2024 Year In Review, Part 2

Blue-chip scandals, wordless rolls, and lotsa nonfiction

Once Were Journalists

RECENCY BIAS OBSCURES two toxic ethical bombs that led the year straight down the clown hole, sullied the journalism profession, and foreshadowed another campaign season where polls upstaged stakes.

Two once-prominent journalists traded in their self-respect for access. First, former Newsweek editor and Aspen Institute Director, Walter Isaacson, wrote a gauzy Elon M*sk biography that defended his fascist leadership style (“eccentric,” and “impulsive”) as the “necessary” cost of sending a man to Mars (which remains uninhabitable). Then, almost in lockstep, Michael Lewis trailed FTX’s man-child fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried to write Going Infinite during the crypto bubble and watched his book plummet as his protagonist went to jail. Both shot up the best-seller lists, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences just named Lewis as a new member, and he still plugs a podcast and storytelling Master Class. Isaacson has since come out against the oligarch’s plutocrat as bad for government.

Crypto may have “rebounded” (so far) but many journalists can never feel the same way about either of these bylines, and all their self-aggrandizements mirror their subjects. Meanwhile, all the the post-election navel-gazing that frames today’s politics without mentioning either racism or sexism compounds the problem.

Small Screens (and Big)

So far nothing’s jumped our batteries like that first season of Dogs of Berlin or Dead Horses. The Diplomat reigns as the thriller dramedy in large part because of the thin competition, and the Golden Globes gave it a giant kiss-off. It wins, however, marital dialogue of the year, when Sewell says:

“…Only you could ruin a perfectly good wordless roll in the ashes of a dead union.”

What the fuck?

The Diplomat, dialogue worth quoting (click and be glad)

The Old Man started off promisingly, especially with the return of Amy Brenneman, and what might have proven a breakout roll for Arrested Development’s Alia Shawkat. But by the plodding, speech-driven third season, Shawkat felt miscast, and your heart went out to both Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow for pointing cloying speeches into oblivion. Cheers to Janet McTeer for reprising the creepy witch she played in Ozark (who knew Joel Grey held out for crazy CIA mentor roles?) International intrigue has a long way to go to live up to The Honorable Woman (2014) with Maggie Gyllenhaal. (PS: She got a huge producer credit for that lazy David Simon HBO soft porno The Deuce. For what? That show didn’t exactly super-charge James Franco’s career either. And what happened to Margarita Levieva besides Litvinenko?)

The Boys plunged into plausible but unwatchable sexual degeneracy. Childish Gambino put out his latest record complaining that it felt too much like work. His four seasons of Atlanta on FX stick out with work like Get Out as primary text for our time, material that plunges a mass audience into alienated realities. The Mr and Mrs Smith thing disappointed, even though Maya Erskine brought chemistry. Other reliables included Ptown, Sort Of, and Casual. But by the end of the year we cheered for The English Teacher, an FX sitcom with both courage and Big Laughs even from its incidental characters. And the new season brought promising early episodes for Pitt (from ER’s John Wells) and On Call (from Law and Order’s Dick Wolf).

Late entry highly recommended: Say Nothing, based on Patrick Radden Keefe’s book. Makes a great companions to 2022’s epic We Don’t Know Ourselves A Personal History of Modern Ireland by Fintan O’Toole.

For yucks and trash energy we suggest Bad Monkey, which introduced Natalie Martinez as a redoubtable mortician, Jodie Turner-Smith as a witch, and watery Tom Petty covers for a soundtrack as bland as beachfront property. Between sex in the morgue and bottom-feeder real estate clowns (a one-armed Rob Delaney), Vaughn bounced around like a pinball. Michelle Monaghan entertained as the fallback dame, but standout Meredith Hagner put the blasé torque back in evil gumption, and her smirk steered the plot sideways. People think it’s a burn to call Carl Hiassen Florida’s Elmore Leonard, but resistance is futile. (Editor: please assign this essay, we’ll post it.) We kept coming back for four seasons of For All Mankind at the suggestion of our son who has an interplanetary geology jones, and found a respectable high-tech, alternate reality soaper with Lennon Lives-Beatles Reunion newsreel references.

Calling most big-screen ventures stuck feels like a banal observation in itself. The Fall Guy has its pleasures, like Hanna Waddingham’s self-satisfied producer, or how Gosling’s stunt man starts complaining about “too much plot” during his don’t-kill-me speech (on the docks). Darker moods won out: Civil War with Kirsten Dunst tore at us all through summer’s joy and November’s emotional hangover. And I barely recognized Cailee Spaeny, who starred in Alien: Romulus, and carried that surprise whopper with grizzly humor. She also played Priscilla, which I’m still postponing. Avoid the new Springsteen Road Diary doc, where platitudes go to beat dead horses. But some juicy casting comes our way: Scott Cooper pits Josh Logan as the Boss’s producer-manger Jon Landau in the Deliver Me From Nowhere biopic, presumably for those juicy Roy Cohn fumes he had in The Apprentice.

Watch “Triumph the Insult Comic” dog at Madison Square Garden, the perfect tonic to our giant slo-mo hate crime.

Then there was Austin Abrams, whose monologue almost redeemed Wolfs, while upstaging both Clooney and Pitt. Let’s get all pretentious and dub this guy a threat:

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Books: Criticism

Producer Joe Boyd (Richard Thompson, R.E.M.) writes the single-volume history of world music from the inside

And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, by Joe Boyd, Ze Books, 2024.
Cinema Speculation: Essays on Film, by Quentin Tarantino, Harper, 2022.
Hip-Hop Is History, by Questlove and Ben Greenman, AUWA, 2024.
Lou Reed: The King of New York, by Will Hermes, Picador, 2024.
Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres, by Kelefa Sanneh, Penguin Press, 2021.
A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, by Hanif Abdurraqib, Random House, 2021.
Picasso's War: How Modern Art Came to America, by Hugh Eakin, Crown, 2022.

NONFICTION
War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine, by Mikhail Zygar, Scribner, 2023.
You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America, by Paul Kix, Celadon Books, 2023.
How the World Made the West: The History of Western Civilization, by Josephine Quinn, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024.
Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature, by Farah Jasmine Griffin, W.W. Norton & Company, 2021.
The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians, by Carlos Lozada, Simon & Schuster, 2024.
The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Germany's Jews on the Eve of World War I, by Steven Ujifusa, Harper, 2023.
*James: A Novel, by Percival Everett, Doubleday, 2024. (*Fiction so good it counts.)
Our Moon: The Story of Earth's Closest Neighbor, by Rebecca Boyle, Random House, 2024.
The Picnic: A Rush for Freedom and the Collapse of Communism, by Matthew Longo, W.W. Norton, 2023.
Against All Odds: A True Story of Ultimate Courage and Survival in World War II, by Alex Kershaw, Dutton Caliber, 2022.
Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir, by Margo Jefferson, Pantheon, 2022.
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, by Richard Rothstein, Liveright, 2017.
Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, by Malcolm Harris, Little, Brown and Company, 2023.
On Freedom: The Four Songs of Care and Constraint, by Maggie Nelson, Graywolf Press, 2021.
The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine, by Nathan Thrall, Metropolitan Books, 2017.
Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet, by Taylor Lorenz, Simon & Schuster, 2023.
South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, by Imani Perry, Ecco, 2022.
King: A Life, by Jonathan Eig, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

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noises off

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