A Few Faves from 2015

Pimping butterflies, girls who kick ass, interstellar faith, love and loss

This is pretty straight-forward. I just want to share a few of my favorite cultural things from 2015, especially from film, literature, television, music and podcasts.

So without further ado …

Books

I read several books this year, but the one which resonated most for me was certainly Michael Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things. From my Goodreads review:

A slow but entrancing, deeply sad and haunting, but ultimately magnificent read, quite unlike anything I’ve encountered before. Michel Faber imagines a unique new world, rich with alien detail. Against that though, he also provides a nuanced and intelligent meditation on faith and love. It’s alternately touching and harrowing, and though you’ll wonder and fear where it may be headed when it’s at its darkest, Faber’s Book of Strange New Things ultimately proves forgiving and emphatically humanistic. It promises to linger in my mind, even my dreams for years to come.

I also read Faber’s superlative, sweeping The Crimson Petal and the Rose this year, which is arguably an even better book. Faber achieves a sort of deep, psychological realism in that book, which you seldom see paralleled. I came to Michael Faber, by the way, after reading his chilling parable-like novel Under the Skin, which was turned into a film by Jonathan Glazer starring Scarlett Johansson, which departed significantly from the book. Since then, I’ve wanted to read everything of his I could get my hands on.

I also read several excellent books in the post-apocalyptic vein: Karen Thompson Walker’s The Ages of Miracles, Jeff VanderMeer’s eerie, excellent Souther Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority and Acceptance) and finally Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s 1972 sci-fi classic Roadside Picnic (which seems oddly named until you reach the explanatory metaphor in the book).

In the non-fiction a vein, the standout read for me this year was Oliver Sacks’s Hallucinations. Sacks was a great hero of mine and I wrote a tribute of him here on Medium when he died. In Hallucinations, Sacks works his way thoroughly through describing all manner of hallucinations — some of which we’ve all likely experienced whether we knew it or not through to some of the more exotic and bizarre forms of hallucination I’d never heard of. It’s a compelling and fascinating read and Sacks demonstrates his characteristic compassion and humanism at all points along the way.

I also read Jon Krakauer’s Eiger Dreams, a selection of his early writing (mostly from the ‘80s, magazines like Outside, where he made his name and Smithsonian), which focuses primarily on mountain climbing, as well as rock climbing and canyoneering. Krakauer is another of those writers for whom I want read everything he writes and I look forward to reading his latest book, published in 2015, Missoula, which reports on a series of sexual assaults at the University of Montana between 2008 and 2012. If you’ve never read any of his books — Into the Wild, Into Thin Air, Under the Banner of Heaven, Where Men Win Glory — put them on your list.

I’m also finishing Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, a slim piece of non-fiction, which isn’t just about running at all, but also about writing, running a small business and … life. Suspect it would’ve been one of my favorites if I’d finished it in time.

Movies

My hands-down mainstream movie this year was — somewhat surprisingly — Mad Max: Fury Road. Surprisingly, because I feared that a fourth installment in the Mad Max franchise might be an anemic one. Instead, the 70-year-old director George Miller boiled down the Mad Max legend into a simple, linear plot, which still proved compelling and also introduced a female character, who managed to overshadow Max himself, Imperator Furiosa. What a ride! The odd by-product: Internet griping from some men, who felt Mad Max pushed a feminist agenda and didn’t appreciate the fact that a tough male icon like Max Rockatansky seemed nudged aside by a new female character. Of course, we just saw this dynamic repeat itself when Star Wars: The Force Awakens came out and featured a tough new female protagonist in the form of Rev. Grow up boys. It’s not like 99% of movies aren’t still male-centered efforts, dripping with machismo.

Some other flicks I enjoyed tremendously: Ex Machina, The Martian (which I also read), Spotlight and The Big Short (those last two being great movies to help get your outrage on). I haven’t seen The Revenant yet, which I hope will be another favorite. And I thought The Hateful Eight entertaining, but not one of Tarantino’s best. Cary Fukunaga’s Beasts of No Nation, the (almost) straight to Netflix movie, was a compelling movie, too, though awfully hard to watch in places. What We Do in the Shadows was probably the funniest movie I saw this year and the best mockumentary I’ve seen in ages. And The Gift with Jason Batemen and Aussie noir master Joel Edgerton was the excellent, creepy, twisty thriller few people seemed to see.

I don’t think 2015 was my best effort for seeing foreign film, however, which I’ve typically seen much more of.

What a year for documentaries though!

At SXSW, I saw Joshua Oppenheimer’s extraordinary The Look of Silence, his sequel to The Act of Killing, which depicts one man’s interviews with the men responsible for killing his brother during the 1960s Indonesian genocide. Both bravely executed and chilling, I’ve never seen a film remotely like it. I also enjoyed The Salt of the Earth at SXSW, Wim Wenders documentary about the photographer Sebastião Selgado. Wenders co-directed with Selgado’s son Juliano. Truthfully, Selgado’s wife Lelia plays a huge role in the story as a powerful and creative motivator in her own right.

Other must-see documentaries from this year include Going Clear (of course!), The Wolfpack, TransFatty Lives, Rolling Papers, Cartel Land and A Good American, which details the discoveries of former NSA employee Bill Binney and his development of ThinThread. It was a great followup film to Citizenfour. Another small documentary I’d strongly recommend is From This Day Forward, which depicts a family’s coping with the father’s transition to female. It’s directed gracefully and evenhandedly by the family’s daughter, Sharon Shattuck.

