things i liked this year that were good and nice

i'm likely forgetting so so so much

It is list season in media world. Bed Crumbs is not technically “media,” I don’t link ranking things, and I’ve written more about a lot of things I consumed this year in depth already, which I’ll link to throughout. But I have to do something end of the year related! Below, a scattered remainder of things that made this year mostly good :) I will be back in 2024 after having a little rest to think about how many more long, melancholic Miss Serious essays, “cultural” “criticism” (stupid compilation lists), and unhinged musings I can make here.

Okay! Thanks for reading this chaos and subscribing. Love you!!!

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The greatest installment of Sylvanian Drama to date:

@sylvaniandrama @sylvaniandrama ♬ Fortunate Son - Creedence Clearwater Revival

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The Gilded Age
Let’s get one thing clear: This is not a good television show. Every week feels like getting a lobotomy, though I say that in the most complimentary way possible. I don’t really know what’s going on, and I don’t really care! Will Louisa “face card immediately gives away that you’re a Gummer nepo baby in spite of your stage name’ Jacobson actually marry the widowed hot dad who I think is her cousin???? What’s the deal with Peggy and her dad again? Will Cynthia Nixon eventually use her star power to mold her character in her own real-life image like she did Miranda in the equally terrible And Just Like That—like, will we eventually see a 180 change and meek little Ada Brooks becomes a radical suffragette? Who will win in the mother off between Christine Baranski and Carrie Coon? Which member of whose staff is the twink with the alarm clock again? How many times will I think “I would look so good in that little outfit! I would have been such a great girly in the Gilded Age era!” before reminding myself “everyone probably smelled so bad then though”? Will the railway workers strike? Will the Metropolitan Opera succeed???? Every episode I ask the same questions of “who” and “what” over and over again and delight in the most insane pieces of dialogue like this

And for that I am thankful. 

The Golden Bachelor
I said it would never happen. For 20 whole years, I stood my ground and refused to become a Bachelor Nation girly. Dating competition shows are not for me; reality television outside a small subsect of the Bravo Universe is just not my vibe. (And even at that—it took me until like 2021 to start watching Below Deck.) And, really, not to be “I’m not like other girls!” but I once shared working space with a very basic-coded “women’s magazine” where a large percentage of the staff decorated their workspaces with wine bottles and spent like an hour every week huddled around gossiping about the latest Bachelor happenings and…ya, I’m not like other girls! Some of you will probably read this and be like “wow what a misogynistic judgement for you to have” and I will say “feminism doesn’t mean you can’t call other women stupid for taking stupid things seriously; this is no different from me calling men who play fantasy football dumb.” Anyway! 

It’s so hard for me to know that I finally got got by ABC simply because they made an all-senior citizen cast offshoot. Embarrassing for me personally! This show was not good, I definitely fell off about midway through, and apparently Gerry (pronounced Gairy) is kind of a grifter? But for a few brief and shining moments early on, this show was one of the most deranged, tonally inconsistent hours of television I have ever enjoyed. One minute, it’s a very earnest and touching look at love and ageism and visibility, about hope and optimism: A widowed gentlemen and a handful of women in an age bracket we’re not typically shown as heroes and heroines of the story on television, all spreading a message that it’s never too late, that everyone deserves a second shot at love, and that people who have already led rich lives still have so much more life left in them to live—hopefully with someone else by their side. And then the next it’s this:

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Season 5 Episode 6: The Testi-Roastial
I’ve got to give it to the Sherman-Palladinos: After a mostly-mid season four, they pulled through and launched the final season into “we’re so back” territory. I was wildly, deeply obsessed with the flash forward device they employed throughout the season, both as a clever structural ploy to answer the series-long will-Midge Maisel-make-it-or-not question before the finale but, more importantly, to show what happens after fame by showing the personal fallout that comes from being a wildly famous woman in an era where one absolutely had to choose between her family and her career—a choice so often framed as a necessary sacrifice by men we view as geniuses that is often judged and perceived as monstrous when women do it. Obviously right up my alley, very Miss May Does Not Exist-coded, a deeply nuanced subject that should be depicted and discussed more, pre-order the book, yada yada yada, blah blah blah. 

