I’m clearly two years late on this, but when I recently looked back at my post of favourite albums of the previous decade, I couldn’t help doing this again, if only to leave myself something to look back on in another 10 years.
- 12 Bit Blues - Kid Koala (2012)
- The Navigator - Hurray for the Riff Raff (2017)
- Lonerism - Tame Impala (2012)
- My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy - Kanye West (2010)
- Trouble Will Find Me - The National (2013)
- Love & Hate - Michael Kiwanuka (2016)
- The ArchAndroid - Janelle Monae (2010)
- A Moon Shaped Pool - Radiohead (2016)
- Art Angels - Grimes (2015)
- I Am Easy to Find - The National (2019)
Bonus List - Favourite Songs That Aren’t on the Aforementioned Albums
In no particular order:
- “begin again” - Purity Ring, Another Eternity (2015)
- “Piss Crowns are Trebled” - Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress (2015)
- “Wide Open” - Chemical Brothers (feat. Beck), Born in the Echoes (2015)
- “The Heart Wants What it Wants” - Selena Gomez, For You (2014)
- “Blood and Rockets - Movement I, Saga of Jack Parsons - Movement II, Too the Moon” - The Claypool Lennon Delirium, South of Reality (2019)
- “Good Intentions Paving Company” - Joanna Newsom, Have One On Me (2010)
- “Optimist” - David Byrne & St. Vincent, Love This Giant (2012)
- “Time” - Hans Zimmer, Inception (2010)
- “Do I Wanna Know?” - Arctic Monkeys, AM (2013)
Bonus Bonus List - A couple of artists who have been incredibly prolific during the 2010’s, and who don’t have any specific works that I especially love, but still, I like almost everything they do
- Lana Del Rey
- Run the Jewels
The Truffle Hunters is a documentary film about a bunch of old dudes in Italy who work with dogs to find truffles1 buried in the ground, deep inside forests. As a dog lover, I envy the working relationship that these people have with their dogs. My dog is great, but she’s never going to help me write any Javascript.
The film is visually gorgeous, made up mostly of static shots that are perfectly composed, lit and colour-graded. One shot that springs to mind is of a married couple sitting behind a stack of tomatoes, washing them one by one. Every unblemished tomato is a deep, rich shade of red.
While it looks great, the impeccable style makes me question the authenticity of some of the more emotional scenes. I couldn’t help but imagine the filmmakers meticulously setting up the camera and the subjects, and waiting for the perfect sun, and then saying “action” to what is supposed to be a genuine outpouring of emotion. For example, there’s one scene involving a distraught and crying truffle hunter, telling a police officer that one of his dogs has been poisoned by ruthless corporate truffle hunters trying to encroach on his territory. I felt bad for him, but still, I had to ask myself, Is he acting here?
Which brings us to the dark side of the film: because truffles are so rare and valuable, greed and competition have entered into the truffle hunters’ lives. I’ve always had a distaste for “foodie” culture because of the accompanying snobbishness, and this film pushed those buttons for sure. The Truffle Hunters depicts the middlemen and consumers of the truffles as shady characters. They haggle for low prices with the hunters in nighttime back-alley meetings, before turning around and selling to restaurants for a huge profit margin. They berate hunters for leaving a little bit of dirt on the goods. They demand attention from journalists and photographers by holding truffle exhibitions. And worst of all, they are seemingly involved in the intentional harm of innocent animals.
The cost of elevating food to a status symbol is that honest and hard-working people (and their beloved pets) are exploited and hurt.
Footnotes
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Personally, I don’t get what the big deal is about truffles. Generally, I have a strong sense of smell—I once identified blue cheese as a condiment in a colleague’s sandwich from all the way at the other end of the lunch cafeteria table—but when I’ve tried truffle-based dishes, the supposedly distinctive aroma just doesn’t hit me. ↩
It’s kind of embarassing, looking back at this previous post. It sounded like I was arriving somewhere, where in fact, those “big changes in my life” just kept rolling. I got married, got a dog, moved house, changed jobs (twice). Where I’ve landed is a place where I’ve seen my creative output trail off, enough to miss it, enough to want to return to it.
I’ll start off by describing the journey that my online presence has taken. I started this blog in 2004, publishing on a Blogger.com site called “A Logical Waste of Space,” which was shared with friend of mine. (His stuff is still there.)
Over time, the kinds of things that we wanted to write about diverged, and it made sense for me to split off. For archival purposes, I’ll keep that site around, even though I’m not too proud of some of the dumb stuff I used to write.
Then, I hosted this site on Squarespace for a while. I like the templates and WYSIWYG design tools that they provide, but felt like my data was trapped. I’m the type of person who likes to work in non-proprietary environments, so I started to look for alternatives.
The current iteration of this site is built using Jekyll, which is a geek’s dream. I’m writing this in a Markdown text file, and Jekyll takes care of compiling it into HTML. I have a DigitalOcean app pointed at a GitHub repo where these text files live, and it updates the site whenever I make changes. Sure, it takes some coding to customize the look of the site, but hey, I know how to do that stuff! It doesn’t even cost anything (unless I get an unexpected uptick in fame).
So, here I am again.
Some big changes in my life over the past few years, and fell out of the habit of blogging. This year, I have started to take my writing “career” more seriously, and I hope that it also results in my having more to say here.
Hello again!
