Rob's Ramblings: The Best of 2023
Better nate than lever
Look, I get it, everyone does a end-of-the-year post, and late January seems way too late to be doing this. But I didn’t have this Substack in 2023, and I want to share my opinion about current things in a convenient list-type format. So here’s my top choice in every category I can think of, until I run out of words.
Best new or ongoing TV show: For All Mankind
This is a bit of a cheat, as I spent much of the year catching up with this show in time for the fourth season. For All Mankind is the rare modern TV show that has the broad sociological perspective of a Deadwood or The Wire, and applies it to an alternate history Space Age that spreads out across several decades. Even while acknowledging all of the degradations of national politics and capitalism that affect space exploration, For All Mankind managed to rekindle my childlike wonder at outer space, and creates an alternate history so compelling you wonder why it didn’t happen for real. Building an episode around The Bob Newhart Show also does a lot for you in my book.
Honourable mentions: Reservation Dogs, Party Down
Best anime: Mobile Suit Gundam – The Witch from Mercury
It was a bit of a down year for anime for me, but the most I felt in tune with the broader fandom was the conclusion of The Witch from Mercury. “Utena with Gundams” is a hard concept to mess up, but this series went above and beyond with compelling characters, queer romance, and an interesting translation of Gundam’s typical soldier-to-peacemaker arc within the “school battle” genre. And yes, Suletta is Best Girl.
Honourable mentions: Vinland Saga, Spy x Family
Best individual episode: Rick and Morty – “That’s Amorte”
This year’s season of Rick and Morty had even more extreme peaks and valleys than usual, with some of the series’ best and worst episodes. One of the highlights was “That’s Amorte”, which takes a seemingly edgelord premise (a planet whose inhabitants’ bodies become tasty spaghetti sauce when they commit suicide) and uses it to grimly examine our indifference to other people in our pursuit of creature comforts. This episode even has a spot where I thought “here it comes, the big emotional montage”, followed by a montage that genuinely made me very emotional. You can’t say they didn’t call their shot.
Honourable mentions: The Last of Us – “Long, Long Time”, The Amazing Race – “A Planes, Trains and Automobiles Day”
Best old TV show I watched: Gilmore Girls
I’m only halfway through the first season, but this is the old TV show that impressed me the most in 2023. Gilmore Girls was a different kind of teen soap, staying entertaining while keeping the focus on grounded mother-daughter relationships. The cast is remarkable, with this season featuring an all-rookie lineup of future WB stars (Jared Padalecki AND Chad Michael Murray?) and great character actors. The show also highlights one of the great things that has been lost in the modern TV schedule: seeing the seasons change over the course of a year of TV.
Honourable mentions: Kaiji, The Thick of It
Best new movie: Asteroid City
Shocker: I really liked the movie whose framing device was a 1950s anthology drama hosted by Bryan Cranston. Wes Anderson can be hit or miss, but I thought this was one of his best efforts to date, touching on the universal drive for connection, the purpose of storytelling, and tricky paternal figures. It’s also very funny. I hope the alien song is performed at the Oscars.
Honourable mentions: Spider-man: Across the Spider-verse, Saint Omer
Best old movie I watched: Memento
I did a bit of a deep dive into the Christopher Nolan filmography this year to try to hype myself up for Oppenheimer (which I ended up finding kind of dull.) The highlight of this (other than reaffirming that The Dark Knight is a miracle of a movie) was Memento, which is a perfectly constructed crime film which also acts as a subversion of the wife-vengeance stories that would go on to make up so much of Nolan’s ouevre. Plus, it has the second-greatest Carrie-Ann Moss role and the third-best Joey Pantaliano role ever.
Honourable mentions: When We Were Kings, Full Metal Jacket
Best new book: Devil House – John Darnielle
It was a pretty thin year in reading for me, at least as far as actually finishing books. I only logged 19 books, although I have about as many sitting in-progress on my Kindle or around my apartment. The best semi-recent one I read was by John Darnielle, long one of my favourite songwriters, who it turns out is a pretty good novelist as well. Devil House is a nested metafiction that deals with true crime and 80s subcultures. Just when you think Darnielle is somewhat idealizing his characters, the last chapter comes along to put everything in a thorny new context.
Honourable mentions: Doppelganger – Naomi Klein, Stella Maris – Cormac McCarthy
Best old book I read: The Shadow of the Torturer – Gene Wolfe
I’ve been gradually tackling Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun tetralogy this year, with the help of the Shelved by Genre podcast (although I’ve fallen badly off the pace.) All of the books are an equal combination of fascinating, frustrating, and strange. Shadow shone a lot more for me reading it the second time around, and it manages to avoid falling down the rabbit hole of weird sex stuff that some of the later volumes do. The tension between what the narrative tells us and what we’re meant to infer what the truth is makes these books a fundamentally unsolvable riddle.
