The Annotated Beukemix 2020

Hey, remember what a crappy year 2020 was? Me too! But I did make a mix that year! Here are my favorite then-mostly-new-to-me songs that helped get me through it.

Also: there was nothing I picked that was too obscure to make a Spotify playlist of it! So now you don't have to overcome the social distance, or your aversion to asking for things, to listen to the mix.

1. Cristo Redentor - Donald Byrd
I heard this on the Jazz station, and it might have actually been in the 2019 holiday season. Gorgeous, though, in any case.

2. Faraway Look - Yola
Lovely. Didn't know how prevalent the faraway look would become.

3. Think About Things - Daði Freyr
This was to be Iceland's entry to the 2020 Eurovision Song Contest, and was apparently a favorite to win, had it not been canceled. It's a bop, about wanting to know more about what's going on in the head of your new kid.

4. Santiago - Preservation Hall Jazz Band 

Somehow the PHJB broke through from the Jazz format silo into the NPR eclectic world a few years ago. So whenever they drop a new album, we get a couple more great cuts from them on The Current.

5. Domino - Nicole Atkins
A fun, fuzzy groove that hit the radio just before the pandemic when I was still driving enough to hear a fair amount of new stuff on the radio. In hindsight, the lyrics kind of went on to fit the feeling of bits of society collapsing.

6. Ghost Town - The Specials

7. Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing - Stevie Wonder
A little while into the lockdown, I finally started meeting up with friends for outdoor hangouts. On the way one day to hang out with Nels in a park, I heard these two back to back on the radio. The first obviously reflected how the world felt in the Spring of 2020. The latter was a welcome balm.

8. Cosmonauts - Fiona Apple
When it came out in April, "Fetch the Bolt Cutters" was making the rounds on my Twitter feed, where it seemed to take root as expressing feelings of isolation. A writer at Salon even declared it "the unofficial soundtrack of the pandemic." Apparently Apple recorded it at home, mostly by herself, during a long period since her previous album in which that's mostly how she lived her life. Anyhow, this was the standout track for me.

(The description of one video I found of the song notes: "The last date that all living humans were together on Earth was 2000-11-02. Since then there has always been 3 to 6 people constantly onboard the International Space Station." I think that's pretty cool.)

9. Uh Huh - Jade Bird
Not quite sure how I missed this one, when it had been released as a single in 2018 and on an album in 2019. But it's a straight-ahead, driving, country-tinged rock barnburner. Great stuff.

10. After the Lights Go Out - The Walker Brothers
The Walker Brothers specialized in a certain evocative, almost ghostly pop. This one was used in the end credits of the Denis Villeneuve thriller Enemy, which Melissa and I watched in June, immediately following one of the most unexpectedly frightening moments I'd seen in a movie. 

11. My Silver Lining - First Aid Kit
Heard this loud in the car one day and was deeply moved. Another pandemic button-press, I suppose. The lyrics certainly map onto the lockdown mood and wanting to be safe but feeling held back.

12. I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man (1979 Version) - Prince
This 1979 demo of Prince's 1987 hit was on the deluxe reissue of "Sign o' the Times." It's a fun artifact, to hear a late-80s hit in the New Wave setting of the earlier era.
                                                
13. Mercy, Mercy, Mercy (Live) - Cannonball Adderly Quartet
My beloved iPod's hard drive died in March, and I got a replacement with a solid state drive for Father's Day. In the process of rebuilding some playlists on the thing, I was looking at the Pitchfork "Best Songs of the 1960s" list, and noticed I'd previously overlooked this one. I'd been familiar with the Buckinghams' pop cover from Oldies radio growing up, and was only dimly aware of the original from hearing it in Wolf of Wall Street a couple years back. But listening closer, I loved the sweet and smooth setting for the improvisational skills of Adderly et al.

14. It's Not Easy - Ofege
15. A Hero's Death - FONTAINES D.C.
16. Impossible Weight - Deep Sea Diver ft. Sharon Van Etten
The peril of writing these up almost two years after the fact is that the details of when and how a song hit me may be lost to time. So it goes.

17. Be An Astronaut - Declan McKenna
I love how theatrical this is.

18. I Am Your Gummy Bear - Fanfare Ciocărlia
I knew the song because of the kids, so I was utterly delighted when this cover popped up in the Borat sequel. The band appeared on the Beukemix way back in 2007 because of their cover of "Born to Be Wild" in the first Borat movie. I don't know whether I'd want to listen to a whole album of off-kilter Romani Balkan brass band covers, but I sure hope they'll pop into my awareness every 13 years or so.

