Wrap Bag: 2024 Edition
"My taste is avant-poor"
Previous Wrap Bags
A Letter From The Editor
Ahoy! Hello and welcome to the traditional, Negative Progression End of Year Wrap Up Grab Bag, long since codified as the The Wrap Bag. Typically, these “Editors Notes” are a meditation / vibe check on the year that was, but that is tough when the big picture vibes are so fucked in every direction right now. I don’t know how to square that, so I have chosen to acknowledge said world-fuckery and continue on with the banal world that exists in this blog/newsletter/mélange of musings1.
This year, with two pieces published prior to this Wrap Bag, I doubled the output of 2023! Hooray! But, wait…one of those was written by someone else, so I maintained my single article output. Alas! But, wait…as you will see below, I actually published two pieces (and guested on a podcast!) on another platform. So I tripled last years output! Hooray! Just not here. Alas!
There are, in various stages of completion, four articles in my draft folder so let’s see if I can knock any/all of them out next year. I will commit here and now to finishing The Greatest Hits of Rick Froberg next year. That’s been 75% complete since I suffered a crisis of confidence during the summer and shelved it but its tickling at my brain again.
For today, we focus on wrapping the year, which includes revisiting some themes and topics previously covered around these parts. As ever, thanks for reading this. I appreciate you! Happy December!
Playlist: 2024 Favorites
Let’s start with my lowest effort output, the stale as fuck year-end list. As is now tradition, this list is presented without any inherent rankings, merely in alphabetical order, and as favorites and not bests, with a playlist sampling all-but-one pick that you can stream here:
Chris’ Favorite Records of 20242
Antenna - Antenna (EP) - Urge Records
Cola - The Gloss - Fire Talk
Heavy Lag / Bad Crime - Split LP- Bloated Kat
Klaus Johann Grobe - Io Tu Il Loro - Trouble In Mind
Lifeguard - Ministry / Energie (7”) - Matador
Rebecca Valeriano-Flores - Demos - Unreleased
The Mystic Tide - Frustration (reissue) - Numero Group
Royal Headache - Live In America - What’s Your Rupture?
Various Artists - Soft Summer Breezes (compilation) - Numero Group
A live album? A compilation? A single? An EP? A reissue? Unreleased Demos? Only nine items on the list? It’s true, I had a low year on new music. Some brief notes on the list:
I feel kind of bad for including Rebecca’s demos on my list, because everyone who isn’t Tall Pat, likely won’t have heard them because they were ‘released’ via a tweet that was later deleted. You’ll have to take me on trust when I tell you they are fantastic and I truly hope they see the actual light of day sometime. They have a jangle / ‘80s indie / pop vibe that I can’t describe better than that, but which you instantly recognize and appreciate as soon as each song starts. Within her pantheon it leans closer to Tyler Jon Tyler3 than Negative Scanner but is truly its own thing. Is Palmer Square the song of the year? No one will ever know…
Klaus Johann Grobe returned from a six year hiatus with a change of direction, moving away from euro-dancefloor-synth-disco to what I am reliably told is more of an Italian soft-rock direction. What we have here is perfect summer day music. Oh, they also switched from German to English lyrics (mostly.) This album rules, seek it out. If the groove of Try doesn’t get you bopping in your chair, check your pulse.
I was not previously familiar with Cola but they are a new favorite. Post-punk guitars go further and further with me every year and the addition here of the tight and precise vocals - often compared to poems - put this over the top. I never know what is going on in these lyrics and that is a compliment. Case in point: Keys Down If You Stay, perhaps my favorite across these 10 tracks of all killer-no filler.
Antenna is perhaps the most exciting release this year, in terms of future potential. Antenna is Tim “Shogun” Wall from Royal Headache (also featured on this list with their live album, which meant we finally got an official release of their version of Teardrops, as discussed previously on One Perfect Song) and Antenna is the closest Shogun has come to recapturing the sense of earnest and heartfelt joy, punk energy and exhilaration that made Royal Headache so legendary4. I can’t wait to hear more from Antenna, who are playing no shortage of shows on their home turf. Listen to all five tracks for the mission statement of this Antenna State.
