top of page
LISTS
January 2nd, 2025
Apocalypse Wrapped: 2024
I am listening to a YouTube compilation called Hyperdrive Boogie, living through the end stages of American empire, and getting a cat later today. I am trying to decide whether to respond to this phone bank text about the People's March because I don't get what it's supposed to do, or let it go, I am sending money to a woman in Gaza, I am not getting mad at people, I am mad at people, I am thinking about how long it's been since I've practiced drums. I am couching what I say because I don't want to upset people who are not as upset as I am, I am doing this for everyone except my mom. I am happy for Syria. I am happy for you. I am going to finish a book this year. I am going to finish a book this year. I am going to finish a book this year. They are demolishing a building next door that has a mural of a flamingo on the side. They are turning my backyard into a parking lot. I am thinking of increasing my dosage. I am walking two blocks to get a new record, four blocks for a good coffee, three blocks for an escape room, five blocks for another escape room. I am proud of myself for making three phone calls this week. They don't know empire is temporary. I am thinking everything is different when seen from the inside. I am thinking nothing is different. I am thinking everything is the same. I am mad at you. I am happy for you.
BOOKS: Living My Life (vols. 1 & 2) by Emma Goldman (1931, 1934)
Apologies in advance, because what follows might be the Most Charlotte thing ever committed to writing: I've had a special place in my heart for radical anarchist Emma Goldman since I was little, thanks to growing up with the musical Ragtime and the woman whose introduction consists of calling American robber barons "sons of bitches" and "the demons who are sucking your very souls dry." (Get their asses, Emma.) So I've been singing along with Emma since, like, age 8, but it wasn't until this year that I actually sought out her work.
Emma Goldman's autobiography is some of the most fascinating writing I've ever encountered. Even acknowledging how predisposed I am to like it, Living My Life is a whirlwind through the early 20th century rendered firsthand by one of its most polarizing figures -- a woman vilified for such beliefs as "women should have access to birth control" and "workers shouldn't be shot." I kind of genuinely don't know what to say here because of how sweeping this read was. She arrives in America as a sixteen-year-old and pretty much immediately meets fellow anarchist Alexander "Sasha" Berkman, her lover-confidante-best friend for the rest of her life. She helps Sasha attempt an attentat (politically-motivated assassination) of Henry Frick, manager of Carnegie's steel mills during the Homestead Strike, which fails and lands Sasha in prison for 14 of his 22 sentenced years. She goes to prison herself. She works as a seamstress, an ice cream parlor owner, an author, a lecturer, a nurse, a cook, a photography assistant, and an extremely brief single night stint as an attempted sex worker. (Sasha needed money to buy a gun to kill Frick.) She joins and expands a remarkable anarchist community in the States, and when she's finally deported -- a path she chooses, as the options were to stay in America alone or follow Sasha on his deportation to Russia -- she lands back in her mother country during the earliest days of the Revolution and its incredibly flawed Bolshevik rulership. She loves theater. She loves children. She once jumped on stage and horse-whipped Johann Most.
There's too much to cover, and this blurb is already long, but suffice it to say that Emma's was a brilliant, determined, compassionate mind. It was a long read but easy to keep coming back to, and especially interesting in the year of our lord 2024. The more things change, the more they stay the same, etc. etc.
Recommended for fans of the musicals Ragtime and Assassins, people who want to know why their insurance premiums are so goddamn high, and supporters of Chappell Roan telling off that one photographer.
Honorable Mentions:
Nails and Eyes - Kaori Fujino
The Monster of Elendhaven - Jennifer Giesbrecht
Eileen - Ottessa Moshfegh
The Brides of High Hill - Nghi Vo
The City in Glass - Nghi Vo
MUSIC: empathogen - WILLOW
I wasn't expecting to become a Willow stan this year, but here we are! This album is a bop in 7/4! From the artist who brought you Whip My Hair comes a concise package of jazz, pop punk, Tori Amos- and Bjork-infused alt-piano songwriting, and RnB. It's so satisfying to hear a musician embracing their element like Willow does here -- stretching the limits of her voice, experimenting with time signature. Willow's not just Will and Jada's kid, she's a fully realized artist, and I'm just sorry it took until this album for me to learn that. Recommended for former members of high school jazz bands, Paramore fans, and teenage girls with big emotions.
