My Year in 100 Things

I’m currently fact-checking Vol. III of my Parkwood series, an especially time-consuming process given that it’s literally twice as long as Vol. II (if you can believe it, and I’m sure you can). It’s nevertheless a process I insist on; if I’m essentially self-publishing a book for free online—I didn’t necessarily realize I was doing this right off the bat, but more on that some other time 🤪—I may as well make sure it’ll hold up for at least a few weeks.

For now, I figured that I’d send out something of a holdover in the form of my usual year-end wrap-up—a little late, of course, since I think I needed to be a few weeks removed from 2024 in order to wilfully revisit it. (It certainly had its moments, but also so many Moments.) I seem to go for a different format anytime I put one of these together, and this time I decided to simply give you 100 things about my year, more or less in the order in which they happened. That includes everything from memorable meals, to recommended reading, to notes on the music-video landscape. I quite literally say this every year, but the plan in 2025 is to regularly include a civilized/reasonable dose of that kind of thing at the bottom of various newsletters, rather than... whatever this is below.

Though I’d characterize 2024 on a macro level as “tricky,” the micro suggests that I’m actually amazing at squeezing a little joy out of every day. So I’d like to thank my unhinged tracking habits for pulling through for me there, and for giving me a bit of perspective. I hope 2025 has been bearable so far for all of you, and I’ll be in touch very soon—a week today, in fact—with all that other stuff! ●

ONE — My camera roll is telling me that January 9 is when I first made what would be one of my biggest recipe hits of the year, this lemon and Boursin orzo bake. It’s especially ideal if you’re cooking for someone you’d like to give your uninterrupted attention; you first assemble it for five minutes while your guest says things like “I didn’t know you could do this with a Boursin” and “I can’t remember whether I like parsley,” but otherwise it just cooks in the oven while you catch up

TWO — I don’t historically have any emotional connection to The Hunger Games—never read the books, and don’t think I’d ever watched anything past Catching Fire (2013)—but we threw The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023) on one day early in the year, and it’s maybe the only thing that’s ever made me care about the series proper or any of its characters, so I’ve now seen all of it. The prequel is giving genuine romance in a way that the other films never really have for me, and I guess it’s technically about pop stardom? When I someday interview Francis Lawrence about his music videos, I’ll be sure to work it into the conversation

THREE — For my birthday in January, I got to see Madonna’s Celebration Tour, which was the first time I’d ever seen her live. (Yes, I was at the Toronto show where she began things, incredibly, with “Hello, Boston!”) It was one of those nights where I mostly just stood there taking in as much as I could, grateful to be in the room at all and terrified to miss any small detail; it didn’t even occur to me to try and write about it. The bit of the show that’s stuck with me most is the “Holiday” into “Live to Tell” transition, where a bit of dance-floor euphoria gives way to a live AIDS memorial. I’ll probably never listen to either song the same way again

FOUR — The next day, I insisted on hosting an eight-person dinner party where I made almost all of the food. For added context: I’d never before cooked for even three people at a time, and I actually made five or so dishes that I’d never made before, since I’d chosen them literally that morning. I’ll chalk this whole act of hubris up to the strange psychological state that characterizes the first several months of having a new puppy, but it ultimately worked out just fine

FIVE — Everyone seemed to have a different favourite dish that evening, and I know I was asked to send the recipe for this smashed potato salad to my brother-in-law (which I remember being the most labour-intensive of everything I made—fair warning)

SIX — My own fave was probably this baked Brie with jam; I made it for at least one other dinner party in 2024, but most of the time actually flipped the concept into a cottage cheese toast—as in, you use cottage cheese instead of Brie, but keep everything else exactly the same

SEVEN — I got a lot of mileage out of Bruno Mars’s Tokyo thank-you post:

EIGHT — A final cooking hit from January was this take on what’s apparently Stanley Tucci’s zucchini pasta. I don’t know anything about that

NINE — One of the first books I finished in 2024 was Landon Palmer’s Rock Star/Movie Star (2020), an academic one that’s been comically useful for multiple bigger projects of mine, with different chapters about the screen careers/presences of the Beatles, David Bowie, Madonna, and more. This was me reading it  

TEN — As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’ve always been weirdly fascinated by the several bits of iconic Western pop culture that came out of the 1983-’85 Ethiopian famine—I 100% realize how bizarre that sounds out loud—where “We Are the World” (1985) is among the less cringey and drug-fuelled of the bunch. That made me an easy mark for The Greatest Night in Pop (2024), a Netflix documentary about the charity single that’s nominated for Best Music Film at the upcoming Grammys. You should watch it so that I have someone to talk with about what I’ll call “the Bob Dylan scene,” “the Sheila E. scene,” and “the ‘Day-O’ scene”