Album Art of the Year goes to Cola
As is always the case, there were some key discoveries this year that were released in years past:
Tube Alloys - Magnetic Point - Urge Records (2023)
Post-Punk meets Synths and Futurism in this Los Angeles/Sydney crossover band. Key track: Magnetic Point
Summer Blood (2014-2018) & Boredwalk (2018 - 2019)
Last years Wrap Bag led off with my extreme hype write up of Romero’s Turn It On (still my favorite album this decade, and #2 still ain’t close, please listen to it if you didn’t already) which of course ended on the extreme bummer that was the death of Adam Johnstone, one of Romero’s key members.
This led me to investigating his back catalog which is primarily made up of Summer Blood’s one album, two EPs and two singles, all of which are worth your time, but most especially 2018’s self-titled album which is as classic an “indie rock” sound as you can reasonably expect to hear.
There are also three songs under the Boredwalk name, which are very solid but appear to be more in the vein of a bedroom project than anything else (not a knock - lotta great bands come out of bedroom projects, see: RMFC) but are worth checking out, not least because Flower appears to be the first collaboration between Johnstone and Romero singer Alanna Cassidy, so it has historical significance if nothing else.
Finally, if you want to hear me talk about some music from previous years - from 1970 through 2022, including some bands discussed in the past here - you can listen to my guest appearance on “Music of The Mat Remixed” where Andrew (the host) and I choose some songs for each other that are the first song from an album (which, because the podcast is hosted by a wrestling site, has an extremely loose wrestling tie-in, but is absolutely a show about music and not wrestling.)
Wrestling Wrecap: Finding Joy Amongst Mediocrity
In last years Wrestling Wrecap5, I focused on the joy of a truly great wrestling crowd - the 8,283 fans inside Tokyo’s Ryōgoku Kokugikan6 on August 13th 2023.
Tellingly, the focus was on the crowd, and specifically a Japanese one, because any American wrestling that I care about has been in a creative slump since some time in 2022, plus American crowds have long been more interested in themselves than the wrestling they are watching. The joy of that specific crowd was that they ascended from the norm, because the truth is a lot of the Japanese wrestling I care about has also been in a creative slump and a lot of crowds there are joylessly quiet7. There is also just a lot more wrestling available to watch than there was even five years ago. All of this is combining to often make a lot of wrestling feel like a slog. No hobby should be a slog. It should be joyful, otherwise it’s a chore and not a hobby.
Seeking out joy became the name of the game; and similarly to music, when the major labels aren’t delivering, one must don one’s hipster hat and scour the independent scenes across the world to find the new hotness. In the 2010s, the new hotness in professional wrestling was Pro Wrestling Guerilla, which was the premier “super-indie” company who, through unique circumstances, were able to make matches happen that few other companies could. Since then, between the hollowing out of the US indie scene by the major league companies, the pandemic and real life matters taking precedence, PWG is on permanent hiatus and had lost a lot of steam anyway. Most other “super-indies” have also lost all their steam.
Enter Sareee8, who spent two and a half years in the US in the early 2020s somewhat unsuccessfully working for WWE, through no fault of her own. Upon her return to Japan in 2023, she decided, like any smart creative fresh from trying out the corporate world, to take ownership of her career by going freelance.
The first thing Sareee did was create Sareee-ISM, which what the Japanese wrestling community calls a “Produce Show,” which is series of shows in which a wrestler makes the matches, books the other wrestlers and generally controls their own destiny. It’s what punks have long called a DIY Show and it’s become what American wrestling fans call a “super-indie.”
