The Best of 2022: Part II
Judgment, hierarchy, and hard decisions as we count down to the number one thing of the year.
I’VE ALWAYS LOVED—
—director Steven Soderbergh’s annual Seen, Read list. It’s laid out chronologically, there are no rankings, it’s simply a list of his inputs throughout the year, which gives you a clear picture of his polymathic tastes and unconscious biases. It’s formatted nicely, too: different textual treatments for films, books, television shows. But it’s a quantitative accounting, an accumulation—there is no subjectivity, no assessment of a value, just the acknowledgment that these particular artefacts existed in this particular year.
I prefer to be more judgmental—to make difficult decisions, to choose one thing over another, to establish a hierarchy. And so, as you scroll down towards the bottom of this post, rest assured that each new thing is superior to the last, each new piece of ephemera intensifies in quality until you reach the end, where you will find the very best thing of 2022.
THE 50 BEST THINGS OF 2022, CONTINUED
25. BANSHEES OF INISHERIN
Martin McDonagh’s best ever film, an Irish bromance breakup fable in which Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell’s performances are somehow overshadowed by a domesticated donkey. You’ll want to live forever in the idyllic village of Inisherin, and also escape it as soon as possible.
24. “LE PIANO” by Donny Benet
A little bit Yacht Rock, a little bit disco, carried along by a drum machine and saxophones. The perfect EP for a lazy workday, when you’re desperately trying to wrangle your wandering focus so you can answer that email, send that document, finish that presentation and be done with it already.
23. GREEKING OUT
The Daughter, now eight, became enamoured by this podcast during our summer road trip. Classic tales of Greek mythology retold in colloquial, compelling style. I became enamoured by it, too, if only for the fact that it stoked her appetite for podcasts and left me feeling the quiet pride of a parent who has passed along a good habit to their kids.
22. Best Graffiti of 2022
From Diagonal 77 in La Plata, Argentina:
“Beneath every creative idea is a great working process.”
20. ALWAYS SUNDAY
The playlist of the year, described by Apple Music as “eclectic low-key songs that create the Sunday vibe any day of the week.” From Beach House to The Beatles, Thelonious Monk to Tame Impala, with hundred of tracks from artists across the continuum of music, this playlist was on perpetual repeat in our house, on Sundays and every other day.
19. AFTERSUN at The Screening Room in Kingston
I’d never heard of The Screening Room, a secret little indie theatre hidden within Kingston’s downtown core, but the moment I stepped inside I was ready to leave my life behind, rent a small apartment nearby, and apply for a job. We saw AFTERSUN there, which was the exact right movie to see in that cozy space: small-scale, meticulous, lovingly assembled—just like the theatre itself.
18. Mordantly Relevant Tweet of the Year
My new personal tagline:
17. HIGH AND LOW
Forget TOP GUN: MAVERICK—the most thrilling cinematic experience I had this year was watching a 60-year-old black-and-white foreign film about designing comfortable women’s shoes. The Kurosawa classic, based on an American pulp novel, begins as a melodrama about class conflict in postwar Japan and ends as a cold-blooded police procedural.
16. THE DIVORCE, by Cesar Aira
I read Aira’s 2008 novella, which documents a series of uncanny encounters at a sidewalk cafe in Argentina, while I was drinking a Fernet Branca cocktail at a sidewalk cafe in Argentina, which felt perfectly in rhythm with the story’s magical cadence.
15. “EROTIC 80s” on You Must Remember This
From Tom Cruise dancing in his underwear in RISKY BUSINESS to the resonating cultural impact of FATAL ATTRACTION, Karina Longworth’s 12-part podcast series about the rise and fall of onscreen sex in 1980s Hollywood was the film studies class I didn’t know I needed, and the podcast I looked forward to most each week.
14. PRODUCTIVITY
I keep a fairly detailed record of how many hours I spend writing, and can fairly say that I wrote more in 2022 than any other year in recent memory—certainly more than any year since we had kids. But I also didn’t publish anything. These two statistics — the amount of time you spend writing, and the amount of writing that appears in the wider world — bear no relation to one another. Nonetheless, it felt like a successful year. Big projects took shape. Small projects (like this newsletter) filled the gaps. One must write with the end in mind, but the end isn’t always a thing you can show off to others.
13. UNCLE DAN’S MARGARITAS
The best cocktail of the year, prepared by Danny Lynch at the kitchen counter of his Rosedale home. Instructions: shatter ice in your palm with the back of a spoon, drop it in lowball glass rimmed with salt; add juice from a single lime, a splash of Cointreau, two ounces of artisanal Mezcal from a bottle with no label that you picked up in some unnamed Mexican village five years ago; drink three more, go immediately to bed.
12. TÁR
Everything you’ve heard is true: Cate Blanchett gives the best performance of the year; the film asks troubling questions about talent and privilege and provides no easy answers; it’s long and long-winded and so mannered that it borders on pretentious. Still, as the last scene unfolded, as I realized what fate our hero had earned herself, and laughed out loud: a perfect ending for Lydia Tar.
