The Best of 2022: Part I
The ancient human tradition of list-making, ranking, and trying to make sense of everything that ever was.
“There is nothing more tentative, nothing more empirical (superficially, at least) than the process of establishing an order among things; nothing that demands a sharper eye or a surer, better-articulated language.”
—Michel Foucault
AROUND 1120 BC—
—when Ramses IX was running the show in Ancient Egypt, it was decided that all the knowledge of the universe should be written down. For posterity, for promotion (or maybe a little of both). The result was a papyrus document known as the Onomasticon of Amenopĕ, which was a list of 610 unique things, all separated into categories and ranked, that was meant to establish a hierarchy for everything real and ethereal that had ever existed in the universe—“all things upon which Ra has shone.” A short introduction explained that the list was meant to be used “for instruction of the ignorant and for learning all things that exist: what Ptah created, what Thoth copied down.”
Even three thousand years ago, human beings were trying to make sense of their time on earth by making lists.
LONG AFTER—
—the Onomasticon (but before they became the format-of-choice for clickbait articles) my dad and I spent many evenings sitting quietly and making lists. We covered all sorts of topics, though they trended towards movie-related topics: the scariest horror movie scenes, the best bank heists, the most overrated actors, etc. These lists weren’t meant to be objective, rather an expression of opinion, rooted in personal experience—a sort of autobiography of our tastes. Making these lists required us sit in silent contemplation, combing through our sense-memory, searching for lost feelings of disappointment or elation, assigning them a relative value, putting them in order. But what made writing them really fun was the reveal: reading them in reverse-order, counting down to number one. As we did this, some overlooked favourite would inevitably appear on the other’s list — my god, how could I have forgotten that one! — or, better yet, our picks would overlap, and what better feeling is there than discovering that a thing you love is loved by someone else, too?
CONSENSUS—
—in the original Latin, means “feel together,” as in: we’re in agreement about how to feel about this thing. Every meaningful relationship I’ve had has begun with a shared feeling about some cultural object or another. I imagine it’s like that for a lot of people. You meet a kid on the playground who knows the difference between Autobots and Decepticons; you meet a colleague at your new job wearing a Grand Moff Tarkin T-shirt; you meet a cute girl, scroll through her iTunes, and find albums by Cake and Wu-Tang Clan. You immediately know: this person is a little bit like me.
BUT THE OPPOSITE—
—is also true: making a list (especially one meant for public consumption) is fraught with danger. In the online age, your opinions are your identity, and a list of your favourite things is a naked declaration of who you are and what you believe. One has to be careful. One must broker peace with the widest segment of the population. You see such negotiations taking place in many year-end lists: attempts to express a sense of balance, throwing in an obscure documentary to justify one’s love for a beloved blockbuster. Making a list of your favourite art is, itself, an art.
SO—
—how do you make a list that truly captures the best parts of a year, from beginning to end, stripped of recency bias, faithful to the vibes and flavours and feelings of those 365 days? How do you rank all the things that buoyed you, that brought you joy and enlightenment, that challenged and changed you, that were (most importantly) specific to your experience of the year—a list that could never be mistaken for the list of another, a list you could look back on twenty years from now and say, yeah, that’s pretty much how it went?
Maybe it would look something like this—
THE 50 BEST THINGS OF 2022
“For instruction of the ignorant and for learning all things that exist: what Ptah created, what Thoth copied down.”
50. DECISION TO LEAVE
A South Korean murder-mystery in the Hitchcockian mode. Opaque, baroque, surprisingly funny—I had no clue what was happening after the first twenty minutes, but I soon realized that was the whole point, to be trying (and failing) to piece it all together.
49. A MINOR CHORUS, by Billy Ray Belcourt
A queer indigenous metafictional novel in the style of Rachel Cusk, in which everyone speaks the academic language of grad students and articulates their feelings in a high poetic register. In other words, totally my kind of book.
