Top Ten of 2013 by Matty Byloos
“and a monkey made of orange licorice shone down upon us”
These appear in no particular order of importance, though they are numbered from 10 to 1...
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10 Best Live Performance of Equally Great Music Seen During the Year
Thee Oh Sees live at the Hawthorne Theater, Portland, OR
If you buy one album from 2013, it should be Foxygen's We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic.* But if you buy two, then you must be sure to add Floating Coffin, the 2013 release from Thee Oh Sees, to your collection. Every now and again, I'll scour iTunes in the hopes of finding a few new gems. I'll make a 10 song playlist, and binge on it every time I'm in the car. Whatever stands out, gets more of my attention. Besides King Tuff, Thee Oh Sees were one such find in 2013, and after listening to Floating Coffin every day for more than a month, I got an email alert from a local concert promotion company, advertising one of the band's shows in Portland, at a venue within walking distance from my front door. This may have been the best $12 I've ever spent, as Thee Oh Sees completely owned the stage with their rapid-fire, no nonsense surf punk style and high energy display that pretty much never ended until the set was done.
*See other entry, numbered 6, below.
9 Most Compelling Video / Short Film Associated With Music That May Not Have Actually Been Released in 2013:
Spiritualized, "Hey Jane" (the video)
Yeah -- I get it, it came out in March of 2012 for an album release that same year, but so what. I was introduced to the video in 2013, and that's all that matters. Plus, this kind of a list is about introducing others to the shit you found interesting/compelling/fascinating/inspiring during the year, and my bet is that there are more people out there who still need to spend some time with "Hey Jane." Please consider spending that time now:
8 Favorite Accidental Misc. Google Search That I May Actually Have Stumbled Upon on Purpose
CAMO HUNTERS
I hate giving away these little gems, but this here is in the interest of full disclosure, sharing, and opening up myself in public, quirks and all. What did I spend an awful lot of nearly productive alone time doing this year?
That's right.
Googling "camo hunters" to see how far human ingenuity has come, and who is actually winning the battle for superiority between human animals and regular animals. A battle, need I remind you, that has been going on since the very dawn of time.
Can't we just get along, people animals and regular animals?
Methinks not, actually, because making every available piece of outdoor terrain into a secret hiding spot is far too much fun.
7 Most Mind-Blowing Large-Scale Fully Realized International Art Exhibition
Heritage 2013, Commissioned for ‘Cai Guo-Qiang: Falling Back to Earth’, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2013
According to the press release, "The centerpiece of the exhibition "Falling Back to Earth" — Heritage 2013 — features 99 replicas of animals from around the world, gathered together to drink from a blue lake surrounded by pristine white sand, reminiscent of the lakes of Moreton Bay’s islands." Now, I'm at a loss. I look for the bigness in art all the time, and find it so seldomly. It's alive and well in Doug Aitken's Migration, and Christian Marclay's The Clock, but it seems like the truly mind blowing bigness of art only happens a few times each year.
Because art does not exist outside of culture and society and civilization, it is in fact an inherent element of all those things, I think that we should plan on seeing these large-scale works appear more frequently in the era within which we are living. What the hell could speak to as large an experience of being alive as the Internet? Art made from exploding fireworks, that's what. After creating the fireworks displays for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, Cai Guo-Qiang virtually became a household name, and for good reason. Fireworks exist as a thing whose very nature is about explosiveness, about containment becoming uncontrolled in micro-segments of time. Cai Guo-Qiang managed to figure out a way to control that moment and make something even more beautiful, even more compelling out of it. Keep an eye on the work that comes out of this studio -- especially as the international stage continues to invite his big wonderful brain to make even more amazing work.
