What I Read and Watched and Listened to in 2025

With the winding down of another year comes the chance to think about the stuff I've enjoyed (more or less) throughout the year. I found myself reading more books this year, but watching fewer movies, and I think my TV watching was also slightly down on previous years, for a number of reasons.

In terms of comics, I've mentioned a few of the books I've been reading this year, but the main thread remains the Uncanny X-Men. If I spent 2024 reading one issue of that series each day, from 1963 onwards, this year the question was reading through it until I got to the end of its original run, which I did the other day. That makes Uncanny volume 1 the first comics series I've read from its beginning in the 1960s to its end in the 2010s. Marvel subsequently relaunched it with new numbering, so I'll be checking those out in the year to come, but it's definitely the end of an era - when I was a kid I liked seeing those ever-increasing numbers and the increasingly ludicrous milestone issues (#500! #750! etc).

Quality-wise, it was a weird year for reading X-Men comics, quite apart from what's happening in the books at the moment. As I finished 2024, I reached the reboot that saw Grant Morrison take over New X-Men, something I'd been looking forward to since signing up for Marvel Unlimited. I liked Morrison's New X-Men, and I still think it's the second-most important point in the X-Men's history, but I suppose it didn't hit the same as in 2004, when I first read Planet X and Here Comes Tomorrow.

I had a similar feeling when I went back and read the original Age of Apocalypse event. I remembered a lot of it, but I'd just been reading the core X-Men books, and hadn't read much of the X-Factor or Excalibur or X-Force tie-ins - which may have been the wise choice back in 1995. I wasn't super impressed with the sequel miniseries from 2006, either, though Chris Bachalo's art on it was pretty good.

The other notable comic for me this year was an Epic Collection of the original run of Master of Kung Fu, the title featuring the original conception of Shang-Chi from back when Marvel owned the rights to Fu Manchu. It's not on Marvel Unlimited, and the Epic Collections are out of print, so I was super excited when I found it at one of my local comics shops. It's pretty dated, both in terms of Chinese representation and in terms of storytelling and art, but reading it, I can see why Douglas Wolk highlighted it in All of the Marvels. The book I have is the second collection, and I'd love to find the first and third, which apparently both exist - I don't know if I'm ready to go looking for individual back issues.

In terms of books, I stuck with my usual mix of SFF and history, for the most part. I read the second of Genevieve Cogman's Scarlet Revolution novels, which I quite enjoyed and I'm looking forward to reading the third, Damned, in the coming year. The first in her new trilogy was announced in January as coming out in October of 2026, so I'll be eager to snap that one up as soon as I can.

And I've spoken about romantasy, having started A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas and Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros. I'm really interested in the storytelling potential of this genre, which is why I figured I needed to do some research.

I also spent a few enjoyable months reading John Julius Norwich's histories of Byzantium and Venice. I liked the one on Byzantium better, it must be said, because it was a good summary of that empire's long history, and because I feel like there's more drama to it than to the Most Serene Republic, though I liked getting an understanding of how Venice came to be such an important power in the Mediterranean.

But by far my favorite history book that I read this year was Unruly, by David Mitchell. The prose was entertaining, because he's a very funny man already, but I also appreciated that Mitchell really knew his stuff, providing insights into how the English understanding of the monarchy changed over the years. I'd love to see a similar book on the kings of France or the US presidents, written in the same tone, but I appreciate that Unruly will likely have to remain a one-off.

Outside of those genres, the Slow Horses series occupied a lot of my reading time. At some point this year I bought books 5-8, and ended up reading them all in quick succession, with book 9 pinch-hitting admirably after its release in September. Mick Herron has become a surer hand with his plotting, and even if certain tics seem to have insinuated themselves in his writing, they're still super entertaining in their glorious put-downs, skewerings of British politics, and generally twisty-turniness. I was happy to also get some background on certain Slow Horses secondary characters in the Secret Hours, which is set in the same universe.

Speaking of, I got Apple TV late this year so that I could watch the latest season of Slow Horses, and stuck around to watch Down Cemetery Road. The former was a solid entry, modified from the book in ways that make sense, and I'm looking forward to whatever else they do on the show. With regard to the latter, it was similarly twisty and paranoid, and entertaining enough that my dad also got really into it (he doesn't watch much of the same TV I watch). I'm curious how it differs from the book, but hopefully we get another couple of seasons to fully adapt the rest of the series.

Apple TV was on a bit of a hot streak this year, since I got into Severance with the approach of season 2. I tend to think Season 1 was better, but that final image of Season 2 was amazing - hopefully it doesn't take too long to come back. I liked Murderbot even more than Severance, having read a couple of the early novellas in the series (and it's another one my dad loved). I'm still about halfway through Pluribus, but I'm quite taken with it, even more than with Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul (though my dad's less into it, so make of that what you will). I hope to write something clever about Pluribus when I finish it.

I didn't only watch Apple TV, though. Alien: Earth was well-made, but I don't think I loved it as much as many others did. It really came alive for me in the 5th episode, which flashed back to all the monsters running loose on the ship. Boy Kavalier and the other stuff on Earth was a little less of a draw, in the end. I got caught up with The Boys and Gen V, both strong entries though I found the parallels to current real-world politics wearing. I'm looking forward to the new season of the Boys, though, as well as Fallout.

I've already called Andor the best Star War in years, to the point that it overshadows Rogue One. This may seem like it's in contradiction of my complaint about the Boys, but at heart, Andor's less nihilistic and it's not rubbing your face in the comparison. Same with Daredevil: Born Again, which revisits and expands on the original Netflix show so well, while giving us a similar parallel in Wilson Fisk's ascent to NYC mayor. That said, I prefer the one we got in real life. As for Ironheart... I wanted to like it, but it came to a screeching halt for me when they had Riri get mixed up with magic, though I'll admit that the fabulous crew of bank robbers also felt like they belonged in a different show - preferably one that would give them more of a spotlight and not come off as box-ticking.

Another disappointment was Season 3 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. In contrast to last season, it didn't feel like it pushed as many boundaries or played with the structure, preferring instead to work in as many references to older Trek in place of storytelling (see "Wedding Bell Blues", where Rhys Darby plays Trelane). Where the show did play with the formula, the results could be... uneven. The "documentary" episode "What is Starfleet?" is an example, and ranks - for me - as the worst hour of Trek I've ever seen. I think part of the reason I was so disappointed was that I'd spent the year studying the show deeply while writing my spec script, so my expectations may have been too high. There's only two seasons left, and they've wrapped on the fifth, so I guess I won't be seeing my little script onscreen, but at least I hope they right the ship in the home stretch.

The main show that characterized my year though was Line of Duty - incidentally, another show that held my dad's attention. Keelie Hawes as Lindsay Denton in Season 2 was the best adversary, in my opinion, but every season's been a banger, and I'm glad that it's coming back for a seventh go. In the same vein, I've gotten into Blue Lights, which is sort of like the Wire but set in Belfast. I took out a subscription to Brit Box expressly for those two shows, just to give you an idea.

As mentioned, this wasn't a big movie-going year. I think I went to the cinema three times, all for superhero flicks? Whether at home or in the theater, old or new, my standout was Superman, imperfections and all. It certainly surpassed both Captain America: Brave New World and Fantastic Four: First Steps, which may have been better than Eternals or the Marvels, but still felt drifty to me. I'm getting excited about the next Avengers movie, though.

Turning to music, I listened to a shitload of it, but very little new stuff, though I appreciated some of the singles by Sabrina Carpenter and Addison Rae - wonder what that's about, eh? Something I got obsessed with late on has been Vince Guaraldi's Peanuts soundtracks - his Linus and Lucy seems to be on permanent repeat in my head.

My big British rock listen-through reached the Britpop era, which was great - I got to revisit Blur, Pulp, Oasis, Suede, plus other lesser-known faves like Ash and Supergrass. I was also weirdly taken with Cast and Sleeper - the fact that I kept listening to Cast's first few singles was not something I'd ever have predicted, but here we are. I then spent October listening to Apple Music's goth playlist, so I got acquainted with the Sisters of Mercy, and I quite enjoyed some of their stuff too.

Looking back right now, it feels like there wasn't much going on this year, but I've written a lot more than I expected to, so I'm clearly consuming more than enough media. TV is clearly my big thing, given how many strong opinions I have, but this year I've also learned about how it's produced, so I think that's given me extra appreciation for the good stuff.

Anyway, here's to an equally fecund and watchable 2026! As long as there's more than one studio left, and the output isn't all AI slop paying homage to David Ellison at Skydance, it should be an interesting year. We'll see.

RIP Brian Wilson

Usually I'm a little quicker at getting these obituary posts up, but a number of things got in the way, and I also found myself having to consider what I could say about Brian Wilson or about The Beach Boys in general. I'm not that big of a fan: my direct experience is with Pet Sounds, as well as some of the songs that have filtered through into the wider culture, like the early surf-rock songs or Kokomo. 

I'm also aware of Brian Wilson's influence on other artists, REM being a prime example. In their singles collection, In Time, several members of REM talk about how their love for Pet Sounds and later Brian Wilson work influenced songs like At My Most Beautiful.

I'll also be blunt: for the longest time I associated liking The Beach Boys with a certain type of middle-of-the-road white dude. I then met a super-racist white dude in college who was into them, which colored my opinion of the band. It wasn't until I got into the Beatles that I learned about how influential Pet Sounds and other Brian Wilson works were on them. And it helped that a friend of mine, who was also into the Beatles, could paint a better picture of The Beach Boys (hi, Matt!).

So a couple of years later, spurred by those experiences and by reading panegyrics about it on Pitchfork, I picked up Pet Sounds. I'll say that it's not my favorite album of all time, but it's a good listen - my favorite is Sloop John B, but there's a certain spirit pervading the entire album, from the first note of Wouldn't It Be Nice to the sonic landscape at the end of Caroline, No.