Most of the episodes were highs for me, but it’s episode 6, which focuses almost entirely not on Midge, but on Susie, and is set mostly at a 1985 Friars Club roast in her honor, that takes the cake for me. It’s here that they show us, point blank, how showbiz myth-making happens; the story of Hollywood by and large gets written by a bunch of drunk dudes in a room gossiping! Brilliant!!!! 

“$20” / “Not Strong Enough” / “Satanist” - boygenius
I don’t know, I wasn’t as enraptured with the full length album (sorry, the record, as they titled it) from Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker as most people were. Kind of hit a “few killer and a lot of filler” spot for me personally. Here is where I could talk a little about how they’re overexposed now or how the whole “we’re best friends who did therapy together also maybe a throuple!” thing is veering on a schticky, manipulative act that feels a bit like it’s deliberately feeding into their rabid fanfic loving parasocial gen z fan base all while they bitch about the invasiveness of said rabid fanfic loving parasocial gen z fan base or how I think perhaps they all need a break to like genuinely rest! But I won’t! Because I do genuinely like them all! This blurb is about the music, which, when it hits, it hits. I like mid-tempo guitar-based indie rock with references for people with brains (when Lucy Dacus sings “Solomon had a point when he wrote Ecclesiastes; if nothing can be known then stupidity is holy” in a verse about nihilism? That’s that good shit I like). So shoot me! 

“You Can Be Mean” – Indigo de Souza
Maturity is finding empathy for someone you know who behaves badly and acknowledging your own complicity in letting them treat you like shit—but not without going in for a kill shot that makes it clear they’re not at all off the hook for their actions. When Indigo de Souza sings “I’d like to think you’ve got a good heart and your dad was just an asshole growing up. But I don’t see you trying that hard to be better than he is”? That’s how you do it! 

“Bug Like an Angel” – Mitski
The thing that makes me so mad about Mitski’s more recent work is that I find it just rehashing the same themes with diminishing returns: Oh, you have another song about depression or the desire to self-destruct? You want to create an allegory for addiction? Do you want it to feel poignant? Should we feature a choir to play up the contrast of community vs individual isolation? Should we show a stumbling drunk in the music video? Should we overextend an image into a metaphor about god and holiness and sin and the binary of good and bad and how no person is irredeemable even if they feel like they’ve hit rock bottom and the very nature of the human condition is to fuck up and fumble and fail over and over again? Haven’t heard that one before! But then it’s like ugh she sets it against such a simple melody that creates the (false!) perception of intimacy by way of minimalism that I fall for it once again!!!  

Walking around New York City playing “Music for a Found Harmonium” by Patrick Street by way of Penguin Cafe Orchestra pretending I’m in a trailer for a coming of age movie made some time between 2004 and 2009 and released on Fox Searchlight or Sony Pictures Classics

Walking around New York City in chilly weather with a little brooch on my coat and a funky hat listening to this playlist and pretending to be Dianne Wiest in Hannah and Her Sisters

“Open Invitation” - Lou Reed
I’m sorry but it’s genuinely so funny that late Lou Reed music is all like “here’s a rock song about doing tai chi, hope u enjoy”

French Tape Vintage Party
Two ways I enjoy listening to this comp and highly recommend: First, when you’re cooking some sort of meal that is actually quite simple but has a step like “deglazing the pan with wine” that makes you feel like “ooh la la look at me I’m a chef I’m in a Nancy Meyers’ movie I am the first person in the world to ever look beautiful and mysterious while cooking I feel like if I had a skinny cigarette hanging out of my mouth right now it would look so chic and not at all gross.” Second is when you’re getting ready to go out and you want to pretend that you’re on your way to some terribly chic party at someone’s home in the mid-to-late-60s—think: this sequence from Two For The Road—where someone will offer you a Quaalude and not, like, on your way to happy hour at Parm.

