Beatrix Madell: My top ten: soccer players of the year (this took forever, too many to choose from)
1. Christen Press
2. Alexia Putellas
3. Catarina Macario
4. Kristie Mewis
5. Katie McCabe
6. Alyssa Naeher
7. Sophia Smith
8. Jenni Hermoso
9. Caprice Dydasco
10. Beth Mead
Beatrix Madell is a 13 year old who lives in Brooklyn and loves music (playing and listening), theatre and film, science, and women’s soccer.
Erin Moran, A Girl Called Eddy
1) Love Goes to Buildings on Fire. Best book I’ve read about music since Viv Albertine’s Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys
2) Jim’s Organic French Roast Decaf
3) Get Back
4) Singing on Burt Bacharach’s latest record Blue Umbrella
5) SolaWave Skincare Wand. It’s a red light therapy/microcurrent thingamajig doing yeoman’s work trying to lift my jowls
6) Call My Agent! on Netflix. French, funny, smart
7) The ramen at Menkoi Sato, 7 Cornelia St. NYC
8) Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold
9) Tom Ford’s Lost Cherry. Not a film about a young boys’ journey from Milan to Minsk, but a perfume. Oh the almond-y/Vidal Sassoon shampoo smell of it
10) The Dodo on instagram
Janice Headley (KEXP, chickfactor): Ten Things I Liked in 2021 (In No Particular Order)
1) Season 3 of Stath Lets Flats (to be fair, my partner Joe did not like it AT ALL, so your mileage may vary.)
2) Zoom karaoke w/ west coast pals
3) The podcast Films to Be Buried With with Brett Goldstein
4) Huichica Music Festival (I now wish every music festival was held at a winery.)
5) Japanese stationery store niconeco zakkaya [263 E 10th St in NYC]
6) HBO’s Insecure
7) Glossier’s Monochromes eyeshadow sets (particularly in Heather)
8) Blake’s Hard Cider Strawberry Lemonade
9) Crying in H Mart: A Memoir by Michelle Zauner
10) Licorice Pizza (except for the unnecessary racist Japanese bullshit, and yes, I know Paul Thomas Anderson has a Japanese mother-in-law [Maya Rudolph’s stepmom], but that is still no excuse.)
Nancy Novotny’s top records
Rather than calling it a “best of” list, I’d say that these are the 30 albums & EPs (culled from a list of over a hundred favorites) that possessed something “je ne sais quoi, oh so very special”* for me. Your mileage, of course, may vary. In no particular order:
Merope – Salos (Stroom)
Andy Aquarius – Chapel (Hush Hush)
Meril Wubslin – Alors Quoi (Bongo Joe)
Blue Chemise – Flower Studies (B.A.A.D.M.)
Nathan Salsburg – Psalms (Quarterstick)
Vanishing Twin – Ookii Gekkou (Fire)
Conny Frischauf – Die Drift (Bureau B )
Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek – DOST 1 (Bongo Joe)
Dummy – Mandatory Enjoyment (Trouble In Mind)
Richard Dawson & Circle – Henki (Domino)
Mdou Moctar – Afrique Victim (Matador)
Monokultur – Ormens Väg (Mammas Mysteriska Jukebox & Ever/Never)
Hawthonn – Earth Mirror (Ba Da Bing!)
Henry the Rabbit, Beatrice Morel Journel & Semay Wu – Songs of the Marsh (Moon Glyph)
Tarta Relena – Fiat Lux (La Castanya)
Grouper – Shade (Kranky)
Hamilton Yarns – Outside (Hark!)
Steven R. Smith – In the Spires (Cold Moon/Worstward)
Oddfellow’s Casino – The Cult of Water (Nightjar)
Dechmont Woods – November ’79 (Woodford Halse)
Blod – Missväxt (Grapefruit)
Midwife – Luminol (The Flenser)
Green-House – Music for Living Spaces (Leaving)
Doran – Doran (Spinster)
Various Artists – Incantations (Seance Centre)
Beautify Junkyards – Cosmorama (Ghost Box)
Shirley Collins – Crowlink (Domino)
Laura Cannell & Kate Ellis – October Sounds (Brawl)
Jonny Nash & Ana Stamp – There Up, Behind The Moon (Melody as Truth)
You’ll Never Get to Heaven – Wave Your Moonlight Hat for the Snowfall Train (Seance Centre)
Some notable singles:
Claire Cronin – “Bloodless” (Orindal)
Bas Jan – “You Have Bewitched Me” (Lost Map)
Constant Follower – “The Merry Dancers on TV” (Shimmy-Disc)
Large Plants – “La Isla Bonita” (Ghost Box)
Astral Brain – “Five Thousand Miles” (Shelflife)
Burd Ellen – “The High Preistess and the Hierophant” (Thread)
Dean McPhee – “The Alchemist” (Hood Faire)
Garden Gate – “Tarot” (Library of the Occult)
La Luz – “Tale of My Lost Love” (Female Species cover) (Numero)
Some notable reissues/archival anthologies:
Persona – Som (Black Sweat)
Aurita y su Conjunto – Chambacu (Mississippi)
Alice Coltrane – Turiya Sings (Impulse!)
