42. Highlights of 2023
I. Albums
To start with: music! I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m a huge fan of Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd by Lana Del Rey. It’s a dark album, in which every glimmer of light brings the greatest beauty. Del Rey sings about falling and getting back up. The harder you fall, the more beautifully you rise. One of the tracks has the Japanese title Kintsugi: the art of repairing broken pottery with silver and gold. Don’t hide them away, but let those cracks shine.
I think the title track Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd is perhaps the most beautiful thing she has ever written. And Fingertips turns your stomach. No album moved me more this year than this one.
We were treated to two albums by The National. They get better with every listen. On New Order T-Shirt from the album The First Two Pages of Frankenstein , Matt Berninger sings: ‘I keep what I can of you’. That simple line captures the elusiveness of life. It is the sudden scent of fresh bread on the street. It is a fading love slipping through your fingers.
Send For Me also contains a few beautiful lines. “If you’re ever heartsick in an elevator / Full of bachelorettes / Cornered in, and it’s taking forever / Please, don’t forget / Send for me whenever, wherever.” And: “If you’re singing in a sons museum / Without a drop to drink / And you can’t even make eye contact / Can’t even think / Send for me whenever, wherever.”
On the second album Laugh Track features Hornets, a track where you know from the very first piano notes that it’s going to be a The National classic. Matt Berninger has been recovering from depression over the past year, so you don’t necessarily hear the most uplifting music. But Smoke Detector proves that the band hasn’t lost its spark yet. The track came about during a jam session. Guitarist Bryce Dessner looked at Berninger and saw: “This man is back in full force, without a care in the world”.
Spinvis has released a delightfully diverse album. Be-Bop-A-Lula is, for me, his finest since Tot Ziens, Justine Keller from 2011. An eclectic collection of songs that stick in your head. Whenever I hear someone say ‘my god’, I finish the phrase in my head with ‘what a taxi costs’. It’s the first line from the beautiful Portugal. The little songs remain the best. Just have a listen to Speel dat ik leef, and dance along like a tata in sunglasses.
Lana Del Rey already had a long album title, but Sef takes the cake. On Ik zou voor veel kunnen sterven maar niet voor een vlag, he explores the problems in our society. Stereotyping, capitalism, artificial national borders. Big themes, but Sef doesn’t make them unbearably heavy. He keeps it personal and prefers to be an idealistic optimist.
Sef is one of the best rappers in the Netherlands and now presents a concept and an idea. It results in atypical hip-hop, but the tracks flow seamlessly into one another and form a cohesive whole. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any hits with clever lyrics on it. I’d mention the catchy Anorak, Als Een Boom Valt (“If you drop dead on the ground and nobody posts it / Do you then have just one corpse?”) and the straight-up funk of De Machine.
II. Concerts
I’m repeating some of the artists from the previous section, but there’s simply an overlap between my favourite albums of 2023 and the tours that followed.
On Liberation Day, I saw Arctic Monkeys like I hadn’t seen them in years. At Lowlands last year, the gig was a bit of a let-down, but the band were amazing in Amsterdam. Alex Turner was really up for it and live, the tracks from last year’s album The Car are unrivalled. As far as I’m concerned, they could even have included fewer older tracks. Body Paint was the absolute highlight. You can’t drag out the build-up to a track like that for long enough, until the guitars burst into life and you’ve got goosebumps all over your arms.
I’d never seen The National play so well before either. Sometimes the band is in better form than others, but The National always give it their all. This time they were at the top of their game with bangers like Squalor Victoria and Mr. November, but the highlight of the evening was About Today. Carefully built up to a climax, yet with space for a silence that echoed through the Ziggo Dome. I can still feel it now.
Lana Del Rey announced her concert a week in advance. The tickets sold out in ten minutes and the whole venue was packed to the rafters with TikTok teenagers. I hadn’t quite expected the screaming that came from there, given her most recent and rather heavy-going album. But once I got past that, it turned into a concert to remember. Her little gospel choir made Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd miraculously even more beautiful than on the record.
I have a soft spot for The Veils. They’re one of those bands that have been around for years and keep making beautiful songs, yet still haven’t quite broken through to the wider public. At TivoliVredenburg, the band proved their worth once again, with songs from their strong album …And Out of the Void Came Love, interspersed with older crowd favourites such as Swimming with the Crocodiles and Sit Down by the Fire. After the show, I told singer Finn Andrews that I Time is one of his best songs (and of this year). Unfortunately, they didn’t play it.
