My Top films/songs/books of 2023
As indexed by the year I experienced them -- not the year of release
Here are my top 4s of 2023, based on when I experienced them, not the release date. A lot are from 2022, because in 2022 I had an infant and wasn't keeping up to date with the latest. Also now I have a newborn son, so I'm trying to write this in my 20 free minutes a day (this is also why it’s a top 4, not a top 5.)
Films
High Life (2018)
I can't in good conscience recommend this film to anyone. It's an extremely weird avant-garde scifi-film starring Robert Pattinson. The film takes place on a spaceship of just a dozen or so people traveling towards a black hole to conduct experiments. This involves lots of reproductive experimentation, and you end up seeing lots of semen and some sexual assault.
As with most great science fiction films, the science fiction backdrop is set there to help us learn more about ourselves as humans. Through that all, it's a beautiful story about a father, Robert Pattison, and his daughter. Unlike a film like The Road, the relationship doesn't take up all the screen time, it's instead crammed into the opening and closing of the film. It's the contrast to the weird, fucked up core of the movie that gives it its power.
Pattison's acting as a loving father is superb, and without it, this film would collapse onto itself. The way he holds his infant daughter and soothes her to sleep, at times begging her to stop crying, was a more honest display of the role of a father to his infant daughter than I've seen before.
A common trope you also see with films that center around a father and daughter relationship, is the depths of violence to which the dad will go to protect her. That's fine, but that's not what this film is about. It's instead about an optimistic presence of mind and resilience of love cast against a dark and fucked up universe. As I said though, I don't recommend it.
Aniara (2018)
Thematically similar to my first recommendation, Aniara is a film about a massive luxury space vessel ferrying humans from earth to another planet. Immediately it is knocked off course with its engines damaged, voyaging into deep space with no apparent ability to turn itself around. This film is half a traditional plot driven film, but half concept driven, often jumping forward a number of years at a time.
A lot of the film deals with whether there a point to living, even to loving, if you are the final generation. I'm not spoiling anything by admitting to you that this film doesn't answer your questions. It does let you see the way the protagonist and the other main characters attempt to answer it for themselves over the decades, through the mundane, raves, families, and strange cult behaviors.
I don’t think living on earth is equivalent to being stuck on a huge spaceship traveling through space. Although this film makes you ask yourself what specifically about it is different? On the ship there is “no future.” But what is the purpose of a future? Is it for our kids to become space-faring? Is it for our merging with the machine? As the future becomes weirder in its possibility space, and our progression into that future accelerates, I wonder what is the future for my kids, exactly?
This is a dark film, and if the concept sounds fascinating to you, you'll probably like it. You can take from this film what you want in a sense, but there is a certain despair embedded within it.
The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)
This was a solid (darkish) comedy. It's an Irish film about male friendship, and more specifically about the tension between shooting the shit with leisure time spent with those you care for, vs. trying to make something of yourself. Or at least that's what it was about for me.
Circa 2014 I had some friends visit San Francisco, where I was living at the time, from Seattle. They wanted to hang out with me over the weekend, and I initially said no. Later changing my mind and hanging out with them for part of one afternoon.
I was too busy studying differential equations. I needed to better understand how they worked for my job. That's sort of a whole other story, but I got hired for a job that required a level of math education I didn't have, and I would spend my nights and weekends trying to learn it so I could do my job and not get fired and not totally fail and not blow my one chance at making it and... My friends never worked as hard as me, they just wanted my time and attention.
I reflect back on a lot of these times, what was I working so hard for? Was it worth the sacrifices? Would another afternoon really have thrown me so off course? Should I have been a better friend? I think I should have and I can't take that back.
The Trench (1999)
I was really into The Battle of the Somme for about a month this year. I had a great great uncle who died fighting for the British in that battle. My great grandpa, who I never met, enlisted in the war as a surgeon following his brother's death. Unable to save his own brother, I suppose he hoped to save the brothers of his countrymen.