From there I heard about the lost album, Smile, but I never got as far as that, even when Brian Wilson came out of seclusion in 2004 to release something approximating what he'd envisaged the original album to be. I got more traction with Surf's Up, which is another step in that darker, more mature direction that Wilson dreamed of when he came up with Pet Sounds.

Reading this piece in the Guardian, it's easy to see why Wilson gets name-checked by so many other artists. In collaboration with Van Dyke Parks and others, he went deeper than the surf-rock style that the band was famous for and pulled in influences from all over American music. Indeed, listening to Parks's album Song Cycle feels like the bits of Surf's Up and Smile that I have heard, while also reflecting folk and classical idioms. BTW I should point out that Van Dyke Parks remains the only artist I've ever met after a gig, and the only one I've ever high-fived, after having asked him whether Aaron Copland really smacked him on the ass. Nice guy.

Anyway, I don't know as much about Brian Wilson's work as I ought to, but I greatly appreciate what I do know. And I think I'll take a break from my British music project to listen to Smile and Surf's Up, because I should know more about them in general.

Paul McCartney's Photography at the DeYoung Museum

I spent yesterday afternoon up at Golden Gate Park with my dad, since we had the day free and wanted to get out of the house. The plan had originally been just to drive up, walk around the park and have a snack at the museum cafe. But since my dad has a membership to the DeYoung Museum (as well as its sister museum, the Legion of Honor), we decided to have a look around the galleries a bit.

The main exhibit we checked out was the collection of Paul McCartney's photos from the Beatles' early tours, including their visits to Paris, New York City and Miami. McCartney had been experimenting with photography for a while and had brought his camera along to take some candid backstage photos as well as some artsy compositions of the Beatles and their friends and well-wishers. Along the way, the pictures also depict the preparations for the band's arrival in America, press events, the famous appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, and the band in relaxation mode in various places.

The backstage snaps are all pretty interesting: there are shots of band members goofing around their dressing rooms, along with shots of other performers who were touring with the Beatles, such as Cilla Black. In the sequence showing the band's visit to Paris, there are studio snaps of them hanging out with local musicians who were recording work for other bands or for the re-recordings in other languages of the Beatles' own songs. You also get glimpses of various band members' partners at the time, like Cynthia Lennon and Jane Asher, whom Paul was dating at the time.

Most of the photography is in black and white, but it bursts into brilliant color for the section showing the Beatles in Miami. That section is pretty much all vacation snaps, depicting the band swimming, lounging by the pool or fishing on boats. Everyone looks impossibly young and the Fab Four in particular seem delighted to be trading the environs of rainy northern England for the swanky parts of Miami in the summer.

One of the things that was fascinating about the exhibition was seeing my dad's reaction to it. He was initially skeptical about it, thinking it wouldn't be that interesting, but he ended up enjoying it a lot, especially seeing again the decor and names of that period, when he himself had been a teenager. At the end, when we ventured into the gift shop, he was moved to buy a double CD compilation of Beatles songs from the period (for my part, I bought Help!).

The other thing that struck me was how of their time the shots of the Ed Sullivan performance were. John, Paul and George are standing in a line, dressed in suits, each carrying their guitars and bouncing up and down slightly as they play. It's the iconic shot of them, and the pose that countless bands imitated in those initial years as other artists and impresarios aimed to capitalize on the Beatles' success. But it's also very, very different from how artists present themselves these days.

As I write this blog, I'm listening to an album by Beady Eye, the band that Liam Gallagher formed after the breakup of Oasis. Liam was particularly drawn to Beatles iconography, but it's hard to imagine a more different image from the clean-cut and purposely non-threatening Beatles than Liam Gallagher, who once stalked up and down the stage at the BRIT Awards in big puffer jacket, inviting people to fight while his brother Noel gave the thank-you speech for their award win.

That's not to say that Liam's bad and the Beatles were good. I just find it funny to see the original pose from their performance that gave rise to, as I said, so many imitators but also to so many reactions against that image. The Rolling Stones started out looking similar to the Beatles, but soon leaned into Mick Jagger's physicality, while The Who also initially ran around in blazers and ties but would end their sets by destroying their instruments.

In a world of Mick Jagger or Morrissey slinking around the stage and flaunting their sexuality, and Beyonce or Lady Gaga putting on elaborate choreography and costuming, it's quaint and kind of sweet to see those four young guys from working-class Liverpool, looking so self-conscious in their suits as they bounce around on TV. Just like the playbills depicting Sylvie Vartan and Johnny Halliday, or the interior decor of Pan-Am airplanes circa 1964, they're images from a bygone world, and it's great that this exhibition captured them so well.

The exhibition is on at the DeYoung until July of this year, so if you're in the Bay Area and have a free afternoon, it's worth checking out. And if you're not in the Bay Area, I'm sure it'll come to your city sometime soon, if it hasn't already. It's definitely worth a look, especially if you're a big Beatles fan like me.

Now That's What I Call All of British Music: The Britpop Years

My project to listen to (almost) all of the biggest UK rock bands from the 60s to now continues, and in recent weeks I've hit a big milestone that I was looking forward to, namely I've reached the Britpop era.

Because I listen to all of a given band's discography, I've gone through several bands and artists that were releasing material in the 90s, some of which swirled around what the Britpop bands were doing. For example, David Bowie was getting recognition again at that time, even as he experimented with other genres and styles, like electronica. Then there were the bands who came just before Britpop, like the Madchester/baggy scene (notably the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays), or the likes of the Beautiful South, Saint Etienne and the Lightning Seeds.

BTW, speaking of electronica, I've already explored the strand that was most closely associated with Britpop, the genre called big beat, which for my purposes consisted of Fatboy Slim, the Chemical Brothers and the Prodigy. And what's most fascinating about big beat is that my way in was through Fatboy Slim, aka Norman Cook, who was previously a member of the Hull indie band the Housemartins. While Cook went on to become one of the biggest names in electronic dance music, his former bandmate Paul Heaton spearheaded the Beautiful South, bringing things back to 90s guitar rock.

These bands, like the Beautiful South, were all in rotation on MTV Europe during the summers when I'd go to Italy, and they played between the videos that I was really looking forward to, those from Blur and Pulp. That's why it's kind of poignant to reach Blur and Pulp's discographies, because I'm reminded of how new and fresh they felt when I was just discovering them, and it also reminds me of how hard it used to be to find certain music.

It wouldn't be fair to say that it was impossible to hear these bands here in the US. Before the mythical summer of 1995, when I first saw the videos for Blur's Country House and Pulp's Common People, I'd already heard Girls and Boys and Underwear on my local alternative rock station, Live 105, but the visual component turned out to be so important for imprinting on my brain. As I've mentioned before on this blog, Country House (despite being reviled by a number of reviewers at the time) was bright and breezy and irreverent, in contrast to the dour fare I saw on American MTV at the same time. Common People was also a blast of fresh air, with its 70s sartorial stylings and bright colors.

When I got obsessed with Blur (moreso than with Pulp), I was fascinated by the diversity of musical styles on their albums as well as the aesthetics of their singles. To the End, from the Parklife album, features on its cover a rose lying on top of a gun with a silencer, evoking James Bond. End of a Century, also from Parklife, features a painting of a starship resembling the USS Enterprise from Star Trek. 

I wasn't picking up these singles at the time, though I'd likely have seen posters for some of them when I started visiting London. But the real impact is seeing them now and imagining how it would have felt to see them back then. It's the same with Pulp's songs from 1995 or so - in addition to remembering how I felt about certain songs at the time, I also find myself thinking about they must have sounded to other people.

The aims of the British rock listening project were initially to get acquainted with the discographies of the Kinks and then of The Rolling Stones, and subsequently to work my way up to music from beyond 2006 or so, which is about when I stopped being current with new music. But one of the other benefits has been to contextualize a bunch of bands I was listening to when I was in high school, such as Peter Gabriel or the Pet Shop Boys. 

Now that I'm at the Britpop years, I'm getting to do the same with an even bigger, more important chunk of my musical background, and I'll be at it for a while: after Blur there's Oasis and Elastica and Sleeper and all the other lesser-known bands that made up the scene, or at least orbited around it. Without getting too caught up in nostalgia, it'll be fun to revisit those times, and fill in any gaps in my musical knowledge of the era.

UK Election 2024: Labour's Coming Home

Amid all the Euro 2024 fueled jubilation, I haven't had a chance to comment on last week's election in the UK (or on yesterday's election in France). But ever since the results came in, I've been thinking about the return of the Labour Party to 10 Downing Street, and the parallels with New Labour in 1997. What crystallized it for me was rewatching the Britpop documentary, Live Forever, which is overall a pretty good encapsulation of what was going on back then.

Comparing the results of 1997 with those of 2024, they look pretty similar. Labour had 418 seats then and has 411 now. In both elections the Conservatives are in second and the Liberal Democrats are third, though now the Tories have way fewer seats than in 1997 (121 vs 165) and the Lib Dems have more (72 vs 46). One of the big changes is that there are more parties represented in Westminster now, with the notable ones being Reform and the Greens, neither of which picked up seats in 1997 (Reform didn't exist, but UKIP, its predecessor, was one of a couple of Eurosceptic parties that put candidates forward). The Scottish National Party has a similar number of MPs as it did then, in part because it suffered an electoral wipeout, while Sinn Fein has grown to be the largest Northern Irish party, which would have been unheard of then.

