71: Best of 2023
Welcome to Border Crossing issue #71. A very happy new year to you and I wish you a thousand good things for 2024.
Including, if you’re a UK reader, finally casting out those damned Conservatives, ideally for a very long time.
I hope you’re keeping warm and having a decent break, or had one if you’re back to work. Thank you very much for your patience with (the absence of) Border Crossing in the second half of 2023. The email returns ‘properly’ this month — it will drop in your inbox very soon, with some details about how things’ll work going forward.
For now though, here’s my best of the year.
Best of 2023
This time, I haven’t included the music categories here in Border Crossing, instead I already published them (as three sub-categories, albums, gigs and music onscreen) in my Double Chorus newsletters that went out the week before Christmas. I made a Spotify playlist too.
However the rest of culture’s delights are here in abundance.
Television
01/ Reservation Dogs (Disney+)
We watched the second and third seasons of the Rez Dogs’ adventures in quick succession, as their world expanded beyond our four plucky teenage heroes, and we learned more about the previous generation — as well as the complex, nuanced, gorgeous spiritual forces at play. The third series is the last, which is gutting but makes total sense.
02/ The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House (Netflix)
I shouted about this like mad online after first watching it, but I know hardly anyone who has bothered to check it out. It’s a super-quiet, low stakes (on the surface anyway) Japanese realist drama series by acclaimed filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda. It’s his first Netflix show. Two teenage friends travel to Kyoto to join a modern-day geisha house. After not quite making the cut as a trainee maiko, Kiyo (Nana Mori) becomes chef for the house. For me, this show unfolded into a pindrop perfect — if wholly unlikely — companion piece to The Bear. It created an utterly different atmosphere, yet remained thematically near identical.
03/ A Murder At The End Of The World (Disney+)
Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij on soaring, chewy form. Emma Corrin ridiculously great, and Harris Dickinson and his punk mullet my new favourite male actor. Clive Owen plays Jason Isaacs and tears it up. Add me to the list of people convinced this show was secretly — how audacious is this? — a bravura third season of The OA snuck in through Disney’s back door. Which would of course make Marling and Batmanglij the cleverest subversives in telly.
04/ The Bear (Disney+)
05/ Blackport (RÚV)
On the plane to and from Reykjavík, I gulped several episodes of this hilarious, treacle-black Icelandic 1980s-set fishing wars dramedy, which I’d already been anticipating. That was almost a year ago, so by now I fully expected it to have been a hit in the UK, but it’s still not showed up anywhere. No clue why, keep an eye out for it in 2024. Or maybe it won’t show up — but that would be a travesty.
06/ The Last Of Us (NowTV)
07/ Succession (NowTV)
08/ The English (BBC)
09/ The Diplomat (Netflix)
10/ Fleishman Is In Trouble (Disney+)
11/ Deadloch (Prime)
Aussie comedy-thriller spoof of a Nordic Noir type detective mystery, set in rural Tasmania, where the crime investigation plotting side of things actually holds up (and gets better as it continues). Early on, the series is nearly derailed by a super-broad high energy turn by Kiwi star Madeleine Sami, which risks smothering the slapstick/procedural balance, but thank god the show gets very rewarding later on (including Sami’s work) when we stuck with it.
12/ Black Ops (BBC)
Oh my god, Gbemisola Ikumelo is just fantastic.
13/ Taskmaster (Channel 4)
Worth it alone for the love affair between Sue Perkins and Susan Wokoma. It’s nuts how this format is still proper funny after all these years.
14/ A Spy Among Friends (BBC)
15/ The White Lotus (HBO)
16/ Richard Osman’s House Of Games (BBC)
17/ Wellmania (Netflix)
18/ Ahsoka (Disney+)
Not actually the Star Wars content I enjoyed most this year, which was a thrilling binge of all four series of their sublime animated show Star Wars: Rebels. That show is effectively a long, drawn-out prequel to this one, so I viewed it as prep for Ahsoka and ended up preferring it, overall. And I’m certain it made Ahsoka better. We get a whole nother fully-rounded legend of rebel and Jedi heroes, existing in parallel to the Skywalker story. And it’s that world Ashoka drops us (back) into. But I wonder if the series would’ve worked at all, if I didn’t already know Ezra Bridger, Sabine Wren, The Ghost and various other characters and histories involved.
