2022 Consumed Part 2

Listing all the great art from the year: Music and Film Edition

Lists, Lists, and more Lists!

Albums

Beyonce - Renaissance

Almost obvious. Can the greatness of this album be overstated? Pure fun yet mired in clearance dramas, claims of appropriation, and new conversations of authenticity. It is a testament to the quality of Renaissance that these conversations seem to do nothing to stop its replayability. I have a friend who referred to Break My Soul as more than an earworm, but “cursed“. When the visuals for this release…I will finally find bliss.

Cities Aviv - Working Title For The Album Secret Waters

I was introduced to Cities Aviv last spring and I’ve been slowly winding my way through his discography since. The second of his releases this year, Working Title captures the beauty of Aviv’s simple and hypnotically repetitious production style. Simple, crackling loops sit beside compact collages that cause time and distinction between his pieces to fade. I could listen to Aviv endlessly, and probably will.

Charli XCX - CRASH

Confession time: I wasn’t a Charli XCX fan until this album. Clearly, this is why I don’t write about music, because if this info got out before I’d be labeled a charlatan and actually straight. While many of the true Charli fans didn’t go for CRASH, I found a new song to play on repeat every few months. I think Call Me is the favorite, for now…

Daphni - Cherry

There is something unbelievably awesome about playing Take Two and being transported, sans intro, into Daphni’s crazed disco groove. Other tracks like Arrow or Fly Away are subtler and deeper in their bounce, but all are danceable. One of the most frenetically fun albums of the year, and deeply helpful in aiding my baby steps in learning to love house.

Danger Mouse, Black Thought - Cheat Codes

Unexpected and wholly enjoyable, Cheat Codes is perfectly produced and features the best A$AP Rocky verse in years. I always forget just how prolific and versatile Danger Mouse is as a producer, and he allows Black Thought to shine in an environment totally separate from The Roots.

Destroyer - LABYRINTHITIS

Sometimes all it takes is the right synth and a raspy enough voice. Beautiful, short, and dark. I look forward to all the moments in years to come when I can rediscover this.

Earl Sweatshirt - SICK!

Touted by some as a way of giving the spotlight to collaborators like Zeeloperz and Black Noi$e, I still find the star of SICK! to be Earl and his impeccable flow, great writing, and pointed tastes. SICK! is a testament to Earl’s consistency.

EYEDRESS - Full Time Lover

I’m still unsure if Eyedress albums are ultimately defined by their collaborators, but Full Time Lover happens to be both the best Eyedress album and one that features Chad Hugo, Vex Ruffin, Paul Cherry, and Homeshake. It’s strangely long yet diverse and engaging for an artist who makes music that can seem homogenous. Proof that the slew of Tik-Tok adjacent pandemic era indie pop artists has more desire for experimentation than meets the eye.

John Carrol Kirby - Dance Ancestral

Thank god for John Carrol Kirby’s endless, soothing synths. The veteran Stone’s Throw signee is a master of the genre, a storyteller and a meditator, a sleepier, twee-er Dam-Funk. I am obsessed with this man and his beautiful synth castles.

Kendrick Lamar -Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers

Not obvious in the way that Renaissance is, but almost obligatory in the sense that even a deeply flawed, overstuffed, and at times controversial Kendrick Lamar album is still one of the best around. N95 rocks, Mr. Morale is some of Pharrell’s best production of the year, and the direction of the album is legitimately interesting coming from a tastemaker and icon like Lamar. The prestige surrounding We Cry Together earnestly confuses me in its Brent Faiez melodrama. Then there’s the endlessness of its discourse with regard to Transphobia, Ye, and its ability to re-legitimize known rapists like Kodak Black.

Louis Cole - Quality Over Opinion

What a rebrand. Louis Cole, known by me ostensibly for his hit song Blimp, has turned hardcore. Cole isn’t quite done mixing his wild production impulses with odd and humorous lyrics (Park Your Car On My Face, Failing in a Cooler Way), but uses collaborations with Sam Grendel and others to transfigure into a free, jazz-like sound. It runs long for a Louis Cole project, but not a moment feels wasted.

