It’s a new year, a fresh start, a hope this year is maybe a bit less suck than the last one! I’ve complained enough about the year that was, so instead let me dive back to look at ten musical, cinematic or literary experiences that rocked my world in ’23:
Go back to those Gold Soundz: I didn’t check out a lot of live music last year, but what I did was superb, led by the old guard showing they can still blast with the best of them. Indie icons Pavement put on a superb reunion show that left me humming the chorus to “Gold Soundz” for weeks, while I finally saw punk/post-punk legends The Damned for the first time on the back of their excellent Darkadelic album, and they melted my face. And my ears. I don’t quite know if my hearing has ever been the same.
Tonight, a blind woman and a monster came to town: I’ve been getting fewer ongoing monthly comic series these days, but one that’s on my must list is Ryan North’s brainy, witty take on Marvel Comics’ Fantastic Four, which is inventive science-bro action combined with the family heart that is key to the FF. It’s just darned fun, good comics that (so far) don’t have to be part of some sprawling pointless multi-comic company crossover to feel epic. It’s the best the Fantastic Four has been in ages.
A long long time ago, when I was a little chick: I wrote a whole story recently asking local book lovers for their favourite New Zealand books they read and it reminded me of what an excellent year it was for NZ fiction, led by Eleanor Catton’s wickedly fun satire Birnam Wood and a two-fer by Catherine Chidgey – The Axeman’s Carnival, an amazing novel about a bird who becomes a social media celebrity, and the nearly as good teenage angst thriller Pet. Go team NZ!
You don’t know the first thing about piracy, do you?: There was a lot of great TV in ’23 – Reservation Dogs, that banger final Succession run, Poker Face, and I’m only just now discovering how fantastic The Bear is – but the one that sticks with me the most is Taika Waititi’s unexpected gay pirate comedy Our Flag Means Death, which in its NZ-filmed second season truly transformed into a delightfully sweet romance mixed with swashbuckling pirate fun. A gem.
And in an instant, I know I’ve made a terrible mistake: Daniel Clowes has been blowing my mind since long ago when I first stumbled on an issue of Eightball. His comics are less prolific than they once were but they’re worth the wait, with this year’s graphic novel Monica (art at top of post) quite possibly his masterpiece. A sweeping story of one woman’s exploration of her own mysterious past, it’s a technically dazzling (those colours!), assured and layered work that you’ll keep churning over in your head for days afterwards. It’s not a speed-read like many modern comics, but an experience that might just leave you feeling like the world is a slightly different place when you’re done.
All my life I’m looking for the magic: Yeah, I know, physical media is dying, bla bla blah, but while I’m definitely a bit more choosy about what I buy in the age of internet abundance, I can’t pass up a good mix, and UK record label Cherry Red constantly is putting out fantastic CD box sets of eclectic punk rock from 1977-1982, power pop from the UK and US and ’80 synthpop that spans my mid-1970s to late-80s sweet spot. Sure, you can find a Spotify playlist, but I enjoy the curated, elegant physicality of these great boxes and the buried treasure they contain. Each set is hours and hours of gems waiting to be rediscovered and if I close my eyes I can almost pretend it’s coming from a cassette mix tape as I drive my old Volkswagen Rabbit around town.
That monster … will never forgive us: This was the year comic-book movies stumbled and became just as cliched as the Will Smith and Tom Cruise action movies they replaced. But look across the seas to Japan and some of the year’s best blockbusters came from there, with kaiju instead of capes in the terrifically oddball Shin Ultraman and the bizarre Shin Kamen Rider and best of all, the monumental reimagining of the biggest beast of all with Godzilla: Minus One. There were decent superhero moments this year, but not one of them compared to the kinetic thrill of watching Ultraman or Godzilla stomp on buildings with fresh energy.
Dear Allen, thanks for your letters. I was glad to hear from you: William S. Burroughs was not a decent man. A drug addict, the accidental murderer of his first wife, homosexual in a repressed era, his twisted, tormented writings are decidedly not for everyone. And yet, and yet. This year I found myself once again reading Burroughs’ books like The Soft Machine and turning to his nonfiction writings, particularly his collected letters, because the nonfiction shows so well what went into his far-out fiction. The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945-1959 fascinated me because it revealed the real person behind the sneering, sinister king of debauchery Burroughs became. It’s extraordinary to read how human and lonely Burroughs is in these letters, wrestling with unrequited love, addiction and ‘normal’ society, and his determination to find new shadowlands behind the world we live in. A stoic mask soon settled over his public face, but here we learn how he got there.
To be honest, when I found out the patriarchy wasn’t just about horses, I lost interest: “Barbenheimer” might have been a marketing technique gone viral, but it was a heck of a lot of fun and rewarding to see two very good movies leading the summer box office and showing up the latest dusty, unnecessary franchise-extender Indiana Jones sequels and the like. Barbie was a huge hit, but it was also just subversive enough to charm all but the most cynical, while Oppenheimer was Christopher Nolan’s best movie yet led by a dazzling Cillian Murphy and sequences on the iMAX screen downtown that melted my face nearly as much as a Damned concert.
The meat goes into the oven: This one’s a bit self-indulgent, but I had a very good year stretching my feature writing muscles this year in my paying gigs, between several book reviews for the NZ Listener magazine and writing for Radio New Zealand about stuff I love like barbecue restaurants, fans of weird movies, used book fairs, film festivals and more. Turn your passions into words, folks, and let’s all have a fine 2024!
Nik Dirga 