In the mid–2000s, I was completely taken by the book “Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences,” written by Lawrence Weschler and beautifully published by McSweeney’s. Weschler surfaced “strange connections” between images and wrote about them intriguingly. I still think of the book when I come across an image — a photograph, a painting, a movie moment — that brings to mind another one.

I spent part of this evening with Julie Blackmon’s absorbing book of photographs, “Midwest Materials.” Blackmon has some intentional allusions in her photographs, but others I think just come from the consciousness of the viewer.

There’s something, for instance, about the turf and peculiar (and menacing) objects in her photograph “Spray Paint” that brings to mind Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite” (picture the poster, and the final 30 minutes).

Or, seen below, “Snow Days,” which immediately brought me back to a moment in Tarkovsky’s “Mirror,” which I recently rewatched and posted about early in the month:

I realize there’s a risk in it seeming like I’m undervaluing the originality of one work by graphing it over another. But one of the pleasures I get in taking in art of all kinds is not just the pieces themselves — which I’m grateful for individually — but for how they intermingle in my mind.

Since 2000, I’ve had a year-end tradition of sharing my cultural highlights of the past 12 months. For this year’s post, I’ll first note the major life change I had in 2021.

After eight years leading comms and marketing for the nonprofit conservancy Forest Park Forever, I re-entered the agency world this summer by joining The Stoke Group, a fully distributed digital marketing and content studio that focuses on the B2B tech sector.

As the Senior Director of Editorial Content, I spend most of my time on editorial projects for Adobe (a key client, and one that values great writing and design), as well as helping produce the video podcast Real Creative Leadership with its host, Adam Morgan. While I miss the connection to my St. Louis community, I’m enjoying working with strategists, writers, and designers on content work for large global clients. I hadn’t worked with clients at this scale or in this specific sector, so it’s been broadening in the way I hoped. The team’s packed with interesting, talented, upbeat people.

With that 2021 milestone covered, here’s a look at some cultural-intake highlights from the year:

Books: Fiction

1. Lanny, Max Porter

2. Second Place, Rachel Cusk

3. Leave the World Behind, Rumaan Alam

4. The Copenhagen Trilogy, Tove Ditlevsen

5. Whereabouts, Jhumpa Lahiri

6. The Morning Star, Karl Ove Knausgaard

7. Beautiful World, Where Are You, Sally Rooney

8. The Sellout, Paul Beatty

9. Tenth of December, George Saunders

10. My Heart, Semezdin Mehmedinović

11. Fox 8, George Saunders

12. The Carrying: Poems, Ada Limon

13. New Teeth, Simon Rich

Books: Non-Fiction

1. Counterpoint: A Memoir of Bach and Mourning, Philip Kennicott

2. The Most Fun Thing: Dispatches from a Skateboard Life, Kyle Beachy

3. Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design, Michael Bierut

4. Suppose a Sentence: Brian Dillon

5. Hannah Wilke: Art for Life’s Sake (Eds., Tamara Schenkenberg and Donna Wingate)

6. Three Women, Lisa Taddeo

7. They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, Hanif Abdurraqib

8. The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, Louis Menand

9. Of Human Kindness: What Shakespeare Teaches Us About Empathy, Paula Marantz Cohen

10. Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres, Kelefa Sanneh

11. The Monocle Book of Homes (Monocle)

12. The Innovation Stack: Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time, Jim McKelvey

13. Studio Culture Now (Ed. Mark Sinclair)

14. The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel, Kati Marton

15. Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks, Adam Nayman

16. This Isn’t Happening: Radiohead’s “Kid A” and the Beginning of the 21st Century, Steven Hyden

17. After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made, Ben Rhodes

18. Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald

19. An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination, Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang

20. The Master: The Long Run and Beautiful Game of Roger Federer, Christopher Clarey

21. Proustian Uncertainties, Saul Friedländer

22. Seeing Serena, Gerald Marzorati

23. Graphic Life, Michael Gericke

24. How to Raise an Adult, Julie Lythcott-Haims

25. Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, paired with Twelve New Essays by Jessica Helfand

26. Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century, Tim Higgins

27. The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, Jonathan Alter

28. No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention, Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer

29. Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, Adam Grant

30. Sorry Spock, Emotions Drive Business, Adam W. Morgan

Movies

1. The French Dispatch

2. Cold War

3. Certain Women

4. Meek’s Cutoff

5. The Power of the Dog

6. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

7. Let Them All Talk

8. The Farewell

9. To the Wonder

10. Citizenfour

11. In One Breath: Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark

12. Biggie: I Got A Story to Tell

13. Mies

14. Untold: Breaking Point

15. WeWork: or The Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn

TV

1. Succession, Season 3

2. The Bureau, Season 1

3. Ted Lasso, Season 2

4. Great British Baking Show, Season 12

5. The Chair 6. Only Murders in the Building

7. The Other Two, Seasons 1 and 2

8. This Is a Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist

9. Lupin, Season 1

Podcasts
New finds I enjoyed this year: A Change of Brand, Conversations with Tyler, and The CMO Podcast. The Two Month Review’s podcast series on William Gaddis's J R delivered a ton of insights and smiles during the first few months of 2021.

Visual Art
This was the second year in a row with little travel (which often prompts new art-viewing) and sadly little museum-going here at home (that’s on me). That said, and acknowledging my bias, the exhibition Hannah Wilke: Art for Life's Sake — curated by my wife, Tamara H. Schenkenberg, at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation — gained in richness and meaning every time I saw it. If you’re here in St. Louis, I highly encourage a visit before its January 16 close.

Music
A million years ago, my year-end lists included dozens of individual albums and concerts. While music’s a daily essential for me, I see almost nothing live and dip in and out of all kinds of new things I learn about, often without good record-keeping.

I usually work listening to classical, then jazz is on in the evening. The only specific new recordings I’d surface this year are the terrific records from Tyler, the Creator, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker. Phoebe Bridgers didn’t have a new album, but I loved her live Pitchfork Festival set that I happened to catch the evening it streamed.

In terms of new discoveries, there was one artist — and one song — that I’ll long connect with 2021: “A Lot’s Gonna Change” by Weyes Blood (Natalie Laura Mering). I was introduced to this singer/songwriter through a Spotify station as I drove on an errand of some kind. I was transfixed.

At about 1:20, Mering sings the title phrase — “A lot’s gonna change / in your …. life / … time.” — and it swallowed me up in the way great song moments do. Likely because my wife and I spend so much of our non-working time focused on raising our young kids and thinking about what their future lives will be like, the line took on all kinds poignancy and significance in the seconds I heard it.

Later on, the second time that part of the song comes around (2:55 in the video above), Mering sings, “‘Cause you’ve got what it takes / in your … life / … time.”

Here’s to the time we’ve got ahead of us in 2022.

Year 20 of my annual cultural-recap tradition was quite something.

Thus far my family’s had good fortune amid the global pandemic, so we’re spending most of our time feeling grateful, yet exhausted, then grateful, yet exhausted.

With lots of time at home, there was some enjoyable culture to take in. Here’s a look at some highlights:

Books

1. The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches & Meditations, Toni Morrison
2. Uncanny Valley: A Memoir, Anna Wiener
3. Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, George Packer
4. Having and Being Had: Eula Biss
5. My Parents: An Introduction, Aleksandar Hemon
6. Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, Cathy Park Hong
7. Weather, Jenny Offill
8. Promised Land, Barack Obama
9. Then the Fish Swallowed Him, Amir Ahmadi Arian
10. Jack, Marilyn Robinson
11. My Life in France, Julia Child
12. Severance, Ling Ma
13. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson
14. Luster, Raven Leilani
15. Intimations, Zadie Smith
16. Monocle: How to Make a Nation
17. The Passion Economy, Adam Davidson
18. These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson, Martha Ackmann
19. Wine Simple, Aldo Sohm
20. Normal People, Sally Rooney
21. The Lying Lives of Adults, Elena Ferrante
22. Girl, Edna O’Brien
23. Lurking: How a Person Became a User, Joanne McNeil
24. How to Be a Family, Dan Kois
25. Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight Over a Modernist Masterpiece, Alex Beam
26. The Secret Lives of Color, Kassia St. Clair
27. No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram, Sarah Frier
28. Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, Hanif Abdurraqub
29. How to Write One Song, Jeff Tweedy
30. How Architecture Works, Witold Rybczynski
31. Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State, Barton Gellman
32. To Start a War, Robert Draper
33. The Spy Masters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future, Chris Whipple
34. Agent Running in the Field, John le Carré
35. The Monocle Guide to Better Living
36. Hell and Other Destinations, Madeline Albright
37. The Ride of a Lifetime, Robert Iger
38. Bitter Brew, William Knoedelseder