ELEVEN — January 27 was the beginning of what would be my Year at the Opera—a world I had very little familiarity with prior to that day, when I caught the Met’s newest Carmen live at my local movie theatre and felt like I’d been let in on the secret that is live opera at your local movie theatre. (I grew up seeing ads for those Met broadcasts and never realizing that “live” meant “happening right this second in New York,” which is a me problem.) This production starred the mesmerizing Aigul Akhmetshina as Carmen and has been summarized (not always lovingly) as “Rodeo Carmen,” with everything set in the present day somewhere on the border between Mexico and (as per some critics) Texas. I’ve been obsessed with the opera’s Habanera since I was a teenager, but the song that emerged as a second-place favourite in 2024 was the Seguidilla (I love these videos of Maria Callas doing both songs). My original plan with the Beyoncé series was to totally skip over her star vehicles unless they were ones she’d produced—I’m so glad I didn’t do this in the end, wow—and I think spending so much time with Carmen early in the year subconsciously factored into me changing my mind, since I suddenly wanted to write about Carmen: A Hip Hopera (2001). Beyoncé actually has a super interesting relationship to opera, though I’d never really thought about it until this past year—taught by an opera singer growing up, had a lightbulb moment when a glamorous one visited her mother’s hair salon, played one of opera’s most iconic characters in her first big movie role, often works operatic vocals into her recordings and performances, and reimagined “Caro mio ben” for her most recent album (which I’ll get to later)

TWELVE — I took myself downtown to see Don Giovanni the next weekend, which was my first time seeing an opera IRL. (I figured it was a good choice because so much of that music and story was already semi-familiar to me from Amadeus [1984]—and I wasn’t wrong there, but the movie probably set my expectations too high for the climactic scene.) I’d by this point developed a rough routine that involved reading the Wikipedia page for whatever opera I was seeing the day beforehand, catching my screening/show, and then spending the days and weeks afterwards listening to any “key” “recordings.” The set designer for Don Giovanni was Es Devlin, with the production based around a rotating cube with projections—conceptually not unlike the “Monolith” she designed for Beyoncé’s Formation World Tour in 2016, though it looked pretty different in practice

THIRTEEN — While I more than fell off at some point after this, I was good for the first several months of 2024 at watching and listening to things in German as a way to get “comprehensible input” hours in. I noticed one day that Tidal carried the German audiobook of Tina Turner’s Happiness Becomes You (2020), called Happiness: Mein spiritueller Weg, and because I’d read a couple of her English-language books in the past and already knew her story, it seemed like a healthy kind of challenge given that she was more or less telling that same story again here. That turned out to be extremely smug of me, even if I did pick up a lot of vocab along the way, and back to German Peppa Pig I went

FOURTEEN — There were several moments during the 2024 Grammys where it felt like winners were pointedly (and refreshingly) ambivalent about the act of winning a Grammy, from first-time winner Miley Cyrus telling the room that “life was beautiful yesterday” (and then performing her song about being able to love me better than you can!), to Jay-Z calling the whole institution out on his wife’s behalf while accepting his own award, to other little asides made during acceptance speeches throughout the night. Jon Caramanica seemed to be on the same page for the New York Times, but I’m honestly unsure how much of that mood has stuck a year later

FIFTEEN — Later in February, I got to hold my beautiful baby nephew for the first time. No notes, love him, etc.—and can’t believe he’s almost a year old already

SIXTEEN — I unironically really enjoyed both This Is Me… Now: A Love Story (2024) and The Greatest Love Story Never Told (2024)—two thirds of Jennifer Lopez’s “I love my husband, Ben Affleck” trilogy, which has only become more fascinating to me since she filed for divorce in August. The first project is the CGI-drunk visual album for This Is Me… Now (2024), and the second is a documentary about the making of both the album and film. The doc fills this huge biographical/emotional void that I hadn’t realized had been left in her previous documentary, Halftime (2022), and it struck me as Ben Affleck’s most compelling screen appearance in years? It’ll probably make for a different watch post-August, but I’ll still be revisiting it because of the interesting way everyone onscreen talks about—and sometimes butts heads about—the project’s genre. (If I remember correctly, Ms. Lopez doesn’t want anyone involved in the project characterizing it as “music videos”):

SEVENTEEN — I got to talk about the history of visual albums—with J. Lo’s as our timely hook—on Pop Pantheon, since I’ve been chipping away at this huge project about them for what feels like whatever at this point (since 2019, technically). You’ll hear if you listen to the episode that I was then piecing together an imminent series for this newsletter, but I thereafter decided to tie up the Parkwood one first; I figured—correctly, as it turned out—that it would be super helpful for getting to the bottom of Beyoncé’s actual role in the format’s evolution. I’m still working on that project (an understatement), but I’m not 100% sure right this second what release format makes the most sense

EIGHTEEN — This feels a bit like I hallucinated it now, but I got to see Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé (2023) for the second time as part of a Black History Month event at Hot Docs here in Toronto—now with my mom and a totally packed theatre, which rocked. Off I go to finally commit to a theory as to why it’s still not available to stream

