music on Stephen Schenkenberg

Cultural Year in Review: 2025

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 09:35:56 -0500

Continuing my year-end tradition, here are a few cultural highlights from the past 12 months:

Cultural Outings: Summer trip to NYC with the kids — nothing like it. Smalls Jazz Club, The High Line, Little Island, Ellis Island, Bryant Park, “A Century of The New Yorker” at the New York Public Library, ”Amy Sherald: American Sublime” at The Whitney, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” at The Met. Here in STL, my wife’s exhibition “Veronica Ryan: Unruly Objects” at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Wilco live, and a few trips to hear the St. Louis Symphony, including at the newly renovated Powell Hall.

Reading — Fiction: The best novel I read this year was one I’d had on the list forever: “Middlemarch” by George Eliot. Everyone was right. Others I enjoyed: “James” by Percival Everett; “The MANIAC” by Benjamin Labatut; “Vera, or Faith” by Gary Shteyngart”; “The Emperor of Gladness” by Ocean Vuong; “Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver; “Assembly” by Natasha Brown; “Perfection” by Vincenzo Latronico; and “The Summer Layoff” by Matt Bucher.

Reading — Nonfiction

Affairs: “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This” by Omar El Akkad and Zadie Smith’s “Dead and Alive: Essays,” two of the most incisive books I read in 2025.
Design & Visual Arts: “The Invention of Design: A Twentieth-Century History” by Maggie Gram; “Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible” by Sophie Lovell; “A Visible Distance: Craft, Creativity, and the Business of Design” by Matt Owens; “Diane Arbus: In the Beginning” by Jeff L. Rosenheim; “The Use of Photography” by Annie Ernaux; “Q&A” by Adrian Tomine; “The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick” by John Bleasdale; “Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop” by Vikki Tobak.
On the Job: “The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent” by Robert A. Caro; “All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art” by Orlando Whitfield; “I Regret Almost Everything” by Keith McNally; “Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service” by Michael Lewis; “Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance” by Atul Gawande; “Why I Cook” by Tom Colicchio; Richard P. Rumelt’s “The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists” and “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters” (one memorable passage).
On the Media: “When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines” by Graydon Carter; “Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America" by Michael M. Grynbaum; “Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live” by Susan Morrison.
Technology: “More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI” by John Warner; “Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company” by Patrick McGee; “The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future” by Keach Hagey; “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism” by Sarah Wynn-Williams; “Source Code: My Beginnings” by Bill Gates.
A Few Others: “The Revolutionary Genius of Plants” by Stefano Mancuso; “A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck” by Sophie Elmhirst; “All That Happiness Is: Some Words on What Matters” by Adam Gopnik; “My Life in Middlemarch” by Rebecca Mead; “The Family Dynamic: A Journey Into the Mystery of Sibling Success” by Susan Dominus.

Movies: “A Real Pain”; “The Seed of the Sacred Fig”; ”Sentimental Value”; “All We Imagine as Light”; “Nickel Boys”; “Sorry, Baby”; ”The New Yorker at 100”; “Perfect Days”; “Black Bag”; “Away We Go”; “The Brutalist”; “The Martian”; “F1.” + A bonus rewatch of Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women” with the kids.

TV: The four-episode “Adolescence” was unforgettable — made with extraordinary humanity and skill. Others I enjoyed: “The Studio”; “Task”; “The Pitt”; “Mare of Easttown”; “Eastern Gate”; “The Lowdown”; “Righteous Gemstones”; “Ludwig”; “I Love LA”; “A Man on the Inside.” Some comedy picks: Mike Birbiglia’s “The Good Life”; Sarah Silverman’s “PostMortem”; the Conan O’Brien/Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize special. As always, the latest “Great British Bake Off” season was a family fav.

Podcast Episodes: The Rewatchables on “High Fidelity” and “Kicking and Screaming”; Dissect’s “The Most GENIUS Number Bars in Rap History”; and You’ll Hear It’s “Why Jazz Musicians Love Hip Hop”.

Music: Enjoyed the new records from Jeff Tweedy, Ben Kweller, Wednesday, Earl Sweatshirt, Clipse, and Lucy Daucus, as well as the newly released “Nick Drake: The Making of Five Leaves Left.”

To close, with well wishes for the coming new year, here’s one of a few versions of “Saturday Sun” from that Nick Drake box set of unaccompanied demos, studio outtakes, and previously unheard songs.

Year in Review: 2024

Fri, 27 Dec 2024 16:41:00 -0500

As I’ve done for the past few decades, I’m ending the year with a look back at some cultural highlights I found most fulfilling during the past 12 months:

