It's not meant to be a strife, it's not meant to be a struggle uphill
An open letter
Dear Ms. O'Connor,
I tried to write directly, or rather indirectly via your management company, but they said that due to the high volume of such requests they could not transmit messages to you. Oh, well. That's understandable. No doubt your work has impacted many lives, and many people would feel compelled, as I do, to say thanks for that. But – who knows? – perhaps you'll read this in any case, at some point.
Over the past year, your music and words have saved my life, as it were. (As I write this, I'm not actually sure whether, or to what extent, that's hyperbole or not.) I was always very fond of your music, especially those amazing first two albums; one of the first really striking videos I ever saw was "Nothing Compares 2 U." But this past year –– the hardest of my life, and the first that really stirred up and brought back awful memories from some of the very hard years that I had growing up –– I've listened so many times to (among many others) "Just Like U Said It Would B" and "Feel So Different" and "Black Boys on Mopeds" and "The Last Day of Our Acquaintance" and "Troy." Especially "Troy," and more especially all the extraordinary, stripped-down live performances of it, where you whisper "God, I love you" like it's a profound secret and just before that sing "I know you're always telling me that you love me but just sometimes I wonder if I should believe" as if it's one long word, impossible to break up into component parts. At the most difficult times, particularly early in the morning or very late at night (same difference, really), these songs, and these moments in time, fortunately captured and crystallized for posterity, were always there and were so critically important for me.
Reading your new book, Rememberings, has similarly provided real consolation and strength. Memory itself is such a strange, powerful, painful thing, isn't it? Even such a genius as Augustine, when he assembled his own "Rememberings" some sixteen-hundred-plus years ago, could not fully and completely comprehend the peculiar nature and fathomless depth of this fucked-up human thing, memoria. When you write with such courage about the terrible abuse you suffered and the vitriolic backlash for speaking vital truth to power, it is a tremendous inspiration, and an example par excellence. Your singular perspective and humour and grace are all woven together across this book's pages, just as evocatively as the scene-setting opening lines of "Troy."
With your shaved head and single tear, I always, on some level, associated you with Joan of Arc –– or, rather, with Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc, which has essentially replaced all the earlier images. But the stories recounted in your book and the decades of music after the superlative first two albums have added layers of depth and many different shades and colours to that perfect image of the iconic suffering saint.
Sincerest thanks.
Josh
Recent viewing
But I have watched some good-to-great horror, or horror-adjacent, movies on Shudder (the best: Hagazussa, Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum, Don't Leave Home, The Love Witch) and also the profound and beautiful Ryuchi Sakamoto: Coda; re-watched The Lady Eve, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, An American Werewolf in London, The New World, A Hidden Life, A Hard Day's Night, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and Manhunter; and finally got around to Fleabag, which is as good as any of those movies save for the two Malicks.
Remains of the Day
It will be a real shame if The Father is largely remembered as a kind of footnote or trivia answer, inextricably associated with the oddly anticlimactic ending of an unconventional Oscars ceremony. Conversely, if its last-minute Oscar upset provokes more people to actually seek out and see Florian Zeller's brilliant, haunting (and genuinely terrifying) film, then perhaps it's for the best? And better still if they know as little as possible going in, or else expect something like a typical, histrionic "Oscar drama."
I'll say no more for now (I plan to watch it again very soon...), except that Anthony Hopkins' lead turn is not only the year's best performance, but, without any hyperbole, one of the most powerful and indelible performances I've ever seen.
Reading, Watching, Listening
–Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time
–Barack Obama, A Promised Land
–Jason Lutes, Berlin
–Jessica Maier, The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps
–Barack Obama, A Promised Land
–Jason Lutes, Berlin
–Jessica Maier, The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps
–Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird
–Small Axe (Steve McQueen)
–Terrified (Demián Rugna)
–The Queen's Gambit (Scott Frank)
–Kiki's Delivery Service (Hayao Miyazaki)
–Beau Travail (Claire Denis)
–Sinéad O'Connor, The Lion and the Cobra + I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got
–The Cranberries, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We? + No Need to Argue
–Phoebe Bridgers, Punisher
–Carly Rae Jepsen, Dedicated Side B
–My "Best of Gillian Welch" playlist on Tidal
Excellence
It should not escape our attention or appreciation that CRJ's B-side-album toss-offs are better than most artists' lead-off singles, and this has been the case for nearly a decade. This is consistent excellence like Prince in the '80s, PJ Harvey in the '90s, Timbaland in the 2000s. Or maybe, for a more categorically apt comparison, Kyle Minogue's stellar run between Impossible Princess and Body Language.
