“What’d you do, kiss him with a wrench?” — 2019

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The “best of” version of everything I read, saw and heard in 2019 — All lists are in the order that they were viewed, read or listened to, I think

— Podcasts
— Films
— TV shows
— Documentaries
— (Watchable) Internet
— Music
— Art
— Fiction
— Non-fiction
— Articles

— On Work
— Robert Caro
— The VERY best
— Things learnt and then forgotten

— Footnotes

“I’m on the roof with a gun - but I don’t want to use it because of the neighbours”

— Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper) in The American Friend

The most interesting podcasts episodes #

-

And the best podcast series #

On work 1 #

We all have to wrestle with the reality that there are armies of invisible Ghost workers who help technology run. Their jobs exist to allow us to post, order and receive things more quickly and the technology we use both add to it and shields us from it. From the CLEANERS who are expected to view 25000 images or videos a day - many traumatic - to Amazon workers tracked and unable to take sufficient breaks. And, unfortunately, as the systems improve things get worse: “Amazon’s system tracks the rates of each individual associate’s productivity and automatically generates any warnings or terminations regarding [the] quality of productivity without input from supervisors.”

In SORRY TO BOTHER YOU Boots Riley gets into the subject of work, capitalism, unions and conflict between workers in beautiful ways. The scene with Cassius & Salvado fighting through compliments and well-wishes is great.

“I hope your month is full of successful days. And a lot of great ventures. I
hope you just come up, brother. I hope your whole fucking year is spectacular.”

The best films I watched #

Some of these are probably classed as 2018 films but hey

— Sorry to Bother You
— You Were Never Really Here
— Leave No Trace
— The Florida Project
— If Beale Street Could Talk
— Blindspotting
— Widows
— Us
— First Reformed
— Can You Ever Forgive Me?
— Apollo 11
— The Guilty
— The Irishman
— Destroyer

And the best video countdown of the films I should watch next

Some quotes #

I folded over so many book pages there should be lots more

“Those who travel with the current will always feel they are good swimmers; those who swim against the current may never realize they are better swimmers than they imagine” — Hidden Brain podcast

“The fortunate man is seldom satisfied with the fact of being fortunate. Beyond this, he needs to know that he has a right to his good fortune. He wants to be convinced that he deserves it and above all, that he deserves it in comparison with others. Good fortune thus wants to be a legitimate fortune.” — Max Weber (via Seeing White podcast)

“I think there are three points to this anecdote: one, criticizing someone is easy; two, creating something original is very hard; three, but somebody’s got to do it. I’ve been doing it for forty years; it’s my job. I think I’m just a guy who’s doing what somebody’s got to do, like cleaning gutters or collecting taxes. So, if someone is hard on me, I will hold out my instrument and say, “Here, you play it!”” — The Underground Worlds of Haruki Murakami

“I had four kids, I took any job I could get. Every time it reached a lower level I thought I could tolerate, it dropped some more, and then some more. Near the end, I had no agent, no manager, no lawyer, no nothing. I was taking whatever fell through the cracks.” — Robert Forster

“The man who wrote the dictionary … The opposite of Boris. A man interested in the meanings of words, not one whose interests leave words meaningless.” — Ali Smith in “Winter”.

Music #

Most released — and all heard for the first time — in 2019

TV Shows #

— Russian Doll
— Fleabag (s2)
— Chernobyl

“The mind refuses to believe that the worst that could happen has happened”

— When They See Us
— Godless
— Succession (s2)
— Guilt
— The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story

Documentaries #

— Billy Connolly: Made in Scotland
— Fyre - The Greatest Festival That Never Was

Fyre Festival Was a Huge Scam. Is Netflix’s Fyre Documentary a Scam, Too?

— Generation Wealth
— Leaving Neverland 2
— Loki’s History of Scottish Hip-Hop
— Free Solo
— Spotlight on the Troubles: A Secret History
— Storyville - The Internet’s Dirtiest Secrets: The Cleaners
— The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young
— Minding The Gap
— The Great Hack

(Watchable) Internet #

The best fiction read #

— Normal People (Sally Rooney)
— Autumn (Ali Smith)
— The Mars Room (Rachel Kushner) 3
— In Our Mad and Furious City (Guy Gunaratne)
— My Sister, the Serial Killer (Oyinkan Braithwaite) 
— The Nickel Boys (Colson Whitehead)
— Friday Black (Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah)

Non-fiction #

— Call Them by Their True Names (Rebecca Solnit)
— Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy (Serhii Plokhy)
— Natives (Akala)
— The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (Masha Geesen)
— Say Nothing: A True Story Of Murder and Memory In Northern Ireland (Patrick Radden Keefe)

Robert Caro #

I continue to be somewhat obsessed with Robert Caro, despite not reading one of his books in its entirety (yet!) A ha!. There’s something about the way he goes about his work, the diligence, the unfussiness, the length of time that it takes him to complete a book, the fact that he’s put it all on the line to get there (mortgaging the house, not earning much, moving house) which is wonderful.