Hitting the road with the kids: 2024 was a special year for family travel — an early summer trip to stay with relatives in San Francisco (a moment from there above), then a late summer stay with my sister just outside of D.C. Muir Woods, Presidio Tunnel Tops, the de Young, the Glenstone, MLK Memorial, National Gallery, and so much more. Great ages for the kids to experience both. Fortunate to have been able to do it.
Nonfiction books: “The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight," by Andrew Leland; “The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983 – 1992” by Tina Brown; “All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess” by Becca Rothfeld; “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” by David Graeber and David Wengrow; “The Message” by Ta-Nehisi Coates; “Kafka: Diaries” (translated by Ross Benjamin); “To Fall in Love, Drink This” by Alice Ferring; “Lovely One: A Memoir” by Ketanji Brown Jackson; and “The Contagion Next Time” by Sandro Galea.
Chunky, visual-heavy nonfiction books: “The Look of the Book: Jackets, Covers, and Art at the Edges of Literature” by Peter Mendelsund and David J. Alworth; “The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing” by Adam Moss (an exceptional editorial mind); “I. M. Pei: Life Is Architecture” by Shirley Surya; “The Wes Anderson Collection” by Matt Zoller Seitz; “Branding: In Five and a Half Steps” by Michael Johnson; “How Design Makes Us Think and Feel and Do Things” by Sean Adams; and “Crossing the Line: Arthur Ashe at the 1968 US Open” (multiple editors/writers).
Novels: “The Fraud” by Zadie Smith; “Nonfiction” by Julie Myerson; “Intermezzo” by Sally Rooney; and “Catalina” by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio.
Books of poems: “Scattered Snows, to the North” by Carl Phillips and “A Film in Which I Play Everyone” by Mary Jo Bang, both STL-connected writers.
Books about what went wrong at Twitter: I should not have spent time reading two books on this subject, but they were interesting: “Battle for the Bird” by Kurt Wagner and “Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter” by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac.
Rereading “Gilead”: Endures. Recommended for when you’ve just read two books about Twitter.
The William Gass Centenary: I spent many years writing about and promoting awareness and discussion of Bill’s work, and I had the great fortune of getting to know both Bill and Mary during the last decade of his long and productive life. In October, WashU organized a day-long event to mark what would have been Bill’s 100th birthday. While the Gass projects I launched over the years are set on a kind of permanent simmer, it was meaningful to re-immerse myself in the world of Bill’s writing. Videos and resources are available on the university’s centenary website.
Movies: I was deeply impressed and moved by “The Zone of Interest”; “The Taste of Things”; “Past Lives”; “Anatomy of a Fall”; “Petite Maman”; “Saint Omer”; “Aftersun”; and “His Three Daughters.” Also enjoyed “Killers of the Flower Moon”; “American Fiction”; “You Hurt My Feelings”; “Between the Temples”; “May December”; “Barbie”; “Oppenheimer”; “Maestro”; “Janet Planet”; “She Said”; “Showing Up”; “BlackBerry”; and “Dumb Money.” Temporarily engrossing: “Conclave.” Interesting docs: “Modernism, Inc.: The Eliot Noyes Design Story”; “Martha.”
Satisfying rewatches: “Marriage Story”; “Heat”; and “Kicking and Screaming” (prompted by The Rewatchables). Plus, with the kids, “Spellbound” and “The Princess Bride.”
Articles about the world: “Seventy Miles in the Darién Gap” by Caitlin Dickerson, The Atlantic; “Our Strange New Way of Witnessing Natural Disasters," by Brooke Jarvis, NYT Magazine; “The Forgotten History of Hitler’s Establishment Enablers,” by Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker; and “Unsafe Passage: A Palestinian Poet’s Perilious Journey Out of Gaza,” by Mosab Abu Toha, The New Yorker.
Articles about America: “What Will Become of American Civilization?" by George Packer, The Atlantic; “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending,” by Franklin Foer, The Atlantic; “The Man Who Died for the Liberal Arts," by David M. Shribman, The Atlantic; and “Shibboleth” by Zadie Smith, The New Yorker.
Personal essays: “On Cancer and Desire," by Annie Ernaux, The New Yorker; “The Birth of My Daughter, the Death of My Marriage” by Leslie Jamison, The New Yorker; “If My Dying Daughter Could Face Her Mortality, Why Couldn’t the Rest of Us?" by Sarah Wildman, NYT; and “Variations on the Theme of Silence," by my friend Jeannette Cooperman, The Common Reader.
Great match of medium and story: “She Slept With a Violin on Her Pillow. Her Dreams Came True in Italy," by Valeriya Safronova, with photographs and video by Sasha Arutyunova, NYT; “How Taylor Tomlinson Nailed Her Closing Joke," by Jason Zinoman, NYT.
TV shows: The show that made me smile the most all year was “Girls5Eva” (all seasons are streaming on Netflix). Huge fan as well of “Beef”; “The Bear” seasons 1 and 2; “Ripley”; “My Brilliant Friend” season 1; and “Fargo” season 5. Enjoyed “Magpie Murders” and “Bad Monkey.”
New Music: “Oh Smokey” from Clem Snide; “Manning Fireworks” from MJ Lenderman; “Charm” from Clairo; “Patterns in Repeat” from Laura Marling; “Hit Me Hard and Soft” from Billie Eilish; and “Chromakopia” from Tyler, The Creator. Doechii’s Tiny Desk performance was fierce.
New podcasts: My favorite new-to-me podcast this year was Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso. The host is wise beyond is years, does superb research and prep, and seems to quietly relish his good fortune of gently steering weighty conversations. (You can’t go wrong choosing an episode, but Fragoso’s conversation with Ocean Vuong was especially memorable, particularly for the author’s insights about youth and masculinity in America.) Another new discovery I enjoyed, as a former magazine EIC, was Print is Dead (Long Live Print). I can’t remember if I discovered it last year or this year, but I enjoy Jarrett Fuller’s Scratching the Surface podcast (as well as his blog).
A few podcast episodes: Bonnie Prince Billy talks through “I See a Darkness” on Life of a Record; The Wolf of Wine decodes his single “Quintin Tarantino”; Zadie Smith talks through “The Fraud” on Fresh Air; and the Dissect hip-hop aficionados talk through the Best Bars of 2024.
Connecting with two living artists: Any year when my wife Tamara presents a new exhibition is a good one, and this year saw her open “Delcy Morelos: Interwoven," at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. Having our kids meet the Colombian artist, and hearing her talk astutely about her work, were highlights from the year. Grateful as well to meet Julie Blackmon, one of my favorite living photographers, and hear her discuss her distinctive Midwestern work at the Saint Louis Art Museum (thanks for the invite, JF).
Home tour with Laura Dewe Mathews: I have such admiration for Matt Gibberd and what he’s built with The Modern House — from the real estate listing website to the Homing In podcast to the publications, each one presented handsomely and with soul. In the summer, Matt shared a video interview and tour he did with architect Laura Dewe Mathews. I was thinking back to this one in particular, because Mathews' lovely home is known locally as “the gingerbread house” — and our kids are asking to begin nibbling away at theirs.

With that, sending best wishes to you in the new year.

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 17:16:18 -0500

Lovely, gentle new album from Clem Snide: “Oh Smokey.”

Low, “The Plan” (Can I hold it?)

Sat, 13 Apr 2024 08:09:30 -0500

This rich new New Yorker piece on Alan Sparkhawk — about the death of his late wife and Low partner Mimi Parker and the music he’s been making since — sent me back to band’s incomparable catalogue.

There was a stretch of months in 2003 when I’d started a new writing job at the Saint Louis Art Museum, and I’d play Low’s album “The Curtain Hits the Cast” over and over at a low volume in my little office; it was the soundtrack to my days in a new job in a returned-to city.

Here’s that record’s transcendent song “The Plan”:

Here’s a live version from April 2007, perfectly fuzzy and just out of reach of mere mortals:

Year in Review: 2023

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 14:26:59 -0500

Continuing a 23-year tradition of rounding up cultural highlights from the past 12 months, here’s a recap for 2023:

15 Books I Especially Loved This Year

An Additional Batch I Enjoyed

(That first hard-to-ID book is “Pentagram: Living By Design," which I had to scramble to procure before it sold out. The brown one in the middle column is “Scaling People”, a terrific book about team- and company-building. The full list of what I read in 2023 is here.)

TV
Especially grateful for “Succession” (a perfect close), “Patriot” (committed to its singular vision), “Reservation Dogs” (often profound and goofy within the same shot), and “Slow Horses.” Enjoyed “Jury Duty,” “Fleishman Is in Trouble," and “Vienna Blood.” “The Diplomat” was fun in parts.

Movies
Each year it’s a fresh bummer to have seen so few new movies, considering how many my wife and I used to see pre-kids. In terms of what I saw: I loved every minute of “Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb,” and also really liked “The Banshees of Inisherein” and “A Quiet Passion.” Two good docs: “Beckham,” “Navalny.” “The Killer” was well-made, but I wondered why I was spending time on that subject. Enjoyed rewatching “Tár” and “After Yang” and “Karate Kid” (Leo screening). Couldn’t get excited about “Mission: Impossible,” except for that last extended escape-the-train scene. Wish I liked more: “Asteroid City." “Air" was entertaining, but didn’t quite seem like a full movie.

Music
Enjoyed new albums from Joanna Sternberg, Youth Lagoon, boygenius, Mitski, Killer Mike, and Veeze (a discovery for me).

Podcasts
New-to-me this year: “Heavyweight” (so late to this; now cancelled : / ), “The CITY Voice,” “After Hours,” “The Power of Teamwork” (it was fun to have pitched this to Adobe; congrats to my former colleagues on S2) and “Dissect”’s deep dive into Radiohead’s “In Rainbows.”

Articles & Essays
A few highlights from The New Yorker: “Words Fail," by Rachel Aviv; “The Fugitive Princesses of Dubai," by Heidi Blake; “The Greatest Showman," by Alex Ross. A few standouts from The Atlantic, which gets better every year: “We’re Already in the Metaverse," by Megan Garber; “The Moral Case Against Equity Language," by George Packer; “The Resilience Gap," by Jill Filipvic; and “Black Success, White Backlash” by Elijah Anderson.

Visual Art
Not a lot of museum-going this year (or travel, which often leads to it). But it’s always such a pleasure to see my wife Tamara open a show at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. Pictured: Opening night at “Faye HeavyShield: Confluences," with our kids vying for the spotlight.

A Song That Struck Me
In many of these year-end posts I include an especially memorable songwriter discovery (Weyes Blood, Haley Heynderickx). This year in his Substack newsletter, Jeff Tweedy mentioned that the band keeps a Spotify playlist where they share music they’ve been enjoying. While streaming that mix in the background, a song called “Life According to Raechel” by Madison Cunningham stopped me cold. Many repeat listens that day, and days after. Here’s a solo version to share with you, followed by one with an ensemble:

Happy New Year, and best wishes for an enjoyable 2024.