19/ The Gold (BBC)
Unwittingly hilarious on class, and briefly on the mysticism of Thames mudlarking. I don’t know, perhaps The Gold was trash but I enjoyed it.
20/ Poker Face (Paramount)
The best episodes deserved to be much higher in this chart, but the worst eps deserved to get the whole series binned. Brilliant start, brilliant end, sagged like fuck in the middle: I’m convinced they used it to give experience to new directors, or writers, too early in the show’s potential multi-series run, without quite enough quality control. Lyonne excellent as always.
Top 5 older TV seen for the first time
01/ Star Wars: Rebels
02/ Elementary
03/ Love
04/ Search Party
05/ Manifest
Documentary films and miniseries
01/ I Get Knocked Down
02/ Renaissance: A Film By Beyonce
03/ All The Beauty And The Bloodshed
04/ The Romantics
05/ Taylor Swift: Eras Tour
06/ My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock
07/ American Symphony
08/ Wham!
09/ The Pigeon Tunnel
10/ Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story
I’m not going to include a FILM list right now, since I still haven’t seen enough of 2023’s most important movies. After doing pretty well earlier in the year, my film viewing — and especially cinema-going — dipped drastically in the last three months of 2023. Which was right at the moment I’d usually be catching up on the best films I’d missed.
Maybe you’ll get a film list later in January, but I still need to plough through at least fifteen potentials, before it’s remotely justifiable. Who knows where the time goes.
Live non music: theatre, standup, talks
01/ Blue Now at Brighton Theatre Royal
02/ A Strange Loop at the Barbican
03/ Dougald Hine at Friends Meeting House, Brighton*
04/ John Robins: Howl at Brighton Corn Exchange
05/ Suzannah Evans poetry reading at a house show in Shoreham
06/ The Eagle & The Seagull at the Bridge House Theatre
07/ Dunstan Bruce — I Get Knocked Down Q&A, Duke of York’s, Brighton
08/ Chila Kumari Singh-Berman in conversation, Brighton Museum
09/ Keith Brymer Jones at Brighton Theatre Royal
10/ Bob Geldof gets cross at One Young World conference, Belfast
Two of these entries (Robins and Geldof, plus a third show I enjoyed that landed just outside the Top 10, Stomp! at its home venue The Old Market) were courtesy of Richard Freeman, who presents The Possibility Club regular interview podcast that I edit. Thank you very much Rich, if you’re reading this, and for some other brilliant adventures.
* it’s slightly cheating to have included Dougald Hine’s visit to Brighton, because this was my own event and I was the interviewer. But I’ve decided Doogz was (as usual) so powerfully thought-provoking, his appearance deserves to be in the chart, regardless my contribution.
Books
This year I read sixty-something books in full and another fifty-ish that I put down after giving them a go. No mercy and no guilt these days: if I’m not into it after, say, sixty pages, it’s gone. I’m too old to be fucking with books I’m not getting something out of. Also, there are audiobooks on this list and as far as I’m concerned it’s fine to say “I read it” if you actually listened to someone else read it, as long as it’s an unabridged version.
Mostly, I consume non-fiction via audiobook and fiction on paper. The Kindle is now abandoned in a cupboard, only because I can’t find the cable to recharge it. Here are my 15 favourites.
