What I Read, 2015-25

No comments, no nothing, solely for my benefit and that of the curious (?). Exists because I don't like the Good Reads layout, nor the fact that it's owned by Amazon.

2015
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
Iris Murdoch, The Bell
Tõnu Õnnepalu, Radio
James Dickey, Deliverance
Margaret MacMillan, Nixon and Mao
William Shakespeare, Cymbeline (the Royal Shakespeare Company edition - first one I found in a used bookstore, no larger point intended)
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
Henry Green, Loving
Robert E. Kapsis, ed., Conversations with Steve Martin
P.G. Wodehouse, /Blandings Castle/
Raymond Kennedy, Ride a Cockhorse
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
Michael Lewis, The Big Short
Dag Solstad, Shyness and Dignity
Finn Brunton, Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet
Heinrich Böll, Billiards at Half-Past Nine
Michael Dibdin, Cabal
Jan Morris, Hav [NYRB volume combining Last Letters From Hav and Hav of the Myrmidons]
Henri-Pierre Roché, Jules and Jim
Elizabeth Taylor, You'll Enjoy It When You Get There: The Short Stories of Elizabeth Taylor
Philip Roth, When She Was Good
László Kraznahorkai, War & War
Hitchcock/Truffaut
Scott Saul, Becoming Richard Pryor
Renata Adler, Speedboat
Witold Gombrowicz, Cosmos
P.G. Wodehouse, /The Code of the Woosters/
P.G. Wodehouse, /How Right You Are, Jeeves/
Michael Dibdin, And Then You Die

2016
"Pitticus Lore," I Am Number Four
Jane Austen, Lady Susan
Philip Roth, Indignation
Oakley Hall, Warlock
László Kraznahorkai, Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens
Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
Stephen Davis, Hammer of the Gods
Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before
Mark Jacobson, Teenage Hipster in the Modern World
J.G. Ballard, High-Rise
Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love
Nancy Mitford, Love in a Cold Climate
Legs McNeil and Mickey Leigh, Please Kill Me
Michael Herr, Dispatches
Jon Fine, Your Band Sucks: What I Saw at Indie Rock's Failed Revolution (But Can No Longer Hear) (do not read this book)
James Andrew Miller, Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency
Tess Slesinger, The Unpossessed
Don DeLillo, Underworld

2017
Lucy Wadham, Heads and Straights
Gilbert M. Gaul, Billion Dollar Ball
John Belton, Widescreen Cinema
Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
Ivan Klíma, Love and Garbage (too much love not enough garbage)
David Bianculli, Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
László Kraznahorkai, Herman/The Last Wolf
Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa
James Wilcox, American Baptists
Chuck Klosterman, X
John A. Farrell, Richard Nixon: The Life
George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
John Boorman, Tom Luddy, David Thomson and Walter Donahue, ed. Projections 4
H.R.F. Keating, Inspector Ghote's Good Crusade
Chuck Klosterman, But What If We're Wrong?
Stephen Spender, The Temple
Günter Grass, The Tin Drum
Christine Angot, Incest
John Gregory Dunne, The Studio
Jessica Mitford, Poison Penmanship
Javier Marías, All Souls
Mike Myers, Canada
Sally Shafto, The Zanzibar Films and the Dandies of May 1968
Anya Von Bremzen, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking
László Kraznahorkai, The World Goes On
Christian Metz, Film Language

2018
Ryu Murakami, Piercing
Jane Austen, Sense & Sensibility
Richard Collins, Vincent Porter, WDR and the Arbeiterfilm: Fassbinder, Ziewer, and Others
H.R. F. Keating, The Sheriff of Bombay
Nancy Mitford, Christmas Pudding
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart
Emily Y. Danforth, The Miseducation of Cameron Post
Glenway Wescott, The Pilgrim Hawk
Michael Benson, Space Odyssey
Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals
Alain Guiraudie, Now the Night Begins
Nancy Mitford, Pigeon Pie
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Pages from the Goncourt Journals
Walter Abish, How German Is It
Theodore H. White, The Making of the President — 1964
Heinrich Böll, The Lost Honor of Katherina Blum
Dawn Powell, A Time To Be Born
Bernard Rosenberg and Harry Silverstein, The Real Tinsel
Dawn Powell, Turn, Magic Wheel
P.G. Wodehouse, A Prefect's Uncle
Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone
P.G. Wodehouse, /The Mating Season/
Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant

2019
Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters
Louis Black and Collins Swords, CinemaTexas Notes: The Early Days of Austin Film Culture
Moshe Safdie, Beyond Habitat
Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz
E.M. Delafield, The Way Things Are
Kyōko Hirano, Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo
Anna Seghers, Transit
Eric Ambler, Here Lies
E.M. Delafield, Diary of a Provincial Lady
Lawrence Wright, God Save Texas
Euclides da Cunha, Rebellion in the Backlands
Simone Signoret, Nostalgia Isn't What It Used To Be
George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft
William Gaddis, JR
Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station
László Krasznahorkai, Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming
George and Weedon Grossmith, Diary of a Nobody
Jean-Patrick Manchette, Nada
David Lynch and Kristine McKenna, Room to Dream
Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty

2020
Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of American Consensus
Chen Ruoxi, The Execution of Mayor Yin and Other Stories
Elizabeth Taylor, A View of the Harbour
Studs Terkel, American Dreams: Lost & Found
W.K.L. Dickson, The Biograph in Battle
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
Lizzy Goodman, Meet Me in the Bathroom
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Joanne McNeil, Lurking
John Hawkes, The Lime Twig
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
Charlotte Mosley, ed., The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh
László Krasznahorkai and Ornan Rotem, The Manhattan Project
Iain Reid, I'm Thinking of Ending Things
Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries
Mark Asch, New York Movies
Eric Ambler, Background to Danger
Michael Innes, A Family Affair

2021
Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley
P.G. Wodehouse, Tales From the Drones Club
Annie Ernaux, The Years
Michael Almereyda, Jonathan Lethem and Robert Polito, eds., Manny Farber: Paintings and Writings
Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa
David Plante, Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three
Eric Ambler, Cause for Alarm
Bertolt Brecht, The Good Woman of Setzuan ("revised English version by Eric Bentley")
Rosario Castellanos, The Nine Guardians
Jenny Hval, Girls Against God
Michael Innes, Death at the Chase
Annie Ernaux, A Man's Place
Don DeLillo, Mao II
Annie Ernaux, A Woman's Story
Michael Gilbert, Smallbone Deceased
Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion
E.M. Delafield, The Provincial Lady Goes Further
Barry Hannah, Long, Last, Happy: New and Selected Stories
Edmund Crispin, The Long Divorce
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
Valeria Berletti (Cari Beauchamp, ed.), Adventures of a Hollywood Secretary
Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit
Annie Ernaux, The Possession
Rosa Liksom, Compartment No. 6
Joe McCarthy, ed., Fred Allen's Letters
Michael Innes, Hamlet, Revenge!
Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel
P.G. Wodehouse, Barmy in Wonderland
Annie Ernaux, Happening
Robert Coover, The Public Burning
Marguerite Duras, The Lover
Marguerite Duras, The Ravishing of Lol Stein
Annie Ernaux, Exteriors
Henri Charpentier and Boyden Sparks, Life à la Henri
H.R.F. Keating, Under a Monsoon Cloud
Jurij Meden, Scratches and Glitches
Italo Svevo, As a Man Grows Older
Donald E. Westlake, The Cutie
Annie Ernaux, I Remain in Darkness
Annete Michelson and Kenneth White, eds., October Files: Michael Snow
Philip Roth, Deception
Annie Ernaux, A Girl's Story
Albert Camus, The Fall
Patrick Modiano, In the Café of Lost Youth

2022
Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians
Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Erasers
Denis Diderot, Rameau's Nephew
László Krasznahorkai, Chasing Homer
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
Carl Gottlieb, The Jaws Log
Marguerite Duras, The Vice-Consul
Lucy Sante, The Other Paris
Roland Barthes, New Critical Essays
Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Quarry
John Collier, Fancies and Goodnights
Peter Handke, A Moment of True Feeling
Denis Johnson, The Stars at Noon
G.F. Newman, A Detective's Story
Michael Innes, The Gay Phoenix
Robin Kinross, Modern Typography
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Gregory Mcdonald, Souvenirs of a Blown World
George Gissing, The Whirlpool
Don DeLillo, /White Noise/
Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Miklós Szenkuthy, Marginalia on Casanova (St. Orpheus Breviary, Vol. I)
Michael Innes, Christmas at Candleshoe
Thomas Bernhard, Correction
Michael Almereyda, Tesla: All My Dreams Are True
Christian Gailly, The Passion of Martin Fissel-Brant
Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight
Annie Ernaux, A Frozen Woman
Dag Solstad, Professor Andersen's Night
Pamela Hansford Johnson, The Holiday Friend
László Krasznahorkai, A Mountain to the North, A Lake to the South, Paths to the West, A River to the East
Annie Ernaux, Shame
Emma Healey, Best Young Woman Job Book
James Lattimer and Eva Sangiorgi, eds., Textur #5: Alain Guiraudie
Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

