My Personal Best of 2013 in All the Rest: Movies, TV, Video Games and Comics

I may have managed to read a fair amount of books (blog) and listen to a lot of music (blog) in 2013, but I had little time for other types of media. Nonetheless, I always make an effort, so here’s my best of 2013 in movies, television, video games and comics.

The only movie I saw in movie theaters this year, and the most enjoyable movie I saw this year, was Star Trek: Into Darkness. J. J. Abrams’s reboot of Star Trek is the best thing to happen to the franchise since Star Trek: The Next Generation. But the rest of my movie viewing tended to be of classics, which I find increasingly reliable for stimulation (blog). After hearing philosopher Slavoj Zizek discuss Possessed (1931) in the following clip from The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, I had to check it out. (Discussion of Possessed starts after the intro and finishes at 3:16 when he starts talking about The Matrix.)

 

In Possessed, a short and fast-paced film, Joan Crawford plays a factory worker who becomes the kept woman of a city gent (Clark Gable). At first, she’s just out for his money, and even tells him so, but she ends up falling in love and desiring marriage even though the ensuing scandal would harm his chances of being elected governor. It doesn’t sound like anything special, but like all great films, it covers a lot of ground, as the back cover of the DVD summarizes so well:

“This pre-Code scorcher…expertly mixes greed, ambition, politics and sex into a frank portrait of a world where men have power and women have a sell-by date stamped on their flesh.”

I fared less well in television this year, falling even further behind with series I love like Game of Thrones and Mad Men. These are on hold until my wife and I can find time to sit down together and watch them--which means the situation is dire. On my own, I did find time to watch both seasons of Rome. The shifting fortunes of soldiers Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus were entertaining, and it was interesting to watch the fall of the Roman Republic as the House of Caesar rose, but I enjoyed most the character of Atia of the Julii. She schemes for her family’s power with such lovable simplicity that the sore price she pays in the end, as her son finally rises to become Emperor Augustus, makes her tragic. Here is Polly Walker in full flurry as Atia the Amoral:

 

In video games, I played through The 3rd Birthday, a sci-fi shooter and spin-off from the Parasite Eve series, on my trusty PSP, and, in a sudden burst of activity, I busted out the old PS2, scraped the crust out of its crevices, and finished off Silent Hill 2--a game I began seven years ago way back in 2006. I got the suicide ending, which apparently means I play on the edge with no regard for danger. I would have expected to get the chickenshit ending, but this is much cooler.

Comics suffered the worst this year since I have yet to find an economical and convenient way to buy them in Japan. However, I did read through the graphic novel of the Spider-Man classic Kraven’s Last Hunt, and it proved to be as engrossing as it was when I was a kid scouring the shelves for single issues at Day & Palin in Farmington, IL. When Kraven the Hunter decides it’s time to kill Spider-Man and take his place, we readers get a deep look into the psyches of the two, their darkness and strength.

 

All in all, as 2013, the Year of Dwindling Free Time, draws to a close, I count myself blessed. I can never read enough or absorb enough music, but increasingly I find that other forms of entertainment like movies, TV and video games can take a backseat to everything else. Much better to spend time with my family, say by talking with my wife over a bottle of Sangria or using Tomica cars to knock down Transformers with my son.

My Personal Best of 2013 in Music

Between my Major Life Activity, a two-year-old and everything else, my once small reserve of time for kicking back and relaxing has dwindled to the point where it’s as ephemeral as those stars you can see out of the corner of your eye but which disappear when you try to look straight at them. Nonetheless, sitting at my desk working long hours every day, I can still enjoy music--and here’s my personal best of 2013.

The hands-down best music I encountered this year was Lucius (new album), noted for its two lead female vocalists who often sing in unison. I’m reminded of when a band performed traditional Irish music at the Harbor Bar in Portrush, Ireland when I was at university. Sometimes, a female vocalist would join for a few songs and a reverential hush would settle over the bar. Lucius is like that. The group's best songs and recordings are a moment within which something intimate occurs, something carved out of all the surrounding clamor. A lot of fans came to Lucius through a Tiny Desk Concert for NPR (here), but I just can’t get “Two of Us on the Run” out of my head:

 

 

Perhaps the biggest force in my listening habits this year, however, was The Roots. It all started when I read drummer Questlove’s memoir Mo’ Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove. I kept notes as he mentioned his favorite albums from soul and R&B to rap and hip-hop, and then I began tracking down as many of them as I could, from Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life to N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton to De La Soul classics like De La Soul Is Dead. And, of course, I devoured just about anything The Roots have touched: studio albums, live albums, collaborations, and even songs merely produced by the group or featuring its members as guests. Here’s an official video medley from the 2006 album Game Theory:

