2024: The Art that Made Me Feel Things
It's April! Time to look at my favorite art from the year that ended four months ago.
I love a good list. Specifically, I love it when people list the things they love. My YouTube history is half video essay and half listicle: “Best indie games of the 2010s,” “Top 10 beautiful scenes in otherwise terrible movies,” “Ranking Every A24 film.” You get the gist. It’s easy to look at a list and see its faults—lists often compare things cross-genre in ways that diminish their uniqueness. In my ranking of fruits, of course, apples will always be beaten by oranges, but the idiom stands. Lists, like rubrics, often run the risk of grading dissimilar pieces of art on the same axis. And just as with rubrics, they reveal the biases of the teacher, the grader—the critic. But at their best, lists also reveal the values, the passions, and the heart of the lister, especially when we reach the upper levels of our lists. As one reviewer whose name I have forgotten argued in a YouTube listicle I can’t find the link to, the media we rank a 7-8 out of 10 doesn’t necessarily reveal much about us, but our 10/10s—if we mete them out sparingly—are windows into who we are. A 9/10 video game is a Very Good Game.TM A 10/10 game is a Very Good Game That Meant Something to You at a Time in Your Life When You Desperately Needed it to Mean Something.
All this to say, I’ve been thinking about the way we talk about art. And I’ve been thinking about lists. As 2024 came to a close, I read list after list of games, films, and books, but I tend to engage with art—I’m avoiding the words “consume” and “content”—sporadically and broadly, and I wanted to assemble something that reflects that. So now that it is April, it’s time I assembled a list of the art that made me feel things in 2024. For all my talk of lists, I won’t be ranking these in any way—these are already my 10/10s—my art that pushed me, moved me, made me reconsider. The art that shaped those 366 days.
Some ground rules: to qualify for this list, I must have interacted with the art in some capacity in 2024. That doesn’t mean I hadn’t ever experienced it before. It indicates nothing of “completion.” A book that I got halfway through could make my list, as could a video game I was playing for the fourth time. Secondly, all media is free game: I’m talking books, television, board games, albums, paintings. Lastly, if I make another list next year, anything on this list is eligible to reappear on that list, assuming 2025 brought some fresh engagement with it.
Without further ado—
1: Culinary Class Wars
The art that most viscerally affected me in 2024 was a South Korean cooking competition show on Netflix. My family are something of cooking competition fanatics, and holed up in an Airbnb in Chicago, we spent our Thanksgiving day watching our first snow of the year and a cooking show in a culinary and cultural context totally unfamiliar to us. Culinary Class Wars is nothing if not a slow burn. We almost gave up on the show before it properly got started—it took a whopping 40 minutes before anyone cooked anything. Until then, the questionably dubbed contestants talked extensively about how intense the show was and explained and re-explained its premise, while the editing occasionally interspersed previews of what was to come. Then the cooking started, and we couldn’t stop watching. The show’s premise is that fifty “white spoon” chefs—veritable culinary kingpins—square off against fifty relative newcomer “black spoons.” If that premise doesn’t sound particularly interesting to you, don’t worry—it barely matters. What actually makes this show tick is the people, including contestants ranging from the quirky “Comic Book Chef,” who exclusively cooks recipes he’s pieced together from the food featured in manga, to straight-laced experts like Chef Choi Hyun-seok.
Perhaps the real stars of the show, and what kept us so engaged, are the two judges, business mogul and restauranteur Chef Paik Jong-won and three-starred Michelin chef Ahn Sung-jae. The two of them ground the show in an enthusiasm for food that feels somehow more genuine than a lot of the American shows I’m used to. Nothing about their responses to the food they try here feels manufactured by studio executives. When Judge Paik talks about flavor and what makes food exciting, it’s clear he loves food itself. He also takes enormous bites at every tasting—we marveled at how often the judges actually finish the food they are tasting, rather than trying a single bite and moving on, as is common in American competitions. It’s refreshing! I later read online that Judge Paik even brought a packed lunch every day and ate it in addition to all the food he was tasting.
Judge Ahn Sung-jae is equally enjoyable to watch—commanding but surprisingly vulnerable, a harsh but fair critic who eliminates contestants for rice that was cooked for a few seconds too long or for putting a pinch too much salt in their dish. He is precise and exacting, but he frequently showcases moments of vulnerability when talking to former students who have come to compete. In a character-defining moment—and a moment that sets the show so clearly apart from American fare—he delays making judgment on the quality of a contestant’s dish because her food and presentation (she is dubbed the “Master of School Arts”) reminds him too thoroughly of the food he ate in school growing up, and he worries this nostalgia will sway him. Instead, he asks Judge Paik for a second opinion. A full episode later, we find that this contestant has passed to the next round.
