In review: 2019

Acknowledging that I take a curmudgeonly stance on the listing of one’s personal top-ten, top-whatever, movies, books, albums and the like — but trapped inside my own list-addicted head, in which I keep running tallies of practically everything, all year round — I’ll confine the following year-end roundup, which, predictably, almost certainly serves for my own enjoyment alone, to just a few items. The selections are accompanied by some (hopefully succinct) reasons for standing out, in my opinion. 

Proceed at will.

Film: Drama/Comedy

My favorite film, among those released in 2019, is a two-way tie between The Beach Bum, by Harmony Korine, and Sword of Trust, directed by Lynn Shelton. Both have struck me and stuck with me, in differently deep ways, in both cases based on performances. In Korine’s film, there is Matthew McConaughey’s monolithic rococo and unhinged expansion of caricature and exaggeration — tracing its roots back to the Coen brothers and The Big Lebowski. In Shelton’s entry, there is the unquestioned king of the 21st Century second act, Marc Maron, perfecting, at last, his wounded, walking entity of post-millennium neurosis and frustration. Both films are touching, funny, wildly independent, and blissfully devoid of the needless spectacle, reckless meanness, and pandering titillation that filmed entertainments now foreground. More like these, please. Watch these both and revisit the experience of human beings exploring something personal about what it means to live a life.

Film: Documentary

Werner Herzog’s new one was my favorite this year: Meeting Gorbachev. Reconnecting with the voice and mind of a world leader who hails from what is now another epoch — and, in light of our post-2016 reality, an era, however dangerous, that we could almost yearn for — Gorbachev’s story is one that needs retelling, rethinking, and recasting. And it is one in which the West’s role must be reconsidered. We really fucked ourselves after we won the Cold War. Responding to those circumstances, Herzog’s characteristically gentle, probing, funny, self-effacing scratching around reveals humanizing opportunities for insight and better question-asking. Recent history gets the start of its second draft. Thanks, Werner.

Books: Novels*

I hereby stray from the established formula. Stop what you’re doing and acquire Normal People by Sally Rooney, which came out in 2018, but which I read this year.

Yes, many have already written about Rooney’s masterpiece of Irish Millennial disaffection, mal-affection, and steadfast loyalty. Nonetheless, I recommend it. Normal People is a minor saga that unfolds across the months and years of its characters emotional emergences and early independent lives. I’ll put it another way: there hasn’t been a novel about fucked-up love that rings truer than Normal People since the very in-fuck-ulated chronicle of the heart’s messy messes that was John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire. Rooney’s tilting world operates under narrower rules and commits fewer transgressions, but it’s orbiting the same star as Irving’s. 

I would also like to add another book that few are likely to require me to recommend at this stage, another miracle of a novel, which is The Flamethrowers, by Rachel Kushner, published in 2013. Again, a hand reaches into the chest and re-squeezes the rhythms of the heart. Massive, alive, a fully breathing universe into which you can crawl and get to know other minds as they move through space and time. It is also breathtaking, the way Kushner slips you into the feeling of first watching a film such as Five Easy Pieces or Wanda … or the way she can slowly pull the focus until you realize you’re in what could only be Donald Judd’s building. I may read The Flamethrowers a second time in 2020. These special effects warrant it alone, and they’re only part of the experience. 

*Note of confession: I failed to read a novel published in 2019, in 2019.

Books: Non-Fiction

Hands down, the book of the year is Losing Earth: A Recent History (Nathaniel Rich, 2019). There is not a more important and timely spine on the shelves of the world right now. Rich takes us through the very recent and almost certainly fatal sequence of climate-action milestones that have pushed our planet to the edge of what is about to happen over the next very near term. Arm yourself with this catalog of terrible intersections and then share what you’ve learned with everybody you know.

Television

For George Pelecanos and David Simon, The Wire and Treme were a pair of very excellent warmups for the three-season career-topping monument of New TV that they completed, in 2019, with season three of The Deuce. Nothing about this work should work. Particularly not the choice to have James Franco play the central roles of twin brothers Frankie and Vincent Martino. Particularly not that it’s set in the porn-soaked streets of Times Square in the 1970s and 1980s, complete with goopy graphic details that demand you rather speedily come up to speed with the frequent on-screen presence of humans’ usually tucked-away bits and bobs and whatever comes out of them (or goes in). So many things about The Deuce are over the top, way over the mark, and wildly in your face. It works, however. It succeeds, and it exceeds. Rather than explode and toss you further and further away from its core ideas — except for maybe initial moments of the first season, when it sort of does, just before your eyes and mind become acclimated to the subject and portrayal of prostitution and porn — The Deuce instead draws you nearer and closer and nearer to its gradually collecting mass. And then everything goes critical. It’s heartbreaking, inspiring, honest, always trying to hustle you as a viewer, and it’s absolutely the most brilliant work its creators have ever made.

Music

My favorite new album of 2019 is by my favorite new group of 2019: Therapy Island by Cheekface. The trio nominally in charge of the smartest and freshest thing going in pop and alternative music — Greg Katz, Amanda Tannen, and Mark Edwards — is fusing elements of everything that was ever glorious and important about Talking Heads, They Might Be Giants, MC 900 Foot Jesus, and Soul Coughing, putting all those reference points into a freewheeling word-rich powerhouse re-combination that leaves you, at the end of Therapy Island, having to start over from the beginning right as the album finishes. You can’t tell if you heard all of it the first time through. How are they writing this stuff? And, guess what, Cheekface’s best track isn’t even on Therapy Island — it’s on the follow-up single, No Connection. From that song, this one bit of lyric is in my head forever as the bulletproof anthem of 2019: 

I'm announcing loudly, ‘I don't know what's going wrong!’ 

I tried turning it off and then turning it back on

Do I look better when I'm suffering?

There’s no connection

That’ll do it. Thank you, 2019, and good night.