I saw 1917 recently, which was a contemporary film. The effects and wartime cinematography was excellent. The Trench, a much older film, has nearly zero combat or notable cinematography. Although the actor list is relatively stacked, with Daniel Craig, Cillian Murphy, and James D’Arcy. The entirety of the relatively short film is dialogue that takes place within a British trench. It's not particularly deep dialogue either, it's what you might expect from mostly uneducated teenagers shooting the shit on the eve of what they know is to be a catastrophic battle.
Perhaps that's why the reviews for The Trench were so poor: No combat, middling dialogue. It's in some sense though more of a true re-telling than most other films. Trench warfare was a lot of nervous chatter and passing the time within a trench, only to die a pointless death. This was a window into a certain aspect of the war I haven't seen in many other war films.
Music
Simulation Swarm by Big Thief (2022)
A few years ago Grimes, another one of my favorite artists, released a song dealing with scifi topics of simulations and AI, 'We Appreciate Power': "Simulation, give me something good God's creation, so misunderstood." Her song sounded like it should be played during the dance scenes in the third matrix, where the humans were listening to futuristic rave music.
Simulation Swarm by Big Thief is different, both sonically it is more traditional, and lyrically it sounds like a sci-fi Edgar Allan Poe poem: "From the 31st floor of the simulation swarm with the drone of fluorescence flicker, fever, fill the form." I've always appreciated art that recasts our primitives of human experiences against our latest incomplete understanding of reality.
Poe asked if everything is a dream within a dream, now we wonder if it's a simulation. It’s true that we know much more about the natural world today than the past. The early Greeks would interpret the causes of the world to be from the whims of the gods. The first naturalistic philosophers instead would put forward other explanations: Perhaps the earth did not shake because the gods rocked the world, but actually the world floats on water. The leap away from the gods was a win for our scientific progress as a species, but you can’t just… then make up another explanation and claim it’s true.
Sometimes I feel that’s the stage we’re in now with reasoning about the world as a simulation. Simulation Swarm isn’t a song about simulations, really. It’s a song about an adopted brother she’s never met, and the continued mystery of love and meaning.
Psychedelic Switch by Carly Rae Jepsen (2023)
I love Carly Rae Jepsen, and while I've enjoyed her new albums, nothing really hits quite like her pop masterpiece Emotion. At least until Psychedelic Switch, which was a song off her latest side B release. I think it was 2019 I first got into Carly. Having encountered the first real, well, I guess trauma of my life. Suddenly the sad music of my youth felt narcissistic and I couldn't relate to it anymore.
What I needed was the divine feminine of CRJ to remind me life remains worth living, and dancing on through all the pain. This song fuses disco beats and psychedelic imagery into a single banger track about new love. There's nothign more to it, It's just happy pop, it's happy. Sing along to it.
Crush by Ethel Cain (2022)
Ethel Cain is the only artist I've heard that has successfully riffed on Lana Del Rey's sonic style. Not surprising it took an mtf to do it properly, they seem to be our new master race.
Crush is a contemporary southern-gothic pop song that reminds me of the first time I heard Blue Jeans by Lana in 2011 -- shamelessly about toxic relationships "I owe you a black eye and two kisses Tell me when you wanna come and get 'em". And while the song has a catchy pop vibe to it, all of Ethel Cain's tracks off this album are embedded on a guitar heavy and cinematic latent space. It's all deeply Americana.
Kisses by Slowdive (2023)
Shoegaze was invented in a lab to make you feel nostalgic. I remember listening to M83 and My Bloody Valentine when I was 19 years old nostalgically reflecting on my highschool days. Now at 34 though the nostalgia hits a little differently.
I think nostalgia is mostly a bad feeling to chase. I used to spend a lot of time reflecting on the gone days of the past, but I mean, what's the point? Okay still, this song and the music video are fantastic. The melodic synthy gazer music cast against the faces of girls riding on the back of a moped that I might have thought were pictures of beauty when I was in college, and now just look weirdly young.
Books
The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy (1994)
The Crossing is the second book in McCarthy's border trilogy, following All The Pretty Horses. It's about a teenager - an American cowboy on the southern border - taking a wolf back to Mexico. It's sort of a weird premise, but after capturing a wolf that was killing their cattle, he feels compelled to return its home in Mexico. That's the first crossing.
