Nick Gonzo's Review of End of Year Reviews

Hello you,

Its 2024, except it isn’t for me yet, but it is for you, reading this. I am sat waiting for a Chinese meal to arrive on New Years Eve before heading out to a party where I will probably play a lot of Overcooked on the Switch.

I could talk to you about the weird relationship I have had with New Years Eve and the peace I now find myself at with it. For years I chased the idea of a good New Years Eve, investing a lot of time and effort in trying to make it the best most exciting moment of the year by going to big parties or drinking lots. I could talk to you about that and how I have come to the realisation that its just another day and that its just an opportunity to have a groovy time playing Overcooked. However my good friend Christopher R Moore already wrote a piece about it for the Independent.

So just read that instead please.

Well everyone is doing their best of the year lists so I thought to myself I should do one. I seem to do a lot and this thing primarily styles itself as an arts and culture mailing list so lets talk arts and culture. Its not going to be top ten list or anything like that, and its highly unlikely that I am going to be talking about things that exclusively manifested in the year of our lord 2023, but I will talk about things that I ingested in 2023. I will run down;

1) Film

2) Book

3) Music

So if any of them tickle your fancy then as always feel free to skip ahead.

I am not sure if 2023 will be remembered as a powerful year for films or if I have been negligent in seeking out good quality movies. Every time I seem to think of a film I enjoyed this year it came out in 2022. But there are still some that I thought were excellent and will prattle on about in a second. But 2023 is the year I started getting really into buying DVDs and catching up on stuff I have missed from the past. For example, this is the year I finally saw A History Of Violence (2005), Stop Making Sense (1984), and The Descendants (2011), each one a fantastic movie that I cannot believe slid by me all these years.

An unexpected joy for me this year was the movie They Cloned Tyrone (2023), a Netflix original movie in the school of Jordan-Peele-Style-Movie (or Boots-Riley-style-movie) which aims to combine cinematic love letter with charismatic social commentary. This movie is a Blaxploitation at heart that looks at conspiracy theories as a lens to frame the cultural manipulation of African America. Its incredibly funny, with Jamie Foxx delivering a hilarious performance as Slick Charles the Highly strung pimp, and Teyonah Parris playing a sex worker desperate to escape her home neighbourhood. But its John Boyega who runs a streak of misery through the movie. His hardman drug dealer burying deep loss and sadness inside brings a tenderness to what could be a very disposable film if handled by a lesser cast and a lesser director.

Another complete surprise was Theatre Camp (2023), a mockumentary comedy about a finance-bro influencer taking over his mothers theatre camp when she falls into a Bye Bye Birdie related coma. It was very funny, mostly in a gentle way but occasionally interspersed with wild absurdism that really shines against the rest of the dry wit. I was never a theatre kid and claim to hate musicals despite loving quite a few of them, so its a testament to its writing that I connect so easily with the subject matter and fell in love with its weird cast of characters. Including the business bro who I thought might make me cringe inside out when he first turned up.

I am thoroughly aware that 2023 was the year of Oppenheimer (2023) and Barbie (2023), as well as Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (2023) and Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Amongst Thieves (2023). But I kind of knew all these films were going to be at least passable before I went in. Barbie was great and I really liked it and so did my Mum, and Dungeons and Dragons was everything I ever wanted a D&D movie to be (as a DM of over a decade) but the fact they were good wasn’t a surprise and probably diminished their impact on me. Take for example Asteroid City (2023), a Wes Anderson movie turned up to full in terms of its visuals, performance, self awareness, and commentary on the stilted nature of American society. I loved it, every second of it, but I knew I would so there was less joy in it than a movie where you have no idea where its going or what it will do next.

I also want to mention the output that Adult Swim put out this year. For those not in the know Adult Swim is the after dark for adults animation block on Cartoon Network that has gifted us such gems as Sealab 2021, Super Jail, and Rick and Morty. Well they cancelled two TV shows in 2020 (I think) and then gave them a big old budget to finish them off as movies. So 2023 brought us Metalocalypse: Army of the Doomstar and Venture Brothers: Radiant is the Blood of the Baboons Heart (both 2023), which were both shockingly good. I would say the Metalocalypse one was better as it had much more depth and character development and actually felt like a closing to the series, whilst the Venture Brothers movie sort of felt like an extra long episode of my favourite animated TV show of all time.

Best film of the year I watched in January and it actually came out in 2022. Boo hiss, I know, but it was the film I most enjoyed and this is my Newsletter so I can move the goal posts however I like.

