Photography, Books.
I did one of these (two, actually) for 2022. 2023 isn’t over yet, but with 11 days remaining I feel okay starting to shake out the purse of my year and seeing what all besides a lipstick and some earbuds was in there. Here’s Pt. 1, posted last Wednesday. You’ll get music and movies when the final installment drops next week.
Photography:
I’m earmarking this space to show off some of my favorite digital and 35mm photography I did this year. And why not? I haven’t found a proper home for it yet, outside of the ever-enshittifying Instagram.
Books:
Memoirs, Bios. Like everyone else I know, I went deep into popcult biographical nonfiction in 2023. John Szwed’s comprehensive Harry Smith book offered detail and insight that the Whitney’s minuscule Smith exhibit could not because of how little of his corpus is available to us physically (but if you go, spend quality time with Mahagonny). The Britney tell-all made me roil with anger and sadness, and while it’s not a great piece of literature, I do love how she, ghostwriter Sam Lansky, and audiobook narrator Michelle Williams capture a youthful, hopeful ebullience that carries through even in the muddiest trenches. Matt Singer’s Siskel & Ebert history Opposable Thumbs is a warm, funny, well-reported journey into the two critics’ often volatile working relationship and friendship, and the production and reception of their long-running reign on TV. And I was delighted by the appendix: blurbs of several films S&E thumbs-upped that either fell utterly through the cracks or have just bubbled under mass memory. Up next in my TBR pile: Sly Stone.
Novels. Emma Cline’s buzzed-about The Guest was cute and tawdry in a hedging, Northeast liberal arts–girlie way. Nicole Flattery’s gorgeous Nothing Special kinda floored me with its sophisticated ground game for burrowing into the root of of the banal, the exhaustingly meh, the heartbreakingly unremarkable. But I slacked on my fiction intake in 2024, esp. w/r/t stories not by millennial white chicks.
The Tom Verlaine Book Sale. I went to two installations of the ongoing sale of Tom Verlaine’s beyond-massive book collection, hosted by Better Read Than Dead / Capitol Hill Books. The first was in a pair of cramped garages in Bed-Stuy; the second at Woodbine in Ridgewood, Queens. I can’t help but feel queasy about scavenging the possessions of the dead — I ultimately declined to attend a similar book sale by the late No Wave artist/musician Barbara Ess. But the Verlaine events seem bigger than merely “look what a famous guy left behind”; they’re a celebration of beloved things, the particular madness of surrounding yourself with objects of joy and illumination, the drug of the pulp-and-mildew smell that hits you the further into the Strand you wander. A celebration of the kind of New York lifer we want to keep extant as long as we can. On a phalanx of folding tables, hundreds of music books, dozens of poetry volumes, a few philosophy and film journals, and a whole stunning volley of title after title on spirituality and the occult. I came away with, among other bits and bobs, a couple collections of music essays, a 1974 critical work on Pynchon, a 1984 text on political street art, Derek Bailey discussing free improvisation, A. B. Spellman talking midcentury jazz, Peter Bogdanovich spreading the gospel of Fritz Lang.