The second crossing he takes with his younger brother, in an effort to get back some horses - that's all I'll say. McCarthy's novels are so massive in scope and meaning, it feels improper for me to try and summarize it anymore. At its heart, to me, it was a coming of age story about the cruelty and love of brotherhood, and all the pain within.
Being an older brother myself, there is this lifelong sense of responsibility. It's just there, and I've felt it nearly my whole life. Before I was old enough to self-reflect it existed only in its primitive form. At times manifesting itself as simultaneously being dismissive, while also knowing it's my sworn duty to do everything to protect him. Granted in my relatively plush and safe upbringing this didn't result in anything all that interesting.
Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck (1951)
I have this odd habit of reading about twenty books at a time, and often taking years to finish them. The Sea of Cortez probably wins an award here for the longest time I've spent "reading a book.” I think I started it seven years ago, maybe more, and finally finished it this year. It's not a long book either. It sat partially read on my bookshelf for years. One day I decided it was time, and finally finished it.
It's a book about Steinbeck's journey collecting marine specimens in the 1940s in the Gulf of California. It definitely has a lot of notes and discussions about various sea creatures taken from the ocean and put in formaldehyde. This mainly is a backdrop for Steinbeck to reflect on humans, life, and what drives us to take our actions or beliefs. Steinbeck reminds me of Orwell in a specific way, not in his discussion of politics or anything, but in the journalistic way (non-derogatory) he seeks out the primary experiences of humanity.
His long paragraphs on the purpose or destiny of humanity would read as contrived if he were writing them from his desk. You can imagine him though, on a warm night, anchored near some coastal Mexican town, looking out at the ocean and reflecting and writing:
“...that one thing is all things - plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.”
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller Jr. (1959)
Six hundred years after the "flame deluge" (nuclear war) a small abbey in the Southwestern United States keeps artifacts from the 20th century, some of them old engineering texts. This book was written when the threat of nuclear war still was at the top of our minds (should it not be anymore?).
It's about scientific (re)discovery, and the confluence of people, artifacts, knowledge, and nations, that all must come together perfectly for the explosion of technology to occur. It's also about how in the absence of that perfect set of events, humanity can experience zero progress for centuries on end.
All of my hope in the future for our world, our nation, for my family, centers on the fact that we are living at the intersection of this engine of progress. When it's whirring away, and we are building and inventing new things, it feels as though anything is possible.
Do I worry about the dysgenic effects of lower birth rates among high ability subpopulations and illegal immigration? I mean it's not great, but does it matter if we can do genetic hacking? Do I worry about global warming if we can do bioengineering? If all we had to solve them was human coordination mechanisms, I think it would be over. If you can transform it into an engineering problem? Then my optimism shines through. It's such a deeply fragile system though, just a few tweaks and it's over. Look at the EU.
This book centers though the human impulse that does not exist in all of us, but does exist within the entirety of us, to preserve information, seek out explanations, and discover our natural world. It also explores to what extent we can live in peace without destroying all we create.
Starship Troopers Robert Heinlein (1959)
This was a re-read, but I'm not sure I appreciated it at age 17. I listened to it on audiobook on a drive home from Canada a few months ago. This is a scifi book about killing alien bugs, but it's really a book about moral and political philosophy. I think calling it a reactionary or military fascism political philosophy is way over the top. I'll admit there is a military element to it, but it's ultimately a political philosophy of traditional conservatism.
An extended portion of the book is monologues on moral philosophy. My favorite part was basically articulating why when teenagers or young adults (or new recruits) fuck up, it's the fault of their parents and guardians for having raised them incorrectly.
It's incredible how out of fashion this sort of political philosophy is these days. In general the broad based left and democrats reject this fundamentally. And the right is too busy trying to own the libs on stupid shit to retreat back to its robust intellectual roots and argue on those grounds. As long as it exists in books though, we may be able to retvrn someday to a society that takes responsibility for continuing to give birth to underclasses that rotate in and out of prison their entire lives.
Aniara sounds fascinating. I'll have to track that down.
Good stuff - need to read the crossing soon