19. So Says I - The Shins
Despite Zach Braff and Natalie Portman trying to convince me that the Shins would change my life, I never paid them much attention. But this popped up on the radio or a playlist, and really grabbed me. I enjoy how it seems to wind down and need to be started back up a couple times.

20. You're Not Alone - Semisonic
The first new Semisonic music in nearly 20 years would have been an occasion itself. But a bracing power pop anthem about the challenges of life really hit the spot as the shitty year was waning.

21. BONUS TRACK: Empire Recruitment - John Powell
Right as I was putting the 2020 mix together, I discovered that there was an expanded soundtrack to the 2018 semi-failure Solo: A Star Wars Story, and that it had this wonderful bit of ridiculousness on it. Not only does it recast John Williams' Imperial March in a triumphal British style simply by shifting to the major key, but it also played diegetically in the movie, which means that this music exists in the Star Wars galaxy. And that is silly and great. 

The Annotated Beukemix 2019

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Finally getting my thoughts out on the mix from two years ago. I considered skipping it, since it's more than a year since I made it. But, realizing I use these writeups for my own later reference, here we are.

If you want a copy of this, drop me a line -- I will happily send you a CD or a rip. I did put the mix on Spotify, but it has a replacement for Track 11 because the Spidey Bugout Megamix isn't on there -- sorry..

Who has time to tally horn sections or hand claps or Twin Cities bands anymore? Not me! 

1. OYAHYTT - The Coup ft. LaKeith Stanfield
Watched The Coup co-founder Boots Riley's absurd anti-capitalist satire SORRY TO BOTHER YOU early in January '19. OYAHYTT plays throughout the early movie, an engine to get us up to the appropriate level of frenetic, holding-on-by-a-thread energy that is to come.

2. Can't Run But - Paul Simon
Paul Simon had returned to SNL as musical guest in October 2018, joined by the modern chamber ensemble yMusic. I really liked their performance of this restless, half-sung song, a rework of a song from 1990's "Rhythm of the Saints." Finally dug into the associated album "In the Blue Light" early in 2019.

3. The Eye - Brandi Carlile
As I mentioned in the 2018 mix, Carlile's "The Joke" had knocked me on my ass. Listening to that mix on the way home from a date with Melissa early in the year, she mentioned that she really liked this song, which was making the rounds on a couple Twin Cities stations despite being a few years old at that point. We stayed in the car in the driveway to listen through this gorgeous song, with lush harmonies layered under Carlile's warm, clear voice.

4. Sisyphus - Andrew Bird
This one snuck up on me over the course of several listens on The Current. One day I started to pay more attention, and thought I'd finally found a Father John Misty song I really liked. That wasn't quite right -- it sounded like the midpoint between FJM and Alex Ebert from Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. Turns out that I really like when folky indie rock artists like Andrew Bird lean a little farther in the rock direction, make the sound bottom-heavy and give the vocals some gauzy, ghostly reverb.

5. Heads Gonna Roll - Jenny Lewis
Love the Beatles-esque orchestrations and chord progressions here, including a solo in the bridge that I'm legit not sure whether it's a guitar running through effects pedals, or an organ. Lewis' vocals are in the fine tradition of 1970s pop-rock singer/songwriters, in a vein similar to some of my favorite songs from her Rilo Kiley days. (EDIT: I have learned that, Beatles indeed, Ringo Starr plays drums on this track. Also, the keys are Bentmont Tench from The Heartbreakers; still couldn't tell you if that solo is his instrument or not)

6. Saw Lightning - Beck

A little slice of apocalypse. The shouts in the background throughout make it feel like the recording studio is under attack and they're trying to get the thing recorded before it's overwhelmed. Or, if you think about the dark forebodings of the lyrics, maybe it's a tent revival on the precipice of getting out of hand.

7. The Bleeding Heart Show - The New Pornographers
This was on The Current's list of 893 Essential Songs Since the Year 2000 that spring. The build on this thing is so slow and careful. The three-against-four rhythms, and chords that never quite resolve, are layered and layered, and you get AC Newman's vocals first, and then Neko Case coming in on harmony, and it backs further away from resolution... until it FINALLY lands in a major key ("We have arrived") and STAYS there in a glorious, life-affirming anthem.

8. Tennis Ball - Hello Peril
ALWAYS BE MY MAYBE was a sweet and funny if somewhat by-the-numbers romcom, but one of my favorite things was Randall Park's character's live hip hop band. The songs we hear are musically legit with really funny, clever lyrics. This is one of them.

9. Los Ageless - St. Vincent
Also from The Current's post-2000 song list comes this cri de coeur from Annie Clark, lamenting a lost love and having weird feelings about Los Angeles (I assume this was about actress Cara Delevigne, with whom she had recently ended a multi-year relationship). It's an amazing, digital creation, with an absolutely killer chorus: "How can anybody have you? / How can anybody have you and lose you? / How can anybody have you and lose you and not lose their mind, too?"