Moor Mother - Jazz Codes

Such a dense, kaleidoscopic work, and one of Moor Mother’s best. Some of Moor Mother’s best production and her most stellar rapping. While I love the separating out of songs off of albums for playlists and individual obsessions, Jazz Codes works best in its entirety and consumption in full. It’s an album I always look forward to returning to.

MIKE - Beware the Monkey

This is why you wait till the last week of the year to make your lists - because MIKE is back. This year seeing MIKE live only made his flow more infectious, his production sweeter, and his collaborations more joyful. Beware the Monkey is superb in the way MIKE seems superb as a person; it’s earnest, it’s open, and it’s wise.

The Randy Persantes Trio - Now At Last

Technically an EP. Features the sensational Sam Grendel and some of the strangest, most entrancing jazz vocals I’ve heard in a while. I’ll play my favorite, Put Your Head on my Shoulder to others and after a few bars they’ll give me puzzled looks. Nothing encapsulates the chilly last few months of the year more than this.

Rico Nasty - Las Ruinas

Rico Nasty’s fame gives me hope. Las Ruinas saw 100 gecs production collabs move from bubblegum autotune to swirling trip-hop. Synthetic and unmemorable Don Tolliver and Amine verses are switched out for a more consistent and compelling Bktherula collaboration. It’s an album that successfully updates and expands Rico’s sound and style while proving that her commercial appeal has given her new resources and new opportunities.

Roc Marciano, The Alchemist - The Elephant Man’s Bones

It can be hard to keep up with the Alchemist’s endless projects, but rewards come to those who wade through the beat tapes, production features, and Action Bronson tours. This year, The Elephant Man’s Bones is that gem. The beats are great as expected, but Marciano’s impeccable lyricism and control, his storytelling and his flexing are what make the project a gem. Verses by Bronson, Boldy James, and Ice T (?!) may seem predictable for an Alchemist album, but all feel hand-picked and personal.

Sam Grendel - BlueBlue

So soft, so lovingly textured, and so fantastically designed. Grendel became a new favorite for me this year - he basically soundtracked my entire late December. There is a perfectly blurred quality to Grendel’s instrumentation, to me, it’s reminiscent of Chet Baker and other champions of a soft California cool. His compositions here are deceptively bare, yet somehow revealing.

Sudan Archives - Natural Brown Prom Queen

The songs on Natural Brown Prom Queen surprise and shift in pace, a dirge evolving into a dance into a charged violin solo. The evolution of Chevy S10 or NBPQ is astounding. Compelling and unique, I feel as if I’m still wrapping my head around this album and will be for a good while. A testament to the diversity in the sounds Stone’s Throw selects as well as the incredible work and growth Sudan Archives has undergone.

Toro Y Moi - Mahal

Alphabetically and fittingly last, Mahal is what reminds me why I love Toro Y Moi so damn much. It’s experimentally funny, sexy, synthy, and soulful. It’s music I want to do everything to.

Live Shows

Jonathan Richmond at the Masonic Temple (Cleveland)

KeiyaA at the Cat in the Cream (Oberlin)

Cat Power at the House of Blues (Cleveland)

Mike, Junglepussy, and Tisakorean at Young World (Brooklyn)

DJ Assault at the Sco (Oberlin)

Films Released in 2022

Marcel the Shell With Shoes On

Vaguely twee, sentimental, kind films touted as masterpieces (see Padington) have a tendency to make me suspicious. Are we starved for this kind of emotional connection to film, or is the film legitimately powerful? Marcel the Shell with Shoes On made me want to stop asking such snooty questions because sometimes they are that powerful. This film is funny, impressive, resonant, and again admittedly very twee. It’s a hard film to recommend seriously, let alone as one of the best films of the year because it exists squarely within this category of intrinsically sweet quasi-family film (and because it’s about a very little shell). And yet, Marcel is a brilliant meditation on family, loss, purpose, and grit.

