Here it is, 57 days into 2024, and I’m only now writing up on stuff I started before 2023 was over. Kee-rist.

BOOKS:

Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger: Be forewarned before reading this that while this book has a “plot,” it isn’t the least bit interested in it–it’s about a guy doing salvage-diving in 1980 and finding a mystery in an underwater aircraft, and apparently some government agents come after him…but it’s more about the guy fading away into nothing because his sister–the protagonist of Stella Maris, this novel’s companion book–committed suicide eight years prior. As far as “sad person wandering around fading away into nothing” stories goes, it probably beats, say, Terrence Malick’s Knight Of Cups, but it doesn’t beat Nomadland, Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, or for that matter, McCarthy’s own Suttree, which sometimes this book reads similarly to, albeit much older and sadder. I thought Stella Maris was better, and that book is written in a significantly different style from this anyway. There are some very powerful, sad passages in the book, so it’s not a complete throwaway, but there are lots of parts where poor old McCarthy is spinning his wheels and basically yammering on and on about nothing much, so I’d have to place this towards the lower middle of his oeuvre. The ending is very graceful and grave, though, to make up for the book’s failings, and with that note, my adventures reading Cormac McCarthy, probably my favorite writer, have come to an end. It was great while it lasted. RIP!

TV:

Arrested Development (season 5): Nobody talked about this at all, which partially had something to do with lack of promotion (the season was awkwardly delivered in two halves), and partially something to do with Jeffrey Tambor misbehaving on set and yelling at Jessica Walter, only to have the rest of the male cast members defend Tambor in a very awkward New York Times interview that has since entered legend and caused the cast to all hate each other. The other reason nobody talked about it is that it’s basically a failure and a miserable shadow of everything the show was previously. There are no good new charaqcters (a boring surfer guy played by Dermot Mulroney? Okay), nothing new is being done with most of the classic characters (GOB might be gay! Tobias is trying to start a makeshift family! Michael and George Michael are still tiresomely fighting!), and even less is done with the new characters from season 4 (DeBrie Bardeaux, who was hilarious, is completely wasted here.) The story is just a continuation of lesser plot threads from season 4 and adds up to Buster lamely confessing at the end that he killed Liza Minelli…which scores no humor points whatsoever. I cannot easily name a great new joke, and the meta-rehashings of old jokes have become stale as hell. The only bright talking point is Alia Shawkwat, who dresses up as a middle aged Jewish lady and becomes the closest thing this painful mediocrity of a season has to a comedic MVP. If you didn’t watch it, don’t; if you feel like reading the reviews, you’ll be treated to an increasingly irritating barrage of ugliness that further pushes the idea that the fourth season was a complete disaster that this season has somehow corrected. These people have the fever?!? What a sad note for a great show to end on; plus, you know this time it’s really over.

MOVIES:

Radical Wolfe: A passable 90 minute documentary about Tom Wolfe that tries to avoid being another one of those lame tossed-together hagiographies that pass for documentaries these days, but doesn’t entirely succeed. My theory that Wolfe is the forefather of South Park Republicanism would be given weight by a lot of what we see here (I didn’t know he tried to be a commie-fighter at Yale in the 1950s, which was the germ of the whole thing really) but his post- Man In Full years, when he turned into a Bush-supporting anti-evolution crank and wrote two 700-page books that got torn to shreds by even some of his biggest supporters, are glossed over so they can talk about how he got cancer. I have yet to re-read any of his books, but I guess he was sort of a totem for me, the kind of person you read a lot of because you kind of admire the guy and dislike him at the same time.

The Killer: David Fincher’s most recent film, from last year, starring Michael Fassbender as a rather obsessive hit-man. I am sad to have to report that this great director’s mediocrities and failures now equal or outnumber his successes, I forget which. Fassbender spends a lot of time doing voice-overs where he blathers a lot of typical talking points about violence and killing that we’ve heard a zillion times before (“I. Do. Not. Give. A. Fuck”), so the most interesting thing about the character ends up being how many times he screws up, in spite of his persnickety nature, a bit like Harry Caul from The Conversation. There’s a fist fight between Fassbender and the guy who was in the Sauron costume in Lord Of The Rings that I didn’t believe for a fucking second, and an encounter with a character played by Tilda Swinton, who plays…a cold, androgynous-haired, overly-literate-sounding mecha-woman. Yeah, I couldn’t believe it either! Fassbender is good, but he’s been good in more movies that I haven’t liked than that I have. Get away from trash-lit, Finch (it’s based off of some French comic book.) You’re better than this.

