A Few Favorites of 2024
hypocrisy and commerce!
I’m not a fan of lists. I’ve discussed this here before. My objections to Big List1 are probably obvious to anyone who works within any cultural industry in our bereft algorithm-flattened landscape blah blah blah. Nobody wants to hear it.
But other people seem to like lists, especially this time of year. And I’m traveling and lazy and about to stuff myself full of hot chicken for New Year’s Eve, so I’ve decided to be less of a crankypants this month and just give the people what they want. Here are some of my favorite things from 2024.
Happy New Year!
Sports:
The Memphis Grizzlies. I dallied with Memphis fandom last year, when, along with my significant other—the poet laureate of Grizz nation—I watched roughly half of the team’s games and attended a handful in person. That squad finished in 13th place, thanks to injuries and tomfoolery. But a lot of young and talented players got minutes, and they had a sneakily great draft: Zach Edey and Jaylen Wells both look like legit contributors on a playoff team, if not rookie of the year candidates.2
This year, I’m all in. I’ve got multiple pieces of Grizzlies gear, a League Pass subscription, and a working knowledge of every player on the roster, all the way down to Yuki Kawamura, the most popular 18th man in the Association. Now that Ja Morant is relatively healthy3 and keeps doing things like this, the Grizzlies are contenders who are likable and fun to watch. This month alone, they’ve gone into Boston and beaten the defending champs, pasted the Warriors by 51 in a game where they didn’t allow Draymond Green or Steph Curry a field goal, and set a franchise scoring record by hanging a ludicrous 155 on the Raptors, the highest score in the NBA this season. As I write this, they’re in second place in the West, and I’m praying their injury luck improves—it seems like it can’t get any worse—so they can stomp the Lakers in the playoffs.
Books:
This was my second year tracking my reading. (I wish I’d started sooner.) I read more books this year than I did last, something like 40 all told, not including work-related reading or drafts of my increasingly albatrossish novel-in-progress. It was a banner year for books by friends, former students, and/or colleagues. It would be hypocritical to list those after I just criticized other listmakers for doing the same, so here you go: Zoe Bossiere’s memoir Cactus Country, D. Seth Horton’s story collection On a NASA Flight to Heaven, Scott Nadelson’s novel Trust Me, Brian Teare’s hybrid work Poem Bitten By a Man (technically late 2023), J.M. Tyree’s novella The Haunted Screen, and Matt Young’s novel End of Active Service. I hope I didn’t forget anyone.
Some other highlights by strangers that weren’t released in 2024: Dayswork, the latest translation of Pedro Páramo, Benjamin’s Illuminations, Rodolfo Walsh’s Operation Massacre, Silko’s Almanac of the Dead.
Film:4
Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus, dir. Neo Sora. This is essentially a concert film, but a particular kind. Sick with terminal cancer, the legendary Japanese musician arranged a final solo piano performance for his son, the film’s director. Not a feel-good Friday night kind of watch, for sure, but it’s beautiful.
Pictures of Ghosts, dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho. It’s been a minute since I watched this, and it’s hard to describe—ostensibly about bygone movie theatres in the director’s home city of Recife, really about memory and images and the blurred line between—but I remember really loving it.
Sometimes I Think About Dying, dir. Rachel Lambert. This year I realized the same thing that’s happened to me as a reader and writer over the last fifteen years or so also applies to my movie-watching self: I mostly like and care about documentary forms. This quirky, quiet, atmospheric dramedy set on the Oregon Coast was the only fictional film I loved this year.
Happy Campers, dir. Amy Nicholson. My best surprise watch of the year—I didn’t know anything about it, and didn’t expect much, but this intimate doc about a doomed trailer park was maybe my favorite movie of 2024. Two different friends who watched it after I recommended it here have told me they also loved it.
Babygirl, dir. Helena Reijn. I just saw this a few nights ago, and have managed to mostly avoid the discourse, so I’m still figuring out how I feel about it. It’s as odd and horny as advertised—a breakout film for dairy kink— but it held my interest throughout and struck me as original and well made. I didn’t see many movies in the theater this year. This was the best one.
Some favorite films not from 2024 that I watched in 2024: The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, The Battle of Chile,5 Touki Bouki, Fanny and Alexander, Hearts and Minds, Fish Tank, the Apu trilogy, Brother’s Keeper, Nostalgia for the Light, Wanda, The House is Black.
TV:
Homicide: Life on the Streets. I wrote about this here a while back. The show is old, and feels it—its vibe is extraordinarily ’90s—but it wasn’t available to stream until this year, so it sort of counts as a 2024 show. I’m five seasons deep and already dreading the end. It’s hard to believe a network police procedural could once have been this smart and sophisticated.
Feud: Capote vs. the Swans. I wrote about why I liked this show here.
Music:
True Green, My Lost Decade. I first listened to this record because my lady knows Dan, the man behind the band. Soon enough it was on my Spotify wrapped. It’s catchy, clever, and a true album, the kind of thing I often found myself listening to this year on long drives or while making dinner or around the house.
Bill Ryder-Jones, Iechyd Da. I had to put my dog down a few months ago. I liked this album before that, but for about a week afterward, this was the only thing I could listen to. Despite that association, I still like it enough to listen to it, which I think says a lot about how good it is. Also the kind of album you want to play in full.
Cindy Lee, Diamond Jubilee. This was probably my favorite album of the year, although I didn’t listen to it that much, because it’s unavailable on most streaming services. (For about six months after it came out, it was only available as one long YouTube video or for download from a Geocities website.) The context of the album’s success—from obscurity to Pitchfork rave to near-ubiquity among my demographic—might seem precious, borne of nostalgia for the era of mid-oughts internet-hype indie rock. And it probably is. But it’s also just as good as everyone said it was.
Other albums from this year I liked and/or listened to a lot: Sturgill Simpson/Johnny Blue Skies, Passage Du Desir; Being Dead, EELS; William Basinski, September 23rd; Sunset Rubdown, Always Happy to Explode; MJ Lenderman, Manning Fireworks; Shannon & the Clams, The Moon Is In the Wrong Place.
Here’s a playlist of what I’ve been listening to lately:
That they’re driven by publicity and marketing, not taste; that they overvalue recency and popularity, two factors that are more reliably signs of bad art than good; that many of their makers haven’t engaged deeply with the things they’re recommending; that many of the people who make them are trying to advance careers and/or farm engagement by recommending their friends and/or what’s popular/controversial; etc, etc.
They may not compete for the award thanks to another thing that makes me like Memphis (the team and the city): they’re chronically ignored by the national media, for all sorts of geopolitical and demographic reasons I don’t have time to get into here.
Of course, the day I wrote this sentence, he got hurt again.
I think most of these were technically released in 2023, but weren’t widely available until 2024.
Parts 1 & 2; the third one’s not quite as good.