The Doubling Riders – Doublings & Silences Vol. 1 (Btx3R/F01101/Exe)
Aunt Sally – Aunt Sally (Mesh-Key)
Alison Knowles – Sounds from the Book of Bean (Recital)
Oh OK – The Complete Reissue (HHBTM)
Kiko Kids Jazz – Tanganyika Na Uhuru (Mississippi)
Pamela Z – Echolocation (Freedom to Spend)
Kiri-uu – Creak-whoosh (Stroom)
Joel Vandroogenbroeck – Far View (Drag City)
Michèle Bokanowski – Rhapsodia / Battements solaires (Recollection GRM)
Michael Ranta – Taiwan Years (Metaphon)
Roger Fakhr – Fine Anyway (Habibi Funk)
Nancy is a voice actor, a sacred harp singer and a DJ at Freeform.
Gail chickfactor’s top things of 2021
Roy Kent
Dairon Asprilla
Sophia Smith
Queer Eye (why can’t they release a new season every week!?)
Sex Education
Another Round
Vegan BBQ at Pure Soul
You people
Creativity
Comfort (loungewear, noodles, bobble hats, blankets, flannel, umami)
My own culinary skills: I am a genius
Horsegirl, Billy
Rachel Love, Picture in Mind
The Umbrellas, The Umbrellas
Magic Roundabout, Up
Marisa Anderson & William Tyler, Lost Futures
Pearl and the Oysters, Flowerland
H.E.R., Back of My Mind
La Luz, La Luz
OneTwoThree, OneTwoThree
Damon & Naomi, A Sky Record
Silk Sonic, An Evening with Silk Sonic
Jennifer O’Connor, Born at the Disco
Sukhdev Sandhu’s best of 2021 list
Jens Lekman’s ‘Smalltalk‘ column appears irregularly on his website. It’s always quiet and wise. One column dealt with going bald. “What bothered me the most was the pressure to be proud of myself. It didn’t allow for a natural transformation. I remember people shouting at me, ‘Be proud. Take off your hat. You look great.’ But my face had just made a U-turn. What used to be a frame for the canvas that was me had disappeared. I wanted to mourn.”
Lots of friends spent lots of time in hospitals this year. In December I read an old History Workshop Journal obituary of Clive Goodwin (1932-1977), widower of English pop artist Pauline Boty (1938-1966) – “In America, whoever calls for medical attention for another person is responsible for paying the bill. Clive was killed by capitalism.”
A track on Dutch electronic producer Legowelt’s Pancakes With Mist LP – “Side By Side We Ride Against The Hordes of EDM.”
Ancient historian Robin Lane Fox’s gardening column in the weekend edition of the Financial Times. He’s been writing it for over 51 years and is unfailingly equable except for his dislike of gnomes.
Andrew Tuck’s wry and calming weekly essay on Monocle on Saturday radio show. Common threads: walking the dog, the weather (meteorological or otherwise) in London, how to be a good work colleague.
Wanting to give Gabriel (played by Grégory Montel) a long hug every time he lost a client in Call My Agent. And an extra can of whipped cream.
Laura Barton’s impossibly sad account of travelling to Greece during the pandemic to begin a round of solo IVF. She wrote it in 2020, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it in 2021. “For a week I feel truly pregnant. And then suddenly I do not. One day I wake to feel a tangible distance between the synthetic hormones and my own body. I do not tell anyone. Instead I walk down to the water, stay out far beyond the mandated hour. I marvel at the flicker of tiny fish moving between the boats in the harbour. I look at the bright yellow tangle of fishing nets, the deep pink of wooden shutters, the distant mountains, snow-peaked against the bluest sky.”
Pallavi Aiyar’s The Global Jigsaw Substack. Aiyar writes about China, about cats, about travel. She’s also, unfashionably though not necessarily incorrectly, in favour of cultural appropriation. “As a writer, and as a person, I’ve desired to stretch my identities; to be supple. The imagination’s work is to bend and twist around the policing of boundaries— political, religious, gastronomic, temporal. The writer, the reader, or any curious person, really, has a proclivity towards inhabiting the past and the future, as much as the present. They extend themselves beyond their ethnicity, gender, colour, sexuality, and empirical experiences to imagine other lives in other places and times.”
Belatedly discovering the writing of Jewish educator and children’s rights champion Leila Berg (1917-2012). Her autobiography Flickerbook (1997—and republished last year by CB Editions) is a funny, raw, diaristic account of coming of age in the 1930s—“Fancy Joan Littlewood and Jimmy Miller getting married! We all talked about it. Fancy concentrating all that spikiness together, and having double-spiky agitprop children!”
As always: Everything But The Girl, Night and Day; The Style Council, The Paris Match; Blueboy, The Joy of Living. But also: Shelleyan Orphan, Beamheart; Steve Beresford, Vous qui passez sans me voir; Time Is Away on NTS Radio. And and and – all of Kings of Convenience’s first LP for 12 years, Peace Or Love. Sad, tender, bitterly gorgeous.