Honourable mentions: Austerity Britain – Paul Kynaston, The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
Best ongoing/new comic: Chainsaw Man – Tatsumi Fujimoto
I’m not sure if Part II of Chainsaw Man has had quite the same viral impact as the first section of the story, but to me it’s a fascinating reinvention of the manga. Part II has shifted the locus of the story away from Denji to a new female character, but one who is just as depraved and “just like me fr” as him. This, along with the decision to move at a more deliberate pace, is a real risk from a breakout artist, and yet Chainsaw Man part II feels like a perfectly judged, captivating story. In a year where some of the biggest shounen manga have descended into incomprehensible climactic battles, Fujimoto continues to be an exemplar for the genre.
Honourable Mentions: Ducks – Kate Beaton, Otoyomegatari – Kaoru Mori
Best old comic that I read this year: Finder – Carla Speed McNeil
Having bounced off a lot of well-intentioned classic sci-fi comics, I was surprised at how enraptured I became with Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder series, which I read the first omnibus volume of this year. That volume is primarily dedicated to one long-form story, an exhaustive digging into one family’s history, informed as much by psychologically real trauma as LeGuin-esque speculative sociology. McNeil’s artwork and page layouts are always attention-grabbing and on the bleeding edge of comics, and their plotting calls back to when left-wing sci-fi felt more exploratory than didactic.
Honourable Mentions: Battle Angel Alita -- Yukito Kishiro, The Secret to Superhuman Strength – Alison Bechdel
Best New Video Game: The Legend of Zelda; Tears of the Kingdom
Breath of the Wild was maybe the best video game ever, and Tears of the Kingdom makes it better. Even as someone who hasn’t really engaged with the building, Tears makes so many conceptual links in translating Breath of the Wild’s map to three dimensions with a richer story and more life-like world. The game’s willingness to give you tools like Ascend which would theoretically break it stand in stark contrast to critically-acclaimed games that are still full of invisible walls and unscalable fences. Just running around looking for shrines in Tears of the Kingdom is some of the most fun I’ve had in video games all year.
Honourable Mentions: Hi-Fi Rush, Super Mario Wonder
Best Old Video Game I Played: Super Mario World
As a result of taking advantage of Nintendo’s voucher program to buy Tears of the Kingdom, I also had to subscribe to Nintendo Switch Online (that’s how they get you), which led to me digging into the vault of games I never really played as a result of not owning a NES or SNES as a kid. This included Super Mario World, which... have you guys heard of this game? It’s really good!
Honourable Mentions: GRIS, Kirby and the Forgotten Land
Best Wrestling Promotion: Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling
Other promotions may have had better business years, but none was as consistently fun to watch as TJPW. This year featured a great rookie class, Mizuki’s ascent to the top of the promotion, and the farewell to Yuka Sakazaki. It also had wrestling matches at an aquarium and a theme park (and, even crazier, America.) If you’re looking to dip your toes into Japanese wrestling, or wrestling in general, a Wrestle Universe subscription remains the best purchase you can make.
Honourable Mentions: All Japan Pro Wrestling, Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre
Best Wrestling Match: Kenny Omega vs. Will Ospreay (AEW/NJPW Forbidden Door, June 28)
Okay, I get it, there are a lot of reasons not to like Will Ospreay, and together these two can be a lot, and Don Callis coming back mid-match didn’t really make sense. But I was at this match live, and it was an almost riotous experience. People were jumping up and down in the aisles for the two (completely perfect) kick outs at 1. It cost too much money to get a nosebleed seat for this show, but I was glad that I did it.
Honourable Mentions: Kento Miyahara vs. Katsuhiko Nakajima (AJPW, 12/31), Fuminori Abe vs. Takuya Nomura (Kaiten, 10/12)
Best Sporting Event: Wimbledon Men’s Final
The tennis world has been waiting over a decade for a changing of the guard in the men’s game, and it didn’t happen this year, with Novak Djokovic winning 3 out of the 4 majors this year. But the one he didn’t was magical – an epic five-set final against Carlos Alcaraz, the rare younger player who rose to the moment and seized the opportunity. At the time, it felt like a historic event. The following few months of Djokovic resuming his dominance have only slightly lessened the moment – Alcaraz is still the future.
