Are You Experienced: Holiday Edition Part 2
The Gratitude issue, in which I give thanks for all the things that give me joy and reassurance, and also a list of books I read this year, annotated
Do you have lots of technology in your life?
Let me ask this a different way: how many screens are in your home and office?
Rose always says, "Why do you need so many screens?"
Efficiency, I think. I'm a complex person. I need lots of places to look at things. To look up things. To do things with these things.
I have this recurring situation that happens to me.
Say I have a video game console. A Playstation 5, let's say.
And it has a controller, wireless/bluetooth, all mod cons. It vibrates, it rumbles, it has "Haptic Feedback" so you can feel the raindrops through your fingertips in the most responsively designed games.
And then I have a "Playstation Media Remote" because I need to replicate the sensation and responsiveness of a TV remote control to watch movies on my PS5, despite the fact that said wireless/bluetooth controller will, in fact, do everything a remote control will do, if you just take the minute to figure it out.
But no, I say, I am not a caveman.
I need the media remote so I can feel like I have ultimate modern control over the Prime Video channel and the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
I also have my phone, which sits next to the chair where I watch said top-notch streaming television, and where I play my marvelously complex video games.
I also have a keyboard, and a mouse, next to the chair, because I can also control my Gaming PC — as opposed to my work PC or my Podcasting PC or the Laptop I’m writing this on in bed, or the iPad, or the other Tablet, or the old laptop that’s next to the bed that has a pen / tablet feature so I can write notes to myself in the darkest of night — on the Samsung Smart Television, and I might want to compose an email while I'm busy playing Final Fantasy VII: REBIRTH, a remake of a video game from ancient history.
I think 2007.
But no, I usually need said devices because I need to stop playing the PS5 and then click a remote and suddenly I am on my PC on my TV, and I need to put the PC on my TV into BIG PICTURE MODE so I can play Starfield, which is only playable on a PC on my TV or an XBOX which I do not have, because that would be excessive.
And so, and thus, I have yet another video game controller which sits next to the chair, so I can play video games on my PC on my TV, after I have used the keyboard and the mouse to put my PC on my TV into BIG PICTURE MODE.
You get it, this is modern life. This is First World Living. This is why I have 11 remote controls in the living room. Do not come to my house and expect to easily watch the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, it takes personal training from me, or several manuals, and 5 of the remotes to be able to get to it.
It's only the Jamie Oliver Channel on my Samsung Streaming Channel for you, neophyte.
OK, so back to the chair and the video game controllers and the media controller and PC and keyboard and mouse. There I am, trying to watch Godzilla vs Kong, and the volume will not work. Worse, the movie seems to be playing at double its normal speed.
This is an uninhabitable space.
Dammit, I think, I have spilled something sticky on my video game controller and it is now broken and my house of cards has fallen. Nothing is possible anymore. I am a broken shell of a man.
I get on Gamestop Dot Com, I am ready to buy a new video game controller, but no, since the pandemic, every household has had one of me who is trapped in his chair with his PC on his TV and his devices and his PS5 and thus, video game controllers with haptic feedback are sold out Coast to Coast.
I am, quite visibly, quite literally, fucked.
But no. Wait. What is it I see on top of the media controller?
Did I put a box of HEB Seasonably Crunchy Peanut Butter and Chocolate Chip Cookies on top of the media controller in my haste and over-familiarity with my all mod cons set up here?
And thus, is said box sitting on the buttons designated for volume and fast-forward?
I have over complicated my life in such a way that the entire system is broken.
Let’s simplify things a bit.
Things I Am Grateful For!