10. Harmony Hall - Vampire Weekend
Speaking of killer choruses. This was something like a song of the summer for me in 2019, but <rueful laugh>, little did I know that it would become the song that best exemplifies the sentiment of 2020. "I don't wanna live like this / but I don't wanna die," but wrap that sentiment in a beautiful, uplifting arrangement. In the summer of 2020, I drove to Eat Street to pick up some food, and this song came on. The location and the music took me back to an amazing meal I'd had in the neighborhood for my 40th birthday a year before. The sense of loss and isolation and fear came crashing in, and I had to pull over and just be devastated for a little while. 

11. Spidey Bugout Megamix (Expectations Remix) - DJ KiddLove
INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE knocked my socks off, and the graffiti scene in the subway was the moment I locked into the movie. This is the music from that scene, a tremendous mashup of "Apache" and "Hypnotize" and "Mary Mary" and some samples from a half-dozen things (including Red Leader shouting "It's away!" in the Death Star trench run). The vibe reminded me a lot of DJ Shadow's "The Number Song" off of Endtroducing, and it turns out there's a good reason, as this mix also samples a remix of that song. Those many sources and samples are probably why this song hasn't been officially released in any purchasable fashion.

12. Cuz I Love You - Lizzo
My favorite cut off of Lizzo's major-label debut was the title track, with its growling big-band sound, and Lizzo pushing her voice to the absolute limits.       
                                                
13. Hungry - Paul Revere and the Raiders
ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD reminded me of this song that I instantly remembered, but which my brother and I had somehow overlooked in our big Oldies Download Project years ago. Dig that ultra-fuzzy guitar in the post-choruses, and the wordless vocals in what seems like the coda until they jump back into the chorus and fade out. Generally, I loved how music, and especially pop radio, threaded throughout that movie. 

14. Dark White - Joshua Redman & Brooklyn Rider (w/ Scott Colley & Satoshi Takeishi)
Heard this on the jazz station one day and really liked it. You've got saxophonist Redman, the Brooklyn Rider string quartet, and Redman's usual bassist and drummer Colley and Takeishi, straddling the jazz/classical line on a composition by Patrick Zimmerli.

15. Right - David Bowie
"Right" was used in the end credits of an episode of "Mindhunter," David Fincher's Netflix serial killer drama, and you know, any excuse for another Bowie track on a mix.

16. Mariners Apartment Complex - Lana Del Rey
Music critic Matthew Perpetua jumped out in December '18 with a hard stance in favor of this song as the best of 2018. Somehow I didn't see that tweet until late in 2019, but finally checked out the track, which is indeed quite good. Meanwhile, Rolling Stone had connected it spiritually & thematically to Leonard Cohen, which once upon a time might have been a major contraindication for me (my feelings on Cohen's music are complicated for dumb reasons). But Cohen never drenched his songs in as much atmosphere as Del Rey.

17. Last Train - Allen Toussaint
I didn't know much about Allen Toussaint before catching this on the radio, let alone his legendary status in New Orleans R&B. This is a funky little track from 1975 that starts relatively simple, but gathers instruments and textures as it goes. Made me want to hear more Toussaint, for sure.

18. Israelites - Desmond Dekker & The Aces
Already loved this from hearing it occasionally on oldies radio as a kid and later being re-exposed to it by some list of best songs of the 1960s. Its somewhat non-sequitur use in HBO's "Watchmen" miniseries renewed my appreciation.

19. Gelaye - Radio Tehran
Watched the Iranian/American vampire film A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT for my usual pre-Halloween horror viewing and was not disappointed! The music, in particular, was great, and this track stuck out to me.

20. Comin' Thru - Chali 2na
I remember Kumail Nanjiani saying on Twitter early in the run of "Silicon Valley" that Mike Judge had ridiculously good, deep taste in music, and especially in hip-hop. This one from the Jurassic 5 veteran Chali 2na, used over the credits in an episode of the last season, supports that conclusion.

21. Colors - Black Pumas
Damn, this is great. I love how spare the groove is when it starts, with just a chattering guitar line, and the organ just faintly sneaking in underneath, and then the drums as just a click, and layering and layering until it's a big, beautiful, celebratory, soulful anthem.

My 2019 in Movies

2019 was my second year of seriously tracking my movie watching and writing something about each movie I see, centered around my Letterboxd account. It was also the year of the Criterion Channel's debut, which has filled the Filmstruck-shaped hole in the hearts of cinephiles in the United States and Canada. So: would I be able to maintain the breakneck pace of viewing I had in 2018 (120), or collapse under the weight of the endeavor (so tired...)?

