Welcome to the new year! When Aaron first started writing these annual notes, winter was merely a time to enjoy long nights, short days, and a brisk breeze. Now for two years running, it is a time to avoid anyone who exhales, while hoping you don't have to see a doctor for anything because they're all booked up with plague victims. Here's hoping next winter will break that pattern.
In the meantime, here are some of the diversions that kept us entertained last year, most of which didn't even require leaving the house. Please send any of your suggestions!
Aaron Caplan & Leah Lee
Most of this pandemic year did not involve open movie theaters, so most of the viewing was at home. And the year's limited crop of material seen for the first time in 2021 fell into what in a usual year would be the “Honorable Mention” category.
As in other years with no movies that seem to deserve or demand pithy little descriptions, we offer instead a recipe you are sure to enjoy: a buttermilk-raspberry “snacking cake” that works extremely well as muffins. Yum!
The Bad Seed (1956){L}
The Beatles: Get Back (2021)
Don’t Look Up (2021)
Dopesick (2021){L}
Dune: Part One (2021){L}
Flight (2012)
Hereditary (2018)
I Care A Lot (2021)
Judas and the Black Messiah (2021){A}
No Sudden Move (2021)
Nomadland (2020)
Promising Young Woman (2020){A & L}
Sound of Metal (2020)
Summer of Soul (2021){A}
Whirlybird (2021)
Whirlybird might not make that much sense to those of you who don't live in LA, but around these parts every day is like an episode of The Running Man, complete with live aerial coverage of high-speed chases. It's probably more popular than baseball, and certainly more popular than hockey. Being home during the pandemic allowed Leah to watch, among other things, the longest police chase in LA history (which is truly saying something). These daily spectacles give you a better sense than Consumer Reports about how cars perform in a real-life stress test. It turns out some models of Kia can go 119 mph. BMW markets their cars as "high-performance vehicles," and it's really true. Run-flat tires are a superb choice for the fugitive, but it's good to know that you can drive a long way just on your rims if you don't mind the occasional shower of sparks.
On a rare outing to a record store (yes, some still exist!) Aaron came across a compilation attributed to Jon Savage, the author of England’s Dreaming (1991), a detailed history of punk and one of the best books ever written about popular music. The compilations collect singles from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, reflecting Savage's youth as an avid listener of pirate radio. The discs were a spinoff of the book 1966: The Year The Decade Exploded (2018). Each chapter is devoted to a month of the year, focusing on a song that serves as a launching pad to discuss how the world works, ranging from nuclear disarmament to race relations to LSD to feminism.
The double-disc compilations that Savage curates for Ace Records exhibit routinely excellent taste. It’s particularly valuable to learn about songs from the British charts that never made it big over here, like "Come On Back" by Paul & Ritchie with The Crying Shames (although to be honest, this b-side probably never made it big over there either). Pay attention to that muffled electric guitar burbling in the background.
Also in the right-place-right-time category is this lovely song Aaron heard once and only once on the radio. Turns out the artist is not well known, since he spent his decades-long career as a lounge pianist with a regular gig at Jim’s Steak House in Bloomington, Illinois. In the mid-1970s, Senrick recorded a short album in friends’ living rooms and pressed a few dozen vinyl copies. One of them somehow made its way to a used record store in Japan, where somehow it was picked up by a German record collector who somehow played it to a friend from San Francisco on a European road trip who somehow got it reissued in 2019. And now, even if you only count its miniscule number of plays on YouTube, there are more electronic copies of it available than there ever were physical ones.
Spend enough time procrastinating on YouTube and you find stuff like this: multiple performances of Ravel’s Bolero arranged for cello quartets playing only one cello. This one claims to be the original, but I'm fonder of this one:
| Two malfunctioning bits of organic matter were removed from Aaron's flesh this year. In January, a kidney stone left his body the hard way. In June, two chock-full-of-cataracts lenses left his eyes with surgical assistance. You know you need some ophthalmology after you have this conversation: “Look at those two birds flying in perfect unison!”
“That’s only one bird.” The cataracts were replaced with crystal clear acrylic lenses not found in nature, which means Aaron is now a cyborg. And both Aaron and Leah are pleased with the additions of certain vaccines that let them walk around with valuable antibodies against novel coronaviruses. |
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Aaron hasn't tied shoelaces in months, after discovering permanent elastic replacements. (On the left are Hickies and on the right are Xpand.) You'd think that anyone this excited about not tying his shoelaces was either 4 or 87 years old. The California Department of Aging evidently thinks he is 87, since it just sent a helpful postcard telling him which numbers to call for meals-on-wheels, dementia support, and protection from elder abuse. |
Using this bit and this bit of online knowledge from the Lockpicking Lawyer, Leah demonstrates why it’s so easy for hotel staff to get into that safe in your room: it's easy to reset the master override code that opens all of them.
For another interesting reason, you might not want to invest a whole lot into most home burglar alarms, either.
Leah now possesses a family heirloom, The Field Guide to Stains (2002). No more improvising when it comes to tomato sauce, motor oil, and feces.
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| There was much to kvetch about in 2021. | The gang signs are incidental; Leah blames LA. |
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| In a razor-thin victory, Leah took home a much-coveted fantasy football trophy for 2021. (This year, not so much...) | Mask from Raygun, among the nation's finest purveyors of face coverings, t-shirts, and coffee mugs. |
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This culprit was apprehended by automatic cameras while in flagrant violation of traffic laws. Being all excited about your new electric car is no excuse for being a scofflaw! |
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| Aaron and Leah were heartbroken to lose Izzy Meatloaf in November... | ... but Lexi and Coco seem to enjoy their new freedoms. |