6 The Most Intriguing and Pleasurable Complete Vinyl Listening Experience That My Ears Would Like to Report On
We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic, by FOXYGEN, released on January 22, 2013 on Jagjaguwar
As far as I can tell, these two musical geniuses dropped out of the sky. Didn't play too many shows in 2013, and when they were in Oregon, I missed them due to the fact that I hadn't yet learned of their existence. Music made for a vinyl listening experience, with all its warmth, and magic, and slowness. An entire album that deserves your trust, insomuch that you need to put the vinyl on the record player, and then find a comfy couch until it's time to flip the record. An absolutely delectable melange of strange musical references, French-pop stylings, psych-rock freak outs, and the offbeat lyricism of a couple of musicians operating at the height of their craft, especially considering their age. Yikes, people. Do yourself a favor, and investigate Foxygen today.
5 The One Object I'd Most Like to Exist in Any Room With, Anywhere, as Much of the Time as Possible
Faceted Woodblock Side Table, $298 at Urban Outfitters
Urban Outfitters may represent everything that's wrong with youth lifestyle consumerist culture to some, but to me, it's a decent place to get a pair of pants and a White Elephant Christmas Party gift. Also, every once in a while, they come up with some kind of decor for the home that just kills it.
So what are you going to do, be prejudiced against a clothing store?
I've grown so obsessed with this side table, that it's become the only thing capable of inspiring me to make paintings again after a nearly six-year absence from the studio. The feeling is not unlike what happens to Richard Dreyfuss during Close Encounters of the Third Kind, when images of the Devil's Tower begin to take over his conscious and subconscious thinking, and before he knows it, he's making a dirt sculpture of the landscape right there on the carpet of his living room floor.
Go figure. It took a well crafted side table to get me painting again, and mostly because I can't stop thinking about what it means to be obsessed with an object.
4 Maybe Not the Best Film, But a Pretty Solid Film, and Certainly the Best Piece of Script Writing Performed on Screen by Two Absolute Magicians of Acting
Ray Liotta and Tobey Maguire in The Details
Again, this movie was officially released in 2011, but I've had a terrible habit of not making it to the theaters, and waiting for movies to appear in the streaming annals of Netflix, so when The Details appeared in the menu, I was lucky enough to try it out. Lo and behold, the movie is darkness, darkness, darkness. Solid writing, amazing performances, and enough weird human behavior masking as drama to convince us that as a social species, we're not as fucked up as we really are (because who could do such fucked up things?! -- oh yeah, us humans. Never mind. We're totally fucked up).
If you watch one video in this Top 10 list, this should be it. Setup: Tobey Maguire's character has cheated on his own wife with Ray Liotta's character's wife. When Ray Liotta's character finds out, he's obviously upset, but gives Tobey Maguire's character a choice -- come up with a large sum of money in a very short amount of time, or pick up the phone in front of him, call his own wife, and bust himself and his act of infidelity. Then the two meet on a bridge the next day to see which option Tobey Maguire's character has chosen. Witness:
3 Best Television Writing That May or May Not Be Taking Place Behind Bars
Jenji Kohan, Orange Is the New Black, a Netflix original series premiering in 2013
From the very first note of the Regina Spektor song (originally written and performed for the show), and just as the opening credit montage of close-up female faces begins, the viewer is hyper aware that they are entering a different reality.
You've got time (the main lyric to the song) can mean so many things, and the writing of the show has a phenomenal ability to straddle the line between the fact that the main character, Piper Chapman, has got time, as in jail time, but also time -- 15 months of her life, deprived of any outside stimulation, deprived of her boyfriend and her family and her freedom -- time to consider what she's done, how she didn't get away with something at the very last minute before the statute of limitations runs out, who it was that might have put her in jail, who she actually is and what she's capable of, how sexuality and attraction are perhaps as much impacted by external forces and the context of one's surroundings as they are internal energies that we believe we have control over...
So much complexity in what often appears to be a simple television show. Don't be fooled. Whatever happened for Kohan after Weeds was triumphant, and this show is a game changer.
