What a supremely fine and lovingly crafted book this was. Astute, admiring, and entertaining scrutiny of decades of rap lyrics. Huge kudos to author Daniel Levin Becker. A few especially great passages I drew circles around in my copy:

I will go to my grave wishing my self-conscious rhetorical throat-clearings could sound so cool. What Nas seems to toss off here is not just a very efficient overview of the themes he’s spent his career elaborating—decadence, gunplay, activism, divinity—but also a rare window onto his composition process, his creative deliberations, the whole inner monologue around medium and message that is at once so tantalizing in a rapper and so often viewed as beside the point. Most of all, though, what I hear in it is a true statement about what it’s like to speak on something so much bigger than yourself, so much more expansive than the present, something inexhaustible and infinite that is also right here. It’s what it feels like, for me, to put words to a way with words that so often leaves me, before the rest colors itself in, speechless.

And:

All the discrete and interwoven pattern recognitions in this book, assembled with joy and leaving me no closer to a unified theory of how it all fits together, seem to be proof of rap’s multitudes, its dynamism, its knack for illuminating a bigger picture by obscuring many smaller ones. This is what the best art does, and I think it’s also why we play with puzzles. It’s not about the completed image, but about the slow, oddly suspenseful progress we make toward resolution and completeness—otherwise we’d just look at the picture on the box the puzzle comes in, right? There is so much in the world that is at least provisionally more awesome, more arresting, more puzzling than good. The endlessly deferred promise of understanding, being in the dark and working ever toward the light, just might be what makes the whole thing, impossibly, float.

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.)

Borrowing the structure of a few other online writers whose websites I enjoy (Paul Robert Lloyd and Mark Boulton, among others), I thought I’d start weekly low-key look-backs on the week, bullet list-style. Perhaps weekly is aspirational. We’ll see.

• Greatly enjoyed Emily Nussbaum’s long New Yorker profile of Fiona Apple, whose long-awaited record just hit my Spotify streaming today. After reading the piece, I’d been going back through Apple’s back catalogue, awaiting the new songs and relishing the old. That stellar start of “I Know”: “So be it / I’m your crowbar….”

• Also in the New Yorker, I was moved by Alex Ross’s essay honoring his late mother, “Grieving With Brahms.” I admire Ross’s writing greatly.

• Okay, one more New Yorker reference for the week: I was floored by Dan Chiasson’s review of Joyelle McSweeney’s new book of poetry that involves motherhood and tragedy.

• I’ve been dabbling with Roam, which is getting a lot of indie attention as a networked-notes app. (See: #roamcult) At least for now, I’ve enjoyed reading in-depth use studies more than actually using it. Somewhat relatedly, it’s been a big few weeks for Notion, which I continue to use more as a work/life dashboard than a notes app. This general area of knowledge management is one I’m deeply interested in and will continue to be tracking.

• Speaking of tech, I’m three episodes into “Devs” (Hulu) and plan on continuing. Intrigued. (I loved the look of Alex Garland’s “Ex Machina.”)

• “Knives Out” was fun.

• During quarantine, Pentagram’s Michael Bierut — one of my favorite voices on branding and communications — is offering a “Virtual Bookshelf Tour” on Instagram. Mouthwatering. Starts here.

• On my family’s own isolation front, lack of options breeds ingenuity. Today Leo and I played driveway tennis over a rope tied between our basketball hoop and a locked stroller, followed by foam-ball lawn golf employing our Christmas tree stand as the hole. Worked surprisingly well.

Thanks to a chance moment listening to KDHX in the car, I’ve now had Haley Heynderickx on repeat — especially her record “I Need to Start a Garden,” and especially the song “Oom Sha La La.” Looked it up, and sure enough, there’s a Tiny Desk concert in the books as well, with that tune kicking it off. Grateful for the find.

Two relatively new music books I enjoyed this summer: Jeff Tweedy’s Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back:) A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc. (honest, often funny; really enjoyed the sections about his sons) and the bluntly titled Beastie Boys Book (their mischief has been carried over to the copy and design).

While not personally a blues guy, I loved every paragraph of David Remnick’s terrific New Yorker feature exploring Buddy Guy’s long career, the change of blues’s place in culture and what the future holds, if anything, for the genre as Guy’s been playing it. Toward the end of the piece, Remnick turns to his magazine’s own poetry editor — poet and essayist Kevin Young — for this insightful description of the form:

The blues contain multitudes. Just when you say the blues are about one thing—lost love, say—here comes a song about death, or about work, about canned heat or loose women, hard men or harder times, to challenge your definitions. Urban and rural, tragic and comic, modern as African America and primal as America, the blues are as innovative in structure as they are in mood—they resurrect old feelings even as they describe them in new ways.

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. 

