This post attempts to answer two questions:
If you could spend a few weeks being Barack Obama, what would you learn about his life and the world in which he lives?
How would this experience change the way you think about the man, his policies, and the American presidency?
Welcome to the Met! My name is Aaron, and I’ll be your tour guide today.
Come again?
Oh! It’s kind of a funny story, actually. I was supervising Finger-Painting Day last week, and this four-year-old spilled yellow paint all over my uniform! It’s still at the cleaners.
Of course they have spare uniforms. But they don’t fit me very well. I have an unusual hip-to-waist ratio. Also, broad shoulders.
Anyway, let’s get started!
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”
Thus, I’ll keep my writing to a minimum.
I listened to ~500 new albums and ~5000 new songs this year.
This means that I wasn’t paying enough attention to most of the music. But to make this list, a song had to catch my attention and keep my thumb on the replay button. Some of the best songs did for me what I imagine powerful drugs do for other people.
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I get fancy when I review books and music. Not so for movies.
This is a straight-up list of the films that moved me this year. The first on the list was the best. The ninth was the ninth-best.
Most of these weren’t released in 2015 — that’s just when I found them. Whatever year you live in, I’d recommend them all.
“Hello. You’ve reached the disembodied voice of Aaron Gertler. Aaron’s body isn’t here right now, but if you leave a message, it will get back to you soon.”
I review the best books I read, but reviews are often almost useless. Many books should simply be read — and the best review is to quote from them, at length, so that others can begin reading right away.
I read about 125 books this year, and these are the ones that come to mind when I think of the word “best”. They are very different, and you won’t like all of them, but they all do something well.
To quote my book-review post from last year:
I’ve sorted this list into a series of “bests”: a Best Graphic Novel for people who like those, a Best Book About Selling Stuff for people who like those, and so on. Whoever you are, I’d probably recommend many of these books to you. And some of them are free!
For a list of every book I remember reading, check out my Goodreads account.
These are in alphabetical order, save for the first four, which I liked most of all.
It must be very strange to be Adele.
Whenever Adele sings anything, even in the privacy of her own home, she is singing “an Adele song”. When she sings “Can’t Buy Me Love” in the shower, she is singing “Adele covers The Beatles”.
It is not easy to make me angry, and it is harder still to make me angry enough that I feel the need to write about how angry I am. This is, I think, the first time I’ve written anything angry on this blog.
But GQ recently did a really good job of making me angry.
Not the entire magazine, but this story, which has inspired me to write my first post with a tag of “outrage”:
https://genius.it/www.gq.com/story/sugar-daddies-explained?
I annotated the story with the Genius Web Annotator, so you can see my notes in the original context, though the context doesn’t make the story any less terrible.
Adapted from something I wrote in Yale’s “Daily Themes” class. (Great class, by the way!)
The prompt:
Write twelve possible first lines to twelve different stories (fictional, non-fictional, or some combination of both). For a real challenge, let those lines start to feel like they hold together by juxtaposition. See the work of David Markson for a model.
These aren’t good sentences, but I wrote them hoping they could become first lines for first drafts of good stories.
I haven’t written those stories yet, but if you’d like me to write one, let me know and I will do that, just for you.*
*With the exception of #9, because the Amish deserve an entire novel. And #8, because it’s the friggin’ history of the world.
(To see all 60+ prompts from Daily Themes, click here.)