More of me on music here (my spotify wrapped this year) and here (songs of the summer)

Ninotchka (1939)
Greta Garbo sharing radical sentiments in the ladies room after getting drunk on champagne is so me walking around the 2019 C*ndé N*st holiday party after two drinks saying “I think we should unionize”! This movie is so lovely and charming and smart and silly and heart fluttery that it became an instant favorite; I’m furious at myself for keeping it on my watchlist until this year. Why was I waiting for the “right” mood to sit down and watch it for so long!? I love Lubitsch!!! Ugh, someone Don’t Worry Darling me into an old MGM flick, I beg you! I don’t want to be in this version of the timeline anymore!

Double Indemnity (1944)
Another one for the “Carrie why did you wait so long” list, although I will say seeing it on a big screen in 35 mm for the first time was the way to go so maybe the wait was deserved. I’m not really a noir fan but I am a fan of movies about people being so dickmatized (gender neutral) that they do the dumbest shit imaginable, and this is maybe one of the best examples of that! I’m not a psychopath I promise but, ugh, hard to watch people fuck up so badly and not think “I could do this and get away with it because I’m smart” and then catch yourself and say “But obviously I wouldn’t.” Also, great fits on Barbara Stanwyck! Let me dress like a femme fatal! 

Auntie Mame (1958)
Spectacularly deranged, unexpectedly soft, incredibly outfitted. A two and a half hour long epic about…family!? The life of one eccentric aunt in the early twentieth century?! Amazing! True “they just don’t make ‘em like this anymore!!” and “I can’t believe they let them make em like this!?” picture if I ever saw one. I have not stopped thinking about it since. For someone who has known almost all her life that it is her destiny to one day become the glamorous, eccentric, worldly, mysterious, aloof—but undeniably warm!!!—relative in a big city…Rosalind Russell in this movie is the absolute blueprint. I don’t want my sisters to have kids because—as I have said many times—I think it’s morally and ethically irresponsible at this point in the climate crisis and increasing global instability to introduce a new life to what will only grow more horrific and catastrophic in our and their lifetimes, but I do selfishly want a young child to mold in my Cool Aunt image. Idk, if you have a kid who could use some CULTURE in their lives, I volunteer? Saying this in a very normal and not at all weird way, of course.

Sweet Charity (1969)
Saw at Film Forum with the intermission kept in tact, as is right. Bring back intermissions in movies, I’m begging you!!! Glorious, deranged, beautiful. What more can I say? Fosse was a fucking freak! 

Saint Jack (1979)
I started 2023 with every intention of watching every single film—good, bad, and obscure TV movie garbage—in Peter Bogdanovich’s oeuvre and while I spectacularly did not follow through on that, I did finally watch Saint Jack and loved it so much. Ben Gazzara in breezy camp shirts walking around saying hi to everyone and knowing their names and asking after their wives/kids/work/hobbies/boozing/lives, and loving and looking out for women—even though, yes, okay, he is objectifying and commodifying them—and playing into the US war machine solely for profit before soon becoming disillusioned by and at moral odds with it………that is so hot to me, personally. 

The Player (1992)
RIP Robert Altman you would have loved “but, hey, that’s showbiz, baby” jokes.

The Metropolitan Opera: The Hours (2022)
Saw this when Lincoln Center did a summer series of playing tapings of their operas outside in the plaza at night and it was so nice :)  The opera itself is obviously amazing and—sorry—funny and objectively cunty. I loved it! 