With this terrific Kottke.org guest post — “Bill Callahan, the only sad man worth loving” — Carmody had me immediately returning to the handful of albums I own. (As Carmody points out, Callahan’s not on Spotify, my own daily streaming service: “This means his legacy risks being eclipsed for a whole cohort of fans. I find this unacceptable.")

Thanks to a surprise purchase by my wife, I’ve been enjoying the new issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, which takes music as its cover-to-cover subject.

I’ve enjoyed reading Lapham for years, but hadn’t known that he’d studied piano as a youth, or that he’d spent time in New York City as a young writer waiting (and waiting and waiting) to write about Thelonious Monk. After several months of sharing late-night space in the Five Spot, this happened:

At four AM on a Thursday in late March [1965], the Five Spot’s waiters stacking chairs on tables, Monk stood up from the piano, snapped his fingers, thrust his palm in my direction. “Time to play, man,” he said, “time to hear what you know.” Out front in the back of a Rolls-Royce, the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter was come to carry Monk home. She did so many mornings, but I never had been around at four AM to see Monk nod to the chauffeur holding open the door. A beautiful woman of uncertain age, wrapped in fur and wearing pearls, the baroness smiled, pointed me toward the seat in front. I can’t now remember if she spoke more than four words in my direction, either in the car or after we arrived at Monk’s apartment on West Sixty-Third Street at Eleventh Avenue.

Monk didn’t mess with preliminaries. Not bothering to remove his hat (that evening a fine English bowler), he pointed to the piano, opened and closed the wooden door of the bathroom directly behind it, seated himself on the toilet to listen to whatever came next. Nellie and the baroness sat upright and attentive on the small blue sofa they shared with a rag doll and a rocking horse. I played Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 27 in two movements (the first in E minor, the second in E major), run time fourteen minutes if taken at the indicated tempos. I don’t say I played it as well as Lipsky might have played it, but I’d been practicing it six days out of seven for two months, and to the best of my knowledge and recollection, I didn’t miss many notes, never once felt ill at ease or afraid. Monk stepped out of the bathroom, looked me square in the face, said simply, straight, no chaser, “I heard you.”

By then I knew enough to dig what he was saying. It wasn’t the personality of Lewis H. Lapham he heard playing Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 27. He didn’t care who or what I was, clubfooted and white or blue-eyed and black. It wasn’t me or my interpretation, it was the music itself, off the charts beyond good and evil that somehow and if only for the time being I’d managed to reach.

Following his exceptional profile of Father John Misty, Paumgarten goes deep with the intriguing, shrewd and self-aware St. Vincent: 

When she listens to a playback, she often buries her head in her arms, as though she can hardly bear to hear herself, but, really, it’s just her way of listening hard. Once, during a mixing session, while she was at the board and I was behind her on a couch, surreptitiously reading a text message, she picked up her head, turned around, and said, “Did I lose you there, Nick? I can feel when attention is wandering.” Her cheery use of the name of the person she is addressing can seem to contain a faint note of mockery. There’d be times, in the following months, when I’d walk away from a conversation with Clark feeling like a character in a kung-fu movie who emerges from a sword skirmish apparently unscathed yet a moment later starts gushing blood or dropping limbs.

Where have I been to miss this marvelous podcast for its first 101 episodes? Hrishikesh Hirway interviews musicians and asks them to break down a single song, which we hear in bits … and bits … and then in its entirety. It’s a fantastic idea executed with great polish, sensitivity and humility (Hirway is almost never heard from). I’ve so far enjoyed Jeff Tweedy/Wilco, Ghostface Killah and Bjork, with many more in the queue.

Insightful and entertaining New Yorker profile by Alec Wilkinson. I can still vividly recall seeing the White Stripes at The Pageant in 2002, a blazing tricolor duo that owned that room from start to finish. 

Really enjoyed Carrie Brownstein’s impressive, observant, terrifically titled memoir. 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzzVdi3HOfU?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=https://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]

My Bubba — great discovery for me via NPR Tiny Desk Concerts.

I’ve been a happy subscriber and many-hours-a-day listener for years. Bummed they couldn’t make it work.

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

The Frank Lloyd Wright house in Ebsworth Park, which we visited in February

This post is part of my “Annual Favorites” list I’ve been keeping for the past decade-plus.