In Bruges: This is half serious and half comedy and is annoyingly inconsistent in both. Colin Farrell’s performance is probably one of his better ones; the character is basically an immature, violent shithead, but the scenes where he has to play remorseful about having accidentally killed a child during a hit on a priest somehow AREN’T miserably inconsistent with the character otherwise. There’s some very funny lines, like when Ralph Fiennes yells at his wife or has to threaten Brendan Gleeson, but there’s also loads of playing to the cheap seats and dumb scenes where Farrell or Fiennes punch out people they shoudln’t, which I guess shouldn’t be surprising from the guy who ended up being responsible for the abominable Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. On the serious end, there are a couple of big deaths near the end of the movie which are bafflingly handled, only defensible if you accept that the movie is taking place in sort of a fairy-tale setting, which I guess Bruges is supposed to remind you of. This movie is supposed to have become a modern classic by now, with Gleeson and Farrell reuniting with the director last year for Banshees Of Inisherin which I may see just to see if I like it more than I liked this.

Horror In The High Desert: In 2014, a hiker named Kenny Veach disappeared after finding a weird cave near Area 51, and his case has become a magnet for Internet conspiracy theorists. This found footage film is based on something similar to that; actually, it’s about an hour of boringly fictitious interviews with people who knew the film’s protagonist, followed by about 15 minutes of black-and-white found footage where the protagonist encounters something outside an abandoned cabin. I guess I liked that part okay (though “found footage” is admittedly a genre that ran out of ideas very fast) but the interviews are real hell. This already has a sequel. I am going to skip it and advise you skip this.

ALBUMS:

Chris Bell, I Am The Cosmos: I should have heard this in full decades ago, but I kept forgetting about it. If you like Big Star’s #1 Record at all, and I of course love it to pieces, this compilation album is an absolute must, and you’ll have no trouble liking it whatsoever. The two best songs are the ones that actually got released while Bell was alive, “I Am The Cosmos” and “You And Your Sister,” the latter of which features Alex Chilton on backing vocals. Both of those are power pop standards, but have you heard “Better Save Yourself,” “Get Away,” “Make A Scene,” “Look Up,” “Though I Know She Lies,” or “In My Darkest Hour”? Well, you SHOULD. This is possibly the best album I heard in 2023, though it is admittedly very easy to like (and good as it is, it of course doesn’t beat any of the three classic Big Star albums.) A good way to cap off a year when I watched a Big Star documentary and read a biography of Alex Chilton, and revisited the first two Big Star albums.

Meat Loaf, Bat Out Of Hell: Although this is stylistically overblown (Springsteen crossed with Queen and stretched out) and easy to dismiss, I have to confess that I can, without actually relistening to any of the seven songs on the album, remember how ALL of them went just by looking at the song titles, or at least remember their title hooks. That’s pretty impressive. I guess Jim Steinman really could write songs, then? Meat Loaf for his part has a good voice, which helps sell material that a lesser vocalist might not have been able to. I guess this is 70s bombast that sort of predicts 80s bombast–at the very least, I can see how, say, “Heaven Can Wait” is a song totally stuck in the mid to late 70s and yet seems to predict the shameless “power!!!” aspect of 80s monster ballads. But who would want to think that Todd Rundgren is in part responsible for 80s monster ballads? (Apparently he was interested in producing this because he thought it was a parody of Springsteen, and I didn’t know the harmonized guitar parts were played by him–I thought the whole E Street Band played on this, not just Bittan and Weinberg.) Even more inexplicable is that I thought the title track was the best song, even though it obviously retreads “Thunder Road.” Do YOU like this album?

Beck, The Information: I didn’t know until I started reading the reviews of this that Nigel Godrich had produced it; I thought he was only called in when Beck wanted to do a sad or slow-spacey album. I couldn’t really have told, because this just seems like a continuation of the funky Guero, which got compared to Odelay, not the Godrich-produced stuff. I guess most of Beck’s lyrics from Sea Change onward have been bleak or depressing regardless of whether the music is funky, but the reviewers had more to say about that than I ever will. The best songs are mostly towards the beginning, with an impressive run consisting of “Think I’m In Love,” “Cellphone’s Dead,” “Strange Apparition” and “Soldier Jane.” I don’t have anything bad to say about the rest of it, though it pads out to an hour in length thanks to this 10 minute collage thing at the end that Beck and Godrich cowrote, which is like the last gasp of the CD-bloat era (this is from 2006, in case you forgot) staring you right in the face. I’d rate it about the same as Guero, but maybe a smidge under Midnite Vultures. It’s good!!