NINETEEN — I ended February by giving a talk about my work in an undergrad film class at the University of Toronto, thanks to my former supervisor Nic Sammond. The room’s mixed feelings on music videos as a format trickled a bit into this newsletter

TWENTY — I loved these Irish schoolchildren celebrating Cillian Murphy’s Oscar win:

TWENTY-ONE — A cool thing my body did on March 12 was let me run 10k for the very first time. An uncool thing my body did just a few days later—one of the big gems in the crown of a year of uncool body things—was need to be hospitalized (bad) and on morphine (effective) for what I’ll call Kidney Stuff. So the rest of March is sort of a blur of hospital visits and their emotional aftermath

TWENTY-TWO — At some point in the midst of the above, I did a bunch of stress-cooking and noted that I loved this lemon and spinach tortellini, this creamy rosé pasta, and this bang bang chicken—all recipes from Sammy Montgomery, like a lot of the others linked in this recap

TWENTY-THREE — I haven’t yet listened to Justin Timberlake’s most recent album—it’s in the Tidal queue—but he made two videos last year that lingered in my mind. The first was the director’s cut of “No Angels” (said director being Ti West), which made my official 2024 recap—available here as an alphabetical three-hour YouTube playlist—and the second was “Selfish,” directed by Bradley Calder. Both videos are, in very different ways, self-reflexive ones about Justin Timberlake needing to make a music video, and perhaps—to project a little here—asking “Who even is Justin Timberlake in 2024?” along the way

TWENTY-FOUR — I’m trying to save as many thoughts as possible for Vol. IV of the Parkwood project, but the album I listened to more than any other this past year was Cowboy Carter (2024). “Bodyguard” was, numerically speaking, my top song, whether from the album or more generally in 2024. I felt like I was floating the first time I heard it, and it strikes me as more than a little Feist-y—and I have a growing case file related to Beyoncé being a huge Feist fan. In second place (but virtually tied, I imagine) was “Sweet * Honey * Buckiin,” i.e. Beyoncé and Pharrell at their offbeat best. Tidal is telling me that “Ameriican Requiem,” which to me vibes nicely with the Tommy (1975) universe somehow, was in third place, with “My Rose”—this one’s a bit harder to explain—in fourth. (I recommend these unofficial instrumentals if you’re looking for something without lyrics to work to.) No 2024 project fired my brain up quite the same way, and I’m looking forward to being able to (ironically, of course) go deep on the cinema of it all very soon

TWENTY-FIVE — A few things I read and appreciated about Cowboy Carter in 2024: “Beyoncé’s Act of Reclamation” (Carl Wilson, Slate); “Beyoncé Won’t Burn Down the Barn with ‘Cowboy Carter’” (Doreen St. Félix, The New Yorker); “Our Sweetheart of the Rodeo” (Craig Jenkins, Vulture)

TWENTY-SIX — I finally got around to The Untouchables (1987), and boy does that train-station sequence hit on an edible. At some point I’d really like to do a De Palma project. Have I said that before?

TWENTY-SEVEN — I officially finished my big David Bowie deep dive on the first of April. That one seemed to take me an especially long time, both because of how on-and-off I did it—I had to keep putting him aside to prioritize someone/something else for work reasons—and simply because of how much stuff I had to go through. I like to have two such deep dives going at once, and I celebrated the end of that one by immediately beginning my Prince journey (my other open case file being Janet Jackson, whose career I’d be caught up on by later in the month)  

TWENTY-EIGHT — In April, I also caught the Met’s live broadcast of La rondine. I loved the Art Deco production design, but admittedly totally forgot about both the story and music upon leaving the room. Signor Puccini, if you’re reading this, I loved everything about La bohème, which I caught an encore screening of later in the year

TWENTY-NINE — I’m fascinated by how Chappell Roan didn’t make a single traditional music video in 2024—not one! She tends to perform “Good Luck, Babe!” while backed by that song’s April-released lyric video, but that’s it; her most recent “official visualizer” was “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl” in September of 2023, and her most recent “official music video” was “HOT TO GO!” a month before that. All of this said, I don’t think the takeaway here is necessarily “music videos don’t matter,” since she blew up with more-than-substantial help from Music Videos in the academic sense, and it’s largely been other Music Videos powering the Chappell rocket since

THIRTY — One of my biggest repeat recipes of the year was these peanut butter noodles