Sun, 28 May 2023 19:42:58 -0500

Fantastic interview on the Time Sensitive podcast with a writer I admire: “Jelani Cobb on 50 Years of Hip-Hop and the Future of Journalism.”

Sat, 21 Jan 2023 22:54:48 -0500

Rick Rubin, talking with Tyler Cowen, gets to the heart of what we lose as streaming music fans:

I’ll say the most difficult thing about it now is that all of it has a disposability that it didn’t have before. In the old days, you would buy a piece of music, you would own it, and you would be invested in that piece of music as yours. Now everything is available, which is fantastic and I love it. As a fan, I love it.

When something comes out by an artist that you love, it doesn’t have the same gravitas that it once had because it’s on this conveyor belt of music that’s always going by. Even the thing you love, you listen to it, but then there’s something new right behind it, coming right behind it, always something new coming right behind it. I don’t know how the music of today can get to the point of the canon of the music of the past based on that short term, the fact that the music goes by so quickly. Even the things we love, the shelf life is very short now.

Sat, 12 Nov 2022 20:56:10 -0500

In The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot explores the “melancholy grandeur” of Weyes Blood, my favorite new find of last year.

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 23:01:05 -0500

What a match: Remnick on Dylan.

Sun, 30 Oct 2022 11:57:40 -0500

For the generation that has listened to music only in earbuds, intimacy is the new punk rock.

Bono, speaking generally but also of Billie Eilish specifically, in an engaging NYT Magazine interview.

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 22:05:07 -0500

I’m just catching up with Björk’s podcast, Sonic Symobolism. One album per episode. Unsurprisngly, it’s excellent. On a few walks today I listened to a deep dive into the lush and intimate “Vespertine”, which she made after acquiring her first personal laptop. Loved this part:

And I still meet journalists today that always have this, ‘If it’s done with a computer it doesn’t have a soul’ — that argument. But it’s not about the tool. You cannot rely on a guitar to put the soul in a song. Or a violin. Or a laptop. If there is not soul in it, it’s because the human did not put it there.

"What's Good: Notes on Rap and Language”

Sat, 11 Jun 2022 21:34:00 -0500

What a supremely fine and lovingly crafted book this was. Astute, admiring, and entertaining scrutiny of decades of rap lyrics. Huge kudos to author Daniel Levin Becker. A few especially great passages I drew circles around in my copy:

I will go to my grave wishing my self-conscious rhetorical throat-clearings could sound so cool. What Nas seems to toss off here is not just a very efficient overview of the themes he’s spent his career elaborating—decadence, gunplay, activism, divinity—but also a rare window onto his composition process, his creative deliberations, the whole inner monologue around medium and message that is at once so tantalizing in a rapper and so often viewed as beside the point. Most of all, though, what I hear in it is a true statement about what it’s like to speak on something so much bigger than yourself, so much more expansive than the present, something inexhaustible and infinite that is also right here. It’s what it feels like, for me, to put words to a way with words that so often leaves me, before the rest colors itself in, speechless.

And:

All the discrete and interwoven pattern recognitions in this book, assembled with joy and leaving me no closer to a unified theory of how it all fits together, seem to be proof of rap’s multitudes, its dynamism, its knack for illuminating a bigger picture by obscuring many smaller ones. This is what the best art does, and I think it’s also why we play with puzzles. It’s not about the completed image, but about the slow, oddly suspenseful progress we make toward resolution and completeness—otherwise we’d just look at the picture on the box the puzzle comes in, right? There is so much in the world that is at least provisionally more awesome, more arresting, more puzzling than good. The endlessly deferred promise of understanding, being in the dark and working ever toward the light, just might be what makes the whole thing, impossibly, float.

Year in Review: 2021

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 01:00:00 -0500

Since 2000, I’ve had a year-end tradition of sharing my cultural highlights of the past 12 months. For this year’s post, I’ll first note the major life change I had in 2021.

After eight years leading comms and marketing for the nonprofit conservancy Forest Park Forever, I re-entered the agency world this summer by joining The Stoke Group, a fully distributed digital marketing and content studio that focuses on the B2B tech sector.

As the Senior Director of Editorial Content, I spend most of my time on editorial projects for Adobe (a key client, and one that values great writing and design), as well as helping produce the video podcast Real Creative Leadership with its host, Adam Morgan. While I miss the connection to my St. Louis community, I’m enjoying working with strategists, writers, and designers on content work for large global clients. I hadn’t worked with clients at this scale or in this specific sector, so it’s been broadening in the way I hoped. The team’s packed with interesting, talented, upbeat people.

With that 2021 milestone covered, here’s a look at some cultural-intake highlights from the year:

Books: Fiction

1. Lanny, Max Porter

2. Second Place, Rachel Cusk

3. Leave the World Behind, Rumaan Alam

4. The Copenhagen Trilogy, Tove Ditlevsen

5. Whereabouts, Jhumpa Lahiri

6. The Morning Star, Karl Ove Knausgaard

7. Beautiful World, Where Are You, Sally Rooney

8. The Sellout, Paul Beatty

9. Tenth of December, George Saunders

10. My Heart, Semezdin Mehmedinović

11. Fox 8, George Saunders

12. The Carrying: Poems, Ada Limon

13. New Teeth, Simon Rich

Books: Non-Fiction

1. Counterpoint: A Memoir of Bach and Mourning, Philip Kennicott

2. The Most Fun Thing: Dispatches from a Skateboard Life, Kyle Beachy

3. Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design, Michael Bierut

4. Suppose a Sentence: Brian Dillon

5. Hannah Wilke: Art for Life’s Sake (Eds., Tamara Schenkenberg and Donna Wingate)

6. Three Women, Lisa Taddeo

7. They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, Hanif Abdurraqib

8. The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, Louis Menand

9. Of Human Kindness: What Shakespeare Teaches Us About Empathy, Paula Marantz Cohen

10. Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres, Kelefa Sanneh

11. The Monocle Book of Homes (Monocle)

12. The Innovation Stack: Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time, Jim McKelvey

13. Studio Culture Now (Ed. Mark Sinclair)

14. The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel, Kati Marton

15. Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks, Adam Nayman

16. This Isn’t Happening: Radiohead’s “Kid A” and the Beginning of the 21st Century, Steven Hyden

17. After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made, Ben Rhodes

18. Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald

19. An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination, Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang

20. The Master: The Long Run and Beautiful Game of Roger Federer, Christopher Clarey

21. Proustian Uncertainties, Saul Friedländer

22. Seeing Serena, Gerald Marzorati

23. Graphic Life, Michael Gericke

24. How to Raise an Adult, Julie Lythcott-Haims

25. Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, paired with Twelve New Essays by Jessica Helfand

26. Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century, Tim Higgins

27. The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, Jonathan Alter

28. No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention, Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer

29. Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, Adam Grant

30. Sorry Spock, Emotions Drive Business, Adam W. Morgan

Movies

1. The French Dispatch

2. Cold War

3. Certain Women

4. Meek’s Cutoff

5. The Power of the Dog

6. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

7. Let Them All Talk

8. The Farewell

9. To the Wonder

10. Citizenfour

11. In One Breath: Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark

12. Biggie: I Got A Story to Tell

13. Mies

14. Untold: Breaking Point

15. WeWork: or The Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn

1. Succession, Season 3

2. The Bureau, Season 1

3. Ted Lasso, Season 2

4. Great British Baking Show, Season 12

5. The Chair

6. Only Murders in the Building

7. The Other Two, Seasons 1 and 2

8. This Is a Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist

9. Lupin, Season 1

Podcasts
New finds I enjoyed this year: A Change of Brand, Conversations with Tyler, and The CMO Podcast. The Two Month Review’s podcast series on William Gaddis's J R delivered a ton of insights and smiles during the first few months of 2021.