Not a movie but while I’m on this opera note: I finally leveled up and started going to the opera this year, part “I can’t believe I’ve lived here so long and keep thinking I’ll go to the Met but never have because I thought it was expensive (until I found out ways for it to not be!) and part encouragement of my friend and number one opera freak Caitlin Bower and part I love any occasion to dress up. Literally, my first trip—to see a modern staging of Die Zauberflöte—was the result of telling Caitlin I needed a reason to wear a vintage Oscar de la Renta dress I bought a year ago—mostly, to be honest, because it was the kind of dress, for the kind of deal (not exactly affordable but not like “this would financially ruin me”) that I was “I can’t not buy this, that would be criminal”—and still had yet to take out. But sometime within the first ten minutes, I leaned over and said “this is so punk, I’m obsessed.” I did not love Dead Man Walking mostly because I don’t think its ethical dilemma is as compelling as it thinks it is, but that’s a source material issue! The staging was mostly great! Should I go see The Hours on my birthday next year? Should I join the 40 Under 40 club? Tell me!

Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb (2022)
Hear me out: A perfect movie to watch just a teensy tinsy bit zooted because when it ends, you’ll be in the best mindset to leave thinking “I have to read every single book about Lyndon B. Johnson that Bob Caro has ever written and I have to do it right now. I have to become the most educated version of myself possible starting immediately” Hopefully you have friends who will tell you “oh no, baby, do not buy four (4) one-thousand page books all at once right this second! Don’t do that! How are you going to get them home?!” while you’re at the book store, so you will instead settle for just finally reading The Power Broker (1162 pages) instead. 

I loved this movie because I love anything that demystifies the process of writing and exposes it as mostly unromantic: tedious, boring, laborious in a granular way. I hesitate to say hard because I don’t believe that writing itself is hard—and I have a decidedly unsympathetic “maybe you shouldn’t be a writer then” response whenever I see writers complain about how much they hate writing and how hard it is—so much as meeting your own high expectations as a writer is hard. Getting a sentence or paragraph or page out is not hard; getting it just right, to the extent of hyper-fixating on rhythm, or punctuation, or one word choice versus another so that it sings is what’s hard. Writing something that doesn’t make you feel like you’re a mediocre piece of shit is hard. Writing something that honors the subject, and respects the time of the reader—that’s what’s hard. I love that the Bobs really get that! 

But also, while we’re on the demystifying point here, I love that this film was like “We will show that, yes, these guys are two of the most brilliant figures in 20th century publishing, but just as importantly: They are also two absolute weirdos.” RIP Robert Gottlieb!! What’s gonna happen to your plastic purse collection!!!! 

Summertime (1955)
A perfect movie. A perfect movie. Being single is 75% liberating and the best but also 25%  lonely! The duality of being a human! Katharine Hepburn yearning girl blueprint! David Lean location king! Cried so hard I hyperventilated, I’m not even exaggerating. 

Past Lives (2023)
Soft! Quiet! Extremely my “people we used to and can no longer be” shit.

You Hurt My Feelings (2023)
The precisely perfect movie to see at 2 p.m. on a Friday at the Lincoln Square AMC. A woman sat in the seat literally right next to me despite only 10 of us being in the entire theater and when it was over she turned to me and said “I just love that Jeannie Berlin” and I said “Same” and she said “She was so good in that Chuck Grodin movie” and I smiled because I’ve never heard anyone other than his showbiz buddies call him that and then she said “How old is she, like 100?” and one thing I’m not gonna do at the Lincoln Square AMC is age shame Jeannie Berlin, who is absolutely not “like 100,” but also the last thing I’m gonna do at the Lincoln Square AMC is correct my elders so I just smiled politely and walked away! 

Anyway if you want to know what being a writer is like it’s the scene where Julia Louis-Dreyfus flips through her manuscript and mutters “Shit for brains…shit for brains…” to herself over and over again. Not my favorite Holofcener but it still hits the spot.

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (2023)
I don’t believe in god except for when I drink an ice cold Coke Freestyle machine Sprite Zero Shirley Temple at the after school screen time of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret surrounded by tween girls who got to see themselves honestly depicted in a major motion picture for the first time in who knows how long! Girlhood is so dumb and so humiliating and so precious. Just a sublime, pitch perfect gem of a movie. Let James L. Brooks and his stylistic heirs cook again, goddamnit!