“You’re never going to achieve what you want to, Mr. Caro, if you don’t stop thinking with your fingers”

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(Image from Robert Caro’s Papers Headed to New-York Historical Society)

Articles #

— The Unbelievable Story Of The Plot Against George Soros

“Finkelstein’s premise was simple: Every election is decided before it even begins. Most people know who they will vote for, what they support, and what they oppose. It’s very difficult to convince them otherwise, Finkelstein believed. It’s a lot easier to demoralize people than to motivate them. And the best way to win is to demoralize your opponent’s supporters.”

— The Secrets of Lyndon Johnson’s Archives by Robert Caro

“In interviews, silence is the weapon, silence and people’s need to fill it—as long as the person isn’t you, the interviewer. Two of fiction’s greatest interviewers—Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret and John le Carré’s George Smiley—have little devices they use to keep themselves from talking and to let silence do its work… As for me, I have less class. When I’m waiting for the person I’m interviewing to break a silence by giving me a piece of information I want, I write “SU” (for Shut Up!) in my notebook. If anyone were ever to look through my notebooks, he would find a lot of “SU”s.

— Why Do the Oscars Keep Falling for Racial Reconciliation Fantasies?

“We’d all been reared on racial-reconciliation fantasies. Why can’t Mookie and Sal be friends? The answer’s too long and too raw. Sal can pay Mookie to deliver pizzas ‘til kingdom come. But he could never pay him enough to be his friend.”

— A Suspense Novelist’s Trail of Deceptions

“ I was recently told about two former publishing colleagues of Mallory’s who called him after he didn’t show up for a meeting. Mallory said that he was at home, taking care of someone’s dog. The meeting continued, as a conference call. Mallory now and then shouted, “No! Get down!” After hanging up, the two colleagues looked at each other. “There’s no dog, right?” “No.””

— The Underground Worlds of Haruki Murakami
— They Had It Coming

“These parents—many of them avowed Trump haters—are furious that what once belonged to them has been taken away, and they are driven mad with the need to reclaim it for their children. The changed admissions landscape at the elite colleges is the aspect of American life that doesn’t feel right to them; it’s the lost thing, the arcadia that disappeared so slowly they didn’t even realize it was happening until it was gone. They can’t believe it—they truly can’t believe it—when they realize that even the colleges they had assumed would be their child’s back-up, emergency plan probably won’t accept them.”

— The Truth About Dentistry

Consider the maxim that everyone should visit the dentist twice a year for cleanings. We hear it so often, and from such a young age, that we’ve internalized it as truth. But this supposed commandment of oral health has no scientific grounding… Today, an increasing number of dentists acknowledge that adults with good oral hygiene need to see a dentist only once every 12 to 16 months.

— Fight club: Life after the Jeremy Kyle treatment
— Before, and After, the Jogger
— The Most Beautiful Icicle

Twenty years after the Apollo 11 mission, Janet and Neil separated. Neil became as inconsolable and indecisive in life as he had once been ambitious and single-minded. Letters and invitations went unopened. There was nothing his former wife felt she could do to help.

Art #

— Don McCullin — Tate Britain
— Diane Arbus: In The Beginning
— Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory
— Antony Gormley - ‘ANOTHER TIME’ For Margate

The VERY best on the internet #

— The Red Hand Files by a country mile

Some things I learnt and then forgot #

— Donald Trump wears long ties because they are slimming
— When Russian authorities sent musicians to play loudly over speeches and protests, the protesters used lemons to stop them

“Ekaterina Podoltseva, a brilliant forty-year-old mathematician who had become one of the city’s most visible - and most eccentric - pro-democracy activists, produced a recipe for fighting the brass band. She asked all the regular “Hyde Park” participants to bring lemons with them the following Saturday. As soon as the band began playing, all the activists were to start eating their lemons or to imitate the process of eating if they found the reality of it too bitter. Podoltseva had read or hard somewhere that when people see someone eating a lemon, they begin, empathetically, producing copious amounts of saliva - which happens to be incompatible with playing a wind instrument. It worked: the music stopped, and the speeches continued.” (from The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin)

— The song “Midnight Train to Georgia” started out as “Midnight Plane To Houston.”
— 7/10 homeless people in San Francisco had homes in San Francisco before they were homeless.
— American women are 50% more likely to die in childbirth than their mothers
— Roe vs Wade could have been called Doe vs Wade if there hadn’t already have been a Jane Doe on the docket
— The Hottest Chat App for Teens Is … Google Docs
— “The poor spend over a quarter more on funerals than the rich” and
the rich cremate more and the poor bury more.
— The Cost of Running Guantánamo Bay is $13 Million Per Prisoner
— Protestants and Catholics have separate ice cream vans in Northern Ireland

“I just keep my eyes and ears open. I don’t know. I could go backwards in time, I could go forwards. I’m looking at the coup in Iran in 1953, I have an abiding interest in that but I just don’t know. I really don’t know. I may just put a lot of effort into a tweet.”

Chris Morris

Image: Your house is overloaded with books. What do you do? by Tom Gauld

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