Visual Art
This was the second year in a row with little travel (which often prompts new art-viewing) and sadly little museum-going here at home (that’s on me). That said, and acknowledging my bias, the exhibition Hannah Wilke: Art for Life's Sake — curated by my wife, Tamara H. Schenkenberg, at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation — gained in richness and meaning every time I saw it. If you’re here in St. Louis, I highly encourage a visit before its January 16 close.

Music
A million years ago, my year-end lists included dozens of individual albums and concerts. While music’s a daily essential for me, I see almost nothing live and dip in and out of all kinds of new things I learn about, often without good record-keeping.

I usually work listening to classical, then jazz is on in the evening. The only specific new recordings I’d surface this year are the terrific records from Tyler, the Creator, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker. Phoebe Bridgers didn’t have a new album, but I loved her live Pitchfork Festival set that I happened to catch the evening it streamed.

In terms of new discoveries, there was one artist — and one song — that I’ll long connect with 2021: “A Lot’s Gonna Change” by Weyes Blood (Natalie Laura Mering). I was introduced to this singer/songwriter through a Spotify station as I drove on an errand of some kind. I was transfixed.

At about 1:20, Mering sings the title phrase — “A lot’s gonna change / in your …. life / … time.” — and it swallowed me up in the way great song moments do. Likely because my wife and I spend so much of our non-working time focused on raising our young kids and thinking about what their future lives will be like, the line took on all kinds poignancy and significance in the seconds I heard it.

Later on, the second time that part of the song comes around (2:55 in the video above), Mering sings, “‘Cause you’ve got what it takes / in your … life / … time.”

Here’s to the time we’ve got ahead of us in 2022.

Sat, 13 Nov 2021 22:11:00 -0500

Nice line from Kelefa Sanneh’s “Major Labels”:

Unlike many virtuosos, Eddie Van Halen had a knack for making virtuosity seem like a good time, and all the early Van Halen albums sound as if they were recorded at house parties, with the party noise somehow edited out.

Thu, 26 Aug 2021 22:02:00 -0500

Jeff Tweedy’s new Substack newsletter, Starship Casual, is unsuprisingly great — at turns goofy and thoughtful, just like his books and interviews. Today’s post, “Heart of Glass (Rememories 5), was especially memorable. He’s a slyly penetrating artist.

Year in Review: 2020

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 00:00:00 -0500

*Sylvie, sipping through a backyard quarantine concert by a friend and SLSO musician*

Year 20 of my annual cultural-recap tradition was quite something.

Thus far my family’s had good fortune amid the global pandemic, so we’re spending most of our time feeling grateful, yet exhausted, then grateful, yet exhausted.

With lots of time at home, there was some enjoyable culture to take in. Here’s a look at some highlights:

Books

The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches & Meditations, Toni Morrison
Uncanny Valley: A Memoir, Anna Wiener
Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, George Packer
Having and Being Had: Eula Biss
My Parents: An Introduction, Aleksandar Hemon
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, Cathy Park Hong
Weather, Jenny Offill
Promised Land, Barack Obama
Then the Fish Swallowed Him, Amir Ahmadi Arian
Jack, Marilyn Robinson
My Life in France, Julia Child
Severance, Ling Ma
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson
Luster, Raven Leilani
Intimations, Zadie Smith
Monocle: How to Make a Nation
The Passion Economy, Adam Davidson
These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson, Martha Ackmann
Wine Simple, Aldo Sohm
Normal People, Sally Rooney
The Lying Lives of Adults, Elena Ferrante
Girl, Edna O’Brien
Lurking: How a Person Became a User, Joanne McNeil
How to Be a Family, Dan Kois
Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight Over a Modernist Masterpiece, Alex Beam
The Secret Lives of Color, Kassia St. Clair
No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram, Sarah Frier
Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, Hanif Abdurraqub
How to Write One Song, Jeff Tweedy
How Architecture Works, Witold Rybczynski
Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State, Barton Gellman
To Start a War, Robert Draper
The Spy Masters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future, Chris Whipple
Agent Running in the Field, John le Carré
The Monocle Guide to Better Living
Hell and Other Destinations, Madeline Albright
The Ride of a Lifetime, Robert Iger
Bitter Brew, William Knoedelseder

Movies

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (exquisite, perfect)
Parasite
Booksmart
Marriage Story
Little Women
Uncut Gems
1917
Meyerowitz Stories: New & Collected
The Irishman
The Trip to Greece
Palm Springs
Rams
Knives Out
The Other Guys
Maggie’s Plan
Shoplifters
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
The Price of Everything
Ford v. Ferrari
Despicable Me

TV Shows

Better Call Saul, Seasons 4 and 5
Atlanta, Seasons 1 and 2
Schitt’s Creek, All Seasons
Never Have I Ever
Call My Agent, Season 1
Roadkill
Devs
Great British Bake-Off, Season 6 and 8
Ted Lasso

Visual Art
I can’t recall a year when I saw less art — whether here in St. Louis or in cities we didn’t travel to. With that unfortunate reality, I’m especially grateful to have been able to see the fantastic exhibition “Terry Adkins: Resounding” at the Pulitzer this summer.

Podcasts
Favorite new discoveries: The Modern House Podcast, Distributed, with Matt Mullenweg, Siegel+Gale Says, and Simplicity Talks. Valuable mood-improver for 2020: Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend.

Music
My Spotify’s a shared-with-kids mess, and for loads of weekly hours I stream jazz and classical music that I don’t make a note of to be recalled. That said, I did especially enjoy new records from Fiona Apple, Phoebe Bridgers, Adrianne Lenker, Jeff Tweedy, Lomelda, Bob Dylan, Run the Jewels, and Freddie Gibbs & The Alchemist. I’m grateful to have been turned on to the music of Big Thief, Harold Budd (via the e-newsletter Flow State), Eleanor Bindman, and Haley Heynderickx, whose “Oom Sha La La” always brightened our family’s quarantine, with the kids screaming and jumping along to the swelling refrain, “I need to start a garden!” Here’s to what’s to come.

Weeknotes #02

Sun, 03 May 2020 20:33:00 -0500

Odds and ends from the past few weeks:

What a fun treat to see Forbes spotlight ListenForestPark.org, an audio microsite my team launched a few years ago as a side project. It’s found a new audience these days.
Finished “Devs” on Hulu. Dug the style and performances; so-so on the ultimate substance.
The series “ZeroZeroZero” was, like one of the creator’s prior work “Sicario,” cinematically beautiful; it was just too grim and violent for me to continue past episode three.
Made me laugh over laundry: “The Other Guys.”
Two episodes into “Never Have I Ever” on Netflix and really enjoying it. Brilliant choice of narrator.
Two live song performances I’ve replayed a number of times recently: Clem Snide and Scott Avett’s “Roger Ebert” and Father John Misty’s “Total Entertainment Forever.”
A favorite new weekly listen: The Modern House Podcast. Search for it in your podcast player of choice. Also recommend the publication’s short video going inside architectural designer Jonathan Tuckey‘s family home in northwest London.
Delighted that we were able to snag this unusual wood and leather lounge chair from STL’s MoModerne Design Shop. Bought through an Instagram DM, now settled into our den for years.
Best for last: We finished season 5 of “Better Call Saul.” Tremendous television. (How in the world did Lalo just show up so late and start owning scenes with major talent that had four seasons of episode strength beneath them? What a character and performance.)

Weeknotes #01

Sun, 19 Apr 2020 22:15:00 -0500

Borrowing the structure of a few other online writers whose websites I enjoy (Paul Robert Lloyd and Mark Boulton, among others), I thought I’d start weekly low-key look-backs on the week, bullet list-style. Perhaps weekly is aspirational. We’ll see.

