music

2014 in review

Two thousand fourteen, I think I can safely say, was not my favorite year on record. This is less because it was a terrible year — though it often was that, at least in the news, in the nation, in the greater scheme of things. It’s just that I finished up the year feeling kind of rudderless, set adrift, not exactly happy with the choices that I’d made (or not been making) over the past few (or maybe even ten) years.

On paper, it wasn’t such a bad year. And while of course man does not live on paper alone, there are a few things I’m glad to have seen and done in 2014.

I got to travel a little: for work, to Texas; for writing, to Canada. Both trips were over much more quickly than I had expected, both leaving me a little melancholy upon my return. (I think you could say I still haven’t quite shaken that yet.)

I sold a couple of short stories, one to Andromeda Inflight Spaceways Inflight Magazine and the other to Mythic Delirium. Both are still forthcoming, though I’m hopeful they’ll both appear sometime in the new year. I saw more rejections than acceptances, but that’s the nature of the things. I know I need to write more, even as I know there will be more rejections ahead.

Meanwhile, I keep plugging away at Kaleidotrope, that little quarterly zine I publish. This year, a poem from 2013 was nominated for a Rhysling Award, and I published twenty-two new stories and ten new poems, all free to read. I’ve received some good feedback on the zine, and while I’m not entirely sure where it’s going, it’s something I still enjoy.

I read considerably fewer books than I have in years past, but there were some good ones in the mix. There’s a full list here, if you’re for some reason interested, but I think James S.A. Corey’s Expanse novels were my favorite.

expanse1 expanse2 expanse3 expanse4

Having read them all this past year kind of gives 2014 a shape it otherwise sort of lacked.

I saw some decent movies. I even saw some bad ones I didn’t mind quite so much. These, below, were probably the best ones, though it’s all really subjective anyway.

movie1 movie2 movie3 movie5 movie4 movie3b

And I put together a mix of my favorite songs from the year. (A few actually from this past year. It starts with Bob Seger and ends with Taylor Swift, so you try figuring out this year’s theme from it, ’cause I’m sure not. Also, if you’re one of the “lucky” few who I sent an actual physical copy of the mix with a Christmas card, know that this online version contains one additional, concluding track I hadn’t heard in time to add to the CDs. So, yeah: bonus!

Ultimately, though, I’m less interested in revisiting, or even reminiscing over, 2014 and more interested in looking ahead to 2015. It’s going to take a lot of hard work to get where I want to go, and it’s work I don’t feel entirely ready for — but which I’ll need to do nevertheless. It’s going to take a lot of luck and perseverance.

I don’t know if I’ll have enough of either in 2015, but I have to try.

Sunday

I spent a good part of yesterday sitting out in the backyard reading Kaleidotrope submissions, before it rained. I’m getting closer to being caught up, but I still have somewhere shy of a hundred left to read. Most of those are from March, which doesn’t make me feel quite as bad about not getting to them yet. But I still don’t want to keep people waiting too long, in part because I’m likely to reject most of them.

(That’s just the way it goes. I’d actually be in trouble, or booked solid for the next few decades, if I loved everything I received.)

Last night, after dinner, I watched 12 Years a Slave. I think I’d had all the common worries about the film: that it would be a downer, too brutal, too much. And it is terrible brutal, and often difficult to watch, but it’s also a terribly powerful movie with some wonderful, heartbreaking (and rightly Oscar-nominated) performances. (Lupita Nyong’o is the only performance that won the Oscar, for Best Supporting Actress, and the win is a testament to how affecting she is in the role, given that she’s actually on screen for relatively little of the movie.) The movie is surprisingly beautiful, compelling not just for the violence and cruelty of slavery on display but the spirit of those who endured and survived it.

I’ve now seen six of the nine movies nominated for Best Picture last year, and this is the first time I thought the film wasn’t just really good but actually a Best Picture. (Although Gravity has some terrific technical filmmaking, and arguably the best movie-making of the bunch.) I suppose now I’m compelled to watch the other three (Philomena, Nebraska, and Her). Oh woe is me.

Today, I sent out more Kaleidotrope rejections and watched a bunch of Parks and Recreation episodes. (I’m way behind, in the third season.) I also went to my weekly writing group, and I supplied the free-writing prompt. It was born out of this Twitter exchange last night with Maurice (who’s another third of the writing group):

And this is what I wrote:

[I’ve decided to expand and revise this, so I’m removing it from here]

I like it, and I think I might be able to do something with it — other than let it continue to spiral into just more and more plot — but the ducks will probably have to go.

