions: These mentions are somewhat less honourable than in other categories, given that I read a total of five new books in 2023. Fewer than that, even, when you consider that I haven’t actually finished Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Iliad. Nevertheless, I’m confident to include it here: it’s a fast-paced and passionate account that finally broke the seal on a text that’s resisted me for my whole life. Otherwise, my contemporary reading has been dominated by uncertain non-fiction. Ben Smith’s Traffic is an annoying little book about how a handful of smart people ruined the media by leveraging their connections and personal ruthlessness instead of their brains. Still, I’m happy to have read it because the story it tells is the story of how the internet arrived at its present, apocalyptically terrible state–even if it isn’t couched in the outraged tone I’d prefer. Finally, John Vaillant’s Fire Weather is dazzling to the point of self-indulgence. Vaillant’s narrative voice is loud, gauche and devoid of sympathy or self-reflection. Given that its ostensible subject is a tragedy that occurred in my hometown, I ought to despise it. But I can’t quite do it, partially because it concerns the ongoing catastrophe of climate change, which will ultimately prove far more tragic than one mere wildfire, and also because I cannot help but be dazzled. 

Television, etc.

Runner-up: The Lincoln Highway (Noah Caldwell-Gervais)

Noah Caldwell-Gervais makes YouTube videos in two different genres: travelogues and video game reviews. There’s an established, expected grammar for both of these genres on YouTube, but Caldwell-Gervais doesn’t use that grammar in either case. His travelogues and game reviews are both built from the same simple materials. And with the significant difference that one set of videos takes place in the real world and the other doesn’t, they are essentially the same thing. Kieron Gillen inspired a lot of self-indulgent writing when he proclaimed that games journalism should be “travel journalism to Imaginary Places.” Perhaps Caldwell-Gervais has vindicated Gillen by proving that these two disciplines can be practiced with the exact same approach. 

The Lincoln Highway is an old and arguably obsolete motor route, and it takes Caldwell-Gervais to parts of the United States where he’d never otherwise have any reason to go. He takes us inside an abandoned stone cairn, once used to produce charcoal for the railway, now abandoned for generations but still smelling of smoke. He finds himself oddly uncomfortable at the world’s most opulent truck stop. He shows us the saddest sculpture in America at a 9/11 memorial. There’s a volume of alternative American history here, delivered with an enthusiasm that only a person who’s been there could possibly muster. It is an act of what Guy Debord called “psychogeography”: the tracing of history down a semi-arbitrary line in physical space. Many writers have taken to the open road in search of America. Caldwell-Gervais has no such goal: he simply tells the story he finds. The best way to experience this work is to start from the beginning and watch as much of it as you can in the fewest possible sittings. But if you’re unwilling to commit to a seven-and-a-half-hour YouTube video, just watch the segment on Ohio, where he finds three different kinds of hell in Mansfield alone. 

YouTube has become glossier and glossier as its middle-tier professionalizes, but Caldwell-Gervais’ format remains pure and eccentric: a written essay read out loud, sometimes with audible retakes, over long segments of uncut footage with no sound or additional music. The footage may come from the dashcam on Caldwell-Gervais’ T-bird, or it may come from Resident Evil 4. Either way, it is remarkable non-fiction filmmaking, produced with the simplest of tools. It’s uncanny in 2023 to witness the internet delivering on its promise after so many years of degrading the world. But here it is, happening. 

Winner: The Devil’s Plan (season one)

The clearest alternative to storytelling is gameplay. Games are as fundamental to human life as stories and probably just as old. But for me, the idea that games exist not just for the enjoyment of the players but also spectators, is relatively new. It is not new to anybody else–I’m aware that sports exist. But the last decade has brought about entirely new ecosystems built around the assumption that all kinds of gameplay can be compelling to watch. 

The Devil’s Plan is not part of any of those ecosystems. It is produced by Netflix, making it the closest they’ve come to compensating for my existential spiral after Stranger Things season four. The fact that I consider The Devil’s Plan novel probably has more to do with me than it: I have almost as little experience with reality competition shows as with sports. But I can’t imagine a more intricate clock in this particular format. 

The rules are simple enough: twelve competitors play two games a day. Good performances bring rewards; bad performances push you closer to elimination. But the games themselves are not simple. It can take ten minutes or more for the show to even finish explaining the rules of the upcoming event. The joy of The Devil’s Plan lies in watching a group of preternaturally gifted game players discover the possibilities of a rule set in real time. Netflix has renewed The Devil’s Plan for a second season, but I fear the magic will be hard to recapture. This season’s cast featured a perfect alchemy of personalities, including one contestant who chose a meta-strategy that threatened to undermine the whole premise of the show. 

I’m grateful to The Devil’s Plan for getting me through the week in November when my tonsils swelled up to the size of golf balls and I couldn’t get off the couch. It’s a low-effort viewing experience if you want it to be. But like the best ambient music, it rewards whatever level of attention you’re willing to give.

Honourable mentions: Until dramatic television learns the lessons it ought to from Mike Leigh, the best place to see the chaos and wonder of the world depicted on the small screen will be documentary. The third and final season of How To With John Wilson lives up to its previous, remarkable standards. Wilson imposes a different kind of order from other documentarians on his incredibly disparate raw materials. He has more in common with a great painter than a great narrative filmmaker: his primary skill is in recognizing the potential meaning of a memorable image. My other favourite documentary series of the year is more conventional: the enormously long behind-the-scenes game dev documentary Double Fine PsychOdyssey. Even so, it defies convention by its sheer length. The filmmakers trust us to be interested in minutia, and indeed we are. The one scripted program that really hit for me this year was the animated series Pluto, indicating that I am still vulnerable to wild ideas and spectacle.

Games

Runner-up: Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo 

Video games should be the great hope in these days of narrative saturation. The surest way to tell a story that doesn’t fall into predictable patterns is to open up a space of narrative possibility rather than conform to a single narrative thread. Shigero Miyamoto, the creator of Mario and Zelda and probably the most influential game designer of all time, famously considers storytelling a secondary priority at best. The real story, by this approach, is not the narrative imposed by the developer but what the player chooses to do in the sandbox. This ought to appeal to me. So why was I more excited this year to play Paranormasight, a game that tells a pretty straightforward linear story once you untangle the threads, than I was to play Tears of the Kingdom? 

The simple answer is that a good story is still a good story and I’ll probably always be more interested in the intentional narratives packaged by self-professed storytellers than the subsidiary, half-accidental narratives that emerge organically on Reddit from people building beautiful, infantile shit with Nintendo’s plasticine. So here I am, foregoing my opportunity to praise the most significant weak-narrative entertainment property of the last several years, in favour of a visual novel with the forward thrust of a Disney movie. I warned you that not all of these choices would bolster my argument. 

It’s best to go into Paranormasight as unspoiled as possible, so I’ll just say that its narrative involves a corpus of folkloric backstory that’s encouragingly reminiscent of Year Walk. Bizarrely enough, its gameplay reminds me of a Zelda game I’ve played many times: Majora’s Mask. Like that game, Paranormasight requires you to live out the same period of time from multiple perspectives, until you’ve gradually filled in enough details to change the story’s outcome. It isn’t a sandbox, but it isn’t the opposite of that either. It’s a perfect compromise between intentional narrative and the imperative to explore. 

Winner: Baldur’s Gate III

I didn’t play Tears of the Kingdom this year, but I did finally play Breath of the Wild. I bought a Nintendo Switch in April, fully intending to play both. The idea was to replicate my childhood experience with the Nintendo 64, which was the last time I owned a console. My parents gave me an N64 near the end of that console cycle, at the precipice of the Gamecube era. Suddenly I had access to not just one but two three-dimensional Zelda games. I experienced Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask as simultaneous phenomena. Without considering the shock of originality and the threat of diminishing returns, Ocarina paled in comparison to its uncanny, funhouse mirror sequel. This year, I saw an opportunity to recreate this: to experience a modern classic and what would hopefully be a weirder, darker follow-up at the same time. Hopefully that way, I’d be able to see the second game as an equal partner, rather than a secondary text. 

My plans were scuppered twice over. The first complication was that Tears of the Kingdom immediately eclipsed its predecessor in a way that Majora’s Mask did not. The second was that I didn’t love Breath of the Wild as much as I’d hoped to. The novelty of playing both games one after the other evaporated. If I’d played Tears of the Kingdom this year, it would have been the first time I played a triple-A game in the year of its release since… Dr. Mario 64. (Thanks to Backloggd for helping me figure that out.) Instead, the honour went to another triple-A release, which, like Paranormasight, recalls the clockwork universe of Majora’s Mask more than either of the most recent two Zeldas. At least, from what I’ve heard. 

Baldur’s Gate III is the wildest shit I’ve ever seen. Like every other open-world game, it has a “main campaign” and a constellation of subsidiary story beats that you can focus on at your leisure. But uniquely, the main story is granular to the point that any given interaction on the critical path can accommodate events as large as an unscripted major character death. Yes, main characters can just straight-up die in combat at the start of the game and the whole story shifts to accommodate it. 

Both Baldur’s Gate III and the two most recent Zeldas present their own challenges to the conventional narrative structures I’ve become so frustrated with. In both cases, the narrative is challenged by the amount of flexibility given to the player. But in Zelda, that flexibility mostly comes down to the fact that you can explore the environment while ignoring the story for long stretches of time. The environment in question is much larger and more fully interactive than in previous games, but this isn’t a new phenomenon. Breath of the Wild’s story remains steadfastly beholden to a high-fantasy three-act structure. Baldur’s Gate III is the only game I’ve ever seen that maintains a flexible and expansive enough story space to let the player truly determine what the story is and if it even makes sense. 

I’ll play Tears of the Kingdom eventually. But I’m only two-thirds of the way through this, so it might have to wait a year or two. 

Honourable mentions: Let me complain for just one brief moment. The emerging narrative in the gaming press is that 2023 has been one of the greatest years in the history of the medium. This makes me feel insane. Maybe playing Tears of the Kingdom will change everything. But when I look back on the last twelve months, I can’t find the slew of instant favourites that emerged in either of the last two calendar years. Where’s this year’s Inscryption? Immortality? Pentiment? Umurangi Generation? The Case of the Golden Idol? Betrayal at Club Low? The Forgotten City? Genesis Noir? Knotwords? Citizen Sleeper? Any of these smaller titles could have given Baldur’s Gate III a run for its money if they’d come out this year. It’s possible that I just haven’t managed to discover this year’s outstanding indie releases because the games journalists that I rely on for recommendations got swallowed up by the pair of infinite possibility engines that make up the top two spots on most of their year-end lists. But a few smaller titles did bubble up to the surface (no, that turn of phrase does not indicate that I’m about to endorse Dredge, which owes so much to Sunless Sea that I genuinely lose my cool a little every time I see it described as “original”). World of Horror smashes together two deeply haunted bodies of work: the horror manga of Junji Ito and PC RPGs from the 1980s. The stories that the game tells are unsettling enough, but not as unsettling as the nostalgic childhood fear that a piece of software might be able to hurt you. Babbdi was released last December if we’re being particular, but if Rock Paper Shotgun can put it on their list, then so can I. It places you in a sparsely populated small neighbourhood where the people are dwarfed by massive brutalist structures. There were times when I’d discover a new method of traversing its rooftops and many hidden rooms and I thought to myself, do I like this better than Breath of the Wild? And now that I’ve dunked on Nintendo enough for one year, I’ll confess that I played and adored Super Mario Bros. Wonder. Side-scrolling Mario games are as confined and regimented as open-world Zeldas are free. But when a game has this many wild ideas in it, freedom doesn’t seem so important. 

Music

Runner-up: Canto Ostinato (Simeon ten Holt, Erik Hall)

And now we conclude with the art form to whose condition all art aspires. 

Simeon ten Holt’s Canto Ostinato has never been a particular favourite of mine. All minimalist and post-minimalist music exists on a spectrum between Steve Reich’s rigorous, conceptual early tape music on one side and the vapid human arpeggiator music of Ludovico Einaudi on the other. Canto Ostinato sits between them chronologically and spiritually: less concerned with the playing out of processes than Reich, but much more authentic to minimalism’s origins than Einaudi. Ten Holt was, after all, more than a decade older than Steve Reich. Still, he’s always been a little too eager to embrace uncomplicated beauty for my tastes. I somehow take comfort in the austerity of early Reich. Canto Ostinato never comforted me this way. It always triggered my distrust of simple pleasures.

This new version recorded by Erik Hall has fully reversed that opinion. It’s the second in a promised trilogy of one-musician minimalist recordings, the first one being Hall’s lockdown recording of Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. That recording, while novel, had a massive legacy to live up to. The original recording of Reich’s masterpiece is transcendent, and the Ensemble Modern’s recording is also pretty great. Hall did what he could, but his version will never be the one I reach for first. 

His Canto Ostinato has no such legacy to live up to. Previous recordings cast ten Holt’s music in settings for multiple acoustic pianos in reverberant auditoriums, as if it’s the St. Matthew Passion but twice as long. Hall’s recording puts you inside of his piano, a Steinway living room grand, paired with a Rhodes piano and a Hammond organ. It’s an intimate, matter-of-fact, and unsentimental approach that pushes ten Holt towards Reich’s half of the minimalism spectrum, a little farther away from Einaudi. Hall’s recording of Canto Ostinato fits alongside the music of the more substantive post-minimalists like Nils Frahm and Max Richter. Suddenly, this music is as straightforwardly enjoyable to me as it was always supposed to be. 

Winner: 93696 (Liturgy)

Liturgy was always coming for me. They’ve got all the hallmarks of the artists I’ve loved most since childhood: optimism, complexity, ambition, accusations of pretentiousness, limitless variety, controversy, and a tendency to be at their best when their reach exceeds their grasp. Their leader Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix screams her way through anthems and lullabies in rapture, not anger. And she’s provided a generous analytical paratext for her band’s music that recalls Jon Anderson’s notes for Tales from Topographic Oceans. They were coming for me fast.

2023 was the year when Liturgy finally came for me. 93696 is their masterpiece; an unavoidable totemic accomplishment that reveals their other really good albums as uneven, tentative steps towards this. It is the apogee of transcendental black metal that Hunt-Hendrix has been searching for since she codified it in an essay that reads like Walt Whitman writing an exhibition catalogue. Hunt-Hendrix sees the history of metal as a quest towards the “haptic void”: a sensory experience so total that it is indistinguishable from nothingness. To attain this experience is to recognize that each step towards the void was more satisfying than the void itself. “Having climbed to the peak of the mountain, the mountaineer lies down and freezes to death.” 

Liturgy does not seek the omnipresent onslaught of the void: they are the extreme metal band most dedicated to honouring the ebb and flow of life itself. 93696 is their best album because it is their most human and organic. It is transcendental because it is symphonic, which is the word we use when humans succeed at conveying the enormity of their whole selves. 

Honourable mentions: The Emerson String Quartet clued up their career this year by collaborating with the most exciting artist in contemporary classical music, the soprano Barbara Hannigan. Their album Infinite Voyage is a satisfying farewell to one of the greatest chamber groups of the last thirty years, and a courageous assertion that the challenging music of Paul Hindemith and Arnold Schoenberg is a worthy way to say goodbye. It was a good year for American black metal. Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix must be proud to see her Whitmanesque vision of metal spreading through the music of Victory Over the Sun. Their album Dance You Monster to My Soft Song! strives towards transcendence the same way Liturgy does, and with more hooks. Finally, Sufjan Stevens’ Javelin finds him exploring loss again, for the first time since his masterpiece Carrie & Lowell. When he’s in heartbreak mode, he is the most emotionally generous songwriter alive.

***

This has been my brain diary for 2023: a very weird, very good year. Maybe next year this fever will break and I’ll only want to watch glossy blockbusters and read airport paperbacks. Watch this space.

Peter Gabriel has come unstuck in time

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I remember being twelve years old and witnessing the reception of Peter Gabriel’s Up, his first album in ten years, with some confusion. “Out of touch,” said Rolling Stone. “Dated” said the Guardian. I was a child out of time, born in 1990 but listening mostly to music from twenty years earlier than that. I was totally unaware of whether anything new I heard sounded current. I’d never heard the Nine Inch Nails albums and big beat music that Gabriel had clearly spent the 90s obsessing over. I didn’t know what anybody was talking about.  

