Year's End: The Writing

I've mentioned before that I'm not much of a holiday guy, personally. Not opposed, just take 'em or leave 'em.

That's true for every holiday except New Year's. I love New Year's.

It's like Thanksgiving without the colonial baggage - a time to party with friends and family, reflecting on the past year, readying to turn over the page for the next. It's the most cathartic holiday, a deep sigh and a bracing inhale at the same time. And while, within December's weeks there's veritable rogue's gallery of festive dates, it's all just part of the build-up towards the 31st, when we finally put a year to bed and allow ourselves to feel brightened by the wide-open emptiness of whatever's next.

As a pop culture fiend December is also a special time because it's when everyone and their mum's starts putting out their end-of-the-year lists. You've probably already seen this starting. Spotify Wrapped has become the de facto inaugural event to this side of the season, with their shareable, personalized recaps of everyone's listening habits. In the movie world every critics' circle, film review blog, and filmbro podcast will be putting their best of the year lists together ahead of the February Academy Awards. The Grammys meanwhile have put out their head-scratching nominees already, prompting a torrent of dissenting opinions from the critics alongside lists of their own. And then, over at Goodreads, voting has commenced for book of the year which, paired with NPR's annual Books We Love list will, I'm sure, form the basis for my reading goals next year.

Here at The Crossover Appeal, we've been making lists all year, recommending the good stuff to you week-by-week. In fact, since starting up in February, we've recommended over 100 things to listen to, read, watch, and play - which feels both like a huge amount of things and very little at the same time. But that isn't going to stop us from making our own year-end top fives and tens like everyone else. That all starts this week with something a little more specific (and selfish) than the year's best tv shows or books. As we've been on this journey from newsletter to website to community, I've heard from a lot of you that the introductory essays in front of every list have been your favorite thing to check in on, week in, week out.

To that end, here are my Five Favorite Essays from The Crossover Appeal this year, presented in perfect tear-and-share format, perfect for passing around at your leisure.

5. April 3: This is the blessing of my thirties

A bit of introspection around getting the vaccination and how our sense of what exactly counts as being in public means.

When it was my turn to get the shot, the nurse at the table smiled beneath her mask. Her eyes crinkled up so tightly that I reflexively grinned. She asked how I was and I returned the question [...]

She said, "I'm great. I'm so glad you're here."

4. June 5: Honey, it already did

Prompted by INSIDE, Bo Burnham's pop oblivion journey into existential pandemic depression, this edition of The Crossover Appeal wandered for a while around the concept of the vibe. It's an attempt to put a little more context around a word whose flexible mushiness - not to mention viral resonances thanks to that stupidly catchy WILLOW chorus - have made it a favorite linguistic crutch around here. Make sure to read the James Wright poem tucked away in the middle, whose writing outclasses anything I've put to page by a long shot.

A vibe is a feeling you have when for a few moments you no longer feel the weight of your own conscious life. The executive function shuts up, for once, and you coast along on someone else's power. When Jesus said, come follow me for my yoke is easy and my burden is light, he was saying, it's a vibe.

3. October 22: Your patterns are still in place

Looking down the barrel of a second full pandemic winter, I wrote about the things our loved ones leave behind when they pass away. The combination of attending a friend's memorial service and listening to Injury Reserve's masterful album, By the Time We Get To Phoenix, this essay spends some time mulling over the way taste and friendship are mingled sweetly in the face of terrible loss.

When you take a recommendation from someone else, you take a little bit of them into your own index and when you recognize your own tastes in the preferences that someone else has left behind, well, it’s a powerful gift.

2. March 13: To rejoice in the complexity of things

Early on in this project I realized that this newsletter was really about taste. How it is that we come to have the tastes we do, how taste functions as a powerful cultural gatekeeper, and what makes sharing our tastes with other people such an important point of contact. This bit of writing was an early attempt to get those thoughts out into daylight.

Taste is a weird thing. It's the part of you that feels judged when you learn that something you thought was cool turns out to be bad. That part of you that shames someone else for preferring the remake to the original, the movie to the book, one cover to another. Your taste is something that feels inalienably yours - it's the product of your class, your gender, your traumas, your fears, and everything else in some weird alchemy that sits exposed above the surface like the tip of an iceberg, a cold raw nerve ready to collide with every new recommendation.

1. November 13: Stuttering in bleach and lights

Picking up on the themes from the 22nd of October, this essay reflects on the intersections of play, memory, and mourning that emerged unexpectedly from my time with Playground Games' racer, Forza Horizon 5. It was something I needed to write and I hope something that folks needed to read.

As you drive, these games collect all kinds of information about how you like to race. How aggressively you pass, how tightly you like to corner, and often you go wide open on the throttle. Forza takes in all this data and creates a ghost of how it thinks you would drive, even when you've never taken a spin around that particular track. It then offers this information to your friends in the form of an opponent. This whole mechanism of collecting information and reproducing it like this is a black box - I have no way of knowing how accurately Forza Horizon 5 actually reproduces Zach’s way of driving around Mexico, had he had the chance to do so. But nevertheless, the aura of the index gives me the feeling of playing with something - or someone - he left behind. And so, his ghost and I barrel down the side of a volcano in our McLarens and Ferraris and I think about the indexes he left in my own grey matter; memories of spilling beer on his lap at a D&D game, twice in a row, of feeling his reassurance at my shame for having gotten terribly drunk after a particularly difficult day, of harassing our friend Mark together for being just a little bit older than the rest of us. I think about how good it suddenly is to race with ghosts.

I was talking with a friend on Twitter today about how important it is to revisit your own work from time to time, if only to remind yourself that you are pretty good at the things you like to do. Doing this in public in a newsletter to other people is a bit gauche, but I pray the cover of year end listing is enough to excuse my vanity.

In all seriousness, thank you for reading and share with your friends and family any of these excerpts that gave some words to your own thoughts and feelings.

Next week: the top recommendations of the year. See you then.

Jordan Cassidy