THIRTY-ONE — My second most-listened-to album of the year was The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology (2024) by Taylor Swift, which is funny because I don’t exactly love it. I think a solid third of it is “great” and sometimes even “brilliant,” but where those songs are unfortunately and fascinatingly bogged down by more than a few lacklustre ones and a couple of (if you ask me) better-off-unreleased ones. No matter my feelings, two hours straight of mostly mellow Taylor Swift is exactly the sort of thing I depend on to knock out my Weimaraner a couple times a day (see below). The two of us listened to the album over and over again all year as a result, which did endear several songs to me over time. I started going through Taylor’s career in an official sense once I finished my Janet deep dive, so the same April as TTPD’s release, and perhaps it’s especially easy to be disappointed by some of it when you’re otherwise devouring her early work, in all its bluntness and something-to-prove-ness. I will say that “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” was, for my money, one of the most compelling (and, well, disturbing) pop-culture texts of 2024—not that the video made my YouTube playlist, but I won’t get into that right now because I’m actually working on a proper piece of writing about her directing work

THIRTY-TWO — The fact that I’ve been so mixed on TTPD as a whole will show in this collection of fave Taylor Swift-related writing from 2024: “Can We As a Culture Resolve to Be More Normal About Taylor Swift in 2024?” (Steven Hyden, Uproxx); “Taylor Swift Is Having Quality-Control Issues” (Spencer Kornhaber, The Atlantic); “There are Plenty of Power Publicists. But Only One Works for Taylor Swift” (Allie Jones, The Wall Street Journal); “The Problem With Taylor Swift’s New Album” (Carl Wilson, Slate); “How Britney Spears explains Taylor Swift” (Constance Grady, Vox); “Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poetry” (Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker); “Taylor Swift and the Good Girl Trap” (Anne Helen Petersen, Culture Study); “The Tortured Poets Department / The Anthology” (Olivia Horn, Pitchfork); “Taylor Swift Made Grammy History—And One Big Mistake” (Carl Wilson, Slate); “Premature Evaluation: Taylor Swift The Tortured Poets Department” (Tom Breihan, Stereogum)

THIRTY-THREE — I ended April by introducing a screening of Saturday Night Fever (1977) at the Screening Room in Kingston, Ontario, as part of a series called The Aesthetics of Barbie. If I remember correctly, my intro was mostly about the film’s producer, Robert Stigwood, a key figure in 20th-century music-based films who’ll likely have his own mini-chapter in whatever this visual albums project shapes up as

THIRTY-FOUR — The music video director of my year was probably Aidan Zamiri, the only one who appears three times on my playlist. His two contributions to Charli xcx’s brat (2024) were “360” as well as “Guess” with Billie Eilish, and then he also did “Birds of a Feather” for Billie alone (and got a lot of unwarranted shit for it because it wasn’t what fans had been picturing in their heads as they listened to the song). One of my favourite images in any music video last year is Charli spilling red wine all over her tank top as she stands on a “vibration plate” (I had to look this up) in “360”:

THIRTY-FIVE — In May, I finally finished Grace Jones’s I’ll Never Write My Memoirs (2015), one of the wildest autobiographies I’ve ever read. As the Parkwood project started taking over my life, I found myself prioritizing unread books on my shelf that I thought might be complementary in some way—not necessarily because I intended to cite them, but because I wanted to be in a certain headspace—and this was one such book

THIRTY-SIX — While its videos (save for “Training Season,” which is on my playlist) didn’t do much for me—I think they were too concerned with referencing and rehashing others’ work, which dovetailed with the criticism that the album didn’t have its own storytelling identity—I actually loved Dua Lipa’s Radical Optimism (2024) and its singles. (It hit me on the treadmill one day that “Houdini” was reminding me of “It’s My Life.”) For me, “Falling Forever” is the single that got away

THIRTY-SEVEN — Sometime that same month, I took myself back to the opera to see Medea, which was both more gruesome than I expected and one of the cooler stage concepts I encountered this past year. There was a huge mirror that hung at an angle over the stage, giving you a dual angle of any given scene—like this:

THIRTY-EIGHT — For those of you who aren’t immediately turned off by this protein bowl concept, it may change your life the way it has mine. And yes, I’ve of course nailed the toast variation  

THIRTY-NINE — Another 2024 album I really loved was Ten Fold by Yaya Bey

FORTY — We spent a couple weeks watching all the 2011-to-present Planet of the Apes movies back to back, which I quite enjoyed; my fave was whichever one had Woody Harrelson being terrifying in it

FORTY-ONE — In early June, I published an inaugural—and not final, I promise—“MM File,” a 101 piece on stylist and costume designer B. Åkerlund. She called it “the most thorough breakdown of my career I have seen to date,” which I’ll be holding close for a long time  

FORTY-TWO — My favourite video from brat—and one of my top three faves of the year, I think—is “Von dutch” (directed by Torso), where Charli wreaks havoc on an airport. I also love this behind-the-scenes video she shared:

FORTY-THREE — On June 11, which was my newsletter’s fourth birthday, I published the introduction to my Parkwood series, which at the time was scheduled to be totally wrapped up by the end of the summer. Lmao!