Honorable Mentions:
I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU - JPEGMAFIA
Grace - Jeff Buckley (1994)
All Born Screaming - St. Vincent
Bubblegum XX (2024 Remaster) - Mark Lanegan
TELEVISION: Landscapers (2021)
Is there a creator you trust so implicitly that you'll watch anything they make? For me, that's British-Japanese multi-hyphenate Will Sharpe. (You may know him from The White Lotus season two where he played Ethan.) Personally, I know him from being the creator of one of my favorite television series of all time, the two-season BBC show Flowers.
It took me a little time to get around to Landscapers, but I was not disappointed. Olivia Colman and David Thewlis play Susan and Christopher Edwards, a British couple who've absconded to France after they may or may not have murdered Susan's parents. The series leans hard into what Sharpe excels at, which is the surreal and uncanny -- characters reenact the events of the murder like a stageplay, and we can see the edges of the set, the multiple takes to get the performance right -- followed by the real news coverage of the crime during the credits. Colman and Thewlis are in turns endearing and off-putting, terrifying and pathetic. If you want art that says "life is bizarre and beautiful," you might try Will's work. Recommended for true crime girlies and people who wish Anatomy of a Fall was funnier.
Honorable Mentions:
Squid Game (season two)
The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy
Vigil
Game Changer (season six)
Very Important People
MOVIES: Große Freiheit (Great Freedom)
Another heart-warmer! 2024 was a really great movie year for me, and Great Freedom is probably the film whose ending hit me hardest. Set over multiple decades, it follows Hans, a gay man who is liberated from a Nazi concentration camp at the end of World War II, only to be placed back in prison by Allied West Germany for violating the same laws against homosexuality. His frequent cellmate, Viktor, is a convicted murderer and eventual confidante. It's an intense watch, but not just due to the brutality of the prison system -- it's compassionate, too, incredibly so. Two men forced into emotional isolation by their circumstances start to tolerate each other, until suddenly that's the most important person in your life. Franz Rogowski and Georg Friedrich are fantastic and flawed and heartbreaking, and I'm not sure what else you could want from a German-language character study set in a 20th-century prison, you know? Recommended for people who can take a hit, dedicated readers of subtitles, and folks who pay attention to Cannes.
Honorable Mentions:
Apples (2020)
Alien (1979)
The Zone of Interest
Decision to Leave
All of Us Strangers
The Unknown Country (2022)
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Tokyo Godfathers (2003)
The Substance
Vampire humaniste cherche suicidaire consentant (Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, 2023)
GAMES: Indika
Huh. Willow is really holding down the "not surreal, existential, or a bummer" fort in this list. I promise I'm fun at parties!
Do you like bizarre, incredibly slow bike chases set to chiptunes? Do you think nuns would be more interesting if they had philosophical debates with the devil? Do you want to painstakingly fetch water from a well?? Then do I have the game for you! Indika is my number one game this year, hands-down, and that's because it's a surreal and puzzle-y walking sim set in an alternate 19th-century Russia where you play a nun who has to deliver a letter. But also she can hear the devil. But also she meets an escaped convict with a frostbitten hand who believes God is saving him. But also you get points that don't do anything. But also all the animals in the game are inexplicably enormous. But also the soundtrack absolutely slaps. Games are art, and games let you do things that no other medium can, and that is why Indika's unflinching meditation on faith, profit, industry, connection, and salvation work so well. It's the kind of game I wish I had gotten to write.
Recommended for weirdos, story gamers, fans of The Seventh Seal, ex-Catholics, current Protestants, and anyone from a formerly Soviet country.
Honorable Mentions:
Dragon Age: The Veilguard
Deadlock
Arco
Children of the Sun
bottom of page