In June, my mom’s old pal, Theresa, referred to my mom as a life raft. I just loved that—the truth of my mom being a life raft (to so many), the term life raft itself as a word guy, and the idea of the life raft as a terrified-of-open-waters guy.

I then wrote about the art and artists that had felt like life rafts for me over the first six months of the year. Life rafts, I wrote then, were the things that helped me float…that made it easier—pardon the heavy-handed metaphor—to navigate the stormy seas…that offered buoyancy, bringing me steadily closer towards land/clarity. (I can’t stress enough that I’m terrified of open waters, the non-metaphorical kind.). A life raft still feels like all those things. It props you up, keeps you dry, and feels like a companion towards True North.

In June, I included 10 life rafts on my list. Now, in December, I’m including 15. Because there were 15. And because I make the rules around here! I’d love to hear what’s been a life raft for you. Here we go, baby.

15. Maggie Rogers. If you transported 24-year-old Joni Mitchell to 2018, right to the SNL stage, to perform a soulful song about heartbreak while dancing around, barefoot, like a delightful spazz—like how we all dance around in our rooms by ourselves—it wouldn’t quite be Maggie Rogers. But it’d be pretty close. I can’t remember being so moved by an SNL musical performance. Such gusto. And presence.

In September 2017, I came across the famous video of her in a music production class at NYU with guest professor, Pharrell, gushing over her song, “Alaska.” It felt serendipitous then—and galvanizing—to find this epic school video right when I was starting school again. A school video that does and doesn’t feel like a school video. A school video that I still revisit sometimes before getting workshopped to put my head in a more open, receptive Maggie/Pharrell frame of mind.

14. The trailer for Love, Gilda. Not the actual movie, which felt dull and flat for how incandescent Gilda Radner was (and it used up all the best parts of the trailer within the first 15 minutes). But the trailer itself has everything I need in a trailer: funny and kind people, famous funny and kind people, wise and thoughtful writing—read aloud, famous funny and kind people reading wise and thoughtful writing aloud, uplifting music, old grainy footage, black-and-white shots of John Belushi with bad haircuts, really poignant voiceovers, a wonderful sentiment about feeling like I can do anything if people are laughing.

13. William Goldman. For years, I only vaguely knew of William Goldman. I knew he was widely considered to be the screenwriting G.O.A.T (All The President’s Men, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride). And I knew he’d inspired The William Goldman Movie Test: is this movie worth two hours of my time? But that was about all I knew.

A few weeks ago, I was in the library at school when I found out he died—and immediately went to check out Which Lie Did I Tell?. It’s just the most excitable and direct film writing. He’s both screenwriter and critic, novelist and essayist, smug curmudgeon and thoughtful empath. He reads like a less literary Pauline Kael…and like the most eloquent guy at the bar who’s endearingly stubborn, deceptively romantic, and three drinks deep.

There is one crucial rule that must be followed in all creative meetings. Never speak first. At least at the start, your job is to shut up.

 

12. Roma. Is the first half a little slow? For sure. Is there more violence and nudity than I’d prefer? Mhmmm. Did the second half wreck me? Yup. Is the whole thing a revelation, though, a plodding, tender, understated revelation—where the camera’s unhurried and just lingers and observes all the beautiful mundane, attentively and distantly? Yup. Do you leave the movie wanting to listen and observe better—to people and things? Absolutely. I left A Star Is Born wanting to act. I left Vice wanting to write and edit (no one does non-linear arcs and wonderfully jarring cuts and wacky, associative transitions like Adam McKay. He’s a cheeky, surrealist marvel.) And I left Roma wanting to direct. And give more hugs and say more THANK YOUs.)

 

11. Mumford & Sons. I really like their new album  (“October Skies” is gorgeous. And there are 10 seconds on “42”—from :22 to :32— that are as cathartic as any 10 seconds of any song for me.).

I REALLY like their videos with National Geographic:

But what I LOVE is this pseudo short documentary, Newport Tapes, of them at the Newport Folk Festival this year—with its absurd tracking shots, the cover of “The Weight” with Maggie Rogers and Brandi Carlile and Mavis Staples (!!), the been-around-the-block, sturdy confidence that manages to express what I’ve been struggling to express the last few years:

When I was younger, I would look at people and assume that growing more secure would lead to being more kind of conventional and conservative in your thought. But actually, from a secure place, I felt like you can take more risks.

(In 2012, when Emmett Malloy directed Mumford’s first documentary, Big Easy Express, I watched it—I shit you not— like once a month for probably 15 months. Nothing inspired me more to make videos back then. I was intoxicated with it all— the hand-held cameras, the long takes, the choppy editing and raw sound, the live music that veered into montage. Newport Tapes isn’t the loud spectacle of Big Easy Express. It’s quieter and calmer. There’s a cool maturity and patience to it. The transitions are smoother and more polished. There are more soft grays and blues than yellows and reds this go-round. Their personal reflection’s deeper. It takes place in what looks like a lighthouse (?!), which feels like the perfect metaphor.)