The show has a few structural flaws, and it occasionally struggles to give each chef an equal time in the spotlight, as careful editing tries to focus on relevant chefs in the earliest episodes without giving too much away of what comes next, but the show succeeds remarkably at showing us people who care deeply about food and cooking, and getting us to care as much as they do.
One of the late-stage challenges in Culinary Class Wars is dubbed “Infinite Tofu Hell.” Eight finalists compete single-elimination to reimagine tofu again and again. Imagine your typical “secret ingredient” challenge, but the secret ingredient is always tofu. The ingenuity on display in this single challenge is enough to make this a personal favorite.
It might seem strange that I’m starting off a list of art that moved me with a reality TV show. But Culinary Class Wars reminded me, a terrible cook, of what I love about art and artists, people who dedicate their lives to something beautiful. And it reminded me just how many ways there are to be an artist. The important part is caring.
2: Live, Volume 1, by mewithoutyou
Mewithoutyou is like no other band. Also, mewithoutyou does not exist. That’s a lyrical reference, but it’s also a fact: the band concluded touring in 2022, and their last album released back in 2018. I was a bit unlucky in that the majority of the time I have spent with mewithoutyou’s music has been post-2022. I have never seen them perform live, and I have never eagerly awaited a new album to release from them. My relationship with their music is one of looking back. But then in 2024, the band announced a whole trilogy of live album releases, beginning with Volume 1. There are no new songs on this album, but the songs that are present certainly sound different. Everything here is arranged with intention, from the urgent opening screams of “Bullet to Binary” to the final earnest insistence of the rabbit protagonist of “Four Fires,” that unto the end, his deceased father’s “faith in love was still devout.” This is a strange and winding tour of mewithoutyou’s strange and winding discography, from the screamiest of post-hardcore emo to the twangiest of folk fables about singing animals. Every bit of the band’s identity is on display here. And what a complex identity it is! This album contains a song about Jewish fundamentalism and an angry encounter with the IDF immediately before a song about circus animals fleeing a crashed train.
Mewithoutyou has always been hard to pin down. Headlined by Aaron Weiss, the band has been claimed by Christians as Christian rock music, but I have trouble squaring that identity with songs like “Allah Allah Allah,” which appears as the penultimate song on this album, or with the band’s curious mixture of Hebrew and Arabic throughout its lyrics. If there was ever an artist I felt comfortable labelling “Abrahamic,” with all the baggage and contradictions that label entails, it would be mewithoutyou. Raised by a Jewish father and Christian mother who both converted to Sufi Islam, Aaron Weiss’s childhood was one of rich (and perhaps confusing) religious tradition. All of that is on full display in his complex, deeply personal lyricism. But it’s not just the stray religious reference that catches you off-guard with this band—it’s also the way the songs careen from subject to subject deftly and dangerously. In crowd-pleaser “Timothy Hay,” Aaron begins by singing about taking care of a domestic rabbit pet who yearns to eat real grass—“please, no more timothy hay!” then shifts to a different kind of discussion of freedom and bondage, as he alludes to the time he was arrested alongside activist Sister Margaret McKenna at a die-in protest on the White House lawn during the Iraq war. The song finally ends with an invocation of the divine with the refrain “What a beautiful God, what a beautiful God, what a beautiful God there must be!” The song is difficult to follow, and it plays fast and loose with transitions between these big overarching ideas, but that’s the beauty of this band.
There are a few other gems to be found in this live album specifically. Between songs, Aaron speaks to the crowd occasionally. At one point, he references the flowers the band was given on stage, and notes that this was his first calla lily, which, as a former florist, he appreciates. Later, he responds to a shouted “I love you!” from the crowd with an “I love you too,” before amending his statement to reflect on how he doesn’t actually know them, before finally asking, even if you’re married to someone, even if you live with them, what do you know of them really? What do any of us know of each other? He then goes back to the microphone and begins singing his bizarre animal fables.
It’s hard for me to parse exactly what it is about mewithoutyou that makes them my favorite band. I never had an emo phase, and I find most other bands in similar genres—hardcore, punk, even metal—a bit difficult to listen to. But for whatever reason, mewithoutyou clicked for me. Aaron’s lyricism has even changed the way I write. I’m not afraid to be as eclectic or bizarre with my allusions as I want, and I’m not afraid to write lines of poetry that mean something to me even if my audience may find them confusing.