Sareee, with some help from her friends, her peers and her rivals has not only hosted multiple critically and commercially successful Sareee-ISM shows, she has also almost completely taken over the world of women’s wrestling in Japan, holding multiple world titles at the same time in multiple companies and reaching creative highs that very few other wrestlers - of any gender - have achieved in a post-pandemic landscape. It’s been truly remarkable.
In the spirit of the afore-mentioned Pro Wrestling Guerilla, Sareee-ISM has become the place where matches happen that cannot happen anywhere else, due to the headaches, hassles and horseshit that is pro-wrestling politics. The culmination of this approach so far - both creatively and politically - is the main event match from SareeeISM Volume 5, a match of such non-stop action that its been compared to a fireworks display and a true Match of the Year candidate.
Remember in the Editor’s Notes when I said I had written two pieces on another platform? Well one of those was about Sareee and Sareee-ISM and is about how, even in the niche places where the deepest wrestling-nerds congregate, there’s a lack of awareness of what she has been doing. You can read that using the link below if you wish (but I only recommend it to the actual wrestling fans!)
Expertise: This Old Ledge
As first discussed way back in Grab Bag Vol 4, I am a lover of expertise.9 This year, I found myself a new favorite expert, who ties together some ‘soft interests’10 of mine: skateboarding, architecture and urban design.
The expert in question is Ted Barrow and his outlet is the This Old Ledge series on the Thrasher Magazine website and YouTube channel.
Barrow’s great skill is the way in which he seamlessly ties the art-history of the locations into the history of skateboarding and outlines how the two have become tied together as a result.
There’s a lot of excellent archival footage used to illustrate the skating history but a lot of research also went into the urban history, as the videos are packed with architectural plans and renderings and vintage photography of these often world-famous locations, for example the Embarcadero in San Francisco.
This is just the perfect kind of niche expertise for me and very much in the spirit of what I want to celebrate in this “publication.” Currently there are ten episodes, most of which are around 10 minutes long and all are easily worth your time.
Thursday Night at The Movies with Leonard Maltin
A couple of times a year, my work inbox receives emails about CTCS-466: Theatrical Film Symposium calling it “USC’s most popular elective for 50 years” and letting you know this class is better known as “Thursday Night At The Movies With Leonard Maltin.”
As noted above, I Love An Expert, and there are few living people with more expertise in their field than Leonard Maltin, who literally wrote THE book on movies for 40 years. So for years, I dreamed and schemed about how to get a peek inside that class, which of course is not open to the public, nor to non-students. Eventually, I decided to ask someone who I thought would have an “in”. They did; to use D&D terminology, I passed the charisma check and talked my way in.
For the last three months - and its been a real lifetime highlight - I got to sit in on this class as a guest and observe The Expert discuss cinematic arts with a few hundred undergrads while everyone asks smart questions and makes extremely insightful observations. The format of the class is: every week we watch a movie, then the students and Leonard discuss it with some of the film-makers afterwards, and then the next week the group reflects and discusses it further. Leonard is so knowledgeable but also so sweet and earnest - he was way nicer to me than he needed to be - and the students universally asked incredible questions. I learned more about cinema and film-making in three months than the rest of my life combined.
We watched a lot of good movies (the full list is below.) A couple were GREAT and one was absolute TURD, but the post-movie discussion for that one (Here) did lead to a Q&A with Tom Hanks (yes, really) so at least I have an A-Lister experience to talk about for the rest of time. Some of these movies never hit theatres (thanks to Netflix’s anti-theater agenda) so we were some of the few people that saw those on a big screen. Pretty cool stuff.
Something that completely changed my film watching experience, maybe forever, is that most weeks, I did not know what we were watching until the film started, or minutes before it started. I am now a total convert to the concept of the mystery vortex11 movie viewing experience. Leonard himself is also a booster of this approach and fervently avoids watching trailers where possible.
Truly, I would not have watched most of these films if I was left to my own devices. Consider just walking into a theater some time, sight unseen and watch whatever is on when you arrive. You’ll likely leave pleasantly surprised.
