A Good List Goes a Long Way: 2023 Edition

I realised that for reasons I can now hardly recall, I skipped the yearly lists at the end of last year-it may have been some sort of weird conviction that lists don’t matter- that it’s pointless to draw lines at the end of a year, and then make resolutions for the one to come. Admittedly, I am always miserable in winter, in spite of starting the season, every time, with a fresh resolve to be fine. The end of last year was some sort of low, looking back on it. It also set me on the right track to spend this year as an absolute National fiend. Embrace being middle aged, and still clueless and miserable, but in a vaguely uplifting manner.

Not a sad dad in physical reality, but a sad dad at heart. Weird Goodbyes was in fact released in 2022, but since I had no list last year, it’s not cheating to have it here- nothing is cheating, basically, because I make the rules.

Other highlights of the year are the outrageously catchy Kandy, part of the Swedish craft of making perfect pop music. At the polar opposite, the disheveled but fabulous ego trips of Christine and the Queens and Lana del Rey- whose Kintsugi is the most Leonard Cohen thing done this year, and every year must have a winner in that category.

Also to be mentioned, the ubiquity, as radio music, of Romy’s Enjoy Your Life during our end of year Turkey trip, alongside Troye Sivan. Something beautiful in a barista with a headscarf and striking make up obliviously bobbing her head to anthems of gay love. (Is she really oblivious, is it a statement?)

songs

The National feat Bon Iver- Weird Goodbyes
The National- Tropic Morning News
Fever Ray-Kandy
Sofia Kourtesis-Madres
IDLES, LCD Soundsystem-Dancer
Oneothrix Point Never- A Barely Lit Path
Lana Del Rey-Kintsugi
Romy-Enjoy Your Life
Sufjan Steves- Will Anybody Ever Love Me?
Mitski-I’m Your Man

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Year’s best use of a Mitski song

albums

The National- First Two Pages of Frankenstein
Lana del Rey- Did you know there’s a tunnel under ocean boulevard
Fever Ray-Radical Romantics
Sofia Kourtesis-Madres
The National- Laugh Track
Nation of Language-Strange Disciple
Christine and the Queens-Paranoia. Angels.Love.
chien noir- Apollo
Mitski-The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We
Blur-The Ballad of Darren

The longer (and still occasionally expanding) list of great tunes from 2023 to be found below.

I hate it when year end lists are published in early December, just as much as I hate the fact that very often the first months of the year are also completely forgotten. Most ‘definitive’ lists for each year are in fact a snapshot of late summer- early autumn, the period when everyone’s back from vacation and starts to reckon with the passing of yet another year. Two of my most favourite films this time around ‘exhausted’ themselves in the pre-Oscar circuit and hardly anyone remembers them- I do, fondly.

I very much appreciated the somewhat baroque attempts of a Romanian- RMN- and a Hungarian-Magyarázat mindenre/Explanation for Everything– film trying to make sense of the complexities of their respective societies. These are brave and necessary efforts not many people are willing to make. Same goes for Anatomy of a Fall– a worthy Palme d’Or winner if there ever was one, tackling plenty of thorny topics in one ambitious go. The one standing out for me was the inability of most people to contend with the idea of a woman who is foremost an artist and might be lacking in other aspects of her life. Were she a man, she would be branded a genius, but as a woman, many will think of her as monster.

Also in the list, a triple fest of Hollywood escapism, feeling a little bit like the end of an era: something tells me that after the Guardians of the Galaxy played its last hurrah, no superhero film from the current iteration of the Marvel and DC universes will have anything really poignant to say anymore.

films

Aftersun
Anatomy of a Fall
The Banshees of Inisherin
RMN
Magyarázat mindenre
Fallen Leaves
Asteroid City
Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning
John Wick: Chapter 4
Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3

I plead guilty to being a Knausgård apologist who regrets nothing, all while agreeing that sometimes he does get lost in (interesting) but ultimately self-serving digressions. I was thus pleased to discover that in The Wolves of Eternity he (re)gained a focus on the tale actually leading somewhere. Flashes of Stephen King and Agatha Christie, steeped equally in existential angst and magical hopefulness. An absolute gem- over 800 pages, of course, as you do.

Otherwise, I did gravitate towards shorter works this year- Constance Debré’s Love Me Tender I read on a flight from France to Hungary, and I feel it now belongs to that unique transitional time so special to flights. In Brigitte Giraud’s Vivre vite (I find most translations of the title lacking the alliterative urgency of the French original) I recognised my penchant for overanalysing details and loading them with perhaps undue meaning, but applied to a fundamental existential event, something I was lucky not to experience myself.

I am often wary of books that become fashionable with a certain ‘hip crowd’, but Michelle Zauner’s memoir is poignant and heartbreaking in the purest sense of the words and sent me the way of Korean restaurants ever so often long after I read it. In Goran Mrakić’s Micile plăceri ale morții I was delighted to discover an author writing in my own dialect of Romanian, something I didn’t realise I missed, or needed, but I do. In a random convergence of events, Krisztina Tóth was Knausgaard’s conversational counterpart at the Budapest book festival, and she struck me as a very sharp and insightful person, but perhaps, I felt, overly formal. I was therefore delighted to discover her short stories that are ever so often infused with an absolutely wicked sense of humour that made me laugh out loud on sleepy café terraces. Don’t judge books by their cover, and authors either.