3: Chrono Cross: the Radical Dreamers Edition
How do you make a sequel to the best video game of all time? Well, the team at Square in 1999 gave us a pretty complicated answer. For some people, Chrono Cross, the much-anticipated sequel to 1995’s Chrono Trigger, still widely considered one of the greatest RPGs ever made, answers the question by refusing to engage with the question. Cross barely references Trigger explicitly in its first 30 or 40 hours. None of the characters are the same. The game map is entirely different. The actual gameplay uses an entirely different battle system that hasn’t exactly aged as gracefully as Trigger’s. Then, you get to the last third of the game, and a huge exposition dump reveals all the convoluted, asinine ways in which the game tenuously links to its predecessor.
I have spent about 30 hours over the past several years playing Chrono Cross: the Radical Dreamers Edition, the 2022 re-release of the PlayStation 1 game, on my Switch. In that same period, I’ve spent significantly more time thinking about it. Part of the reason for this is that I basically refuse to play Cross when I’m not visiting or being visited by my brother. I started the game when he was in town, and I’ve found I enjoy it much more when he’s there to help me Google combat tips or strange, archaic gameplay features, and when he’s there to experience the plot twists. Plus, we both grew up watching our older cousin play through Trigger.
I suspect that when I finish the game and fully understand the parts of the plot I haven’t already spoiled for myself, I’ll have much more to say about this game’s treatment of its themes, but for now, there’s already a lot to chew on. Chrono Cross is a game anxious about legacy. It is deeply skeptical of the merit of the game made before it, often going out of its way to retcon significant plot elements or respond in extremely counterintuitive ways to the things people loved about that game. It is a game obsessed with fate. In one memorable moment, I made the decision to travel to an alternate universe to kill the last living hydra there so I could use a humour from it to cure one of my friends, who got mortally wounded helping me. The exact consequences of doing so are laid out plainly—in one of the game’s two parallel universes, the hydras have all gone extinct. In the wake of this extinction, the forest they inhabited is a wasteland filled with toxic fumes. Cruelly, Cross often puts you in dire straits and forces you to make unethical decisions, then later reveals that there was a third path all along that would have made everyone happy—they just didn’t explain it to you. From a gameplay perspective, this is about replayability and sharing game secrets with friends to make the game more exciting. Narratively? This game wants to force you to reckon with your own sense of unease. It wants to push you toward questionable decisions and then make you regret them. The game even seems interested in making you question the actions you probably took in a different game. Cross works hard to recontextualize the seemingly benevolent time travel shenanigans you took in its predecessor, recasting these as irresponsible and dangerous. If you’re interested in learning more about this game and its strange storytelling decisions, I highly recommend William Hughes’s 2022 op-ed for the AV Club, “Two decades on, a revisit of Chrono Cross reveals a game that’s melancholy, middle-aged—and cruel.”1 Depending on how exactly you interpret some of the game’s plot in the back half, the actual events of the game may or may not be particularly dire. It’s all pretty confusing. But what Cross does best is in making you re-evaluate your relationship with nostalgia.
4: unalone, by Jessica Jacobs
I have spent a significant amount of time this year writing about whales—specifically, about The Book of Jonah. Although I’m not entirely new to poems, I am new to writing poems with a shared sense of intertextuality with a specific book, in my case, Jonah. This year, I made an effort to read more poets, and in particular, to read more Jewish poets. Ever since attending the Yetzirah: a Hearth for Jewish Poetry2’s inaugural conference in 2023, I’ve been making a more conscious effort to engage with Jewish poetry. If I am writing myself into a tradition, I have to know more of that tradition, and I didn’t grow up reading a ton of poetry, let alone Jewish poets. Additionally, I am interested in how Jewish poets are responding to the current moment or moments. October 7, the carnage in Gaza, unelected public officials in America making Nazi salutes—what do we make of all this as poets? As Jews? How can we even try to make sense of this? So, I am reading Jewish poetry as much for comfort as for guidance. In 2024, Jessica Jacobs, founder of Yetzirah, published unalone, a book deeply engaged with The Book of Genesis3. It’s a thick book of poetry, and I gave myself three days to read it, but I ended up reading it all in a single sitting.
The book follows the twelve parshiyot (portions) of Genesis and engages with Genesis linearly. And my goodness, what a weighty book Genesis is! We begin, of course, with the creation story, but beyond Eve and Adam we have Cain and Abel, Noah and his ark, the Tower of Babel, Rebecca, the binding of Isaac, Jacob and his ladder—there are universes within universes here. And this gorgeous book of midrashic poetry is in conversation not just with Genesis but with other midrashic sources about Genesis—between these poems there are rabbis. I can practically hear them arguing. Like reading Edmond Jabes, I left this book with questions, because so too does the poet.