Beck, Modern Guilt: …And just like I didn’t know until I read reviews that Nigel Godrich produced The Information, I didn’t know that this was produced by Danger Mouse. I’m not sure what to make of Mr. Mouse, whose “Grey Album” I only listened to as a lark a couple of times decades ago. This album is only 33 minutes long and seems to consist of a grab-bag of stylistically inconsistent, moderately-experimental stuff, roughly occupying the same place in the Beck-scography as Wilco’s Star Wars and Schmilco. And like those albums are among the lesser Wilco discs, this is perhaps the weakest Beck album. It’s got two great songs–the Pink Floyd-ish “Chem Trails” (the mention of which was a joke back in the days of the Chem Trails and You board around here–and which is the only thing I ever remember anyone saying about this album back in 2008) and the elegiac, possibly $cientology-related closer, “Volcano,” which could be a lighter Sea Change number. I also liked “Gamma Ray,” the title track and the rocking “Profanity Prayers,” but “Replica” is one of the wost Beck songs, a terrible electronic stab at imitating Radiohead’s skittery post-rock percussion crap a la Amnesiac. I didn’t think much of this album, but I’m not getting the impression it was meant as any kind of masterpiece, so it’s not like I feel any hate for it.

Beck, Colors: The second track here, “Seventh Heaven,” is the second-best Beck song overall after “The Golden Age” and the best song I heard in 2023 that I hadn’t heard before–a mashup of sparkly 80s keyboards, Yo La Tengo beachiness and the energetic beat of “Hey Ya.” Quite a cocktail and quite a banger of a song, proving that Beck, age 47 at the time of this album’s release, can still make music for the kids, just like he was still young. I mean that “for the kids” remark as a backhanded compliment–only a few reviews felt, as I did, that this whole disc sounded not unlike that Foster The People album I listened to last year, and a few other reviews thought Beck was aping MGMT with this album–but hey, weren’t these kinds of acts descended from Beck in the first place? His collaborator was Greg Kurstin this time, whom I don’t know much about, but if this is funky party music for the kids, so be it; the only other great song besides “Seventh Heaven” was the elegiac closer “Fix Me,” but most of the danceable stuff manages decent hooks, such as “Colors,” “Dreams,” “Dear Life,” “Square One,” “Wow,” and the Police-ish “No Distraction.” …So yeah, kiddie-funk or no, this is another really consistent Beck album, as far as I’m concerned, and perhaps a success where something similar like Arcade Fire’s Reflektor and Everything Now’s dance-rockery didn’t. I think it’s kind of amazing he’s still able to pull this off, for sure.

Beck, Hyperspace: Another slow Beck album, but this time he went for spacey lush somberness instead of sad lush somberness, backed by a bevy of ethereal Blade Runner synthesizers. This describes pretty much every song on the album except the goofy barn-dance of “Saw Lightning,” and I could easily see this becoming one of the biggest love it or hate it Beck albums since Sea Change. I liked it quite a bit–I’m not sure whether it’s Beck himself or his collaborator Pharrell Williams manning those synths, but they certainly know how to use them. “Uneventful Days,” “Stratosphere,” “See Through” and “Everlasting Nothing” are the biggest highlights, even if you can guess just from looking at the song titles what they’d sound like. The title track has a strong Beck hook but watch out for the lame rap in the middle that is not Beck. Honestly, it’s all, again, very consistent–I’m very glad I finished the Beck discography this year. Did YOU hear this album?

Crosby, Stills & Nash, After The Storm: This is the worst CSN(Y) album, producing a grand total of zero songs that I cared about or even found memorable in the slightest. I’ve grown increasingly impatient with and contemptuous of albums like this–these old fogeys don’t even have the courtesy to embarrass themselves once, so that I could at least be inflamed with dislike? Sure, this is from 1994 and the band dropped the much-loathed 80s dinosaur production from their previous two albums, but at least those albums still showcased a bit of songwriting skill! Looking at the track listing, I can’t even remember any of this, except for a lame and perfunctory “In My Life” cover. You probably never heard this album anyway, but if you didn’t, avoid.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Looking Forward: Wikipedia says this sold 370,000 copies, and charted at #26, whereas CSN got dropped from their label after the previous album, so I guess they went out on what was for them a relatively passable note. If you heard anything about this album at all, what you probably heard was that Stephen Stills did a cranky old man “rap” song, but it’s really just a “Subterranean Homesick Blues” knockoff with Stills ranting about “cyberpunks.” I guess it’s actually one of the more memorable tunes here (certainly more than the Rolling Stones’ “Sweet Neocon”!)…though the one big highlight, and one I’ve actually listened to outside the album since hearing it, is “Slowpoke,” a lovely, sad, soft, slow Neil Young number originally intended for one of his solo albums and deliberately re-using the meter of “Heart Of Gold”…so God knows how I prefer it to that hit, but I do. Apparently it was Neil’s idea that CSNY get back together in the first place, maybe to prove that he’s aged better than they have. I liked the title track and “Queen Of Them All” too, if you care. But you don’t, just like I didn’t care about the rest of it.