Greatly enjoyed Emily Nussbaum’s long New Yorker profile of Fiona Apple, whose long-awaited record just hit my Spotify streaming today. After reading the piece, I’d been going back through Apple’s back catalogue, awaiting the new songs and relishing the old. That stellar start of “I Know”: “So be it / I’m your crowbar….”
Also in the New Yorker, I was moved by Alex Ross’s essay honoring his late mother, “Grieving With Brahms.” I admire Ross’s writing greatly.
Okay, one more New Yorker reference for the week: I was floored by Dan Chiasson’s review of Joyelle McSweeney’s new book of poetry that involves motherhood and tragedy.
I’ve been dabbling with Roam, which is getting a lot of indie attention as a networked-notes app. (See: #roamcult) At least for now, I’ve enjoyed reading in-depth use studies more than actually using it. Somewhat relatedly, it’s been a big few weeks for Notion, which I continue to use more as a work/life dashboard than a notes app. This general area of knowledge management is one I’m deeply interested in and will continue to be tracking.
Speaking of tech, I’m three episodes into “Devs” (Hulu) and plan on continuing. Intrigued. (I loved the look of Alex Garland’s “Ex Machina.”)
“Knives Out” was fun.
During quarantine, Pentagram’s Michael Bierut — one of my favorite voices on branding and communications — is offering a “Virtual Bookshelf Tour” on Instagram. Mouthwatering. Starts here.
On my family’s own isolation front, lack of options breeds ingenuity. Today Leo and I played driveway tennis over a rope tied between our basketball hoop and a locked stroller, followed by foam-ball lawn golf employing our Christmas tree stand as the hole. Worked surprisingly well.

Playing Haley Heynderickx

Wed, 29 Jan 2020 21:48:03 -0500

Thanks to a chance moment listening to KDHX in the car, I’ve now had Haley Heynderickx on repeat — especially her record “I Need to Start a Garden,” and especially the song “Oom Sha La La.” Looked it up, and sure enough, there’s a Tiny Desk concert in the books as well, with that tune kicking it off. Grateful for the find.

Tweedy + The Beasties

Sat, 24 Aug 2019 20:30:52 -0500

Two relatively new music books I enjoyed this summer: Jeff Tweedy’s Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back:) A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc. (honest, often funny; really enjoyed the sections about his sons) and the bluntly titled Beastie Boys Book (their mischief has been carried over to the copy and design).

Remnick on Buddy Guy and the Blues

Sun, 24 Mar 2019 08:45:37 -0500

While not personally a blues guy, I loved every paragraph of David Remnick’s terrific New Yorker feature exploring Buddy Guy’s long career, the change of blues’s place in culture and what the future holds, if anything, for the genre as Guy’s been playing it. Toward the end of the piece, Remnick turns to his magazine’s own poetry editor — poet and essayist Kevin Young — for this insightful description of the form:

The blues contain multitudes. Just when you say the blues are about one thing—lost love, say—here comes a song about death, or about work, about canned heat or loose women, hard men or harder times, to challenge your definitions. Urban and rural, tragic and comic, modern as African America and primal as America, the blues are as innovative in structure as they are in mood—they resurrect old feelings even as they describe them in new ways.

Mon, 12 Nov 2018 22:45:00 -0500

“Will Oldham: Unmasked” — For GQ, Alex Pappademas gets unusual access to one of my favorite songwriters.

Mon, 30 Jul 2018 22:26:00 -0500

Our house suddenly feels warmer with the recent arrival of this 1963 Wurlitzer Spinet. Props to the kind folks at [http://www.jacksonpianos.com](Jackson Pianos).

Cultural Notes: January 2018

Sun, 04 Feb 2018 15:45:10 -0500

With a nod to Kottke's monthly "Media Diet" posts, I'm experimenting this year with short monthly recaps of interesting things I've read, watched or listened to. (This is as much for myself, as noting what I took in can help me better recall it.)

Read

Paula Scher: Works — Terrific, from the opening essay and interview to the work itself. (A)
Abbott Miller: Design & Content — Intelligent and beautiful. Especially loved reading about Miller's co-founding of a "content-based studio" years before 'content strategy' became a thing. (A+)
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, Ta-Nehisi Coates — I'd read most of these essays when they were published in The Atlantic, but they were even more powerful here as a package. I liked Coates' brief introductions to each one, noting any changes (to what happened in the world, to how he thought about the issues) since original publication. (A)
Obama: An Intimate Portrait, by Pete Souza (A)
"Old Woods and Deep: Traces of Cormac McCarthy's Knoxville" — A rare deep dive into McCarthy and in particular Suttree, my favorite novel of his.

Watched

The Big Sick (B+)
Columbus (A) — Unique and sensitive debut with such lovely and surprising architecture.
The Sopranos, Final Season (A)

Listened To

Lomelda, "From Here," — Stumbled on her via Spotify Discover. The last-third build-up gets me singing.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on "Discovering America" — On this recent New Yorker Radio Hour interview with David Remnick, Adichie was incisive and funny. Moved me to pick up Americanah, which I'm reading now.
Slow Burn — Binged-listened to this podcast about Watergate. Hard to believe.
Saint Louis Symphony Concert Family Concert — First time taking Leo, who looked up with wide eyes at Powell Hall's magnificent ceiling. It was a treat that the special guest was the 442s, friends and collaborators on this Forest Park Forever project. A week since going, Leo's been loudly 'conducting' in the kitchen.

Tim Carmody on Bill Callahan

Fri, 03 Nov 2017 09:01:00 -0500

With this terrific Kottke.org guest post — “Bill Callahan, the only sad man worth loving” — Carmody had me immediately returning to the handful of albums I own. (As Carmody points out, Callahan’s not on Spotify, my own daily streaming service: “This means his legacy risks being eclipsed for a whole cohort of fans. I find this unacceptable.")

When Lapham Played Beethoven for Monk

Tue, 24 Oct 2017 21:47:00 -0500

Thanks to a surprise purchase by my wife, I’ve been enjoying the new issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, which takes music as its cover-to-cover subject.

I’ve enjoyed reading Lapham for years, but hadn’t known that he’d studied piano as a youth, or that he’d spent time in New York City as a young writer waiting (and waiting and waiting) to write about Thelonious Monk. After several months of sharing late-night space in the Five Spot, this happened:

At four AM on a Thursday in late March [1965], the Five Spot’s waiters stacking chairs on tables, Monk stood up from the piano, snapped his fingers, thrust his palm in my direction. “Time to play, man,” he said, “time to hear what you know.” Out front in the back of a Rolls-Royce, the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter was come to carry Monk home. She did so many mornings, but I never had been around at four AM to see Monk nod to the chauffeur holding open the door. A beautiful woman of uncertain age, wrapped in fur and wearing pearls, the baroness smiled, pointed me toward the seat in front. I can’t now remember if she spoke more than four words in my direction, either in the car or after we arrived at Monk’s apartment on West Sixty-Third Street at Eleventh Avenue.

Monk didn’t mess with preliminaries. Not bothering to remove his hat (that evening a fine English bowler), he pointed to the piano, opened and closed the wooden door of the bathroom directly behind it, seated himself on the toilet to listen to whatever came next. Nellie and the baroness sat upright and attentive on the small blue sofa they shared with a rag doll and a rocking horse. I played Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 27 in two movements (the first in E minor, the second in E major), run time fourteen minutes if taken at the indicated tempos. I don’t say I played it as well as Lipsky might have played it, but I’d been practicing it six days out of seven for two months, and to the best of my knowledge and recollection, I didn’t miss many notes, never once felt ill at ease or afraid. Monk stepped out of the bathroom, looked me square in the face, said simply, straight, no chaser, “I heard you.”

