Category: Recommended

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Waves

I took a surf lesson at the La Jolla Shore. It was awesome. I had a great instructor and the water was perfect for practicing. Low tide with calm but steady waves. I got up on 7 or 8 waves and plenty of fun fall-off’s. It was a blast, it kicked my ass, and I want to do it again.

After finishing Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday  (which was really good) I grabbed a book I had my eye on for awhile, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan. I knew little about this book other than that it was a memoir about surfing, it had won the Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography, and I’d seen it recommended a lot. The author grew up moving back and forth between California and Hawaii but surfing constantly at both. Early on I came across a passage talking about surf clubs:  “I had never been in a surf club. In California you heard about Windansea, which was based in La Jolla and had some big-name members.”

This is the exact beach we’re staying four blocks from, where we’ve gone every day it was sunny, and where I I’ve walked down to in the evening and watched surfers catch waves.

The book is wonderful so far. I love coming of age stories, and this one infused in the culture of surfing and Hawaii in the 60’s is interesting and new to me, and I’m learning a lot.

Surfing was a way of life for Hawaiians. It had religious importance. When the waves were good “all thought of work is at an end, only that of sport is left”.

“The islands were blessed with a large food surplus…Their winter harvest festival lasted three months- during which the surf frequently pumped and work was officially forbidden.”

Until the Europeans came. Calvinist missionaries specifically. “They changed the Hawaiian’s way of life, changed their religion, their agriculture and industry. They banned surfing. And spread disease…between 1778 and 1893, the Hawaiian population shrank from eight hundred thousand to forty thousand”.

The survivors were “forced into a cash economy and stripped them of free time.”

We sure know how to fuck up a good time.

Luckily surfing survived “thanks to the few Hawaiians, notably Duke Kahanamoku, who kept the ancient practice alive. Kahanamoku won a gold medal for swimming at the 1912 Olympics, became an international celebrity, and started giving surfing exhibitions around the world. Surfing caught on and postwar Southern California became the capital.”

It’s interesting to think of what manages to survive and everything else that fades, either from the collective memory, or the face of the Earth.

We used to spend our summers on the Cape at Nauset Light. That beach has faded from the erosion of waves.  A video shows the damage after a storm and how far the tide’s gone up. The Nauset facilities we knew have been demolished because the erosion posed a public safety risk. You can still go to other parts of Nauset, but it’s completely different from what it was even 10 years ago.

The waves were ferocious when we first got here and one day me and Sean swam out into them. Ducking under, swimming into, bobbing our heads up and under amongst some vicious waves. This is what we used to as kids with our Dad. You go under and feel it pass over you. Or you let it crash into you and you’re thrown around and lose up from down. Being in and under waves like that puts you into a special kind of flow and it puts you in your place.

Finnegan describes the allure of waves poetically: “I couldn’t get enough of their rhythmic violence. They pulled you toward them like hungry giants. They drained the water off the bar as they drew to their full, awful height, then pitched forward and exploded. From underwater, the concussion was deeply satisfying. Waves were better than anything in books, better than movies, better even than a ride at Disneyland, because with them the charge of danger was uncontrived. It was real.”

After ducking under and going over wave after wave, exhilaration becomes exhaustion. It was a real struggle to get to shore with the tide pulling you back in. For a split second you feel that real fear. And then you let the next wave push you forward, and you’re back on land.

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Sex Criminals by Matt Fraction & Chip Zdarsky

Hear me out.

This comic book is fucking amazing. It’s a hilarious and earnest look at sex, from puberty to adulthood, all running under an insane premise. A man and a woman are able to stop time momentarily after they have sex. And then decide to rob a bank.

It’s the funniest comic I’ve ever read.  Each page is gorgeous, like Chip, the man who creates them. The visuals are stunning and the editing and storytelling remind me of a movie. I can’t wait to read the next volume.

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Black Panther & Marvel Rankings

God damn what a gorgeous, powerful movie. Boseman and Nyong’o are elegant and badass. Shuri steals the show. Killmonger’s the best villain Marvel has had yet. Michael B. Jordan absolutely killed it. It’s a real ass movie about deep, painful conflict that’s festered for generations. The scenes in the ancestral plane are touching and tragic. It also has a sense of humor and Andy Serkis is maniacally entertaining. Loved it.

Here’s my stab at ranking all of the 18(!) Marvel movies up to this point.