FRED'S 2019 YEAR IN REVIEW, VIA LETTERBOXD

I watched 17 short films, 5 comedy specials, 6 "other", and 130 feature films in 2019, and unless it was something I'd already written about on the site, I wrote a little bit about each of them. Early in the year, author and critic Gretchen Felker-Martin tweeted something that resonated with me, and that has become a touchstone when I try to think about my response to a movie:

Being a critic isn't about toeing a line, or picking a brand to stan for, or pointing out loudly what's problematic and what's Pure. It's about communicating what art makes you feel and then dissecting why it did.

It's a simple idea, but one that this amateur writer thinks about a lot.

Breakdown of my viewing:

• 26 rewatches of movies I'd seen before
• 104 movies new to me
• 32 2019 releases
• 20 theatrical viewings
• 10 new-to-me Criterion Collection features
• 19 horror movies
• 16 animated films, 7 of them in the main Disney animated line
• 12 films distributed by A24
• 7 documentaries
• Setting aside multiple voice/Star Wars/Marvel performers, I saw 4 films each featuring Keanu Reeves, Michael Keaton, or Tilda Swinton
• 2 films from around WWII that I hadn't seen in about 30 years and liked much better than I remembered (The Wizard of Oz and It's a Wonderful Life)
• Ridley Scott's best film (Alien) and one of his worst (Alien Covenant)
• A little cycle of Charles-Manson-adjacent movies: first, Bad Times at the El Royale, which features fictional characters based on the Family; then Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, which directly covers Sharon Tate and the night of the murders on Cielo Dr.; and after that I listened to the season of "You Must Remember This" about Manson, which introduced me to Joan Didion, and in turn led me to watch Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold. (Edit 1/19 late night: I realized there’s a fourth! In Her Smell, Becky Something sings Charles Manson’s song “Garbage Dump” during one of her drunken episodes.)
• One ridiculous 80s action movie that a critic I enjoy wrote 365 essays about, one per day, throughout the year.

And some of my favorites:

• My favorite new film I saw this year was Safety Last!, a silent Harold Lloyd comedy from 1923. You're likely familiar with the image of him hanging off the face of a clock on the side of a building; I know I was. What surprised me was how modern the filmmaking techniques were, and how sophisticated the special effects. I was blown away, and I recommend the superb Criterion Collection transfer of the movie to anyone. The 4 and 8 year olds even got into it a bit.
• My favorite film of 2019 was Parasite, which is a masterful class satire with many of the pleasures of a con or heist film before things take a darker turn in the back half. The less said before you see it, the better, but I highly recommend it.
• Other older movies that I loved were 25th Hour and Frances Ha. Two very different movies about very different groups of people in NYC in the opening decades of the 21st Century, one melancholy, one charming.
• Saw two movies that overtook Isle of Dogs as favorites of 2018: The Favourite, and Into the Spider-Verse. The latter was just so joyful and clever about what a comic book movie COULD be, and did some really thoughtful and creative things with the animated medium.
• Other movies that have really stuck with me: Moonlight, The Clouds of Sils Maria, The Babadook (the terror here is, as a parent, what if I don't have enough for my child?), Under the Silver Lake, Midsommar, Margaret, and Us.

The Annotated Beukemix, 2018

Life gets in the way! Anyway, better late than never. Hit me up if you want a copy.

What a moody musical year! It was hard not to be, given [arm sweep in the direction of the internet and news media], and that was absolutely reflected in the music that struck a chord with me.

(Hey, I'm writing this in the future! 2021! Donald Trump isn't president anymore but some other bad stuff happened, but you can also listen to this mix on Spotify!)

1. Drive - REM
I finally got Automatic for the People at the end of 2017, and early in the new year, I was on a late-evening errand, driving the dark, wooded back roads of a Minneapolis suburb, locked into this song's atmosphere. I'd heard it dozens of times on the radio over the years, but this time it kicked my ass. The layering of elements, starting with Peter Buck's spare ostinato guitar, adding sequentially the bass, the vocals, the drums, and piece-by-piece, the string section, before the bottom drops out and we're left with the core group, gives the whole thing a dark, Southern Gothic feel. The lyrics, meanwhile, are preaching self-motivation and participation; reportedly Stipe was inspired to write it by his involvement encouraging youth voting in the early 90s. So we're kicking off the year with grim, politically tinged determination. FEELS ABOUT RIGHT.

2. Finesse (Remix) - Bruno Mars ft. Cardi B
New Jack Swing was the style of pop music when I began listening to current pop music, and I love the textures of the beat programming, the characteristic sampled orchestra hits. Two of my favorite cassettes of the day were Rhythm Nation and the Ghostbusters II soundtrack. So this song was a tidy little pile of catnip. That the video pays tribute to In Living Color, which I spent years sneakily watching in the basement on Sunday nights, is a cherry on top.