By then I knew enough to dig what he was saying. It wasn’t the personality of Lewis H. Lapham he heard playing Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 27. He didn’t care who or what I was, clubfooted and white or blue-eyed and black. It wasn’t me or my interpretation, it was the music itself, off the charts beyond good and evil that somehow and if only for the time being I’d managed to reach.

Nick Paumgarten Profiles St. Vincent

Mon, 04 Sep 2017 08:46:02 -0500

Following his exceptional profile of Father John Misty, Paumgarten goes deep with the intriguing, shrewd and self-aware St. Vincent:

When she listens to a playback, she often buries her head in her arms, as though she can hardly bear to hear herself, but, really, it’s just her way of listening hard. Once, during a mixing session, while she was at the board and I was behind her on a couch, surreptitiously reading a text message, she picked up her head, turned around, and said, “Did I lose you there, Nick? I can feel when attention is wandering.” Her cheery use of the name of the person she is addressing can seem to contain a faint note of mockery. There’d be times, in the following months, when I’d walk away from a conversation with Clark feeling like a character in a kung-fu movie who emerges from a sword skirmish apparently unscathed yet a moment later starts gushing blood or dropping limbs.

Sat, 08 Jul 2017 22:03:00 -0500

Fascinating, entertaining profile of Father John Misty in The New Yorker.

Mon, 19 Jun 2017 23:36:00 -0500

Demo of Low’s “Will the Night.". Among the most beautiful three minutes of music I know.

Song Exploder

Sat, 08 Apr 2017 14:06:00 -0500

Where have I been to miss this marvelous podcast for its first 101 episodes? Hrishikesh Hirway interviews musicians and asks them to break down a single song, which we hear in bits … and bits … and then in its entirety. It’s a fantastic idea executed with great polish, sensitivity and humility (Hirway is almost never heard from). I’ve so far enjoyed Jeff Tweedy/Wilco, Ghostface Killah and Bjork, with many more in the queue.

Jack White's World

Wed, 15 Mar 2017 08:16:00 -0500

Insightful and entertaining New Yorker profile by Alec Wilkinson. I can still vividly recall seeing the White Stripes at The Pageant in 2002, a blazing tricolor duo that owned that room from start to finish.

"Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl"

Sun, 14 Feb 2016 16:29:10 -0500

Really enjoyed Carrie Brownstein’s impressive, observant, terrifically titled memoir.

Year in Review: 2015

Fri, 01 Jan 2016 20:55:20 -0500

Continuing a 15-year tradition (though one that’s gotten briefer with age and fatherhood), here’s a roundup of some of my favorite things experienced during the past 12 months:

Books

My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Elena Ferrante
The Story of a New Name, Elena Ferrante
The Story of the Lost Child, Elena Ferrante
Lila, Marilyn Robinson
My Struggle: Book 2, Karl Ove Knausgård
Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald
The Balloonists, Eula Biss
Being Mortal, Atul Gawande
Becoming Steve Jobs, Brent Schlender
Stress Tests, Timothy F. Geithner
Van Gogh: A Power Seething, Julian Bell
Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo, Nicholas Carlson
Bark, Lorrie Moore
Girl In a Band, Kim Gordon

So-so: Grace: A Memoir; I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel

Movies

Ida
Ex Machina
While We’re Young
Birdman
Boyhood
Mr. Turner
Carol
Interstellar
Magic in the Moonlight

So-so: Spectre; Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation

Borgen: Season 3
Mad Men: Final Season
An Honorable Woman
Black Mirror: Season 1
Master of None: Season 1
Veep: All Seasons
The Good Wife: Seasons 1-6
Sherlock

Podcasts

Music
I used to make long lists of specific albums purchased and enjoyed, but since I’ve gone to paid streaming (and, maybe, since I’ve become a committed podcast listener), it’s harder for me to point to specific recordings at a year’s end. This is especially the case since Rdio shut down, and I’m now starting fresh with Spotify — my digital records are kind of a mess. While I listen to hours of classical and ambient/lush music through the headphones during work, a few specific artists I spent more time with in 2015 include Angel Olsen, Youth Lagoon, Sun Kil Moon, Sharon Van Etten, My Bubba, Jennifer O’Connor, Girlpool, Atlas Sound, Earl Sweatshirt, J Cole, Common, Pusha T, A$AP Rocky, Villagers, Natalie Prass, and Perfume Genius.

NYC + D.C.
I had the good fortune of accompanying my wife on a work trip she had to NYC, and it was incredibly culture-rich. Highlights included the new Whitney, MoMA (Yoko Ono and Bjork special exhibitions), The Drawing Center, David Zwirner Gallery (Serra show), Neue Galerie (sensational collection), the Cooper Hewitt, and “Drifting in Daylight” in Central Park (where I shot this short phone video). We also enjoyed a long weekend in D.C. with family, with pleasant dips into the National Gallery (terrific Caillebotte show) and The Phillips Collection (first time, great time).

Work
I’m fortunate to have a great job at Forest Park Forever, and 2015 saw a few especially fun projects ship. This includes the introduction of our new brand platform, our launch of Forestparkmap.org and the formal introduction of Forever: The Campaign for Forest Park’s Future, with a new website that features a beautiful campaign video we made with the team at Once Films.

Family
As referenced appropriately at top, so much of this year — and so much of every day — has been about Tamara and I raising our son. I’d been told that right around 2 is a fun age, and it’s true. This year had a ton of special moments, including — just to pick one, which we happened to catch on film — Leo’s changing expression during his first ride on a carousel at the Saint Louis Zoo.

Year in Review: 2014

Sun, 11 Jan 2015 16:20:00 -0500

Back before Tamara and I had our son in the summer of 2013, I used to keep regular lists of my “Annual Favorites” of the year — the best books, movies, TV shows, podcasts, exhibitions and so on that I’d consumed that year.

To say my rate of cultural digestion changed with fatherhood would be an understatement; that said, I still have an interest in logging the great stuff (if only for myself). So while I skipped 2013 entirely, here’s a go at some highlights from 2014:

TheGassInterviews.org
In May, I published a project I’d been working on for some time: The Ear’s Mouth Must Move: Essential Interviews with William H. Gass. I chose to publish this on Medium at no cost to the reader, and included a range of footnotes, photos and videos. Thanks to all the contributors who made this possible.

Books

On Immunity: An Inoculation, Eula Biss
My Struggle, Book One: Karl Ove Knausgård
Little Failure, Gary Shteyngart
Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays, Eula Biss
What We See When We Read, Peter Mendelsund
Inferno (The Divine Comedy, #1), Dante Alighieri (Mary Jo Bang, Translator)
Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips

Movies

Like Someone In Love
Inside Llewyn Davis
Her
The Grand Budapest Hotel
La Notte
Jane Eyre (2011)
A Most Wanted Man
Gone Girl
Take This Waltz
Enough Said
The One I Love
Your Sister’s Sister

Podcasts

Design Matters
Slate Culture Gabfest
Serial
The Monocle Weekly
Longform
In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg
The Entrepreneurs (Monocle)
The Stack (Monocle)
The Political Scene (The New Yorker)
New Yorker: Out Loud

Articles & Essays
If you follow me on Twitter, you have likely already seen links to the best articles and essays I read in 2014. I use it mainly as a way to praise and recommend.

Music
I listen to Rdio every day of the week — on my Mac, iPad and iPhone. A great deal of what I stream is classical, since I listen while I work. And on that front I do a poor job of logging what I like, as I hop quickly from label to composer, from soloist to trio. So for this post I’ll skip classical (and hip-hop, where I also jump around) and point simply to a handful of indie albums I enjoyed this year:

Beck, Morning Phase
Low, The Invisible Way
Angel Olsen, Burn Your Fires For No Witness
Sun Kil Moon, Benji
Tweedy, Sukierae

Life

Leo turning 1, walking, saying words
A relative I love being brave against illness
Tamara earning her doctorate in art history
Serving as Best Man as Mike and Sarah married
Tamara’s birthday dinner at Stone Soup Cottage
Attending a 90th birthday reading by William Gass

Year in Review: 2012

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 14:45:00 -0500

This post is part of my Annual Favorites list I’ve been keeping for the past decade-plus.