In “Torn Mind,” Jacobs responds to Avivah Zornberg and to both Jacob and Jonah with a poem about what it means to have a “settled mind.” “So though he shivered in the briny dark,/ krill wreathing his ankles, I find/ I am jealous of Jonah,” she writes. “Like Ninevah, I am a city in need of saving.” There is a depth of curiosity in these poems. A sense of wonder and a sense of a deeply human relationship with these often super-human characters. “In the Shadow of Babel” is a dense 6-page poem full of ambition. “How the Angel Found Her” is three short stanzas. In “Why There is No Hebrew Word for Obey,” Jacobs’s whole poetic ethos is on full display. Here, the akedah is not so much about the binding of Isaac as it is about what comes after. “What came later, even with Isaac alive/ in the fields, inside// Abraham was the knowledge/ of what he’d been willing to do.” This is a poem about fundamentalism. About hatred and violence, about what it means to believe in G-d, and, finally, in the end, about the difference between “obey” and “listen.”
This is a book that encourages you to be a little less certain. To listen, to learn, and to ask big, sometimes unanswerable questions.
5: Star Wars: Skeleton Crew
It’s easy to say Star Wars has sold out. The Disney era of our beloved space opera is a rocky one, full of some staggering quality dips, and even some of my favorite stories of the Disney era are bogged down by unnecessary easter eggs, crossovers and [insert-meme-of-Leo-DiCaprio-pointing-at-thing-he-recognizes-here]. Star Wars has become a self-referential swamp of recycled and repurposed ideas. It disguises product placement as intertextuality, and it’s frankly exhausting. And when Disney does let its writers and directors take big, swingy risks on occasion, they often miss. With the exception of Andor, the risky Star Wars stories we’ve gotten these last ten years have not worked for me at all. The Last Jedi is a confusing, jumbled mess thematically, punctuated with plot problems and shoddy character work, despite the sprinkling of genuinely innovative moments. And The Acolyte has an extremely neat premise to hook you, then doesn’t know what to do you with you after it’s grabbed you and just falls apart. But Skeleton Crew…Skeleton Crew is different. There’s genuine joy here. This is a story that isn’t ashamed of being a Star Wars story but also doesn’t revel in its own relationship to that enormous intellectual property as an easy way out of telling a story with any value. In fact, Skeleton Crew manages to feel quintessentially Star Wars without roping in a single cameo from another Star Wars film, show, book, video game, or toy. Everything that’s present is present to tell this story, which happens to be a Star Wars story, not to gear us up for some inevitable crossover in three years.
Unfortunately, television reviews for places like Rotten Tomatoes generally release after the second or third episode of a new show, and reviewers rarely swing back around to review a finished show, so despite Skeleton Crew’s success in telling a complete, standalone story in just eight episodes of television, if you google reviews for the show, you’re likely going to find a lot of early impressions of the pilot and not much else. Which is a shame, because Skeleton Crew is a joyous romp full of intergalactic swashbuckling whimsy. Jude Law plays pretty much the only relevant adult character in this show, and he is fully locked into the role. Part Jedi, part pirate, part complicated father figure, he’s given a lot to work with here with a surprisingly nuanced script. And the child actors? All of them are remarkable. Child stars Ravi Cabot-Conyers, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Kyriana Kratter, and Robert Timothy Smith make for a compelling posse of naïve protagonists who deliver their lines believably without ever dipping into melodrama. Oh, and there’s a robot pirate played by Nick Frost, and he’s great too. One episode features a surprisingly nuanced portrayal of how children navigate disability. One of the characters has cybernetic components, and she hates that her friend treats her as fully capable of everything that other kids can do when she isn’t, but she doesn’t know how to talk about it. The show acknowledges that those of us with disabilities may have different limits than our peers and that being treated as badasses who are capable of everything they can do actually harms us. And somehow the show never preaches anything. The themes are just there.
There’s a lot to be said about the way the show addresses fear and safety, how sometimes children can easily feel the adults in their lives are sacrificing joy and life itself in exchange for a safe but meaningless life. And this feeling is extrapolated to show what it would mean for an entire society to do that on a large scale. But what I really admire about Skeleton Crew is that it is never ironic—it is never afraid to be sincere. We live in a time in which sincerity is hard to come by. Our popular films and shows, our books and movies, our daily interactions—everything is cloaked in layer after layer of irony. Because true sincerity is scary. It’s risky. And it reveals too much about us. Somehow, Skeleton Crew doesn’t care if you think it’s a little bit cheesy. And these days that feels like a minor miracle.
Wrap-Up:
This year, I hope to continue thinking about art. In the first few months of 2025, I’ve already experienced quite a lot of art that has made me feel things. I’d like to do these more frequently than once a year, so, if you enjoyed my eclectic little list, stay tuned for what the next few months may bring. If you read this and enjoyed it, please stick around for future articles. And more importantly, tell me what art moved you last year (or this year) in the comments!