2023
Rebecca De Pas and Eva Sangiorgi, eds., Viennale 60. On Film Festivals
Georges Simenon, Maigret at the Crossroads
Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk
Ferdinand Oyono, Houseboy
Edmund Crispin, Holy Disorders
Annie Ernaux, Getting Lost
Gerard Reve, The Evenings
Jacob Korg, George Gissing: A Critical Biography
László Krasznahorkai, Spadework for the Palace
Patrick Wright, The Sea View Has Me Again: Uwe Johnson in Sheerness
Marcel Rouff, The Passionate Epicure: La Vie et la Passion de Dodin-Bouffant, Gourmet
Max Frisch, Homo Faber
Peter Corris, The Empty Beach
Henry Cecil, Brothers in Law
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
Jan Morris, Venice
Theo Panayides, The Lives of Others
Martin Melhuish, Bachman-Turner Overdrive: Rock is My Life, This is My Song
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Gregory Mcdonald, Flynn
P.G. Wodehouse, /Eggs, Beans and Crumpets/
Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Michael Innes, Appleby's End
Andrew Kazdin, Glenn Gould at Work: Creative Lying
Dezső Kosztolányi, Kornél Esti
Elizabeth Legge, Michael Snow: Wavelength
Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
Dag Solstad, Novel 11, Book 18
Benjamin Constant, Adolphe
Jacques Futrelle, E.F. Bleiler (ed.), Best "Thinking Machine" Detective Stories
Annie Ernaux, Do What They Say or Else
Jon Fosse, The Other Names: Septology I-II
Guy Debord, Panegyric: Volumes I & II
Jon Fosse, I is Another: Septology III-V
Jon Fosse, A New Name: Septology VI-VII
Matthias Ulrich, ed., Elizabeth Price: Sound of the Break
Paul McEwan, Cinema's Original Sin: D.W. Griffith, American Racism, and the Rise of Film Culture
Annie Ernaux, The Young Man
Michael Innes, The Daffodil Affair

2024
Benito Pérez Galdós, Nazarín
Yannick Haenel, Hold Fast Your Crown
Henry James, What Maisie Knew
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy
Philippe Sollers, The Park
Agatha Christie, /Lord Edgware Dies/
Stendhal, The Red and the Black
Donald E. Westlake, Why Me
Cyril Connolly, The Rock Pool
Roland Barthes, Travels in China
Steve Tesich, Karoo
Peter Corris, Deal Me Out
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
Patricia Highsmith, Ripley Under Ground
Augusto De Angelis, Death In a Bookstore
Ken Annakin, So You Wanna Be a Director?
Sergio Chejfec, The Incompletes
J.G. Farrell, Troubles
Phoebe Atwood Taylor, The Cape Cod Mystery
W.M. Spackman, Heyday (Dalkey Archives revised version)
Aaron Cezar, Dani Burrows, eds., Politics of Food
Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch
Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys
László Krasznahorkai, Herscht 07769
Stephen Potter, One-Upmanship
Roberto Rossellini, Adriano Aprà (ed.), My Method: Writings & Interviews
W. Somerset Maugham, The Gentleman in the Parlour
Vincent Kaufmann, Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry
Robert Coover, A Night at the Movies
André Launay, Posh Food
Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, The Use of Photography
Edmund Crispin, The Case of the Gilded Fly
Isabel Colegate, The Blackmailer
Jie Li, Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China

Guilt/pleasure

We were just here a few years ago but let me briefly run through the umpteenth rendition of this never-ending "guilty pleasures" thing. The "against guilty pleasures" broadside is a hardy perennial you can count upon encountering every now and then, certainly much more than its presumable opposite ("in favor of guilt and shame"). It's also a far more popular essay than one that would just get on with the work of case-by-case critical analysis, the same way that it's far easier to get money to write an essay decrying crappy web content and calling for better work than getting the editorial go-ahead for actual better work; once you've read and nodded along, you can feel better without expending any intellectual energy.

It's broadly understood that movies are (or can be) art, that formerly disreputable comic books, rock or disco, et al., are all defensible, reclaimable and up for integration into some kind of canon. The latest round of Sunday belligerence on Twitter was triggered by an Adam Sternbergh article which uses Proust and Moby Dick as shorthand for "high culture." (One day I'd love to read a version of this article that gets aggrieved instead about, say, people yelling at you to read Hermann Broch.) Rather than feeling guilt, he asks if we can instead "instead envision a world in which the person struggling through (but enjoying!) 'Remembrance of Things Past' and the person tearing through (and enjoying!) 'Gone Girl' can coexist on the same strip of sand"? (Don't they already? This seems like an argument torn from the foulest imaginable internet comment board.)

The whole "guilty pleasure" concept is obviously contained within the sphere of cultural consumption; it's always "I should be perusing this rather than this," not "I should be participating in my community and trying to effectuate ways to end structural inequalities rather than watching 'The Good Wife.'" Within that framework, policing the high/low artistic divides seems like an incredibly archaic concern. Maybe this is because I don't know enough assholes who berate others for watching trash TV or not spending sufficient time contemplating Kant or whatever; pretty much everyone I know understands that a balanced high/middle/low intake (however we'd define those brows) of whatever is pretty crucial to maintaining equilibrium (as well as acquiring a broad-spanning vocabulary that allows you to run from the demotic to the self-consciously rarefied, which helps keeps things lively).