01/ David Graeber — Pirate Enlightenment
02/ Ian Penman — Fassbinder Thousands Of Mirrors
03/ Katherine Rundell — Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne
04/ Naomi Klein — Doppelganger
05/ Tiffany McDaniel — On The Savage Side
06/ Adania Shibli — Minor Detail
07/ Zoe Gilbert — Mischief Acts
08/ David Grann — The Wager
09/ Dougald Hine — At Work In The Ruins
10/ Polly Barton — Porn: An Oral History
11/ Dorothy Max Prior — 69 Exhibition Road
12/ Fern Brady — Strong Female Character
13/ Isaac Butler — The Method: How The Twentieth Century Learned To Act
14/ Annie Ernaux — Getting Lost
15/ Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow — Chokepoint Capitalism
Older books
01/ Kai Bird & Martin J Shermin — American Prometheus
02/ David Graeber — Debt - Updated and Expanded
03/ Patti Smith — Just Kids
04/ Ocean Vuong — On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
05/ Angela Davis — Freedom Is A Constant Struggle
06/ Julian Jaynes — The Origin Of Consciousness
07/ Mike Davis — Buda’s Wagon
08/ Robin Wall Kemmerer — Braiding Sweetgrass
09/ Olga Ravn — The Employees
10/ Olivia Laing — The Trip To Echo Spring
Podcasts and radio
01/ In Our Time
02/ Class Divide
03/ Lovecraft Investigations: The Haunter Of The Dark
04/ Swimming In Sound with Colin & Malka
05/ Longform
06/ The Totally Football Show
07/ Marc Riley on BBC 6Music
08/ Now You’re Asking
09/ The Great Humbling
10/ Comfort Blanket
11/ Queer Lit
12/ Slate Political Gabfest
13/ Graham Duff’s Mixtape
14/ This Cultural Life
15/ Kermode & Mayo’s Take
16/ Slate Culture Gabfest
17/ Scriptnotes
18/ ICYMI
19/ Granny (Max) Takes A Trip
20/ Dua Lipa: At Your Service
21/ Mixed Tapes
22/ The Adam Buxton podcast
23/ Fresh Air
24/ Full Time Europe
25/ The Rest Is Politics: Leading
Art exhibitions
I think this was my most fun year for visual arts in half a decade, and Rifa thought the same. It has cemented for me the value of chasing fine art wherever we are in the world, even if we’re there for other reasons. I went back to Iceland for a music festival (Dark Music Days, which was magnificent) and without planning it, saw my favourite exhibition of the year.
One thing I’ve noticed is that the current art-world trend of (arbitrarily) pairing artists in joint shows doesn’t necessarily land for me, even when the shows contain great works. Hilma Af Klint & Piet Mondrian at Tate Modern is included on this list solely for Hilma’s work and I came away feeling cynical about the pairing; imagining that it whiffed of commercial cowardice. The whole idea risks pushing curators to develop a comparative analysis where it isn’t needed, or worse, actively gets in the way. I wish Tate had felt confident enough just to give Hilma Af Klint’s phenomenal gloopy pastel visions a solo headline show on their own — the Mondrian was same old same old and my eyes slid past it all. To a lesser extent, Degas/Manet in Paris had that similar compromised flavour of a double-header, but at least that pairing makes artistic sense. Obviously Degas would’ve loved it, floated out of the gallery supremely flattered. Manet, perhaps not so much.
For a while, I also included on this list Pere-Lachaise, the sprawling hillside cemetery in East Paris, after we spent a gorgeous three hours wandering around. We scored a far richer, more transformative experience than simply the famous people’s graves one initially focuses on locating. It’s not fine art though, it’s a working graveyard. So I gave up trying to categorise it as a cultural experience.
Then there was the Turner Prize, where two nominees were of moderate interest, one was close to worthless and the good one — Barbara Walker — was bewilderingly wondrous, leaving me crying mortified actual tears in the gallery, gawping at her huge, overwhelming portraits, done directly onto the walls. Of course the Turner judges sided with the most pretentious corner of the critical clique — rather than the rest of us — and gave the cash to the wrong one. Jesse Darling is a good chap though: at the award ceremony the judge’s inward-looking decision-making wildly backfired in a most pleasing way, as he slagged off the Tories and waved his Palestine flag around.
