things i liked this year that were good and nice
coming in just under the wire
Sorry I didn’t get this out sooner; I’m clearly very bad at managing my time. A few things to remember, as always: I don’t believe in “best of” lists even though I contribute to them and perpetuate the best of list cycle in spaces outside of here. I don’t love recapping the year—who cares!—but I overshare here anyway so why not, think of these more as letters of recommendation. Do not tell me your new year’s resolutions because scientifically you’ll likely blow them by January 19th and I don’t want to feel bad that you told so many people—myself included—and also I just don’t care.
okay! thanks sorry love you happy new year bye!!!!!!
Shopping secondhand
Okay, so this isn’t exactly exclusive to this year—about 95% of my wardrobe is consignment, thrifted, or vintage, because: (A) My tastes have always exceeded my means (B) I like unique pieces! I enjoy experimenting with and evolving my own tastes and sense of style! I have never wanted to dress like everyone else! I like to be on trend sometimes but NEVER trendy (there’s a difference!) (C) I just love old things and miss the GLAMOUR (D) Maybe most strongly: Almost all our clothes today look like shit and are made like shit at nearly every price point—if anyone wants to talk shit about the low-tier brands that shifted into mid-tier luxury pricepoints during the pandemic and are now selling 95% polyester/5% acrylic dresses for $425, please, get at me—so the quality of older things is better (E) I do not need to do drugs to get high I just need to score an insanely good deal while out shopping. (F) FUCK overconsumption FUCK the environmental impact of buying things new!!!! Some greatest hits of the year:
This double-face wool and cashmere mini skirt from Theory
The other 5% of my wardrobe that are new purchases boil down to basics like t-shirts or investment pieces that are “you’ll wear this for the rest of your life if you take care of it right” classics I’ve bought only after months of research and decision paralysis. I spent maybe years looking for the perfect simple, classic, minimalist black wool (NOT polyester, NOT acrylic) mini that also wasn’t like $500 and finally landed on this one from Theory. It’s extremely flattering, extremely warm, almost marked way down on sale—so truly a WORTH IT! purchase—and after spending most of last winter sick at home, very much in heavy rotation in my going out wardrobe these days. And look at this red color! How divine!! Someone buy it so I don’t!!! (Honestly…I wish I could create a side gig as a personal shopper because I love shopping so much but I do not have the money or closet space or even just general need for all the clothes I wish I could buy. Who will let me shop for them!!!!! I’m very good at it!!!!)
Walking around New York at night listening to シティ・コネクション (City Connection) by Terumasa Hino pretending I’m a glamour girl in a Halston dress and tall strappy platforms going out dancing in midtown Manhattan in 1979
New York is always changing, it’s true, but it makes me sad that the small glimpses of what it used to be—spaces in the city that seem to, if not remain unchanged, at least lag a few decades behind the others in their Disneyfication glow-up—are growing smaller and smaller. But for whatever reason, the New York of the past seems so much closer and easier to touch on nights when it’s either very hot or very cold. Something about stepping out on a steamy summer evening—or, conversely, in the winter, when it’s almost too cold to bear—makes it feel like if I just tilt my head a little, I could be in a time machine verison of New York.
Maybe it’s that the bad weather makes the city streets a little more empty, maybe it’s just a delusion, maybe it’s simply that very hot or very cold nights are the nights when I need to listen to a going out playlist to get myself to go out, and that going out playlist is almost always either my bowery apartment, 1981 playlist or Jason Diamond’s late night in the city, 1980something. Either way, it was through Diamond’s playlist that I first became familiar with Japanese jazz trumpeter Terumasa Hino, and once I started playing his funk-infused albums from the late-70s and early-80s, I was hooked. This track, in particular, is an all-timer. Put it on and just TRY not to feel like the main character, I dare you!
Listening to “Where Are You?” by Mildred Bailey while walking around New York in a big wool coat with a bitchy little brooch and a big hat and scarf pretending you’re in Hannah and Her Sisters.
The song isn’t actually in Hannah and Her Sisters—it’s put to transcendent use in Love Streams—but the vibe is the same. Look, I don’t know. Sometimes it’s really nice to listen to depression era swing and jazz and feel like a sophisticated New Yorker in a W**dy All*n film and wish that there was still a market for talky, intellectual, “small” New York movies so someone who isn’t a piece of shit could make these types of movies and we could all snap to it and be like “oh, yeah, that guy only really had like three, maybe four, good movies in his entire run, the rest is just slop which is what happens when you try to make a movie every single year” anyway I digress the song is great.