Keir Starmer is from the same wing of Labour as Blair was, specifically the more centrist wing. Like Blair, he came in after a stinging defeat for Labour under a more leftwing leader; though apparently Jeremy Corbyn is a bit further left than Neil Kinnock was. Starmer's also relatively young, though he doesn't give off the same cool-guy vibes Blair did. Not that I've had an opportunity to see lots of Starmer interviews, but it's hard to see him noodling on a guitar or playing head tennis with Kevin Keegan. On the other hand, he did chat to Max Rushden and Barry Glendenning of the Guardian Football Weekly, so there may be a cool bone in his body somewhere.

The cultural moment is very different from 1997, though there are some interesting similarities. The big difference is the sense of exhaustion that's permeated Britain in the last couple of years. The country was hit hard by the pandemic and by Brexit, and by the mess the Tories left. Britain under Margaret Thatcher and John Major was a two-speed economy, with all the growth concentrated in the Southeast and the more industrial regions left behind. Britain under this vintage of Tories has that dynamic, though the hollowing out of anywhere outside London and the Home Counties has just accelerated in the past 30 years, plus it's suffered from austerity since 2010.

To put it another way, Britain before 1997 was just stultifying, where many young people had no option but to go on the dole. Britain up until 2024 hasn't even let them do that, because of the cuts to benefits implemented by the Tories (and to an extent by New Labour before them). Instead, young people have had to leave university in debt because of higher tuition fees, find worse and more cramped flats to live in (all in London, because that's where the jobs all seem to be), and pay for all this with increasingly precarious zero-hours contract jobs that offer no security or chance for advancement. The celebrations feel more muted now, probably because no one has any energy for a proper knees-up.

Culturally, Britain doesn't really feel like it's on the ascendant now, either. Part of that is the nature of the culture industry, and specifically the music industry - there's a reason why the Live Forever documentary is about music rather than sport or art or cinema. 

One side effect of all those young people on the dole was that they had time to make music, so we saw a great flowering of unique artists like Morrissey and the Smiths, Depeche Mode, Erasure, the Cure, New Order and loads more. These artists, who sang in their native accents and didn't try to emulate American mannerisms like some of the more popular singers and bands, so we got the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays, and these gave way to Suede, the Auteurs, and eventually to Blur, Pulp and Oasis. 

Now it seems a lot harder to find the new Morrissey or David Bowie or Robert Smith or Noel Gallagher. I'm sure there are great bands all over Britain, but none of them seems to have broken through to the mainstream or to the US. My suspicion is that Taylor Swift is the most popular artist in Britain right now, even though she's not British herself. 

This isn't to disparage any of the great grime or UK garage bands out there, by the way - Britpop was a lot of things, but it wasn't diverse, and there were precious few non-white faces among all the bands I loved as a teenager. Whereas now you can have someone like Stormzy headlining a stage at Glastonbury. It's just a sign that the culture industry is more fragmented than it was back then.

Of course, the 90s were a strange moment for Britain overall. It wasn't just music, as Live Forever points out, and as John Harris's book The Last Party also stresses (though Harris's book is more focused on music). British cinema was getting exciting, though the only names I can really point to are Danny Boyle and Ewan MacGregor. In art, Damien Hirst was probably the most visible face of an art movement that includes Tracey Emin and was doing all sorts of innovative stuff in the 80s and 90s. Live Forever even goes beyond its musical remit to talk to designer Ozwald Boateng, who was also held to embody the virtues of the UK back then.

Just about the only thing that seems to have the same hold on the British imagination now as it did in 1997 is football. The England team of the 90s benefited from an explosion of funding following the creation of the Premier League, and from a lot of goodwill as the game cleared out the violent hooligans and became something that everyone, notionally, could enjoy. Just as importantly, black players were starting to come through and play regularly for England, better reflecting the cultural and ethnic mix of the country.

The English game of the last few years may not have suffered from violent fans or a European ban like it had in the 80s, but since Gareth Southgate was hired as head coach of the men's national team, results have been a lot better, with England reaching the semifinals of the 2018 World Cup (the first time in any tournament since 1996), then the final of Euro 2020 (the first since 1966), and after a disappointing, but actually on-par quarterfinal exit from the 2022 World Cup, England is currently one of four teams remaining in Euro 2024.

Incidentally, I'm going into this level of detail to record the ongoing savage culture war that's raging over whether Gareth Southgate is a good manager or not. I'll probably go into that in detail in another post, but here it's worth pointing out that Southgate makes for a nice callback to the 90s, because he was in that Euro 96 team that reached the semifinals before losing to Germany (indeed, it was his missed penalty that sank England). You kind of wonder how much that sense of the country being behind the team has permeated how he approaches the job now - certainly London didn't feel as bound by love for the England team during the years that Sven-Göran Eriksson, Fabio Capello or Roy Hodgson managed them.

I suppose, coming back to the Starmer vs Blair theme, that Starmer appealed to football via the Football Weekly podcast because that's the one thing that still ties together a majority of people in Britain, or at least England. Blair could invite Blur and Oasis to policy confabs and No 10 cocktail parties, because they were the biggest bands in Britain and most people knew about them. He could champion British filmmakers and artists because all of them were firing on all cylinders, whereas now Starmer really can only use football to connect with people.

There's also a cynical comment to be made here: with culture so fragmented along lines of ethnicity, race, sexuality, etc, football is the only thing that won't subject Starmer to accusations of favoring one group over another. It sounds a little stupid to say it, until you remember how apoplectic certain subsets of England fans got when the team would take the knee for racial justice in 2021.

In 1996, about a year before Labour won the election, Britain was enthralled by the first tournament on home soil in a generation (remember, the Scots also qualified). The song of the moment was Three Lions, by the Lightning Seeds along with comedians David Baddiel and Frank Skinner, characterized by its chant that "football's coming home". Blair used that slogan on the campaign trail, tying himself into all the cultural strands that the electorate loved.

Three Lions fell out of fashion for a while, but made its comeback in 2018, and has been trotted out at every tournament since then. Just our luck, then, that it's being sung on the terraces in Germany just as, back home in the UK, Labour's coming, at long last, home.

What I Watched and Read and Listened to in 2023

It's Christmas, so the year is basically in the can. I'm going to do a more comprehensive post later on how my year went, but here I wanted to consider books and movies and TV and all kinds of other art I experienced this year. Because the pandemic is influencing my decisions less and less (though I still take certain precautions), it meant I could also start experiencing movies in theaters again, as I wrote in an earlier blog this summer.

I also indulged my geeky/obsessive side more this year by keeping a spreadsheet not only of books I read, which I do every year, but also one each for movies and TV shows. I've always been curious about how much TV I watched, and because I was still quite locked down in 2022 I was watching more movies than usual, so I wanted to see just how much I was watching, and where I was watching them.

The short answer is that HBO Max, and subsequently Max, was where I watched the overwhelming majority of my movies in 2023, and I suspect it's also where I watched most movies in 2022. This is partly skewed by all the DC-related movies I watched, which accounted for almost half of everything I watched on that streamer. But Max also remains one of the best places to see older movies, including from before the 1960s, as well as generally decent films from the past decade or so. At the start of the year I was getting it from a friend, but when he decided to cancel his subscription it was a no-brainer for me to set up my own subscription (and I shared my credential with him, since that seemed only fair).

Overall I watched a decent number of 2023 movies, including some finally back in theaters. Realistically I could have gone back earlier, but it always felt like a hassle to pay $20 to watch a movie with a mask on and having to share a bathroom. Still, it was nice to see something when it came out, rather than waiting months for it to come to Max or Peacock.

Some favorites that I saw this year were Barbie, Oppenheimer, Asteroid City and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, with special honorable mentions for Maestro, Super Mario Bros and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. There's not much to say about Barbenheimer that hasn't already been said, apart from marveling at this cultural moment where the two biggest films of the year were a feminist deconstruction of a children's toy, scheduled against a dense, dour biopic of a mid-century physicist. Without pretending either is high-brow, it's heartening to see that people still enjoy smart movies.

Asteroid City is probably the movie that haunted me the most in 2023. I'll have to do a blog about Wes Anderson at some point, but this movie showed how he's much more than just the meticulously designed camera tableaux that everybody imitated for their generative AI pastiches of his work. I'm not entirely sure I understood it all, and I had to watch a couple of YouTube discussions to get a better sense of it, but it certainly worked as a meditation on the pandemic and its dislocations. It doesn't rank as highly for me in his oeuvre as Grand Budapest Hotel, Rushmore or Royal Tenenbaums, but it's a worthy addition.

Super Mario Bros and D&D were both surprisingly better than I'd expected. To put it another way, I had higher hopes for D&D, which it met, and lower hopes for Mario, which it exceeded. Chris Pratt remains my least favorite Hollywood Chris (and coincidentally, Pine is probably my favorite), but Mario was entertaining enough and made enough cute references to impress me that I was finally seeing a beloved character onscreen. Maestro, meanwhile, was anchored by Bradley Cooper's great performance and also his clear love of both cinematic language and Bernstein's music.

TV was more of a mixed bag, especially the shows that came out this year. First off, there wasn't a single streaming service that dominated like in my movie watching. Disney Plus probably accounted for more TV shows than any other streamer, but it was fairly close. I don't buy into the doom and gloom surrounding the MCU at the moment, but it was notable that Secret Invasion was a pretty spectacular misfire. On the Star Wars side, season 3 of the Mandalorian and season 1 of Ahsoka were okay but never scaled the heights of last year's Andor.

Some favorites were the latest seasons of Picard, Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks, which all traded in varying degrees on heavy nostalgia and in-universe references. Picard was so good that it almost made me mad, considering how inessential it made the previous two seasons, but it was good to see the old gang back together. SNW and Lower Decks, meanwhile, just went from strength to strength, with SNW in particular showcasing a range of genres that you really never get in Trek.