When I was at University I was sort of the black sheep of the friendship group as I was the only person not doing English in some form. Everyone was either a Literature student, or a creative writing student, or a comparative literature student which I am assured is a different thing to a Literature student. So I’d be sat there whilst people had conversations about Walt Whitman and Dorothy Parker and I would just nod along having never read them and instead written 5000 words about Alvar Aalto’s impact on contemporary architecture but never having the opportunity to talk about my form of modernism because everyone else was talking about their form of Modernism.

This is a long way of telling you that I hadn’t read Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise before seeing the film of the same name, and going in blind I had no idea what happened in the film beyond the fact Adam Driver looked to be having a great time as the lead character. The less you know the better before approaching this story of Academic thinking and American Family life and how both flavour the endless battle we go through against anxiety and the fear of death.

I loved the film so much I watched it three times in 2023, and then read the book. The dialogue is lifted right from it and perfectly presented with all the actors completely committed to the off kilter vibe of the movie. For me, one of the most alienating things in contemporary movies is the way dialogue is written. Its written at a punchy, quippy level that implies that the universes of the films are filled with master orators all ready with quips and retorts to whatever may come their way. Its up there with Irony Poisoning for me as one of the Marvel Malignancies that have really spread into cinema at large. What elevates White Noise above this is the quality of the back and forth. It represents itself as heightened version of our reality populated with people desperate to exert some control over their uncontrollable lives and the place of them in an unknowable and terrifying world by holding onto the idea that deep down inside, on a cellular level, they know what’s going on. Whether that’s as academics, parents, consumers, lovers, or survivors. There is a line my Girlfriend and I quote at the time, which comes as a response to a rather strange and poetic observation about a woman’s hair, which is “I think I know what you mean”. This is a skilfully tight way of summing up the character. There is no way of knowing what the other character means. What they’re admitting to here is actually “I have no idea what you mean, but I need you to think that I do so that I keep my mask of authority, because if I don’t know what you mean, maybe I don’t know what anything means”. Of course this is anchored in the skill of Don Delillo’s writing in the source material, but to take something from one media to another and have it work in its own merit is the hallmark of a good adaptation.

It has a breakneck pace for a film with a run time of two hours sixteen minutes, and the 80s corporate Americana is perfectly sold through the sets, costumes, and production design. I thought it was a triumph of all its parts and I carried it with me through the year much like I did with Crimes of the Future in 2022 and Shiva Baby in 2021. Available now on Netflix.

After seeing the film I read White Noise by Don Delillo, which was the best book I read this year, but I’ve talked enough about that already. My love for it might be swallowed up in another newsletter at some point in the future. Keeping to the Post Modernism theme I also read Vineland by Thomas Pynchon after starting my quest to fill in his complete body of literature between the big ones I’ve already read (Just Mason Dixon to go).

Thomas Pynchon is the master of the shaggy dog story. He tells you a story about nothing as a framing device to tell you a story about literally everything. Gravity’s Rainbow is a history of the Second World war explored through one pudgy mans journey to have a lot of consensual sex with bored and lonely women. Inherent Vice is the story of the 60s told through a gum shoe detective story. Vineland is a story about what Richard Nixon did to America through the lens of a Hippy Surf Rock drummer trying to find his Ex-Wife. Its a dark story of paranoia, cultural malaise, and right wing suspicion, but also it has Ninjas, Mafia Families, a militant film collective, and a man trying to find out if Godzilla is actually real. Its very silly and all over the place, and filled with moments of great beauty tucked between recipes for Roast Jam and Bologna.

This method of story telling was actually a point of discussion between a University Lecturer friend of mine as we were talking about the next book I really enjoyed this year; Drive Your Plough Over The Bones of The Dead by Olga Tokarczuk. This is a murder mystery at its bones, but this pulpy skeleton only serves to carry around the true body of the story which is its narrator, a wonderfully opinionated lady called Janina. Living in an isolated community in Poland she spends her time working out a meaningful philosophy of the universe and translating William Blake. She has unique views on the way we treat the natural world, naming conventions, and astrology.

It’s something special and must be read. Smatterings of folk horror colour the pages of a book that is about the way we treat the things we think of as lesser than ourselves which often is minorities, women, and the natural world.

Now I want to briefly touch upon two comics I really enjoyed that have the added distinction of being two of the only things I read this year that actually came out in 2023. They are Monica by Daniel Clowes and Time Under Tension by M. S. Harkness.

Both have full size posts about them coming up I am sure, Time Under Tension especially as I have been looking at diary and essayist comics a lot as part of my research. So I won’t go on about them now, but both are excellent. Clowes’ continues to defy expectations and really has embraced just doing whatever the fuck he wants and letting us see the results. But yes. Books are great, and my house groans under the weight of them all.