Up was the third record in Gabriel’s ongoing “delayed” period, in which he takes increasingly outlandish amounts of time to finish the records he starts. So took four years–an eternity in the ‘80s. Us took six, and spawned an anecdote that Sarah McLachlan still relates occasionally. Up took an unprecedented ten years to complete, including seven years of active recording. In 1997, Gabriel’s contemporary David Bowie released Earthling, an album inspired by industrial music and drum and bass. At the time, the NME described Bowie as “acutely conscious of his 50 venerable years,” and accused him of belated bandwagon jumping. Five years later, Peter Gabriel released Up. 

Gabriel has always had the impulse to write about social movements, discourses, and subjects out of the news cycle (e.g. “Biko,” “Shaking the Tree,” “The Veil”). He has always had the impulse to introduce new sounds into his sonic palette (e.g. the Fairlight, drum machines). The defining condition of his last 30 years has been that he still attempts to do this, but he takes so long to release his work that the sounds and ideas are no longer contemporary by the time we get to hear them. The question becomes whether they’re still relevant, which is not the same thing. 

Earlier this month, Gabriel finally released I/O, his first album of new material since Up. I’ve been aware of I/O since I was twelve, but it was perpetual vapourware: sidelined in favour of cover albums, legacy tours, and apparently “living.” It is extremely uncanny to hear it after all this time. With a bit more experience and cultural knowledge behind me, I find myself responding to it similarly to the way that some critics responded to Up in 2002. 

I/O’s lead single “Panopticom” offers an inversion of Jeremy Bentham’s proposed prison design, where it isn’t the powerful who possess the all-seeing eye–it’s the people at the bottom, suddenly obtaining the means to hold the powerful to account. It’s an idea Gabriel has been fascinated with since he founded WITNESS, a charity that gave cameras to citizens of underprivileged countries for the purpose of filming human rights abuses. WITNESS vastly predates the role of phone cameras in BLM and the Arab Spring. 

But does “Panopticom?” Given the timescale at play here, it may. And it certainly seems like it does–the song presents a futuristic vision of technology-assisted accountability that has already come to pass. Indeed, the promise of this moment has come and gone somewhat. We now live in a world where citizens’ unlimited ability to disseminate information has turned out to be a catastrophe, and not an emancipation. “Panopticom” is deeply, maybe even charmingly naive in the era of Elon Musk’s X. It is replete with the techno-utopianism of the early aughts. It even has a Web 1.0-style neologism for a title. 

It’s a title that the neologism king Buckminster Fuller might have enjoyed, as might his devoted acolyte Stewart Brand. Brand is the definitive techno-utopian of his (and Gabriel’s) generation, and his influence is a quiet presence throughout I/O–especially on my favourite track, “Playing for Time.” It’s a simple ballad, expressing a mixture of anxiety and resignation about the passage of time. Brand shows his face in the final verse, which describes the Clock of the Long Now, a marvellous initiative from Brand’s Long Now Foundation (I/O co-producer Brian Eno is on the board of directors). The clock was conceived by Long Now co-founder Danny Hillis, to help humanity recognize the potential enormity of the future. It only exists as a prototype, but it will eventually be installed inside of a mountain in Texas. It will tick once a year. The century hand will advance once every hundred years. The clock will chime each new millennium, for 10,000 years. 

Intentionally or not, “Playing for Time” is Peter Gabriel’s definitive statement on the last thirty years of his career. If “any moment that we bring to life will never fade away” as he says, then it doesn’t matter if you make an early-90s Nine Inch Nails album in 2002, because no moment, not even the present one, is any more or less valid than any other. And besides, 1992 and 2002 are infinitesimally close together. If it doesn’t seem that way, just listen to the silent clock in the mountain. 

I/O has arrived into a dramatically different world than Up did. It has been received somewhat more positively in its first couple weeks, in spite of being–in my view–significantly less consistent. But we are not so quick to dismiss an artwork for being dated anymore. Now, we name and catalogue the distinct aesthetic trends of the past for easy reference, and we live in a static, patchwork culture of throwbacks and homage. Peter Gabriel was already unstuck in time when he released Up. Two decades later, the only difference is that we’ve joined him. 

A recent newsletter promoting I/O described it as “an album of, and for, the here and now.” This is patently ridiculous. It’s worth noting that the album’s title refers not only to the expression “in, out,” but also to one of Jupiter’s moons. The album was a lunar phenomenon from the start: Gabriel released one song on every full moon of the last calendar year. His music exists on a cosmic timescale now, governed not by human trends but by the rotation of celestial bodies that will still be there when all that’s left of us are charred ruins and a stately old clock. 

Notes on Moby-Dick (five years later and still having fun): Part 5

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“How many things have I left unfinished? How many times have I pulled the brakes on a train of thought before arriving at a troubling certainty? And how long will it take me to finish reading this book?”

Matthew Parsons, September 2018

There are two ways to read Moby-Dick. “Quickly” is not one of them. No: if you make it from cover to cover in a sane and reasonable amount of time, your experience has been somehow wanting. I dare say the two ways to read Moby-Dick are better characterized as two viable defenses for why it is taking you so long to read it. I will call them the Ahab defense, and the Ishmael defense. 

The Ahab defense asserts that the book is an obstacle to overcome. It is the defense mounted by those for whom the book has become their own “white whale.” Those who plead the Ahab defense may not even particularly enjoy reading Moby-Dick, but persist nonetheless because they feel they have to read it. The book has become a meaningless and insane compulsion: a task to be undertaken at the cost of their own time, mental health, and personal relationships. 

This is not the defense I plan to assert. I will take the Ishmael defense. The Ishmael defense holds that nothing good ever comes from reaching an ending. Ishmael is the patron saint of amorphous and unpredictable middleness, only happy when he is literally and figuratively “out to sea.” From the moment I met him, I found this argument persuasive. And here we are five years later. 

Fortunately, we still have a ways to go before we’ll have to contend with Moby-Dick’s ending. So let’s continue. Welcome back. 

Chapter 42: The Whiteness of the Whale

This is one of Moby-Dick’s most famous chapters: something I anticipated the way you anticipate “to be, or not to be” in every new production of Hamlet. But “The Whiteness of the Whale” finds Ishmael in a very different mood from his other iconic digressions. This is the chapter where we watch his usual way of making an argument–marshaling an impossibly diverse and detailed range of examples–completely break down. 

He begins by anticipating H.P. Lovecraft yet again, while trying to explain what specifically unsettles him about the whale: 

“…there was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.”

JUMPSCARE!!!

In his long-winded efforts to explain himself, Ishmael returns to the vein of horror fiction repeatedly, noting the whiteness in the visages of the dead, the matching colour of the shrouds in which they are traditionally wrapped, the whiteness of ghosts in the popular imagination, and the pale horse upon which Death proverbially rides.

He also touches somewhat awkwardly on race, noting that the global pre-eminence of the colour white “applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe.” Neither Ishmael nor Melville actually subscribes to this sentiment, as pointed out throughout the rest of the book, and by Dr. Parker in the footnotes. Ishmael later invokes white colonialism in North America as a kind of fall from grace, implicitly filing white people alongside the polar bear, the great white shark, and all the other various bloodthirsty pale creatures he finds so uncanny. Perhaps this is too modern a reading for a book published in 1851, but I don’t really think so.

In any case, all of this quickly becomes unimportant. As you read this chapter you can actually feel Ishmael gradually giving up on his argument, nearly raising the “white flag” of surrender to an idea he can’t reckon with. But then he hits on something, almost by accident: as if a voice in his head has suddenly whispered a line from a half-forgotten nightmare. 

Ishmael recalls the idea that colour itself is a trick of the eye: that nothing is implicitly colourful and that colour only applies to a thing when it is observed. So, perhaps the universe is fundamentally colourless and blank, and light itself if not filtered through the subjectivity of human vision would render the whole world with the uncanny, impassive whiteness of the dead.

The terror of the white whale is simple, then. Its whiteness is a confession of some deeper, suspected truth about the universe: that all of its vibrancy and color is a lie, constructed by humans as a way to cope with the fundamental blankness of the world before them. This is the most insidious way that Ahab has gotten into Ishmael’s head. A few chapters ago, Ahab asserted that the whole world is a “pasteboard mask” obscuring the true nature of things, and that the white whale is an emissary from the bleak reality beyond. 

Ishmael doesn’t invoke Ahab directly here. In fact, he comes closer to invoking Ahab’s opposite: his first mate, Starbuck. He refers to the blind instinct of a young colt, a “dumb brute”: the exact same words Starbuck used to refer to the whale. Starbuck would absolve the white whale of its violent tendencies because it acts on instinct: it lacks the willpower to act with real malice. But Ahab has recognized that “blindest instinct” is what the whole world is constructed from. And he cannot bear this. So he makes himself a golem of pure willpower, pure intention, and he lashes out at the universe’s indifferent violence. 

Ishmael could never do the same: he’s a man of ideas, not a man of action. But something in Ahab’s philosophy has taken hold of him. Ahab introduced Ishmael to the prospect of a blank and colourless world. It’s an idea that can’t be unthought. That is the true horror of the whiteness of the whale. 

Chapter 43: Hark!

It feels like ages since we’ve heard from the Pequod’s crew. Five years, at least. Actually it’s only been two chapters, which is not bad by Ishmael’s standards. 

This brief scene is an exercise in suspense. Two sailors hear something odd at night–a cough, perhaps, from below decks. Previously, we heard from the prophet Elijah that Ahab had secreted something, or someone, aboard the ship under cover of darkness. Now it comes to mind again. 

This is the kind of writing that subsidizes chapters like the previous one. Melville can afford to let Ishmael go on about his theories and anxieties, because he knows he can hook you into the story again in half a page or less. 

Chapter 44: The Chart

I expect there are readers who would prefer if all of Moby-Dick were written like this chapter, with Ishmael’s erudition folded neatly into the character drama. Most of the chapter concerns the surprising precision with which sperm whales travel, migrating predictably alongside their food sources. This makes their hunting easy for those who are willing to adequately obsess over their patterns. 

But rather than frame this knowledge as a pure digression, Ishmael presents it as the sort of thing that a compulsive personality like Ahab would know. Ahab’s perverse rationality here reminds me of the insane narrator from “The Tell-Tale Heart”: “You should have seen how wisely I proceeded — with what caution — with what foresight — with what dissimulation I went to work!” Likewise, Ahab plots and plans, and mathematically adjusts his well-worn charts. But by night, we’re given the striking image of him sleeping with clenched fists, fingernails driving into his palms hard enough to draw blood.  

This chart is from a generation later than Ahab, but I like to think Ahab’s was more detailed even so.

Ishmael envisions Ahab split into two parts: the rational, thinking Ahab of the daytime–and the haunted willpower golem of the night. He returns to his grim realization from two chapters ago, describing this nocturnal Ahab as “a ray of living light… without an object to colour, and therefore a blankness in itself.” Neither Ishmael nor Melville are trying to be subtle in their analogies between Ahab and his quarry. What’s interesting is that Ahab conceives of himself as the opposing force to the white whale’s impartial violence, all the while animated by precisely the same sub-rational blind impulses. Is he indeed a creature of pure will, or a “dumb brute” himself? At this point I’m not sure, and neither is he, and neither is Ishmael, and probably neither is Melville. 

Chapter 45: The Affidavit 

Once again, Ishmael spends this whole chapter trying to lend credibility to his story. There’s something poignant about his outright insistence that he can once again simply make his point by citing examples. Only three chapters ago in “The Whiteness of the Whale,” we saw him try to do this very same thing, only to fail dismally and spiral into madness. Three chapters is how long it took for him to suppress this madness once again. I imagine he hopes we’ve forgotten. Probably he has. 

In any case, the point he’s driving at here is that it isn’t so unlikely that a specific whaler could encounter a specific whale twice in one lifetime. Ishmael has seemingly witnessed this several times. Also, he’s asking us to believe that a whale is capable of acting with genuine vengeance, as opposed to simply self-defense. As part of his evidence, he cites the wreck of the Essex in 1820, the subject of the film The Heart of the Sea. The Essex was wrecked by a whale whose attacks “were calculated to do us the most injury,” and whose aspect “indicated resentment and fury.”

This is all part of Ishmael’s constant attempt to make us see the white whale from Ahab’s perspective. But he’s got another explicit goal as well: that we shouldn’t consider his story “a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.” I love this. It should be paraphrased in the comments of every YouTube video with “ENDING EXPLAINED” in the thumbnail. 

Also, this may be the first time in the novel that Ishmael’s been funny on purpose: “…the Commodore set sail in this impregnable craft… But he was stopped on the way by a portly sperm whale, that begged a few moments’ confidential business with him.” 

A FEW MOMENTS’ CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS

Chapter 46: Surmises

Here we have a whole short chapter dedicated to explaining that, however intent Ahab was on killing the white whale, he still had to placate his sailors’ need for money and diversion by operating a genuine whaling operation along the way. It finishes with the promise that soon we may actually witness some action. Maybe so, but we’ve been fooled before. 

Chapter 47: The Mat-Maker

Fooled before, indeed, but not this time! From the moment this chapter starts, it’s clear there’s action coming. A placid reverie has taken over the ship, allowing Ishmael a few moments to reflect on the relationship between fate and free will–but only a few. This type of calm is clearly a storytelling device. It’s “the calm before the storm.” You can tell something’s about to happen just by the way that Melville situates Ishmael’s reflections at an actual point in time. If he intended to go on like this for a while, he’d just be talking to the reader about fate and free will directly, but here he’s reflecting on this while sitting beside Queequeg and weaving. While the story is happening. 

And when it happens, it happens. Tashtego sees a whale, and the Pequod jumpstarts into action. Moby-Dick the Long Essay is finally giving way to Moby-Dick the Adventure Story. And the suspense over the Mysterious Secret Below Decks is about to be relieved. 

Chapter 48: The First Lowering

There’s a moment halfway through this chapter that feels like a fulcrum point: standing aboard a boat pursuing a whale through the sea, the harpooner Tashtego spies a flicker of movement below: “Down, down all, and give way!–there they are!” It took nearly eight-five thousand words to get here, but WE’RE HUNTING WHALES, BABY

The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions; ye are all asleep. Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and pull. Pull, will ye? pull, can’t ye? pull, won’t ye? Why in the name of gudgeons and ginger-cakes don’t ye pull?

This is the first truly action-packed chapter in the book. Even so, the thrill of it lies mainly in watching these characters we’ve come to know so well behaving exactly as you’d expect them to behave under pressure. Stubb is loud and garrulous, Starbuck quiet and a little scary. And Flask, when we catch a glimpse of him, is careless–risking life and limb in pursuit of his ambition. He stands on his massive harpooneer’s shoulders to see across the water: action comedy worthy of George Miller. 

As for the Mysterious Secret Below Decks, the rattling, coughing shadows seen and heard at various points throughout the story are five expert whalers from Manila. Suddenly, we see them released from their quarters to join Captain Ahab himself on one of the smaller boats lowered from the ship for the hunt. 

The crew and officers regard these men with total shock and astonishment. Perhaps we can even understand their racism towards the newcomers, given what a betrayal of trust this is on Ahab’s part. To the crew, the new arrivals could have simply arrived on the Pequod suddenly from hell. Even Ahab’s first mate Starbuck is taken by surprise. Leave it to second mate Stubb to find a way to rouse his men to action in this challenging moment:  “Never mind the brimstone–devils are good fellows enough.”

Ahab speeds toward his destiny as if on rails, propelled by his team of sudden demons. We’ve heard a sample from each of Ahab’s mates, indicating how they speak to their men. But Ishmael declines to reproduce the words Ahab speaks at this moment. No doubt they are devilish words, unhearable by delicate landsmen and good Christians. 

By this point, the reader may well feel like they’ve picked up another book entirely from the one they’ve been reading all these years. It’s as if a painting turned into a movie. Appropriately, Melville caps off his first chapter of genuine action by zooming out his camera from the character details we’ve seen so far: 

“It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;—all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her screaming brood;—all this was thrilling.”

Pure kino. 