Succession's final season was pretty compelling too. For me the high point (SPOILERS!) was the episode where Logan died, and it was fascinating seeing how that event shone new light on certain characters. For instance, when Kerry showed up at the memorial and was kicked out by Marcia, it was oddly illuminating that Roman was the one who comforted Kerry and treated her kindly. The finale was a bit of a letdown for me, though.

I've also talked about how much I loved Slow Horses, and that's inspired me to start reading the full book series. But some MVPs that held my attention this year were Fargo and the Expanse. I started watching Fargo via Netflix's DVD.com, RIP, and just adored the first two seasons in particular. Season 3 had some high points but wasn't quite as successful, though still better than a lot of other stuff. I have yet to watch the fourth season, as that wasn't available on DVD.com, but I'm hoping to catch that and season 5 in the near future.

Meanwhile, the Expanse got better with each season. I originally watched the first two seasons on Netflix, pre-pandemic, back when SyFy was airing it; they were faithful recreations of the books, but the interest was more in seeing characters and plot lines foreshadowed or appearing earlier than in the books; it suffered a little from the same syndrome as the first season of Game of Thrones, where the world was well-realized but thinly populated. However, the show really came to life in season 4, when they went to Ilus, and I'm now midway through season 5. I'm preemptively a little sad about season 6, because it's a short one and it's clear they won't be able to fully tackle the Laconian invasion from the last few books.

Another honorable mention was the Last of Us. I had the great pleasure of watching the show at the same time that I was playing the game, so that an hour or two per week let me keep up with the show. I also thought the show was paced brilliantly, giving us digressions like Bill and Frank or Ellie's backstory at the exact right times. It also did a great job of conveying the same emotions in certain scenes as in the game, like when Ellie sees the wild giraffes toward the end. I've never played Part II, but I'll be interested to see how the second season of the show goes.

Speaking of games, Last of Us dominated the early part of my game-playing in 2023, but when I finished that I started up another one that I hadn't touched since I got it, Dragon Age: Inquisition. It's been fun to play that and to look at all the resources on the web that have sprung up over the ten years since it came out. It's a very complex game, though, and sometimes I'm in more of a mood for something easy, that I can boot up and start without worrying about updates and cutscenes.

Super Mario Wonder, on the Switch, filled that niche for me. The learning curve is simple if you've ever played a Mario game before, but it also does a nice job of adding new elements. Whereas The Last of Us or Dragon Age are sprawling games with lots of areas to explore, it's easy to get through a lot of Super Mario Wonder's levels quickly and soon you find yourself ready to beat the game. I'm hoping to finish Inquisition this coming year and also Wonder, and to take on more of my immense backlog of Switch games.

In terms of books, I didn't read a lot of recent stuff, but I did enjoy Annalee Newitz's The Terraformers - even if it's not quite as mind bending as Autonomous was, their books are always reliably entertaining. I also bade farewell to Genevieve Colman's Invisible Library series, which came to a satisfying end, and in the new year I'll be starting on her next book, Scarlet, featuring vampires during the French Revolution. Wes Chu's War Arts Saga also made its way onto my Kindle app, and I'm looking forward to continuing that one as well.

Special mention also goes to Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club. I ran out of books to read while in Munich, so I found it at an English-language bookshop near the university, and tore through it (luckily I finished it after I got home). I'd been hearing about it for a while, because I follow Osman's agent on Twitter, so I got to see for myself how enjoyable it is. It's an odd, but pleasing, counterpoint to Mick Herron's Slow Horses books, and I'm finishing the rest of the series soon. Just a shame Osman didn't start his series back in 2010, like Herron did, because I'd love to have a big backlog to catch up with.

In terms of listening, I continued my British bands project, and quite enjoyed Erasure's back catalog. In new stuff, I discovered Olivia Rodrigo because I go to the gym again, and Get Him Back! is a fun companion song to Kelly Clarkson's Since U Been Gone.

And finishing up with comics, I already mentioned my new subscription to Marvel Unlimited in my last post. It was prompted by my discovery of Comics Conspiracy in Sunnyvale, and my subsequent spending of crap tons of money on old Excalibur, X-Factor and Vertigo collections. I'm still in the early phases of the Uncanny X-Men, but as the year goes on I hope to branch out into more recent books, though for this year I'm probably not going to focus on Spider-Man or the Avengers yet. 

For 2024, I haven't decided if I'm going to keep tracking movies and TV shows, or if I'll add music, podcasts or video games to my spreadsheet, but overall, I've been taking in a lot of stories and stuff for the past two years. In the coming year, I want to spend less time consuming art and more time making it - but I'll have more to say in my final summing-up post.

Thoughts on Apple Apps

I've got a number of things I wanted to write about, but I'm not quite done reading or watching them all, so I thought instead I'd talk about something that's been on my mind a lot recently: Apple's various services.

If you have an iPhone, or are generally plugged into the Apple ecosystem, you've probably gotten alerts about free trials for certain services. They also do a pretty good job of tying these trials to specific devices that you've just acquired: when I got my Apple TV a couple of years ago, I also got a free 12-month trial of Apple TV Plus, which meant I could watch Ted Lasso like basically everyone else during the pandemic.

So for this post I'll summarize a few of these services and what I've discovered by using them. Some of it's good, some of it's bad, but it should all give a good idea of what Apple's focusing on these days, given that the phone/hardware market is probably not going to be enough to sustain it in the long term.

Apple TV Plus

As mentioned, I picked this up a couple of years ago when I got my Apple TV. I hadn't been desperate to sign up for Apple TV Plus, because its opening slate of shows didn't exactly light the world on fire. But then Ted Lasso became everyone's favorite show during the pandemic, and it became a favorite of mine too. 

I actually cancelled my subscription after finishing season 2 of Ted Lasso, but renewed it for season 3, and then kept it because I wanted to finish a couple of other shows. I liked the first season of Little America, and of course I love Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon, its creators, so that's on the list, along with Foundation and For All Mankind (which apparently got good). I'm also interested in Slow Horses, since I read one of the books in that series in 2021, but the main thing I'm watching right now is the Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman travel shows, starting with Long Way Round.

It does seem like Apple has some decent shows on there now, and it doesn't seem to be wielding the cancellation hammer like Netflix or Max, so that's nice. It's also interesting how the feed can pull in content from other apps, if you let it, though my experience was that it was super buggy with HBO Max (but then, that had so many bugs they could have called it Starship Troopers).

I don't know how long the trial period Apple offers is currently, but it's worth a look. It's also pretty cheap compared to all the other streamers, so that's another point in its favor.

Apple Fitness Plus

This was a bit of a misfire, in my opinion. I got a few months of it when I replaced my Apple Watch, and gave it a few tries, but ended up cancelling the trial early. There are some extremely clever aspects, like how it syncs your Apple TV to your Apple Watch, so that you can see your calories burned and your heart rate onscreen. It also has a bunch of different types of workouts, from yoga to HIIT to whatever, so you're not locked into one type of exercise.

That said, a lot of those workout types weren't very convenient for me, since I live on the top floor of a condo building and I don't have loads of space or equipment. I had to keep all my HIIT workouts to the low-impact versions (usually demonstrated on the side by a second trainer), so that I wouldn't annoy my neighbors or burst through their ceiling one quiet Sunday morning. Some workouts looked like they required a treadmill, which is cool, but I'm not taking my iPad to the gym, where it can get lost or stolen or broken. I'd like to have kept it, but I just couldn't use the damn thing to its full potential.

Apple Arcade

I got this one with my new iPhone a couple of years ago, and promptly loaded its constituent games on my iPad. I've also since signed up for it for a month or two at a time, to enjoy certain specific games (Kingdom Rush Frontiers and Kingdom Rush Vengeance, primarily). There are some fun exclusives, but the draw with those two Kingdom Rush games is that all the heroes and towers are unlocked, so you're not making in-app purchases.

Another game I spent a good amount of time on was the updated Oregon Trail. The Apple Arcade version looks great and its soundtrack sounds like a lost mid-2000s folk rock album, plus it has updated educational material about the Native tribes you'd have interacted with, as well as about race relations, gender relations and more. Maybe the only problem is that it's too addictive.

Now that I have a new iPad, with a little more horsepower, I want to check out Apple Arcade again sometime. It's also $5 a month, which feels like a ridiculously cheap price to get so many games.

Apple News

Not sure why I got offered a free trial to this one, but when I got the alert I decided to check it out, since it promises unlimited access to a bunch of news outlets that otherwise have paywalls or article limits.

It should be good, since I can check out the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal (on those rare occasions when I want to read it) and more. But it's really not. Of all the apps I'm writing about here, this is the worst, because of the lack of searchability and the fact that it doesn't integrate with other apps where you might find news.

To give you an example, I saw a New Yorker headline on my Facebook news feed. I tried to click on it, but I was at my article limit for the month or something. I went looking for it on Apple News, but News doesn't have a search function, so after sifting through a few issues' tables of contents, I realized I didn't know what issue it would have been in, so I had to search for it on Safari. When I found it there, I still couldn't read it because of the article limit. You'd think that two Apple apps could integrate, but you'd be wrong.

The original idea, of revenue-sharing with news outlets and aggregating news based on your interests, is good, but the execution is terrible. Avoid.

Apple Music and Apple Music Classical

From the worst to the best. I got a 6-month trial of Apple Music when I bought my Beats Fit Pro earbuds, and it immediately became my go-to music app, supplanting both Spotify and YouTube (for the most part). Unlike News, Music has a great search function, and unlike Spotify, it has pretty much every musical act I could want. I haven't spent a lot of time with its podcasts (nor did I listen to Spotify's), and its curated playlists are okay, so I can't speak to those, but I love the completeness of each artist's discography.