Honourable Mentions: Women’s World Cup, World Baseball Classic
Best Athlete: Nikola Jokic
From one Serbian to another, Nikola Jokic totally dominated the NBA playoffs after being denied a regular-season MVP. What’s more, he brought such a joy to the sport, pushing his way through defenders and moving like a man half his size. I have no idea how accurate Jokic’s public persona as a laid-back, horse-loving guy who treats basketball as a job and not an obsession is, but it’s definitely refreshing after so much mythologizing of the work ethic of Jordan and Kobe.
Honourable Mentions: Shohei Ohtani, Naoya Inoue
Best Live Experience: The National & Patti Smith concert at Budweiser Stage in Toronto
This was a special night, with perfect summer weather. The National concert was on at the same time as the CNE and a Toronto FC game in the same area, which created a festive (if very busy) atmosphere, and walking through the fairgrounds on the way there and back was a great nostalgia blast. I sadly didn’t get there in time to see the opening act of US Girls, but Patti Smith lived up to her legendary reputation, including a Neil Young cover perfectly pitched to the audience. We would have all been happy going home after that, but The National were great as well, turning their chill-out songs into what seemed like the biggest arena rock in the world.
Honourable Mentions: AEW/NJPW Forbidden Door, Canadian Premier League finals
Best New Album: Javelin - Sufjan Stevens
A lot of artists I love released pretty par-for-the-course albums this year, but one record that really knocked my socks off was Javelin. Not to be too much of a sad sack, but when the lead single is called “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?” you’re on my wavelength. The limited glimpse we got into Stevens’ personal life this year made these songs resonate even more, and I hope that he’s able to recover from his health issues and make beautiful music for many years to come.
Honourable Mentions: The Price of Progress – The Hold Steady, Sundial – noname
Best Old Album I Listened To: In An Aeroplane Under the Sea – Neutral Milk Hotel
Okay, I know this is a pretty cliche starter-kit indie album, but somehow I hadn’t listened to it until this year, and you know what? It’s really good! From the title I was expecting it to be a little too twee, but the songs had a surprisingly spooky tone to them, especially “Two-Headed Boy.” I should say more here, but I’m bad at writing about music.
Honourable Mentions: Hold On Now, Youngster – Los Campesinos, Blues Funeral - Mark Lanegan
Best Podcast: Oddity Roadshow
I was a big fan of this group’s previous Actual Play podcast, Critical Bits, even if I never got caught up before the end of the series, and Oddity Roadshow continues the tradition in spades. It’s a funny, occasionally touching, and most importantly weird improvised story with as much or as little gay sex as you want. What else could you want?
Honourable Mentions: The Age of Napoleon, The Flophouse
Best Food: Chicken Biryani from Shehnai
With my financial circumstances, I’m always looking for value when I get take-out. Biryani gets you value: one $15-20 order will get you four filling dinners, and it tastes good too. Plus it’s a block from my house and the staff aren’t rude. That may not be useful information to you, but it was useful to me.
Honourable Mentions: Dairy Queen summer Blizzards, those peanut butter pretzel bites at Fortino’s
Best Article I read this year: Behind A Locked Door -Margaret Talbot
Getting a discounted online subscription to the New Yorker for a few months exposed me to a lot of long-form articles, but none of them knocked me out quite like this one. The article is a deeply researched, deeply personal and well-written account of an abusive foster home in post-war Germany and the culture that created it. This was the rare long article that felt like it justified all of its length.
Honourable Mentions: Why Barbie Must Be Punished -- Leslie Jamison, My Own Private Energy Crisis – Justin Smith-Ruiu
Favourite Article I wrote this year: Come and See, and the Impossibility of Anti-War Art
I wrote a fair amount last year, but fairly little of it saw the light of day (which was one of my motivations for launching this Substack.) My sole Medium post was an article about the legendary Russian movie Come and See, which went into detail about the depiction of history and whether film can ever truly be anti-war. If you liked my Godzilla article, maybe you would like this?
Honourable Mention: A Series of Accidents - Timequake
Favourite Eternal Couch Potato episode: Blue Ribbon Bouts – Sandy Saddler vs. Charlie Riley
I always like writing about sports, if only because it’s a nice change of pace, and this was one of my favourite pieces to work on. Probably the highlight was researching how insane most boxers’ schedules were in 1950, and putting that in context of this individual fight as well as the tactics of the sport. Not to mention it was a fun fight to watch, and didn’t require too much elbow grease to access. We should get another boxing match at some point this year, and I’m looking forward to writing about it.
Honourable Mentions: Lights Out – “Martian Eyes”, The 3rd Non-Annual Golden Potato Awards