David Bowie, The Next Day:_You probably remember that Bowie’s final album _Blackstar got glowing reviews and cemented his legacy once and for all on a high note, but you probably forgot that this 2013 album got glowing reviews too–seriously, go back and check Metacritic. I’m rather mystified–sure, Old Man Bowie still had enough life in him to do it after his 2004 health scares, but this album doesn’t do anything he wasn’t already doing on Heathen and Reality, just general Old Bowie Rock. “Where Are We Now?” is the big highlight, IMO, but I’ll go to bat for the annoyingly titled “The Stars (Are Out Tonight),” “(You Will) Set The World On Fire” (energetic!), “Boss Of Me,” “I’d Rather Be High,” and maybe the weird atmosphere of the closer, “Heat.” That’s not many strong songs, though, and of course the album is a bit slow and overlong. (Oh, and “Valentine’s Day” is about a school shooter, but so what.) So while I’m not wild about the album, I’ve gotten the impression that the good press it got has faded away and replaced with the better press that Bowie got for Blackstar and his death–I can’t tell what this album’s reputation has gone down as, or will stay as.

David Bowie, David Bowie: Yep, I had to hear something like 27 other Bowie albums, including all the ones I relistened to over the last two years, before finally arriving at his low point, which was his first point, released in June 1967 just in time to get blown off the charts by Sgt. Pepper’s. And although it’s his worst, I can’t muster up much bile to throw at it–you probably already know that it’s a bunch of cutesy English kiddie music based off of Anthony Newley (some reviews, like George’s, compared it to the Kinks, but I’m not hearing it.) I can’t automatically hate that–I didn’t mind hearing From Genesis To Relevation–_but his songwriting is admittedly mostly miss. “Sell Me A Coat” is okay, I guess, goofy lyrics and all, but that’s about it. And hey, the tracklisting I used for this on Youtube had 24 songs, so I was scouting high and low for good kiddie Bowie music–I didn’t want to miss anything, even though there probably isn’t anything to really miss!! (In case you didn’t know, this, just like that Genesis album, has been repackaged a bunch of times, with a bunch of different titles and tracklistings, to milk it for every last buck.) You know you’re in trouble when the much-mocked “Laughing Gnome” song is one of the few you can remember when the album’s done!

David Bowie, The Buddha Of Suburbia: The last Bowie album I’ve covered in two nonstop years of plowing through the remainder of his discography while relistening to everything I’d already heard save Hunky Dory is a non-soundtrack to a 1993 British TV thing based on some book I’ve never read and starring the guy who went on to be Sayid on Lost, and it sold really poorly and got no promotion, and oh yeah, DAVID BOWIE APPARENTLY SAID IN 2003 THAT IT WAS HIS FAVORITE OF HIS OWN ALBUMS, OUT OF LIKE THIRTY THAT HE MADE. You might want to re-read that sentence (I got it from Wikipedia), because either it indicates that Bowie’s health problems around that time were messing with his brain, like when Brian Wilson apparently blurted out that 15 Big Ones was his favorite Beach Boys album, remember that? I mean, what you’re in for here on DAVID BOWIE’S FAVORITE ALBUM OF HIS OWN is a mishmash of second-rate 90s Bowie stuff that wasn’t good enough for his spotty 90s albums…the title track with Lenny Kravitz (eeeww) is fairly good, I s’pose, and there’s a lot of atmospheric instrumental music that I think reminds people of the second halves of his Eno-Berlin 1977 discs, but it’s not as good…what you get is super slow stuff like “The Mysteries” or “South Horizon,” which is okay if you like hearing Mike Garson do lots of those twirly piano tinkles of his. There’s also goop like “Sex And The Church,” which is Bowie muttering the title over and over through a vocoder. Maybe “Ian Fish, UK Heir” is okay? Who cares. Not planning on revisiting this much. Should I do Tin Machine? Did I miss anything there? Nobody ever seems to have anything nice to say about Tin Machine.