Another reason to get this app is that, if you like classical music, their Apple Music Classical companion app is included, though it's a separate app that you have to download, and it's designed for iPhone, so it looks weird on my iPad and doesn't exist on desktop. That said, it fixes the one glaring gap with the original Music app, which is that classical music discovery was pretty bad. This, on the other hand, lets you search by composer, genre, century, musician, etc. For the last few weeks I've been going through all the George Gershwin compositions, many of which are available in multiple recordings, and it's been fun to see how they all stack up against one another.

The other thing I like about Apple Music (the original) is that because it's natively on my laptop, tablet and phone, I can just listen to it whenever I want. That's particularly handy in the car, since I can connect my phone via bluetooth and play whatever I want when I'm driving, as long as I have signal. And unlike Spotify's free tier, Apple Music isn't ad-supported and it doesn't force you to listen to albums or playlists on randomly generated playlists. I've been a bit sad to leave behind my Spotify playlists, but I've had so much other music to listen to that I haven't had time to go back and recreate them in Apple Music.

This one is well worth the $10 a month, especially with its Classical companion. Which makes sense, since music was a key part of Apple's resurgence 20 years ago with the iPod and iTunes. They may not get all their services right, but it's good to see that this one is done so well.

Bluetooth Headphone Face-Off: Sony wins on sound, but Beats win on usability

I can't stop buying headphones. Since 2018 I've bought three sets for myself, received one set for my birthday and bought or advised on the purchase of two more. I thought I was cured when I bought my Sony WH-1000XM4 over-ear headphones in 2021, to celebrate getting a new job, but just last week I picked up a set of refurbished Beats Fit Pro earbuds, because they were on sale at Woot.com for $100, or half of what I'd pay for new ones at the Apple Store.

It's not like I need them. My M4s give me good noise cancelling for writing, while my first-gen AirPods connect easily to just about every one of my devices. But I persuaded myself that what I really needed was a pair of earbuds for working out, even though I don't listen to music while running and I don't go to the gym at the moment.

On the other hand, now that I've had a chance to play with them, I'm glad I got them. They may have edged out my AirPods, but I thought it would still be worthwhile to do a comparison of all three on certain aspects that I've found are important. So without further ado:

Fit

This refers to how they fit in my ear, or over it, and to how well they stay in place. With regard to the former, the AirPods are clear winners. They fit into the ear canal so nicely that after a while I don't even notice they're there. Their shape doesn't create the vacuum needed for noise cancellation, but that's actually a plus for me (which makes it even weirder that I got the Beats ones, but more on that below).

On the negative side, the ease of putting them in means they also fall out easily. I haven't lost them or had them fall out while walking, but I am constantly checking and adjusting them. Not only that, but when I did go to the gym pre-pandemic, I'd wear them while walking on the treadmill and the sweat would make them fall out more easily.

The Sony M4s (as I'll be calling them from here on) fit over the ears, so the band over my head helps keep them in place. They do create a bit of vacuum, but because it's over the full ears it's not so noticeable. They also stay in place nicely if I'm walking around with them on, but the weight of them makes that less desirable (and I'm a bit self-conscious walking around with them).

The Beats Fit Pros have that earbud tip that I usually hate putting in, but it makes sense for the noise cancellation. Unlike the AirPods, I'm aware that I'm wearing them at all times, but on the other time, I can trust that they'll stay put. I went out walking while wearing them this morning, and I appreciated not having to constantly adjust them. 

One of the reasons I got them was also the wings that are meant to hold them in place in the ear, and those are comfortable enough. If I do find that they're bothering my outer ear, I can adjust them and solve it that way. I have only two complaints: the feeling of ear pressure when they're in noise-cancelling mode; and the fact that when I used my phone settings to test their fit, it said it couldn't get a good fit on my left ear. I'll have to mess with the ear tips a bit, but hopefully I'll be able to fix that.

Connection

I've also noticed differences in how easily they connect to my other devices and how well they stay connected. I've connected each of them via Bluetooth to my iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air and Apple TV. You'd think the AirPods would score highly here, but surprisingly they don't, even despite the ecosystem advantage. They pair relatively easily with each of the devices, though it took a while to get them paired with the Apple TV. Once they pair, though, they drop the connection pretty easily. I've noticed it mostly on my phone, where sometimes the connection fails mid-sentence while I'm listening to a podcast.

The worst, however, is on my laptop. They require an extra step, of going to the settings menu and choosing them for my audio output. This setting just drops out at random from time to time while I'm wearing them, even though they maintain the connection. This happens less often on the iPad or Apple TV, but it's particularly bad on the iPhone, since they're meant to go with you and should therefore be reliable.

The Sony M4s have the most reliable connection, but with an asterisk: I mostly use them with the cord plugged into my laptop or iPad. This makes them way more reliable, but also less portable. Because they're not Apple devices, there's a little extra trouble to connecting them via Bluetooth, and they don't seem to like connecting that way to my laptop. On the other hand, they connect just fine to the Apple TV.

The best overall are the Beats. Right out of the box they connected straight away to just about everything that was in reach. They even did so on the laptop, and don't require me to choose them for audio output, nor do they drop the Bluetooth connection. Even if I wander out of range, they connect right up again when I go back to my laptop. The only time they dropped the connection was when I was listening to a podcast on my phone and set a timer; when the timer rang, they dropped the connection.

Sound

I need to do a full test of how music and voices sound on each of my headphones, but even without doing a full test I've seen a bit of a difference among all three. The other part of this section is noise cancelling, which doesn't apply to my AirPods.

To be fair, all three sets of headphones sound good, certainly compared to the older, wired headphones that came with various devices over the years. One way I measure that is by how loud I have to set my devices' volumes when I'm connected to the headphones. When using the AirPods I have to set the volume on my laptop to its lowest setting, while when I wear the Sony M4s I have to reduce the volume even further, by lowering it in the app I'm listening to: this is the same whether it's on YouTube, Apple Music or Spotify. The Beats, on the other hand, don't sound as good at such low volumes, though maybe this is because of the issue with the fit on the left ear.

Turning to noise cancelling, my impression is that it's better on the Sony M4s than the Beats, both because of the fit issue and because the Sony ones cover my ears completely. The effect also seems to be more subtle with the Beats: when I turn on noise cancelling it blocks out the constant hum of my fridge and the nearby road, while the Sony headphones feel like they cut out the world. Noise still gets through, but not as clearly as when I wear the Beats.

The real test will be next time I fly. I wore the Sony M4s on the plane last summer and was impressed by how much engine noise they cut out. I'll be curious to see how the Beats fare on planes.

The only other thing to note with the Beats is Apple's spatial audio, which they're compatible with. I didn't notice it much when I listened to Apple Music on my laptop, but when I went walking with them I put on some music with spatial audio and there was a clear difference. Specifically, if I turned my head then the music concentrated in the earbud that was facing toward where my body was facing. To put it another way, if I turned to the left, the music sounded like it was coming from my right earbud.

It's kind of a neat trick but not the surround sound I was expecting. Maybe I need to try it again when I connect them to my Apple TV.

Battery

In normal use all three sets seem equally long-lived, though the Sony M4s may have the longest battery life. That could be because they're physically larger, meaning they can hold a larger battery. It could also be that I use them slightly less because they're larger and more unwieldy, whereas the AirPods and the Beats get more use during the day because they're easier to connect and I can move farther from my laptop with them.

The one extreme case where the Sony M4s have done clearly better than the AirPods is on long video calls. I regularly play Dungeons & Dragons, for sessions lasting 3 hours, via video calls on Discord. I usually use the Sony headphones for noise cancelling, and they always hold up well for the entire three hours. For one session I wasn't able to use them, so I tried the AirPods, and they lost their charge after a short time, meaning I had to switch to another set of headphones. I haven't had that happen again, but I'm curious if the Beats would work for as long.

Other stuff

The AirPods have the smallest, most portable case, which is nice, but it also feels more flimsy than that of the Beats. The Beats also have a stronger magnet in their case, which snaps them in place for charging. The case for the Sony M4s, meanwhile, is huge and unwieldy, but that makes sense because they're over-ear headphones, so can't be as small as the earbuds.

Both the Sony headphones and the Beats charge via USB-C, which is nice for most people, but because I'm so locked into the Apple ecosystem I actually find it nice that I can use Lightning cables for the AirPods. This means I can use one charging cable for my phone, tablet, iPod and AirPods, whereas the other headphones require another, special cable that doesn't go with all of my other chargers and power banks.

Verdict

For audio quality and noise cancelling, the winners have to be the Sony M4s. They're a little heavier and more unwieldy, but the sound is clearer and I suspect they block out more noise than the Beats. They're not great for walking around, but they're also not terrible at it, and at least I can trust that they won't fall out.

For everyday use, I'd say the Beats have overtaken the AirPods. They may be a little less comfortable, but I never have to worry about them falling out while I walk, or even while I'm lying down. They also connect to all my other devices more easily, which makes them more convenient and quicker to get started using.

The AirPods will probably remain best for listening to stuff while I'm lying in bed or watching TV or generally staying still. Their sound quality is good considering that they don't have noise cancelling and so don't have to create a vacuum in my ear canal. I also appreciate the comfortable fit, though that fit is probably why they slide out of my weirdly shaped ears.