Here’s my list…
01/ Zanele Muholi at National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavik
02/ Barbara Walker at Turner Prize 2023, Towner Gallery, Eastbourne
03/ Nan Goldin: This Will Not End Well at Stedelijk, Amsterdam
04/ Tate Britain permanent collection rehang
05/ Isaac Julien: What Freedom Is To Me at Tate Britain
06/ Hilma Af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms Of Life at Tate Modern
07/ Degas / Manet at Musée d’Orsay, Paris
08/ Women In Revolt: Art & Activism in the UK, 1970-1990 at Tate Britain
09/ Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief at Stedelijk, Amsterdam
10/ Cezanne at Tate Modern
11/ Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia at Kling Og Bang, Reykjavik
12/ Steve Bloom: Beneath The Surface - South Africa in the 1970s
at Leicester Museum
13/ The Rosettis at Tate Britain
14/ permanent collection at Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris
15/ Larry Achiampong & David Blandy: Genetic Automata at The Wellcome Collection, London
16/ Lee Miller: Dressed at Brighton Museum
17/ Capturing The Moment at Tate Modern
18/ Boogaloo Stu and Ladypat: Queer Hearts at Jubilee Library, Brighton
19/ artists’ studios at 59 Rue de Rivoli, Paris
20/ Beyond The Streets at Saatchi Gallery, London
Dining out experiences
01/ H/eart.h, Amsterdam
This plant-based fine dining place squeezed us in (unbooked) at the bar, to feed us unique, swaggering, intensely sexy food: I was blown apart by shiitake teryaki charcoal ravioli with wasabi salt (and nothing else), the gnocchi was delicious, my vegan foie gras starter was ridiculous and they even got away with blue lime foam. Superb cocktails too. Fucking edgelords.
02/ La Cova Fumada, Barcelona
Ben took us to this much praised traditional (mostly seafood) Catalan tapas dive in a re-purposed winery, food created and served by the same family who ran it in the 1940s. It’s not pricey but very hard to get into. We ‘queued’ (a numbered ticket system) seated out in the courtyard with beers for a fair while, but that was fine. There’s no paper menu, no reservations, no a sign outside to announce it exists. Once we got seats I used Google’s translation-via-photo thing to unpick the chalkboard on the wall, and it translated one item as just the word “Jews”. Obviously I ordered some, and they turned out to be the most delicious green beans I’ve eaten. There weren’t many veggie items but they were all perfect and someone ate a squid (not me).
03/ Terre A Terre, Brighton
Classic vegetarian superstars firmly back on it in 2023: Rifa’s birthday feast, also lunch with Carol & Mark, lunch with Izzo, dinner with Jim, all wonderful.
04/ Bonsai Plant Kitchen, Brighton
Headily excellent gen z owned plant-based Korean fusion barbecue round the corner from our house. Far, far better than it needs to be. That’s now the fifth entirely vegan food seller opened within three-hundred metres of us, which is bonkers if you think about it.
05/ Akur, Reykjavik
Posh French/Nordic dinner kindly laid on by the team at Dark Music Days festival. Fabulous food and service, great company, then they inexplicably ran out of coffee.
06/ Dumpling Library, Belfast
Dumplings, bao, aubergine, with Rich Freeman, one of many highlights of our Belfast work trip.
07/ Benedict, Paris
Brunch: cheese and champignon egg florentine with truffle fries.
08/ a self-made pre-gig chip baguette butty in Bristol
Ben’s chips from Asado, with a baguette from the gig rider
09/ Cañete, Barcelona
Gorgeous beginnings of an epic tapas lunch (finest Spanish omelette I’ve tasted) sat in Gwyneth’s usual seat, said the waiter, showing us photos, but lunch was sadly/amusingly aborted when Ben’s hangover defeated him
10/ Moksha, Brighton
Must give a shout out to our regular local brunch haunt, which has never once let us down. Staff are brilliant. Their flagship homemade hash browns alone redefined the city’s breakfast scene in recent years, forcing other places to up their game. I get the same order almost every time, which is a bit basic of me — but it’s brunch, usually on a Monday, so fair doos.