The best of Stan Rogers, though, that’s staying put in my playlist.

In media rest

Okay, then. I read a few books this year, 136 at the current (and unlikely to change) count. Personal favorites included:

  • Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
  • The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht
  • The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
  • Taft by Ann Patchett
  • The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
  • The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters

But it was a pretty ordinary year, actually. There were a few disappointments, Embassytown by China Miéville and Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger chief among them, and in any year when I read such a weird mix of comics, there were bound to be a few there as well. (I’m looking at you particularly hard, end of run on Exiles.)

I didn’t re-read as much as I’d hoped to, only two books instead of the hoped-for five or six. And one of those, Stephen King’s It, was via audio book. But that’s two more than last year, and I found a lot of value in revisiting those two books. (Particularly It, although Watership Down was also quite lovely.) I’m not yet sure what I’m going to re-read in 2013, but I think it’s an experiment worth continuing.

I also watched several movies in 2012, not least of all nearly all of the “official” James Bond movies. Again, it was probably a pretty ordinary year, but a few personal favorites, in no order except the order seen:

  1. Drones
  2. Drive
  3. The Innkeepers
  4. The Cabin in the Woods
  5. The Avengers
  6. Moonrise Kingdom
  7. Sleepwalk With Me
  8. Skyfall
  9. Beasts of the Southern Wild
  10. The Descendants

Movies that turned out to be significantly better than I expected?

  • Underworld — though I can’t say the same for the sequel
  • John Carter — which I need to revisit, but which I think was sadly under-rated, this year’s Scott Pilgrim
  • Fast Five — so ridiculous, and some of it obviously just for fans of the series, but surprisingly fun
  • Predators — not, you know, great, but it has its moments
  • The Amazing Spider-Man — we hardly needed another reboot or origin story, much less one like this, but Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone are good together
  • Knight and Day — so are Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz. It’s not brilliant, but the chemistry works.
  • Moonrise Kingdom — I had reservations going into it, since I like Wes Anderson but am not a part of the cult. This is definitely the Wes-Anderson-iest of his movies, but for all that it’s rather delightful.
  • The Bourne Legacy — again, I’m not sure this is a series that really needed continuing, but I liked Jeremy Renner and Rachel Weisz here.
  • Ruby Sparks — it’s not a perfect movie, but it takes what could have been a tired premise and does some very interesting things with it.

And then there are the Bond movies, but there I feel like I’m grading on a curve. Some of them are pretty dreadful (The Man With the Golden Gun), and others are good mostly by comparison (Moonraker).

Biggest disappointments?

  • Them (Ils)
  • Tiny Furniture
  • Prometheus
  • Underworld: Evolution
  • Lockout
  • Dawn of the Dead (the remake)
  • Ghost Rider
  • Paranormal Activity 2 — although I’m almost weirdly glad this was disappointing
  • Tower Heist
  • V/H/S

A few of those I probably could have predicted going in. The biggest unexpected disappointment was Prometheus, which was easily one of my least favorite movies of the year. It’s simply gorgeous to look at it, and very reminiscent of the first two Alien movies — sometimes even in good ways — but it’s full of questions and plot holes. I just did not like it.

And then, finally, there was music. I’m actually surprised to see tht nine out the twenty-four songs on my “best of the year” mix are actually from this year, while another eight were released in 2011. (The rest are a jumble, going back from 2008 to 1989.)

  1. “Love Makes All the Other Worlds Go Round” by Dan Bern & Common Rotation
  2. “Little Black Submarines” by the Black Keys
  3. “Sugar” by the Horrible Crowes
  4. “Manchester” by Kishi Bashi
  5. “Houdini” by Foster the People
  6. “We Are Young” by Fun (feat. Janelle Monáe)
  7. “Little Talks” by Of Monsters and Men
  8. “New Ceremony” by Dry the River
  9. “I Love It” by Icona Pop
  10. “Let’s Get the Show on the Road” by the Michael Stanley Band
  11. “When I Write the Book” by Nick Lowe
  12. “Pursuit of Happiness” by Lissie
  13. “Abide With Me” by Emeli Sandé
  14. “Now” by Mates of State
  15. “It’s Time” by Imagine Dragons
  16. “Keep Me in Your Heart” by Warren Zevon
  17. “American Tune” by Paul Simon
  18. “Wheel Inside the Wheel” by Mary Gauthier
  19. “Bleed Like Me” by Garbage
  20. “Mountains” by Radical Face
  21. “Avalanches (Culla’s Song)” by A Fine Frenzy
  22. “Emmylou” by First Aid Kit
  23. “Revolution” by Dr. John
  24. “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis (feat. Wanz)

Some of those are a little NSFW, for those of you who received a copy of the mix from me. (If you’d like a copy and didn’t get one, just ask.)