Best of 2020
FILMS
01. Moving On (Yoon)
02. There Is No Evil (Rasoulof)
03. Twilight's Kiss (Yeung)
02. There Is No Evil (Rasoulof)
03. Twilight's Kiss (Yeung)
04. First Cow (Reichardt)
05. Da 5 Bloods (Lee)
06. Soul (Docter)
07. Servants (Ostrochovsky)
08. Emma (De Wilde)
09. My Rembrandt (Hoogendijk)
10. Days (Tsai)
PERFORMANCES
01. Delroy Lindo, Da 5 Bloods
02. Pierfrancesco Favino, The Traitor
03. Paula Beer, Undine
04. Imogen Kogge, Merkel – Anatomy of a Crisis
05. Pierfrancesco Favino, Hammamet
06. Amanda Seyfried, Charles Dance, and Gary Oldman, Mank
07. Maria Bakalova, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
08. Choi Jung-woon, Moving On
09. Sacha Baron Cohen and Mark Rylance, The Trial of the Chicago 7
10. Lee Kang-sheng, Days
ALBUMS
01. Fiona Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters
02. Morrissey, I am Not a Dog on a Chain
03. The Microphones in 2020
01. Fiona Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters
02. Morrissey, I am Not a Dog on a Chain
03. The Microphones in 2020
04. Phoebe Bridgers, Punisher
05. Chloe x Halle, Ungodly Hour
06. Kathleen Edwards, Total Freedom
07. Carly Rae Jepsen, Dedicated Side B
08. Jessie Ware, What's Your Pleasure?
09. Soccer Mommy, Color Theory
10. Selena Gomez, Rare
SINGLES
01. Cardi B feat. Megan Thee Stallion, "WAP"
02. Dua Lipa, "Levitating"
02. Dua Lipa, "Levitating"
03. Morrissey feat. Thelma Houston, "Bobby, Don't You Think They Know?"
04. Megan Thee Stallion, "Girls in the Hood"
04. Megan Thee Stallion, "Girls in the Hood"
05. Chloe x Halle, "Forgive Me"
06. Dua Lipa, "Love Again"
07. Phoebe Bridgers, "Kyoto"
08. Megan Thee Stallion feat. Beyoncé, "Savage Remix"
09. Stephen Malkmus, "Xian man"
10. Dua Lipa, "Don't Start Now"
We just watched this –– a perennial childhood favourite of mine –– and, I'm not gonna lie, it legitimately gave me goosebumps at times.
Grace Jones! k.d. lang! Magic Johnson! Little Richard! Oprah! Charo! The Marine choir!
(Thank god, he didn't invite a certain Manhattan real-estate developer...)
You must got me fucked up
We saw Chloe x Halle open for Beyoncé and Jay-Z a few years ago. They were good. But I more or less forgot about them. Now, I can't stop listening to their album, Ungodly Hour. In certain respects, it reminds me of Destiny's Child crossed with En Vogue, but the production and some of the unusual melodies are really quite different from both. "Forgive Me," the first track after the intro, for instance, is the closest Chloe x Halle come to a "Don't Let Go," yet it ultimately sounds unlike anything I've heard before – somehow portentous and funereal and sleekly sexy at the same time. The closer, "ROYL," evokes FKA twigs, but with Southern gospel inflections, evincing their Atlanta roots. This dynamic of familiarity and strangeness is one they totally sustain across the ten tracks in between. And they sing the shit out of all of it.
Home viewing
Having recently revisited some old favourites for the first time in many years, I decided to revise my 100 movies list.
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