Movies

1. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (exquisite, perfect)
2. Parasite
3. Booksmart
4. Marriage Story
5. Little Women
6. Uncut Gems
7. 1917
8. Meyerowitz Stories: New & Collected
9. The Irishman
10. The Trip to Greece
11. Palm Springs
12. Rams
13. Knives Out
14. The Other Guys
15. Maggie’s Plan
16. Shoplifters
17. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
18. The Price of Everything
19. Ford v. Ferrari
20. Despicable Me

TV Shows

1. Better Call Saul, Seasons 4 and 5
2. Atlanta, Seasons 1 and 2
3. Schitt’s Creek, All Seasons
4. Never Have I Ever
5. Call My Agent, Season 1
6. Roadkill
7. Devs
8. Great British Bake-Off, Season 6 and 8
9. Ted Lasso

Visual Art
I can’t recall a year when I saw less art — whether here in St. Louis or in cities we didn’t travel to. With that unfortunate reality, I’m especially grateful to have been able to see the fantastic exhibition “Terry Adkins: Resounding” at the Pulitzer this summer.

Podcasts
Favorite new discoveries: The Modern House Podcast, Distributed, with Matt Mullenweg, Siegel+Gale Says, and Simplicity Talks. Valuable mood-improver for 2020: Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend.

Music
My Spotify’s a shared-with-kids mess, and for loads of weekly hours I stream jazz and classical music that I don’t make a note of to be recalled. That said, I did especially enjoy new records from Fiona Apple, Phoebe Bridgers, Adrianne Lenker, Jeff Tweedy, Lomelda, Bob Dylan, Run the Jewels, and Freddie Gibbs & The Alchemist. I’m grateful to have been turned on to the music of Big Thief, Harold Budd (via the e-newsletter Flow State), Eleanor Bindman, and Haley Heynderickx, whose “Oom Sha La La” always brightened our family’s quarantine, with the kids screaming and jumping along to the swelling refrain, “I need to start a garden!” Here’s to what’s to come.

Odds and ends from the past few weeks:

• What a fun treat to see Forbes spotlight ListenForestPark.org, an audio microsite my team launched a few years ago as a side project. It’s found a new audience these days.

• Finished “Devs” on Hulu. Dug the style and performances; so-so on the ultimate substance.

• The series “ZeroZeroZero” was, like one of the creator’s prior work “Sicario,” cinematically beautiful; it was just too grim and violent for me to continue past episode three.

• Made me laugh over laundry: “The Other Guys.”

• Two episodes into “Never Have I Ever” on Netflix and really enjoying it. Brilliant choice of narrator.

• Two live song performances I’ve replayed a number of times recently: Clem Snide and Scott Avett’s “Roger Ebert” and Father John Misty’s “Total Entertainment Forever.”

• A favorite new weekly listen: The Modern House Podcast. Search for it in your podcast player of choice. Also recommend the publication’s short video going inside architectural designer Jonathan Tuckey‘s family home in northwest London.

• Delighted that we were able to snag this unusual wood and leather lounge chair from STL’s MoModerne Design Shop. Bought through an Instagram DM, now settled into our den for years.

• Best for last: We finished season 5 of “Better Call Saul.” Tremendous television. (How in the world did Lalo just show up so late and start owning scenes with major talent that had four seasons of episode strength beneath them? What a character and performance.)

Continuing for month two of this recent effort to note the cultural intake of the prior month: 

Read

• Medardo Rosso: Experiments in Light and Form, Pulitzer Arts Foundation — (Disclosure: Married to a contributor) (A)
• Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin, Robert Cialdini  — Recommended by someone high-wattage bright in conversation, who was advising on how to nudge. (B)
• Magnitude: The Scale of the Universe, Kimberly K. Arcand (B+)
• The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War in the Age of Global Terror, Garrett M. Graff — An older book with Mueller at the core (B)
• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Chip Heath and Dan Heath — I can still recall being taken by this cover in the Borders I frequented more than a decade ago. Finally read it. (B+)
• Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Cal Newport — Enjoyed Newport's interview with Ezra Klein. Found the book just so-so, but the reminder is valuable. (B-)
• "The White Darkness: A Journey Across the Antarctic," David Grann — Another incredible novella-length gem from David Grann. After reading, don't miss an audio segment with voices from the piece. (A+)

Watched

• Get Out (A+)
• Room (B+)
• Phantom Thread (A-)
• 45 Years (A-)

With a nod to Kottke's monthly "Media Diet" posts, I'm experimenting this year with short monthly recaps of interesting things I've read, watched or listened to. (This is as much for myself, as noting what I took in can help me better recall it.)