Anyway, Ishmael finds himself on the unlucky boat at the end of this. He and Starbuck are separated from the others by a squall, and a whale surfaces directly underneath their boat. YOU WANTED WHALES, WELL BUDDY YOU GOT ‘EM

Chapter 49: The Hyena

Rockwell Kent’s illustration of Ishmael’s first brush with death

Surely we can afford our narrator a few moments of light philosophy, given how much action he just managed to get through. We know it’s hard for him. Give the man a break. Certain experiences, Ishmael tells us, are so hilariously grim that they can cause a person to stop taking his misfortunes so seriously. He must simply join the cosmic hyena in its laughter. This hyena doesn’t appear in Ishmael’s narration. It’s only implied by the chapter title. But I expect this hyena will be laughing throughout the rest of the book. 

Anyway. Once he gets back to the ship, Ishmael’s colleagues reassure him that this harrowing misadventure he’s been through is just par for the course in the whaling industry. No reason to get worked up about it. You only nearly died. Ishmael recruits Queequeg as the executor of his will, and suddenly feels much more at ease.

Chapter 50, Ahab’s Boat and Crew–Fedallah

This chapter concludes with a racist passage implying that Fedallah, the newly-arrived Filipino harpooneer, is some sort of devil-spawn. Reading against the grain, these troublesome moments are the points when Moby-Dick truly earns its reputation as the Great American Novel. Elsewhere, it’s just a Great Novel. 

It’s been two chapters since the shock reveal of five hitherto unseen crew members aboard the Pequod. Now we learn why they’re here: it’s unusual for a captain to actually participate in the whale hunt himself, especially not a disabled one. The Pequod’s owners would have never allowed this, so Ahab secretly arranged for his own boat crew to be shepherded on board by night and kept below decks until the moment of truth. 

Flask argues that Ahab ought to quit while he’s ahead. At least he’s got one knee left. Stubb counters: “I don’t know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel.” I wonder if we ever will. 

To be continued. 

Things I loved in 2022

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Let’s not belabour this with introductory tedium. What we have here is a nice round top ten for the year, with a long stretch of Honourable Mentions Word Vomit below. I wrote this over the course of like four months, so apologies if the tone is a little scattered. 

10. TÁR

TÁR speaks its shibboleths with an easy confidence. It spends its first hour seducing the audience that’s most susceptible to its knowing charm: we’ve all heard that weird Glenn Gould recording of the C major prelude, right? And then it tells you to go fuck your shibboleths. This film’s flattery of an audience that knows just enough demonstrates one of the ways that powerful creative people can be dangerous. 

In a way, it says everything it intends to say right at the beginning, when Todd Field forces the audience to sit all the way through the credits before the movie even starts. All of those names are important. It’s a spit in the face of auteur theory from a filmmaker who’ll be regarded as an auteur regardless. Also, this is one of Cate Blanchett’s top two performances, and the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s assistant conductor gets a mention for some reason. Hyperspecific, uncompromising and magnificent. My other top movies of the year will not be Oscar favourites, so here’s hoping it sweeps. 

ApArTmEnT fOr SaLe
YoUr SiStEr’S iN jAiL
YoU’rE gOiNg To HeLl
ApArTmEnT fOr SaLe

9. Immortality

Sam Barlow makes games that obsess over the boundary between performance and authenticity. Presumably, that’s why he’s put his focus on full-motion video: games featuring live-action footage rather than animation. I strongly disliked his acclaimed indie debut Her Story, because I felt Barlow wasn’t able to get a subtle enough performance out of his leading actor. I found it hard to tell whether the character was being dishonest or if the actor was just uncertain. As much sense as it makes to use human actors in games that revolve around the theme of performance, this is a major risk. 

With Immortality, Barlow found a story he can really tell. This is a Hollywood story: specifically, a story from the late 60s and early 70s, the age of “New Hollywood” and Andy Warhol’s superstars. Warhol is a spectre haunting the game, promising fifteen minutes of fame to anybody with the drive to do a screen test. Thus, everybody in this story is performing at all times, even when they’re not specifically “acting.” The boundary between performance and “authenticity” is still muddy here. But unlike in Her Story, that’s a feature and not a bug. When trying to come up with comparisons that describe Immortality, other games don’t come to mind. It feels of a piece with Roeg and Cammel’s Performance, Leos Carax’s Holy Motors and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. 

8. Blank Check with Griffin and David

The highest purpose of criticism is to enable its audience to see a work of art from another perspective. That is perhaps a lofty thought to begin with, given that Blank Check is a nakedly stupid and indisciplined podcast, where two dudes make dumb jokes and talk about movies for hours at a stretch, regardless of whether the movie in question merits the expenditure of time. Nevertheless, when I recently went to see The Fabelmans having already listened to Griffin Newman and David Sims discussing it, the echo of that conversation in my head made me walk away adoring the movie rather than just liking it. Normally I prefer to go into movies without having read or heard much about them. In this case, I’m glad I didn’t wait. 

Blank Check was the podcast I appreciated most this year for many reasons, but mainly because I’m exhausted by the churn of discourse surrounding new releases and present-moment pop culture ephemera. By dedicating full seasons to the filmographies of individual directors, Blank Check invites listeners to watch along and be part of something, without having to engage with whatever tedious new thing people are talking about on Twitter. Instead, you can watch the complete works of Stanley Kubrick, about whom Griffin and David actually had insightful and funny things to say this year, even though he made several of the most talked-about films of all time. Or you can dive into the work of more cultlike figures like Jane Campion or Henry Selick. Take a break from the discourse drumbeat.

Granted, I know I’m currently ranking my favourite things of 2022 on my blog. Just know that I’m aware there’s a better way to live. Thank you, Griffin and David.

7. Hellfire (black midi)

I feel like there’s a certain type of music nerd for whom the only albums of consequence this year were Hellfire by black midi and Ants from Up There by Black Country, New Road. Sometimes I am that kind of music nerd. But honest to god, I didn’t hear another rock album this year that could touch Hellfire. The BC,NR album is huge and anthemic and cathartic, but is it deranged carnival funk? No? Then get it out of my face. 

Hellfire is easily black midi’s best album, but not because it’s more mature than its predecessors. If anything, it’s a little more precocious. Its brilliance outstrips its discretion at every turn. But even writing that, I feel like one of those writers in the ‘40s who were so anxious to take Orson Welles down a peg. I see why they might have wanted to: they were old, and he was better than them. 

No matter. I haven’t gone a day since this album’s release without the guitar/drum break in “Welcome to Hell” looping in my head for at least a couple minutes. And I haven’t gone a day without thinking to myself “LIZZEN: the SWEET PEEEELS of moon-LYYYYYGHT in-JUUICED luv-MAKE-ing on the STREETS to-NYE-yyyt.”

6. Everything Everywhere All At Once

When I went with a friend to see Swiss Army Man in theatres in 2016, we were the only people at our poorly-attended screening laughing. Shame on those others present, because Swiss Army Man is the best extended fart joke in cinema history. One of the many miracles of Everything Everywhere All At Once is that it carries over the sheer, joyful, puerile spirit of its directors’ previous film into a story with real emotional intelligence and sensitivity. It’s a movie that’s equally concerned with the dynamics of a Chinese-American family and the possibility of a universe where everybody has hot dogs for fingers. 

There’s not much more to say, except that there’s a sequence in this movie featuring hundreds of still photographs of Michelle Yeoh in different costumes, flipping past at incredible speed–and I noted that a couple of them have subtitles, on screen for no more than a couple frames. It’s a movie you’d have to pause every few seconds to take in all the detail. 

5. Better Call Saul (Season Six)

I almost left this off the list entirely, simply because I have nothing original to say about it. Better Call Saul is one of the best television shows ever made, easily surpassing its predecessor, and its final season is probably its best. After watching the finale I was so preoccupied by its absolute bleakness that I couldn’t think about my own problems for a while. I’m not sure other people read it the same way, but to me it’s darker and messier than anything in Breaking Bad, and I sat in silence for a long time after. I can’t think of another series finale that shook me up this much.

Better Call Saul is one of the rare shows that manages to be more ambiguous in its writing than with its visual storytelling. Frequently, a scene driven by dialogue would leave me wondering what exactly it signified, while its wordless montages left no ambiguity at all. It is frankly virtuosic how the directors of this series can offer up a seemingly impressionistic series of images, without dialogue, and still communicate one specific idea.

Finally, Rhea Seehorn’s performance as Kim Wexler is maybe the best in the history of television. I can usually manage to maintain some distance from what I watch: I don’t tend to become invested in fictional characters. But Kim might as well have been a relative. Not for nothing, Seehorn is also maybe the most articulate living actor on the specifics of process. 

4. Two Ribbons (Let’s Eat Grandma)

The first Let’s Eat Grandma album felt like it was made by two people who’d barely spoken to anybody else in their whole life. It was the first public statement in a secret language that wasn’t fully translatable. Two albums later, having experienced the pressures of success and personal tragedy, they made a record explicitly addressing the forces that have started to cause complications in their friendship. Two Ribbons finds Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth acting with grace and kindness in spite of those complications. It’s like the opposite of Fleetwood Mac. 

I’m not sure that Two Ribbons has hit quite as hard for the world’s music nerds as I’m I’ll Ears did. That makes sense: it’s more vulnerable, more melancholy and personal, which is why I like it better. It’s rare to get this kind of a glimpse into a creative partnership. Let’s Eat Grandma has made their own Peter Jackson documentary, in the form of this open and warm record. You come away from it understanding exactly how these two have managed to make such eccentric, singular music: they make it for each other. 

3. Ducks

As a person who was born and raised in Fort McMurray but has spent his whole adult life elsewhere, I have two frustrations. One is that people who’ve lived in Fort McMurray for a very long time tend not to recognize how abnormal a place it is. The other is that people who’ve never lived in Fort McMurray tend not to recognize how ordinary a place it is. Kate Beaton’s graphic memoir of her two years working in the oil sands is the first depiction of my hometown that rings true to me, because it takes up residence in this very contradiction. 

Beaton’s memoir deals with the rampant culture of sexual abuse in the work camps outside of Fort Mac, the massive environmental toll of Alberta’s oil industry, and the ongoing legacy of settler colonialism that manifests here as dire health issues in Indigenous communities downstream of the sites. Beaton has no time for the ridiculous defensiveness of Fort McMurrayites who refuse to acknowledge these realities. But she also has no patience for the blithe condescension of the rest of the country towards the people who work in the oil industry. 

The moment in this book that has stuck with me most of all is a conversation Beaton has with an older coworker from Newfoundland. She asks him if he used to be a fisherman. “I’m still a fisherman,” he responds. “I’m just here.” Fort McMurray is a place that nobody wants to call home. Ducks is why. 

2. Critical Role

Dungeons & Dragons was a silver lining of lockdown: I can hardly imagine another circumstance in which I could have spent two years playing make-believe every week with a group of six to eight full-grown professionals. I started watching Critical Role to get a better handle on the game. But at some point, after I’d seen about 50 four-hour episodes, I had to confess to myself I was just watching it because it’s good. 

Critical Role is one of those now-commonplace internet phenomena that is massively profitable and all-consuming for its community while also being invisible, or at least inscrutable to everybody else. So for the sceptical, what is the appeal of watching a bunch of nerdy-ass voice actors sit around and play Dungeons & Dragons? How does one reckon with all the lore? The episode lengths? The fact that every player comes to the table with the exhausting theatre kid energy of ten million Lin-Manuel Mirandas?

Best I can describe it, you’re watching three things at once: a game, a story, and a reality show. The strategy of the gameplay, the unfolding drama of the story, and the personalities of the people around the table all take precedence in their turn. It’s a dense thing to watch, and a viable alternative to the increasingly predictable narratives of genre television and film. Plus, it’s thrilling to watch as an ambitious storyline teeters at the edge of a cliff, pending a literal roll of the dice. 

2022 was Critical Role’s strongest year yet, with shocking developments in its third campaign and the apocalyptic miniseries “Exandria Unlimited: Calamity,” which is probably the best tabletop role-playing story ever recorded. At the best of times, the cast of Critical Role visibly forgets that the cameras are there. In this belated internet age, we’re accustomed to feigned spontaneity, fake unselfconsciousness. But you can tell the real thing when you see it. It is as beautiful as it used to be, and rarer. 

1. Crimes of the Future

She: Surgury is sex, isn’t it? Surgery is the new sex. 
He: Does there have to be a “new sex?”
She, with great haste: Yes, it’s time

It’s been a year full of old master storytellers summing up their lives’ work. George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing is an obvious example. The Fabelmans, even moreso. Neil Gaiman has been obsessed with the purpose of storytelling for decades, and this year it culminated in the belated television adaptation of The Sandman. But none of those grand statements can match this warm, funny, wise, poignant and gross late masterpiece by David Cronenberg. Trumpeted as his “return to body horror,” it’s actually a completely new kind of movie from him. Cronenberg’s previous body horror movies used gore to illustrate some central anxiety or psychological irregularity. But the gore here is largely incidental to the film’s central concerns, which are how to age gracefully as an artist, and how to leave the world better than you found it. This film’s story introduces a world where pain is rare. Thus, gore can at last be divorced from violence, and addressed in purely aesthetic terms: let’s stop saying things, and just make something uncannily beautiful, it says. 

Evidently the script for Crimes of the Future dates back to the 90s, with both Nicholas Cage and Ralph Fiennes attached to star. We should be grateful the project was shelved at the time. This is a story best told by a filmmaker with as much life behind him as possible, and it benefits from the casting of Cronenberg’s one genuine muse: Viggo Mortensen, whose prior work with Cronenberg lends weight to his casting as the director’s self-insert figure. 

Is it Cronenberg’s best movie? Maybe! Certainly it wouldn’t hit as hard without the legacy of The Fly, Videodrome, Scanners, etc. behind it. But of all his movies, only Dead Ringers is equally moving, none are funnier, and certainly none have better across the board performances. Kristen Stewart is the scene stealer, conveying the weirdest horniness ever captured on camera. But this is Viggo’s career-best performance as well, and Léa Seydoux is arguably the funniest person in the movie because she’s the only one taking it completely seriously. 

It’s one of the weirdest, most perverse films of 2022 and I came away from it a little choked up, with a big dumb smile on my face. Nothing made me happier this year. 

Honourable Mentions Word Vomit

I feel like the above list doesn’t quite reflect a few things that changed in the time since I stopped blogging regularly. For example, I’ve mainly swapped television for movies. I watch way more movies now. Also, I’ve promoted video games from a C-tier to an A-tier beloved pastime. On the other hand, the list does reflect the fact that I don’t really listen to podcasts anymore, and that the ones I do listen to are totally different from what I was listening to back then. Music taste: largely the same. And I still don’t read very many new books. 

In any case, the following wall of text probably represents the way I’ve spent my time better than the things I selected above for special recognition.

Movies. I managed to shoehorn some of my thoughts about the year’s other movies into the proper list, but here’s a lightning round. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is adorable and sad, and really hit that sensitive Toy Story spot that every millennial has. Mad God is a gross, singular and incredibly technically impressive feat of stop-motion animation from a practical effects master. I saw it on the middle night of a three-night stand at the Rio, between Alex Garland’s least excellent movie and Crimes of the Future. A satisfying build. Also, I swear this is true: during one of the gross parts I started to feel an uneasy, itchy sensation around my neck. I reached up to scratch around my collar, and there was a caterpillar crawling out of my sweater.

The Banshees of Inisherin was my first Martin McDonagh movie, so I came to it without the baggage of his divisive previous film and completely adored it. It has four of the best performances of the year. Similarly, I also hadn’t seen any of Park Chan-wook’s movies prior to Decision to Leave, which I think probably made me like it more than most people on account of my having nothing to compare it to. It might be the most visually stylish movie I saw this year, though there sure is an argument to be made for RRR, another movie by a director who’s new to me. It is fully unhinged, and easily my most memorable cinemagoing experience of the year.

Nope is another terrifying experience from Jordan Peele, but it’s also his “movie about movies”: a statement on the occasionally harmful act of looking. Catnip to me. On the note of “movies about movies,” The Fabelmans is one of the best in the history of that tradition, and a “family falling apart” movie to boot. Supercatnip to me. 

The Northman is pretty much exactly what I wanted from a big-budget Robert Eggers movie. It certainly doesn’t top his less expensive previous films, but as cinematic spectacles go it has more originality than most. Glass Onion doesn’t hit the highs of Knives Out, but the series is proving a reliable source of twists, turns, and emotional catharsis for people who dislike the rich. Finally, Moonage Daydream didn’t totally live up to my extremely high expectations, but it does provide a road map for how to make visually compelling documentaries about artists that aren’t governed by tedious tropes and the same old structure.