48. TOKYO VICE, but only the first episode
Apparently it was a uniquely good year for television, but I wouldn’t know, because I didn’t watch much of it. The best single episode of television I saw this year, however, was the first episode of TOKYO VICE, which was kinetic, stylish, and felt like a Michael Mann film—which makes a lot sense, since it was directed by Michael Mann. If only he’d stuck around for the rest of the season.
47. “NEW SHAPES” by Charli XCX
A buzzy synth hook, trippy snares, and backing vocals from Christine and The Queens—all the things you need in a soothing pop song that plays in your headphones while you’re emptying the dishwasher for the six-thousandth time.
46. Mo’s Cottage Burger
Two thin patties, well-salted, smashed thin at high heat on a cast iron pan, stacked between alternating cheese slices, a strip of bacon thrown on top for good measure, served on an English muffin (by Mo).
45. TURNING RED
Why did this film, of all the animated movies I watched with the kids this year, feel so revelatory? Because it takes place in Toronto, and features a cameo from a box of Timbits? Because the central premise is a metaphor for menstruation, which I found sweetly progressive? Or because it hits all the conventional beats of a coming-of-age story in the most unconventional ways? All of those things, probably.
44. The Afterlife
I thought a lot, this year, about this Twitter thread.
43. Cartoons and Cereal at The Mayfair
After a two-year hiatus, The Mayfair Theatre’s extravagant Saturday morning tradition finally resumed. Three straight hours of the 20th-Century’s best cartoons — from Betty Boop to She-Ra (and everything in between) — with an open-bar of the most wonderfully grotesque cereals ever dreamed up by the General Mills marketing department. The curation of cartoons is brilliant (there are often cheers from the audience when new episodes begin), but the ingenious touch, the thing that really transports you, are the vintage commercials and station IDs they play between episodes.
42. “VOICES CARRY” by ‘Til Tuesday (1985)
This was the year I discovered that Aimee Mann fronted a New Wave band in the 80s, and also the year that I discovered that the ghostly melody long buried in the back of my brain was from their biggest hit.
41. FEMME FATALE, by Guy du Maupassant
A caustic little short story about a trio of entitled, self-satisfied millennials cruising the Parisian club scene, getting drunk, bullying their rivals, preparing for the end of civilization. That it was written in 1881 makes it all the more damning.
40. EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE
A movie so committed to its surrealist manner that after dropping a throwaway joke about an alternate universe where people have hot dogs for fingers, it then returns to that universe several more times and (somehow, impossibly) stages some genuinely moving moments within it. Seemingly written by sugar-doped grade-schoolers scribbling obscenities in the margins of their notebooks, but also by Anton Chekhov.
39. The TOLSTOYAN Brand
This declaration is less self-aggrandizing than it seems: the simple wordmark was created by the inimitable Steve St. Pierre, who was working from my lazy brief: “What if Timothee Chalamet started an underground self-help brand based on the teachings of Leo Tolstoy that featured articles about Norwegian Literature, 90s action movies, and ruminative personal essays about existential topics like youth and death?”
38. BLACK SQUIRREL BOOKS
I frequented a lot of great coffee shops this year — Bluebarn Coffee in Wakefield, Palmier in Chelsea, and an exciting new discovery, Art House Cafe in Ottawa’s Chinatown — but so long as it remains open for business, nothing can compete with the GOAT: Black Squirrel in Old Ottawa South, where I someday hope to have my ashes scattered across the floor in front of the Classic History shelf.
37. Positive Affirmation of the Year:
36. WORKBOOK, by Steven Heighton
I picked up this slim little volume at Kingston’s lovely Novel Idea bookstore, just a few months after Heighton (a Kingston native) had passed away. It would be derogatory to call what he offers “writing advice”—Heighton’s observations are both more specific and more philosophical than that. I often fold the corner of a page to mark a passage that strikes me, and by time I finished reading WORKBOOK, my copy looked like an origami crane.