If you're interested in cultural consumption on some kind of serious level (prose, music, movies, whatever), then yes: a certain amount of guilt should ensure if you find yourself constantly drawn to what's widely understood to be garbage without any kind of critical engagement. Things don't need to be good to be culturally significant, unconsciously reflect broader concerns, et al., but that's clearly not what your average Da Vinci Code, Vince Flynn et al. reader is up to. If you're invested in a medium, you need to acquire a certain level of expertise. That means inevitably that you're going to be able to make meaningful distinctions about (at the very least) the level of craftsmanship on display. The problem with The Da Vinci Code isn't that it's pretty much recycling the idiocies of The Passover Conspiracy; the problem is that Dan Brown can't write, and if everything you read is badly written, that means you can't write either — and if you believe that writing is a good way to organize your thoughts, then you're kind of screwed.

The idea that you should enjoy whatever you're consuming, instantly, is just such a lousy metric for deciding whether to engage with something. Works which are harder than other works — movies which eschew narrative for seemingly endless tracking shots of silent trudging, books with sentences that trail for pages (this is my kind of arena) — will retrain your brain; eventually you'll learn how to consume them, and they'll stay with you. And so yes: feel guilty sometimes. Don't feel too guilty: we all get tired, too tired to deal with difficult material. And not everything Difficult is Good, and not everything Enjoyable is Garbage, propositions I hope all adults eventually understand. But I don't think people need more encouragement to consume what they enjoy consuming on a mass scale, and if you're going to really Engage with — dissect, understand, articulate your interest in or distaste for — a given object (the proposition Sternbergh ends with), you've simply got to put some time in more difficult material.

My most popular Letterboxd capsules of 2013

So I'm barely writing reviews this year: they're now the least-trafficked, least paid-for component of "film writing," a crisis/topic for another, angrier day. (In all probability, it'd be easier to get someone to pay me to write a "think piece" about why paid criticism is the least valued component of this market than to get someone to pay me to write reviews; critics are now barely-paid grist for reconsiderations of largely faulty misinterpretations of what they wrote. Whatever.)

But I've gotten into the habit for years now of writing capsules for everything I see and don't get to review, which these days is pretty much every movie it'd be desirable to be On The Record about. Rather than trust my own scanty wits to determine which of these pieces will be passed down to posterity, why not let the readers of Letterboxd (where all this stuff is now going up; RIP, Geocities film logs full of terrible writing and now locked up for life in the musty vault of my hard drive) determine what I wrote that was decent this year?

1) Zero Dark Thirty
2) Frances Ha
3) The Canyons
4) To The Wonder
5) Gravity
6) Amour
7) Like Someone In Love
8) Computer Chess [round 2]
9) The Counselor
10) Museum Hours

Alexey Balabanov on Cargo 200, 2008

Just learned of the death of one of my favorite contemporary directors, Alexey Balabanov. No time to get into a full appreciation right now, but I'm reposting my 2008 interview with him about Cargo 200 that disappeared from the internet when the archives of an older incarnation of Spout blog went down.

"In every country there are decent people and there are freaks." — Alexey Balabanov, 2007

When did you first come up with the idea for Cargo 200?
I came up with the idea for Cargo 200 a long time ago, after the film River [a 2002 project about a 19th-century leper colony left unfinished after actress Tuiara Svinoboeva died in a road accident during production]. I traveled a lot around the country in 1984-86. I know Siberia and the far north well, and this is based on true things that happened. The only thing I made up when the corpse of the dead soldier is thrown into bed with the girl. In reality, when I served in the army from 1981-83, the boxes with dead soldiers from Afghanistan disappeared all the time. And where they ended up, no one knows. Those kind of discotheques were everywhere then, I went to them. At that time, there were limitations on vodka, so everyone bought imitation vodka.

A lot of American reviews said the movie's set in 1984 in reference to Orwell's book.
No. That's not correct. The truth is, Gorbachev is a thief. There was a famous cotton scandal in Uzbekistan in 1983. Everything that happened connected back clearly to Moscow, and it was all terrifying. And Gorbachev was then the Minister of Agriculture. That's the whole story. I had 1984 in mind, because this was the last year under Chernenko. After that began changes in the country, right after his death [in 1985].

The two boys who walk off together at the end are going to become oligarchs, right?
Yes yes yes, these are the people who will start businesses in the future. These are the beginnings of capitalism, and then these people became oligarchs. I don't love capitalism. I don't love communism either. I like it when people are honest and decent. Oligarchs are for the most part not decent people because their capital is stolen. The communists, they're simply terrible people.

Does your film belong to the chernukha genre [a series of films popular during perestroika depicting Soviet life as unpleasantly as possible]?
In the first place, this is a film without genre. I insist on this. I don't like chernukha or horror movies. This is a film without genres that absolutely reflects the position of our history in 1984. In the second place, many people don't like this film, many people like it. For example, Andrei Zernov the famous director said "We all wanted to make such a film, but we didn't have enough courage. But Balabanov made it." It was very pleasant for me to hear his words. It seems to me that this film is honest, truthful and good. There's no chernukha. In any case, the worst kind of movie is those they say nothing, when people instantly forget if when they watch it.