MCU Power Rankings

  1. Captain America: Winter Soldier
  2. Guardians of the Galaxy
  3. Captain America: Civil War
  4. Black Panther
  5. Spider-Man: Homecoming
  6. Avengers: Age of Ultron
  7. Iron Man
  8. Captain America: The First Avenger
  9. Thor: Ragnarok
  10. The Avengers
  11. Doctor Strange
  12. Iron Man 3
  13. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
  14. Ant-Man
  15. The Incredible Hulk
  16. Thor
  17. Iron Man 2
  18. Thor: The Dark World

God damn. The fact that there’s 18 movies on it alone is incredible, and that 75% of them are at the very least, good, is just astounding. I’ve enjoyed all of the Marvel movies to some extent, except maybe the last 3 or 4. Winter Soldier and Guardians are two of my favorite movies period. And I’m fully expecting Infinity War to blow them all out of the water. As a Marvel nerd, this is really special.

 

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Lady Bird

Man I loved this movie. Funny, real, surprising. Every character, small or large is wonderfully played and realized. The dynamic between Lady Bird and her parents felt intimately familiar. I’ve been catching up with all the Oscar contenders this past month and they really are all incredible and beautiful in their own way. 2017 was an extraordinary year for movies, and I would have a very hard time trying to rank them in any order. So I won’t. I’ll just enjoy them. And I still have a few left to check out!

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The Shape of Water

This felt like such a perfect movie. Romantic, mysterious and suspenseful. The mood and music, the physicality of each performance, and the beauty in every shot propels you forward. Sally Hawkins and Dough Jones (under amphibian disguise) convey so damn much emotion and feeling without ever speaking.  And the supporting cast elevates it to another level. Michael Shannon and Octavia Spencer are perfect in their roles, and Michael ‘Scene Stealin‘ Stuhlbarg is far and away the reigning character actor MVP of our time.

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Phantom Thread & Call Me By Your Name

I did a double feature of these two movies and they had an oddly satisfying contrast to each other. Both movies are about love, but have two very different entry points (and conclusions). I wouldn’t say either was my favorite of the year, but I liked them both a lot, and could appreciate the masterful direction of each.

Phantom Thread of course was made by the Master himself, Paul Thomas Anderson, and played to perfection by a fellow master, now retired thespian Daniel Day Lewis (hey, they both have three names). It was claustrophobic, luxurious, tense, and at times unbearable. It was precise and harsh and I really, really liked it. Day Lewis’s character’s name is Reynolds Woodcock, so there’s another selling point.

Call Me By Your Name was straight up gorgeous, lusciously shot in Italy, and depicts viscerally the agony of discovered sexuality, the ecstasy  of its realization, and then back to that familiar agony. Chalamet and Hammer are excellent, but the scene that struck me the most was towards the end, when Chalamet’s father, played by Michael Stuhlbarg, delivers such a heartfelt, measured monologue to his son. It’s unlike anything I’ve seen displayed between a parent and child on film. Just pure understanding and love. It was really touching.

The music in each of these is immaculate.

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My Year in Reading 2017

Books

This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff

This was my favorite book of the year. I’d heard about Tobias Wolff before, from two incredible writers who are huge fans, George Saunders and David Sedaris, but based solely on the name I figured he was Old and Boring. Boy was I wrong. I picked this up and couldn’t put it down. It’s essentially a memoir of his childhood with his single mother and eventually a step-father that did not treat him very well, to say the least. He also spends plenty of time talking about all the trouble he caused as a kid and it was vividly familiar. His writing is beautiful, funny, and honest, and I couldn’t recommend this book highly enough.

Theft By Finding: Diaries 1977-2002 by David Sedaris

I got into David Sedaris in 2016 and read even more of his books this year. He released a large collection of his diaries in March and as an avid journaler I loved it. He’s one of the funniest writers I’ve ever read and seeing his raw diaries be that funny was both inspiring and exasperating. What struck me most about it though was the casual harshness he encountered throughout the late 70’s and 80’s. Sedaris is a gay man growing up in these times and he routinely witnessed or was the victim of constant harassment, where you could get mugged, be called a faggot, or have something thrown at you from a car all in the same month. While we clearly still have a long way to go, the misogyny, racism, and homophobia all seemed to be so much more out in the open and blatant back then, ready to greet you at any street corner.  And this wasn’t the 1950’s, this was all happening in the decade or so before I was born. While the shitstorm of the last year has revealed how much more we still need to reckon with as a society, it’s important to recognize the ways life has gotten better, but even more importantly, that we’re always going to have to work to make it better and uphold the good, even if it is hard, often demoralizing fucking work.