That’s all I feel like mentioning. I ranked all of the new movies I saw this year here, on my favourite website. 

Television. At first I didn’t like The Sandman. But consider the challenges. Thirty years, it took them to make this show. In the intervening years, the Sandman comic’s big ideas have been stripped for parts and thoroughly incorporated into other people’s stories. For several years, Doctor Who served as the Sandman show that wasn’t. Undertale has a little Sandman DNA, I’d wager. Even this year’s Three Thousand Years of Longing feels like it might owe a little to Gaiman. And so, the long-awaited adaptation felt like diminishing returns for the first few episodes. A victim of its own influence. But once the show gets past the worldbuilding and into the specific storytelling it’s clear that while the generalities have been ripped off over and over, the specifics are still unique. Good chance I’ll watch season two. 

I wasn’t certain that Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared would survive the transition from freakish little online shorts to half-hour television. And I wasn’t sure that its blend of children’s television tropes with gore and surreal horror would still feel daring more than a decade after it debuted on YouTube. Frankly both of these concerns were valid: the narrative format doesn’t quite work and the genre subversion is a little played. But it has some really funny writing, a few genuinely disquieting moments and most importantly, incredible puppetry and animation. The visual style and effects alone make it worth the time. Also the Channel 4 streaming service has the worst recommendation engine maybe ever: “Because you watched Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, you might enjoy… Frasier.” 

The Bear is a delight, full of likeable characters and extremely good food photography that genuinely threatened my vegetarianism. It has a few rather pat, too-easy character arcs, which are one of the reasons I ostensibly don’t like television anymore. But it’s got chaotic overlapping dialogue and achieves clarity without undue exposition; what am I supposed to do, not like it?

Andor is a good thriller but it’s not as good as Better Call Saul and it’s not as good as Michael Clayton.

Finally, Jerrod Carmichael’s Rothaniel is one of the few stand-up specials where it genuinely feels like anything could happen. The audience is as important as the performer. 

Games. I somewhat regret not having the hardware to play the consensus game of the year, Elden Ring. But Zach Gage is the FromSoft of casual puzzle games and Knotwords is his Elden Ring. It very nearly made the ten until I had to acknowledge that I haven’t felt compelled to play it in several months. Nevertheless, it is a thing of profound elegance. Gage has spent years making low-barrier, deeply thoughtful puzzle games that are addictive without being predatory. Having made the best sudoku app that will probably ever exist, and the beloved word puzzle game Spelltower, it feels natural that he should combine sudoku and crosswords. Knotwords is a word puzzle game that doesn’t rely on your vocabulary or trivia knowledge. It relies solely on your willingness to learn how to solve this specific kind of puzzle. It’s the best word game ever made. Plus, Gage’s collaborator Jack Schlesinger contributed design and music that changes throughout the day so that the vibes are always flawless: Knotwords is a pump-up jam if you play in the morning, and a lullaby in those all-too-frequent moments when you boot it up at 3am. My streaks have lapsed recently, but this is still probably the most honourable among these honourable mentions. Call it number eleven.

There’s nothing better than being set free to explore a rich environment and talk to interesting characters, and that is pretty much all you do in Pentiment. I was bound to like it, given that it’s a story about art, history, art history, and how making things isn’t a compulsion or a calling but a social role like any other. (It serves as a worthwhile counterbalance to Immortality in that sense.) Early Renaissance Bavaria is a great setting for a game, because it’s just intrinsically interesting and filled with tensions that are visible on the surface. Everybody’s life is dominated by the church. The church is facing massive changes, thanks to Luther. And to complicate things even more, the old folks in the villages still remember the old pagan ways. Nobody’s sure how to live, and the game shows us the effects of that by allowing us to explore a town over the course of twenty-five years of rapid change. Also it’s definitely the only game I’ve played where the credits end with a bibliography that includes Hildegard von Bingen.

Speaking of communities on the brink of massive change, I also want to single out NORCO. It’s the tale of an environmental catastrophe striking a community that is defined by the industry that caused that catastrophe in the first place. Somehow it hits almost as close to home as the graphic novel that’s literally set in my hometown. NORCO was sold to me as “Kentucky Route Zero in an oil town,” but it is only similar to Kentucky Route Zero in that it is anti-capitalist art set in the American south, a tradition that predates video games by generations, and is bound to continue for generations more. 

Earlier this year, we learned the sad, ironic news that the core members of the team that made Disco Elysium had been forced out of their own company and aren’t working on the sequel that’s currently in development. That’s a shame, but 2022 also made it clear that Disco’s influence has been felt, and it’s starting to show up in smaller, scrappier titles. Citizen Sleeper is the most noteworthy of these, with a compelling science fiction setting and a dice-spending mechanic that’s unique from other comparable RPGs. Better still, in my opinion, is Betrayal at Club Low, a music-themed RPG with entirely customizable dice that I have written more than enough about already. 

The other unlikely microtrend of the year was what I’ll call the “Popelike,” i.e. games that take after the work of Obra Dinn developer Lucas Pope. The Case of the Golden Idol is the only other game I’ve played that requires the same kind of deductive reasoning that Obra Dinn does. It differs mainly in that it presents a number of smaller puzzles, rather than one huge one with everything interconnected. Depending on how much you like Obra Dinn, this could be a selling point rather than a demerit. In far more unlikely news, somebody finally had the guts to repurpose the famously mundane gameplay mechanics of Pope’s Papers, Please for a story about running a flower shop. Strange Horticulture is as oddly relaxing as Papers, Please without any of the ethical torment.

(It’s worth noting that every game I’ve mentioned except Immortality and Pentiment can be finished in less time than it takes to watch a modern season of television. Some are only three or four hours long. The fact that games can be short now is the industry’s biggest innovation of the last decade.)  

Music. Tell you what, it sure wasn’t a year for discovering new faves. One exception: Darklife proved a good introduction to Death’s Dynamic Shroud. That’ll be one of the things I regret not putting in the top ten a year from now. A transcendent record, from extremely online vaporwave nerds who grew up. Never heard anything like it. But henceforth, every one of these honourable mentions comes from an artist I’ve been into for years. Sometimes it’s like that. 

The two biggest artists in the world both released albums I liked this year. RENAISSANCE is certainly the more accomplished of the two, but ultimately it’s a record for extroverts, so I prefer Midnights. While by no means experimental, that album outpaced recent records I’d expected to prefer by more idiosyncratic pop singers. Now Taylor, if you’d only send Jack Antonoff out to pasture and find a less boring producer, we’ll really be cooking. I’m sure Lana Del Ray can get you Congleton’s number. 

Moving on from global superstars to the biggest superstars of my personal music universe: my two most-listened bands of the last few years both put out good-to-great albums in 2022. Meshuggah’s Immutable is as subtle as extreme metal gets, and a huge improvement over their previous album. We’re talking about a band that’s been around for more than thirty years, and they’re well into their diminishing returns era, so good on them for treading new ground. Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for my years-long Mountain Goats fever to break. They’ve been my most-listened to artist for three years running, and I’ve come to embrace their whole catalogue, from the earliest lo-fi recordings to their slickest recent Memphis/Muscle Shoals records. The common read on Bleed Out seems to be that it’s a return to form, but I reject the assumption beneath that. I have mixed opinions of some of the recent records, but 2021’s Dark in Here and the lo-fi throwback Songs for Pierre Chuvin are both minor classics. Bleed Out takes vintage action movies as its subject and thus has a lot of energy. But to me it’s still only the third-best of their last five albums. It’s growing on me. 

My ambient music hero released a real stinker this year. A well-intentioned, environmentalist stinker that the NYT named a critic’s pick, but a stinker nonetheless. And another hero who makes similar music in a more acoustic vein also put out a record that smacks of diminishing returns. Alas. Good thing my favourite Vancouver-based musician Ian William Craig had 80 minutes of ambient music stocked up for release on a video game OST. I played the game and gently bounced off of it, but Music for Magnesium_173 stands alone and is detailed, tense, and beautifully sung as always. Two artists featured elsewhere in this post also put out OSTs that I spent a good bit of time with: Cosmo D’s Betrayal at Club Low OST and Let’s Eat Grandma’s The Bastard Son and the Devil Himself OST. The latter of which is probably the soundtrack I’ve listened to most enthusiastically while having absolutely no interest in ever watching the thing it’s a soundtrack for.

Finally, Ghost’s Impera is an album that I thought was going to be a bit of a grower, but then I didn’t listen to it for most of the year. I still think it’s nearly up to the standard of other recent Ghost albums, if a little more uneven. I still think it might be a grower, but I haven’t put the time in to know for sure. 

Books. Aside from Ducks, I only read one other book this year that was published in 2022. It was definitely a year for reading (and re-reading) things from decades or centuries ago. Appropriately enough then, the other “new” book I read was Yin Mountain, a newly translated collection of poetry by three Chinese poets from 1300 years ago. These poems are often far more relatable than you’d expect. Better still, sometimes they’re not relatable at all.

Podcasts. There is a degree of familiarity you can acquire that leads to the death of a thing in your heart. As such, I haven’t listened to a narrative journalism podcast for several years. I’ve got their number: the stories are all different, but the beats are all the same. The podcasts that kept me company through the worst of the pandemic were built around conversation, which is inherently less predictable than storytelling. The last three years have been marked by obsessive phases with several McElroy properties and an abiding appreciation for Melvyn Bragg. But 2022 specifically was mainly about pop culture shows, both broad and specific. 

On the more general side, FANTI is probably the best combination of smart and funny available on podcatchers right now. The more specific shows I listened to were mainly concerned with either movies or games. Or Shakespeare. Into the Aether is my current favourite in the vast world of game podcasts. It’s hosted by two funny people with chill vibes, and they build the show around what they love rather than what’s new. Sometimes that’s all it takes. You Must Remember This releases infrequently these days, but the “Erotic 80s” series is one of the best things Karina Longworth has ever written, and if its follow-up on the 90s had arrived by the end of the calendar year, it probably would have made the ten. The Folger Shakespeare Library’s Shakespeare Unlimited is the finest podcast produced by an arts institution of that sort, featuring interviews with imminent Shakespeare-adjacent people from Ian McKellen on down. Barbara Bogaev is low-key one of the best interviewers alive, and her main gig is focussed entirely on Shakespeare, which doesn’t seem at all inappropriate to me. Finally, Screen Drafts is the most uncompromising and ridiculous show in the universe of movie podcasts, and maybe in the world of podcasting generally. Its episodes frequently stretch past the five hour mark, with guests competing to get their favourite movies in high positions on ranked lists. It is cinephilia as an endurance sport, and it is beautiful.

YouTube. While we’re on the topic of cinephilia, I’ll bring up the YouTube channel I discovered this year that I’ve appreciated most: The Cinema Cartography. It’s full of beautifully made long-form video essays about specific directors, national scenes, and particular themes running through the work of various filmmakers. This year, they started a series on the history of cinema, handling the standard Film Studies 101 material with an interpretive flair seldom seen in these sorts of sweeping surveys. All of this is presented with a sincerity and earnestness that you don’t see much anymore, especially on YouTube. To talk about art anymore you have to be lighthearted and funny. Glib, even. It’s refreshing to see this channel’s two hosts taking what they love totally seriously. 

A couple more, in the interest of pushing the full list to an even 50: Dan Olson’s essay-documentaries on Folding Ideas are the new standard bearer for media about media, and specifically about the way the internet is the new frontier for grifters. And Noah Caldwell-Gervais‘ video essays are the most thoughtful, personal games criticism on the internet. He martyred himself this year by daring to produce videos about Dark Souls, thus inviting abuse by FromSoft’s horrible fan community. From my perspective, if not his, it was worth it.

***

That’s it. 40 honourable mentions plus the main list equals 50 wonderful things. A few subtotals before we go: 

Movies: 13 (3 on the list, 10 honourable mentions)
Music: 11 (2 on the list, 9 honourable mentions)
Games: 8 (1 on the list, 7 honourable mentions)
Podcasts: 6 (1 on the list, 5 honourable mentions)
Television: 6 (1 on the list, 5 honourable mentions)
YouTube: 4 (1 on the list, 3 honourable mention)
Books: 2 (1 on the list, 1 honourable mention)

Notes from Off-Peak City

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I’m writing this shortly after the release of Betrayal at Club Low, the latest game from the indie developer Cosmo D. By the end of this essay I will have played it: an exciting thing, because every new Cosmo D game depicts another corner of magnificent, scenic Off-Peak City. It’s common enough to see a world develop over multiple video games. It’s rarer to see this happen with a world that’s almost entirely the product of one person’s dreams and preoccupations. As a fictional world, Off-Peak City isn’t governed by the traditional tenets of worldbuilding: history, laws, etc. “Lore.” Instead, it gets its consistency from its unmistakable atmosphere and a handful of recurring reference points. You know it’s Off-Peak City because of the music, the architecture, the way people talk, the way images look, the board games, the great stone faces, the pizza. You may not understand what’s going on. But actually you do, because the understanding is in the looking and the listening. 

I really adore Cosmo D’s work. The Norwood Suite in particular is a game I’ve replayed many, many times. When we talk about a game being replayable, sometimes what we mean is that the game changes significantly on a second or third playthrough. We say this as if movies aren’t rewatchable in spite of being the same every time. I find Cosmo D’s games rich, immersive, and satisfying. So, before I crack into Betrayal at Club Low, I’m going to revisit the catalogue and make some notes as I go. I’m not aiming to exhaustively annotate these games, and I don’t really have an argument I’m trying to make. I’m just going to take another stroll through these beloved old streets and hallways and point out a few of the things that fascinate me the most. Consider this a field guide to the world of Cosmo D: a tour led by a fellow traveler who shares Cosmo’s obsession with music, his love for the surreal, his irresistible impulse to put his obsessions on display, and perhaps his nagging sense that this impulse may be shallow. 

Cosmo D has released five games at the time of writing: 

  • Saturn V, an early experiment that’s very short and simple
  • Off-Peak, a short freeware title
  • The Norwood Suite, his first commercial game
  • Tales from Off-Peak City Vol. 1, the most polished of his first-person adventure games
  • Betrayal at Club Low, a third-person RPG

(A quick note here that these games are unspoilable in my opinion, but many will differ on this. Full spoilers ahead for all five games. More to the point: if you haven’t played these games, this may be a challenging read.) 

So, let’s begin our tour a billion kilometres away from Off-Peak City, orbiting another world altogether.

Saturn V (2014)

In 2013, while nursing a leg injury, the cellist and electronic musician Cosmo D started making a game. Naturally, the impetus was music. Saturn V is an illustration of the song of the same name by Cosmo’s experimental dance band Archie Pelago. It presents you with a simple, three-floor museum space to explore. As you do, different facets of the title song drift in and out of the mix. When you’re done, you can simply hit Esc to close the app. There is no ending in Saturn V, no confirmation that you’ve finished the experience you were meant to have. Narrative is absent here, and the only character present is you. You’re left to wonder about who put all this together, for what purpose, and how it all came to be orbiting the planet Saturn, visible through the massive skylight over the top floor. 

Cheap ass accommodations. Not even a view of the rings.
D’OOOH

The orbiting exhibition contains many surprising things. Period maps of New York and Brooklyn. A Pringles can: sour cream and onion. Homer Simpson is here, three-eyed and courting a cease-and-desist. Near the entrance, you’re greeted with something I thought was the box art from an old edition of Turbotax, but which is in fact the poster for a Brooklyn-based DJ night. Around a corner you’ll find a rehearsal space, where Debussy’s Sonata For Flute, Viola and Harp sits on a trio of music stands. (I’m listening to this piece as I write. It’s C-tier Debussy in my opinion, but even C-tier Debussy is worth your time. He didn’t write much chamber music, so fill your boots. This recording is good.) Oddly, there is no flute present in the exhibition. There is a recorder. Perhaps somebody attempted to play the Debussy sonata on that. Perhaps that’s why this place is deserted. 

Don’t get me wrong, the recorder is a beautiful instrument.

A generous assessment of this exhibition would be to look at it as a sort of mood board. But taken that way, it doesn’t amount to much. Really, it’s an assertion of identity, cobbled together through things Cosmo D and his bandmates enjoy. Board games. Craft beer. Fashionable music (and also Debussy). It illustrates the modern tendency to define ourselves by what we consume, rather than what we produce. 