CTCS-466: Theatrical Film Symposium Fall Semester 2024 Screenings
Rebel Ridge - taut revenge thriller reminiscent of Rambo: First Blood. Thumbs Up.
In The Summers - incredible story of family growth and decay. Two Thumbs Up, my favorite of all of these movies.
It’s What’s Inside - body swap comedy/horror. An easy watch, if a little manically edited. Thumbs Up.
Saturday Night - almost real-time comedy/drama retelling of the 90min before the first episode of SNL. Thumbs Up.
The Body Politic - Documentary about the Mayor of Baltimore’s groundbreaking and polarizing approach to tackling gun violence. Thumbs Up
Here - multi-generational tale of the residents of one house in New Jersey. Saccharine, lazy trash with bonus negative points for the AI aging/de-aging. Two Thumbs All The Way Down.
Emilia Perez - drama/musical about a crime lord who undergoes gender transition and tries to find redemption. Thumbs Up.
Ainda Estou Aqui (I’m Still Here) - Brazilian biopic about the life of Eunice Paiva (and her family) during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1960s-1980s. Come for the incredible acting, cinematography, production design and sound design, stay for the history lesson. Two Thumbs Up, one of the best looking films I have ever seen.
September 5th - Gripping historical drama that takes place over 22 hours almost entirely in the control room and studios of ABC’s 1972 Summer Olympics coverage as the Black September terror attack unfolds. Thumbs Up.
Screenings I skipped for various reasons: The Wild Robot (went to see Pulp in concert), Wicked (gave up my seat to the long guest list, also very much not my bag) and Moana 2 (was shown in 3D and I can live without the headache.)
Looping all the way back to what I said at the very start, the world seems more fucked every day, but spending a few months listening to some smart and savvy young people talk about art gives me some hope for the future. As did Ainda Estou Aqui because for everything that Brazil (and many other nations) went through during the military dictatorship and then again under hard-right rule in recent years, no matter how bad things got, they bounced back each time and never stopped living, loving and making art. Something to strive for as we strap in for 2025 and beyond.
!~See You in 2025~!
To be clear: I’m here for the hard conversations, I just don’t want to start one here.
Best of 2013 (live Radio Show recording)
Best of 2014 (old blog post)
Best of 2016 (old blog post)
Best of 2017 (old blog post)
Best of 2019 (YouTube playlist)
Best Of The Teens (Negative Progression post)
Best of 2022 (YouTube playlist plus notes in last years Wrap Bag)
Best of 2023 ( YouTube playlist plus notes in last years Wrap Bag)
The first Tyler Jon Tyler record turned 15 years old a few days before I wrote this section and yet every song they released sounds as vital and relevant now as they ever did. Such an under-rated band.
Case in point: at a RMFC/Tube Alloys show this summer (a show filled with Australians, even here in Los Angeles), multiple people commented on my Royal Headache shirt, including a stranger with a thick Aussie accent noting “That’s one of the most important bands this century” with which I heartily agreed.
This name sucks and yet I haven’t changed it. Suggestions, please.
Last year’s Wrestling Wrecap ended with this line: “maybe one day, it can be me losing my mind in Korakuen Hall, Ryōgoku Kokugikan or Nippon Budōkan.” Update on that: barring any unforeseen events, I will be losing my mind in Ryōgoku Kokugikan on 12/29/24. Work on your bucket list, friends.
Best crowd this year? The 16,500 people that sold out the legendary Arena Mexico in Mexico City for the annual CMLL Homenaje A Dos Leyendas show. Gotta go there sometime, too.
Yes, that’s Sareee with three (3) e’s, a combination of her actual name (Sari) and a Japanese boy band called Greeeen.
A rare and dying breed in modern society, sadly.
Soft Interests: Things I am loosely interested in, but know relatively little about.
More Pro Wrestling Guerilla lore: they would do an annual show with no matches or wrestlers announced in advance called Mystery Vortex