FORTY-FOUR — I thought I Am: Celine Dion (2024) was great, but found it distracting that the archival footage had all been Get Back’d. Why can’t we just leave the grain in there?

FORTY-FIVE — This iced banana date latte was something I made a million times last year

FORTY-SIX — I caught a Met encore broadcast of Madama Butterfly, whose story I’d only learned of on Wikipedia the day prior. Devastating and spectacular! I’m set to see it IRL shortly

FORTY-SEVEN — Whatever’s going on with Normani, I thought DOPAMINE (2024) was excellent and hope something eventually comes of this May teaser

FORTY-EIGHT — I admittedly wasn’t terribly familiar with Ryuichi Sakamoto’s work before his death in 2023, with the exception of remembering that he’d appeared in Madonna’s “Rain” (1993) video. I was still very moved by Opus (2024), a concert film where he sweeps through his own body of work one last time in a quiet setting. It was directed by his son, Neo Sora, and actually filmed by Bill Kirstein, a key player in the early years of Parkwood whose name appears quite a bit throughout Vols. II and III

FORTY-NINE — Here’s some of my fave 2024 writing on movies: “The Evolution of Synth Soundtracks” (Danz CM, Current); "Trash and Treasure at the Razzies" (Mark Asch, Current); “Lady Gaga’s ‘Chromatica Ball’ Film Oozes Joy and Sweat” (Coleman Spilde, The Daily Beast); “Mozart holds up. Does Amadeus?” (Fran Hoepfner, Fran Magazine); “‘Smile 2’ and ‘Trap’ Turn Pop Stars Into Final Girls, Expose Horrors of Fame” (Rory Doherty, Teen Vogue); “The Zone of Interest is about the danger of ignoring atrocities — including in Gaza” (Naomi Klein, The Guardian); “An Oscar-Night Diary: The Kenergy Was Palpable” (Michael Schulman, The New Yorker); “The Dark Lord of Fine Details” (Eliza Brooke, SSENSE); “The Weirdest Night in Pop” (Sarah Larson, The New Yorker); “Hollywood’s Forgotten How to Make Movies Like The Count of Monte Cristo” (Bilge Ebiri, Vulture)

FIFTY — Some of the up-and-coming video artists I’m particularly excited about right now, all of whom appear somewhere on my playlist (often more than once): JADE, Nemahsis, Doechii (who I had on my 2023 playlist, too), Addison Rae, Yseult, and RAYE. Keep it up, ladies!

FIFTY-ONE — Beyoncé calling Inside Out 2 (2024) the best movie she’d seen all year prompted us to watch it, and I will say that it includes the most interesting depiction of an anxiety attack I’ve ever seen committed to film  

FIFTY-TWO — I published Vol. I of my Parkwood series, which covers 1981 through 2007, on June 30. This was the chapter that was initially supposed to be short enough to tack onto my introduction (!), which was really just me underestimating how important the star’s early film work is to understanding why she founded her own production company in the first place. Scrolling through all those words I wrote, you can see how much time I’d otherwise been spending researching visual albums and listening to my Carmen recordings

FIFTY-THREE — My sister and I saw Janet Jackson’s Together Again Tour in early July, which was a lot of fun; I’m truthfully not sure I have anything more profound to say about it. Costume-wise, everyone onstage was kind of giving “the boys of Spring Awakening,” if that means anything to you

FIFTY-FOUR — The next Beyoncé-complementary book I’d pulled off my shelf was On Divas (2023), a collection of Spencer Kornhaber essays on various pop stars—he includes Donald Trump here, fascinatingly—from the Atlantic

FIFTY-FIVE — If you’re a fan of ye olde buttered noodles, try this lemon garlic pasta next time

FIFTY-SIX — We finally got around to Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022), and I have to say that I’m very into this recent wave of batshit/revisionist approaches to the music biopic, which might also include Rocketman (2019), Aline (2021), Piece by Piece (2024), and of course Better Man (2024). Breaths of fresh air in an increasingly tired genre, and I think Grace Jones should consider making one along these lines—off the top of my head, where she continually narrates from a study in menswear like it’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

FIFTY-SEVEN — Later in July, I watched a dear friend walk down the aisle to “Edelweiss,” which completely surprised me and therefore made me cry

FIFTY-EIGHT — I got to help edit the first part of the second volume of Broad Sound, the journal of arts and culture launched by my buddy Ethan Warren a couple years back. The second part is incoming and, as far as I understand, imminent   

FIFTY-NINE — I went back to Kingston with the express goal of finishing Vol. II of the Parkwood project, which I did, and otherwise “cooked” many boxes of mac and cheese and listened to a lot of Prince

SIXTY — While on that same trip, the best loosely Beyoncé-adjacent book I read was Manuel Betancourt’s Judy at Carnegie Hall (2020), which was useful not only for thinking about A Star Is Born (1954) but also things like torch songs and gay iconicity  

