Hi - It’s the end of the year or the beginning of the year depending on when you read this, so I’m blessing you with my end of year lists that are really only relevant to the three people in my fanclub.
Here’s my favorite music that came out this year, with my absolute favorites in bold:
L’Rain - I Killed Your Dog
Tirzah - trip9love…???
Anjimile - The King
Alex Heffes & Ryuichi Sakamoto - Crystalline
Mary Lattimore - Goodbye, Hotel Arkadia
Laurel Halo - Atlas
Anohni and the Johnsons - My Back Was a Bridge for You To Cross
Nourished By Time - Erotic Probiotic 2
Kari Faux - REAL B*TCHES DON’T DIE!
Kabeaushé - The Coming of Gaze
Nabihah Iqbal - DREAMER
June Mcdoom - With Strings
JPEGMafia & Danny Brown - Scaring the Hoes
Joseph Shabason - Welcome to Hell
Oval - Romantiq
Sigur Rós - ÁTTA
Yaeji - With a Hammer
Laraaji - Koto
Laraaji - Baptismal
Noname - Sundial
Blue Mena - Multi Adolescence
Mary Jane Dunphe - Stage of Love
Pharoah Sanders - Pharoah
My favorite albums that I listened to a lot this year that didn’t come out this year:
sunn O))) - Monoliths and Dimensions (2009)
The Pogues - Red Roses for Me (1984)
The Pogues - If I Should Fall From Grace With God (1988)
Devin the Dude - Dude (1998)
Here’s my favorite films I watched this year in reverse order of when i watched them:
Jallikattu - 2019 - Lijo Jose Pellissery
I love all of Lijo Jose Pellissery’s films which are sometimes unflatteringly honest portrayals of Malayali life in Kerala but with a frenetic, sleek and stylistic approach, sometimes Tarantino-esque. This one is about an angry bull on the loose in a rural village and all the angry men trying to catch it, big fun!
Return to Haifa - 1982 - Kassem Hawal
I watched this at Spectacle Theatre in Williamsburg as part of their Palestinian film series. It’s basedon a novel of the same name about a couple living in the West Bank who attempt to return to their home stolen from them during the Nakba, only to find a Jewish refugee from Poland living there and (spoilers) raising the son they were forced to abandon as an infant. The budget is low, the print appears to be dated and the acting is sometimes comically wooden, but it’s such a great and sad story that I think it’s worth watching.
The Time that Remains - 2009 - Elia Suleiman
This is an intergenerational story about a Palestinian family living in Israel during and after the Nakba who are forced to assimilate into the new Israeli society while secretly maintaining resistance. It is actually a comedy, with a laconic tone. It has a bright color palette reminiscent of Wes Anderson the director plays himself in a kind of Jacques Tati-esque role. There is a musicality to the mostly physical humor which I found really delightful.
Godzilla Minus One - 2023 - Takashi Yamazaki
This movie is like, what if we made a Godzilla movie but took it seriously. And the result is good! It’s a sad anti-war film where Godzilla takes his, I think, appropriate place as an inscrutable natural disaster that stretches comprehension, as opposed to the on again off again supervillain/superhero role he plays in the Toho films and American films. G-zilla does not get into any big kaiju fights, nor does he bodyslam other monsters in this movie and I think that’s fine! He’s just a big fucking monster!
The Boy and the Heron - 2023 - Hayao Miyazaki
I haven’t seen every Miyazaki film but of the ones I’ve seen this is one of my favorites. I think I need to rewatch it and some of the mystical world-building/world-ending felt hard to decipher but I mainly liked that it has lots of weird birds doing funny stuff with their bodies. I read it as a kind of apocalyptic fairy tale about finding dopey pleasure in a fraying universe.
Past Lives - 2023 - Celine Song
I thought this was cute! I did not agree with all the characters’ decisions but for the most part I understood them. I will say the most annoying thing about this movie is it goes out of its way to make you feel bad for a cucked white man.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - Mutant Mayhem - 2023 - Jeff Rowe
Easily the best ninja turtles movie, the character designs are all inspired and it was a revelation to have the ninja turtles portrayed by/voiced by actual teenagers. Like why didn’t anyone think of that before…
Belly - 1998 - Hype Williams
Glad I got to see this for the first time, I found the story indecipherable at times but visually it’s a really stunning film and I was particularly drawn to the dancehall scenes in Jamaica which were hot!
The Super Mario Bros. Movie - 2023 - idk probably Luigi
I wanted to see a Super Mario Bros. movie that looked exactly like the video game, a relentless explosion of polychromatic eye candy and pointless references to video game canon with a threadbare plot. And baby that’s what I got!
Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse - 2023 - Joaquim Dos Santos Justin K. Thompson Kemp Powers
There’s a scene where Rakim’s “Guess Whose Back” (1997) plays at a party and that’s when I knew this was a good movie.