Favorite Books (Goodreads profile)

1. The German Genius, by Peter Watson (choice passages)

2. Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880-1918 (choicepassages)

3. Life Sentences, by William H. Gass

4. Nox, by Anne Carson

5. A Hologram for the King, by Dave Eggers

6. Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective

7. Donald Judd

8. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, by D.T. Max

9. The Long Goodbye, by Megan O’Rourke

10. Gerhard Richter: Panorama

11. Where Good Ideas Come From, by Steven Johnson

12. The Lifespan of a Fact, by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal

13. Chip Kidd: Book One: Work, 1986-2006

14. The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court, by Jeffrey Toobin

15. The Obamas, Jodi Kantor

16. Some of My Lives, by Rosamond Bernier

17. The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach

18. Berlin Stories, by Robert Walser

19. The Address Book, by Sophie Calle

20. The Englishman who Posted Himself and Other Curious Objects, by John Tingey

21. Art and Activism: Projects of John and Dominique de Menil

22. The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes

23. The Bridge on the Drina, by Ivo Andrić

24. Shards, by Ismet Prcić

25. The Promise: President Obama, Year One, by Jonathan Alter

26. Elizabeth Costello, by J. M. Coetzee

27. How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne, by Sarah Bakewell

28. Death in Spring, by Mercè Rodoreda

29. The Art of Intelligence, by Henry A. Crumpton

30. Zoe Strauss: 10 Years

31. Mortality, by Christopher Hitchens

32. Karaoke Culture, by Dubravka Ugrešić

33. The Fate of Greenland, by Philip W. Conkling

34. Redheaded Peckerwood, by Christian Patterson

Happy to have read Karen McGrane’s Content Strategy for Mobile, Frank Chimero’s The Shape of Design, and Mike Monteiro’s Design Is a Job, but would keep them off the ranked list. Same with “Mark Owen”‘s No Easy Day.

Favorite Movies: 2012 (Letterboxd profile) 

1. Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present

2. Gerhard Richter Painting

3. Moonrise Kingdom

4. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

5. Lincoln

6. The Master

7. The Queen of Versailles

8. Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap

9. Arbitrage

10. Skyfall

11. The Dark Knight Rises

Didn’t connect with: Headhunters, We Have a Pope, The Bourne Legacy.

Favorite Movies: Pre-2012

1. A Separation

2. Bill Cunningham New York

3. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

4. Certified Copy

5. Margin Call

6. Notorious

7. A Dangerous Method

8. Bridesmaids

9. Young Adult

10. Moneyball

11. Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop

12. J. Edgar

13. Too Big to Fail

14. Hopscotch

15. Haywire

Music

I continue to be a huge fan of Rdio, which I pay $10 a month to be able to stream music on a desktop, iPad, or iPhone. (This includes, say, streaming the new Nas via my home’s wi-fi as I mow my suburban lawn.) There will always be rituals and a closeness to the music I miss from my CD days, but the advantages of Rdio — especially the ability to discover and immediately listen to new music, particularly hip-hop and classical — are significant. I don’t have a ranked list here, but my listening history is an open book.

Favorite Articles, Essays & Blog Posts (categorized, not ranked)

Affairs

• “Newtown and the Madness of Guns,” by Adam Gopnik

• “The Voter-Fraud Myth,” by Jane Mayer

• “I Didn’t Come Back to Jerusalem To Be in a War,” by Dahlia Lithwick

• “The Implosion,” by Jon Lee Anderson

• “Of Babies and Beans: Paul Ryan on Abortion,” by Adam Gopnik

• “It Matters,” by Josh Marshall

• “A Victory for Obama and for Obama’s America,” by John Cassidy

• “The Choice,” by The New Yorker Editors

• “2,700 Hundred Pages for Anton Scalia,” by Amy Davidson

• “Money Unlimited,” by Jeffrey Toobin

• “Obama, Explained,” by James Fallows

• “One More Massacre,” by Adam Gopnik

• “Colbert v. the Court,” by Dahlia Lithwick

• “Pussy Riot Closing Statements,” by Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina Samutsevich

• “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” by Atul Gawande

• “How Obama’s Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics,” by Andrew Sullivan

• “The Obama Memos,” by Ryan Lizza

Culture

• “Too Big To Succeed,” by Lee Kponstantinou

• “Spotify and Its Discontents,” by Mike Spies

• “Big Other’s Birthday Tribute to William H. Gass, 2012”

• “When Art Makes Us Cry,” by Francine Prose

• “Much God Damned Entropy,” by Gabriel Blackwell and Greg Gerke

• “The First Church of Marilynne Robinson,” by Mark O’Connell

• “We Are Alive,”by David Remnick

• “Viewer Discretion,” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus

• “The House That Hova Built,” by Zadie Smith

• “Peace, Adam,” by Sasha Frere-Jones

• “American Mozart,” by David Samuels

• “Diary of an Aesthete,” by Alex Ross

• “Maxim Interrogates the Makers of The Wire”

• “Till the Knowing Ends,” by Joanna Scott

• “Radiohead’s Runaway Guitarist,” by Alex Pappademas

• “The Meet and Greet Museum,” by Steven C. Dubin

Tech & Media

• “Your Anti-Social Media Rant Reveals Too Much About Your Friends,” by Alexis C. Madrigal

