My Favorites of 2013
Leave a commentJanuary 2, 2014 by mycountryisthewholeworld
I am jumping on the favorites band wagon this year. This is not some annual obligation I dutifully pour out at the closing of every December, but this year had so many good things that I felt compelled to list shit. For those who may give a shit. Even if you remain nameless. I will start with my first love which is music:
FAVORITE MUSIC OF 2013:
Which albums or songs a person picks as striking a chord (pun intended) probably depends on the way they tick. Example: the heart of my music love is rock and roll and punk though I don’t just exclusively like that genre of music. Having said that I tend to like stuff with a good guitar or terrible anguish. But what this also means in general is that a current song that secretly reminds people of that one song when they were in that one place on that one day when the stars aligned and they felt a little more alive than normal (wedding? first date? first Brazilian wax and they were in pain?) can subconsciously affect their desires unless they are just so insanely objective and smart and talented that they can separate the wheat from the chaff and be a discerning, academic critic each and every moment they take a breath. I am not that person. If Michael Bolton’s “Steel Bars” would have been released this year it would have made my list because that song is the shit. Sorry but not sorry. What this means is that the following list may be stupid in your eyes, or it may be amazing and we may be music soul mates. Either way I don’t give a fuck because to each his own, though I do thank you for taking the time to get this far in this massive paragraph I just wrote that was entirely unnecessary yet important.
BEST ALBUMS IN ORDER OF FAVORITE (1 being best, ect):
1. Nico Vega: Fury Oh Fury EP This is not a full album, and I just put the title of the section as “Best Albums”. But nonetheless I have to say that I kept coming back to this little EP more than any other collection of songs. I saw Nico Vega at a Stubb’s indoor show and met Aja and the band and got them to autograph a band poster that Aja had drawn for the tour. Aja is a beautiful, sweet, creative, spunky spirit and you can really feel this in her lyrics and live show. Aja cares. I love those who care. Fury Oh Fury was the only album I listened to at Burning Man this year. I would go to the temple and close my eyes and put on “Lead to Light” and start tapping my toes while those around me meditated. I listened to it on repeat on the entire 2 day drive back to Texas. Is this album revolutionary? Not really. But what it has strikes my soul which is burning desire, simple lyrics, passionate understanding and reach, and the pure feminine range of emotions that Aja clearly gets as a woman and isn’t afraid to speak in her simple in-your-face manner. Aja is married to the lead singer of the more successful band Imagine Dragons but she has the best talent between the two IMHO.
2. Queens Of the Stone Age: Like Clockwork Dear God doesn’t struggle produce amazing art? I am so sorry that Josh Homme had complications from a surgery but I am so happy this album came out from such dark searching. The guitar riffs in this are spellbinding. QOTSA released a couple of singles from this album, and that’s nice, but Like Clockwork is one of those albums that is great because you need to hear the entire thing from start to finish and never, ever judge piece by piece songs pulled from the main body of work.
3. Typhoon White Lighter The guy that I have a crush on first told me about this band and album. Does this have any bearing on my liking it? Of course not, I am 100% unaffected by such *cough, cough* (Remember what I said in the 1st intro paragraph about moments where you feel more alive on the planet than other times?) Okay, okay, yes it does. But other things affect my liking of this, like the fact that they are from my favorite West Coast city of all time (Portland–I love it just a hair more than L.A). But no, beyond any personal attachments this album is really fucking great which means you without any of these personal attachments should give it a chance. Example: “You are my last breath of air, and I will try and hold it” and then lead singer Kyle Morton compares the futility of this to holding on to a sunset. Can’t we all relate to the desire to not lose something that is so wonderful when deep inside we know the seasons of life will inevitably cause a change in tide on some level at some point? Our daily countdown to the loss of our final death looms in our subconscious just behind our taking everything in, even in beautiful moments. Kyle gets this all too well as he has battled illness struggles. And he delivers this message via a massive collective of a band that is like a mini choir. Speaking of bands that are like a mini choir…
4. Arcade Fire Reflektor This album was produced, in part, by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem and you can hear his influence from the opening track. What this means is that if their 2004 release Funeral is one of your favorite albums of all time (why yes it is) you may be standoffish to Reflektor, even if you also love James Murphy. This was my initial take on this album. In fact, if this album would have been released at the end of 2013 it may not have made my Favorites list not because it isn’t a good album but because it didn’t light my fire until after multiple listening sessions. I had to unwind from expectations built upon precedence. I had to get my dancing shoes on, because at first I refused to want to boogie to Arcade Fire. But this is what is happening people, which is that you can get drunk on wine in your living room, light some candles, put on Reflektor and have an entirely different experience with Arcade Fire than you ever had before. The album moves a little slow, but like a fine whiskey going down your throat in a deep burn. This means you might need multiple listens of the entire album for this to slowly seep under your skin, and get into your veins where it will soon be pumping through your heart faster and faster as your body grooves to the beat that you at first maybe didn’t really feel, or didn’t want to feel. But it’s there in full force waiting to be consumed.
