Bye-bye 2024
Happy New Year
Well, it’s the end of the year. Sorry I haven’t posted since the election. I wrote up my final thoughts on the Democratic presidential campaign here, but I think we’ve all moved on since then.
Thanks to everyone who subscribed to this newsletter in recent weeks and to everyone who gave Health and Safety to someone as a holiday present or recommended it to their friends. If you’re interested, I was interviewed about the book on the Los Angeles Review of Books Podcast and Brad Listi’s Other People.
As a palate cleanser after a busy fall I recently reviewed Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain for the London Review of Books. It was interesting to me how the election quickly made the book, which came out in September, an artifact. The novel contains a rhetoric of anxiety that now seems simply over—frozen into a reminder of a failed politics—but it’s a special book, and it surprised me how different it was from Greenwell’s other novels, which are about expatriate life in Bulgaria and had a lot of graphic sex. I liked the scenes of the medical procedures in the ICU in Small Rain because they were so concrete in detail. I’ve also loved the poetry of George Oppen since a friend in grad school introduced him to me, and I liked seeing his work in the book, and the reference to this perfect poem:
I participated in the 2024 Year in Reading round-up over at The Millions if you want some more thoughts on the books I read this year (I did not read very many!) One I forgot to include which turned out to be pretty essential drug canon reading was Albert Hofmann’s LSD: My Problem Child.
More lists… my favorite movies I saw this year:
Justine Triet’s Age of Panic (2013)
Olivier Assayas’s Something in the Air (2012)
Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days (2023)
Dune 2 in IMAX (2024)
The Brutalist in 70 mm (2024)
The new album I think I listened to the most was Diamond Jubilee by Cindy Lee.
In other highlights of the year, I went to some nice parties. I got to experience Carnival in Rio, finally. Everyone sees the big costumes of the official parade but the heart of carnival are these marching bands called blocos that are mini-collectives with different themes. They meet up at all hours and you chase them around the city in a crush of humanity.
I got to be an interloper at Whole, the largest queer festival in Europe, because Pure Immanence played the ambient stage.
I did this backpacking trip in Death Valley. And the book came out!
I would say that this was my favorite dancefloor moment of 2024, IYKYK:
But then I was out the Sunday after the election and my friend leaned over during a set by Bryan Kasenic and said, “this track is about 9/11.”
An eighteen-minute Ricardo Villalobos remix of a track about 9/11 was a hardcore thing to play in that particular window of shifting expectations for the future, and it made me think of a line from Ariana Reines’s new book Wave of Blood that, to paraphrase, “this time is coming for all of us.” I have been taken aback by the rampant, heady accelerationism everywhere since the election, the sense that the brakes are off on nuclear power, AI, misogyny, environmental destruction. The exuberance seems manic, as does the consensus that all the arrows are going up.
I had a really great year though, full of love and friendship and the excitement of putting new work into the world. I hope everyone gets to go to a fun party tonight, and best wishes for 2025: time to put on our power suits and return to the office for real now.