Crimes of the Future

The most exciting piece of science fiction storytelling in years. It’s all too freaky, too throbbingly psychosexual, and sublimely disgusting to become truly mainstream, yet it moves more smoothly and efficiently than most recent blockbusters. Kristen Stewart gives the performance of the year, endings are murky and confused, and the world is jagged and arch. In Cannes after the film had ended and Cronenberg’s treatise on art, sexuality, and technology came to a close in a standing ovation, he said “I hope you’re not kidding“. Crimes of the Future is also the funniest film of the year.

Aftersun

A quiet reminder in the hurricane of passion projects, over-financed shit storms, and oscar-ready depression carousels that film can save. This is no culture war diatribe about theatrical experience or history, it simply reminds us the healing power of moving images, what these images help us remember, and what a camera can do. There’s an innocuousness to the whole project - in the brilliant editing, such amazing performances, and a really great script. There’s a point where all the tension and emotional undercurrent of Aftersun boils over, where it’s just too real and too beautiful and too forgiving. Aftersun just breaks through the noise.

Tar

One of the few “cultural critique movies” of the past few years that has actually resonated, actually stuck, and initiated actual discourse. This isn’t to diminish the effect of Tar as a brilliant character study, as a fine performance from Cate Blanchet, and as a piece of powerful filmmaking. The latter seems the least emphasized in commentary on the film, but this is probably the best edited film of the year and one of the best directed.

Nope

I saw Nope many times. Every time I rewatched it I understood more, considered more, and was rewarded more. I took the denseness of the film for granted after my first viewing, and its straightforwardness for granted after my third. A blockbuster in the “old“ sense, a technical *ahem* spectacle, and a masterwork of writing and acting. The missing puzzle for me remained the shoe, an unexplained and mysterious phenomenon in the film. Ultimately, I found the beauty and meaning in this frustratingly apparent unanswered question to be its acceptance of the small and impossible enigmas of the everyday.

RRR

The action spectacle to end all spectacles. Fists, bows and arrows, hell, flocks of tigers and wolves and elk all against the British empire. The set pieces here are comically fantastic, consistent, and insane. While I’m admittedly unversed in the Indian film scene, I’d like to believe the extent of this film’s camp, its hilarious and definitely nonplatonic homosociality, and the intensity of its dance battles are particular to this work. It’s criminal that RRR is relegated to Netflix screens for now, although I’m sure the coastal cities may still be showing it on the big screen, where the film truly pops.

The Fabelmans

So many movies this year have taken on a tone of sanctimonious adoration for and desperate bargaining with the theatrical experience and the power of cinema. Some became film historians, others tried to imagine futurist techno-spectacles, but Spielberg just popped on some home videos and got to work. Fabelmans is the strongest, most personal, and most enjoyable of this self-conscious genre mainly because it feels so natural. It’s an opportunity to reconstruct the joy of teenage filmmaking with a Spielberg budget, turning childhood fantasies into realized worlds. Its criticisms of simplification, dramatization, and “Hollywood enhancement” are sometimes fair, but work anyways mainly because Spielberg’s heart and soul are in the project. It’s greatest flaw is obvious: Fabelman’s didn’t have enough Jews.

Everything Everywhere All At Once

I don’t know why I’m surprised that Everything Everywhere became the year’s discourse draw/fanbase breakdown. Maybe it’s a testament to the presence of terrifying “nice guys“ or that a great deal of criticism and debate is intrinsically performative. Ouroborean culture wars aside, this was the most inspiring project to watch and learn about as a creative. A film that fosters kindness and inventiveness in meaning and its creation. As A24’s highest-grossing film, I hope this changes cultures of production and creative development as much as it does tastes.