This random TikTok from the Jeni’s Ice Cream account that I quote at least once a week
Tina Fey’s all-timer “I Don’t Think So Honey” on Las Culturistas
|LIVES were changed. Dare I say it…this may be the most important cultural moment of the year.
Wrote about this last time around, but one of my favorite songs from one of my favorite albums of the year.
Halfsies - Lizzie No
I can’t write anything eloquent about it but it’s extremely my shit—a genuine, introspective blend of americana and indie rock that just feels so full of life. An absolute gem.
Mahashmashana - Father John Misty
Josh Tillman, you’ve still got it…Feels like maybe his best record in years? Oddly like a greatest hits comp but they’re all new tracks? It’s as if he took all the strongest parts of his past few albums and put them on the same album and god is it great.
“3 Sister” - Waxahatchee
I wasn’t as much of a fan of Tigers Blood as I am of Saint Cloud, I have to admit. Maybe it’s that Saint Cloud came out right at the peak moment of the pandemic and felt sort of like a solace. Maybe it’s that it feels a bit like it’s treading the same ground. It’s good, of course, but indistinguishable in a way that many of the songs seem to bleed together. But it’s opener, “3 Sisters,” is a standout: a slow build, not quite a bait and switch but a song that takes its time to unfold, elegiac and meditative and sparse—just a voice and harmonies, a little piano and atmosphere—before the guitar and drums finally kick in in full force a full two minutes in, it feels like an explosion even though it’s still quiet. Just a truly great song that reminds you how lucky we are to have a songwriter like Waxahatchee right now.
Taking photos on a disposable 35mm camera
I’ve read so many articles and have watched so many TikToks about how we need to print our photos because we’re playing a dangerous game keeping so much of our lives and memories on digital storage that could one day become inaccessible or also just randomly delete things. And for so long, I kept thinking, “yeah, yeah, I’ll do that. I’ll scroll way back through the 6,000+ images and videos on my camera roll and choose ones that I should print in bulk,” but you never really actually do that, do you? You think about it, you come close to doing it, but let’s be so fucking for real: It is a chore. Late this year, I realized if I wanted to have actual tangible memories of moments again, I needed to go back to shooting analog. There’s something about shooting on a disposable camera (I’m in the process of bidding for many different cheap old point-and-shoots on ebay so I won’t be so bad for the environment soon) that is both kitschy and silly but also reminds me that I actually used to love photography before it became so easy to do on an iPhone that I stopped being interested in it. It’s fun, actually, to go for a walk and be super tuned in again to what’s around me, to see beauty and art in the most mundane things, and then to take a chance snapping the lens and not knowing if what you see in your brain will translate to actual results until later when you get the photos back. Also everyone looks hotter on 35mm with no filter or facetune needed!!! Maybe the human brain isn’t supposed to process photos of its own face in 4K UHD!!!!
Learning how to knit
I took up knitting last winter when I was sick with post-flu POTS and lowkey going insane because I thought it would help my anxiety and it did! You cannot check your apple watch to see what your current heart rate is every 30 seconds if your hands are holding knitting needles! I made two hats (one pretty okay and kind of cute that I kept for myself, one absolutely humiliating bad that I gave my mom for her birthday and felt bad about because it really is so fucking ugly but I was like planning on giving her a hat so I didn’t have any backup gift) and then I stopped because I felt better and also because…. who am I if not someone who picks up a new hyperfixation for a month or two and then abandons it simply because it’s out of sight and out of mind??? It was fun while it lasted though. Good if you want a hobby!
The eclipse
Remember that lol? Kind of fun to feel so small and insignificant and in awe of the universe but also scared of it at the same time. I recommend.
Taking baths
I know baths have had a renaissance in the past few years—an aesthetic bragging point on social media, a trend looped in with the rise of wellness culture, etc, whatever—but for so long I could not bring myself to join in. If I think about it too much, I start to get into how gross baths are—like why are we just sitting in our own filth????But recently, on a whim after a particularly tough workout, I thought “ooh, a very hot epsom salt bath would be so nice,” and I got hooked. Baths are nice, actually! Eating an orange in a scalding hot bath? Divine! Drinking a seltzer and watching a movie on your laptop which sits perched on your toilet seat lid that you had to lysol wipe before putting it there and then wipe the computer after just for good measure? Wonderful. (I watched Conclave in the bath and it’s a perfect bath movie, and started to watch Anora but got halfway through before I realized there were actually supposed to be subtitles for the Russian parts and my torrent didn’t have them, but it’d be a good bath movie too if you have the right version.) Maybe baths aren’t gross after all. Maybe it’s just me taking my love of making soup to the next level, only this time I’m an ingredient.
