Welcome to issue two! If you missed the first one, read it here. Also, a quick housekeeping note: if you’re using Gmail, you may need to drag these emails from the Promotions inbox into the Primary one and then select the option to whitelist.
As the year’s end nears, everyone is making lists: sales results (“The Most Popular Gifts of the Year”), critical appraisals (“The Best Movies of 2020”), sports forecasts (“The NBA in Tiers: 2020-21 Edition”), nobody-asked-for-this-but-it’s-not-like-we-pay-our-interns-anyway power rankings (“All 340 Bruce Springsteen Songs Ranked from Worst to Best”), and everything in between. The New Yorker’s Hua Hsu even wrote this treacly, New Yorkerish thing about making lists that ends with “searching for a new way to feel.”
As someone who clearly likes making lists, I often feel that, instead of serving as finding aids for the ever-expanding heaps of content, lists just comprise another, secondary heap to wade through—just ask whatever poor soul had to write “Oh No, There are 82 New Christmas Movies This Year.” That one’s from an entire subsection of Vulture called “Vulture Lists,” which has an air of exhaustion and self-hatred, as if the writers are being forced at gunpoint to comment on every penny of Netflix’s $14 billion annual production budget. It’s an odd coming-full-circle for ClickHole, the Onion spinoff that launched in 2014 to parody such listicles (“5 Shiny Objects Mommy Will Now Make Dance In Front Of Our Faces” and “5 Tom Hanks Movies That Taught Me Life Is Probably Not Worth It” are recent favorites), that articles now imitate its absurdist humor in an attempt to get more traffic.
Lists are mostly just good for business, of course. They force you to scroll and tap your way to top-ranked things, are quick to read, and inevitably draw outrage about what was overlooked or overrated—which leads to even more clicks and shares. That sure seems to be the case with the New York Times’ recent “25 Greatest Actors of the 21st Century,” as if we’ll all be alive in 80 years arguing over whether or not Keanu Reeves was actually the fourth-best actor of our time.
Do I sometimes feel like the readiness to rank and rate everything makes a deranged and needless dog show out of all the things we like and do and see? Yes. Is there anything I can do about it aside from grumbling and making my own little lists? No. For now we’re stuck with AO Scott and things like “18 Gifts for People Who Have Everything,” the first item of which is… a water bottle.
Hopefully this list is more useful than that. If not, the least I can offer you is a link to this screwdriver I just bought.
ben tapeworm
on the turntable
In honor of Spotify Wrapped analytics, with its annual made-for-Instagram reminder that everything we do is under surveillance, I’ve pulled together some tracks that aren’t available on streaming. Less in protest (I use Spotify myself, to the tune of some 87,000 minutes this year) than as a reminder that even the most immense media libraries aren’t exhaustive.
“I Wonder Who She’s Kissing Now” is one of many TV Girl tracks not on Spotify (presumably due to uncleared samples). Listen to their first 3 EPs here.
Brazilian Funk Experience is a compilation album of rare Brazilian funk gems recorded between 1968 and 1989.
“Scenic Cold” is a cross between Katy Perry’s “Hot N Cold” and Beirut’s “Scenic World” from the wacky mashup heyday of the late aughts. Apparently Rostam Batmanglij is behind this, which I didn’t know until yesterday.
On two great Blood Orange remixes, Dev Hynes subdues but sustains the melodrama of Florence + The Machine’s “Never Let Me Go” and totally rewrites the mood of Phoenix’s “Entertainment.”
If you took me up on my radiooooo.com suggestion from last week, you might have stumbled upon Lee Eun Ha’s “이은하 - 정을 주는 마음,” a Korean disco banger that means something like “A Heart That Gives Love.”
As a wedding gift for Bryce Dessner, fellow The National bandmates (along with Sufjan Stevens, Ragnar Kjartansson, and others) recorded a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Memories.” The National’s “Dark Side of the Gym” takes its title from the lyrics, and quite a bit from the music as well.
on the screen
I’ve been watching the HBO series Deadwood recently (it aired from 2004 to 2006), in part because I was intrigued why it was the least talked-about (at least in my circles) of all those hyper-masculine, early prestige-TV shows: The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Wire, even Entourage. Maybe its premature cancellation kept it from being a household name? Maybe the Hollywood-lot sets seem stagey to an audience used to the slicker color grades of Netflix hits? Maybe the famously accurate period dialogue is gratuitous in its virulence? Maybe the misogyny of central characters is more grating than, say, Don Draper’s, because it’s set in actual brothels rather than just rooted in childhood flashbacks to them?
from the archives
Whether or not you live in New York, 1940s.nyc is a wonderful place to get lost—an interactive map of the City with 80-year-old photos of just about every building. My current apartment building in Crown Heights looks about the same, albeit without the rubble-filled basement and occasional bathroom-ceiling cave-in. You can also skip forward to 80s.nyc.
from Japan
Mondo Mascots is an account (on Instagram, too) from British photographer Chris Carlier that highlights the many mascot characters, or yuru-chara, of Japan, which are used to promote everything from municipal governments to eating breakfast. I have watched the hapless Panzo try to skateboard dozens of times, and you should too.
from my incoming texts
“Is it just me or does Borat just have this, you know, je ne sais quoi thing to him?”
“If you need an opinion piece on animal husbandry I’m sure I could whip one up”
“I’ve already had explosive diarrhea next to Nick Braun”
“In Buddhism, desire and ignorance are the root of suffering.”