5. Disclosure Settle Every Euro trash kid from Germany, Spain, the UK, Eastern Europe, ect at Burning Man this year was wearing a Disclosure t-shirt. What does this mean? The second coming of Christ maybe? It’s a sign for sure. Is it considered blasphemy to align the saving of the planet with two English lads named Guy and Howard? Am I implying that these two brothers are bringing us an album that is so earth shattering that it warrants a seismic shift of epic proportions? This is getting out of control!! Uh, no. This album doesn’t begin to count as being something massively great. But this album is very danceable, and currently in competition against another band with God-like worship for the Best Dance Album Grammy: Daft Punk. Oh shame. I have tickets to see Disclosure at Stubb’s amphitheater live on Friday night, January 31st 2014. If they disappoint live I will come back and delete this entry. But based on what I’ve heard about their live shows this will be unnecessary. The only unfortunate thing with this is the fact that Austin has a noise ordinance for outdoor performances so we won’t be able to dance all night.
The remainder favorites I will just list with no description because, well, I’m getting tired. PM me for questions and we can have a fireside chat:
6. Volcano Choir Repave
7. Ty Seagall Sleeper
8. *Note, rather than listing something like Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, Charli XCX or Katy Perry’s latest album that came out in 2013 my pop princess crown goes to #8 with Sky Ferreira Night Time, My Time
9. Savages Silence Yourself
10. Laura Marling Once I Was an Eagle
FAVORITE CONCERTS OF 2013
2013 was a great year for live shows. In late February I took off for San Fransisco where I got to experience Noise Pop festival for the first time. My favorite dance band, Chk Chk Chk, performed at the Great American Music Hall along with other great bands including a young band from Iran called The Yellow Dogs. Tragically members of this band would die in a murder/suicide by the end of the year. March normally brings the best of the bands from across the world to Austin for SXSW but I didn’t get to see one band this year because my Me Ma fell ill and I went up to be with her at Baylor hospital in Dallas during this time. Luckily I would have other opportunities to see great music through travels to Nashville where I saw amazing local acts at various venues (including the iconic 5 Spot where a talented cover band re-created the Summer Jam at Watkins Glen); eclectic music at Burning Man in Nevada along with another sweat-set revisit of Chk Chk Chk at Utopiafest in the Texas hill country in the fall where I got to fall asleep to music in a tent under the stars.
Austin is the home for C3 Presents along with Transmission Entertainment so there were a lot of really great concerts that came through Austin in 2013. ACL festival and Fun Fun Fun Fest this year produced tons of mouth watering pleasures (where the amazing Kathleen Hanna at FFF Fest agreed to do an impromptu autograph signing which made my entire festival as I got her to autograph a poster that I will cherish forever). Seeing the Cure and Depeche Mode play in one night was phenomenal, along with an intimate show by The Lone Bellow at Belmont after the last day of weekend 2 of ACL got rained out for the first time ever. Throughout the year I saw a lot of great local Austin shows, many of them being at The Parish (A Silent Film always puts on a great show and I got to meet Zac from Hanson who was in the audience). The Parish also had other fantastic shows in 2013 like the re-united band Death who performed after a screening of the documentary A Band Called Death at the Drafthouse Ritz; the band Kitten had a rousing show opening for Charli XCX plus the always fun ZZ Ward came to the Parish with Wild Feathers. The Parish wins for my favorite venue of 2013. It also helps that they have a killer sound system.