3. Modern Love - David Bowie
Another familiar song that grabbed me anew, this time while watching a trailer for Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig's "Frances Ha" during a Letterboxd crawl. One of the most danceable Bowie tracks.

4. An Insult to the Fact Checkers - They Might Be Giants
TMBG have been so prolific in the teens that they've been hard to keep up with. This was my favorite track off the first of three (!) albums they released last year.

5. The Joke - Brandi Carlile
Absolute stunner of a song, my favorite of the year. Play it loud. Carlile has described this as a response to the 2016 election, and the sense of shock and defeat that so many of us felt. It's beautifully hopeful at a time when signs of hope are scarce. Writing this in September of 2019, I can say: Congressional Dem leadership, you are letting this song down! Get your head in the game!

6. Maria Tambien - Khruangbin
The spacey, reverb-heavy, mideast-inflected instrumental funk I didn't know I needed. (See also this fun video on youtube of them playing through a dozen hip-hop hooks and other influences.)

7. Make Me Feel - Janelle Monáe
2018's horniest summer jam continues Monáe's streak of excellence. There were several excellent tracks on Dirty Computer, but I gotta go with this one for its clear Prince influence and tick-tock tongue-clucking.

8. Under the Wheels - Calexico
Saw a reference describing Calexico as "desert noir," which I like. This song is a mood piece of fear and anxiety in a threatening, unstable society, set to a reggae beat that reminds me of the first Gorillaz record.

9. Keep Yourself Alive - Queen
This jumped out at me during a rewatch of Freaks & Geeks, in the scene in which a terrified Sam climbs a pyramid of cheerleaders. It was an excellent non-literal use of what I sort of considered a backbench Queen song. (This was months before Bohemian Rhapsody used the song for the band's first gig with Mercury.)

10. Nothing Compares 2 U - Prince
Given Prince's reticence to open his vaults for public consumption, I have mixed feelings about his estate's mining of same. BUT! There is so much good stuff in there, and I love being able to hear his original demo for this song. This means that the Sinéad O'Connor version we almost all heard first was chronologically the third significant recording, after this one and the obscure album version by The Family. I still think O'Connor's is the best, but it's interesting hearing these different interpretations and what they choose to emphasize. Not surprisingly, the demo bears a lot of resemblance to the live version Prince released as a duet with Rosie Gaines a few years after the big hit.

11. Over and Over and Over - Jack White
Jack White can keep releasing bottom heavy, fuzzy, guitar-hook driven songs, and I'll keep enjoying 'em.

12. Lash Out - Alice Merton
Merton's got a hell of a voice, similar in range and power to Florence Welch, and here it's well-suited to belt out an anthem of frustration and anger. Again, something to which I responded strongly 2018.

13. Street Fighter Mas - Kamasi Washington
I enjoy that saxophonist Kamasi Washington is crossing jazz over into the pop world, and especially dig the cinematic sweep of this track. Washington describes this as his personal theme song for his hypothetical career as a professional arcade gamer. Check out the video, which is absurd and funny, and while you're at it, check out Washington's statement about his background with Street Fighter.

14. I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You) - Aretha Franklin
Wasn't super familiar with this one prior to Franklin's passing in August, but a college classmate posted it on Twitter. I'm very grateful for that, because it's tremendous.

15. Curtains - Elton John
The end credits of "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" tend to be anachronistic for the show's 1950's setting, which is fine, as it introduced me to this song that feels like it's all a grand, slow-building intro for four and a half minutes, and then feels like a grand outro for two and a half minutes.

16. A Better Son/Daughter - Rilo Kiley
Hannah Gadsby's "Nanette" special drew my attention to this moving, anthemic march about finding the strength to go on through highs and lows.

17. A Pearl - Mitski
Mitski's sound on this track seems to have stepped out of a time machine from 1995 and hooked up with a horn section, and I love it.

18. Suspirium - Thom Yorke
Gentle and creepy. I didn't see the movie until earlier this year. It was ok. Honestly, the opening credits sequence, set to this song, was one of my favorite bits.

19. Humility - Gorillaz ft. George Benson
A sunny, summery track about loneliness. There are hints of a political subtext, given that writer/singer Damon Albarn has spoken out against the isolationist strain of recent western politics. Despite adoring the Gorillaz first album, each subsequent one kind of has to sneak into my attention. This time around, that came via Matthew Perpetua's characteristically fine writeup of the song.