11. CROSSROADS, by Jonathan Franzen
The premise of Franzen’s sixth novel sounds totally dull: a suburban Chicago family’s dealings with their neighbourhood church group in the 1970s. Franzen is one of my all-time favourite writers, but I was apathetic to this latest thing. I picked it up anyways, listlessly began reading, and quickly learned one of the most important lessons of the year: don’t ever question the master of the modern novel. Franzen is operating at god-level, and effortlessly conjures a half-dozen characters that are realer than real, and whose pyrrhic victories and humiliating defeats are enthralling. Another masterpiece. How could I have expected anything less?
10. “TRUST” by SOHN
In the age of playlists, here’s a true album. One song becomes the next, and you hardly notice the shift in mood and tempo. According to Apple Music’s Year in Review, it was the album I listened to the most this year, yet I don't think I could tell you the title of a single individual track. Hypnotic, narcotic, perfect for a white winter day.
9. THE BOX OFFICE GAME
Like everyone else, I went through an intense Wordle phase. But over the course of the year, I wasted the most time (and had the most fun) playing this daily box office guessing game inspired by the Blank Check podcast.
8. EASTER PICADA
The best meal I had this year was the result of bad financial management: Easter Weekend in Argentina, down to my last few pesos, unable to exchange money because everything was closed. My only hope was a small weekend market, where I somehow managed to communicate to an old farmer, in whimpers and hand gestures, that I wanted to buy a wheel of queso de campo and some cured meat. I had just enough money left over to buy a bottle of red wine at the kiosco around the corner from my apartment, and ate my Easter Dinner in the courtyard, under the night sky. The cheese was semi-firm, speckled with dried spices. The meat was fatty. The wine was cheap, but perfectly sweet. The simplest meal of the year, and the best.
7. NARKINA-5
I tried hard to find something to enjoy in the Star Wars universe this year, but even my emergency reserves of childlike wonder couldn’t compel me to watch past the first few episodes of BOBA FETT or OBI-WAN KENOBI. So when it came out in the fall, as a matter of principle, I refused to watch ANDOR. Fool me once, etc. But, as the weeks passed, too many people were too enthusiastic, so I broke my vow of chastity—and I was glad I did. From start to finish, ANDOR was the best television show of the year. Ingeniously constructed, brilliantly written, dense with plot and characters and —a rarity in a galaxy far, far away — big ideas. Amidst this density, there’s one image that comes immediately to mind when I think about the show: the stark white workrooms of the Narkina-5 prison. I’ve seen a lot of films and read a lot of books about jail, but no vision of incarceration has ever disturbed me as much this: the gamification of captivity; the torture of infinite repetition. Tolstoy, I think, would have admired it.
6. “Russian warship, go fuck yourself.”
A Russian missile cruiser approaches a small border station at the very beginning of the invasion, when it seems like the Ukraine will be quickly overrun by the superior Russian military. The exchange between the warship and border guards goes like this:
I’m aware of how stories like this are used as propaganda, and when I first heard it, I tried to respond with an appropriate amount of skepticism. But it was impossible not to be exhilarated by this kind of ice-cold mettle in the face of death. An action-movie one-liner in real life. A quote destined to go down in history alongside King Leonidas’s response when the Persians commanded the Spartans to drop their weapons (“come and get them!”). Little did we know, in those early days, that the philosophy summed up by this statement would define the dynamic of the entire conflict.
5. TRIANGLE OF SADNESS
Winner of the Palme D’Or at Cannes—the second in three years for Swedish director Ruben Ostlund. A movie that seems, for the first hour or so, a sedate and meticulous character study, and then, when the shit hits the fan (literally!), it becomes a modern-day punk-rock Grimm’s fairy-tale. Just when you think it couldn’t go any harder, it does. And when it seems to have reached the limits of where any movie could go—it goes even further.
4. CIVILIZATIONS, by Laurent Binet
The best book of the year is the ultimate revenge fantasy: a counter-historical account of what would have happened if the Ancient Mayans had hooked up with Norse explorers, learned metallurgy and animal husbandry, and showed up in Europe armed with superior weaponry and exotic germs.
3. The “NAATU, NAATU” Dance Sequence
Midway through the bombastic Bollywood epic RRR, our two heroes show up at a fancy party at the British Embassy, are taunted by xenophobic colonialists, and then exact their revenge—through dance! It’s the most exultant cinematic sequence of the year. Since I first saw RRR in the spring, this song has been on regular rotation in our household: we listen to it in the car when we drive to school; we play it during kitchen dance parties; I use it to coax the kids through their bedtime routine— “Maybe if you brush your teeth and get your pajamas on, I’ll let you watch ‘Naatu, Naatu’ before bed.”
2. A Long Weekend at Hinterhouse
After two years of delay and disappointment, we were finally able to follow through with The Wife’s fortieth birthday celebration, which involved a day of skiing at Mont Tremblant and a weekend retreat at Hinterhouse. Not only did we finally settle one of the longest-running and most contentious disputes of our marriage — whether or not I’m any good at downhill skiing (the answer: I’m very good) — we followed it up with four straight days of decadence, wearing fancy robes, sleeping, reading, drinking coffee in the mornings and wine at night, listening to Always Sunday (see #20), and darting outside every few hours to sit in the sauna. If there was a stretch of days in 2022 that I could relive, it would be these ones.
1. The Bracelet
When I arrived in Argentina to spend three weeks away from home, I found this note hidden in my suitcase.
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A great list Jared. Bearing witness and recognizing the brilliance of the things and people that surround us is a super power well beyond the reaches of the MCU. Please continue to use your power wisely.