But my all time favorite concert of 2013 was unforgettable…the stuff for the record books. The one concert I will remember when I’m 90. Let me paint the picture for you:
It was a cold night in November. I went straight home from FFF Fest because I was freezing. I put on my jammies, I put on my glasses and put my hair in a bun, I made dinner, and sat down at the TV to watch recorded episodes of the National Geographic documentary program called Air Disasters. My plan was to go to bed early. Thurston Moore was in town for FFF Fest with his band Chelsea Light Moving who were scheduled to play an indoor (after) show at the tiny Red 7 venue downtown at 1AM. I knew in this state there was no way I was going to go. But for some unexpected reason at midnight I got a 2nd wind and decided to get dressed and go downtown to see if I could get in. I left my glasses on and my hair in a bun. I found free street parking, I accidentally got in the VIP line and was swooshed in 30 minutes to performance time. A long line of people still waited to get in. The place was packed tight, and beyond capacity. A young man of about 20 years stood around nervously holding a Sonic Youth vinyl. Indoor Red 7 holds maybe 150 people. Right at 1AM Thurston steps out on to the stage with his band.
His hair hung down shaggy in his face. He pulls the guitar on his shoulder and starts testing the strings. And from this point forward, once he started playing, the inside of Red 7 was transformed into something it had never been before. I could have swore I was watching Mick Jagger and not Thurston Moore. The amount of energy he channeled into his guitar playing was epic. Much of this probably had to do with being in such close quarters to get to experience this magic up close. For almost an hour Thurston played fast, slow, and in between. At the end of his crazy guitar slashing set Thurston created a final crescendo by throwing his equipment around, finally slamming the guitar to the ground and abruptly walking off stage. The final chord of the last note slowly died out over the amp. The rest of the band quietly shuffled off stage. The audience stood, stunned and silent. I looked over at some random dude to my right and we both said, out loud simultaneously, “Holy shit, what was that?!”. Our faces buzzed from the fading sounds. Half the room shuffled out to leave since it was 2AM. The young guy stood near the stage still clutching his Sonic Youth vinyl. After that epic ending we knew it had to be over. But it wasn’t over. With a room of about 50 people left and a few bartenders Thurston came back out on stage. And played a final few songs that ended with Thurston jumping into the audience and playing his guitar in the middle of our small crowd. It was like our own little private concert on a cold Austin night at 2AM in November. It is something I will never forget. As the bar tenders were barking people out as fast as they could since it was past 2AM I saw the youth with the vinyl standing near the stage. Thurston didn’t come out for a 3rd time but the roadie took his album and went backstage. A minute later he came back out and handed the vinyl to the guy, signed.
FAVORITE MOVIE OF 2013
Film is another major love I have. I love most of it, as long as it isn’t too formalistic. Even with the changes in the way we watch our movies thanks to technology (2013 saw the shuttering of iconic movie rental chain Blockbuster Video) the industry is still making great film. I usually buy a film badge in order to see all of the awesome films that SXSW selects each year. Undistributed films and art house cinema (the stuff of festivals like SXSW) are different than main stream cinema in many ways, most of it being the motivation to make the film (artistic expression vs pure profit ambitions). You don’t see comic book heroes on the big screen at film festivals, though the journey that the comic book archetypes create can be seen in other forms on smaller screens, without the cape and magical powers but rather in the wrinkled lines on the faces of independent actors and actresses who have ‘been there’. One of the highlights this year for me at SXSW was seeing comic book mastermind Joss Whedon bring his interpretation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing to Austin that included a really enlightening and funny Q&A with Joss and the cast and crew of the film. Seeing the authentic people behind the myth makes everything more human.
The beginning of 2013 also saw the closing of the South Lamar location of the Alamo Drafthouse theater. This was the original Drafthouse on South Lamar that had been open for almost a decade. The theater is being re-built, but it was still a sad day as it represented a part of “old Austin” that was understated (the new Drafthouse is going to be way more polished) yet still iconic not to mention the incredible memories made over the years before the Austin we know now that has been hyped by the rapidly evolving world of social media and mainstream media was created. I went to the final night closing of the Drafthouse where they were showing the new direct sequel Texas Chainsaw Massacre–but not before they screened the original 35mm print from 1974 of Texas Chainsaw Massacre with the original director Tobe Hopper in attendance.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a masterpiece in many ways beyond the typical reactions that horror movies provide in the sense that out of all horror films it feels the most real. It was Tobe’s ability to take us there as the audience that makes the film special. In 2013 many great directors released films: Woody Allen released Blue Jasmine, Martin Scorsese released The Wolf Of Wall Street, David O Russel released American Hustle, and these are all magnificent films that I enjoyed immensely. Yet one film was my favorite, and this included out of all the independent and foreign films I saw in 2013. That film was Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity.