20. Love It If We Made It - The 1975
And we end with this song's observation on our troubled times, structured a bit like a narrowly-focused "We Didn't Start The Fire," though less on-the-nose. It strikes a hopeful, if not exactly certain tone for the future, and I cannot think of a better way to finish this mix of my musical 2018.

(Bonus track: Into The Trap - John Williams / London Symphony Orchestra
I don't usually list out all the also-rans that I cut from the mix, but I did want to note a song that I had on for most of the year but finally cut when I was finalizing the playlist. Both kids got into Star Wars this past year, and this is one of my favorite pieces of music from the original trilogy. As such, I listened to it A LOT.)

My 2018 in Movies

Early in January last year, I started my account on Letterboxd.com tracking my movie viewing and keeping my to-watch list. This was one of several factors (also including the opportunity to share in a friend's Filmstruck account -- RIP -- and the replacement of my ailing Blu-Ray player) that led to what I'm quite certain was a personal record year for film.

Letterboxd compiles a year-end statistics page, and here's mine:
FRED'S 2018 YEAR IN REVIEW.

In addition to 6 short films, 9 stand-up specials, and 6 miscellaneous shows (making-of features or tv documentary miniseries) contained in the Letterboxd database, I watched 120 feature films last year. I'm pretty sure this blows away the only other possible contender: 1998, when I spent my summer watching much of the AFI Top 100 American films list and various other movies that viewing suggested.

I also tried to write a little something on everything I saw. This was almost entirely for my own benefit, to try to work out verbally what I do or don't like and why. So for all 120 of those, and a few others, I wrote between a sentence and several paragraphs on each. You can see that writing if you click on any of the poster images at the bottom of the stats page. I've enjoyed seeing what friends and other Letterboxd users have to say about a lot of these, and the social aspect of the site has suggested a lot of viewing as well.

Breakdown of my viewing:

• 33 rewatches of movies I'd seen before
• 87 movies new to me
• 14 new Criterion Collection feature films (and 3 shorts)
• 13 features on Filmstruck (and 4 shorts)
• 13 theatrical viewings
• All 11 Star Wars theatrical feature films, all of them with Max, plus additional viewings of The Last Jedi and Solo, and two making-of-Star Wars features
• 5 Spielberg films (3 new). If you expand the year to include New Year's Day 2019, you get a 6th.
• 5 Scorsese films (4 new)
• 6 films written or directed by Lawrence Kasdan
• The list of performers is kind of overwhelmed by actors who were in those Star Wars movies, but there were also 4 Kevin Costner performances and 6 by Jeff Goldblum. Expand to 1/1/19, and you get 4 Richard E Grant performances.
• Two films featuring improv guru Del Close.
• A five-film cycle of Berlin-set films, spanning from the late Weimar Republic (Cabaret) to just post-war (Phoenix) to beginning of the Berlin Wall (Bridge of Spies) to late in the Cold War (Wings of Desire) to the fall of the Wall (Atomic Blonde).
• Several movies that had been on a little handwritten watch list I kept in my wallet for years starting in 1998
• One Polish mermaid horror sex musical.

And some of my favorites:

• My favorite film I saw this year was Phoenix, a 2014 German thriller in a Hitchcockian mode about a death camp survivor who, following extensive facial reconstructive surgery, returns to the ruins of Berlin to find her husband. The twists and turns and the knowledge of which characters know what information at what times makes it very satisfying.
• I fell absolutely in love with both Wings of Desire and The Age of Innocence. The latter I tried to watch in college, and just couldn't get into it. The former I knew was supposed to be wonderful, but I worried would bore me. Both knocked me on my ass. Both are romantic, and subtle, and reward patience.
• Also in my top 4 this year was It Follows, one of the scariest movies I want to watch again in the future. Its premise is tailor made to frighten me, personally, as it taps into a recurrent childhood nightmare. Its production design seems intended to be as disorienting as possible. And its use of the film frame is brilliant.
• My favorite 2018 film was Isle of Dogs. Wes Anderson has his limitations, but he's also got my number.
• Other standouts that are still occupying space in my brain long after watching them, even if they weren't my highest rated: Locke, Chungking Express, Annihilation, War of the Worlds, Speed Racer, The Witch, and Blade Runner 2049.

I don't know that I'll get anywhere near 120 films again this year, but I hope to continue writing as I watch, and if you're interested, I hope you'll follow along, join Letterboxd, sign up for The Criterion Channel when they start it up again, and let me know what you're watching!

The Annotated Beukemix, 2017

Liner notes!

If I know you and you'd like a copy of the mix, hit me up however you might normally do so.

Listen to (most of) the mix on Spotify!

1. Soothing - Laura Marling
A sultry, string-rich song in which Marling wrestles with the choice of letting an ex-lover (apparently Marcus Mumford of Mumford & Sons) back into her life, or not.