10. Queer Eye. The most joyful and compassionate show of 2018. I’ve never experienced a higher Happy Tears to Total Episode ratio (5:16 over the 2 new seasons on Netflix). Queer Eye really is the best possible outcome for reality TV: so watchable, empowering, communal, and honest. Jonathan should have his own late-night talk show. Karamo should be the universal Siri for life-coaching.

 

9. Maya Rudolph. She’s charmingly morose on her new show, Forever, with Fred Armisen. She’s a loud hoot in her pinch-hit appearances on The Good Place. She’s the, uh, Hormone Monstress on Big Mouth. But, more than anything, she’s my favorite talk-show guest. She never doesn’t crack me up. She seems like a great hang. No one’s funnier or more natural with conversational self-deprecation. When most actors would name-drop or tell some pre-planned story, she just… she’s just a stupidly good improviser:

 

8. Love Is A Mixtape by Rob Sheffield. Last month, Harry Styles interviewed Timothée Chalamet in Vice Magazine about their art and modern manhood. Towards the end of the interview, our good pal, Harry, asks Timmy, If you were told you were only allowed to listen to one song, watch one movie, and read one book for the rest of your life, what would you choose? I enjoy Timmy C (and his puppy-dog enthusiasm), but I was hoping he’d ask Harry the same question in return—because it’s Harry Styles, whom I worship and about whom I recently wrote 4,500 words for class about how he’s become a lighthouse (and a mirror) for weird, sensitive artist dudes. Timmy did ask the same question back. Harry’s response:

My song would be Madame George by Van Morrison. My movie would be Goodfellas. My book would be…I have two. It would either be Haruki Murakami Norwegian Wood or Rob Sheffield’s Love Is A Mixtape. Which I would suggest you read if you haven’t already. It’s really beautiful.

I followed Harry’s lead—like I do with most things: bright clothing, life mantras (“Treat People With Kindness”), reading recommendations. And Love Is A Mixtape, unsurprisingly, is really beautiful. And heartbreaking. And funny. And has really savvy pop-culture writing blended into memoir. Rob Sheffield, music critic at Rolling Stone, then just 23 years old, meets woman, falls for woman, gets married very soon thereafter, then becomes a widower all within a few years. And he uses music—and specific mix tapes he’s made over the years—to process it all. It’s a tonal tightrope walk between sad and serious and goofy and joyful. And he never falls off the high wire.

Every time I have a crush on woman, I have the same fantasy: I imagine the two of us as a synth pop duo. No matter who she is, or how we meet, the synth-pop duo fantasy has to work, or the crush fizzles out. It’s fun thinking up the names for these groups. These days I live a few blocks away from a store called Metropolitan Floors, which is the greatest synth-pop duo name ever, I think. I want to be in a band called Metropolitan Floors. (Never “the”—real synth-pop duos never have a “the” in their names.) According to the awning, “We’re More Than Just Floors!” I actually stopped in Metropolitan Floors once to look around, before the guy started asking me what kind of carpet I wanted and whether I planned to lay it myself. I was unable to bluff, since “I want to build some 1982 synthesizers and learn to play them and attract a girl to be my lead singer so we can tour the world and make people dance and pretend to be German”—didn’t seem plausible. I just took his business card and promised to call the next day.

7. Lady Gaga:  The first half of A Star Is Born moved me injected itself right into my bloodstream unlike any first half of any movie has this decade. I was, and am, gaga for her and Mr. Jackson Maine and all the live music and her bar fight and their instant chemistry and the parking lot with the frozen peas and his line from the limo and the overwhelming Old School Hollywood Romance And Melodrama of it all and the emergence of Bradley Cooper as the next Clint Eastwood as Best Living Writer/Actor/Director Hybrid (I found the second half too sad and too formulaic and too blandly tounge-in-cheek towards current pop music.). And since I saw the movie in October, what I’ve been equally gaga about is HER, Lady G: all the press she’s done, how composed and kind and resilient she is, how much integrity she has for her art. This interview with Colbert…I mean…

My favorite clip—the clip that most resonated among a lot of clips that resonated—is from 14:09—14:44: if I didn’t have an ability to share my songs, I don’t know who I would be. It’s part of who I am. It’s part of what made me happy my whole life. If I wasn’t sitting here with you right now, I’d still be at a bar downtown, banging on a piano somewhere with my high-heel on the keys, singing my brains off. 

Here’s to Gaga. Here’s to always banging on a piano somewhere.

6. John Mulaney. John Mulaney’s not unlike the LeBron of stand-up comedy: a once-in-a-generation talent who’s also a crazy-hard worker and yet has—somehow, if possible—become a tad underrated. Like, it’s become almost boring and passé to praise LeBron or John Mulaney. It’s boring to root for the heavyweights. But I’m more than happy being boring. I listen to John Mulaney’s stand-up when I just want to play the hits (and be blown away by the hits).  Comedically, he’s Jerry Seinfeld in that he’s a mostly PG, observational comic—but infinitely smarter, more acutely observant, more hilariously physical and animated, and more relatably anxious.