2023 was the year my finger was probably off the pulse of music for the longest. I had a lot on, and my mind was on other things. As a result where usually it would be an easy feat for me to reel off new albums that I really liked from the last 12 months its been a bit of a struggle this year and albums I should have listened to I simply haven’t.

I have added a new task to my time management app to listen to a new album every day this year so that I am on it. People I really admire had albums out in 2023 and I didn’t even give them a try. The National had two albums out, Fever Ray had a new album, Ezra Collective won the Mercury Music Prize, which was a tough win as they beat out the new release by Young Fathers. All music that I missed. Which is a real shame, as my listening seemed to reply heavily on stuff I already new or was already familiar with. On the other side of the coin my gig viewing was so much weirder than it ever has been, but my actual at home listening trod some familiar roads.

Osees return to form with their latest release Intercepted Message. They’re a band who either have a new album coming out soon or have just released a new one, so I am always spoilt for choice, but 2022s A Foul Form was a brief, experiment with hardcore thrash that didn’t really scratch my itch. Intercepted Message comes straight out of the gate with some really good songs that immediately join the bands cannon for playlist crafting purposes. The final song especially, Always At Night, is a beautiful delicate sorrowful song that shows just how much range can come from a band even when you think they’ve done everything already.

On the other hand I enjoyed Lana Del Rey’s latest release Did You Know There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard. This is their ninth album and the first one I have properly listened to since their major label debut Born to Die in 2012.

I had dabbled a bit with Ultraviolence and Norman Fucking Rockwell, but honestly I thought they had explored all they could in their chosen style. Ocean Boulevard is not a departure from this style by any means, but instead is an expansion. Its a bigger sound than I had heard from them before and much more mature. It feels more authentic, despite every note being swaddled in the character of the sad bored socialite Lana Del Ray conjures. The use of samples between songs is very dramatic and brings it more together as a narrative piece rather than a series of singles.

Some of the songs really stuck with me and I found myself listening to it throughout the year, and even learning a few tracks on piano for me to fail to sing over. My voice was not made for singing.

Despite being more known for being a horny vampire on FX than as a musician, Matt Berry is an exceptional song writer. I have dabbled with his stuff, dipping in and out, but other than 2009s Witchazel I haven’t taken in any of his albums. 2023’s Simplicity sees him try his hand at Sound tracking as part of a collaboration with KPM Music, a music library that is known for providing some of the most well known opening themes of classic British television. You can tell that Berry has a love of a certain period of history as this album of music for shows that don’t exist drips with the drab colours of 70s cop shows. I can imagine a Ford Consul GT crashing through a bunch of card board boxes as these tracks play. Its perfectly crafted, feeling like music of the time rather than being a pastiche or overly irreverent. I’ve had this on a lot since its release, both to enjoy the craftsmanship of the music and the style and story of it all, but also to add drama to a walk to the shops.

Final album I want to mention is Darling the Dawn by All Hands_Make Light. Its Orchestral Shoegaze that mixes a member of Broken Social Scene and a member of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Despite being two old hands in this business, they do something new and explore a direction I didn’t expect Post-Rock to go in.

For example; I went to a pretty great Post-Rock gig earlier in the year and saw three Post-Rock bands back to back. I was chuffed and enjoyed the subtle differences between the three sets and the ways they interpreted the works of earlier artists into their own spacey instrumentals. My mate that I went with said it was like seeing Two Beatles Cover bands and then the Beatles and being asked to tell the difference. I felt deflated that I had become the sort of person that listens to the same sort of twiddly hiss all the time and could revel in the slight differences of the twiddling. The debut album by All Hands_Make Light shows what Post-Rock should be like right now, entirely removing guitars from the equations and bringing in delicate vocals to fill the space.

If you aren’t familiar with the genre this isn’t a great introduction to the back catalogue because its new and different. It would be a weird step backwards from this to something like Set Fire To Flames. But its a good introduction to what we might expect from people who come next.

Good God that took longer than expected. As you can tell from the intro I started writing this in 2023, and ended up finishing it 20 days in 2024.

It was something I was exciting to write, but as it wore on it felt increasingly unimportant. What good is a list without something to back it up? Some central message or meaning? These things are tied together by the fact I enjoyed them and experienced them in an arbitrary period of time. I hope you enjoy some of them too.

Luckily there are a bunch of other things I am really PUMPED to talk to you about in this new year, and I will be doing so soon. So I look forward to seeing you there.

Kind regards

Nick