Favorite Books (Goodreads profile)

The German Genius, by Peter Watson (choice passages)
Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880-1918 (choice passages)
Life Sentences, by William H. Gass
Nox, by Anne Carson
A Hologram for the King, by Dave Eggers
Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective
Donald Judd
Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, by D.T. Max
The Long Goodbye, by Megan O’Rourke
Gerhard Richter: Panorama
Where Good Ideas Come From, by Steven Johnson
The Lifespan of a Fact, by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal
Chip Kidd: Book One: Work, 1986-2006
The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court, by Jeffrey Toobin
The Obamas, Jodi Kantor
Some of My Lives, by Rosamond Bernier
The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach
Berlin Stories, by Robert Walser
The Address Book, by Sophie Calle
The Englishman who Posted Himself and Other Curious Objects, by John Tingey
Art and Activism: Projects of John and Dominique de Menil
The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes
The Bridge on the Drina, by Ivo Andrić
Shards, by Ismet Prcić
The Promise: President Obama, Year One, by Jonathan Alter
Elizabeth Costello, by J. M. Coetzee
How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne, by Sarah Bakewell
Death in Spring, by Mercè Rodoreda
The Art of Intelligence, by Henry A. Crumpton
Zoe Strauss: 10 Years
Mortality, by Christopher Hitchens
Karaoke Culture, by Dubravka Ugrešić
The Fate of Greenland, by Philip W. Conkling
Redheaded Peckerwood, by Christian Patterson

Happy to have read Karen McGrane’s Content Strategy for Mobile, Frank Chimero’s The Shape of Design, and Mike Monteiro’s Design Is a Job, but would keep them off the ranked list. Same with “Mark Owen”‘s No Easy Day.

Favorite Movies: 2012 (Letterboxd profile)

Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present
Gerhard Richter Painting
Moonrise Kingdom
Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
Lincoln
The Master
The Queen of Versailles
Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap
Arbitrage
Skyfall
The Dark Knight Rises

Didn’t connect with: Headhunters, We Have a Pope, The Bourne Legacy.

Favorite Movies: Pre-2012

A Separation
Bill Cunningham New York
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Certified Copy
Margin Call
Notorious
A Dangerous Method
Bridesmaids
Young Adult
Moneyball
Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop
J. Edgar
Too Big to Fail
Hopscotch
Haywire

Music

I continue to be a huge fan of Rdio, which I pay $10 a month to be able to stream music on a desktop, iPad, or iPhone. (This includes, say, streaming the new Nas via my home’s wi-fi as I mow my suburban lawn.) There will always be rituals and a closeness to the music I miss from my CD days, but the advantages of Rdio — especially the ability to discover and immediately listen to new music, particularly hip-hop and classical — are significant. I don’t have a ranked list here, but my listening history is an open book.

Favorite Articles, Essays & Blog Posts (categorized, not ranked)

Affairs

“Newtown and the Madness of Guns,” by Adam Gopnik
“The Voter-Fraud Myth,” by Jane Mayer
“I Didn’t Come Back to Jerusalem To Be in a War,” by Dahlia Lithwick
“The Implosion,” by Jon Lee Anderson
“Of Babies and Beans: Paul Ryan on Abortion,” by Adam Gopnik
“It Matters,” by Josh Marshall
“A Victory for Obama and for Obama’s America,” by John Cassidy
“The Choice,” by The New Yorker Editors
“2,700 Hundred Pages for Anton Scalia,” by Amy Davidson
“Money Unlimited,” by Jeffrey Toobin
“Obama, Explained,” by James Fallows
“One More Massacre,” by Adam Gopnik
“Colbert v. the Court,” by Dahlia Lithwick
“Pussy Riot Closing Statements,” by Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina Samutsevich
“Something Wicked This Way Comes,” by Atul Gawande
“How Obama’s Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics,” by Andrew Sullivan
“The Obama Memos,” by Ryan Lizza

Culture

“Too Big To Succeed,” by Lee Kponstantinou
“Spotify and Its Discontents,” by Mike Spies
“Big Other’s Birthday Tribute to William H. Gass, 2012”
“When Art Makes Us Cry,” by Francine Prose
“Much God Damned Entropy,” by Gabriel Blackwell and Greg Gerke
“The First Church of Marilynne Robinson,” by Mark O’Connell
“We Are Alive,”by David Remnick
“Viewer Discretion,” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus
“The House That Hova Built,” by Zadie Smith
“Peace, Adam,” by Sasha Frere-Jones
“American Mozart,” by David Samuels
“Diary of an Aesthete,” by Alex Ross
“Maxim Interrogates the Makers of The Wire”
“Till the Knowing Ends,” by Joanna Scott
“Radiohead’s Runaway Guitarist,” by Alex Pappademas
“The Meet and Greet Museum,” by Steven C. Dubin

Tech & Media

“Your Anti-Social Media Rant Reveals Too Much About Your Friends,” by Alexis C. Madrigal
“Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out,” by Paul Ford
“29th Street Publishing and the Next Wave of Digital Publishing,” by Jim Ray
“The Way We Read Now,” by Dwight Garner
“BuzzFeed’s Strategy,” by Jonah Peretti
Craig Mod: “The Digital-Physical”; “Hack the Cover,”; “Subcompact Publishing”
“Deploy,” by Mandy Brown
“E-books Can’t Burn,” by Tim Parks
“Small Presses & Self-Publishers: Enemies? Or Half-Siblings?” by Sean Bishop
“Out of Touch,” by Andrew Piper
“I’ma Set It Straight, This Watergate,” by John Gruber
“The Death of the Cyberflâneur,” by Evgeny Morozov
“Good Things About Twitter,” by Sasha Frere-Jones
“Does Time Magazine Think Americans Are Stupid?” by L. V. Anderson

Essays

“National Subjects,” by Aleksandar Hemon
“War Dogs,” by Aleksandar Hemon
“The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent,” by Chrystia Freehand
“A Boy to Be Sacrificed,” by Abdellah Tao
“Tony Judt: A Final Victory,” by Jennifer Homans

Misc. Reporting, Articles & Posts

“The Yankee Comandante,” by David Grann
“Boss Rail,” by Evan Osnos
“All Due Respect,” by Peter Hessler
“Cocaine Incorporated,” by Patrick Radden Keefe
“The Story of a Suicide,” by Ian Parker
“Big Med,” by Atul Gawande
“What Brand Is Your Therapist?” by Lori Gottlie
“Artisanal Baby Naming,” by Bob Powers
“Resilient Redbirds Refuse to Lose,” by Bernie Miklasz
“Lionel Messi Never Dives,” by Jason Kottke
“Fals Nine vs. Real Nine,” by Dushko Petrovich
“The Caging of America,” by Adam Gopnik
“Study Reveals Dolphins Lack Capacity to Mock Celebrity Culture,” by The Onion
“The World’s First and Only Completely Honest Résumé of a Graphic Designer,” by Marco Kaye
“How Many Stephen Colberts Are There?” by Charles McGrath

Most-Used iPhone & iPad Apps

I start every morning with the NYTimes’ iPad app. I listen to podcasts, NPR, and music via Instacast, Public Radio Player, and Rdio. I journal using Day One, which is synched using Dropbox on all devices. The new 1Password 4 is a slick companion to the essential desktop app. I organize a lot of my work and personal life using Evernote, and keep up with tasks using Things. Other apps I use often: Reeder (every night, to catch up with the day’s articles), Goodreads, Fantastical, Tweetbot (iphone) and Twitter (iPad), Instagram, Facebook, Checkmark, Instapaper, Pinboard, Netflix, PBS for iPad, Simple, and iBooks (largely for work PDFs).