• “Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out,” by Paul Ford

• “29th Street Publishing and the Next Wave of Digital Publishing,” by Jim Ray

• “The Way We Read Now,” by Dwight Garner

• “BuzzFeed’s Strategy,” by Jonah Peretti

• Craig Mod: “The Digital-Physical”; “Hack the Cover,”; “Subcompact Publishing”

• “Deploy,” by Mandy Brown

• “E-books Can’t Burn,” by Tim Parks

• “Small Presses & Self-Publishers: Enemies? Or Half-Siblings?” by Sean Bishop

• “Out of Touch,” by Andrew Piper

• “I’ma Set It Straight, This Watergate,” by John Gruber

• “The Death of the Cyberflâneur,” by Evgeny Morozov

• “Good Things About Twitter,” by Sasha Frere-Jones

• “Does Time Magazine Think Americans Are Stupid?” by L. V. Anderson

Essays

• “National Subjects,” by Aleksandar Hemon

• “War Dogs,” by Aleksandar Hemon

• “The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent,” by Chrystia Freehand

• “A Boy to Be Sacrificed,” by Abdellah Tao

• “Tony Judt: A Final Victory,” by Jennifer Homans

Misc. Reporting, Articles & Posts

• “The Yankee Comandante,” by David Grann

• “Boss Rail,” by Evan Osnos

• “All Due Respect,” by Peter Hessler

• “Cocaine Incorporated,” by Patrick Radden Keefe

• “The Story of a Suicide,” by Ian Parker

• “Big Med,” by Atul Gawande

• “What Brand Is Your Therapist?” by Lori Gottlie

• “Artisanal Baby Naming,” by Bob Powers

• “Resilient Redbirds Refuse to Lose,” by Bernie Miklasz

• “Lionel Messi Never Dives,” by Jason Kottke

• “Fals Nine vs. Real Nine,” by Dushko Petrovich

• “The Caging of America,” by Adam Gopnik

• “Study Reveals Dolphins Lack Capacity to Mock Celebrity Culture,” by The Onion

• “The World’s First and Only Completely Honest Résumé of a Graphic Designer,” by Marco Kaye

• “How Many Stephen Colberts Are There?” by Charles McGrath

Most-Used iPhone & iPad Apps

I start every morning with the NYTimes’ iPad app. I listen to podcasts, NPR, and music via Instacast, Public Radio Player, and Rdio. I journal using Day One, which is synched using Dropbox on all devices. The new 1Password 4 is a slick companion to the essential desktop app. I organize a lot of my work and personal life using Evernote, and keep up with tasks using Things. Other apps I use often: Reeder (every night, to catch up with the day’s articles), Goodreads, Fantastical, Tweetbot (iphone) and Twitter (iPad), Instagram, Facebook, Checkmark, Instapaper, Pinboard, Netflix, PBS for iPad, Simple, and iBooks (largely for work PDFs).

Final Notes

One unusual memory I have from 2012 is spending several weekday evenings in March walking through my neighborhood for an hour or so, listening to the day’s oral arguments for and against the healthcare act. (My greatest moment of exasperation was hearing Justice Scalia mock-ask whether he was seriously supposed to get through so many pages of material.) In April, I published Abstractions Arrive: Having Been There All the Time, an iPad-only e-book pairing an essay by William H. Gass with photographs by Michael Eastman; New York Times coverage was a cherry on top. May’s Confab conference was one of the best I’ve attended. In August, Tamara and I enjoyed a few highly cultural days in Miami. Surpassing all that, though — we’re expecting a baby in late May of 2013. I expect this should be my best year yet.

The other day, I tweeted some frustration about the news that a world-famous film director had turned to Kickstarter to fund a new project. 

Yesterday, I learned that one of my favorite (but maybe not yet financially set-for-life) singer-songwriters, Chris Mills, had too. That’s more like it. I’ve been listening to Chris and seeing him live since my days living in Chicago in the late 90s. Great songs, really nice guy. Happy to back him. 

Two of my favorites.

At one point, Smith introduces another lyrical gem (“I got watches I ain’t seen in months / Apartment at the Trump I only slept in once”), then rebuts a likely critique:

But asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture understands.

Terrific piece by Sasha Frere-Jones at The New Yorker’s website. Yauch’s transition from celebrated youthful knucklehead to enlightened (and hugely productive) grown-up was admirable.

I can still remember listening to “Licensed to Ill” in 1987 for the first time, on a tape my 8th-grade classmate Chris made me. My parents were away at the time, and I was staying at my grandparents’ apartment here in St. Louis. I listened to the tape on headphones before falling asleep on the sofa in their den. I’d never heard anything like it. More than two decades later, I still listen to hip-hop week in and week out.

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.