Polite Society - 2023 - Nida Manzoor
Pleasurable lowest-common denominator representation porn for South Asians and guess what, it worked! You win!
Joyland - 2022 - Saim Sadiq
Fuck this made me cry. Fuck. The really tragic, infuriating narrative choices in this film made me think about it long after I left the theatre. The film’s moral framework does not flatten transphobia, homophobia and misogyny, showing that these are separate forces and that you can experience one type of oppression but reinforce another.
Rebels of the Neon God - 1992 - Tsai Ming-liang
For a few months this year I got really into the sullen, quiet films of Tsai Ming-Liang, whose films focus on small moments in the lives of aimless young Taiwanese people who also are horny. This one is personally my favorite. It’s about a hoodlum who steals quarters from arcades and befriends a girl his brother had a one night stand with, while being stalked by a probably mentally ill kid who dropped out of school.
Three Times - 2005 - Hou Hsiao-Hsien
A period piece/triptych that casts two actors as a couple in three different time periods, one in the early twentieth century Japanese-occupied Taiwan, one in the 1960s post-independence Taiwan and one in then-contemporary 2005 Taiwan. I loved this movie, it was very hot and cool while also functioning as a meditation on how time and culture shape romance.
Broker - 2022 - Hirokazu Kore-eda
My favorite movie I saw this year maybe? It’s a heartwarming film about making friends while selling babies
Aryippu - 2022 - Mahesh Narayanan
This one is *very* uncomfortable to watch imo but it is good. It’s a Malayalam film about a married couple working in a factory when a video surfaces that is purportedly a sex video with the woman in it. Whether she is actually the person in the video is kept obscured for a huge chunk of the run time. Lots of cringe but also with a clear viewpoint on sexual voyeurism, power and revenge porn.
Stuff I wrote in 2023:
I started writing for Motherboard/Vice this year as a contract-based “staff writer.” I kept my job at Next City as “housing correspondent” during this time. I also worked on a few freelance stories outside of both jobs over the course of the year, which means I worked a lot this year. It was the first time since I made a career switch to journalist in my early 30’s that I actually had enough money to pay down some of my student loans and save for retirement. I even had money to go on vacation! (I went to Brazil.)
My beat is housing at Vice and Next City, so I ended up writing a lot on that topic, on which I am still not an expert.
But I went to a housing journalist conference in Boston in November and I realized I’m one of very few journalists exclusively covering housing on the national level. Considering how much interest there is in this topic (and how important it is), you would think there would be more people on this beat.
Anyway, here’s some of my favorite pieces I wrote this year:
For Motherboard/Vice:
This investigative piece that I spent 8 months on about a security deposit “alternative” that is actually just a predatory fee for poor people.
This piece about tenants whose buildings have loans from Signature Bank fighting to have a say in the bank’s sale
This article about a report showing that, despite a boom in residential construction, the country is still losing units affordable to the poorest people.
This feature about a predatory student housing landlord in California called Core Spaces that models itself on silicon valley startups. The county and city changed their laws just to stop the company from evicting people but they kept sending eviction notices/trying to intimidate them.
A sprawling feature I published in May on tenants fighting their private equity landlords
This very raw and angry essay I wrote after Jordan Neely was killed on a subway in May. I received some hate mail for writing this but not from anyone who appears to have read it all the way through. I just re-read it and am proud of it, mostly because it is infused with rage.
This article about Veritas Tenant Union in San Francisco, whose corporate landlord is legally required to bargain with them - a first, thanks to a local law - but wasn’t following through.
This feature about LA Mayor Karen Bass’ encampment sweeps including interviews with 5 unhoused people showing that many of her administration’s claims -particularly about not involving police - were not true. The mayor’s office never responded.
This feature about an anti-homeless think thank founded by a libertarian silicon valley billionaire and how it’s shaping homeless policy across the country. (It’s as bad as it seems!)
This piece on the problem with using “tiny homes” to “solve” the homeless crisis.
For Next City (All these articles were co-published with Shelterforce):
This explainer/essay about “complaint-driven” anti-homeless measures and the criminalization of homelessness
I wrote about how public housing agencies can independently change their own policies for excluding - or including - people with convictions
This story about a woman and her two children who were the only remaining tenants in an East Boston apartment building that was eventually purchased by the city and will be converted to permanently affordable housing
The most rad books I read this year:
Akira (manga) - I shelled out and bought the 6 volume hardcover set for this manga which I had never read before and LISTEN, it was worth every penny. Every page is beautiful, the story is always surprising even though I was vaguely familiar with it from watching the anime. It amazes me that this was made between 1982-1987 because it looks/feels/moves in such a futuristic way and so much of it feels plausible or at least internally consistent, like a thoughtfully constructed treatise on social collapse, war, trauma, manipulation and control. It also has the best action scenes I’ve ever seen in a comic.