The top floor of the museum ceases to be a museum altogether. Its three rooms contain a dancefloor, a plush living space, and a desk with a mixer and a computer running a DAW. What is this place? Did an Off-Peak City malcontent launch a satellite? Is this somebody’s off-world live/work space? A bachelor pad, for somebody who requires more distance from the city than the Hotel Norwood affords? 

This is a ridiculous exercise, what I’m doing right now. It’s foolish to try and establish the canonicity of Saturn V, because it’s foolish to even consider it alongside Cosmo D’s later work. Comparing The Norwood Suite with Saturn V is like comparing a feature film with a MySpace page. Nevertheless, like all false starts, it tells us something about its creator. To a degree, each one of Cosmo D’s games is another Saturn V: another digital space in which to exhibit his tastes.

Off-Peak (2015)

A year later, Cosmo D’s second game gave us our first real glimpse into his emerging fictional world. This game is also built around an exhibition space full of things Cosmo likes, but there’s an intermediary between Cosmo and his creation now. Saturn V was built specifically to reflect the personalities in Archie Pelago, and the sensibility of Cosmo D himself. This time, the developer has punted some of the responsibility onto a fictional character: the curator of the exhibition you enter when you boot up Off-Peak. 

Oh, we get it.

In Off-Peak you wander through a train station managed by “a born tycoon” named Marcus. Marcus presides over the tracks from a raised lookout, flanked by palm trees, bodyguards, and two cows he strokes like trained tigers. There aren’t very many people milling about on Marcus’s premises. It’s off-peak hours, after all. One suspects it’s off-peak hours forever at this particular train station. You’re told that only the extremely wealthy can afford to travel through here. Really, the trains aren’t the point. The point of this place is the cluster of niche merchants who’ve set up shop here with Marcus’s imprimatur. The passengers on these trains are the sort of people who can keep a merchant afloat for two months with the purchase of a single, exorbitantly-priced vinyl record. This is the sort of place where a struggling musician comes to put their unused sheet music up for consignment where it can be sold to the weekend warriors, the easy marks among the wealthy commuters.

Video games are about wish fulfilment.

The good news is, you’ve got a shot at boarding the next train. All you have to do is find the eight pieces of a torn-up ticket, destroyed by a lap steel player in an act of self-sabotage. As you search, you discover that Marcus’s aesthetic is curiously similar to the one we witnessed in orbit around Saturn. There’s a lot of craft beer and board games. Crates of vinyl. Miles Davis. Sun Ra. There’s a copy of Laaraji’s hammered dulcimer masterpiece Day of Radiance here, which delights me every time.

The accoutrements of classical music are strewn about everywhere. One thing I’ve learned from going to music school, being a record collector, and working in classical music radio is that different groups of people look at classical music from such dramatically different angles that they’re not even really talking about the same thing. There’s the classical music people know by osmosis (The Four Seasons, the Queen of the Night’s aria, Also Sprach Zarathustra). There’s the stuff that the enthusiasts love and tend to assume everybody knows, but they don’t (the Beethoven late quartets, Monteverdi, Peter Grimes). And then there’s the music that is familiar to everybody who’s ever gone to music school, but which only musicians care about. It’s this last category that predominates in Marcus’s domain. As a lapsed trumpeter, I was retraumatized by the sight of Jean-Baptiste Arban’s method book just sitting innocently on a shelf in a video game. Likewise for the Aritunian and Hummel trumpet concertos: works that everybody who played the trumpet, or knew a trumpeter in university knows very well, but which are miles outside the repertory. (Deservedly so in the Aritunian’s case. It’s dreadful, albeit fun to play. The Hummel rules.) 

This is a real piece of music by Baude Cordier. You learn about it in music school when they teach you about “eye music,” which is called that because it’s also fun to look at.
I used to tell people my favourite operas were Wozzeck and The Magic Flute, just to fuck with them.

Some of the people in this train station are flat-out insufferable. The ramen vendor is a former violist, who waxes violently poetic about how his new life cooking ramen is just like playing in an orchestra. And don’t get me started on the sheet music salesman. He can’t read music, but he knows what will sell. Most people here are trying to be Marcus. They’re scraping by, but they’re just one lucky break from transforming their own exquisite taste into a chic capitalist bonanza. There’s only one sympathetic character in this whole station. She gives away stale cookies in the subway. “I don’t care about fancy beer or personality pizza or tricky card games,” she says. Here, far from Marcus’s gaze, is the one person who recognizes the slightly sordid quality of this whole enterprise: art, repurposed as a lifestyle brand. She’s the figure who keeps Off-Peak from becoming a self-congratulatory ode to connoisseurship, a celebration of extravagant commerce. 

Am I hopelessly old school, to side with this person so emphatically? Naïve, perhaps? I suspect Cosmo D, who put in years as a gigging musician, has a more nuanced perspective on this than I do. His games consistently deal with the relationship between art and commerce, and the decisions that artists have to make for financial reasons. But the forces of commerce are not purely malignant in this universe, nor are the artists entirely virtuous. 

Marcus is one of two concentrations of power in Off-Peak. There’s also a circus passing through. They’re a big deal in these parts: the station entrance is lined with posters featuring trapeze artists and tigers, emblazoned with the Polish word for circus, “cyrk.” You learn about the Circus in dribs and drabs. They employ giants, and mistreat them grievously. They’ve got some sort of arrangement with the city. They have a lot of money, but they hire bands to tour with them and pay in “exposure.” Giants drink for free at the station bar, because the Circus pays their tab. It’s said their leader passes through the station at the same time every day. Red hair, orange dress, surgical mask. Can’t miss her. 

Her name is Murial, and she is to this game what the escape key was to Saturn V. Once you’ve finished your explorations, reassembled your ticket and–if you’re any fun at all–stolen as many records, music books and pizza slices as you can get your sticky fingers on, it’s time to board the train. Marcus stops you. That ticket isn’t meant for you, and it’s very expensive. Besides, you’re a thief, probably. The only thing for it is to enter into indentured servitude and work off your debts behind the ramen counter, like Conway at the distillery in Kentucky Route Zero. Enter Murial, holding a glowing white stag head. You’ve seen one of these before; it teleported you some distance. And it does the same now, as you bamf suddenly from the train station into a rowboat with Murial and three triplets who’ve been watching you this whole time. Murial welcomes you to the Circus.

I’ve heard this line in my head every time I’ve walked into a pizza joint since 2015.

There’s a lot in this game that isn’t fully explained. Part of that is a tease, that more will be revealed in the future. (Off-Peak’s final screen is a promotion for The Norwood Suite.) But I think it’s a mistake to regard these games as mysteries or riddles. I don’t really think it’s fun or enlightening to try and render them down to a single, stable, internally consistent narrative interpretation. Cosmo D’s later games become increasingly concerned with narrative and continuity, but Off-Peak functions best as a gallery show, with its various contents speaking to each other in abstract terms. In that sense, it is a much more successful exhibition space than its predecessor. 

So. You’re in a rowboat with Murial. She doesn’t bring it up immediately, but she’s got a job for you at an old friend’s place. 

The Norwood Suite (2017)

The Hotel Norwood is a crumbling gaiety, a haunted funhouse and pilgrimage site for the overambitious and fanatical. Once upon a time, it was a residence and base of operations for Peter Norwood, a pianist and composer with a cult of personality that has endured long past his mysterious disappearance in 1983. Now, it is a poorly-run hotel whose main clientele consists of Norwood acolytes and young people who arrive there for the ongoing dance party that one DJ Bogart has been throwing in the basement for nearly a year. 

(Yes, this is a story about a long-vanished classical musician and a presently ubiquitous DJ, which sounds like the setup for a story about how the old ways were better. Mercifully, it isn’t: that whole notion is so foreign to this game that it doesn’t even consciously subvert that idea. It just cheerfully ignores it altogether and treats all forms of musical endeavour as potentially equal.) 

You arrive at the Hotel Norwood on an errand for Murial, blue-haired now, like Oscar the Grouch turning green in season two of Sesame Street. The details of your job are hazy, but your gameplay objective is clear: you must simply explore this place. Take in the sights at this sprawling old house, just like in Gone Home or Resident Evil. (The Hotel Norwood shares the dramatic central staircase of both.) Inevitably, you will eventually have to Collect Five Things, or however many piano keys and costume pieces there are lying around. But for now, just learn about the people who are here. Learn what’s going on at this hotel.

“Wigor Hall” feels like half a joke to me.

It’s easier than you might expect. Your character in The Norwood Suite is entirely nondescript. In Off-Peak, people occasionally recognized you. Marcus had seen you come through before. You had a routine, and a past. But apparently now you’re such a cipher that nobody thinks twice about asking you to bring them a sandwich, in spite of the fact that you don’t work at the hotel. Nobody thinks twice about telling you all of their secrets and plans. It turns out you’ve arrived at an important moment for the Hotel Norwood. There’s a board meeting tomorrow, which will determine whether or not the hotel will be sold to a company called the Modulo. 

I’m not sure what the Modulo actually does. This is by design: they are an anonymous, megalithic corporate entity of the sort that is so often the antagonist in video games. They aren’t whimsically unknowable like the Circus in Off-Peak. They’re just vague. They wear blue suits emblazoned with the percent symbol. They carry around a ridiculous company manual. They actively recruit young artists away from their music careers. And most crucially, they want to turn the Hotel Norwood into a server farm. I like some of the Modulo folks I met at the Hotel Norwood. But I’m also sad about the Vancouver post office that’s being redeveloped into cubicles for Amazon. And that’s a post office. 

The more people you talk to, the more likely it sounds that tomorrow’s board meeting will play out in the Modulo’s favour. The hotel staff are disconsolate and afraid for their jobs. The Modulo’s legal team is up late crossing t’s, dotting i’s. Alan Miranda, the white knight lawyer hired by the hotel’s manager Nadia to convince the advisory board to vote against the Modulo, is trying to manage expectations. Granted, he says he’s got an ace in the hole. We never find out what it is. It’s a cast of night owls, up late out of inclination or necessity. The Blue Moose flows freely, effervescing like television static. (Saturn V was littered with Red Bull cans; this time Cosmo has disguised it ever so slightly. Blue Moose energy drinks are everywhere in The Norwood Suite, like a comedic ad read in a parody podcast. They’re the official sponsor of the dance party in the basement. Their company representative is officially neutral on the subject of tomorrow’s board meeting, but he’d really prefer if the Modulo didn’t stop the party. Opposing corporate interests. One of these stopped clocks is presently correct.)

If the Modulo gets their way, the Off-Peak City metropolitan area will lose a significant piece of cultural heritage. Just like the train station in Off-Peak, the Hotel Norwood is a reflection of one specific person. But unlike Marcus, Peter Norwood was no mere tycoon: he was an artist of great renown. But who was he exactly? Well for one thing, he was Glenn Gould. Cosmo D has made this explicit, but the parallels are obvious regardless. Gould and Norwood are both eccentric cult figures, private and mysterious people whose lives and personalities revolved around playing the piano. Both of them stopped performing live at the peak of their powers. And Norwood’s mysterious disappearance in 1983 coincides roughly with Gould’s death in 1982: just different enough so it’s not too on the nose. More important than any of this, Norwood and Gould are both cool. The hotel walls are hung with Norwood’s album art: tasteful, minimal, reminiscent of 1960s jazz covers and Penguin paperbacks. Like Gould, Norwood was a genuinely modern classical musician, not a bland totem of sophistication.

“Microtonal Ecstacy” on the other hand, is a whole joke.

But Norwood is also Miles Davis, Charles Mingus and every other Whiplash-esque hard taskmaster bandleader. He’s Rodriguez, missing and presumed dead. And he’s David Bowie, not just because of the glammy outfit. I think about the movie Velvet Goldmine every time I get to the end of The Norwood Suite. It’s a Bowie biopic with the serial number filed off, directed by Todd Haynes. The movie is preoccupied with the moment Bowie cast off his Ziggy Stardust persona (captured on tape and film by D.A. Pennebaker). Velvet Goldmine tells the story of the rock star Brian Slade, a fictional character clearly modelled after Bowie. Slade vanished after unsuccessfully faking his own death at a concert, in a moment that clearly resembles Bowie’s fake retirement in 1973. At the end of the movie, the reporter we’ve been following throughout comes to believe that Slade is alive and well and has transformed into another person entirely: Tommy Stone, a nakedly commercial pop star who resembles Bowie’s Let’s Dance-era supercelebrity persona. The film is tinged with Todd Haynes’ disappointment in Bowie, that he could abandon the gay community who propelled him to success as Ziggy Stardust, just as the AIDS crisis was beginning. More generally, it’s a movie about how artists usually function better as ideas than as people. The real David Bowie agreed. He says so himself in the new documentary Moonage Daydream: what’s at an artist’s core doesn’t matter as much as the way they bounce around in listeners’ heads. He’s talking about Dylan, Lennon, Iggy Pop and himself. Add Norwood to the list. 

The ending of The Norwood Suite is even more elliptical and strange than the ending of Off-Peak. Once you’ve Collected Enough Things, you find your way into the titular Norwood Suite, an off-limits area that was once Peter Norwood’s private quarters. At this point a few things fall into place. You learn that your employer, Murial, sent Norwood a vinyl record sometime in the early 80s, not long before his disappearance. By sheer coincidence, that exact record has found its way back to the Hotel Norwood on this very night, in the possession of a music teacher who’s conducting a field trip. Once she’s able to play it, you learn that the record’s contents are barely music at all. It features an automated voice reciting a series of numbers. The next time you hear this voice reciting these numbers is at the very end of the game. You’ve made it into DJ Bogart’s private suite and presented him with Murial’s mix CD. (This was your mission, it turns out.) Upon hearing this voice, DJ Bogart’s head duly explodes, revealing him to be some kind of automaton wearing a human shell. The implication is that what’s happening to DJ Bogart in this moment also happened to Peter Norwood many years prior, also thanks to Murial. 

The further implication is that Norwood and Bogart are fundamentally the same. Even if they are not literally the same person, they are different personas of the same larger entity, different facets of the same force. They are the same person in a similar way that Brian Slade and Tommy Stone are the same person in Velvet Goldmine. One is an esteemed artist and the other a vessel for corporate sponsorship, but maybe that’s not as important a distinction as it initially seems. To drive the point home, the game ends with a member of Norwood’s old ensemble, an elderly paraplegic harpist, Dr. Strangeloving right up out of his wheelchair and dancing past the smoldering remains of DJ Bogart, straight towards you. For the final act of the game, you’ve been wearing a Peter Norwood costume, complete with mask and monocle. What the old man doesn’t recognize is that he’s in the presence of two absences. DJ Bogart is now quite clearly a machine, a nonhuman. But Peter Norwood is just a costume. And inside that costume is a person so nonspecific that they are routinely mistaken for hotel staff.

What precisely this means is slippery, and it should be. The Norwood Suite is a game that’s preoccupied by the relationship between art and commerce, but you can’t sum up its thesis statement on that topic in a neat line. And it’s wrong to fixate on the ending specifically: the themes are woven throughout. Most of the musicians you’ve met at the Hotel Norwood have fraught relationships with their art. But there’s no sanctimonious judgement here of artists who “sell out.” All of the contempt in the game is reserved for the Modulo: a company that forces concert venues to close and turns magnificent heritage sites into server farms. It’s companies like this that make conditions for artists so challenging in the first place. 

Love to be a normal-sized guy in a room full of very small apartment buildings.

The Norwood Suite leaves many lingering questions that Steam communities and subreddits will be more inclined to resolve than I am. Why is Murial consistently pictured as a member of Norwood’s ensemble, when they almost certainly never played together? What is Alan Miranda’s ace in the hole? Why can the old harpist suddenly walk? What happens at the board meeting? (This last one is answered in the following game; it is as we’d feared. The Modulo wins the day.) More power to anybody who wants to figure this stuff out, but as with Off-Peak, I prefer to look at The Norwood Suite as an exposition space for a constellation of ideas, images and sounds. It is Cosmo D’s most sophisticated exposition to date, because it is not primarily a display of excellent taste. (Not primarily.) There are still board games everywhere, but they’re part of the character drama, not just aesthetic signifiers. 

