Our asses were in high gear this week, but we weren’t too busy to send these picks your way.
LISTEN + WATCH
Music & TV/movie pairings with a lot going on
Some pieces of media just have a lot going on, you know? Multiple themes, ideas, characters, elements, tracks, contributors, etc. These sorts of busy-feeling pieces of art beg for multiple engagements and offer new insights each time. Here are three such things to watch and three such things to listen to, and just to make things even busier, I’ve paired them up with each other, each with a few different points of connection to consider:
Avengers: Endgame (2019) and Forgiveness Rock Record (2010)
The movie was the monumental climax to a save-the-world superhero team-up story containing within it many more individual superhero stories as told and discussed for over a decade. The album, meanwhile, was the climactic last offering by indie rock supergroup Broken Social Scene before a long hiatus, an hour-plus collection of 14 tracks coming at the peak of the indie rock swell in 2010.
Both are fun and full of ups and downs and juicy moments both dramatic and humourous, not to mention lots of satisfying star appearances (oh shit, it’s Doctor Strange/Emily Haines!).
Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) and As Long As I Am In The Tent of This Body I Will Make A Joyful Noise Pt. 1 (2025)
Sometimes life is just too fucking much, you know? And you just wanna be a rock in silence, or say fuck it and break something, or enter a black hole cuz nothing matters anyways. And then someone hugs you or sweeps up your mess and damn, that pinky flick of kindness is a punch. It’s the power of love in parenting, partnerships, and doing your taxes. It’s holding on and letting go; it’s action-(fanny)packed and hanging out at a laundromat. It’s, well, you know.
That was my original attempt at capturing all of the everything that was The Daniels’ surprising and weird and wonderful cinematic hit from 2022 and how I felt about it. I only downloaded John Van Deusen’s As Long As I Am In The Tent of This Body… within the past couple weeks but I’m finding myself having a very similar reaction after just a couple listens. It rocks hard with both questions and jubilation but it also makes room for quiet reflection and even silence (see the simply and aptly titled interlude, “Marsh”). It reaches for the unknowable mysteries of every dimension while staying grounded in the mundane and the earthy (as the excellent seventh track says, “I don’t gotta be anything other than what I am right now”). It’s self-professed Christian worship music for people that don’t usually like to listen to Christian worship music, like John, and like myself. But it connects to the soul for the same reason that Everything Everywhere does—it speaks to (in both senses of the phrase) the power of Love in everything, everywhere, all the time.
The Bear (2022-) and Illinois (2005)
The mutual ties to Chicago make this an easy pair, but it’s the similar noise of both projects, as highlighted by the stylized title on Sufjan’s album art, that really makes it a strong connection. The sound of Sufjan’s orchestral jumble made up of every instrument under the sun, as popularized by this release and a few of his other ones, is instantly recognizable for most indie heads. It’s a little frantic but in the most delightful way, and it makes his softer and slower moments all the more breathtaking. Same goes for The Bear, though the busyness there is usually a little less joyous and has a lot more f-bombs. The intense energy in the kitchen (and at home in the wild “Fishes” episode) often reaches nearly unbearable heights (pun always intentional) but it’s always paired with the most delicately constructed scenes of introspection and exhale. The beginning of season three is a perfect example of this with how it followed up the dramatic anger of the last night of season two with an episode called “Tomorrow” that starts with simple and still shots of the city, sans music, leaving space for everyone and all things to ponder:
I made a lot of mistakes.
-JB
Was I reaching with these connections? What are some of your favourite “busy” bits of media?
READ
The books that kept me busy this year
I’m still in the middle of Homer’s Odyssey, Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, and (just started) Cervantes’ Don Quixote, but this is everything else I finished reading this year, in order of enjoyment.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Read it for a university class ten years ago and loved it, but didn’t get the time to read the ending the way I wanted to the first time. Probably the best novel I’ve ever read. Perfect.
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Like Catcher in the Rye but female and better. Loved it.
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. A classic from one of my favourites that I hadn’t had the chance to read yet. One of the most finely tuned stories I’ve ever read.
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. Chosen by a colleague for our office book club. Oof. Heart-wrenching. Baldwin nails it.
End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland by Haruki Murakami. Read a lot of Murakami this year. This one was my favourite. Lynchian in its ability to create new metaphors in your head by avoiding all preconceived ideas.
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. Another practice in reading works I haven’t yet read from favourite authors. It’s probably my second favourite from Vonnegut now, just behind Slaughter-house Five.
Animal Farm by George Orwell. Basically a straightforward allegory, but an eerily accurate and foreboding one for our times.
Lou Reed: King of New York by Will Hermes. Maybe the best biography I’ve had the pleasure of reading (I haven’t read many, but still).
A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami. Another Murakami, also good. And funny.
I Think We’ve Been Here Before by Suzy Krause. Not what you expect from a small-press release. Also not what you expect after the first few chapters. Surprisingly thought-provoking.
Endling by Maria Reva. A wild ride of a novel. Kept me curious about the plot and the storytelling technique. About political issues without getting bogged down in politics. Political enough to remind you to hate Vladimir Putin.
First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami. A collection of short stories. Interesting, but not at the same level as his novels.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami. It’s a memoir about his hobby of running marathons. Again, interesting, but more as fan fodder than writing I’d want to emulate.
On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder. Good in the sense of being correct, but too short and focused on the basics to score higher than the books above.
James by Percival Everett. I enjoyed it, but it kind of feels like Huckleberry Finn fan fiction.
Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. Expertly written, but too neurotic and weighed down in irrelevant issues (19th Century gender norms) for me to enjoy.
Prairie Edge by Conor Kerr. Just OK. Started with a winning elevator pitch (herd of bison mysteriously released in downtown Edmonton) but didn’t seem to know where to go from there.
-AK
Our holiday breaks are starting. It’ll be 2026 when we return to look back on
I would've picked BSS's self-titled album for an example of maximalism... but love your picks and the general "pairing" concept, Joel! We should reprise it at some point.
Glad you appreciated the connections! "Something essential" is a perfect way to describe it. I'm such a sucker for stories-within-stories so I'll have to give Don Quixote a read as well as Andrew!