SIXTY-ONE — I published Vol. II of the Parkwood project on August 5. In all, I’d found it twice as hard to write as Vol. I—it’s been exponentially increasing with each chunk, I’d say—since there were now not only people online invested in the story but several tricky sections/subplots I needed to pin down in order to be able to write (or even think through) Vols. III and IV. I also had to be especially careful about how I handled all things Mathew

SIXTY-TWO — This broccoli feta soup had been in my saved Reels for a very long time, and my mouth is watering as I go to grab the link in case that tells you whether I liked it

SIXTY-THREE — I hadn’t realized that Bruno Mars has co-directed basically all of his music videos since the early 2010s, and that includes “Die with a Smile” and “Apt.” (which are both on my playlist). What’s interesting to me is how aligned those newest ones are with the previous crop of Silk Sonic videos, where he seems generally into the aesthetics of ’70s music television, or else things like visible instruments and cords on soundstages that are very conspicuously soundstages. Doesn’t seem to matter who he’s co-directing with, either

SIXTY-FOUR — Some of my fave pop music writing from 2024: “Do artists need ‘lore’?” (Eleanor Halls, PassTheAux); “Why Those Big Pop Culture Accounts Are Lying to You About Beyoncé, Britney Spears, and More” (Coleman Spilde, Slate); “Is Justin Timberlake the Pop Star Anyone Wants?” (Kyndall Cunningham, Vox); “‘Last Month NOW 24.6” (Eric Harvey, Pits and Landings); “The Paris Review” (Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, Hearing Things); “The Review: Addison Rae’s ‘Diet Pepsi’ and Super-Sweet Seedy Americana” (Coleman Spilde, Top Shelf/Low Brow); “Every pop girlie wants to be Charli XCX” (Rebecca Jennings, Vox); “Dua Lipa Devotes Herself to Pleasure with ‘Radical Optimism’” (Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker); “Olivia Rodrigo’s Relatable Superstardom on the Guts Tour” (Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker)

SIXTY-FIVE — I’ve absolutely been bitten by the Sabrina Carpenter bug—at once a bit late and on the average timeline, since I believe I’ve known of her since The Hate U Give (2018) (!). I loved Short n’ Sweet (2024) top to bottom and wish I could’ve gone to the tour because I appreciate “what” “she’s” “doing” with all of these eyes on her; the constant Madonna references have been noted! My fave video from the album is “Please Please Please,” a hilarious cultural artefact—Try not to embarrass me, Oscar-nominated actor Barry Keoghan!—and one of a few lately that seem to have been influenced by “Telephone” (2010) somehow

SIXTY-SIX — I made a few days’ worth of this yogurt/peanut butter/chocolate thing in an attempt to meal prep some snacks, and accidentally ate them all in 24 hours instead. Skip the chocolate on top (or don’t, it doesn’t matter to me) and it’s a great dip for sliced apples

SIXTY-SEVEN — A classical album I enjoyed this past year was Mendelssohn by Isata Kanneh-Mason (2024)

SIXTY-EIGHT — I did for-real karaoke for the first time on August 17, singing “Space Oddity” and something else that I can’t remember now

SIXTY-NINE — In late August, I went back to Kingston to try and write all of Vol. III but failed miserably, worried about how long everything was getting (especially given the whole for-free thing) and anxious about doing justice to some of the most important years of Beyoncé’s film career ever. (This more or less summarizes the delay between chapters, I’d say.) The trip was saved by my friend Dan’s 30th birthday party, for which he hosted a screening of Phantom of the Paradise (1974). More fuel for a future De Palma project!

SEVENTY — I need to watch Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024) again because I found it overwhelming as a lifelong Tim Burton fan, but I’m pretty sure it was great? I’ve certainly told a lot of people about Monica Bellucci’s character introduction ever since:

SEVENTY-ONE — Not entirely Burton-unrelated: Gothic Cinema by Xavier Aldana Reyes (2020) is a book I’d had on my shelf for years, and I finally devoured it ahead of my Lemonade (2016) discussion. It turned out to be useful for basically all of Vol. III, which you’ll see if you end up making your way through the chapter

SEVENTY-TWO — A baby named Charlotte was born into my circle towards the end of Brat Summer, so I quickly picked up one of these

SEVENTY-THREE — There was an interesing 2024 trend in music videos that I’ve personally been calling “serving under fluorescents”—see: “Birds of a Feather,” “Von dutch,” “360,” FKA Twigs’s “Eusexua,” Yseult’s “BITCH YOU COULD NEVER,” and Shy Smith’s “Soaked” (the only one not on my playlist). Rachel E. Greenspan has connected it to the greater Office Siren/Tradwife dichotomy that’s big on TikTok as of late