(My other favorite by Sedaris that I read this year was Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls. Yup, that’s the title. But you’re not gonna go wrong picking up any of his essay collections, they’re all hilarious.)

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia & Discontent and its Civilizations by Moshin Hamid

The first a novel, the second a collection of non-fiction essays, both show the incredible strength, intelligence, and versatility of the writer Moshin Hamid. I learned more about Pakistan than I’d ever known and about a culture that was completely foreign to me, but at the same time Hamid expertly shows all of the striking similarities of desires and conflicts that they share with all people regardless of location. ‘Immigrant’ and ‘minority’ is a word thrown around so often but so few of us who aren’t ones ever actually learn what the experience is like. These two books have the same power and affection that Americanah, The Sympathizer, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao gave me the year before.

Seeking Wisdom by Peter Bevelin

The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant

Principles by Ray Dalio

These three were my favorite “intellectual” reads of the year. I set out not to finish these books, but to get what I thought was interesting and useful from them, and in that I succeeded. All three give you a  better understanding of the world we live in and why the way things are the way they are. Seeking Wisdom is one of the best books on cognitive biases I’ve read, and uses great examples from Charles Darwin all the way to Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger to show you the ways human beings trick themselves.

The Story of Philosophy was very interesting and really readable thanks to the great Will Durant (check out him and his wife’s short book, the Lessons of History. They are beasts.) I learned many of the most important philosophers’ thoughts and ideas about society, religion, science and government, and on that last point, it was somewhat reassuring to see people trying to figure out how the hell to organize society and running into the same problems for millennia.

Finally, Principles was extraordinary, with a ton of useful, practical, yet mind-blowing principles you can apply in your own life. I’d recommend checking out Ray Dalio on the Tim Ferriss podcast where they go over some of the book and his story. Dalio seems like an incredibly intelligent, humble, caring guy who’s also massively successful. The best thing about these books is that I’ll be picking them up and learning from them again and again in the years to come.

The Night of the Gun by David Carr

I read a few memoirs on addiction and recovery this year, but this one gobsmacked me. David Carr was a highly respected journalist for the New York Times (he passed away in 2015). But before that he had been an abusive crack addict. With this book he not only writes about his past, but investigates it, just as he would with any other piece of reporting, going back and interviewing the people he ran with at the time and researching and fact checking. The book is about addiction and recovery, but even more so about memory, what we choose to remember, and what we don’t, and how the way we see ourselves often lines up with a view that allows us to move on and live our lives as best we can.

Killing Floor by Lee Child

The first Jack Reacher novel in the series and the first I’d ever read. It was a great, pulpy tough guy novel and a blast to read.

Comics

These comics all blew me away and showed me just how wide-ranging and powerful a comic could be. I’d put these selections up there with any book I read this year.

X-Men Grand Design by Ed Piskor

I’ve been excited for this book as soon it was announced. I wanted to get into the old school X-Men mythos earlier this year but all the books I picked up felt dated and too convoluted. Then I heard about this project by Ed Piskor, a one man cartoonist who writes, draws, colors, and letters the whole dang comic. He was going to streamline the entire early history of the X-Men in how own style for a modern read. This was exactly what I was looking for. I read his previous work (mentioned below) and loved it. I had high expectations awaiting the first issue, which finally came out on December 20th. It wildly exceeded my hopes. The first issue goes over both Professor X and Magneto’s early lives and how they became who we know them as, and wraps up with the recruitment of the original X-Men. I expected it to look dope and be cool, but I did not expect the trauma and pathos each character goes through on their way to becoming the heroes we’re familiar with. Piskor doesn’t shy away from these harrowing trials and tribulations and each one is conveyed with simple but powerful visuals. The pace is breakneck and I can’t wait to re-read it again before the next issue comes out in just a few days on January 3rd. If you’re into the X-Men at all go out and grab this book!

Hip Hop Family Tree by Ed Piskor

My Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris

I wrote about these two earlier in the year. Click the links for my thoughts and praise of HHFT and MFTIM.

Uncanny X-Force by Rick Remender

This book is so badass. I  was lucky enough to borrow the omnibus from a friend in 2016 (shoutout to Kyle!) and took my time with it, finishing it early this year. It’s basically Wolverine leading a team of assassins against any threats the X-Men wouldn’t necessarily have the stomach to handle. The team includes Deadpool, Psylocke, Archangel, and Phantomex (some sort of robot/artificial assassin James Bond-type that I still don’t fully understand but was instantly memorable). It’s a brutal book and puts each character through the ringer, all for a sprawling look at what it means to take life and death into your own hands.