Even more remarkably, there are almost no name drops of real-life musicians anywhere in this game. Off-Peak was packed with music school shibboleths and cred-building obscurities. The Norwood Suite basically ignores the entire history of music and exists in its own totally fictional musical reality. Sure, there’s a blown-up print of a gigue from one of Bach’s cello suites on the wall. But it doesn’t have his name on it. Yes, the dialogue does reference a composer named “Xenokos,” which sure sounds like Xenakis, but it isn’t quite. Likewise for “Froburger,” who isn’t quite Froberger. The briefly discussed “master of the pocket symphony,” Broomes, has a name that sounds like Brahms but that’s where the similarities end. No doubt there are a few things I missed, but I only caught a couple of references to genuine historical figures. One is to the utterly obscure Hungarian pianist and inventor Emánuel Moór. 

The other, much more consequential, is that the Hotel Norwood’s manager is named Nadia Boulanger. The historical Nadia Boulanger was a legendary pedagogue who taught musicians ranging from Aaron Copland to Quincy Jones. Astor Piazzola. Philip Glass. Boulanger judiciously refused to teach George Gershwin, sensing that he basically had it all figured out. She was a skilled composer in her own right, though not a confident one, and always in the shadow of her talented sister Lili who died young. Nadia’s opera La ville morte has been produced exactly twice, and is pretty good. What connection this figure is meant to have with the ruthless, scheming, borderline abusive manager of the Hotel Norwood is beyond me. But it seems meaningful to me that the one figure from music history that Cosmo D chooses to include in this piece is a massively consequential figure who is nevertheless somewhat marginalized and not recognizable by name. 

The Norwood Suite engages with the history of classical music in a way that no other piece of media ever has, to my knowledge. It does not mention the name of a single canonical composer. This is remarkable. Usually when classical music shows up in media, it’s there specifically to trade on its familiarity. Mozart and Beethoven are easy stand-ins for the abstract idea of genius, and familiar works by Tchaikovsky and Strauss serve as shorthands for gracefulness or gravity. This tendency to emphasise a familiar handful of marble faces and iconic tunes is frustrating to those of us who’ve been on our own journeys of discovery with classical music, and to anybody who cares about representation. And here comes The Norwood Suite, which is full of fictional musicians of various genders and races and not a Beethoven reference in sight. Among everything else The Norwood Suite is doing, it is also a vision of what the culture surrounding classical music could look like if it weren’t organised around the canon. I’ll admit, this is what fascinated me about this game in the first place. I love that it depicts people who are writing string quartets, practising etudes and restringing their harps, and whose heroes walked the earth at least in living memory. 

The rough precociousness of Cosmo D’s first two games is gone without a trace. He started off making virtual spaces to display stuff that he and his friends liked. In The Norwood Suite, he’s tempered that impulse so thoroughly that I just spent several paragraphs praising its lack of reliance on historical references. The Hotel Norwood feels like it emerged organically from its own fictional world. It’s an impossible place that feels absolutely real and it makes me feel completely at home. 

Tales from Off-Peak City Vol. 1 (2020)

Imagine if the opening of Bioshock Infinite had been Funky As Shit.

For the second time in a row, you’re being dropped off by the last person you saw. Murial dropped us off at the Hotel Norwood in a rather practical car. But traffic isn’t running to the intersection of Yam and July. The neighbourhood is drastically flooded, so you find yourself drifting onto the sidewalk in a rowboat, along with the elderly harpist who accosted you at the end of The Norwood Suite, and his more articulate daughter. They need you to steal a saxophone that’s locked up in the basement of a pizza joint. Fine. Par for the course. But what’s more interesting is that they ask for your name. This time, you’re not going to be a cipher. This time, you’re a somebody. 

…for EVERYTHING.

The fact that you actually get to choose your character’s name this time is no trivial thing. Tales is a game that’s adamant that you’ll express your identity throughout this story. This time you won’t just explore. You’ll apply your will to the world. You’ll make things. So I guess it’s finally time to talk about gameplay. I poked fun at Norwood’s gameplay macguffin of Collecting Things. (Off-Peak is the same.) And sure, Collecting Things is a bit of a cliché, but in that game your actual objectives are so hilariously incidental to the experience that it feels like missing the point to criticize this. Nevertheless, Tales tries a new approach. There’s still a fair bit of exploring the world to collect items that will serve as keys to get you into new areas. But Tales also sends you on missions, like the tiny open world game that it is. 

Specifically, it sends you out delivering pizzas. Almost as soon as you disembark from the rowboat, you find yourself employed at Caetano’s Slice, a restaurant run by the former saxophonist you’re assigned to steal from. While you try and work out a way to get into his locked basement saxophone vault, you may as well make a little money delivering pies. Also, you’ll have to make them–and this is the game’s first invitation to really express yourself.

Video games are about wish fulfilment.

The pizza making minigame is a simple little thing that I find unreasonably fun. The orders that come into Caetano’s shop read like Oblique Strategies. “Right in the chest,” for example. Lots of room for interpretation. Will you serve your customers elegant, traditional margherita or pepperoni pies? Or will you load them up with more outré toppings: flamingo meat, chocolate chips, gummy worms, synthetic brains? (Given these, the lack of pineapple feels like a deliberate provocation.) Every ingredient is tied to a different instrumental loop in the score. The more sauce you use, the more bowed cello you hear. More gummy worms, more jaw harp. It’s a kind of interactivity Cosmo D has been interested in since Saturn V, where moving from room to room changed the mix of the soundtrack. Better still, there’s actually a physics simulation here, so if you pile on too many slices of buffalo mozzarella (and who can resist), they will tumble off onto the floor. 

Upon delivery, your customers will assess your creation, ingredient by ingredient, praising your good taste or raising an eyebrow at your more innovative pies. (There must be an impressive amount of writing under the hood here, to account for every ingredient in various quantities.) Whatever the verdict, your customers always eat their order in the end. As ever, there’s no way to fail in this game. If you want your road to success to be paved with chocolate chip and olive pizzas, so be it. This is the first time in this universe where your choices determine what people say to you. It’s only right that the subject should be pizza toppings. 

But even before you get your new job, the game offers you another expressive tool: a camera. Even the most beautiful video games can force you into a utilitarian way of looking at the world around you, just scanning for valuable information. The fact that Tales gives you a camera right at the start of the game encourages you to find compelling angles from which to look at the world, to make the act of moving through the world into a creative one. (Coincidentally, this mechanic is the central feature of Umurangi Generation, an indie game that came out the same week as this one.) For two games, Cosmo D has placed us at the beck and call of self-conscious creatives. Gameplay is an implicitly creative act, but the player’s creativity is more integral here than in any of Cosmo’s previous games. This time, we feel embodied. We’re here. When you play all of Cosmo D’s games in a relatively short timespan, you can feel the focus gradually shift from the developer, to the characters, to the player: from me, to they, to you. 

I’m a mediocre photographer in real life too.

Granted, the place we’re here to photograph is in rough shape. The intersection of Yam and July is a neglected part of town, ignored by its elected officials and physically cut off from its surroundings. Two sides are cut off by the flooding, one by an oddly meticulous pileup of cars. And to the north, a train car dangles precariously off its elevated tracks: an ongoing catastrophe that everybody’s sort of gotten used to. Video games necessitate these kinds of barriers, to keep you from moving into the part of the world that doesn’t exist. But here, those barriers serve as jokes, and also as a way of communicating what kind of place this is. These limitations mean something to the people who live here. Luke the music professor can’t get to his classes because the trains aren’t running. The folks who fish in the canal aren’t catching anything because the floods let all the trout escape. 

But city hall is hardly their biggest problem. Like Off-Peak and Norwood, Tales has its own shady organization that looms over the story–quite literally, in fact. The factory run by Human Resources Horizons is the largest building in the area, and its massive white-lit windows are the first thing visible from your rowboat as you drift into the city. The man in charge of HRH, Big Mo, is functionally in charge of this neighbourhood. He’s the first person you meet when you get off the boat, before you get your job and before you even get your camera. He commands an army of wan-faced goons, all alike, who we’ve actually been running into ever since we first set foot in Marcus’s train station. HRH isn’t just a company, it’s a sort of extra-judicial law enforcement agency. The shady organizations of this world are becoming ever more worrisome. Remember when we first heard about the Circus? And they just seemed like a sort of dodgy arts collective? Even the Modulo wasn’t disappearing people. 

Does look like a cozy ride, though.

HRH looks poised to become the ultimate villain of this saga. But all our shady friends are still here. The Circus is sharing an office building with Blue Moose R&D. (We get a tantalizing glimpse of Murial through a crack in a door, her only appearance here.) The Modulo is still present and working its people into the ground. Even Marcus makes an appearance, trying to coerce a naïve young band into an exploitative handshake deal. But some of the familiar faces seem less familiar than you might expect. Part of it is just that the character models have improved so drastically since Norwood that everybody suddenly looks 70 percent more alive. But there are other red flags. Jeremy played the piano in the last game and went by “Jer.” Now he’s a bassist and goes by “Remy.” Same guy? Who can say? What about the guy at Blue Moose R&D who looks and talks like Dirk from Norwood, but calls himself Xavier? Identity is mutable in Off-Peak City, and there’s no such thing as continuity unless you look for it too hard.

That said, Tales from Off-Peak City Vol. 1 is more explicitly concerned with narrative and traditional worldbuilding than any of its predecessors. We get a much deeper exploration of the automata than we did in Norwood. (Automation and AI are almost as much a source of anxiety here as corporate ruthlessness.) Your quest to retrieve Caetano’s saxophone will eventually lead you into his apartment above the pizza shop, where he’s been keeping two automaton recreations of his wife and daughter and attempting to power them with, what else, pizza and energy drinks. You’ll find a map that points to a tremendous number of automata living in the mysterious face-shaped Building 9. You’ll learn that these automata are the work of Human Resources Horizons. You’ll learn more about the two organizations trying to take on HRH: the Circus, and your present employers–whose calling card is a black octagon. You’ll make connections everywhere. 

All this narrative–and this modest incursion of gameplay–leaves less space for Tales to function as the kind of gallery space that its predecessors were. Sure, there’s a floor of an apartment building where one measure of Gershwin plays on a loop, and there’s sheet music for a part song by Josquin sitting in a drawer somewhere. But this element of Cosmo D’s work has been on a downward trajectory since the start. That’s for the best. It also makes this game a little harder to write about. Ultimately what fascinates me about Tales is much the same as what fascinates me about all of Cosmo D’s previous work: its sense of place. By the time you’re through, you’ve got the lay of the land. The politicians have forgotten this place, and the private sector has stepped in to take advantage. War is brewing. But there are still a few places the locals can go to feel part of something. The lounge in the basement of the pawn shop. The banks of the canal. The slice joint that everybody knows is going downhill. 

RIP, villain.

It’s worth noting that nobody actually calls it “Off-Peak City.” From our perspective outside the story, the city is named after the first game that took place there. But I can imagine the nickname “Off-Peak City” catching on among the locals, like “City of Lights,” or City of Brotherly Love.” It’s what they’ll call the place once Marcus has taken total control of the transit system and the trains hardly come through anymore. Soon, there’ll be nobody left here. Off-Peak hours will apply to the whole metropolis. All this property will be snapped up by speculators and emptied out, a ghost town for the commuters to gaze upon as they zoom past on their prohibitively expensive train. Maybe they can open a pizza joint on the corner of Yam and July, for old times’ sake. It’ll be a hell of a lot better than Caetano’s and nobody will be able to afford it.

…it’ll hold.

Betrayal at Club Low (2022)

There’s a moment during Marcus’s one scene in Tales from Off-Peak City Vol. 1 where somebody makes reference to a “next-level jazz-classical-electronic trio.” This tossed-off line has also turned out to be an approximate schema for Cosmo D’s first three commercial games. Norwood is his classical game. Tales is jazz. And Betrayal at Club Low is half RPG, half DJ set. It’s a game you can dance to. 

Cosmo’s music is half the reason to play any of these games, but it seldom factors into the narrative the way you might expect from games that are explicitly about music. The scores of The Norwood Suite and Tales are non-diegetic: we don’t really know what Norwood’s music sounds like, or Caetano’s. Maybe we heard a little of DJ Bogart’s music in Norwood’s basement. But in this game the score could be DJ Chad Blueprint’s set coming through the walls of the club at any time. Granted, it’s odd that he always puts on a new record at the precise moment when you move into a new room. 

In a video game, you can be whoever you want: a witcher, or a soldier, or a person who is comfortable in nightclubs.

Point is, this is the first of Cosmo D’s games where the sound and the subject are totally in concert. There have always been elements of jazz, classical and electronic music in these soundtracks, but even when the narrative focuses on one of the traditionally acoustic genres, there’s always a beat. This isn’t a circle that really needed to be squared, but Betrayal at Club Low finally provides a setting where a good beat is not just welcome but essential. Club Low is a high-stakes environment. The dancers waited a long time to get in, and they know what they like. Peril or glory awaits the brave DJ. Appropriately then, this game has a fail state. 

For the first time in this body of work, there’s been a total change of genre. After four first-person adventure games (“walking simulators,” if we must), this is a straight-up third-person RPG with character stats and progression and health pools and “game over” endings. I expect that we’ll eventually see Betrayal as one of the early examples in a spate of post-Disco Elysium small-scale indie RPGs (Citizen Sleeper is another). But it also serves as the culmination of a trend in Cosmo D’s work that’s been underway for two games now: it makes the player character truly the center of attention, exerting a granularly personal influence on the world by rolling dice. 

Relatedly, the other trend we’ve been tracing since Saturn V reaches a turning point here as well. We’ve been watching as the gallery-like sensibility of Cosmo D’s early games slowly gives way to narrative. Betrayal is the least gallery-like thing he’s ever made, and the most story-rich. There’s still plenty of fascinations and influences on display here, but they’ve been fully incorporated into the story, like flamingo meat into the fluorescent stew simmering in Club Low’s kitchen. Effectively, this means I’ve outlived my helpfulness as a tour guide. 

I wouldn’t eat this, but I’d stare into it for an hour.

Lest anybody misunderstand, there’s plenty in this story to remark on. We could note that Murial is now collaborating with the photographer from Tales who seemed so intent on driving her out of town. We could note that the player character is a wan automaton, confirming that whatever Murial’s aims, the Circus is not above using these things for their own ends. We could observe that we now know the automaton-filled Building 9 to be the headquarters of our mysterious former employers at the Octagon. Did you notice this is the first game where we weren’t dropped off by the last people we saw in the previous one? Or that DJ Bogart named his student Chad Blueprint his sole successor at Club Low one year before the release date of The Norwood Suite–did he know what he had coming to him?

This is all perfectly interesting, and I had a grand time with all of it as I was playing the game, which might be Cosmo D’s best. But concerns like this will never be the element of these games that lingers for me. It looks like there’s an Off-Peak City fan wiki in construction. Granted, people are free to engage with art however they like, but I’ve got mixed feelings about this. There is a part of me that thinks fan wikis enable the least useful, least interesting kind of engagement for a story like this. We may someday learn more about what the precise relationship is between the Circus and the Octagon, or about the origin of these automata, or whether Peter Norwood was ever a real person. But what would it accomplish to square away these surface-level ambiguities? Would it assist in understanding these games’ attitude towards art, or the wealth gap, or the deterioration of public services, or the importance of preserving heritage buildings, or the eternal tug of war between money and joy? I don’t think it would, and I’m much more interested in all of those concerns than I am in solving narrative riddles. If you’ve read this far and you’re disappointed that I didn’t do more of that sort of thing, well, sorry. The good news is that the Steam communities are full of it. 

***

Let’s tie up a few loose threads. First: seven thousand words ago, I described myself as “a fellow traveler who shares Cosmo’s obsession with music, his love for the surreal, his irresistible impulse to put his obsessions on display, and perhaps his nagging sense that this impulse may be shallow.” The conflict that animates Off-Peak and makes it interesting is that it is, on one hand, an artist’s self-conscious attempt to draw attention to his own sophistication and eclecticism and, on the other, a satire of that exact tendency. It’s an exhibition that serves as its own art critic. Having now played Betrayal at Club Low and replayed Tales from Off-Peak City Vol. 1, I feel that their total success serves as an even more effective demonstration that the impulse to put one’s obsessions on display is indeed shallow. There’s definitely space for games to function like galleries. I’m thinking specifically of “Limits and Demonstrations,” the wonderful interlude between the first two acts of Kentucky Route Zero. “Limits and Demonstrations” puts you inside a virtual gallery space filled with artworks that would be impossible to exhibit in physical space. It’s Borges’ “reviews of impossible books” approach to literature, applied to visual art. I’d love to see more of that. But in Cosmo D’s case specifically, the more narrative-focused and less gallery-like these games have become, the more they feel like they’re about something other than themselves. 