Read

• Paula Scher: Works — Terrific, from the opening essay and interview to the work itself.  (A)
• Abbott Miller: Design & Content — Intelligent and beautiful. Especially loved reading about Miller's co-founding of a "content-based studio" years before 'content strategy' became a thing. (A+) 
• We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, Ta-Nehisi Coates — I'd read most of these essays when they were published in The Atlantic, but they were even more powerful here as a package. I liked Coates' brief introductions to each one, noting any changes (to what happened in the world, to how he thought about the issues) since original publication. (A)
• Obama: An Intimate Portrait, by Pete Souza (A)
• "Old Woods and Deep: Traces of Cormac McCarthy's Knoxville" — A rare deep dive into McCarthy and in particular Suttree, my favorite novel of his.

Watched

• The Big Sick (B+)
  
• Columbus (A) — Unique and sensitive debut with such lovely and surprising  architecture.
• The Sopranos, Final Season (A)

Listened To

• Lomelda, "From Here," — Stumbled on her via Spotify Discover. The last-third build-up gets me singing.  
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on "Discovering America" — On this recent New Yorker Radio Hour interview with David Remnick, Adichie was incisive and funny. Moved me to pick up Americanah, which I'm reading now.
• Slow Burn — Binged-listened to this podcast about Watergate. Hard to believe.
• Saint Louis Symphony Concert Family Concert  — First time taking Leo, who looked up with wide eyes at Powell Hall's magnificent ceiling. It was a treat that the special guest was the 442s, friends and collaborators on this Forest Park Forever project. A week since going, Leo's been loudly 'conducting' in the kitchen. 

Continuing a 17-year tradition, I’m happy to share my Annual Favorites list for the year 2017: 

Family
Let’s start with the best thing that happened to my family this year, which is the arrival of Sylvia Huremović Schenkenberg in late April. We’re still smiling at her the way Leo was above, just a few days in. 

Books

1. My Struggle: Book 5, Karl Ove Knausgård

2. Blind Spot, Teju Cole

3. Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine

4. Exit West, Mohsin Hamid

5. Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen

6. Swing Time, Zadie Smith

7. Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches, John Hodgman

8. Now You See It and Other Essays on Design, Michael Bierut

9. Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game, Karl Ove Knausgård and Fredrik Ekelund

10. Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood, Trevor Noah

11. Obama: The Call of History, Peter Baker

12. Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure, Bianca Bosker

13. A Separation, Katie Kitamura

14. Paul Rand: A Designer’s Art

15. More Alive and Less Lonely: On Books and Writers, Jonathan Lethem

16. Powers of Ten, Philip Morrison

17. Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind, Peter D. Kramer

Movies

1. Moonlight

2. Lady Bird

3. Under the Skin

4. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)

5. Clouds of Sils Maria

6. Life Itself

7. Arrival

TV/Streaming

1. Better Call Saul, Season 3

2. The Americans, Seasons 4-5

3. OJ: Made in America

4. Master of None, Season 2

Audio
I’m going to skip making a long list of favorite albums and podcasts, and instead note a discovery in each, respectively: Phoebe Bridgers (watch her Tiny Desk Concert here), and S-Town. They each feel a bit haunted, and they share, in parts, a gothic sensibility. (Also: I can’t not mention Black Thought’s instantly classic 11-minute freestyle video, which c’mon.) 

Technology 
Our SONOS Play: 1 is used every evening for listening to music as we get ready for dinner or just goof around with the kids. Things 3 finally launched, and it’s attractive and enjoyable to use. It’s only been a month or so, but I’ve been enjoying trying out Ulysses as a writing environment (despite having no interest in using Markdown.) I’ve been impressed with Airtable as a flexible, humane alternative to Excel, when you need a database of some kind but have zero needs for financial calculations. (I’d seen the fancy Sandwich video when it launched, but didn’t realize it could fit my needs until the co-founder’s segment on Track Changes.)