Barbie (2023)
Obviously! Big “I can’t believe they let her do this” energy! Coming to HBO Max—sorry, MAX—December 15! Gonna force my whole family to watch it over Christmas and explain all the references so they fully appreciate it and not just like it in a surface level blockbuster way! I’m sure they will all love that and have a very good time and will not tell me “Carrie shut the fuck up” once!

May December (2023)
I don’t think anyone who subscribes doesn’t know this but just in case I need to say it: “Comedy” does not always mean sitcom laugh track a minute jokes. Comedy, as a genre, is not a monolith! Some movies are funny even if you don’t laugh out loud, or even if there’s drama mixed in, or even if the subject matter is lowkey horrific. Sorry that May December used hot dogs in a joke in an elevated way and not in a stupid sophomoric way meant to be loved by anyone who likes to be performatively deep on tumblr like Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy TCM Zoom Special (2023)
Cannot BELIEVE this happened THIS YEAR. Here’s more of me on that.

Reading The Power Broker with every intention of finishing it in a month to become the hottest version of yourself possible and finding yourself yelling “Get his ass, Bob!” but not specifying which Bob you are rooting for at any given moment until it obviously becomes near impossible to cheer for Robert Moses, who is undoubtedly in hell, but then putting it down one day around 500 pages in and forgetting that you didn’t actually finish it and really have to do that

Cyberbullying Eric Adams through every single crisis and mundanity that faces this city alike

GH Bass Mary Jane Weejuns (lest I turn bed crumbs into a fashion blog…which is what it started as in 2010 on tumblr……the lives I’ve lived, the digital footprint I have [shudders]”) which have become my hyperfixation “I want to wear this everywhere” shoe of the moment

Dyan Cannon’s Instagram
“I just want to ask you: Do you know how they trap monkeys in Africa?”

Listening to the Barbra Streisand memoir in audiobook form
At the point in listening (18 hours in but only at What’s Up, Doc?) where I think she can’t say something more unhinged and then she does. A two minute long riff on her favorite flavor of McConnell’s Ice Cream (Brazilian coffee—not “coffee ice cream with chocolate chips—what!? that ruined it for me!”) and how hard it is to find in the middle of a 46 minute long chapter just about Marlon Brando? Exquisite. I hope this book never ends.

The brief stint I had this winter when I would go on my after work walk while listening to Marketplace on NPR because I really thought I needed to finally understand the economy and stocks and the finance world and stop saying “money is a social construct that isn’t real, like, we literally just make up value?? why can’t we print more money” before I gave up, realizing I simply have no clue and never will, and pivoted to earlier walks listening to Morning Edition to just stay aware of literally everything else going on the world which maybe has not been good for my anxiety but I mean a person has to be informed!

Workers around the country partaking in collective action !

Henry Kissinger dying!!!!

Having a job :) 
Condé Nast announced plans to lay off 5 percent of its staff—despite turning a profit for the past three consecutive years for the first time in forever! These layoffs would cut nearly 100 workers from the all-Condé unit that is currently in status quo while we negotiate our first contract with management. It’s blatant union busting, and the company cannot give answers for why they need to make these reductions, or how the company will be restructured in the aftermath. (They’ve been wanting to lay me off since July, when they abruptly cut Pitchfork’s video programming despite views growing 213% in 1H alone and with no plan for what to do without it or how to pivot me back to the other brands I work on! Working in media is so fun this is what I always dreamed of!!!) We’re already woefully understaffed across the board; proceeding with these layoffs is just, tbh, bad business if Condé Nast wants to continue to create award-winning, prestige journalism! 

We at the Condé Nast Union have been demanding answers since layoffs were first proposed on November 1. We’re going to win this fight, but it would be nice if you helped! Tell CEO Roger Lynch that enough is enough—stop hiding information! You can email him with a nice little pre-written template here!!! Pls, I’m a hypochondriac; I’d to keep my health insurance so I can keep going to the doctor all the time!!! And my coworkers need to keep their jobs, too!!! We all want to get our asses up and work through 2024, so let us!!!

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