Did the ban on anyone under 21 seeing it cause you any problems?
Honestly, this is a formality. In reality they let everyone in. For example, I took my children to this movie. I'm not worried about showing it to them: my youngest is 13, my oldest 19. They go to the movie and they're let in.

I read you were planning to work with Willem Defoe at one point.
I became friends with Willem Defoe at Telluride. He really liked [2002's] War. We walked around and talked. I told him about my idea for a film called The American. When I wrote it, I sent it to him. He read it and said it was very good, but he didn't see himself in this role. I badgered him about it for a long time, but he refused. Afterwards we began looking for an American actor and settled on Michael Biehn. We began filming with Biehn in New York, and he was great. Then we moved to Northern Siberia, and he began to drink vodka heavily. We filmed there for three days, then moved to Irkutsk. There all hell broke loose. He drank himself into a stupor. I refused to continue filming, and winter was already passing. He returned to Los Angeles and promised to return the money. He didn't return anything. We filed a lawsuit in 2003.

Is the lawsuit over?
Of course not. We lost our money and that's it.

How do you feel about the current state of the Russian film industry?
It's not very good. Government support has fallen because of the world financial crisis. Has my film Morphia shown up there yet?

No, it's the first time I've heard of it.
You're calling me from New York?

Yeah.
Well, then you can easily find it at Brighton Beach.

Pirated copies?
Of course. You can find it online easily. It came out right after the premiere. Bad quality, but now there's a better one. You can find it at Brighton for sure. Morphia is based on the early writings of Mikhail Bulgakov. This was the first screenplay by Sergei Bodrov Jr., who's sadly dead now.

Do you think people misunderstand Cargo 200 when you show it outside Russia?
I don't know. I think that 1917, the revolution, everyone understands what that means. All this happens at every step to this day. They kill every day. They show it to us on television every day, and it's getting worse and worse.

How to issue fiery negative rhetoric on the internet

This is mostly an exercise in writing something outside of my usual fare to loosen my brain up. If you read me, you know I have a fair amount of experience at being negative, throwing down pissy gauntlets and so on. I was chatting with Kevin B. Lee while he was working on his Argo takedown and thinking about adjusting the tone, so I figured it wouldn't hurt anyone if I codified some general guidelines I've slowly established for myself. I've violated them in the past and may yet again, or even in the body of this post; nonetheless. These guidelines are specifically for people conducting arguments about The Cinema online in the form of blog posts, point-counterpoints and so on, but they might be applicable in general.

Think about your positive argument first
Contrary to what the massively insecure and angry think, criticism isn't fundamentally, primarily or even largely a negative practice; it's analysis and contextualization. Inevitably, though, there'll come a time when something so wrongheaded pops up you feel the need to drop some verbal napalm. You don't need to include some kind of positive resolution at the end of your piece (indeed, doing so might — depending on what you're writing — just be the kind of hackneyed SAT essay "proper essay construction" fit only for, well, SAT essays). But you do need to be clear on why you're so fired-up; the answer, generally, is that whatever it is you're arguing against infuriates you because there's a better alternative: a better movie, a better argument for or against something, a better perspective, whatever. Once you know what you're implicitly or explicitly arguing for, it'll be easier to systematically demolish your targets.

Optional: Write fast and in the heat of the moment
There aren't any solid rules for How To Write — methods, times, sustained concentration — and anyone who tells you there are is just trying to mandate what works for them as perfect because it took them forever to figure out how best to work. However, I've found that when something just really ticks me off, it's best to sit down and get it all out of my system. Fast drafting retains your passion and allows you to barrel past all of the hemming and hawing that can clutter up a first draft. But this may not work for everyone.

Don't go ad hominem
This should probably go without saying, but apparently it doesn't. There are many reasons not to go ad hominem, such as a) it implies your argument isn't strong enough to rest on its own merits b) it leads you to make unflattering characterizations that may not be accurate c) it makes you a dick and life is hard enough d) you probably have mutual acquaintances or friends with the person you're attacking, which will make entering certain rooms tense e) you're potentially burning yourself professionally. A person may be an idiot online, but anyone you feel strongly enough about to attack is probably someone you have some kind of respect for, no matter how begrudgingly. And seriously, life is hard enough.

Minimize the apologetics
You're making an argument. You believe in it. Don't spend 13 paragraphs qualifying your argument or presenting devil's advocate statements against yourself. You know how annoying it is when someone apologizes to you orally at such length that they're not apologizing at all, just trying to get out of trouble? Perhaps you've been that person yourself. Don't be that person in print, which is even more tedious. Succinctly present your respect for the person you're attacking and get on with it.

Name who you're attacking
There are quite a few writers I love and respect otherwise who do this thing where they issue a half-assed formulation ("some people inexplicably believe" or some such) which allows them to attack without attacking. I guess the idea is to avoid personal conflicts (which works unless the person you're attacking reads your piece and gets offended nonetheless) and to not mess up someone's Google. The latter is creditable, but ultimately this kind of pussyfooting is annoying: if the reader doesn't know who you're referring to (which is eminently possible), they'll feel vaguely annoyed and spend hours googling the things you've paraphrased for the express purpose of being un-Googleable.