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Airplane Mode

Tech and social media continue to worm into every crevice of our lives, for good and increasingly bad. One of the things I consider bad is the incessant pull to check our phones, with no real purpose, just an unconscious (and addicting) desire to occupy our mind with something at all times. In an effort to fight off the bad, and to maintain some peace in the mornings, I started tweaking my routine.

First, I moved my phone charger from my bedside table to the desk across the room. This way I couldn’t just pick it up whenever I wanted and disturb my sleep with a glowing rectangle. It also forces me to get out of bed to turn the alarm off and start my day. Then I began putting my phone on Sleep mode before bed. No vibrations to wake me up or tempt me. I also wanted to stop checking my phone in the mornings so I could start my day off on the right foot with some peace of mind. But I’d usually wake up to some text or notification that I ended up checking, and then I’d check another app, and then that peace was gone. So, when I heard Tim Ferriss puts his phone on Airplane mode before bed, that seemed like the logical next step. And it’s surprising how effective it is, and how much nicer my mornings have been. I don’t see any texts, I don’t know what’s happened in the news overnight, and I  have no temptation to check anything. That’s the key I think. Just by blacking out my phones network capabilities, I remove the temptation and the pull to check it. My mornings have been a lot more peaceful, and I can flick on the world in my phone whenever I’m ready.

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My Year in TV & Movies 2017

2017 was an absolutely stacked year for entertainment. I thought it was a really strong year for both mediums, but the amount of great TV that’s coming out every single month now is staggering. There’s lots of great movies coming out too, but you just have to look a little harder for them underneath all the ‘blockbusters’ (though some of those are pretty great too). Netflix absolutely crushed it this year, with 7 TV shows on my list.  Here’s what I really enjoyed this year.

TV

The Leftovers

Legion

My two favorite shows in 2017 were Legion and The Leftovers. While very different shows they both ask similar questions: Am I crazy? Or is the world around me crazy? Am I in control? Or are larger, unknown forces at work? How do we deal with grief and guilt? The two best performances I saw on TV all year came from Carrie Coon of the Leftovers and Aubrey Plaza in Legion. Everyone was superb on the Leftovers, but Carrie Coon was on another level, mining the depths of Nora Durst’s anger and grief for explosive, devastating acting. The gut-wrenching emotion displayed on her face in so many different scenes was extraordinary. Aubrey Plaza on the other hand broke out of her role as April on Parks and Rec, bursting through as the literal and figurative monster pulling the strings of David, the protagonist in Legion. I’ve always liked Plaza, but she leaves behind her apparent one-note dryness and explodes into mania, a monster in control and having fun.

The Leftovers was brutal, beautiful, emotional and gorgeous. Every performance was superb and I think it was the best season of television this year. Legion was a close personal second for me. It was off the wall fun, and you never knew what type of show you were going to get each week. It felt like Legion, along with Logan, showed what a comic book adaption could really be, which is, anything it damn well pleases. Legion isn’t  a super-hero show. It’s a show about mental illness and the struggle to grasp and then control our potential, and recognizing it as both a gift and a curse. The Leftovers is one of the most powerful examinations of grief I’ve seen in art, and was also funny, unpredictable, weird, and heartbreaking. I think both of these shows might have slipped under the radar for a lot of people and I highly recommend checking them out.

Steven Universe

Adventure Time

Rick and Morty

Bojack Horseman

I wrote about these cartoons previously, and there’s nothing more to say other than it still blows my mind how deep each show can get in it’s respective world-building and pathos.

Game of Thrones

Obviously. People ragged on it a bit this year because of some iffy writing, deservedly so, but god dammit we finally got dragons fucking shit up!

Mindhunter

For as much TV as I watch, I don’t really ‘binge’, or at least as compulsively as I think that word suggests. I like to space it out a bit, even if just for a week if it’s on Netflix. But I ripped through this show and finished it in a weekend. David Fincher’s directing, the joy of seeing a show almost purely constructed on conversation between characters, and diving into the psychology of monsters and men made this show enthralling. I’m not a huge true crime/serial killer guy, but I loved this show.

Nathan For You

This show can be uncomfortable to watch, to say the least. It’s also the hardest I’ve laughed at a TV show this year and I’m amazed and horrified at how this genius/psychopath commits fully to his weird, elaborate social experiments/pranks. Completely unlike anything else on TV. So good, one of the greatest documentary filmmakers ever, Errol Morris, just wrote about how much he loved it. 