Janet Planet
I will not rest until you all see it and discuss it with me. It’s on HBO! What is your excuse! My most favorite movie of the year, I think. I fell in love with it from the very first lines—when 12 year old Lacey, anxious and homesick and shy but possessing a flair for quiet dramatics, sneaks away from her camp bunk in the middle of the night to call her mother and say, plainly, “I said I’m gonna kill myself if you don’t come get me”—and it just got better from there. I loved this movie. I LOVED this movie.
Juror #2
Late addition to favorite films of the year since I just watched it last night on HBO. Clint Eastwood, I am sorry that I was not familiar with your game! Went into this thinking it would be more of an obligatory watch and was locked in almost immediately. It’s maybe not my favorite film or the best one I’ve seen this year, but it’s possibly the most fascinating one. It’s gripping on the surface level for normies—a classic “will they or won’t they” courtroom drama that used to be a dime a dozen in the 90s—but even more compelling and meaty on the deeper emotional and philosophical level. Eastwood dives into themes of morality and justice vs. truth—and if truth and justice are even synonymous—with so much nuance and ambiguity; the film never stakes out its moral high ground or beats you over the head with what it thinks is right and wrong. To let the audience chew on that throughout, and even after the end? How satisfying. It shouldn’t be a rarity today, but it is—felt like eating a grown up meal while surrounded by mostly kids menu slop.
Julianne Moore’s bold lip in The Room Next Door
It’s embarrassing for me to say my first Almodovar film was his first in English—his work is a blindspot I’m hoping to get into in the new year—so I can’t totally say The Room Next Door was GREAT, but, like, I enjoyed it! It had the sort of “even the more mid work from this great artist are better than most mid director’s best efforts” vibe to it. I recommend seeing it with a mostly elderly crowd at Film at Lincoln Center just to experience their reaction to the cameo by Film at Lincoln Center. Anyway, Julianne Moore wears an amazing bold red lip throughout the movie and if you think that didn’t lead me on a few day long journey of “I have similar coloring maybe this would look good on me okay so what brand is it what color is it” Sephora hunting you’re out of your mind. (And if anyone else is wondering: The consensus I got from Reddit is that it’s a UK brand not sold here, sadly.)
The absolute cuntiness of Conclave
For the girls who miss OG RHONY
Some more first watches from this year that really stuck with me:
Ball of Fire (1941), Days of Heaven (1978), Love Streams (1984), Cookie (1989), The Age of Innocence (1993), Sense and Sensibility (1995), I’ll Take You There (1999), Hamlet (2000), Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (2004), Broken English (2007), A Master Builder (2013), Problemista (2023), His Three Daughters (2024), Megalopolis (2024), My Old Ass (2024), Between the Temples (2024), Thelma (2024), The Great Lillian Hall (2024), Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point (2024)
My book :)
Wish I could go back to 2004 and shake little 13 year old me and be like “girl 20 years from now you write a whole ass book and it isn’t a total flop and you’re making a movie from it and you’re writing a second book even though you said after the first one you never wanted to write another book again. Isn’t that crazy!?” I’m grateful!!!!!
Okay! That’s it! I’m surely missing things because this is last minute and scatter brained and my brain is only half functioning but who cares!!! That just means there’s room for more recs in 2025.
Stay safe tonight don’t drink and drive don’t smooch anyone you don’t want to don’t text your ex and drink some water before you go to bed xoxo
if you liked this and maybe want to read more, all archived posts live here.
my dms / replies / emails / phone lines* are always open. say hi! (*do not call me)
bed crumbs is a reader supported publication, so subscribe now and tell ur friends!
i wrote a book about elaine may that just came out and if u buy it i’ll give u a little forehead kiss :’)
okay that's it that's the end thanks sorry love u bye
I feel I need an entire "in defense of conclave as a good bath movie" piece.
PS: I, too, discovered the joy of thrifted clothes last year. Vintage pearl snap wrangler shirts from the 70s? Chef's kiss (Quirky western chic has become my new, weird aesthetic). I think I watched too much Yellowstone. Oooops. Happy New Year, Carrie! Happy writing in 2025!
I love this newsletter sm!! can't wait to keep reading in 2025 :)