My five favorite songs of 2008, which may include music made and released in ’07 but which I in my infinite out-of-touch-ness only became aware of this calendar year:
“Strange Overtones,” Brian Eno and David Byrne
“Me + Yr Daughter,” Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head (g0d, what an awful band name)
“Escape City Scrapers,” Mono in VCF (okay, I know this was ’07 for sure, but it was a KEXP song of the day podcast on 12.30.07, so screw it)
“Hangman,” Fire on Fire
I also liked “Paradise Knife Fights” by Vampire Hands, “The Future Is Obsolete” by Voyager One, “See These Bones” by (remember them? “Popular”?) Nada Surf, “Can’t Say No” by the Helio Sequence,
Basically all of these songs come from KEXP podcasts, because that was pretty much the only avenue by which new music reached me since I seemed to have devoted ’08 to film and books and I can only pay attention to two of the three in any given phase of life.
But my total jam through the year was MGMT, which I downloaded illegally last November and couldn’t stop listening to all year long. It was to 2008 as LCD Soundsystem was to 2007, except I didn’t get to see MGMT headline a music festival in Scotland.
In terms of music that didn’t come out this year but which privately defines my aural ’08, I listened to a lot of Panda Bear on repeat one, along with Marianne Faithfull, especially “Intrigue.” “The Drift” by Portishead got seared into my brain because it’s so haunting and I first heard it in rural Minnesota as the sun was setting through a tear in the clouds. I like a lot of songs by Walter Meego. I renewed my appreciation for Scott Walker, particularly “The Lady Came from Baltimore” and the gorgeous instrumentation in “If You Go Away.” “Mathilde” by Scott Walker remains my favorite song of all time, a tenuous status subject to change at any moment but which hasn’t yet. My friend Zan made me a birthday mix and “Headphone Song” by Junior Senior was totes the highlight. I got reacquainted with “Try” by Delta 5 at a party in Seattle; some day it will be in one of those car commercials where an affable dork driver sings along. “Too Nice to Talk To” by the English Beat, also better than I ever realized. To toot my own horn, David Bowie‘s “Young Americans” is now my favorite karaoke jam.
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Film is easier. I watched 186 movies this year, 170 of them for the first time. Among them were virtually everything by Francois Truffaut and Werner Herzog that’s Netflixable. The best new ones:
WALL-E (kind of a copout, but it was the best thing to happen in animation in a long while, and my favorite animated film evah)
My Winnipeg (Guy Madden)
Encounters at the End of the World (Herzog)
The Last Mistress (could you get a less user-friendly name than Fu’ad Ait Aattou? I think there’s an umlaut in there, too. Whatevs, he’s hot and it’s an amazing period film. Suck it, timid American public, for being stupid and forcing the title not to be transliterated as An Old Mistress, as it is in the original French).
Other things I really liked: There Will Be Blood, Tropical Malady, Beau Travail, Zerkalo (The Mirror), Aguirre the Wrath of God, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Wild Tigers I Have Known (best film about gay adolescence I’ve ever seen, and I usually hate them), the Passion of Joan of Arc (I was way, way overdue), Confidentially Yours (Truffaut’s best film), Werckmeister Harmonies, Morvern Callar, Stroszek (Herzog’s best film), Fitzcarraldo, El Topo (phantastic with a ph), Nosferatu the Vampire, Lessons of Darkness (Herzog’s best documentary), Polanski’s Macbeth, Starship Troopers (amazingly prescient, since it’s from ’97, and one of the best satires ever), the Tenant, Pro-Life (a John Carpenter “short”; pretty fucking scary), They Live (another great Carpenter horror), Lola Montes (the very definition of fabulous) and Papillon (I watched it feeling dutiful towards a classic and wound up loving it).
The biggest disappointment was Cloverfield. The thing that made me laugh the hardest was a scene in Amargosa where a slightly crazy old guy is riding an ATV and it’s cut with shots of an emu running around to a banjo…never mind, just watch it. Saw the trailer for the new Star Trek, and I can’t wait!
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Not to be anticlimatic, but with books, I can’t read them quickly enough to have read all that many books put out in 2008. I read 37 this year and none of my favorites were even written this millennium. The five best were Vol. 3 of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, The Guermantes Way, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (its sequel, Parable of the Talents, is good but not as good), Brideshead Revisisted by Evelyn Waugh, and a forgotten novel I heard about in grad school and finally got to, The Man Who Loved Children, by Christina Stead. I liked The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy but in the interest of having at least one non-fiction/2000s title in there, let’s say The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. It’s a little flawed, but she’s rad.
The worst book I read this year, bar none, was Radiant Cool by Dan Lloyd. Don’t even think about it. Of course, no one’s ever heard of it, making my scorn futile. This is unlike last year when I attempted Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and couldn’t finish it even though it’s short and I finish everything because it, like capital-R Romanticism, is extremely odious. The end.
Suck the Rainbow 