Stuff I Watched, Read, Heard, Etc in 2021

With the continuing pandemic and my own reluctance to go out and get potentially exposed, there's been a lot of time to watch stuff at home. Unfortunately, it's meant that I could only watch what was available at home, so HBO Max came through for me in a big way, while Disney Plus took a little longer to share its cinematic delights. Anyway, without further ado:

Movies

I feel like it was a blah year for movies, for the reason listed above. HBO Max, as I said, came through with a number of new releases at the same time as in theaters, and because everything feeds into some IP or other, it meant my girlfriend and I caught up on a bunch of movie series. For new stuff, the standout is probably Dune, which had a nice mix of action and intellect. That is to say, it's not the kind of introspective SF that marked Interstellar or even Denis Villeneuve's earlier film Arrival, but it's a cut above most tentpole SF blockbusters because the explosions and warfare aren't the point. It was a faithful adaptation in all the best ways, and the casting was mostly good. I'm looking forward to the next one - and maybe I'll even get to see it in theaters!

HBO Max also provided access to a couple of big superhero-related movies: the Zack Snyder Cut of Justice League, and the Suicide Squad. It was interesting seeing the long-awaited Snyder Cut, since I remember JL being pretty bad; the new version wasn't Citizen Kane, but thinking back on it now, it felt like a different movie and like all the parts fit together in a way that I don't remember the previous version doing. 

Suicide Squad, meanwhile, was a fun romp through the incredibly rich back catalogue of random DC characters. I don't love James Gunn's other superhero work, but it was nice to see Warners give him free rein to tell the story in as violent and sweary a way as he wanted. The result came off like DC's answer to Deadpool, and it looks like the story will continue with the new Peacemaker series.

I also caught up with Warner's Godzilla movies, several of which I'd seen, but they were better on the second go. Kong: Skull Island was particularly fun, and even Godzilla: King of the Monsters held up better than I remembered. Kong vs Godzilla was a little bit sillier than either, but was an okay romp. It was also nice to rewatch the Jurassic Park movies, and some bits of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom looked a lot better seen a second time.

The one new series that I caught was the Conjuring movies, again because HBO Max released the latest one and made the rest of the series available. The first was obviously the best, but it was fun seeing how the Nun and the Annabelle movies fit into the overall whole.

Looking at the amount of movies I watched there, it's clear that HBO Max has taken over as the streaming service to get the kinds of movies you'd actually want to watch. Netflix has some good ones, but they're mostly its own originals, as all the content holders take their stuff away to form their own streaming services.

TV

I caught up with a lot of series this year that I'd been watching previously, but the main new thing I discovered was Star Trek: Lower Decks. It took a while to warm to it, because I'm not entirely on board with the frenetic type of humor it mines from Rick and Morty, but the show improved as it based more of its humor on obscure Trek lore. I hold it up in contrast to the Orville, which tries to do the same thing (identifying the absurd parts of Trek while also getting at the meanings, morals and messages), but still got stuck too much on making Family Guy-style jokes about it all. That said, both are the continuations of TNG that I've been wanting, so I'm interested to see how their respective second seasons turn out.

Narcos was another fun one, both the original Colombia show and the Mexico sequel. I saw them out of order, catching Narcos: Mexico first, which perhaps made the original stand out better, even in the third season when the focus moves from Pablo Escobar to the Cali Cartel. Both, however, were entertaining procedurals looking at how the drug war is prosecuted, and the final season of Narcos: Mexico looks promising so far. Though I could watch another few seasons of Wagner Moura as Escobar.

Music & Podcasts

I'd love to separate these into two categories, but even with my British music listening project, it's been hard to find new music to fall in love with. The one exception, though it's not recent, is Echo and the Bunnymen, which sounds like something I'd have loved in high school and college. There's something about the soundscapes that reminds me of the Smiths and the Cure, so it's been fun exploring their back catalogue in its entirety.

In terms of podcasts, I discovered a few good history podcasts, mostly on ancient cultures. The Ancient World, the Ancients and Fall of Civilizations have all been entertaining to listen to, and feel like they could provide some good fodder for fantasy or science fiction story ideas.

Books & Comics

The one new book that I read that really caught my attention this year was Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It was a quick, compulsive read, which I found hard to put down and which felt like a spiritual successor to Stephen Baxter's Evolution, and indirectly to Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men. I'm looking forward to the sequel, Children of Ruin, and to looking at the rest of Tchaikovsky's back catalogue.

Otherwise, I just read more books in series I've been rationing out year to year (like Genevieve Cogman's super-fun Invisible Library series and Marko Kloos's also-fun Frontlines books). I've got the final Expanse novel, Leviathan Falls, queued up on my Kindle, which I'll be tackling at some point in the new year, though I don't know what I'll do with myself when I've finished the series. I also read the second and third books of Joe Abercrombie's Age of Madness trilogy, following up his First Law series. Like with Leviathan Falls, I don't quite know what to do with myself now, and while I'll be looking forward to Abercrombie's next book, I hope he revisits this setting sooner rather than later, because I want to know what comes next.

In terms of comics, I stuck with re-reading my whole collection, so I've been revisiting books I haven't read in about 10-20 years, if not more. I've also finally gotten to my Marvel books, and it's been interesting (and sometimes a little infuriating) getting acquainted with the X-Men again. I'm still leaning toward subscribing to DC and Marvel's digital comics services at some point, so that I can read... well... everything. Who knows when I'll find the time for that, of course...

Games

There hasn't been much interesting gaming this year, though I'll have some extra time for it in the coming months. I did manage to get a Switch at the end of last year, and I have a couple of Mario games, as well as FIFA 21 (a stripped down version), to play with. Other than that, I drifted away from Mario Kart Tour on iOS, and drifted into Apple Arcade, which has also led me back to Kingdom Rush - and to the nerdy world of Kingdom Rush fandom on YouTube.

As I keep saying, iOS games like Kingdom Rush are good because they don't require the time and mental investment that the latest blockbuster games for the state of the art consoles require. I've tried picking up Skyrim again recently, but it's been years and I don't exactly know what I'm doing anymore. On the other hand, I can knock out a couple levels of Kingdom Rush without keeping all kinds of backstory straight.

That said, I do sometimes think it'd be nice to grab a new console and game, like God of War or Horizon: Zero Dawn, to be up with what everyone's talking about. I might just try, though I feel like I ought to finish more of the games I already have...

British Sea Power is Dead. Long Live Sea Power

Just discovered today that English indie band British Sea Power has dropped the "British" part from its name and will henceforth be known as Sea Power. My first inkling was when I saw a Youtube video by someone called Sea Power, which made me wonder if it was BSP, a band I've loved since 2004 or so, but with whom I've lost touch in recent years (as I have with all bands, frankly).

So I went looking around, and found that they had indeed changed their name, and they explain why here. It's hard to disagree with their reasoning, especially given the turn that British politics has taken since June 2016 (but also that it was taking long before then). With the Tories spending the last decade ginning up xenophobia and isolationism by invoking the so-called glorious past, especially the Empire and WWII, it must feel increasingly difficult to maintain a name like "British Sea Power".

They say in that Guardian article that the name was originally intended, in part, as "1950s situationist", but I can also imagine that there are sections of the British music-listening public that couldn't pronounce that word, let alone define it (not that I can really define it either - I assume it has something to do with Dada?). And not to put too fine a point on it, especially since I've only seen them live twice, but you can imagine a section of their fans that maybe doesn't understand that the WWI uniforms, lyrics invoking places in Britain, and all other trappings isn't meant to be an uncritical lionization of Britain's past.

That is to say, were there fans at BSP shows who weren't in on the joke? Did BSP worry about getting co-opted by skinheads the way Madness, Morrissey and Joy Division have been, to varying degrees? If so, it's a shame to see them giving up the fight against people like that.

My only quibble (and it's truly just that) is that Sea Power doesn't have the same ring as British Sea Power.  Realistically, I don't see why it should change my opinion of their first two albums, The Decline of British Sea Power and Open Season, as some of the most distinctive and idiosyncratic music in my collection (outside of the avant-garde that I have). The first album, Decline, is so much about Britishness that I couldn't help but love it, while Open Season in my memory sounds like a Victorian trophy cabinet - though that might just be because of songs like Victorian Ice and Oh Larsen B.

Much of my most British music is strongly urban, tied to cities like London, Manchester or Glasgow, but Sea Power's the only one that seems to engage with the countryside, the past and the forgotten parts of Britain (like their song Canvey Island, off third album Do You Like Rock Music?). Their singular vision was demonstrated nicely by their writing a new score to Man of Aran, a 1920s documentary about people living on the desolate west coast of Ireland; and also by selling mugs emblazoned with British Tea Power (one of which I have back in London).

I have no reason to expect that the name change heralds a shift from these themes. But as I say, it feels a little like they're ceding the fight over what's "British" to the worst proponents of the term, right at the time when England, and Britain more generally, needs someone to articulate a left nationalism that encompasses a nautical (as opposed to naval) tradition of the country, and that champions appreciation of nature and the countryside as something for all people, rather than the Tory/nimby impulse to keep the countryside green for the landowners.

It's interesting that they received a lot of interview requests from far-right channels like GB News and Russia Today in the wake of their name change, because it's hard not to see it as a salvo in the ongoing culture war. I applaud them not talking to those outlets, and I wish them success in their next albums - my Great British Music Relisten hasn't arrived at SP yet, but I'm looking forward to it.

Key Years

I've mentioned how I'm frequently rereading books and comics, or rewatching shows, that I've liked in the past, but I've been thinking lately about which media I'm consuming and what times these things are from. I've narrowed it down to three main periods that I keep revisiting, in some way or other. They are, plus or minus a couple of years, 1995 and 2002 and 2013.

The stuff from 1995 seems to be mostly music, comics and TV shows. From 2002 it's mainly books, and extending to around 2004-05 it's music. And finally, 2013 is associated mostly with books.

When I noticed this pattern I started thinking about why I kept coming back to these years, and the best I can come up with is that they were particularly key years, though usually for very different reasons.

1995 is associated with the best time in Britpop, which isn't just when I was experiencing exciting new music but also forming my self-image as a "European". I was getting more interested in European history (especially World War II) and languages, and starting to imagine what my life would be like when I could live on my own.