2. Heaven - Talking Heads
Appeared in the season two finale of "Halt & Catch Fire," a criminally-underseen cable drama that finished its run with its fourth season this year. It's an amazing show and uses music really well: songs chosen never pull you out of the moment by either being too obvious a choice or too out-of-place.

3. Come - Jain
Jain is a French singer who spent musically formative years of her childhood in the Middle East & Africa. I went back & forth on whether to go with the airy bounce of "Come" or the bass-heavy "Makeba." Both are fun.

4. Many Moons - Janelle Monáe
This is from Monáe's debut EP "Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase)," though I didn't stumble upon it until hearing it on The Current this year. It's terrific, which is no surprise considering how much I loved her two full-length albums. The vocal hook at the beginning felt very familiar -- it's the Pointer Sisters' "Number Pinball" melody ("1-2-3 4! 5! 6-7-8 9! 10! 11-12.") from Sesame Street.

(Incidentally, I still really want a sci-fi RPG set in Monáe's Metropolis -- her world building on her albums and in her videos is amazing.)

5. Demon in Profile - The Afghan Whigs
There are moments where I feel like I'm settling into the dad rock stereotype. But when there's a straight-ahead rock tune with some horns and a few strings and lots of ride cymbal and a sweet little guitar solo backing up the chorus, and that great major-key shift near the end, how can one resist?

I don't know what I expected from the video, but it wasn't a starring role for Har Mar Superstar.

6. Rain in Soho - The Mountain Goats
Doom. And. Gloom. And sideways references to Smiths lyrics. I love it. The referenced "Batcave" is a seminal London goth club (so that answers the question of which Soho we're talking about).

7. Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards - Billy Bragg
And now the clouds part for a very sunny anthem about socialism, capitalism, and Bragg considering his own politics and music career. I saw Bragg perform at my college my junior (?) year, and it was a great show (I probably saw him perform this song), but I haven't really dug into his music. I should.

8. Track Suit - Minor Mishap Marching Band
The third season of Fargo was not as immediately pleasurable as the second. It seemed to be dealing with stickier themes that happened to resonate with our present political moment: corporate rule, extreme inequality, Russia... And where the second featured about a dozen covers of songs used in Coen Brothers movies, this one used styles and moods connected to each major character, even winking at this by using the music from Peter and the Wolf in an episode. Nikki Swango, the good-hearted grifter played by Elizabeth Winstead, generally gets music with a lot of swagger, like this.

9. Let The Mystery Be - Iris DeMent
This was the opening credits music to most of Season Two and one episode of Season Three of "The Leftovers," which ended its phenomenal run this year. After the emotional wringer of the first season, the song feels at first like a joke, and then like a lifeline. And it fits better as the series goes on and gets more comfortable being weird and funny in addition to heartbreaking.

10. Junk Bond Trader - Elliott Smith
I didn't listen to Smith's last album released in his lifetime until a couple years later, during the semester of grad school that remains the most stressful time in my life. I would listen to it when I would stay up until 2 in the morning correcting 60 Linear Structural Analysis problem sets or working on my own heavy load of homework. Around the same time that I discovered the record, we went to Washington DC for my grandmother's 80th birthday. My grandfather was not himself: his chronic pain had sapped his outgoing nature. I don't know if I expected it would be the last time I saw him, but the lush arrangements of Smith's songs paired well with the emotional melange of that time. (We lost my grandfather four months later, and I miss him a lot. Coincidentally, the world lost Smith another eight months after that.)

Anyway, one day in 2017 I was riding the bus home after work and this song in particular struck me as beautiful, so here it is.

11. The Morning Papers - Prince & The New Power Generation
Had one of those SIRE (Sudden Instantaneous Recall Effect) moments hearing this on the radio during the Current's top 89 Prince songs marathon, and realized that I'd heard it as a single on KDWB back in junior high. The song is apparently about when Prince fell in love with Mayte Garcia, who he would eventually marry. The Revolution remain my favorite Prince backing band, but they didn't have the NPG's horn section, so nobody's perfect.

12. Snake Eyes - Trouble
13. No Stars - Rebekah Del Rio
With a David Lynch project, you know you're going to get some combination of the following in the soundtrack:
a. 1950s throwbacks (bonus points for guitar arpeggios)
b. Spaced-out singing
c. Emotional ballads, potentially involving Roy Orbison
d. Heavy, aggressive, and/or sleazy instrumentals
e. Saxophone freakouts
So, here are two songs that were performed in the 2017 revival of Twin Peaks. The first, by David Lynch's son Riley's band, Trouble, is (d) & (e). The second, a beautiful song by Rebekah Del Rio touches on (a) and (c), but unlike her jaw-dropping Spanish performance of "Crying" in Mulholland Drive, this one does not involve Roy Orbison, though it does feature Moby on the guitar arpeggios.