Stranger Things 2

Honestly, I went into the second season not expecting much, because the first season was so good, and since the show wasn’t conceived as continuing the first season’s story, I thought this would just be a typical kind of rushed sequel job. I thought it’d be good, just not as good. And I was wrong. Somehow the second season might have been even better than the first, in part because I thought the ending was a lot stronger this time around. Now can Will Byers have one god damn day of peace?

GLOW 

Maybe it’s on me for not looking more widely before, but I felt like this year there was a ton of wonderful TV shows with strong female characters and performances. The Leftovers, Legion and Godless featured some of my favorite performances of the year, all by women. And GLOW was a kick-the-door-in celebration of this fact, as almost the entire show is made up of and focused on women. This show surprised me. I really liked it and look forward to the next  season, and more shows like it.

Master of None

Big Mouth

These two comedies couldn’t be more different, but they’re both hilarious and surprisingly deep. Both shows look at dating, sex, and relationships, and the volatile changes and emotions that come with it, yet each does so with vastly different formats and points of view. It’s cool to see Aziz Ansari and Nick Kroll, two good friends, come up together and each create such distinct, original shows.

Curb Your Enthusiasm

Long live Larry David. I hope he keeps making Curb until the day he dies.

Godless

Godless was the best Western of the year, a 7 episode mini-series that felt like one long, gorgeous, old-school movie. Filled with deep characters dealing with tremendous trauma and loss, there’s still bits of real humanity, history, laughter, and beauty sprinkled throughout. Every actor is perfect, but Merrit Wever’s tough as nails Maggie steals the show. Godless was written and directed by Scott Frank, who had quite the year. He wrote the first movie on the list below. You might have heard of it.

Honorable Mentions:

Billions continues to be entertaining with strong performances. The Good Place is good. The Americans keeps on chugging along in moody silence, just like Phil, but I’m very excited for their next and final season. I jumped into Preacher‘s second season without watching the first and enjoyed it. Fargo was very slow starting off but picked up nicely at the end. Broad City is still killing it. Love is an underrated comedy on Netflix that I’ve really enjoyed.

MOVIES

Logan

Logan was the best comic book movie of the year, and one of the best movies of the year, period. A brutal neo-Western properly closing out both Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart’s Wolverine and Professor X, with their best performances yet. Scott Frank wrote this as well. Both Logan and Godless are masterpieces of their form.

Get Out

A stunning, perfect debut for Jordan Peele, timely, scary, and god damn funny. It’s very cool to see this in Oscar contention, especially with how far back it was released. Can’t wait to see what he makes next.

Thor: Ragnarok

Spider-Man: Homecoming

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 

The Marvel contingency. They’re ranked in the order I liked them. Thor was fun and gorgeous. I felt like this was the first time my version of Spider-Man was on the big screen. I’m pumped he’s in the Marvel fold. Guardians, while also visually stunning, was a bit of a letdown, if only because of how original and fresh the first one felt. That movie floored me in theaters and is one of my favorite Marvel movies, so a high bar to live up to. Black Panther and Infinity War next year!!!

The Big Sick

Baby Driver

Dunkirk

I want more movies like these three in the summertime. Original movies with their own unique style, viewpoint, or message, unattached to any ‘property’. And really, any summer you get new Edgar Wright and Christopher Nolan is a huge win.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

What a fucking movie. Made by the same writer-director who gave us In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths, this movie has the pitch black humor and violence he’s known for, but with more raw emotion, grief, and pathos running throughout. There was uncomfortable laughter and audible gasps in my theater. Martin McDonagh makes you sickened by, and then empathize with, a violent racist and root for and cringe at what a grieving mother’s  willing to do for justice (or revenge). I walked out wanting to immediately see it again and will do so soon. Sam Rockwell’s a god damn gift.

Honorable Mentions:

It, I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Anymore, Wind River, Logan Lucky

Best movies I watched for the first time that didn’t come out this year:

Spotlight, 20th Century Women, The Wrestler, Bone Tomahawk, Moonlight, The Lobster, Moana, Life Itself, Memories of Murder

These movies were all astounding and among my favorites of the year.

Movies that came out this year that I still want to see: 

Ladybird, Call Me By Your Name, Phantom Thread, The Disaster Artist, Downsizing, The Florida Project, Coco, The Last Jedi, The Shape of Water, I, Tonya, The Post, Molly’s Game, Mudbound

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So, what’d I miss?