Link to the person you're attacking
This is basic courtesy both to the reader (who deserves a chance to independently evaluate the thing you're attacking in its original context) and to the person you're attacking (because at least they can get some traffic out of this). This is why asshole conservative websites like Breitbart.com only link to other asshole conservative websites (like "Newsbusters" which come the fuck on): they want to deny traffic to someone while attacking them, i.e. garner non-reciprocal attention. This is rude.

Be civil and email the person you're attacking
This is not a "writing" step, but it's a good idea. There's a good chance that the person whose argument you're going after may not even be someone who you have much in common with POV-wise. But they're a fellow writer, which is a hard profession, and unless they're the worst person in the entire world, you probably don't wish ill upon them. Remember, too, that a certain amount of online conflict is WWE: posturing for attention, fighting without ill will. We're all in it together. E.g.: I do not have the same taste as Dan Kois, to put it mildly, but I emailed him to let him know I'd be attacking him, and he was a total mensch about it, even linked back to me in a follow-up New York Times piece. Unless you exist in an echo chamber solely comprised of the like-minded, it behooves you (both personally and professionally) to accept that you'll be interacting regularly with people who are too low-/high-brow for your taste. That means you won't agree on much, but that's no reason to write them off in toto. If someone or their argument gets under your skin enough to go to the trouble of writing against them, that must mean you feel there's something there worth responding to at length. Otherwise you'd just go on Twitter and be a dick about it. So knock it off and give them a heads-up.

Don't be Kevin Smith
In the movie Chasing Amy, incredibly truthful moments are defused by really lame jokes, just to make sure no one gets too uncomfortable. When you're going negative, resist the temptation to. Write like this? Because like you're like a funny and decent and cool person? And like you don't know what you're saying and you feel insecure and WELP oh no brb? You're going negative and you believe in what you're saying; don't leaven what you're saying with the stupid stylistic tics of momentary internet trends. Have the guts to pursue your argument without the usual JUST JOKING I'M NOT JOKING JUST JOKING JKLOL scaffolding.

Be entertaining
Invective is one of the cheapest forms of entertainment. Don't keep stopping to make jokes, but try to entertain. It leavens the anger.

Do it once, then move on with your life
Assemble all your points into one blast. You may forget something when you're writing it. That's OK, you can qualify and adduce in the comments. Don't go on and on forever in multiple dispatches about it. That's tiresome.

Bonus optional variant: Secret Cambodian bombings
Sometimes, in this life, you run into people who slander you and are just complete fucking dickheads. They make things up about you and don't care about anything. There is no reasoning with such people, and it's really better not to even try to do anything about them. But if you must, unqualified, hyperbolic invective is acceptable. Be careful though: make sure you know exactly what you're writing and that it's correct before you do it. There are no second takes on the internet, and there's always someone with a longer memory than you. Be careful out there.

My 10 Most-Listened To Songs of 2012

As some of you may have gathered, writing about music is (sometimes) how I blow off steam. Music itself being an aide-memoire, I try to do some kind of wrap-up at year's end. This year's project is to annotate the 15 songs I listened to most in 2012, as measured by Last.fm. This ensures I can't lie about what I was listening to.

1. Sleigh Bells, "End Of The Line" The band Sleigh Bells most resembles (conceptually, anyway) are my dimly remembered high school faves Snake River Conspiracy (most notable for an incredibly literal cover of "How Soon Is Now?," in which actual birds chirp when said sound is mentioned): dominant producer auteur male, token female industrial chanteuse who's integral to the project. "End Of The Line" is probably one of the most hyperbolic songs about the end of a relationship in recent years, complete with teenage lyrics ("CAN YOU HEAR ME? CAN YOU SEE ME?") It's Melancholia in song form, a black dog depressive damnation with epic drums, a syrupy embrace of depression and guilt, with massive drums and a manic pixie dream girl sighing. I love it.

2. Metric, "Long To Live" My girlfriend lives across the street from Brooklyn's Prospect Park, which has bands all summer. When Metric came, we stood outside and listened (it's more than loud enough to be immersive). As I flipped out a bit, the g/f bemusedly observed "You're a teenage girl." She was completely correct: the Twilight series had to exist to allow Metric to write a theme song to a vampire romance for self-consciously gloomy tween girls.

Metric's one of the few bands I feel self-conscious about liking (Sleigh Bells, with their large contingent of haters, are still more putatively respectable). This is mostly Emily Haines' fault: her father, Paul Haines, is apparently a respected Canadian poet (so Wikipedia and Emily tell me; I wouldn't know), and she takes her words/angst QUITE SERIOUSLY. In "Long To Live," Haines' nightmare vision of a world imploding is...picturing herself in "a room with no makeup." (The horror!) But it's a great song, with a thumping drumbeat from Metric's incredibly professional rhythm section (live, they rock like resigned LA session players, professionally bloodless and distanced from their own effects), riffing off Howard Shore's score to exciting effect.