We Won’t Be Here Tomorrow: Stories - Margaret Killjoy A great collection of horror and sci fi stories about punks and people on the margins. The characters wrestle with an underlying nihilism and, even when the book is bleak (which is often) it feels life-affirming because of the sense of love and rebellion at the characters’ core.
How Long Til Black Future Month - N.K. Jemesin
The Wretched of the Earth - Frantz Fanon
This is How You Lose the Time War - Amel El-Mohtar/Max Gladstone
Babel - R.F. Kuang Oh wow this was really impressive; it manages to be briskly-paced and action-packed while being scholarly and dense with literary references. It presents a coherent, and rigorously argued view on colonialism, language and violence that is pertinent to the current moment. At times the colonial system being described in the book closely resembles contemporary capitalism. The book feels so light at first but gets darker and more intense as it progresses and it does not pull any punches in service of a happy or simple ending.
Evil Flowers - Gunnhild Oyehaug A collection of absurdist short stories that frequently veers into metafiction where stories comment on previous stories and where the author inserts herself awkwardly. It was refreshingly child-like and playful, but probably not for everyone!
Care Work - Leah Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Gods of Want -K-Ming Chang - Excellent collection of short stories that I’m gonna say are magical realism? or magical surrealism? but veering on prose poetry? about immigrants trying to build lives with other immigrants but encountering ghosts of children, mermaids, and world-destroying floods. A great combination of vibrant prose and deep observations. There’s a refreshing honesty and pettiness about the contradictions inherent in immigrant family that I appreciated.
How High We Go In The Dark - Sequoia Nagamatsu There were parts of this novel in short stories I thought were really beautiful even if I found the whole story uneven! I would like to talk about it with someone else who read it.
In the Watchful City - S. Qiouyi Lu
The framing narrative for this collection of three short stories involves a plant-like biped who connects to a network of energy connecting the novel’s world, through a giant tree that is plugged into all organic life. From their the protagonist can inhabit any living creature as if playing a video game. (The author refers to this setting as “bio-cyberpunk.”) The short stories were cool but the framing narrative was really my favorite part.
Race For Profit - Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor A very necessary but admittedly academic piece of history/sociology about the government’s role in propping up an industry of predatory home loans ostensibly in service of Black homeownership in the mid twentieth century
Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino - Really one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read, I think? A series of dreamline descriptions of imaginary cities. I wish I had read it earlier.
In Sensorium - Tanaïs - A memoir, history of Bangladesh, and an epistolary story about a harmful relationship, with attention to scent and memory tying these threads together
How to Read Now - Elaine Castillo - A bunch of really biting and incisive close-reads of popular culture and literature, featuring a very mean takedown of Joan Didion that made me go, leave her alone she’s already dead! (but it was a very good takedown.)
In Conclusion:
I got sick with covid multiple times this year and am still dealing with the repercussions, I still don’t know fully what the impact on my body has been, but mostly it has resulted in prolonged and periodic fatigue as an aftereffect. From May to August I was pretty much unable to walk long distances, then I got better. Now I’m feeling fatigue again as the year fades out. It feels nice to think that when your body is not acting the way you want it to act that it’s “telling” you something but maybe it’s just “telling” me to tap in another stronger cybernetic body or to sub in Zac Efron’s Iron Claw bod.
In September I went to Sao Paulo and Rio De Janeiro and had a nice time, though. I ate lots of food and went dancing and took pictures. When I got back I started a Portuguese for beginners class, and I’m continuing in January, although I am still bad at speaking Portuguese.
Next year I’m hoping to spend more time writing sci fi short stories and publishing one or two of them, inshallah. I spent some time trying to finish just one story this year but was too absorbed with work. I want to eventually have enough for a collection which means finding a community and carving out the time.
To that end I’m hoping to start a regular workshop/writing group in 2024, something I’ve been meaning to do for years. If you’re interested in joining in, email me! I have a loose framework for what I want to do, but I also want it to be something collaborative that we dream up together.
**
The ongoing genocide in Gaza has been a reminder that the world is inherently inside-out, that adults can partake in a pantomime of civility while demonstrably lacking a soul, that the power brokers running reality are the most violent and unremitting forces on earth even as they gesture toward mythical standards of human rights, that the web of lies, manipulation and self-delusion that can make someone believe their victims are the real barbarians even as they stomp on their children need not be plausible nor coherent to intoxicate and persuade those who benefit from, or prefer to ignore, violence. There are days when Evil wins over and over again and that must be exhausting for the spirit of all living things.
I don’t have any kind of cleansing spell that will work its way into the conscience of those who are perpetrating these atrocities but I think I can try to affirm and support those who are trying, exhaustively, to end this hell. And maybe that is all the peace I have for now.
Stay walking in God’s light and I will see you in the new year.
Dorris Lessing on dreams -