Second: since I started writing this piece, I’ve been eating a lot of pizza. I’ve switched my default from red wine to craft beer. I’ve been listening to Debussy, Milton Babbitt, funk-era Miles Davis, Burial, Four Tet: all artists that are suggested, if not referenced outright, by these games. It’s a complicated thing to grapple with. The notion that a personal aesthetic can be transformed into a brand and sold to others is an idea that troubles and haunts every one of these games, The Norwood Suite in particular. And yet, Cosmo D’s aesthetic is intensely seductive. 

Finally: the closest pizza place to my childhood home was called Cosmo’s. It’s entirely possible that the first slice I ever ate was from that place.

The Survivors: Part Fifteen

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At last, we’ve reached the end of the alphabet. A few thank you notes to go, then a bonus round and a final summing up, and I’m free. 

Yes
Yes
Time and a Word
The Yes Album
Fragile
Fragile (DVD Audio)
Close to the Edge
Tales from Topographic Oceans
Relayer
Going for the One
Tormato
Drama
Union
Essentially Yes (Five-disc set)
Keystudio
Fly From Here
Heaven and Hell
Classic Yes
Yesyears (Four-disc set)

I mean. There are two other bands that have occupied about this much of my shelf space: Genesis and Pink Floyd. But both of those bands were family interests. At the age of ten, I fell hard for Yes, and insisted that we must acquire their complete works. (The only Yes studio album I’ve never owned in a physical format is The Quest, the album they FOR SOME REASON released in 2021, in spite of the recent deaths of two longstanding members and the continuing absence of their founding lead singer.) I think every young music nerd ought to collect the complete works of at least one band. Specifically, I think everybody should collect the works of a band with a huge catalogue and a very patchy success rate. You can learn a lot by listening through the complete works of Bob Dylan, or Aretha Franklin. You can learn the general shape of a creative life, and learn about how small changes of circumstance can result in long phases of brilliance or total catastrophe. Yes was the band that taught me this, and I subconsciously look for the patterns I learned from them in the works of every band, filmmaker and author I become obsessed with. My abiding love for them is situated mainly in their inspired run of six albums from 1971-77. But their role in my life as a music obsessive has just as much to do with uneven-to-bad albums like Tormato, Union and Fly From Here. Precious few bands make up a stronger part of my DNA than Yes. 
Measure of gratitude: Beyond words. Thank you. 

Thom Yorke
The Eraser

An underrated album that I listened the hell out of. Thom Yorke is a more consistent solo artist than people give him credit for. Anima was justifiably acclaimed when it came out, but people forget that “Harrowdown Hill” is a banger and this album rocks. 
Measure of gratitude: Large. Thank you. 

Neil Young
Rust Never Sleeps
Chrome Dreams II
Decade

I bought Chrome Dreams II after seeing Neil live in Edmonton. It was the album he was promoting at the time. It’s only okay, but you can forgive me for being convinced on account of that concert being the loudest, noisiest and weirdest show I’ve ever seen in an arena. It’s a rare and wonderful thing for a musician to be equally brilliant at two things. Neil is as good in grungy guitar noise mode as he is in acoustic folk songwriter mode, which is why Rust Never Sleeps is a masterpiece. Decade was my way in. I’ve heard all of the albums that it compiles from at this point, but it’s still a magnificent front-to-back listen. Neil Young rules. I like him better every year. 
Measure of gratitude: Very large. Thank you. 

Frank Zappa
Freak Out!
We’re Only In It For The Money
The Grand Wazoo
You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 1

I’ve mostly lost my taste for Frank Zappa. He’s the smuggest humourist of his generation, and when he’s trying to be funny he often forgets to write jokes. But when he (proverbially) shuts up and plays his guitar, he’s fun. The jazz fusion stuff like The Grand Wazoo is all good, but you couldn’t pay me to listen to We’re Only In It For The Money ever again. 
Measure of gratitude: Small. Thank you. 

Zodiac Trio
Stravinsky/Bacri/Ustvolskaya/Bartók

Something I brought home from work. I’m sure I listened to it exactly once. But Bartók’s Contrasts is a cool piece. 
Measure of gratitude: Small. Thank you. 

Various Artists
Big Blues Extravaganza: The Best of Austin City Limits
Martin Scorsese Presents: The Best of the Blues
Delos 40th Anniversary Celebration

We had a surprising and pointless number of various artists blues compilations in our house. At some point it starts to get repetitive. How many separate discs do you need with “One Way Out” by the Allman Brothers Band? But Big Blues Extravaganza is great because it’s all live recordings from the vast archive of Austin City Limits. And the Scorsese set has a sort of conceptual purity to it. I liked these albums. The Delos 40th anniversary thing is something I took home from work and listened to once. It was the first time I’d heard a recording of Clara Rockmore playing the theremin. Aside from that I have no recollection of it. 
Measure of gratitude: Middling. Thank you.

BONUS ROUND: MUSIC DVDs

Claudio Abbado: A Portrait
The Beatles: Anthology 
The Band: The Last Waltz
Emerson, Lake & Palmer: Pictures at an Exhibition
Peter Gabriel: Secret World Live, Growing Up Live, Play: The Videos
David Gilmour: In Concert
Jimi Hendrix: Blue Wild Angel
Jethro Tull: Nothing Is Easy, Live at Madison Square Garden 1978, Jack in the Green
Led Zeppelin: DVD
Paul McCartney: Live at the Cavern Club, Back in the US, The McCartney Years
Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, PULSE
Rush: Rush in Rio, R30
Bruce Springsteen: Live in Barcelona
Stevie Ray Vaughan: Live at the El Mocambo
Rick Wakeman: Journey to the Centre of the Earth
Roger Waters: In the Flesh
Yes: Keys to Ascension, Symphonic Live, Yes Acoustic, Yesspeak   

As a kid, I’d listen to CDs on my own, through headphones. CDs were a thing that helped me connect with myself. But this collection of concert DVDs, mainly featuring artists that the whole household agreed on, was a family experience. That makes them complicated. They are also of wildly divergent quality: the early DVD era was a gold rush for makers of indifferent concert films. Precious little here equals the cinematic value of The Last Waltz, even when the concerts documented are magnificent. The highlights for me are the Peter Gabriel discs, directed by the likes of François Girard and Super Bowl halftime show veteran Hamish Hamilton, from stage productions by Robert Lepage. Aside from those, the most valuable discs here are the ones that document, however artlessly, performances by artists in their long-ago prime: Jethro Tull and Jimi Hendrix at the Isle of Wight Festival, Led Zeppelin at Knebworth, Pink Floyd playing to an audience of ghosts at Pompeii. (This last one is actually a Great Film.) Some of these films feel cheap and expendable. The sort of thing I wouldn’t log on Letterboxd. But many of them document crucial moments in music history. Many are thrilling. Many of them I would forget I ever owned, if not for writing this now. 
Measure of gratitude: Profoundly variable. Thank you. 

***

And that’s it. Everybody got thanked, everybody’s off to a new home. Well, almost everybody. There are a few stragglers: the Surviving Survivors. Here are the CDs that I decided to keep. These are recordings that either have specific personal value, or that I’m not likely to find in any digital format. They take up three and a half inches of shelf space: 

  • Howard Bashaw: Hard Rubber, Hard Elastic
  • Adrian Belew: Side Four (autographed)
  • Vicky Chow: Piano Counterpoint (Steve Reich, bootleg)
  • Tyler Collins: Fall (autographed)
  • Glenn Gould: The Radio Artist
  • Marty Sammon: Hound Dog Barkin’ (autographed)
  • William Shakespeare: Henry IV, Part One (Arkangel Shakespeare)
  • The Syrup Trap: Christmas Happens Every Year

I’ve also kept my Beatles Anthology DVD set, and three cassettes: an 80s Bowie compilation, From Genesis to Revelation, and something called Eagle Ridin’ Papas that I’ve never heard but find very funny. 

For better or worse, these physical objects have shaped my life. I mentioned at the start of this project that I’ve become an avid collector of vinyl records. This is partially because I love the sound of a good record. But I think it’s also partially because I have become accustomed to the physical presence of music in my home. I have complicated feelings about streaming. On the one hand, it’s straightforwardly terrible for artists. On the other, I fully believe that having access to virtually the whole of recorded music history at a moment’s notice is the best thing that’s ever happened for music obsessives. There’s no implicit value in physical media, save for a difference in audio quality that probably doesn’t matter that much. But having a music collection does change the way you think about music. It encourages you to think about what’s most important to you, and it helps to define one’s sense of self. The Survivors, and their unlucky predecessors, helped me to shape myself while I could still be shaped. 

Farewell, and thank you.

The Survivors: Part Fourteen

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Richard Wagner
Der Ring des Nibelungen (Marek Janowski, Staatskapelle Dresden, etc.)
Toscanini Conducts Wagner (with the NBC Symphony Orchestra)
Overtures and Interludes (Herbert von Karajan, Berlin Philharmonic)

Wagner is obviously one of music history’s most punchable figures, but I sure do love some of this bullshit. I remember getting Janowski’s Ring cycle for Christmas one year and realizing that meant I had to actually listen to it. I’ve only listened through the full Ring cycle twice, once in this recording and once in the classic Solti. This one’s better. Better still, though, is any disc that presents Wagner’s beautiful symphonic writing outside the context of his often tedious, always overlong operas. My favourite such disc is Chailly’s with the Concertgebouw, but I never had it in physical form. The Toscanini set is a nice artifact. The Karajan disc is sort of dull, though it was the first recording of the Tannhäuser overture I ever heard, so points for that. I genuinely love Wagner when he’s not dictating the terms. 
Measure of gratitude: Large. Thank you. 

Tom Waits
Alice
Blood Money
Real Gone
Orphans (Promotional sampler)

I got into Tom Waits through the classic Swordfishtrombones/Rain Dogs/Frank’s Wild Years trilogy, and that’s still my favourite stuff for the most part. But I stole these more experimental ones from work, and they’re a lot of fun, if a little uneven. I really haven’t listened to them much. I wish I had stronger feelings about this; if my copy of Frank’s Wild Years had been a Survivor, I’d be waxing poetic. 
Measure of gratitude: Middling. Thank you. 

Rick Wakeman
Return to the Centre of the Earth
The Caped Collection

Rick Wakeman was my first hero. I dressed as him for Halloween once, when I was about eleven. Am I embarrassed by this? What would be the point? I still adore his performances on the classic Yes albums, and I can still deal with The Six Wives of Henry VIII, a lovely bit of 70s kitsch. But that’s where it ends. Return to the Centre of the Earth is a bad sequel to an only slightly less bad predecessor, featuring Ozzy Osbourne, Bonnie Tyler and Patrick Stewart all wasting their precious time. The Caped Collection is a compilation of songs that I suppose Wakeman must be proud of. But I am currently listening to “Slaveman” for the first time since I was maybe ten, and it might be the worst song ever recorded. Still, once upon a time I wanted to be Rick Wakeman when I grew up. That counts for something. 
Measure of gratitude: Large. Thank you. 

Ted’s Warren Commission
First Time Caller

Ted Warren came to Fort McMurray every couple of years when I was in high school to do workshops along with a few other wonderful Canadian jazz musicians. This album is pretty good. No further thoughts. 
Measure of gratitude: Medium. Thank you. 

Weather Report
Heavy Weather

Here’s a story. My high school jazz band used to play “Birdland,” from this album. At the end, I’d put down my trumpet, come up front, and play the synth solo on my Alesis Micron. It was my teenage apotheosis. Years later (this year), I was recording an original song. It reminded me of something, but I couldn’t figure out what I’d been ripping off. I thought to myself, hmm, this needs a synth solo. And I found myself recording a solo using the very same patch on the very same synth. The penny didn’t drop until I was mixing the song. I hadn’t thought about “Birdland” or Heavy Weather for half my life, yet here it was in a dumb song I wrote at the age of 30. The human mind, ladies and gentlemen. 
Measure of gratitude: Large. Thank you. 

Kanye West
The College Dropout
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

At this point I’d rather come face to face with Richard Wagner than with Kanye West, but I’d be a damn liar if I said I didn’t still love everything he did up to and including Yeezus. A thing I am genuinely embarrassed about is that I didn’t pay any attention to hip hop until Kanye sampled King Crimson. But what an entry point: “21st Century Schizoid Man” as a self-diagnosis. In one and a half seconds, I suddenly understood sampling. Fantasy will probably always be my favourite of his, as much as I love 808s. The earlier stuff is probably better, but I doubt I’ll ever see it that way. One of the most flawed geniuses of our time, and also a massive creep, but he got me into rap. That’s worth a lot. 
Measure of gratitude: Massive. Thank you. 

The Who
Endless Wire
Then and Now

Listen, I don’t like the Who very much. It’s one of my little quirks. But the hits can be fun every now and then. I mean, every Then and Now. The Who was my first big ticket rock concert, and it wasn’t very good. They had just released Endless Wire (on my sixteenth birthday), and they must have thought it was very good. It is not. 
Measure of gratitude: Small. Thank you. 

John Williams
Star Wars: A New Hope (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

The only album I ever ordered from Columbia House. (I mean, it was ordered on my behalf. I think it counts.) I was never as big a Star Wars kid as some of my friends. But this music was and is undeniable. Empire is arguably Williams’ best Star Wars score, but the first film contains possibly the best cue in any movie ever: “Binary Sunset.” I never listened to this very much, but it rules. 
Measure of gratitude: Medium. Thank you. 

Wobbler
Hinterland

My thoughts on this are largely the same as what I wrote in the last post about the Tangent, but on this album you can actually pinpoint which specific prog band they’re impersonating at any given time. There’s no shame in that, but I also struggle to see the point. I liked it for a while. 
Measure of gratitude: Small. Thank you. 

Rick Wright
Broken China

Roger Waters’ solo career is full of facile, if dramatic political statements. David Gilmour’s solo records declined from satisfying hard rock in the 70s, to the blandest Knopfler-ass rock imaginable on every album after the first. If we’re really being honest, Syd Barrett is the only member of Pink Floyd who stayed the course outside the band. (Improved, even.) This album by Rick Wright is a middle-of-the-pack Pink Floyd solo record. It’s pleasantly moody, albeit occasionally cheesy. And the lyrics, mainly by Anthony Moore, aren’t always up to the task of discussing depression with such frankness.
Measure of gratitude: Small. Thank you. 

Robert Wyatt
Comicopera

I don’t know why I haven’t heard more Robert Wyatt albums. Rock Bottom is an A++ album that grows on me more as I get older and sadder. And this one I bought randomly which isn’t even that notable is also really good. “A.W.O.L.” and “Stay Tuned” are heartbreaking in a way that only Wyatt, with his modest little voice, can pull off. A third of it is in Italian for reasons I don’t fully understand, but not fully understanding is par for the course with Robert Wyatt. I love him with a warm love that partially bypasses my brain. 
Measure of gratitude: Very large. Thank you.

The Survivors: Part Thirteen

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Talking Heads
Remain in Light

Along with Another Green World, this is one of the albums that’s grown on me most. Brian Eno and David Byrne work famously well together, and both of them are people who seemed fascinatingly chilly to me at first, artists who deliberately keep the audience at arm’s length. Maybe I’ve gotten stranger with time, because now I find them both completely relatable. Byrne in particular is simultaneously affectless and genuine, pointy-headed and warm, and I can’t explain why I find this so poignant. But the moment in “Once in a Lifetime” where he starts repeating “time isn’t holding us, time isn’t after us” hits me a little harder every year. 
Measure of gratitude: Massive. Thank you. 

The Tangent
A Place in the Queue

This is the archetypal example of the kind of modern prog that I liked for a hot second in high school: openly nostalgic, self-referential, technically outstanding, utterly isolated from everything else happening in the world of music. Nowadays I try to maintain my opinion that it’s legitimate, out of a sense of generosity. But the spirit of the 1970s prog it emulates—the striving, the invention, the sense of playing without explicit models, without a net—is all absent here. That cannot be replicated. 
Measure of gratitude: Small. Thank you. 