 

While I definitely prefer the late 80s/early 90s hip-hop style--the groups, social commentary, danceable beats and gritty production--my quest for the best in rap and hip-hop also led me to download more recent albums like NAS’s Life Is Good, Kanye West’s dark fantasy Yeezus, and, just last week, Busta Rhymes and Q-tip’s free mixtape The Abstract & The Dragon (here). These recent albums show that the genre ain’t what it used to be, but it can still be engaging.

In 2013, a lot of my favorite groups came out with new albums--AFI, Avenged Sevenfold and Linkin Park--but they all tended to be good rather than great. One artist who redeemed herself in my eyes, however, was M.I.A. Maya, her last official release, left me with the feeling she was rehashing old tricks instead of breathing new life into them, but this year I discovered the Vicki Leekx mixtape, and soon after, this year’s Matangi. Together, the two releases show that M.I.A. has the creativity to back up her swagger. Nothing sounds like her, and that isn’t an easy feat in today’s music industry.

 

All of that is a far cry from the usual heavy alternative and metal that usually moves me, but it wasn’t that kind of year. Go where Euterpe leads, and you can’t go wrong.

My Personal Best of 2013 in Books

Some friends and I have a yearly tradition of sharing our favorite media with each other, and since life hasn’t been kind enough to allow me time to think, much less blog, about anything heavier in recent weeks, I thought I would expand upon my favorites here at The Gleaming Sword, beginning with books.

In a year when a new Robert Jordan book comes out, nothing else stands a chance, and that was true in 2013 as well. Each of the last three installments in the Wheel of Time series, completed by Brian Sanderson based on Jordan’s notes, has been excellent, and A Memory of Light, the fourteenth and final book, was among the best in the whole series. Somehow, Sanderson brought the biggest plot spread and largest cast of characters I’ve ever seen to a satisfying conclusion. I remember seeing The Wheel of Time on a list of books adults should grow out of, but I have to disagree. Its stark vision of Good versus Evil is just as satisfying to me as an adult as it was when I began reading almost 20 years ago in college.

 

Instead of jumping from series to series this year, I tried to follow some straight through to the end. One such sustained reading project was Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series--which even got a blog of its own (blog). The true enjoyment of this series lay in the concept of all humanity resurrected along the banks of a massive river and in learning about the historical personages who appear throughout the series, from Sir Richard Francis Burton and Alice Pleasance Liddell to Cyrano de Bergerac, King John and Hermann Goring. Unfortunately, after the phenomenal first book, I found the series frustratingly uneven, with little in the way of prose style and only infrequent glimpses of the engaging characters, gripping events and insightful ponderings with which the series began.

But it was an interesting series, and it led me to learn more about Sir Richard Francis Burton by reading Fawn M. Brodie’s biography The Devil Drives. Burton was a soldier, explorer, poet, linguist and translator, most known for discovering Lake Tanganyika and translating One Thousand and One Nights. In some of that--his penchant for study, travel and translation--I can’t help but feel he was something of a kindred spirit, but if he was, he was certainly a much higher specimen of our type. The Devil Drives was interesting for its insight into Burton, but also for its glimpse into a time when the world was still being discovered rather than simply covered.

 

If Richard Burton was something of a kindred spirit, my next big subject of interest--with his drugs, alcohol, guns and wild pranks--was certainly not. As I read the biography Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson, I was fascinated, but disconcerted by a mind both unglued as well as genius. I can sympathize with his political leanings, but his way of living positively frightens me. Nonetheless, it is hard to imagine he would have delivered up such classics as Hell’s Angels and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas without continually living on the edge.

The real treat in my exploration of Thompson this year was Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. It spends over half its pages on the Democratic primaries, dives deep into the Democratic convention, and, almost as an afterthought, as a shrug, comments upon George McGovern’s loss to Richard Nixon. The book is Thompson in high style, slewing from serious reporting and interview transcripts to colorful anecdotes, invective and surreal fantasy--and it leaves one sad that a man as good as George McGovern should be forgotten to most:

 

Projects for 2014 include continuing a thread of reading in the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory with Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, with lighter reading in the Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson Dune books and Michael Moorcock’s Elric books.

More on those next year, perhaps.