Not That You Asked: Our Year in Things

The best song I heard this year was “Vampire Empire” by Big Thief.

Very specifically, it was the version of the song that they performed live on the Colbert show on the night after I saw them perform it at Radio City. When the studio version of the song came out months later it was a bit of a disappointment — less raucous, less fun, a little more mopey. Also, bizarrely, in the studio version she muffs the rhyme on the great line: “I walked into your dagger for the last time in a row, It's like trying to start a fire with matches in the snow” by leaving out the “in a row” part.

A strange choice! I guess the great ones are allowed to make those occasionally.

Also, here is the runner-up best song of the year about a vampire:

I guess 2023 was a vampire year, because my movie of the year was Pablo Larraín's El Conde.

This movie is absolutely gnarly, so if you’re not able to tolerate gore don’t bother with it. There are several scenes in which a vampire plops a human heart into a blender to consume like a Concrete from Shake Shack, if that helps you make up your mind about whether or not this is your sort of thing.

It is also hilarious, with the best slow burn joke of the whole year, which I will not spoil for you. And it is gorgeous, with a high-contrast black and white palette which seems like a nod to original Dracula. And again, I will not spoil it for you, but there is a scene near the end that is just insanely, lyrically, unforgettably beautiful. You’ll know it when you see it, if you can get through all the heart blenders.

I’m not necessarily saying that El Conde was the best movie of the year, it was just the one that spoke to me personally the most. A pro critic would probably choose Killers of the Flower Moon, or Barbie, which were both, of course, excellent. Hopefully that critic would choose something other than Oppenheimer, which, with no offense to all the talented people who made it, was an example of my least favorite genre: the “based on a true story” fictional biography of a historical person, in which everything is a slightly fudged version of what actually happened, and some characters are “composites” that were actually a handful of real people, and you need to go read some Wikipedia afterward to figure out if you know anything true after seeing it. If nothing else, Oppenheimer was better than the one where Benedict Cumberface (or whatever) was supposed to be Alan Turing.

Speaking of gnarly, the best book I read this year was, finally, Blood Meridian.

I didn’t say that these things had to be from this year.

When McCarthy died I was went to pick up his two new books, even though they sound pretty much unreadable, and then I remembered that I never got past the first thirty pages of Blood Meridian, and thought: why would I bother with the minor works first? It was time to put on my big boy reading pants, and get this thing done.

And of course, it turns out that if you can stand it, Blood Meridian is the best book out there which is not named Moby God Damn Dick. You could just throw it up in the air and read any random sentence, and like, who ever wrote a better sentence than that? If these are in fact, technically speaking, sentences.

John Hillcoat is currently trying to make a film version, and good luck to him, but why would you do that? This is my current favorite novel but even I don’t want to see a movie about it.

My favorite TV show of the year was the third season of The Great.

Remember when I said that I don’t care for vaguely-true historical fiction? It turns out that I love it when they don’t even try to get the facts straight. The subtitle of this show was “An occasionally true story.”1

Sadly, but not surprisingly, Hulu cancelled The Great a few weeks ago. I can hardly blame them because I always felt like no one watched The Great but me and Maya. No one I know personally ever mentioned it to me, and I can’t remember the last time I ever heard anyone mention it on Substack, or any of the other pale replacements for Twitter where people chat about television. But sometimes it’s nice to have a show all to yourself, and Maya and I will miss The Great.

The best meal I had this year was at Café Mars, in Gowanus.

Go read Helen Rosner’s review if you don’t believe me.

This place exudes Wonkaesque-ness that I would be too grumpy for if it weren’t so delicious. For instance, the castelvetrano olives suspended in negroni jello shots, which is basically my favorite thing stuffed in my other favorite thing.

They also do pork ribs parmigiana, which, you’re right, is absurd. Are you too fine a person to eat such a thing? Congratulations. I’ll have your share.

The dog of the year was my dog, Murphy.

Better luck next year, other dogs!