2 Best Answer to the Question, Dude, What's My Elixer Again? I Drank Too Much of It and Seemed to Have Forgotten
Bourbon, Preferably Over a Single Large Ice Cube With a Tiny Splash of Water
Sometimes you get ahead of a trend and then everyone else catches up and then you're effed when you try to buy what you want because everyone else is too, all of a sudden. And that's exactly what happened with Bourbon in 2013. The magazines are talking about it, craft distillers are popping up everywhere, and large-scale Bourbon makers like Buffalo Trace are investigating the inner-workings of the booze like they're physical anthropologists determining whether or not they've got the real Ark of the Covenant (Reference: BT's Single Oak Project, wherein the manufacturer is examining all of the various ways that the oak used to make the barrels within which bourbon is aged can impact the flavor). My advice to you? Find a good middle-of-the-road bottle for around $40 and learn how to drink this stuff by itself. There's nothing like opening up your real palate, so that you're consciousness's palate might follow suit.
1 Most Challenging and Insightful Journalism Being Performed Today
Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing as a Senior Editor for the Atlantic
In October of 2012, we took a trip to New York. Flights across the country are often the only times when I can get caught up on magazine reading, and the only magazine I subscribe to is the Atlantic. I read the entire September 2012 issue on that flight, and probably most of October's issue too, but the one article that stood out, brought some tears to my face, and really made me think about my place in the world as it related to the writing on the page, was Ta-Nehisi Coates piece entitled, "Fear of a Black President." When we landed at JFK, a black woman behind me tapped me on the shoulder and asked what I'd been reading, noting that she'd been glancing over my shoulder and through the seats at some notes and images in the magazine. With gushing praise, I told her about the article, the writer, and even offered to give her my copy of the magazine, I thought it was so important. She insisted that I hang on to my copy, and promised she'd be buying her own, and we parted ways. Over the last year or more, Coates has continued to weigh in on heavy-duty issues with intelligence, insight, and clarity, and my hope for 2014 is to land an interview with him for NAILED. Read "The Myth of Western Civilization," from his Atlantic blog to get a good sense of the writing he's been doing over the course of 2013.
0 Best Reason to Stay Alive While Simultaneously Flirting With Death
Cafe Racer Style British Bikes, or Bikes That Have Been Modded Out to Look That Way
This year, I finally learned how to ride a motorcycle. It has been a lifelong dream and fear, and now I'm right square in the middle of it. This is the kind of bike that I like to look at the most. Is it really necessary to say anything more about this, other than -- look at the picture?
00 Best Twin to Make Multiple Coming-Out-of-Hiding Appearances and Performances
Kevin Byloos, Older Brother of Matty Byloos, Born 7 Days Before
"For the first time, the heavens opened up and a monkey made of orange licorice shone down upon us, him, holding a bag of Cheetos and very, very high on cocaine..."
According to our mother, these were the first words that my brother spoke to me. This was when Kevin -- seven days old, gazed upon his newborn twin baby brother, me -- there in the crib that we would eventually share (after the biting and urinating ceased). And sadly, they were also the last words that he would speak to me.
Until this year, that is, when he bought himself a fax machine, started writing poetry in earnest from an egg farm somewhere near Lima, Peru, and asked me to put his bizarre messages out to the world via twitter, which I probably don't do often enough. With poetry that borders the ridiculous but makes itself available for some serious investigation of what it means to be alive in the world among people, Kevin's performances are a genre unto themselves. We hope to see big things from this guy, all through 2014, including the prospect of a video advice column, which is apparently in the works.
Here is an example of one of Kevin's poems, found on a piece of paper (including his performance introduction to the piece), that was left in the bathroom of my house after one of his trips to the States:
"You guys. This next poem is called –
THIS IS A POEM CALLED ICE CREAM
We go to the drug store to learn more about each other. Rocky road is grandma's ice cream. No. Wait. Rocky Road is grandpa's ice cream. Butter pecan is grandma's ice cream. Pahcan. Pee-can. Pecaaawhn. Butter pecan is grandma's ice cream. Pralines and cream is grandma's ice cream. The last generation to ever say that. Everyone who came after grandma and grandpa doesn't know what the hell a praline even is."
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Image Credits: Header: Cai Guo Qiang, Art Asia Pacific; Thee Oh Sees credit Jordan Portlock; Orange Is the New Black AutoStraddle; Triumph Thruxton; Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Lavin Agency; Kevin Byloos: Alea Shurmantine. <nailed's top ten of 2013>