5. George Saunders’ essay, “Process And Spirit.” Sadly, this only exists in print in The Writer’s Chronicle, which I picked up at school in September and have kept in my backpack ever since for weekly re-readings on the T. I’m still, three months later, struggling to articulate why this essay has been quite so meaningful and life-affirming for me—as a person and as a writer. Maybe it’s because it has Saunders’ classic empathetic wisdom. Maybe it’s because it explains, more infectiously than anything I’ve ever read, why Patience and Attention are close friends with Artistic Longevity far more so than Being Clever.

At this point in my life, I’m getting a little tired of myself. I’m fifty-nine years old. I know all my stuff. I know the way my mind behaves on anxiety, on bliss, on ambition. I know that I am going to regularly/reliably disappoint myself in the level of attention I am able to manifest in a real-world situation. That person—George, collection of habits— is not so interesting to me. But in writing mode, I’m better: funnier, wittier, kinder; more honest, reliably generous, curious and watchful. This is because, during the many months (or years) during which “that guy” works on a given story, all of the people sub-contained in “him” are allowed to come out and play, so to speak—to weigh in on the story, adjusting it this way and that, over time. The wildly lyrical person, the minimalist; the person who believes in his talent too much, the person who constantly doubts it; the person who loves America, the person who can’t stand it; the cynic, the optimist; the humorist, the tragedian; the person who tolerates an extraneous phrase in exchange for a slight improvement in the image, the person who doesn’t. What a blessing to able to dwell in a story for many months or years and find, when finished, evidence of a better me there on the page, which implies that this better must be in there somewhere, all the time, if it so reliably available for this daily coaxing-out.

Understood this way, writing (this practice of trying to get in the habit of seeing oneself on a continuum with every other person) is not some niche thing, some quaint-but-outdated indulgence. It is the essential thing that human beings do: we story-tell in order to locate ourselves in the universe, to concoct a viable stance for ourselves here amidst the chaos, and forge a less-insane connection with other beings. We story-tell, in a sense, to “untell” a delusional tale we are all born telling: the tale our own permanence, centrality, and separateness.

4. Brandi Carlile. If I made a Venn diagram, where the three overlapping circles were Favorite Musical Artists, Artists Whose Sad Songs Somehow Lift Me, and Artists Who Seem Like Radically Empathetic People, Brandi Carlile would be smack dab in the middle of the three circles (along with Bon Iver, Marcus Mumford, Bruce, and Stevie Nicks. And that’s about it.)

“The Joke” is my third most-played song of 2018 (“This Land Is Your Land” by Phospherescent is #2. “Madame George” by Van Morrison is #1.). It’s also my favorite music video of 2018. And it has my favorite lyric of 2018: I see your eyes behind your hair/and you’re looking tired, but you don’t look scared.

 

3. SNL Steve. Steve Carell’s my all-time favorite performer and professional laugh-maker. This is not a new opinion for me. But what is new is my appreciation for SNL Steve. After he hosted SNL in November, I went back and watched his 2005 and 2008 hosting gigs. Every sketch. About 5-10 times each. I hadn’t seen anything from 2005 and only kind of remembered a few gags from 2008. It felt weirdly nostalgic for something I hadn’t even witnessed the first time around. Steve is and has been Comedic True North for me—as a fellow self-conscious goofball who finds a home with communal humor. He’s the quintessential good teammate—flexible, un-self-serious, committed to the bit all the way to his nerve endings, fun. No one makes me laugh harder. And no one’s inspired me more for my classes at ImprovBoston than the fella playing Bob Bummer:

(This past semester, I took a memoir class. Memoir isn’t really my speed. I don’t like being that exposed. So, throughout the semester, I tended to hide behind other people I admire as much as I could, while still writing in the first-person and still trying to give enough depth to the “I” character. Whenever I got workshopped, the main critique I would get was we want more of Will (and less of whatever I was hiding behind). Which seemed mostly valid. My last essay of the semester was an essay about The Office and where my head was when I started watching it every night in high school with my mom—during a particularly hairy stretch when I was 17. But really, it was less a piece about The Office and more of an attempt to flesh out what drew me to Michael Scott (and Steve Carell’s performance) at that age—and what continues to draw me to Michael Scott and Steve Carell. I’m still grappling with that question. But what I do know is that he’s a forever life raft.)

2. “Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye, who feels like the spiritual and poetic heir to Mary Oliver:

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride

thinking the bus will never stop,

the passengers eating maize and chicken

will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness

you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho

lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,

how he too was someone

who journeyed through the night with plans

and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,

only kindness that raises its head

from the crowd of the world to say

It is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you everywhere

like a shadow or a friend.

1. George Saunders’ 2013 commencement speech, “Failures of Kindness”:

Two years ago, I wrote that “Failures of Kindness” was the number 1 Thing That Especially Spoke To Me in 2016. This year, I had mixed feelings posting about it again—even though it still did speak to me. Deeply. But celebrating the same essay again, only two years later, in another year-end favorites list, felt a little like posting a list of my favorite movies from 2018—and continuing to rave about Good Will Hunting 21 years later. But, this feels different. (And I also make the rules here! So there!). Because George Saunders’ nonfiction— often his writing about writing— always reminds me of something incomparably important: that we make art to live better; we don’t live to make art. He reminds me that, no matter how seriously we take our craft, we can always “err in the direction of kindness.”