One Final Look Back at 2020

One last entry for 2020.

I have already rambled on about some of my favorite beers of the year so now it's time to look back at some faves from the cultural front.

2020 started off in a rather lousy way when the news broke that Neil Peart had died.

I immediately felt sad because I have air drummed to Rush songs more times than I can count over the course of the 33+ years that I have been listening to their music. Peart's lyrics were wide-ranging and engaging. They ran the gamut from the fantastical (e.g. – "Xanadu", "Headlong Flight") to the philosophical (e.g. – "Freewill", "The Trees") to the personal & introspective (e.g. – "Time Stand Still", "Faithless"). Listening to Rush was always a great experience because the music was wonderfully melodic with driving drum fills but also because the words were heartfelt and thought provoking. Always something to chew on when the music was over.

Quite aside from any feelings of loss I had for a man I'd only ever "known" from his songs, I felt terrible for his family and friends and was reminded just how cruel Fate can be. He lost his daughter in 1997 to a car accident and then his wife 10 months later to cancer. He retires in 2015 only to be diagnosed with brain cancer a couple of years later.

Peart's death meant that I listened to a lot of Rush over the course of 2020. From all periods of their career but the 80s probably got the most spins. There was a period of a few months when I went from Power Windows to Hold Your Fire to Presto and I closed out the year with Signals getting many plays before Grace Under Pressure got its turn in the rotation. I realize that Rush was done and dusted in 2015 but the world still seemed a poorer place without him this year.

OK. Onto some highlights from 2020. Not a best of list nor a lengthy inventory; more like short(ish) list of things that had a big impact on or just have stuck with me. Since I am on the subject of music, let's start there.

Truth be told, my musical diet this past year did not feature many albums that were new for 2020. But of the handful I did listen to, Fiona Apple's Fetch the Bolt Cutters is the gem of the bunch.

Handmade rhythms skitter and skip along while piano notes reel and career this way and that. Apple's voice keeps everything in relative order with her sometime off-kilter but always impassioned vocals that are usually, but not always, comprised of words.

As for albums of an older vintage that got a goodly amount of spins this year I think Barnstorm deserves mention here.

Barnstorm was also the name of the band featuring Joe Walsh along with Kenny Passarelli and Joe Vitale. The white funk of The James Gang was left behind and you get a more acoustic affair with one of the most beautiful songs ever, "Birdcall Morning", while also featuring some song great rocks songs. There's even some Pete Townshend inspired synthesizers to be had. There is a lot more to Joe Walsh than what you hear on classic rock radio.

Moving onto movies.

With cinemas closed for most of the year, we saw the majority of movies on our TVs and computer screens the past 9 months or so. As with music, I didn't watch very many movies new for 2020 and instead spent more catching up on my to-watch list which I suspect I'll write about another time. But I did pick two new or at least newer flicks, one narrative and one documentary.

Colour Out of Space is based on the 1927 short story by H.P. Lovecraft of the same name and I felt it really got the horror writer right unlike most other cinematic adaptions. It did a splendid job of showing the characters descend into madness instead of being a mere tentacle fest. Plus humanity is portrayed as essentially helpless against cosmic forces it cannot hope to understand. These are the core Lovecraftian themes, to my mind. Beyond the otherworldly limbs and Lovecraft's hideous racism, his work is about the insignificant place of humanity in the universe and how coming to understand just what else is out there leads only to insanity. This movie got Lovecraft right for me.

On the documentary front there was the latest from Werner Herzog.

Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin is Herzog's encomium to his friend Bruce Chatwin, a British traveler and writer, who died in 1989. The director follows some of the same routes his friend took as he examines the man and the nomadic spirit that animated them both. (And still does so for Herzog.) While it is also about the filmmaker, it never lapses into sentimentality. As an added bonus you find profundity in animal remains. Classic Herzog.

Let's continue with television.

Not to be monocultural, but Lovecraft Country was the best English language TV show I watched this year.

That the heroes are black and the villains white is surely a poke in the eye to Lovecraft's horrible racism and its legacy in his work. But looking beyond skin color, you simply have great characters. They are strong and they are weak; they are heroic, they are imperfect. These are not two dimensional figures who exist simply to give a middle finger to Lovecraft. Instead our protagonists are fully-formed and, when they are not fighting cultists just as white investigators in Lovecraft's stories and in Call of Cthulhu games have done for decades, they are experiencing the humanity within one another. This show is a fun, thrilling adventure that also delivers with relatable, compelling characters.

I watch a lot of foreign TV and the show that wasn't in English that really stuck with me this year was Senke Nad Balkanom which I think translates to "Shadow Over the Balkans" but goes by Black Sun.

It's a Serbian show that mainly takes place in Belgrade. It's the late 1920s-1930s and a World War I vet, nicknamed Tane, is now a grizzled police detective who is paired with a younger partner, Pletikosić, who has been schooled in all the latest forensic techniques. Together they solve murders against a backdrop of gangsters smuggling opium, political intrigue, ethnic hatred, et al.

In addition to my amazement that anyone could drink that much slivovitz and be expected to live, it was just a fun and exciting story full of mystery and machination. Plus I enjoyed being immersed in a culture that I know basically nothing about for an hour at a time. And so I learned a little about the Balkans between the wars while being thoroughly entertained.

Books!

No, there's no Lovecraft or Lovecraft-related material here. The two categories here are Doctor Who novels (since I have a podcast dedicated to Doctor Who books) and everything else.

I read only four Doctor Who novels this year, at last count, and The Scarlet Empress by Paul Magrs really stood out.

It's an Eighth Doctor Adventure from 1998 when the show was off the air. It introduced Iris Wildthyme, the knavish Time Lady who has a past with the Doctor. And it also told a playful story that was an absolute joy to read. It was like a fairy tale but one that was inoculated with a dose of magical realism. Stories like this, stories that twist and play with and even deviate from the conventions of Doctor Who are rare and this one is oh so good.

You can listen to the episode of my Doctor Who podcast dedicated to The Scarlet Empress here.

From the Everything Else category comes A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold.

Although not a native Wisconsinite, he left his mark as a resident of this state and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A Sand County Almanac documents the land and its inhabitants as seen from Leopold's farmhouse near Baraboo, a bit north of Madison. In the book he develops his land ethic and discourses on how we humans can and should relate to nature for the benefit of all.

In a year where most of the pleasures of city life were denied me by the pandemic, I took to my bike and rode out to various local conservation parks to get away from computers and cars and the other trappings of civilization. In this state of mind, Leopold's ideas really resonated within me.

I finished the book I was reading today, Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest - a great tale - and watched another movie from my to-watch list, Walking the Camino. It was wonderful! 2021 starts soon. What to read next? To watch? To listen to?