SEVENTY-FOUR — Megan Thee Stallion was one of the video artists of my year; she’s only on my shortlist twice (“BOA” and “HISS”) because I wanted to turn two of her would-be slots (“Mamushi” and “Bigger in Texas”) over to other artists. But here’s my one note! While I think she looks unbelievable in “Neva Play,” it’s one of multiple videos I watched in 2024 (another is Tinashe’s “Cross That Line”) that I think were quietly influenced by Shay’s “DA” (2022) going wildly viral on Twitter a couple years back—as “the French Doja Cat,” even though she’s from Belgium. And all of that is whatever, I just hope everyone watches Shay’s video, too

SEVENTY-FIVE — Though I hadn’t finished Vol. III on the timeline I wanted, I had to put it on pause to go to Europe with my husband and finally see through the trip we had to cancel for obvious reasons back in 2020. The Beyoncé project would continue to follow me around anyway, as if to torture me. In Amsterdam, that meant encountering Josephine Baker memorabilia at the Sexmuseum and seeing some of Hajime Sorayama’s work at the Moco Museum

SEVENTY-SIX — Our Paris itinerary contained an actually-scheduled bit of Parkwood-related field work: seeing a show at Crazy Horse, where she and Jay-Z filmed “Partition” (2013). Please do this if you ever find yourself in the city!

SEVENTY-SEVEN — Much more surreal was how, full of Crazy Horse-brand champagne, we then walked around the corner to the Plaza Athénée, where Beyoncé and her loved ones had just launched SirDavis days prior. When we confidently told the doorman, “We’re here for the SirDavis event,” he assumed—wrongly, of course—that we were invited and simply let us into what was now a brand activation at the hotel bar. I didn’t need any more alcohol, but at this point it was about Research  

SEVENTY-EIGHT — We then spent about 48 hours in Strasbourg as a sort of wine-and-cheese pitstop to break up all the train travel. That included lunch at Maison Kammerzell, where a bunch of celebrities have eaten and signed autographs over the years, and they hilariously use Madonna’s likeness to help explain who Guy Ritchie is to onlookers… even though he appears to have eaten there in 2010 and 2011, i.e. long after they’d divorced

SEVENTY-NINE — Though it sounded like my actual worst nightmare on paper, we ended up spending an extremely fun day at Oktoberfest in Munich. My rental dirndl (which I paired with Ivy Park high tops; that’s the only Beyoncé connection here) was too long but so was every other tourist’s, and you stop noticing so much after enough beer. Several people complimented me on my German that day, I’ll have you know

EIGHTY — The real point of this trip was to finally—after almost a decade together—bring my husband to Vienna, whence half my family comes. Now you might be thinking, “Surely she won’t find a way to make that about Beyoncé,” to which I’ll respond, “I can make anything about Beyoncé: we went out for drinks and in walked her Epic (2013) co-star Christoph Waltz, who’d chosen the same hotel bar to celebrate his birthday”

EIGHTY-ONE — I really loved this Vogue video on the costuming of Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet Tour. For fans of old musicals and thoughtful creative direction:

EIGHTY-TWO — Filled a major Cronenberg gap in the form of The Fly (1986), which somehow managed to be sexy, revolting, and devastating all at the same time

EIGHTY-THREE — Another tear-jerker, though in a much less surprising way, was Music by John Williams (2024), which I thought was lovely <3

EIGHTY-FOUR — Eons ago, like in the spring of 2023, I did a day of filming for the second season of Hollywood Suite’s Cinema A to Z series, which started airing this past fall. I appear in two episodes so far, “Serial Killers” and “Costumes,” and I’m horrified by how much I apparently overuse the word “interesting.” I truly think everything’s interesting!

EIGHTY-FIVE — I’ve saved so many Turkish eggs recipes over the years, and when I finally attempted this one I was mad at myself for never making them earlier

EIGHTY-SIX — Megan Thee Stallion: In Her Words (2024) was infuriating and powerful in all the ways I expected it to be. “It’s time for that part in the movie where I get up off my ass and I do something about it” is a line that’s been bouncing around in my head ever since, and is maybe my 2025 motto?

EIGHTY-SEVEN — You should have seen me freak out at family dinner when Beyoncé posted her Prince and Apollonia/Vanity Halloween costumes

EIGHTY-EIGHT — There’s been a cool way that my community, if you will, has helped and hyped me up through this sometimes-stressful Parkwood adventure, whether that’s my friends in our monthly writing group Zoom—my friend Rógan has been reading each chapter before it goes out to everyone else, and my friend Ellie has been patiently forwarding me any academic articles I ask for from her university library for at least a year—or various friends and family stepping up to (re)watch things for research with me. My sister handled our childhood favourites Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002) and Obsessed (2009), my Helmut Newton-obsessed dad came over to watch Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful (2020)—this will make more sense once Vol. III is out—and my dentist (you read that right) actually let me watch Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé (2019) on the ceiling TV while I got a filling