That interest in Europe and Britain in particular took in Premier League football, and the British comics I was discovering at the time. Of course, by 1995 Neil Gaiman's run on the Sandman was ending and Garth Ennis had finished his run on Hellblazer, but because I discovered those books around that time (actually even a tiny bit earlier) I associate them with the period. By the same token, I didn't read Grant Morrison's Invisibles until a few years later, but rereading the collections now I see how much that book was a product of its time: 1995.

The other thing I was into at around that time was Star Trek, so I can't help but associate that year with Deep Space Nine, in particular. In fact, I've already noted how my most recent rewatch had me remembering the first time I saw those episodes, i.e. 1995-97, rather than the second time in 2006 or so. About which more anon.

2002 is another key year because I'd just started my first job and was reveling in the actual circumstances of being a young adult on my own for the first time. I'd also gotten into travel, which meant I was fixated on travel writing in a big way. In a way every time I reread my beloved Bill Bryson or Paul Theroux books, I'm revisiting that period, when the world was opening itself up to me in a way that hadn't been possible when I was a kid and when I didn't have a monthly paycheck to finance such gallivantings.

In terms of music, 2002 itself was a little barren but by the end of that year I'd discovered the resurgence of guitar bands that had begun with the Strokes and the White Stripes. I was discovering new bands, both from the UK (like British Sea Power) and, in a first for me, from the US (like Interpol). At the same time, I was also discovering a lot of the older music that was influencing what I was discovering then, so I picked up Morrissey's post-Smiths back catalog, for instance, or Joy Division and New Order.

The next one is 2013, which isn't so much a year of a big transition as it was of a new feeling: actually being good at shit. In 2011 and to a greater extent in 2012 I'd found my feet at work much more than I ever had previously, and this trend carried on in 2013. I don't remember the football so much, and I'd kind of lost the thread of newer music by then, but what sticks with me most from that time is travel and history books. I've already written about it, but there was a whole sub-genre of books mostly by white male British writers extolling the wonders of one specific Northern European country, be it Germany, Switzerland or Denmark, and I was having it all.

The ones about Germany all seem to have hit around the same time, though I didn't read them all when they came out. However, I reread Germania by Simon Winder last year (preparatory to reading Lotharingia, his latest, this year), and I've reread Keeping Up with the Germans, by Philip Oltermann, several times since I bought it in 2014. Honestly, I'm kind of twitching with the junkie-like need to read it right now, although that might also be related to my Europe withdrawal, a result of not being able to get on a plane and go to London and Italy because of this stupid pandemic.

My 2013 nostalgia, by the way, is also manifesting in a desire to finish series I began or was in the middle of during that year. Last year I caught up with Ian Tregillis's alternate WWII trilogy, The Coldest War, and with Jasper Kent's Danilov Quintet, for example, and I'm still working on James SA Corey's The Expanse, though there wasn't a gap with those books as big as with the Tregillis or Kent books.

Now, it's also interesting to think about why certain years don't loom as large. 1997-98 is one, given that I'd just started college and was getting into a bunch of new music (namely all the gloomy Manchester bands from the 80s). 2006 is the other, since I'd just graduated from graduate school and returned to London to start Phase 2 of my working life.

For the former, the music just became part of my mental furniture and I've rarely been away from the Cure, the Smiths and whatever else I was listening to then. For the latter, all the bands that had become exciting in 2002-04 suddenly started releasing boring second albums. I watched a bunch of TV that was perhaps more admirable than lovable (e.g. Battlestar Galactica); or I started the big Star Trek rewatch that essentially continues now. And in terms of books, I have vague memories of a bunch of disappointing British SF novels and waiting for the next George RR Martin book to come out (which didn't happen until 2010).

Memory is a funny thing, of course. We all remember where we were when we heard about momentous events, but we also reconstruct otherwise meaningful times in our lives. By focusing in on those three periods, I can draw some conclusions about what was going on that perhaps resonates now, though it's best not to read too much into it - I could easily point to nostalgia for other books and series I was reading at the time, for instance.

Though I wonder if other people are so fixated on books, music and other media from similar significant periods in their lives, or if it's just because as an SFF writer I'm always chasing the high I got from reading favorite classics of the genre?

Now That's What I Call All of British Music

My research through the twisting and turning corridors of British music continues. As promised when I wrote about listening to all of the Kinks' albums a few months ago, I went on to listen to the Rolling Stones' discography, then The Who, and on and on. I've explored how the blues and R&B fascination of the 60s turned into the hard rock of the 70s, and from there into the stadium rock of the 80s, a trajectory that encompassed all three bands, and might have included the Beatles, if they'd lasted that long.

I had a brief delve into folk, with the Small Faces (though not the Faces) and Fairport Convention, though there again I wasn't sure I wanted to continue through their discography which (impressively) continues to the present day. I might still be on Fairport Convention if I'd done that.

My other big takeaway so far from this whole business is that prog rock is not for me. I gave the albums of Jethro Tull a game stab, but didn't start very promisingly with This Was or Stand Up, and I gave up completely when I got to A Passion Play. Aqualung may be considered a high-water mark but with that in mind, why subject myself to the likes of 1999's J-Tull Dot Com?

The one exception to my "no-prog" rule is Pink Floyd, but I think they really only got good when they left behind the worst excesses of the genre with Dark Side of the Moon. And even they had a difficult decade in the 80s, when David Gilmour and Roger Waters decided they'd had enough of each other.

The Bee Gees are another band that I fail to see the charms of, now that I've listened to their whole oeuvre. They weren't very remarkable before they took up the whole disco thing, nor were they very remarkable after, when they opted for the same over-produced sounds that many a British rock band's career foundered on. Come to think of it, the disco years weren't particularly exciting either.

The most interesting thing about them, I'd say, is the late Robin Gibb's uncanny resemblance to former Tory leadership candidate Rory Stewart. The proof that we're in the darkest timeline is that a Google search for "Rory Stewart Robin Gibb" fails to throw up pictures of the two side by side for comparison (I'd do it myself, but I'm not that bothered, frankly, and I don't have loads of time for such bollocks tonight).

There are positives, of course. I really liked going through Elton John's back catalog. I loved his 70s albums when I was in middle school and high school, and revisiting them had the same effect as re-reading my old comics - being reminded of stuff I hadn't thought about in twenty years and revisiting what I liked about it then. Of course, he had a pretty difficult 80s too, a fact that comes to mind especially when I watch the video for Nikita and realize that Ethan Phillips based the character and look of Neelix in Star Trek: Voyager on Elton's get-up for that video, right down to the unfortunate mullet.

Slightly more seriously, it's interesting to see the similar trajectories, where these artists find out how the things that worked in the first decade of their career don't necessarily work in the second, only to find that a back-to-basics approach allows them to carve out a respectable third decade. It worked for the Kinks, the Rolling Stones and Elton John - the tragedy is that the Kinks broke up just as people started to recognize how good they'd been.

It's worth noting that there's a point to the whole enterprise, beyond muso credit. In a lot of cases, I knew about these less-heralded bits of favorite artists' careers, but only glancingly. It's been nice filling in the gaps in my knowledge, for instance by listening to Genesis and figuring out where both Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins came from.

There's loads more to go, of course. The 60s were easy because if you listen to The Beatles, the Kinks, The Who and the Rolling Stones, you've basically hit the high points (though I did go further and also listen to the Small Faces and the Zombies), but the 70s are when rock splintered into a number of sub-genres... and that's even before you get to punk.

Ironically I'm already a lot more conversant with the best bands of the 80s and 90s, but I'm sure both decades will throw up some interesting stuff. I'm also hoping that the 2000s will hold up as well, and that I'll be able to find some decent bands from the 2010s, though I may have to draw the line at Bastille...

RIP Scott Walker

Just learned today that Scott Walker, the former singer of the Walker Brothers and architect of the most challenging avant garden pop I have, passed away at the age of 76.

I first learned about Walker from a muso friend, who gave me a look of withering disdain in 2003 or 2004 when he told me that this Walker guy had produced Pulp's latest album, and I said I didn't know who he was.

How could you blame me, though? As I discovered a year or so later, when I wandered into a New York record store and asked about Scott Walker's albums, the guy wasn't well known at all in the US in those days. Which is ironic because he was American, though he'd made his name as a 60s boy band icon, and then again as a critical darling in the 1980s for the succession of challenging albums that started with Climate of Hunter. I soon started reading Pitchfork's 100 albums lists, and Walker was all over those (as much as you could be releasing an album only every 11 years, that is).

And as I got more familiar with the history of British rock, I started seeing him get name-dropped again and again. He may not appear in official histories of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, but Scott Walker was creating music, both with the Walker Brothers and on his own, that would be just as influential to the Britpop acts I would become obsessed with in high school.

When I got back to London in 2006, about the time Walker released his album The Drift, I caught a wave of interest in him, and so I picked up the essentials: Scott 1 through 4, and a greatest hits album featuring some of his best solo and Walker Brothers material. I also watched the shit out of a documentary about him and the recording of the Drift, called 30 Century Man. My flatmates at the time were bemused by this slavish attention to an artist they'd never heard of, but I've never shaken my love for Walker since.

I did pick up the challenging albums later, of course - I got the Drift a couple of years later, and Bish Bosh a few years after that, and for Christmas recently I got Climate of Hunter and Tilt. And more awesomely, in 2008 I saw Drifting and Tilting, a concert of Walker's music from those albums, played at the Barbican by an orchestra and sung by luminaries such as Blur's Damon Albarn and Pulp's Jarvis Cocker.