My wife Rosemary and her seemingly infinite patience with me
My dog Olive and her insistence on sitting on top of me at all, or at least most, times
Finding writing again as a place to put the things that threaten to unseat my sanity
Finding a platform (like Substack) where I can put these things and not have the gaping maw of technological capitalism devour them like so much plankton to feed the giant whale of commerce and instead only take 10%, approximately, of said plankton
Ekonomisk Management and The Small Bow who keep me in enough shekels to be able to do this indulgent thing
The cocktail of medication and vitamins that keeps this firmly middle aged corpus from falling apart
Exercise, of which I hope to get more in the New Year (you heard me, legs)
A gentle and good natured set of doctors who have seen me through some shit this year and promise me that next year will be substantially less agita-generating
The 1000 DVDs I bought from some dude in Liberty Hill for $.10 a pop that have been keeping me busy in my collector/hoarder/ex-hoarder/now-retailer mental mind-shift (you can find me at Quatermass Comics and Collectibles where I am selling off a lifetime of ephemera, some of it legitimately cool)
The prospect of moving and a new beginning, even if it is only a thought process at the moment
Calming my soul this year and shifting from the need to be out and drinking and social to be inside, and internal and reading books (a comprehensive list of which, according to Goodreads, I have read this year, below)
Family happy hours, which have had less of a predictable cadence than during the pandemic, but which persist and are a source of much needed grounding and occasional heckling
Escaping the noise out there and finding peace in here
Not doom scrolling and not watching the news, at least as much as possible
Books That I Have Read This Year, A Comprehensive List, Annotated, with Links!:
World Building Fiction - I spent a while this year thinking about world-building, from the perspective of a longtime comic book fan, longtime horror fan, science fiction, fantasy, all that genre stuff. But also from the perspective of wanting to engage my brain in fiction writing, and what kind of fiction that might be. World building appeals to the non-fiction catalog guy in me, remembering all those names, places, titles, reasons. Same as remembering bass players or directors or production designers (Bernard Robinson for the win!) What I discovered, though, is that these books are often dry as dirt and like reading an atlas. Lots of movement, but not much more than names and places. Still, pretty engaged by the Cronin books, and I didn’t mention the series I started and stopped, like Lord Foul’s Bane, The First Chronicle of Thomas The Covenant the Unbeliever, which is about a leper and his magic ring.
The Passage - Justin Cronin
The Twelve (The Passage Book 2) - Justin Cronin
Leviathan Wakes (The Expanse #1) - James S A Corey
Caliban's War (The Expanse #2) - James S. A. Corey
Mistborn: The Final Empire (Mistborn #1) - Brandon Sanderson
A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire #1) - George R R Martin
Movie and Culture Non Fiction - I should probably put this first, as this and the society, business and culture books below are my go-to reading, comfort food for this particular weird soul.
American Scary: A History of Horror, From Salem to Stephen King and Beyond - Jeremy Dauber
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Film That Terrified a Rattled Nation - Joseph Lanza
A History of Horror (2nd Edition) - Wheeler Winston Dixon
The Twilight and other Zones - The Dark Worlds of Richard Matheson - Stanley Wiater
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'N' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood - Peter Biskind
Horror Film Directors 1933 - 1990 - Dennis Fischer
Society, Culture, Business Non Fiction - Clearly this was a year where I engaged with ideas about grievance, monstrous men, technological ageism and general scam-ism. My age, identity, fears and self-worth are showing. TMI Tangborn! Didn’t we learn anything last week?
The Age of Grievance - Frank Bruni
Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma - Claire Dederer
The Secret life of Groceries - The Dark Market of the American Supermarket - Benjamin Lorr
Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Startup Bubble -Dan Lyons
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty - Patrick Radden Keefe
Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurency - Andy Greenberg
Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture - Kyle Chalka
UFO The Inside Story of the US Government's Search for Alien life Here and Out There - Garrett M Graff
Number Go Up - Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall - Zeke Faux
Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties - Tom O'Neill
For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be - Marcus Collins
Influence, New and Expanded: The Psychology of Persuasion - Robert R Ciladini
The Border Trilogy - Reading McCarthy makes you want to write more and better and also throw away your computer and paper and anything that looks like something you can use to write.