Television

What a year for television, huh? We really are living in the Golden Age of TV. I don’t even try to watch everything, but a few favorites things were certainly Daredevil and Jessica Jones (another girl/woman who kicks ass!). I was surprised when Jessica Jones, who I wasn’t familiar with from the Marvel universe, turned out to be one of my favorite new characters of the year. I also thoroughly enjoyed Transparent, Silicon Valley, Better Call Saul, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Master of None, Mr. Robot, and The Leftovers. The final season of Justified was great, too: That was a show that knew its strengths and maintained them consistently, drew a cult following and closed out in much the same vein as it began. It’s also worth watching just to see Walton Goggins repeatedly steal the show from Timothy Olyphant (who was still perfect in his roles).

It’s hard to pick a favorite, but I did admire the way Mr. Robot managed to crib from Fight Club (obviously), Taxi Driver and American Psycho (less obviously but nonetheless) but still come up with something fresh and incredibly culturally relevant. Often seemingly within the moment — including the Ashley Madison hack in the plot, for example.

Now, Making a Murderer will probably turn out to be a favorite, too, though we haven’t finished it yet. Of course, that also qualifies as documentary and it’s interesting to see how tolerance for and interest in this sort of long-form documentary has evolved now with the advent of binge-watching TV.

Additionally interesting to consider: some of these shows were on TV, some showed up straight on Netflix or Amazon, some showed up on your TV networks (notice how few). For me (and most people I suspect now), it’s all just TV.

Music

The odd thing for me this year is I didn’t come away with a favorite album this year. We talk a lot about the death of the album but I usually dig through a lot of music and find something which resonates with me throughout the year anyway. Not so much this year. Having said that though, I do have to agree with many of the critics that Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly was probably the best thing out there (even if not my personal fave), due not just to Lamar’s creative viability, but also due to it’s cultural significance this year. Take the album cover, for example:

That’s a great cover, not just for the striking image and its obvious symbolism, but for the fact that it provides a powerful cultural rorschach test, depending on the viewer’s point of view and their visceral reaction to it. The cover alone is masterful and should prove a classic. The music accompanying it is more often challenging and engaging, too. Maybe I should just go ahead and name it my album of the year.

Other favorites this year were Jason Isbell’s Something More Than Free, new efforts from Hot Chip, Destroyer, Jamie xx, Wilco and Giant Sand. Oh, and all the new stuff out from Run the Jewels, including, yes, their surprisingly good Miaow the Jewels remix album.

That said, some of the albums I listened to the most this year where from previous years. Those included Killer Mike’s incredible R.A.P. Music (produced by his cohort from Run the Jewels EL-P) from 2012, Sturgill Simpson’s Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, Spoon’s They Want My Soul (still enjoying both of those from 2014) and Destroyer’s masterpiece, Kaputt from 2011, which is still one of my favorite albums from the last decade.

Podcasts

Finally, what a year for podcasts, huh? I mean, they’ve been around for years, really. You can trace them back to 2004, at least, and I’m sure further. But Serial obviously took them mainstream this year. I’m enjoying listening to the second season of Serial now, which concerns the story of Bowe Bergdahl. I really started listening to podcast in earnest this year, too, and I learned so much along the way. It’s hard to limit the list so let me just bullet out a few favorites:

• I Don’t Even Own a Television — Probably my favorite podcast, all these guys do is read “bad” books, then spend an hour or so talking about them. you can pretty much listen to this podcast just by skipping around and checking out whatever catches your fancy. Their takedown of Ready Player One (which I also read this year) is probably their most popular/infamous episode, however.
• StartUp — I learned more about starting a company from Alex Blumberg’s masterful podcast than anywhere else. Be sure to start at the beginning of the first season if you haven’t heard it tho.
• On The Media — Maybe this is my favorite podcast. Do I have to choose? I never miss it. Every media junkie should listen, weekly. I also appreciate that they take time to debunk a lot of current news items. The hosts (Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield) are both pretty rigid skeptics.
• Another Round — This wonderful podcast is hosted by two brilliant and funny African-American women, Heben Nigatu and Tracy Clayton. They talk about anything and everything and have also conducted some fascinating interviews with people like Hillary Clinton, Ta-Nehisi Coates and David Simon. It’s a fascinating show to listen to as a white male because it’s often like tuning into a very personal conversation between two black women about both racial and gender matters as well. The show is often incredibly funny, sure, but it also makes for uncomfortable listening sometimes, as I hear first-hand how white people and white men in particular are perceived in the black community. It’s stuff I need to hear and it’s one of my very favorite podcasts.

I’ll stop at providing details with those four of my faves, but there are many more and some others I’d highly recommend are Invisibilia, Love & Radio, Death, Sex & Money, Note to Self, RadioLab (yes, many of these are also NPR shows), Here Be Monsters, Reply All (internet culture, another Gimlet podcast) and Star Talk (Interviews hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. Check out his incredible two-part interview with Edward Snowden.) There are many, many more.

Hope I pointed you to some great stuff here. Happy culture hunting in 2016!