Pinnochio (Del Torro)

I’m appalled that people would doubt Guillermo Del Torro. Maybe it’s my own predisposition to the stop motion genre, but Del Torro Pinnochio in fascist Italy?Cate Blanchet monkey? Tom Kenny Mussolini? Angels and the afterlife and Catholicism? How could this formula fail? Pinnochio is a film composed of brilliant left turns and true heart. It translates the original Disney version’s obsession with vice into something concerning holistic goodness and humanity, something mature enough to consider the fascist, the circus performer, the priest, and the toy maker in the same breath. Del Torro flourishes in the stop motion medium and I hope he never turns back.

Banshees of Inisherin

I have remained surprised at myself in the way Banshees of Inisherin has stayed with me. Maybe it’s great performance after great performance, maybe it’s the writing, maybe it’s that Ireland looks like the most beautiful place on earth. Banshees seems a bit like a play and ends with odd politically vague moralizing and generalizing (my radical Irish partner has taught me well, I hope) but even these oddities can’t stop the charisma and intrigue that emanates from this film. Culture may decry that there are no movie stars, but Banshees may beg to differ.

Favorite First Watches

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)

A totally inventive and exciting form of storytelling. The kind of development or experiment in the medium that seems rare today.

Inland Empire (2006)

The most terrifying film, and maybe the most terrifying thing I have ever seen.

Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003)

Self-indulgent? Maybe. However, this two-hour documentary has changed the way I think about the place I have lived all my life. Teaches with love, with obsessive ownership of home, and with purpose.

Fox and His Friends (1975)

Fassbinder can do it all. Draws out a tragic and inevitable narrative in the most heartbreaking way.

Satantango (1994)

I write about Satantango at length here.

The Conformist (1970)

Incredible how succinctly and wholly I still remember The Conformist months later. More than a biting anti-fascist critique, a study in fear.

Soy Cuba (1964)

Sure, everyone talks about the technicality of Soy Cuba, its insane crane shots, set pieces, and resources expounded on it. It’s also exceptionally effective at crafting short, striking narratives that weave together so well. Something to behold.

Y Tu Mamá También (2001)

One of the few examples of shock and awe filmmaking working. Love the way this crystallizes into a story of homosocial repression and queer discovery.

2046 (2004)

Rewatching In the Mood for Love for so many college courses primed me to be completely thrown for a loop by 2046. Such a wild, desolate ride.

Dick Tracy (1990)

This is comic book filmmaking at its finest.

eXistenZ (1999)

Such a wild ride. An interesting in-between Cronenberg operating as a newer technological critique and self-aware riddle.

The Straight Story (1999)

Lynch’s Disney film reveals the absurdity and idiocy of the term “Lynchian“. A perfect performance with excellent writing and just fantastic vibes.

Fellini Satyricon (1969)

A concoction of obsession, extravagance, and an auteur with money to spend. The kind of passion project I actually want to be subjected to.

The Living End (1992)

The beginning of a long obsession with Gregg Araki in many senses.

Ticket of No Return (1979)

The Oberlin film co-op can be a fantastic place. Gorgeous outfits, perfectly odd, totally compelling.

Nightmare Alley (1947)

The kind of rare, sublime pulp film that masquerades as trash yet never fades. Once seen, basically impossible to see Del Toro’s version as anything more than almost a shot-for-shot remake.

Mr. Arkadin (1955)

God, this is so much fun. It’s clear that Welles had so many more gags and twists about the ultra-wealthy left over.

Popeye (1980)

I wrote about 10 pages on Popeye and I’m still considering how and why.

Lions Love (1969)

The strangest, yet one of the most memorable of Agnes Varda’s Los Angeles films. Vacuous, endless, painful, and gorgeous.

The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982)

Peter Greenaway spoke before this, and I’ve thought often since of his ability to create compact, subversive, compelling films with such ease while directing actual energy and time at obtuse and knotty experimental works.