All The Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy #1) - Cormac McCarthy
The Crossing (The Border Trilogy #2) - Cormac McCarthy
Cities of the Plain (The Border Trilogy #3) - Cormac McCarthy
Biographies, Music and Otherwise - I don’t think of myself as a “bio guy,” unlike most of music pals, who religiously consume biographies of Stones manager Allan Klein or Toto guitariast Steve Lukather (“The Gospel According to Luke”) or that crazy Motley Crue bio, which, to be fair, I read in one gorging sitting. But picking up Doe’s books and Hit Men, all of which I’d been meaning to read for a while, got me back into the rhythm of rock bios, and a brief obsession with books about comedy - lingering from reading two books about Mel Brooks last year - sent me down to Norm McDonald’s characteristically deadpan, very funny anti-memoir, or the chronicle of the birth of SNL, which is about drugs and drugs and interpersonal strife, and then more interpersonal strife. And then there was the Werner Herzog book, which stands alone in its strangeness, its gigantic sense of humor and its bits of truth — that got me so much I wrote a piece about it.
Under The Big Black Sun: A Personal History of LA Punk - John Doe and Tom DiSavia
More Fun in the New World: The Unmaking and Legacy of L.A. Punk - John Doe and Tom DiSavia
Lou Reed: The King of New York - Will Hermes
Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside The Music Business - Fredric Dannen
Don Rickles: Merchant of Venom - Michael Seth Starr
Every Man For Himself And God Against All: A Memoir - Werner Herzog
Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live - Tom Shales and John Andrew Miller
Based On A True Story: Not A Memoir - Norm McDonald
Born Standing Up - A Comic's Life - Steve Martin
Sick in the Head - Conversations about Life and Comedy - Judd Apatow
The Devil's Candy - The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco - Julie Salamon
A Masterpiece in Disarray - David Lynch's Dune - An Oral History - Max Evry
The Spice Must Flow: The Story of Dune, from Cult Novels to Visionary Sci-Fi Movies - Ryan Britt
Horror , Science Fiction, and other Weird Fiction - I consume horror fiction with the appropriate amount of self awareness, as most of it is surface level brouhaha. But Ghost Story and the Harlan Ellison books were rich enough, although Ellison and his compadres go deep enough into that Metal Hurlant sort of mystic surrealism that I think my pot-averse brain struggles to maintain contact. Off Season by Ketchum is a hell of a book, not for everyone, mean and brutal. Dark Matter and Final Girls and FantasticLand and A God in the Shed were cursory reads, at best. OK, maybe I enjoyed FantasticLand’s carnival gone feral and Final Girls’ horror tropes a bit more.
Final Girls - Riley Sager
A God In The Shed - J F Dubeau
FantasticLand - Mike Bockoven
Ghost Story - Peter Straub
Greatest Hits - Harlan Ellison
Dangerous Visions - Harlan Ellison
Off Season (Dead River #1) - Jack Ketchum
Dark Matter - Blake Crouch
Fucking Michael Lewis Books - Why did I read so many fucking Michael Lewis books this year? There’s that moment in most Michael Lewis books - at least the ones about money and economics — where he goes into some sort of mathematical explanation and I follow for a while until I realize I’m good and lost, and my brain and I make an agreement that we’ll pretend we’re up to speed for the next few pages, and if it kicks into a new story that’s not a mathematical explanation we’ll keep going like it never happened.
Flash Boys - Michael Lewis
Moneyball - Michael Lewis
The Premonition - A Pandemic Story - Michael Lewis
The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds - Michael Lewis
Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon - Michael Lewis
The Rest
Trust - Hernan Diaz
The Mountain in the Sea - Ray Nayler
The Killer Inside Me - Jim Thompson
The Long Goodbye - Raymond Chandler
Thanks for reading! I’m out of space! I’m Nick Tangborn - reach me at nicholas@areyouexperienced (dot) CO
See you January 7, 2025!