EIGHTY-NINE — In November, we had a costume party and went full Jaws (1975)—me as Captain Quint, Scott as Chief Brody, and Roy as Bruce the shark. My fake mutton chops were itchy as hell    

NINETY — I loved Icons of Cinema: Baz Luhrmann (2024) by Emily Maskell, the sort of book that feels like it was written just for me, and I can’t wait to get an interview with Emily to you guys ASAP  

NINETY-ONE — I’d been begging my sister to watch Frozen (2013) for a decade, but she doesn’t really listen to anything I say, so I went ahead and bought us two tickets to see it with a live orchestra downtown. Basically the whole room was little girls who’d clearly seen it many times previously (as evidenced by their attire), and yet they squealed at every joke like it was the first time they’d heard it, and fully wailed during those few moments where you’re not 100% sure everything’s going to be okay for Anna and Elsa. My sister liked the movie, but she agreed that it was our tiny fellow moviegoers who made the night what it was

NINETY-TWO — The lovely Siima Itabaaza had me on her podcast, Kutimba with Siima, to go deep on Beyoncé’s self-titled era and especially her 2013 album’s cover. The episode doubles as a sort of preview of Vol. III

NINETY-THREE — I loved this brown butter limone rigatoni, though I don’t think it would hurt at all to use more sage leaves… maybe even twice as many sage leaves. Just measure with your heart on the sage, is what I’m saying

NINETY-FOUR — A Nonsense Christmas with Sabrina Carpenter (2024) confirmed for me that we should only be letting immensely charming pop stars churn out such specials!

NINETY-FIVE — Aside from Frozen, The Count of Monte-Cristo (2024) was easily the most fun I had at the movies all year—and in a way that I badly needed, since December was another challenging month (a story for another time). A true swashbuckler, and I need them to add English subtitles to the VOD version stat so that I can force everyone in my life to watch it   

NINETY-SIX — Here are some miscellaneous pieces from 2024 that I got something out of: “Read me a story: why reading out loud is a joy for adults as well as kids” (Sarah Manavis, The Guardian); “Is Your Instagram Husband Good Enough for the Internet?” (Steffi Cao, Glamour); “Inside ‘The Machine’” (Anne Helen Petersen, Culture Study); “Stanley cups are not a feminist issue” (Sarah Manavis, The New Statesman); “Against trendbait” (Rebecca Jennings, Vox); “The Fab Five and Hair That Does the Talking” (Hanif Abdurraqib, The New Yorker); “The ‘Disney adult’ industrial complex" (Amelia Tate, The New Statesman); “Ten Years Out of Academia” (Anne Helen Petersen, Culture Study); “Day 8 of #1000wordsofsummer 2024” (Jami Attenberg, Craft Talk); “Parents Should Ignore Their Children More Often” (Darby Saxbe, The New York Times); “When Lee Miller Took a Bath in Hitler’s Tub” (Chris Wiley, The New Yorker); “A Pediatrician’s Two Weeks Inside a Hospital in Gaza” (Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker); “Iris Apfel Wore Fame Well” (Rachel Syme, The New Yorker); “Quincy Jones Had Something for Everyone” (Hanif Abdurraqib, The New Yorker)

NINETY-SEVEN — Here’s a final toast for the road—like an actual toast—that’s especially useful for if you ever find yourself with way too much fresh thyme (as happens to me often for whatever reason). Your base is ricotta or cottage cheese, then you pour over a bit of honey and thyme that you’ve just microwaved together in a bowl (a pinch of garlic is also good mixed into here but completely optional), and then you do a little lemon zest on top of that (and maybe more thyme if you still have more to get rid of)

NINETY-EIGHT — I again have to save my thoughts for Vol. IV, but I thought the Beyoncé Bowl was pretty special, and I haven’t been surprised to see a lot of people 180’ing on Cowboy Carter in the weeks since. It was also cool to see so many remarking upon the camerawork and general direction of the performance. My impact? Probably not, but you can expect quite a bit of Vols. III and IV to be about the star’s sometimes rocky relationship with live TV performances

NINETY-NINE — Just under the 2024 wire, I finished my Prince deep dive, so I’ll probably soon read the unfinished autobiography of his that I have sitting on my shelf. People look at me funny when I say this, but he and Taylor Swift made for more complementary deep dives than you might guess—from their artists’ rights stances, to their related label disputes, to their “vaults,” to their use of pseudonyms, etc. In general, I think every fanbase could probably stand to know a little more about Prince   

ONE HUNDRED — This will be old news for many, but you’ve gotta see “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” at the 2004 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony if you haven’t already

Mononym Mythology is a newsletter by me, Sydney Urbanek, where I write about various intersections of popular music and moving images.

If you got anything out of my work in 2024, feel free to send me a little something for a cappuccino or dirty martini or even research material (a great deal of which is needed to keep this engine running).

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