11/ The Corn Mill, Llangollen
The finest chippy lunch of the year, out the back of a beautiful pub, where the outdoor seating overlooks a satisfyingly sploshy section of river. This was a daytime diversion on route to Liverpool, travelling with Jim Bob on our short UK record store tour.
12/ La Perla, Amsterdam
Unexpectedly phenomenal pizza, ordered despite having told them we were only popping in for coffee, after a disappointing cheese museum.
13/ The Laundromat, Reykjavik
It’s not cheap when the Brit economy is in such relative doldrums, but we went back several times for ace brunch and openhearted vibes.
14/ Les Cent Kilos, Paris
Unexpectedly beautiful mushroom penne in a local place that we randomly ran into, only because we were hungry and it’d started raining.
15/ The Flint House, Brighton
16/ Mildred’s King’s Cross
Much better sausage and mash than it needed to be, from the north London stalwart, with my sis Anna Madeleine. Probably even nicer because we’d walked there all the way from the other end of Marylebone, after hot chocolate and cheesecake, chatting gender politics and global affairs, so the food felt justified.
17/ Ivy Asia
This is a ‘plant-based sushi platter served beneath a bonsai tree with dry ice’ type experience. Suspend your disbelief and it’s terrific. Rifa absolutely loved it, to the point that it’s right up near the top of her list. They’ve built it next door to the regular Ivy In The Lanes in Brighton, so the two restaurants share a kitchen and their loos. The men’s loos have a full size waxwork of a warrior in historic costume, standing at one of the urinals, which is the same amount of unsettling as you stumble in after several courses, whichever restaurant you’re dining in.
18/ Benoli, Norwich
Flawed but memorable Italian dinner with Ben, who didn’t like it at all. Some of mine was very good but they did fuck up the affogato.
19/ Patara, Wimbledon Village (pronounced ‘vill-arrrjsh’)
Nice Thai dinner with Rifa’s family. Landrover twats everywhere though.
20/ Bouillon Chartier, Paris
It’s basically a mini-chain for tourists nowadays but still carries off the gently snotty, downtempo existentialist canteen vibe with great Parisian aplomb. I think I mainly ate a big chunk of artichoke, after they tried very hard to serve me lots of meat.
Rest in peace, The Ethicurean.
and finally…
Puddings
I haven’t numbered these beauties, they’re just in A-Z order. It’s tough to accurately rank pudding, beyond a sense of adventure in the broader context — and that isn’t exactly a fair assessment of the dessert artistry. Also, some were home-cooked, some were served in professional places, so it’s hard to compare all these different processes. That said, the best one was the basque cheesecake.
• Adriana’s birthday cake at Rifa’s party
• Al’s poached pears and reluctant chocolate sauce at Noel’s birthday tea
• Brett & Bailey’s last ever Christmas pudding
• Flint House, Brighton — vanilla crème brûlée doughnut
• Heavenly Desserts (yes the chain) — blueberry French toast pudding
• Ivy Asia, Brighton — warm passion fruit and coconut doughnuts
• La Maritxu, Marylebone — basque cheesecake, discovered by Anna
• Lainey’s chocolate trifle, New Year’s Day morning
• Terre A Terre, Brighton — affogato
• Winkel 43, Amsterdam — apple pie with squirty cream
get in touch
email: chris@christt.com
Insta: @thebordercrossing @cjthorpetracey @folkhampton
Twitter: @christt | @folkhampton | @lofiarts
always there
Sign up for my music newsletter Double Chorus. It runs chaotically in parallel to this one.
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Please look after yourself and your people.
All my love, as always.
Chris
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