3. Menomena, "Pique" You all know (or should, jeez) R. Kelly's "Real Talk." So how's this for real talk? "I'm a failure/cursed with male genitalia/a parasitic fuck/with no clue as to what men do/impossible to love (x4)." Menomena are a pretty great band and have been for some time now: they're classically "indie rock" (i.e., they're a band heavy on guitars and bass, resistant to overproduction, writing songs slightly trickier than they need to be). They've hinted at the darker parts of the generic male psyche before (as on "Five Little Rooms," with its bachelor party and a hooker for every man). In "Pique," they connect their sexual/personal unavailability/upbringing with their upbringing: specifically, guitarist/saxophonist Justin Harris' mom, with whom he he has a complicated relationship, to say the least ("You brought me into the shitshow without a penny or a plan"). I don't have a confessional bone in my body, but let's just say I get this song.

4. Stars, "The Theory Of Relativity" Stars should be past their sell-by date: even at the peak moment of 2005's Set Yourself On Fire, they were behind the curve. But they still have some good songs in them, and this is one of them, a rueful admission of their aging potential irrelevance ("It can't be '93, sadly, though I wish it could forever/You call it luck, I call it tragedy"). Time passes, and the partying instinct is slowed by the body ("One more ovation please for the dude who sold us Ecstasy/he's building homes down in the new third world"). It's the usual Stars boy-girl duet, with a wistfulness that doesn't seem forced. This is what aging with musical dignity sounds like.

5. Saint Etienne, "Finisterre" "Use a bank? I'd rather die." I can't remember in what order I've listened to Saint Etienne's albums, which makes me vaguely sad, but they're for sure one of my favorite bands. This year, last.fm tells me I listened to them more than anyone else (675 scrobbles to Sleigh Bells' 292), and "Finisterre" must have been my last first-time stop in their discography. It's a fabulous album overall. "Finisterre" is hauntological urban spelunking, whose lyrics make sense to anyone living in a big city where real estate turnover is constant ("Finisterre/Tear it down and start again," with a nice nod to Orange Juice as well). The album's cover points to a darker meaning, but Sarah Cracknell's grateful embrace of urban anonymity ("I love the feeling of being slightly lost") strikes a melancholy chord. Also: "Imagine the 19th century never happened. Just a straight line from Beau Brummel to Bauhaus."

I guess I should mention that Saint Etienne is one of two bands I saw live this year (aside from my friend Gryphon's terrific project Phone Tag). They played a tight 75 minutes: Cracknell preened adorably with her boa and sparkly dress, while Dolly Mixture's Debsey Wykes sang modest back-up and the two men lurked in the background, manipulating nobs with Pete Tong headphones on. The set was all upbeat tracks, allowing Saint Etienne to pretend they're a light pop band rather than one of the more melancholy curatorial critics' projects around. It was underwhelming and exhilarating simultaneously.

6. "You Lost Me," Sleigh Bells More melancholy; I mope a lot, whatever. "I don't want you to see me this way, but I'm ready to die."

7. "Instigator," M.O.P. I have no idea why this song came back with such a vengeance this year; I've known it for years. But it's on a playlist I keep called "MOTIVATION," composed entirely of aggressive hip-hop. This is such a socially irresponsible number, calling for more violence in the rap world. ("BLAST THAT MOTHERFUCKER/DAMN THAT MOTHERFUCKER/GET AT THAT MOTHERFUCKER"). My id is happy.

8. "I Don't Like" Chief Keef ft. Lil Reese The things which Chief Keef doesn't like seem pretty universal ("a fart," "thirsty bitches"). Chief Keef''s taken a lot of heat for his various misdeeds and incitements to violence. His apologists claim that he's a victim of the system, numbed to the carnage he calls for, while his critics claim he's just making money off of needless street violence. I don't have anything responsible to say or nuanced to say (that part of my brain is focused on Django Unchained); this is the sound of pure, crass negativity, at deafening, repetitive volume. DON'T LIKE. DON'T LIKE. (Facebook "like.")

9. ABBA, "My Love, My Life This is the year I first listened to ABBA consciously (Arrival, specifically) and boy are they terrific. It's a great album, but this song stood out because a) it's not a single, and that contrarian side of my personality dies hard b) IT'S SO SAD. (A pattern may be emerging here.) I especially love the gramatically correct but unidiomatic second-language English, whose frustrated politeness hints at roiling turmoil underneath. "I know I don't possess you, so go away God bless you."

10. Sleigh Bells, "Crush"

What's weird is I hate all the elements normally: the cheerleader chanting, monotonous handclapping, the teen girl gleefulness ("I'VE GOT A CRUSH ON YOU/I'VE GOT A CRUSH ON YOU"). But sometimes joy comes in unexpected packages.