III. Films
There’s been plenty of great cinema this year. Lots of long films too; you really shouldn’t be put off by a running time of two and a half to three hours anymore. Check out my full list on Letterboxd; here I’ll highlight a few.
I left the cinema a wreck after seeing Aftersun. The most beautiful film of the year. It’s about a man who goes on holiday with his daughter to an all-inclusive resort. He became a father at a young age and has been making the best of it ever since, but gloom has crept into his life. Aftersun feels like a nostalgic holiday memory. Most is said in the silences. The longer the film goes on, the more often the pain resonates. But there is just as much room for unconditional love. Sometimes the two go hand in hand.
In Anatomy of a Fall, the concept of truth is meticulously examined. A man falls from a window in the French Alps and lies dead in the snow. Only his wife, a famous writer, and his son were at home. Was it suicide or was he pushed? Who is telling the truth? Or rather: which truth do you choose?
Just before the end of the year, I watched The Boy and the Heron. The latest from Studio Ghibli and probably the last from 82-year-old director Hayao Miyazaki, though you can never be sure. After all, he has announced his retirement a few times before.
This really does seem to be his swan song, a multi-layered fantasy tale about a boy who loses his mother in a great fire. His father takes a new wife, and they go to live with her. A strange heron lures the boy to a magical tower, after which he finds himself in a magical world. The adventure is secretly about much more than you might think: loss, coming to terms with it, self-confidence, learning to let go, and how we all strive to shape our lives.
Sometimes you meet people who immediately feel like soulmates. In Past Lives, you follow Nora and Hae Sun, who as children cannot bear to be apart. But when Nora emigrates from South Korea to the United States, they lose touch. Until the internet brings them back together. The film then explores a relationship that could have been, but never was. A very beautiful and quiet film about fate, love and the choices that shape the rest of our lives.
Everything has already been said about Oppenheimer, but I was captivated for three hours by this story about the father of the atomic bomb. A biopic by Christopher Nolan is no ordinary life story. We race through different timelines and perspectives, and by the time the first atomic bomb test takes place, you’re glued to your seat. A brilliant third act follows. Not only the world, but J. Robert Oppenheimer himself realises the enormous consequences of this invention.
A few more special mentions. Killers of the Flower Moon is a stunning portrait by Martin Scorsese of an almost forgotten genocide in the United States, in which a family of oil-owning Osage Indians was systematically murdered.
Beau is Afraid is a bizarre, almost Truman Show-esque film about a man with an Oedipus complex who embarks on a journey and gets himself into ever deeper trouble. Everything goes against him. The first part in particular is incredibly dark and comical.
And Babylon is a messy and flawed film with a few rock-solid scenes which, as far as I’m concerned, ultimately works as a love letter to cinema. With everything that entails, including the actors who were ruined by it. The realisation that their spirits still inspire wonder every day in cinemas and on TV in people’s homes is something truly beautiful.
IV. Series
I’m more of a film viewer than a series viewer. I often give up on series early on, because I don’t always feel like spending another hour on an episode only to find I haven’t made any headway in the story afterwards. But there are exceptions.
Take How to with John Wilson on HBO, for instance, which is now in its third and final season. The documentary series consists of half-hour video essays on a wide range of topics. For example, scaffolding, splitting the bill and finding a public toilet. Things soon go off in all directions. In one of the episodes, for instance, Wilson tries to get to the bottom of sports fans, but it ultimately turns into a wonderful portrait of vacuum cleaner enthusiasts. It’s a comical portrait of life in New York, but also a love letter to small moments of happiness.
The anime series Pluto is on Netflix, and I haven’t heard enough people talking about it this year. This mysterious tech-noir is set in a future where humans and robots live side by side. When one of the world’s most beloved robots is brutally taken out, Inspector Gesicht is tasked with finding out who is behind it. It soon becomes clear that a far greater danger is lurking. The series is based on a story from Astro Boy, but is a lot darker and more profound.
I didn’t have high expectations of The Last of Us beforehand, because when does adapting a game ever really work? But I eagerly looked forward to this HBO series every week. It deserves a place on the list for the third episode alone, Long, Long Time. A short film in its own right about two men who fall in love as the world slowly falls apart. You follow them over twenty years, and by the end of the episode, the tears are rolling down your cheeks.
Another lovely short Netflix series with a clear beginning and end: Beef. It starts with a seemingly innocent road rage incident. A few middle fingers are exchanged. Then the argument escalates, and it keeps escalating throughout the entire series. It just gets worse and worse. The series is tragic, gripping, witty and a sharp observation of class differences.