There aren’t a ton of characters in Gravity. The film takes place in space with Earth as its backdrop. There are no epic war battles, love stories or fights. But the conflict in Gravity is real, and that is the conflict for survival. And the way that Cuaron shows this conflict is front and center, as though we were the astronauts in the space suits going through the struggles. The horror that this brings up isn’t the exact same as a chainsaw wielding maniac trapping people and killing them, but the struggle for life is very much felt. Add to the story something that is not common in Hollywood, and that is a strong female lead (played by Sandra Bullock). Nothing else I saw in 2013 quite matched the uniqueness of the struggle of this film. And Curaron is a true artist, showing the film from so many different vantage points and with so many colors and striking touches including a floating mouth retainer in one scene that you must catch this movie on a big screen, preferably 3D, in order to be completely immersed in the enchantment.
FAVORITE TV SHOW OF 2013
I am not an avid current TV show watcher. I have too many books to read. I catch a lot of popular shows via streaming on Netflix after they have been shown live (this is where I am at with Breaking Bad, still working on Season 2). Having said that I wanted to mention TV for 2013 because (speaking of Netflix) it was the birth of something really neat: the rise of Netflix original TV programming. And through this came a TV show that a lot of my friends got hooked on and subsequently dragged me into: Orange Is the New Black. As much as I enjoyed this TV show I have to say that my all time favorite TV show of 2013 was: Arrested Development.
There has never been a TV show in the history of programming that holds as much clever use of words and double entendre than Arrested Development. If Shakespeare were alive today and writing TV scripts he would be a writer for Arrested Development. Netflix brought Arrested Development back in 2013 with a 4th season after an almost 10 year hiatus. My relation to this show went beyond just the streaming of the 4th season: In July there was an Arrested Development quiz that my friends and I participated in (go Team Veal Marsala!) where we placed in the top 10 out of 50+ teams . And I got to see ‘Buster’ (Tony Hale) at the Paramount Stateside Theater where he performed his own chicken dance (cameras down). Hell my own mother is a spitting image of Lucille Bluth herself, having brought her mini cooler of vodka and bloody mary fixings to the hospital in May when I had to go to the emergency room (which at least beats her asking where the hospital bar is located which she is the exact kind of person that would ask). Yes, no amount of meth lab or epic fantasy battles can top the entertainment of family dysfunction.
FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2013
I read a lot of books. I try and keep track of some of them on sites like Goodreads but sometimes I just randomly will pick one up and read it in one sitting (coffee shops are great for having scattered books) which results in me overall not reading a lot of current releases. Having said that I have read a few that came out in 2013, some that I am still working my way through that I haven’t quite finished (Command and Control by Schlosser is fantastic but I’m not finished with it so I can’t ‘legally’ put it on this list though it would probably make it). The Flamethrowers is another 2013 release (fiction) that I am enjoying but not finished with. A new release that I did finish is Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath. It is a really great non fiction read and one that will cause you to think about long after you’ve finished reading as it turns the old stereotypes about ‘disability’ and ‘disadvantage’ on its head. But my 2 favorite reads of 2013 that were published this year (one for fiction and one for non fiction) stuck with me the longest.
FAVORITE FICTION: Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean At the End Of the Lane. Burning Man has figured prominently into my narrative of favorites from 2013, and just like with Nico Vega’s Fury Oh Fury EP I took Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean At the End Of the Lane to Black Rock City. Gaiman is a wonderful storyteller and in this story we are pulled into the perspective of a child who is struggling to piece together a story from his English childhood after he returns home as an adult for a funeral. It is a simple read and a short read, but really special and magical.
FAVORITE NON FICTION: Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison Of Belief. This book is broken into 2 parts: the first half explores the life of L. Ron Hubbard and the last half explores Scientology as a religion in relation to Hollywood. This book will cause your jaw to drop in places. I can’t tell you how many times I would be sitting in a coffee shop or bar and my mouth would hang open in astonishment reading about the things this man did. And to know that this person created a religion makes it even more remarkable, especially the way that that religion has touched Hollywood of all places. Wright is a marvelous writer and the way he unpacks Hubbards life is straightforward yet very engaging. Wright lives in Austin and also happens to be a staff writer for the always sublime magazine The New Yorker. No magazine covers such a wide variety of topics including journalistic (non fiction) pieces, fiction, cartoon and poetry than the New Yorker. Speaking of if you have extra time on your hands you should check out the 13 Most Read New Yorker articles from 2013:
This is all I’ve got for this year. Here’s to the wonderful discoveries in store for 2014! Happy New Year!
mycountryisthewholeworld 