35. BRIAN DEPALMA, Rediscovered
In her podcast series Erotic 80s, Karina Longworth argues that DePalma, maligned at the peak of his career as a misogynist provocateur, actually had a much more progressive perspective on female sexuality than he was given credit for. I finally caught up with BLOW OUT (which was great), BODY DOUBLE (which was pretty good, too), and one of my old favourites, CARLITO’S WAY (which I can still recite almost verbatim, even though it’s been two decades since I last saw it).
34. SPITGATE
Some primitive desire was activated by the deliciously stupid controversy surrounding the film DON’T WORRY DARLING. I couldn’t get enough of it. The behind-the-scenes gossip, the passive-aggressive press tour, Chris Pine’s dead-eyed stare during interviews—all of it culminating in the most urgent question of the year: did Harry Styles spit on his co-star at the premiere of the film!? Not since the Zapruder Film has a piece of footage been so closely analyzed.
33. BLUE JAYS 28, RED SOX 5
The Blue Jays played some important games down the stretch, but dropping four touchdowns on their division rivals — at Fenway Park, no less — was the most satisfying sports moment of the season.
32. OYSTER MUSHROOMS
The chanterelles in the forest behind our house didn’t appear until late in the season, and were far less abundant than the previous year. Luckily, the dead beech tree beside our stream made up for the shortfall, producing some incredible oyster mushrooms. Fried in butter, with a bit of salt, they taste just like a rare steak.
31. Leaving the game to see BARBARIAN
With Ottawa down by double-digits in the third quarter, we bailed on the football game and walked to a nearby movie theatre to see an indie horror flick that turned out to be just as nightmarish as the RedBlacks pass defence. What makes BARBARIAN superlative is the narrative switchback that occurs at the midpoint of the film, which turns out to be more than just a clever trick of perspective: it reveals the film’s deeper and more disturbing message about which monsters we should be afraid of.
30. BLUE KERNEL POPCORN
I can’t be the only one who feels this way about President’s Choice Purple Kernel Sea Salt Popcorn, because throughout the year I was left grief-stricken by empty shelves in the snack aisle. When I did manage to find them in stock, I’d buy four or five bags. Crunchy, salty, oily—this popcorn, paired with Earl Grey tea and dark chocolate, has become an essential part of my evening routine,
29. “UNCONDITIONAL II” by Arcade Fire
Even though this was the song I listened to more than any other this year, in light of all the news about Win Butler’s behaviour I puzzled over whether or not to include it. This, one of the great dilemmas of list-making: accuracy or conciliation? I chose the former, and am just happy that I didn’t like Kanye’s latest album.
28. A Hike to The Top of The Hill
In the middle of winter, with the branches stripped bare and several feet of snow on the ground, I was able to scale the rocky hills behind our house and reach parts of the forest that had been inaccessible in the summer and spring. I swam through deep drifts, climbed the rocky escarpment, and eventually found myself at the very top of the ridge that curves above our house. I sat down, drank a thermos of coffee, ate a piece of chocolate, and looked out across the hills. It was quiet, and I thought to myself: I should come here more often. (I haven’t) .
27. DEATH IN VENICE, by Thomas Mann
This was the year that I discovered Thomas Mann, thanks to an essay in Geoff Dyer’s WHITE SANDS and Alex Ross’s profile in the New Yorker. This 1912 novella is a perfect introduction: self-conscious in a modern way, surprisingly funny, and it happens to take place in the midst of a pandemic where people are trying to pretend like nothing at all is going wrong.
26. Vibing with THE BATMAN
I has absolutely no appetite for a new Batman movie — in fact, was dreading it — but of course I went to see it anyways, and after the first half-hour, in which Batman does the typical Batman stuff (stalking bad guys from the shadows, brooding in his bat-cave), I finally clicked with what the film was doing: mainlining the 90s. What if Kurt Cobain was Bruce Wayne? What if Se7en was a superhero movie? I never thought to ask these questions, but was happy that they were answered.
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Jared, thank you for making the 23rd day of each month a date that I always look forward to. 💫