V. Games
I feel for game critics who have to compile a numbered list of the best games of the year this year. 2023 was dominated by a few massive games that were also absolutely brilliant. I’ll highlight three of them.
Alan Wake II was made just for me. Thirteen years after the original, you return to the town of Bright Falls, situated on a large lake and surrounded by misty forests. An FBI agent sets out to find the missing writer Alan Wake in an adventure that opens fantastically and keeps surprising you throughout. You play through a downward spiral into madness. It’s The X-Files and Twin Peaks. At times it’s absolutely thrilling, and at others it’s brilliantly funny. You could safely call it a miracle that Alan Wake II exists and is this good.
The game is deliberately cult and hugely meta, with references to other games by developer Remedy, such as Max Payne, Alan Wake and Control. Even the songs, graffiti and street signs are references within the story you’re playing. And this game has the best cutscene ever. If you know, you know.
In many ways, Baldur’s Gate 3 is the ultimate game. It is certainly one of the best role-playing games I have ever played. In every aspect of the game, you’ll find unprecedented freedom to experience the adventure exactly as you wish. This starts with character creation, but carries through to every conversation you have in the world. You can even avoid fighting enemies by talking your way out of tricky situations.
There’s a solution for everything that you’re not used to seeing in other games. Whereas you’d normally have to search for a key to open a door, Baldur’s Gate 3 gives you the freedom to simply smash it down with an axe, for example. Or you can have someone from your team pick the lock. Or you might find a hole in the wall that you can only get through by shrinking yourself with a spell, allowing you to enter the locked room after all.
Meanwhile, you get to know your teammates (and their backstories) better, and the overarching story in the vast world becomes increasingly epic. It’s an amazing game that takes you by surprise at first (especially if you’ve never played Dungeons and Dragons), but it’s more than worth the investment.
I thought Breath of the Wild was a great Zelda game, but the empty world and the repetitive gameplay eventually started to get a bit tedious. I therefore didn’t have high expectations for the sequel, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, but the adventure soon had me hooked, only letting go dozens of hours later.
This Zelda game simply exudes fun and lets you be endlessly creative. That’s down to the powers that allow you to teleport through ceilings, for example to emerge from a cave onto the top of a mountain. But also because you can assemble vehicles and other structures yourself and combine weapons with all sorts of things. When you think about it, it works.
I read 22 books this year. According to Goodreads, that adds up to 6,762 pages.
At the start of this year, I really enjoyed Collected Works, a debut novel by the Swedish author Lydia Sandgren, who spent ten years working on it. It’s right up my street. It’s about 50-year-old publisher Martin, who has dreamt all his life of becoming a celebrated writer himself. He just can’t seem to make it, whilst his old friend Gustav goes from strength to strength as an artist. They have a difficult relationship, not least because Gustav can’t keep his hands off drink and drugs.
The story unfolds gently as we watch Martin’s history unfold before our eyes. Once there was a woman in his life, with whom he has two children. Until she suddenly disappeared. What happened? Eventually, Sandgren weaves all the storylines in this family drama together. A wonderful book.
Auke Hulst wrote The Mitsukoshi Comfort Baby Company, about a science fiction writer and his girlfriend Mila who split up. She doesn’t want a baby with him and has an abortion; not long after, she has a child with someone else. The writer cannot accept the loss and adopts a robot child. And that results in a page-turner of a book, in which an alternative reality is explored. It is about what might have been, but also about coming to terms with and letting go of a loved one. The inevitable fate: the tighter you try to hold a snowball in your hands, the faster it melts.
Maarten Reijnders wrote about The hackers who changed the Netherlands. It began with a small group of young computer hackers playing pranks to make free calls abroad, for example. The Dutch understood how the technology worked and were able to bend it to their will. Not only does the book contain thrilling adventures, but it also provides a clear overview of the history of the internet’s origins. It makes you feel nostalgic for the 1990s and early 2000s, when we weren’t yet at the mercy of the whims of mad tech billionaires.
Be sure to read Hemel by Mieko Kawakami. Over the course of two hundred pages your throat tightens a little more with every page, as you read about how the main character, Kojima, suffers severe bullying at school. He meets a girl who is also being bullied. They become friends and find support in each other. Hemel makes you think, for example, about what friendship actually is.
Thank you so much for reading this blog. I started it 42 weeks ago as a writing exercise and a digital diary for myself. Now, a friendly, ever-growing group of readers follows it weekly via the newsletter. You are all very welcome; I hope you continue to enjoy reading it and that you find something valuable in it from time to time.
See you next year!