top threes

or, someone asked me and so I'm giving answers

Faye Wong, 2046

If you’ve been following along here since September, you probably have a good handle on what things I like but this question came up and so I thought I’d answer more expansively

Because your top threes aren’t really just things you like. Not even things you love a whole lot.

They’re the things so deep inside that you’re afraid to let them crawl back out into the sun to be seen by the judging eyes of others. But if this newsletter is doing anything, I suppose it may as well be a depot for my effusive exclamations about the art I love (and hate).

Pretty simple post today. Naming my top three books, albums, movies, TV shows, and videogames.

There are two ways to think of lists like this: definitive or transient.

This is a temporary list primarily because me no remember so good.

If you’re feeling particularly sassy, argue with me in the comments or list your own. Just remember: I may be an idiot, but I am never wrong.

Books

• Tours of the Black Clock by Steve Erickson.

  • I love Steve Erickson a whole lot. In 2009, I read all his novels that were yet published. Then I read them all again. This was over about a two or three month period. Since then, I’ve never opened his books up again, partly out of fear. I fear being changed so once more. This, too, is why I haven’t read Dostoevsky since I was seventeen and begging to die. I was given a reason to live and I’ve been afraid to ever go back. And so it is with Steve Erickson. So shattering was this experience that I don’t really wish to go back. Yet I do. I feel haunted always in the way his narrators feel haunted. Tours of the Black Clock is my pick today, though I picked a different one of his novels the other day. Really, you can’t go wrong. But this one has Hitler in it, so there’s always that.

• Fool’s Fate by Robin Hobb.

  • Again, I could have picked any book from Robin Hobb’s massive Realm of the Elderling series, but this one has a moment so singular and powerful that it buckles me even now, five years later. I had not had a son yet. Chelsea wasn’t even pregnant yet. But I felt this one moment so deep in my bones and blood. From what I just said you may think it has to do with having a child, which it does but probably not in the way you think. But this book works both as an ending and transformation of the characters and world, even if there ended up being three more sequels to this book, which would probably be my pick for this list on a different day.

• Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata.

  • Delicate and beautiful. Reckless and heartless. Kawabata sets down words like feathers but they weigh as much as a mountain. This brief and beautiful novel punched a hole through my nineteen year old chest and then again when I was twenty four and even now, just thinking about it here.

Movies

• Hero by Zhang Yimou.

  • I have loved martial arts movies my entire life, but especially I’ve loved wuxia romances. And while you could say this movie only exists because Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon became an international sensation, I think it is stunning in unique and wondrous ways. The action is flawless and gorgeous. Zhang Ziyi and Maggie Cheung are perfect. Tony Leung is still who I want to be when I grow up, and Jet Li made me believe I could fly. I love this movie, though, on a different day, I’d put Wong Kar Wai’s Ashes of Time here for almost identical reasons.

• 2046 by Wong Kar Wai.

  • No one loves this movie the way I do, and I love it so much that I could spend thousands of words talking about it (um, this is a hint). Usually overlooked due to the power and beauty and perfection of its companion piece, In the Mood for Love. But I think this movie does ecstatic and wild things. Also, once again, Zhang Ziyi and Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung take my breath away. Then there’s Faye Wong, who I will always love, and Gong Li who I also want to be when I grow up. This movie is packed full of stories and incredible acting, but its story about stories structure is often something that burrows inside me. And while nothing in this movie hits as hard as a hole in a tree packed with mud, it also washes me away like some great and terrible tide.

• The Good, the Bad, the Weird by Kim Jee-woon.

  • I love Lee Byung-hun and Song Kang-ho and the way they play off one another here is just amazing. It’s chaotic and wild and kind of silly and also pretty brutal. The cinematography is gorgeous, the action is frenetic and funny, and the way it packages Spaghetti Westerns and unpacks them in the Manchurian desert felt revelatory in 2008 when I watched this in a small theatre in Dublin with a girl who didn’t realize what she was agreeing to see.

Albums

• Deja Entendu by Brand New

  • I’ve been listening to this sort of obsessively lately possibly for a larger project that you’ll see in a few months. This was the first album I bought with my own money and I probably listened to it a thousand thousand times. This album was monumental to me. The dueling vocals, the broken romantics, the wasteland of depression - I loved it. It meant everything to me when I was sixteen. It means quite a lot to me here almost twenty years later.

• Fetch the Bolt Cutters by Fiona Apple.

  • This album sounds like it was produced in a messy bedroom and I love it. I love her for it. I’ve been hopelessly throwing myself into Fiona Apple’s music for almost fifteen years and I never get tired of her power and subtlety.

• From the Art of Mirrors by Max Richter.

  • I want you to listen to this. It’s very difficult to find this performance. I have it on my ipod, which is an old fashioned statement, and I lived inside this piece for years. It was the only thing I listened to for entire months. I don’t really know what to say about it except that it means everything to me. It might be why I kept living even when I often didn’t feel like it anymore.

TV Shows

• Community.

  • I like silliness and absurdity. Yes, I like Breaking Bad and other Prestige TV, but I much prefer to just giggle like an idiot for half an hour at a time. Community is the most consistently hilarious and wildly inventive sitcoms I can think of.

• Scrubs.

  • If you want silly, it doesn’t get sillier than this. Or, it took them a few seasons to understand that their silliness and their openhearted approach to emotion was what made this beautiful and forever funny, but when it hits its stride there’s really nothing better.

• Curb Your Enthusiasm.

  • I don’t even really have anything to say here. I will never stop laughing when I think of Larry David.

Videogames

• Final Fantasy IX.

  • I’ll have a lot to say about this when I get back to continuing my playthroughs of this series that has meant so much to me for so much of my life. But Kuja and Vivi will forever be in my heart. I love them. I am them. Too, I think this is where the humor, the romanticism, the tragedy, and the beauty of this series hits hardest and best. Even still, nothing in the series has been as good as this.

• Super Mario RPG.

  • I was still a baby when I played this over and over again. Yes, it was silly and lighthearted, but it also turned the familiar into the ecstatic. It transformed the way I felt about games. I didn’t know I could ever be so inside a game without projecting my entire psyche into Mario’s jump. I had never played an RPG when I came across this and I’ve really never looked back. I’ve played games of all types, but RPGs have and will always be my home. I’ve also been wanting to replay this for a long, long time, but I don’t have a way to. This is tragic to me.

• Ocarina of Time.

  • I’ve talked a bit about this in the past, but this game opened up not just games but stories for me. The haunting melancholia, the vast emptiness of a sorrowful world. The way the narrative is generative and effortless. The way I came to feel so strongly for so many of these rather lightly defined characters. But I think my obsession with death and apocalypse and loss and longing found shape here for the first time.

Maybe I’ll do this again in a few months or a year and see what changes. I meant to mention Terrence Malick and a whole lot of other people, but here we are with this list as it came out unedited and untampered.

Zhang Ziyi and Tony Leung, 2046