Final Notes

One unusual memory I have from 2012 is spending several weekday evenings in March walking through my neighborhood for an hour or so, listening to the day’s oral arguments for and against the healthcare act. (My greatest moment of exasperation was hearing Justice Scalia mock-ask whether he was seriously supposed to get through so many pages of material.) In April, I published Abstractions Arrive: Having Been There All the Time, an iPad-only e-book pairing an essay by William H. Gass with photographs by Michael Eastman; New York Times coverage was a cherry on top. May’s Confab conference was one of the best I’ve attended. In August, Tamara and I enjoyed a few highly cultural days in Miami. Surpassing all that, though — we’re expecting a baby in late May of 2013. I expect this should be my best year yet.

Zadie Smith Profiles Jay-Z

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 18:24:02 -0500

Two of my favorites. At one point, Smith introduces another lyrical gem (“I got watches I ain’t seen in months / Apartment at the Trump I only slept in once”), then rebuts a likely critique:

But asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture understands.

"Radiohead’s Runaway Guitarist"

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 10:21:22 -0500

Great profile of Jonny Greenwood in today’s New York Times Magazine. Greenwood’s soundtrack for “There Will Be Blood” has been a favorite of mine on Rdio for the past year.

"The Germans Dive Deeper"

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 15:55:00 -0500

Peter Watson's The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century is an extraordinary 1,000-page book. It is immensely ambitious, rich in ideas and evidence of the German-speaking peoples’ world-changing achievements in music, literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, biology, geology, bioethics, archeology, art history, and on and on. (On music, to take just one subject: “The standard ‘backbone’ of classical music consists today of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms — all German.”)

Watson, an intellectual historian and former journalist, is a confident, resourceful, learned guide. He succeeds not just in illustrating how Germany was the leading force in the world of ideas until 1933, but also in helping the reader consider the country since it was ever-changed by the Führer and the Nazi Party (“Hitler still makes history but he also distorts it”). As a writer and historian, Watson is sharp and entertaining, as evidenced by these well-drawn, memorable sketches and assessments of just some of the book’s key figures:

Brahms:

Prickly, oversensitive, cynical, and bad-tempered, he was as much feared and disliked as Hans von Bülow, who was notorious for his tempers and antagonisms. At one party in Vienna, it is said, Brahms left in a huff, grumbling, “If there is anyone here I have not insulted, I apologize.”

Strauss:

Paradoxically, Strauss was himself a solid bourgeois, with a sober — even staid — private life. Alma Mahler was at the rehearsal of Feuersnot in 1901 and confided to her diary: “Strauss thought of nothing but money. The whole time he had a pencil in hand and was calculating the profits to the last penny.” His wife, Pauline, was a grasping woman, once a singer, who would scream at her husband, when he was relaxing at cards, “Richard, go compose!” Their house at Garmisch had three separate doormats, on each of which Pauline insisted that the composer wipe his feet.“

Schoenberg:

Richard Strauss was ambivalent about Arnold Schoenberg. He thought he would be better off "shoveling show” [!] than composing, yet recommended him for a Liszt scholarship.“ … A small, wiry man, "easily unimpressed,” who went bald early on, Schoenberg was strikingly inventive — he carved his own chessmen, bound his own books, painted (Wassily Kandinsky was a fan), and built a typewriter for music.

Mann:

When war broke out, Thomas Mann — as we have seen — was as nationalistic as many others. He was not yet one of the giants of European literature but he did have a growing reputation. He volunteered for the Landsturm, or reserve army, but the doctor who examined him was familiar with his work and, reasoning that he would make a greater contribution to the war effort as a writer rather than as a soldier, failed him physically for active service.

Kafka:

Kafka is best known for three works of fiction … But he also kept a diary for fourteen years and wrote copious letters. These reveal him to have been a deeply paradoxical and enigmatic man. He was engaged to the same woman for five years, yet saw her fewer than a dozen times in that period; he wrote ninety letters to one woman in the two months after he met her, including several between twenty and thirty pages, and to another he wrote 130 letters in five months. He wrote a famous forty-five-page typed letter to his father when he was thirty-six, explaining why he was still afraid of him.

Marx:

Along with his fellow German-speaker, Adolf Hitler, Karl Marx probably had a more direct effect on the recently completed twentieth century, and the shape of the contemporary world, than any other single individual. Without him there would have been no Lenin, no Stalin, no Mao Zedong, and few if any of the other dictators who disfigured those times. Without him there would have been no Russian Revolution, and without World War II (or Max Planck and Albert Einstein), would there — could there — have been a Cold War, a divided Germany? Would decolonization have occurred in the way that it did, would there have been an Israel where it is, the Middle East problem that there is? Would there have been a 9/11? Ideas don’t come any more consequential than Marxism.

Freud:

Sigmund Freud’s influence was less catastrophic than Marx’s, but no less consequential…. Alfred Kazin, the American critic, maintained in an essay he published in 1956 to mark the one hundredth anniversary of Freud’s birth that “Freud has influenced even people who have never heard of him.” Kazin thought that, at mid-century in America, “to those who have no belief, Freudianism sometimes serves as a philosophy of life.” He thought that at “every hour of every day now,” people could not forget a name, feel depressed, or end a marriage without wondering what the “Freudian” reason might be. He thought that the novel and painting (Thomas Mann, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Expressionism, Surrealism, Abstraction) had been reinvigorated by the Freudian knowledge that “personal passion is a stronger force in people’s lives that socially accepted morality” and that the “most beautiful effect” of Freudianism was the increasing awareness of childhood “as the most important single influence on personal development.” He thought the insistence on personal happiness — the goal of psychoanalytic therapy — was the most revolutionary force in modern times, a modern form of self-realization.

Nietzsche:

Nietzsche’s most well-known — some might say notorious — aphorism is “God is dead.” One of his most important achievements, along with Max Weber, was to think through and confront the implications of that sentiment, to work out in what he saw as terrifying detail the consequences of modernity, a world of vast populous cities, mass transport, and mass communications, in which the old certainties had been dissolved, where the comforts and consolations of religion had disappeared for many people, and in which science had acquired an authority that was, in his view, as arid and empty as it was impersonal and impressive. It is in this sense that Martin Heidegger called Nietzsche the “culmination” of modernity — i.e., Nietzsche felt the loss of whatever had gone before more keenly than anyone else, and he described that loss in more vivid hues.

Beuys:

All this was overshadowed by the advent of Joseph Beuys, who stands apart (and, for many people, above) all else in German postwar art. Beuys, born in Krefeld in 1921, never deviated from his conviction that his artistic aim was to find a new visual language that would come to terms with the war and at the same time find a way forward that did not ignore all that had happened.

The work of art, Beuys believed, exists in “eternal time, historical time, and personal time.” Having himself been shot down over Russia as a Luftwaffe pilot in the Second Wold War, he was treated for frostbite by his Russian captors, who used felt and fat, which became the materials Beuys used in (some of) his art, fused with other, less personal substances. He felt the spectator should be aware of what these materials meant to the artist, adding a level of consciousness to the aesthetic experience (as a boy he used a tram stop near an important monument), with the national past, featuring railway lines to remind the viewer what railways were used for in Nazi Germany. But, his lines were slightly curved, to hint at progress, a way forward, and up. In experiencing the present-day beauty of his sculptures, Beuys is saying, we must relive past events — this is his dialogue with time.

Congrats to Watson for completing such a tremendous volume of history. I recommend it highly.