14. Riding (Night) - Manaka Kataoka & Yasuaki Iwata
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild contains a lot of references to the previous games in the Zelda series, including in its music, but the score is very stripped-down, stepping away from orchestral bombast in favor of small, pointilist arrangements led by a piano. This piece, which plays if you're riding a horse at night in the game, includes one of the few statements of the original musical theme of the series. Given the scarcity of the melody, it gave me goosebumps the first time I heard it.

15. Fatal Gift - Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton
Great multi-part rumination on success and its trappings by Emily Haines of Metric in her solo side project The Soft Skeleton. I already liked the simple piano-driven opening, but smiled broadly when the electronics kicked in halfway through.

16. Can I Sit Next To You - Spoon
If this had just been another fine Spoon song in the same vein as some of my earlier favorites, like "I Turn My Camera On," it would have been lovely. But! Then we get these amazing string bits in the bridge and the outro, with these fantastic, long, sustained notes that *slowly* bend into a resolution.

17. Bellbottoms - Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
Before I'd seen Baby Driver, I was listening to Matthew Perpetua's Fluxblog 1990s Survey Mixes. This Jon Spencer cut appeared 1994 mix, and was a standout among the songs I didn't already know. Then, it was the basis for the fun-as-hell opening robbery and chase scene of Edgar Wright's movie. Wright has said in interviews that he fully conceived of the scene the first time he heard the song, shortly after its original release.

18. Dear Life - Beck
Perpetua also hipped me to this great new song from Beck. I'm glad he did, because I've otherwise been having a hard time with how, as Perpetua put it, "the surface of Beck’s Colors is glossy and upbeat, as though Beck and his collaborator Greg Kurstin went out of their way to make a record that would sound mainstream and contemporary." The vibe of songs like "Wow," and "Up All Night" just don't compute in my brain with the idea of listening to a Beck song. My problem, not Beck's, I suppose.

Perpetua also said something on Twitter (I'm having a hard time finding it to link to now) to the effect of how this song's piano and guitar make it sound like Beck stole it from the Scissor Sisters. Works for me.

19. Anyone Who Had A Heart - Tim Curry
My brother let me steal this from his 2017 mix CD, having selected a different song from his 1978 debut album, Read My Lips. We all knew Curry could sing -- we're all familiar with Rocky Horror and The Worst Witch, after all -- but this Bacharach and David interpretation kind of knocked me on my ass. (I was unsurprised to learn that Pink Floyd's The Wall collaborators Bob Ezrin and Michael Kamen produced Curry's album, given his turn as the Crown prosecutor in the 1990 performance of the album in Berlin.)

Coen Brother Ephemera Remixed in Fargo Season Three - Episode 4

If the first two seasons of Fargo are any indication, series creator Noah Hawley and his writers and directors will have littered the scripts and the corners of the frame with references to the Coen Brothers' entire catalog. As with last year, I will be taking notes on these connections during each episode and sharing them here.

If you see that I've overlooked one, please let me know in the comments (but please wait until after I've added a given week's episode, as I watch with a day or two of delay, and would like to see it fresh. By the same token, spoiler alert!).

Episode 4: "The Narrow Escape Problem" (5/10/17)

A relatively light week on references: good thing, since I've fallen behind!

• To begin with, we get Billy Bob Thornton (The Man Who Wasn't There, Intolerable Cruelty, Fargo Season One) narrating the introduction to Peter and The Wolf.
• Once again, as in the movie Fargo, we get a Gophers name drop.
  The bag (receptacle? vessel?) in Emmit's safe deposit box is labeled Luverne, also the MN town in which Season Two was set.
• The Luverne bag is, of course, filled with cremains, which Ray gets more willingly close to than The Dude with Donny's in The Big Lebowski.
• "Preferred nomenclature": "cremains" here, but not "Chinamen" in Lebowski.
• And speaking of Lebowski, New Chief seems just as eager to shoehorn in an Iraq War story about his compatriots "face down in the dirt" as Walter is to make everything about Vietnam and his friends "face down in the muck."
• In his interview with Gloria, Ray seems to be Jerry Lundegaarding it up (Fargo), but he is ably out-Lundegaarded by Sy in his encounter with Officer Winnie Lopez.
• "Dingus," again a Hudsucker Proxy word choice, but this time in its anatomical use.

To be continued...

Erstwhile:
Season 3 Episode 3
Season 3 Episode 2
Season 3 Intro and Episode 1
Season 2