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Symphonies Nos. 4-6 (Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan) 

I don’t know why I defaulted to Karajan recordings of all these classic symphonies back in my undergraduate days. I guess I trusted the internet too much. These are perfectly fine recordings of three symphonies I’ve come to like more in other performances. Tchaikovsky isn’t one of my favourite composers. The famous ballet scores aren’t for me. But these symphonies, and especially the sixth, are highlights of the nineteenth century. 
Measure of gratitude: Middling. Thank you. 

Tool
10,000 Days

I liked but didn’t love Tool in high school. I think if I’d heard Lateralus in addition to this I might have loved them. And now the moment feels like it’s passed: I’m more of a metalhead now than I was then, but my tastes run heavier than this. Alas. 
Measure of gratitude: Middling. Thank you. 

Van Der Graaf Generator
The Least We Can Do Is Wave To Each Other
Pawn Hearts
Godbluff

Van Der Graaf Generator might be the most embarrassing of the classic prog bands, but for none of the same reasons as the others. Peter Hammill is at his best when he’s at his most grandiose. But some of those ballads, the personal songs, can get awfully mawkish. When this band is at their best, like on most of Pawn Hearts and the entirety of Godbluff, they’re a strange, scrappy and magnificent beast that’s not comparable to anything. At their worst, they produce catastrophes that bring to mind the worst poetry you wrote in high school, back when you wore a fedora. I love them in either case. 
Measure of gratitude: Massive. Thank you. 

Vangelis
The Best of Vangelis

It might be the most formative CD in the whole collection. I think it found its way to my house by way of the Columbia House record club. The first time I heard it, at the age of six or seven, I was spellbound. It’s how I learned what synthesizers were. From this came Jon and Vangelis, then Rick Wakeman, and inevitably then to Yes, and my whole young adult taste profile. Not all of it holds up nowadays, but all of it is important to me because it’s the root of everything I thought about during my most formative years. 
Measure of gratitude: Astronomical. Thank you. 

Edgard Varèse
The Complete Works (Riccardo Chailly, Concertgebouw)

I bought this because I knew Frank Zappa loved Varèse, but he didn’t have access to these magnificent recordings by Chailly and the Concertgebouw. One of Chailly’s best attributes is his ability to bring out the warmth and expressiveness in ostensibly alienating music (see also: Schoenberg and Webern). I haven’t heard this in years, but if they ever press it to vinyl it’s a day one purchase, because it’s the exact kind of thing I’ll definitely like better now. 
Measure of gratitude: Large. Thank you. 

Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble
The Sky is Crying
Greatest Hits

I listened the hell out of these two albums, the compilation especially, during my brief teenage blues phase. Nobody plays like Stevie Ray Vaughan. I remember one of the first times I read something about a musician’s playing, listened again, and found it to be true, was when I read one of his bandmates’ remarks in the liner notes to Greatest Hits, saying that he was totally capable of playing rhythm guitar and lead at the same time. That’s the defining element of what he does: it’s like listening to Jimi Hendrix and Nile Rodgers playing together, but it’s just one guy. I parted company with Stevie Ray for many years, but rediscovered him as the lead guitarist on Bowie’s Let’s Dance (speaking of Nile Rodgers). Not a lot of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s own music is as good as the singles on that record, but that’s not the point. The point is to listen to him play. 
Measure of gratitude: Large. Thank you. 

Ralph Vaughan Williams
A Pastoral Symphony/Symphony No. 5 (Adrian Boult, New Philharmonia, London Philharmonic)

Vaughan Williams is one of my least favourite composers. “The Lark Ascending” is great, but these two symphonies have exactly one good movement between them (the third movement of the Pastoral). Peter Warlock said Vaughan Williams’ music all sounded like a cow looking over a gate, which is a strong candidate for the greatest line in the history of music criticism. 
Measure of gratitude: Miniscule. Thank you. 

Giuseppe Verdi
Requiem (Carlo Maria Giulini, Berlin Philharmonic, etc.) 

Verdi’s Requiem is the polar opposite of Brahms’ German Requiem. The latter is one of the warmest, most personal things ever written for a large ensemble. It is about mitigating the suffering of those who grieve. Verdi’s Requiem is about the pageantry of death: an epic religious journey in which the dying mortal ceases to be an everyman and becomes a hero on an adventure to another world. It is less dear to me than the Brahms, but no less enjoyable. This recording is an old friend. Nothing like it. 
Measure of gratitude: Massive. Thank you. 

Alan Vizzutti
The Carnival of Venus
Ritzville

This guy is one of the foremost trumpet virtuosos of his generation and I honest to god couldn’t bear to ever listen to any of this shit again. I had his expanded edition of the famous Arban etude book in my trumpet days, and it contained the solo part for “The Carnival of Venus,” his own rendition of Arban’s variations on “The Carnival of Venice.” It is a kind of show-off showpiece that cannot possibly be enjoyable to anybody who doesn’t play the trumpet. I used to do that. Now I don’t. 
Measure of gratitude: Small. Thank you.

The Survivors: Part Twelve

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Stephen Sondheim
Assassins (Original Cast Recording)

Regardless of what you think about musical theatre, your opinion of Stephen Sondheim kind of has to be separate from that. He’s one of those artists who is larger than the genre he writes in. He’s one of the greatest songwriters who ever lived, and even when his shows are flawed, like Assassins is, they illustrate the absolute highest level of character songwriting: a kind of writing that I identify as much with Kate Bush or John Darnielle as with Sondheim’s fellow Broadway icons. This cast recording is a rough listen in a few places, but the sheer perversity of a bunch of presidential assassins jauntily singing “everybody’s got the right to be happy” gives me shivers every time. 
Measure of gratitude: Very large. Thank you. 

Spiritualized
Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space

I stole this from work and haven’t spent as much time with it as I meant to. I’ve loved it on the couple of occasions I’ve listened to it. I’ll come to love it more someday, I’m sure. 
Measure of gratitude: Small. Thank you. 

Sufjan Stevens
Illinois 

This is an album I ought to have heard in high school, but actually heard many years afterwards. The album that finally converted me into a Sufjan fan was Carrie & Lowell, an album so different from this that it may as well be by another artist entirely. Carrie is a spare, beautiful, delicate songwriter album where every song makes me cry at least 70% of the time. Illinois is a maximalist, symphonic rock record that 16-year-old Parsons would have loved. I like it fine even now, but I discovered it past the point where it would have grabbed me instantly. Sufjan Stevens could have been an artist that came with me through two phases of my taste evolution. As it stands, I’ll probably never love his early stuff as much as Carrie & Lowell. 
Measure of gratitude: Medium. Thank you. 

Eric St-Laurent Trio
Ruby

I reviewed this for my undergraduate student newspaper, where they used to pass out CDs that got sent to the offices to whoever wanted to review them. I took this one at my first editorial meeting, because I thought it would impress people that I knew something about jazz. It didn’t. The review was my first piece of published writing. Haven’t listened to it since. 
Measure of gratitude: Small. Thank you. 

Karlheinz Stockhausen
Stimmung (Singcircle)

I went through a phase in high school of wanting to hear the weirdest shit that every musical tradition had to offer. I knew Stockhausen was one of 20th-century classical music’s most controversial eccentrics. And I’d heard a section of this piece on a long vanished old Naxos compilation. I bought it at a shop in Edmonton where I also bought my first professional model B-flat trumpet. I told the shopkeeper I’d heard the first few minutes and liked it. “The rest is exactly the same,” he replied. He was correct. I loved it anyway. This is over an hour of a small vocal group just singing the overtone series. The length of it is the point. I could certainly do without the erotic poetry recitations scattered throughout, though. 
Measure of gratitude: Large. Thank you. 

Richard Strauss
Wind Sonatinas (Armonia Ensemble)

This was pressed into my hands by a former colleague who knew I’d played a wind instrument. Most classical music people don’t like music for wind instruments and it tends to make one a little defensive. Not much to defend here, though. Nowadays I like Strauss primarily as an opera composer. He and Mozart are the only major composers whose operas are what I like best. 
Measure of gratitude: Very small. Thank you. 

Igor Stravinsky
The Rite of Spring/Firebird (Pierre Boulez with the Cleveland and Chicago Symphonies)
Three Symphonies (Michael Tilson Thomas, London Symphony Orchestra)
The Soldier’s Tale (Neeme Järvi, Royal Scottish National Orchestra)

Every music student has a moment where they get really into Stravinsky. For me, it happened thanks to Boulez’s recordings of the Rite and the complete Firebird, recordings which I now find a little surgical, a little lacking in ferocity. (Sure wish I could still bring myself to listen to recordings by that miserable toady Gergiev.) But nowadays it’s the neoclassical stuff that I like best: the least ferocious music in Stravinsky’s catalogue. The Symphony of Psalms is one of the greatest pieces of the 20th century, and The Soldier’s Tale would be another if not for the asinine story. Stravinsky is one of the composers I loved in my early 20s that has the most staying power, along with Mahler. And unlike Mahler, there’s still a lot of his work that I haven’t explored. Someday. 
Measure of gratitude: Massive. Thank you. 

Studio de musique ancienne
Palestrina/Victoria (with Christopher Jackson)

One of the relatively few concerts I saw in Edmonton that completely floored me was Christopher Jackson and SMAM performing music by Giovanni Gabrielli with cornetts and all. I bought this disc of music mainly by Palestrina in the lobby afterwards, convincing myself that I’d like it even though it’s purely choral, without any cool old instruments. I was wrong, I wasn’t ready for it at the time. But I sure did come to like it afterwards, and the other records I’ve heard from Jackson and company have also been outstanding, especially their recording of Orlando di Lasso’s Lagrime di San Pietro. 
Measure of gratitude: Middling. Thank you. 

Sun Ra
Space is the Place

The Karlheinz Stockhausen of jazz, I’ve always appreciated Sun Ra’s work as conceptual art more than as music. But that could be partially because my introduction to him came through this album, which is associated with a film I haven’t seen. His earlier music is a little more austere and a little less corny than this. But it’s a fine line between this and P-Funk, and P-Funk isn’t corny. What’s different, exactly?
Measure of gratitude: Small. Thank you. 

The Syrup Trap
Christmas Happens Every Year

This is an album where the volunteer writing staff of a comedy website sing a bunch of Christmas songs using only the words “O Christmas Tree.” I sing one of the songs and I am on the cover. It is effectively episode zero of a podcast I produced with some of these same people, which was a wonderful project I loved doing. A terrible Christmas album, but an interesting objet d’art that I’m proud to have been part of.
Measure of gratitude: Weirdly large. Thank you.

The Survivors: Part Eleven

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Marty Sammon
Hound Dog Barkin’

My dad brought this home from a business trip to Chicago. Sammon was playing at Buddy Guy’s blues bar; he’s since become part of Buddy Guy’s band. It’s a bonkers thing to say about a self-released album by a guy who I don’t think ever made another, but this might be the best blues piano playing I’ve ever heard. There are elements of the album that don’t hit as hard as the piano soloing, but Sammon is an amazing instrumentalist whose style I could probably pick out of a lineup. Everybody deserves to come in contact with one incredible album that almost nobody knows. This is mine. 
Measure of gratitude: Very high. Thank you. 

Arturo Sandoval
Trumpet Evolution

Sandoval is a musician you get to know when you study the trumpet. He’s a shameless showboat with an impressive high range, and I honestly like that more than I cared to admit at the time. This album finds him doing impressions of other famous trumpeters from Louis Armstrong to Raphael Méndez. I don’t know how he can imitate other people’s tone like that; I always found that with the trumpet you just kind of have to accept the sound you make by default. It’s quite the stunt. But having heard it once I had its number and put it aside. A worthwhile exercise, but that’s all. 
Measure of gratitude: Small. Thank you. 

Carl Saunders
Be Bop Big Band

Another forgotten disc from my trumpeter days. An old teacher sang the praises of this, which was enough to assuage whatever doubts I had because of the graphic-design-is-my-passion album art. It is flawlessly performed big band jazz, but there’s a slick, collegiate quality to this kind of music that I can’t deal with anymore. 
Measure of gratitude: Small. Thank you. 

Arnold Schoenberg
Pierrot Lunaire/Lied der Waldtaube/Erwartung (Pierre Boulez, etc.)

Pierrot and Erwartung are two pieces I absolutely adore, but these recordings really aren’t ideal. Boulez deserves more credit than anybody for bringing the music of the Second Viennese School to people’s ears. But that doesn’t mean his interpretations are always definitive. In particular, he brings in some singers here who just don’t seem invested in the material. Jessye Norman is the exception, but I don’t know that anybody really comes to this for a 12-minute chunk of the Gurrelieder. It is good, though. 
Measure of gratitude: Small. Thank you. 

Shad
The Old Prince
Flying Colours

Shad is a good rapper, but I never find myself listening to his albums start to finish. Some great singles here, though. 
Measure of gratitude: Medium. Thank you. 

William Shakespeare
Henry IV, Part One (Arkangel Shakespeare)

I got this for five dollars at the Bard on the Beach gift shop’s end of season sale. Next thing I know, the Arkangel Shakespeare audiobooks are my preferred way to re-read Shakespeare. I’m not an audiobook person in general, but this has Richard Griffiths as Falstaff, for god’s sake. The Macbeth one has David Tennant as the goddamn porter. Richard II has Grand Maester Pycelle and Inspector Lestrade saying Shakespeare at each other, I mean, come on. These plays were written to be heard. This is the one thing in my collection that isn’t music, but actually it is. Play on. 
Measure of gratitude: Very large. Thank you.  

Dmitri Shostakovich
Symphony No. 10 (Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan)
The Concerto Album (David Oistrach, Nash Ensemble etc.)

Shostakovich was a crucial step on my road to Mahler. His fifth and tenth symphonies (and to a lesser extent the seventh, which has one good movement) introduced me to that late 19th/early 20th century massive orchestra sound that I still love. These days, I tend to prefer his chamber music, including the piano quintet that is bafflingly included on this collection of concertos. 
Measure of gratitude: Large. Thank you. 

Sigur Rós
Ágætis byrjun
Takk…

Takk was my entry point with this band, which I love more and listen to less now than I did at the time. I remember buying that disc soon enough after its release that the internet was still debating whether it was up to the standard of the previous two albums. Many years later it’s gratifying to find that this has been cemented as a masterpiece. I loved it from the start. Ágætis byrjun is also great, probably equally great, but Takk is where I live. I seldom listen to Sigur Rós these days. But when I do, after years of listening to Brian Eno and other texture-focussed music, I appreciate it more than ever. 
Measure of gratitude: Large. Thank you. 

Simon Bolivar String Quartet
Ginastera/Dvořák/Shostakovich

The SBSQ is made up of young musicians from the similarly named orchestra, and they play these pieces better than almost anybody. I think this disc was my introduction to the Ginastera quartet, which I love. Really nice stuff. 
Measure of gratitude: Large. Thank you. 

The Smashing Pumpkins
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

Here’s one that I didn’t encounter young enough. I see why it’s generational, but this is such an archetypal teenage epiphany album that it really can’t work if you hear it for the first time in your late twenties. Alas. 
Measure of gratitude: Small. Thank you. 

Philip Smith
Principal Trumpet, New York Philharmonic

Smith is a wonderful symphonic trumpeter, but there’s no degree of excellence that could inspire me to listen to this solo trumpet rep ever again. 
Measure of gratitude: Small. Thank you. 

Soft Machine
Volumes One and Two

Given my love for pop songwriting, Caravan ought to be my Canterbury band of choice. But they’re not. Soft Machine, their noisier and less disciplined fraternal twin, wins the day largely because of these first two albums. There is a pop sensibility here, the sensibility of Robert Wyatt and on the first album, Kevin Ayers. But that sensibility is frustrated by Mike Ratledge and Hugh Hopper’s exploratory playing and rhapsodic structures. It’s a perfect recipe. Also, every musician in this band is fun to listen to, which you can never take for granted. I’m never embarrassed about the music that I like, but Soft Machine is one of the only prog bands that I think is entirely, objectively not embarrassing at all.  
Measure of gratitude: Very large. Thank you.