My Top 10 In 2012 Rep

1. The Belovs (1993, Victor Kossakovsky) — Some things just come at you out of nowhere. This is an hour-long documentary I saw at this year's True/False Film Festival — a documentary fest in Columbia, MO I hype up a lot. This is the kind of movie it's worth flying to discover: a near-perfect hour portrait of a Russian family unit in all its alcohol-self-corroding trainwreck fascination. It has some of the most wonderfully inexplicable yet somehow perfect scenes I've never witnessed the likes of before. Just look at this:

2. Wake In Fright (1971, Ted Kotcheff) — A comedy of bad male manners in the pitiless Outback. Every bit as good as it's been sold as since its re-entry into viewing range and two of the swiftest hours of my viewing year.

3. Yoyo (1965, Pierre Étaix) — Wrote a bit about this here. The cinephile gnashing of teeth on Twitter when Hurricane Sandy cut short the Pierre Étaix series at Film Forum was really something.

4. Blind Husbands (1919, Erich von Stroheim) — My favorite of the 4 von Stroheims I caught at Film Forum this summer (the others: Greed, The Merry Widow, Foolish Wives). A fabulously mean movie, with von Stroheim sending himself up as the shady European "man of sophistication" preying upon ignorant Americans. No one gets off the hook. Frames teem with details: at one point, chickens are just thrown out from shadows of building doorways where they were lurking, as if taunting viewers who think they've already processed the entire shot.

5. Ruggles Of Red Gap (1935, Leo McCarey) — An unexceptional scenario transformed by Charles Laughton, abetted by McCarey's feel for the improvisatory possibilities of every scene.

6. The Mirror (1975, Andrei Tarkovsky) — Tarkovsky's my biggest Autueurist/Gauntlet-Gets-Thrown-Down-Here blind spot: not one I'm proud of, but hard not to recall my viewings of Solaris and Stalker being especially tortuous (during the former, at age 16, I stopped, made and consumed an omelette very slowly to power through to the end). Hard to tell if The Mirror's just an anomalous pleasure in his corpus, not to mention how to factor in changes as a viewer concerning how much pleasure I can take out of Tarkovsky's wind-and-camera-move-at-just-barely-different-speeds effects (more), how much less the usual Russian bad spirits and self-tortured monologuing bothers me now (quite a bit, I think), and if reading Geoff Dyer's Zona shortly before (and seeing him introduce the screening, during which he begged viewers to get more pleasure by not attempting any kind of analysis while watching) made me more amenable. But The Mirror was downright lighthearted compared to the dourness of my previous Tarkovsky experiences; while there's an undeniably juxtapositional/intellectual-montage element to the film's essayistic plunge from one moment to another,  it's captivatingly goofy when Tarkovsky, without warning, stops for an old Spanish man to imitate bullfights, or to suddenly offer a montage of angry '50s Maoist Chinese in protest. Setpiece by setpiece it's dazzling: not just outdoors, but inside; the mother's walk through wartime printing offices is a stunning changing-light-and-rapid-tracking-shot exercise, one of many moments of endless resourcefulness in finding new ways to stun. This seems comparable to Sans Soleil or even more indulgent late-auteur efforts in its willingness to use the director's mind as the no-need-to-explain background for scenes which can be profitably analyzed (for the rest of my lifetime, presumably) later, and enjoyed in dazed what-was-that? pleasure in the moment.

7. Smile (1975, Michael Ritchie) — Manages to keep extracting mean-but-not-inaccurate laughs out of stultifying California Republican suburbia without falling into the trap of outright angry condemnation; the girls' xenophobic sabotage of Maria Gonzales (Maria O'Brien) is funny, not unsatisfying (Maria's assimilationist hard sell would warm the heart of any Tea Partier) and ugly all at once. The kids are no better than adults, trying to photograph the contestants naked and gracelessly smacking each other around like a particularly crass hybrid of The Bad News Bears and The Three Stooges. Poor Andy (Nicholas Pryor) can't even bitch at the drive-through without having his remarks overheard by the entire diner; no wonder he flees from an induction ceremony conducted by the town's own Lions Club, the Bears: grown men getting drunk in near KKK gear before forcing those who've turned 35 to kiss a dead chicken's ass. Comparisons to Altman are lazy: Ritchie cuts every scene  to the bone, often working in 30-second segments that always build to a punchline, fragmenting his comic universe. An angry film, as it should be.

8. Cousin Jules (1972, Dominique Benicheti) — Wrote this up here.

9. Police Story (1985, Jackie Chan) — I don't understand people who don't enjoy vintage Jackie Chan. I have no idea where Lincoln Center dug up this print (prints of Hong Kong movies are notoriously hard to come by), but I'm so happy they did.

10. 11 x 14 (1977, James Benning) — Wrote this up here.

Most helpful retro: Robert Bresson at Film Forum. Now, like the Pokemon, I've caught them all (the infamous early comedy aside).

Renewed appreciation: Videodrome, Hard Boiled, Mulholland Drive