The music was impressive, for all its challenging nature, because it was just as much performance art piece as rock concert. Just as in the recording of the Drift, for the song Clara (about Mussolini's mistress Clara Petacci) the musicians wheeled out a side of pork onto the stage and had a boxer punch it to achieve the percussion sound from the album.

And of course, what was most impressive was turning round idly at one point during the concert and seeing the great man, Scott Walker himself, sitting at the production boards. That's as close as you could get to a live performance by him.

Thinking about him today, what struck me was that I got into his music at a very dark time for me personally. 2008 was a sucky year, full of job strife, discord with flatmates, bad health and existential angst over my dating life (even more than now, if you can believe it). I was so alone and afraid that I found myself having to go find a psychoanalyst, whom I saw for a year afterward.

Scott 1 through 4 played on fairly continuous loops during those days. "Two Weeks Since You've Gone", a mournful ballad from Scott 3, was what I was listening to one night as I lay in bed unable to sleep from the depression and the anxiety caused by my poor physical health (I was eating like shit and not exercising, and getting more depressed because of it). The string sections perfectly captured my feelings that dark night, and I remember being pleasantly weirded out not long after when I heard something similar-sounding in a Stella Artois commercial - a synchronicity that made sense because Belgian chansonnier Jacques Brel was a huge influence on Scott Walker.

It's been a fairly constant Scott Walker "moment" since he released the Drift, and since that documentary came out about him. Artist after artist has fallen over themselves in the last decade to talk about his influence on them, to the point that the frontman of the Arctic Monkeys even released his own Walker-influenced album, as the Last Shadow Puppets, to explore that influence on his music. It may not be a great album, but the words "influenced by Scott Walker" were enough to get me to plunk down money for it.

The Guardian ran the obituary today, of course, along with a number of testimonials from fans and collaborators. Some never met him, and some worked very closely with him, but all spoke movingly about him.

But the thing that sticks with me right now is a scene from the documentary, when the filmmakers interview Angela Morley (previously known as Wally Stott before undergoing gender reassignment surgery). Morley is telling about her experiences working with Walker, and they play Montague Terrace (In Blue) for her. And as the strings swell, and she hears again the music she helped commit to tape, she tears up - probably the most important moment in a movie aiming to pin down why exactly this one artist, who most people have never heard of, was so revered.

I'm just glad I did get to find out about him, before he passed. And that I got to see him, in real life, sharing the music he wrote, all those years ago.

The Long Strange Career of the Kinks

Just finished listening to basically every album by the Kinks a week or so ago. I get into these moods sometimes, where I go through an artist's entire discography, or through a Pitchfork top albums of whatever decade list, and a few weeks ago it occurred to me that what I needed in my life was to subject the Kinks to this treatment.

I'd say I have a healthy respect for them, borne of owning a couple of studio albums (including Village Green Preservation Society) and a greatest hits compilation. I may not hold them up quite as high as the Beatles in my ranking of British pop bands from the 60s, but they may have a more consistent oeuvre from that decade than The Who, which is another favorite and which is currently receiving the same whole-discography treatment.

Unlike the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, I didn't grow up with the Kinks being played all the time around me. I don't think I heard of them for the first time until Weird Al's parody of "Lola" or until the Britpop thing was underway, and that was mainly in reference to how Damon Albarn's songwriting was clearly indebted to Ray Davies's slice-of-life style. And somewhere in those years I started hearing more about them, until I decided I should just get a greatest hits album to find out what the fuss was all about.

The first thing I discovered was that I actually did know some of their music, since I'd heard songs like "You Really Got Me" over the years. I'd just never known it was them. The next thing was the diversity of their body of work from those years, since those early singles were very different indeed from the likes of "Waterloo Sunset" or "Dedicated Follower of Fashion".

From there I had to get a handle on the idea that the compilation I owned wasn't particularly comprehensive. While it had "Lola" on it, I soon learned that other albums like Village Green Preservation Society weren't represented. After college I went through an initial "music archeologist" phase, as a friend once called it, and gathered Village Green and Face to Face on CD, because they'd been mentioned on a few top British album lists I'd read.

The next thing I did was check out their discography on Allmusic, and that's where I discovered that they hadn't actually broken up until 1996, and had indeed continued making albums of varying quality throughout the years that, it seemed, no one was actually paying attention to them. I remained intrigued by this lost period, and haunted by the statement (I can't remember by whom) that if they'd broken up at the same time as the Beatles they'd have been legends.

So when I listened to all their albums on YouTube the aim was to fill in these gaps and see for myself how good those albums were. I also wanted to get the foundation, from their earliest albums, so that I could hear how their sound evolved from proto-hard rock to English-influenced gentility, and what that turned into.

The main thing I took away from the Allmusic history of the band was that the early 70s, when Ray Davies was insisting on concept albums around celebrity and whatever else, were a pretty terrible period for them. And I can confirm that this is the case, even if the albums aren't completely unlistenable.

What did surprise me was learning how much they improved in the latter half of the decade. Sleepwalkers, their first straight-ahead rock album since the early ones, isn't necessarily a classic (and has a pretty crap cover) but was surprisingly enjoyable. It and its follow ups sounded like the work of a guy in his thirties figuring out again what he's good at and going with that. The other thing that surprised me was that they were all clearly Kinks songs, with Davies's voice and songwriting keeping a line of continuity with some of the best of the 60s, even as they turned into a sort of cut-price Rolling Stones (and I have to admit that I'm both looking forward to and dreading going through that discography) in the 80s.

It's true that by the time they released Phobia, their final album of all original songs, they were sounding pretty tired, though even that album has some high points. But it was so interesting as I listened to those albums to consider what was happening around them in music. While they went for a more traditional English pastoral sound, other British bands were getting louder and heavier.

Later on, Sleepwalkers and Misfits don't make much reference to what was happening in punk, while the albums of the 80s occupy a different universe than the post-punk and synth-pop that was coming out of that decade. And the greatest irony of all is that they broke up just as the British music scene was starting to rediscover them. Phobia came out the same year that Blur released Modern Life is Rubbish, their own foray into British iconography, and the Kinks broke up completely in 1996, the year that Britpop was at its height.

Throughout it all, I was most intrigued by what Ray Davies was thinking as he and the band wrote, recorded and released each of their albums after their heyday. Clearly people were still buying the albums, even if only out of deference to the band's history, but it must have been odd to be so firmly out of the musical zeitgeist. Though it's also fair to say that their music always went counter to the trends being set by the Beatles, Stones or Who in the 60s and 70s.

Thinking back to the idea that they'd have been legends if they'd broken up after Muswell Hillbillies, it's probably true. Albums like Preservation Acts 1 and 2, Everybody's in Showbiz, and Schoolboys in Disgrace are just silly and indulgent (and have some of the worst covers ever). But even if they never again hit the heights of Village Green Preservation Society, it was rewarding discovering those albums when they changed direction toward hard rock. They may not deserve to be in your iTunes collection, but they deserve a listen.

Goth Synesthesia: Dancing Among the Tombstones

Because it's October and I'm a sucker for long-term challenges, I've set myself the task of learning about gothic rock this month. I've been listening to a different band's back catalogue each day, guided in part by this Wikipedia article and by Pitchfork's list from last year of 33 notable goth songs. Some of it's been stuff that I knew a bit, like the Cure's gothic trilogy of Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography. Other things were new to me, like the Birthday Party, Nick Cave's band before he started the Bad Seeds.

It's stretched my understanding of "goth" in new directions, which is a nice way of saying that I thought there'd be more talk of vampires and gravestones. Of course, it's still early in the month, and I've mostly been hearing bands from the early part of the movement.

But it's also true that the most satisfying listen so far has been Bauhaus's back catalogue. For one thing, nothing expresses the idea better than their epic song, "Bela Lugosi's Dead", the bassline of which has quietly been twanging at the back of my mind more or less continuously for the last 20-odd years. And while the rest of their work doesn't necessarily hold up to that moment (for me), it does fit in with the imagery that "Bela Lugosi's Dead" brings into my head.



It may sound weird, but I respond to music that creates certain associations and images in my mind. That can be reminders of times or places or movies, or it can be imagery, almost a physical environment that I think about when I hear the music.

When I think about some of my favorite bands, I imagine a landscape. It can be an urban landscape, like when I listen to the Smiths or Joy Division, or it can be related images, like when I hear the Magnetic Fields (particularly 69 Love Songs). When I hear Bauhaus, I'm imagining graveyards at night. Not all the bands I like have this effect, and seeing it written out like that feels a little reductive, but it's probably close enough to how I respond to most music I like.

Sometimes, a band's music reminds me of other art that I like. Simon and Garfunkel, for instance, are associated indelibly in my mind with 1960s New York City, which carries with it associations of Spider-Man (who, like them, is also from Queens). Listening to Bauhaus this month has reminded me of Neil Gaiman's Sandman.

The look of Morpheus is apparently based on Bauhaus's Peter Murphy, so the connection's not as random as it seems at first. And so much of that comic drew on goth imagery, while also in its turn influencing the goths I knew in high school.

This connection to the Sandman brings this discussion around to my other big preoccupation of the last couple of years, namely re-examining all the things I liked back in high school and college. I've mentioned already how I'm rereading my old comics - well, checking out old music I liked back then, and supplementing that by exploring similar acts I didn't know about, falls squarely into that trend.

I'm not really sure why I'm dredging all that stuff up, other than the fact that I'm getting older and yet I still feel (or would like to feel) a connection to who I was back then. At the same time I'm re-evaluating music, movies, comics, books, whatever through the lens of the experiences I've had since high school.

Looking back has always been a key component of goth culture, and while it is, charitably, a stretch to call myself a "goth", I can see the appeal, especially these days. And more than that, it's exciting to be delving into a new sub-genre, which has always escaped me but has been just around the corner from what I usually listen to.