Personal
As noted on this website earlier this month, I was sad to see an end to the remarkable life of William H. Gass, who I was lucky enough to get to know over the past decade-plus. Bill lived a long and productive life, dying at 93, and working through his final year. I was honored to write briefly about him for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and speak about his life and work on St. Louis Public Radio. I continue posting notes from readers and admirers at ReadingGass.org.

Work
Highlights from a very fun year at Forest Park Forever include engaging the public in the final year of Forever: The Campaign for Forest Park’s Future, speaking at the international City Parks Alliance conference in the Twin Cities, launching a 2.0 version of ForestParkMap.org, and publishing Forest Park: Snapshots of a St. Louis Gem.

I can still remember encountering Crewdson’s work for the first time in The New York Times Magazine more than a decade ago. Original, absorbing and haunting. Today’s “Monocle Weekly” interview with him had me heading to his website, which alerted me to this documentary. 

Finally saw this extraordinary movie, piercing and tender and unforgettable. Catching up on some interesting pieces about it, including this one.

Back before Tamara and I had our son in the summer of 2013, I used to keep regular lists of my “Annual Favorites” of the year — the best books, movies, TV shows, podcasts, exhibitions and so on that I’d consumed that year.

To say my rate of cultural digestion changed with fatherhood would be an understatement; that said, I still have an interest in logging the great stuff (if only for myself). So while I skipped 2013 entirely, here’s a go at some highlights from 2014: 

TheGassInterviews.org
In May, I published a project I’d been working on for some time: The Ear’s Mouth Must Move: Essential Interviews with William H. Gass. I chose to publish this on Medium at no cost to the reader, and included a range of footnotes, photos and videos. Thanks to all the contributors who made this possible. 

Books

1. On Immunity: An Inoculation, Eula Biss

2. My Struggle, Book One: Karl Ove Knausgård

3. Little Failure, Gary Shteyngart

4. Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays, Eula Biss

5. What We See When We Read, Peter Mendelsund

6. Inferno (The Divine Comedy, #1), Dante Alighieri (Mary Jo Bang, Translator)

7. Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips

Movies

1. Like Someone In Love

2. Inside Llewyn Davis

3. Her

4. The Grand Budapest Hotel

5. La Notte

6. Jane Eyre (2011)

7. A Most Wanted Man

8. Gone Girl

9. Take This Waltz

10. Enough Said

11. The One I Love

12. Your Sister’s Sister

Podcasts

1. Design Matters

2. Slate Culture Gabfest

3. Serial

4. The Monocle Weekly

5. Longform

6. In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg

7. The Entrepreneurs (Monocle)

8. The Stack (Monocle)

9. The Political Scene (The New Yorker)

10. New Yorker: Out Loud

Articles & Essays
If you follow me on Twitter, you have likely already seen links to the best articles and essays I read in 2014. I use it mainly as a way to praise and recommend. 

Music
I listen to Rdio every day of the week — on my Mac, iPad and iPhone. A great deal of what I stream is classical, since I listen while I work. And on that front I do a poor job of logging what I like, as I hop quickly from label to composer, from soloist to trio. So for this post I’ll skip classical (and hip-hop, where I also jump around) and point simply to a handful of indie albums I enjoyed this year: 

• Beck, Morning Phase

• Low, The Invisible Way

• Angel Olsen, Burn Your Fires For No Witness

• Sun Kil Moon, Benji

• Tweedy, Sukierae

Life

• Leo turning 1, walking, saying words

• A relative I love being brave against illness

• Tamara earning her doctorate in art history

• Serving as Best Man as Mike and Sarah married

• Tamara’s birthday dinner at Stone Soup Cottage

• Attending a 90th birthday reading by William Gass

A short film about the radio station’s first year. Can’t say I’ve ever connected with the music they play, but I enjoy subscribing to a handful of podcasts, with The Stack, Section D, and The Entrepreneurs at the top of the list. 

Great profile of Jonny Greenwood in today’s New York Times Magazine. Greenwood’s soundtrack for “There Will Be Blood” has been a favorite of mine on Rdio for the past year.