And, of course, there’s my December mix, which is itself almost as many songs as the best of 2012:

  1. “What Makes a Good Man?” by the Heavy
  2. “Revolution” by Dr. John
  3. “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis (feat. Wanz)
  4. “Hit Me” by Mystikal
  5. “Summer of ’93” by the Good Graces
  6. “Emmylou” by First Aid Kit
  7. “Myth” by Beach House
  8. “Weeping Pilgrim” by Elvis Perkins
  9. “Oh My My” by Jill Barber
  10. “Human of the Year” by Regina Spektor
  11. “Maybe Next Year (X-Mas Song)” by Meiko
  12. “White Knuckles” by OK Go
  13. “Ca plane pour moi” by Plastic Bertrand
  14. “Same Love” by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis (feat. Mary Lambert)
  15. “We Are the Art” by Nico Vega
  16. “Next to Me” by Emeli Sandé
  17. “The John Wayne” by Little Green Cars

And that was a year in media, minus of course TV shows, podcasts, the internet, and bits and bobs here and there.

Wednesday various

  • A lot has been written recently about the “film,” Innocence of Muslims, notably its offensiveness to Muslims (and film lovers), the violence that’s erupted in its wake, and the duplicitous nature with which it was made. Now, via Neil Gaiman one of the actresses speaks out:

    It’s painful to see how our faces were used to create something so atrocious without us knowing anything about it at all. It’s painful to see people being offended with the movie that used our faces to deliver lines (it’s obvious the movie was dubbed) that we were never informed of, it is painful to see people getting killed for this same movie, it is painful to hear people blame us when we did nothing but perform our art in the fictional adventure movie that was about a comet falling into a desert and tribes in ancient Egypt fighting to acquire it, it’s painful to be thought to be someone else when you are a completely different person.

  • I’m not quite sure I buy into the idea of Breaking Bad as a “White supremacist fable” entirely — it’s probably true the show doesn’t get the drug trade right, but, then, it’s not really about the drug trade, is it? — but there’s some interesting food for thought here:

    White-washing the illegal drug market involves depicting it like markets wealthy viewers are more comfortable and familiar with, namely those of the farmers market or the local pharmacy. Walter White combines the ostensible moral complexity television audiences demand in a post-Soprano protagonist with a cleanliness that allows him to market expensive cars. The U.S. is still very much a white supremacist country, but classic cowboys-kill-Indians narratives don’t play with wealthy viewers or the critics who help determine those tastes. And Jack Bauer can drive only so many cars. For the credulous viewer who likes to imagine he’s a couple of life crises from being the Larry Bird of meth — and for the people who sell him stuff — White is right.If nothing else, the article makes me want to re-watch The Wire.

  • John Green on self-publishing and Amazon:

    Here’s my concern: What will happen to the next generation’s Toni Morrison? How will she—a brilliant, Nobel-worthy writer who doesn’t have a huge built-in audience—get the financial and editorial support her talent deserves? (You’ll note that there’s no self-published literary fiction anywhere near the kindle bestseller lists.) Amazon will have absolutely no investment in that writer, and they won’t need to. Over time, I’m worried this lack of investment will hurt the quality and breadth of literature we actually read, even if literature remains broadly available.

  • This isn’t new, but: Jonathan Coulton on the future of music, 3D printing, and scarcity:

    This is my bias: the decline of scarcity seems inevitable to me. I have no doubt that this fight over mp3s is just the first of many fights we’re going to have about this stuff. Our laws and ethics already fail to match up with our behaviors, and for my money, those are the things we should be trying to fix. The change is already happening to us, and it’s a change that WE ARE CHOOSING. It’s too late to stop it, because we actually kind of like a lot of the things that we’re getting out of it.

  • And finally, PBS asks, “Can fandom change society?” [via]

Monday various