Well, it was a year.
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I want to say it was a good year, because it was, in many ways. But you have to squint a lot to see past our hell-in-a-handbasket trajectory: the levels of violence around the world, the GOP Circus, the Cult of Donald slouching toward autocracy, the fallout from Dobbs, the escalating climate disaster.
I’m going to admit: it’s hard to feel hopeful. And it makes this whole “Best, etc., of” project feel frivolous.
Nonetheless, here is this year’s relatively unorganized sampling of 2023, as I experienced it.
The best graphic novel I read
I’m a late-comer to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics. This is a little strange, given how long ago I fell in love with Dream’s sister, Death; I bought “The High Cost of Living” as individual comics back when they were originally released. But I’d never really been interested in Sandman — not, at least, until I learned that Netflix was filming its version, and it looked like it was going to be really cool.
I read the first two volumes before the TV series was released, but I didn’t get to the third volume, Dream Country, until late this year. It’s a collection of four shorter stories, one of which — the story involving a writer violently holding the Muse Calliope captive — is my favorite thing by Gaiman yet. (It was my favorite episode of the Netflix rendition, as well.)
I’ve been reading more comics over the past couple of months, and I’ve read some really good ones. Gaiman is in his own league.
And since I received Volume 4: Season of Mists as a Christmas gift from my sister (of Awkward Spinster fame), don’t be surprised if Gaiman appears on next year’s “Best, etc., of” list.
Most enjoyable music rabbit hole
One of my favorite albums ever — it has to be in my Top Ten, likely even my Top Five — is Suzanne Vega’s 1992 album, 99.9 F°. Her collaboration with producer Mitchell Froom marked a powerful change from her usual mellow, acoustic- or clean-electric-based music to a more adventurous sound that placed her soft voice against heavy industrial sounds. Really, really great album.
What I didn’t know: for a long time, Mitchell Froom’s partner in crime was the recording engineer and mixer Tchad Blake.
Blake is an engineer’s engineer. I don’t know how many times his name came up in Andrew Scheps’s interviews with famous old-schoolers (“Andrew Talks to Awesome People“), but it was a lot. And when they spoke of him, they spoke with respect and admiration — and, at times, awe. Blake approaches things differently (including, famously, his practice of recording drums with a binaural “dummy head”), and his results are amazing.
Once I learned that Blake was the engineer and mixer on Vega’s album, I dove down the rabbit hole and discovered that his fingers are all over a crazy number of records by amazing musicians: Crowded House, of course, but also Los Lobos, Tom Waits, Sheryl Crow, Phish, The Black Keys, Pearl Jam, Elvis Costello, David Byrne.
And I then I learned that he mixed the two albums that would vie for my #1 and #2 favorites: Sam Phillips’s Cruel Inventions and T-Bone Burnett’s Talking Animals.
That’s crazy: three of my top five or so albums were mixed, or mixed and recorded, by the same guy.
He’s still working, too: Peter Gabriel just released two versions of his latest album, i/o. They’re the same album, just mixed by different people: the “Bright-Side Mix” by Mark “Spike” Stent, and the “Dark-Side Mix” by — you guessed it! — Tchad Blake.
A favorite YouTuber steps out
I wrote about Abigail Thorne, of Philosophy Tube, in an earlier post. She’s a trans woman who addresses both properly philosophical topics and current issues in a rigorous, yet theatrically entertaining way. As I noted in that post, I’ve learned a lot from her, especially through the ways that she brings her experience as a trans person to bear— sometimes allusively, sometimes explicitly — on whatever issue she’s exploring. (I hope you’re not rolling your eyes at this injection of subjective experience into philosophical inquiry; I’ve come to understand that this subjectivity is an important contribution that trans theorists have made to philosophy.)
Early this year, she performed the lead role in The Prince, an Off West End play that she also wrote. It has hints of Stoppard, in the way that the characters walk in and out of Shakespeare’s plays, but it’s a largely original meditation on identity — trans and gender identity, certainly, but also identity arising from parental and patriarchal expectations.
It could have been heavy handed (and that might not have been bad or inappropriate). But she’s a subtle thinker and writer, so it was pretty light on its feet. I found it funny, engaging, and even moving.
She writes a mean blank verse, too: I was hard pressed at times to tell which lines were the Bard’s and which were hers.
Of course, I didn’t see the play in London (though wouldn’t that have been cool?). But she arranged with the streaming service Nebula to create a professionally produced video of actual performances of the play. I recommend that you sign up (as I did), even if it’s the only thing you watch. It’s well worth the cost of admission.
My most read blog entry of the year
In 2022, since I had written only one blog post for the whole year (that’s embarrassing!), I decided instead to look at my most-read posts of all time. “What I missed on my low-iodine diet” had been tooling right along, by a large margin — until, all of a sudden, it was randomly overtaken by my musings about irony in The Swirling Eddies’ “Outdoor Elvis.” (I still have no idea how that took off — I’ve searched Google et al. for any mention of my post outside of my own blog, but I’ve found nothing.)
This year, “Outdoor Elvis” continued racking up views, but “What I missed” has pulled way out front — almost three times as many views as Elvis this year, which is enough to put it back in the all-time lead.
An amusing aside
Here’s how Google’s Generative AI summarizes my post about “Outdoor Elvis”:
According to Oh Ick, ‘Outdoor Elvis’ by The Swirling Eddies is ironic from a Christian perspective. Oh Ick says that treating Outdoor Elvis like Jesus is a credulous response to the ‘vacuity and meaninglessness of modern life’. Oh Ick also says that the appropriate response is a belief in Jesus.
As Google says, “Generative AI is experimental.” Indeed — I don’t think it could get it much wronger than that…. LOL.]
An annoyance that turned out for the best
Though I would be hard-pressed to offer any evidence to support this claim, I have, in fact, been recording music.
For the past few years, and through the beginning of this year, I’d been using the free recording software, Cakewalk by Bandlab. It was great — full-featured, powerful, reasonably stable. I managed to record and (rough) mix a couple songs (Josie and The Color of the Pen), and I was making progress, however slow, on a few other songs.
Then in the first half of the year, Bandlab announced that they were introducing paid versions of Cakewalk, and that they’d no longer support the free version. Alas.
I looked around and compared a bunch of recording software — ProTools (kind of the industry standard, but damn it’s expensive), Reaper, Cubase, FL Studio, Logic, Ableton…. In the end, it seemed that PreSonus’s Studio One fits most closely with the way I think and work.
I really had no idea things could be this much better than Cakewalk was. I’d watched lots of videos with people using ProTools, for example, and it looked way harder than Cakewalk. I just assumed that recording in any DAW software would be hard.
I mean, it is hard. But it’s nice to have a tool that, once I’ve spent more time with it, will get out the way. (Unfortunately, thanks to an unrelated nasty computer crash, I’ve kind of lost the work I’d done in Cakewalk. It would take as long to reconstruct it as it would to just re-record it — and maybe I can improve my performances this second time around.)
Most successful cat toys at my house
Simple pleasures: almost-closed box, crumpled paper, used Q-Tip, dried sponge.
Looking forward
As I said at the beginning of this frivolous exercise: It’s kind of hard to feel hopeful looking toward 2024. There’s a lot that’s bad, and a lot of ways it could get worse. It feels a bit like we’re in a poker tournament with, as they say, a chip and a chair, and we’re going to need to double up several times in a row if we want to survive — and we’re already all-in, and we need runner-runner hearts just to get to the next hand, at which point we’ll need to do it again, and again, and again.
C’mon, dealer….
Top photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash
Bottom photo by Tessa Rampersad on Unsplash