What’s the best non-2013 pop culture you discovered this year?

This week’s question:
Every year-end holiday season brings a flurry of best-of-the-past-year lists. But what about all the neglected art from every other year? What older films, books, games, TV shows, artists, etc. did you experience for the first time, or come around to loving for the first time, in 2013? (See also our 2012 list of the best entertainment we discovered that year, and our corresponding 2011 and 2010 lists.)
Sonia Saraiya
I read a bunch of books that I’ve been sitting on for months—like Wolf Hall, The Brothers Karamazov, and Notes On A Scandal—all of which were wonderful and worth reading in their own ways. But I feel the best about reading My Ántonia, by Willa Cather—an astonishingly modern novel that takes place in Nebraska, back when Nebraska was a red and forbidding frontier. Cather is one of those authors you know you’re supposed to read, but her work is hard to break into if you’re not independently interested in pioneers and manifest destiny. But her prose is easy to digest, and she brings a sense of interiority to even the vast American prairie. The first half is probably stronger than the back half, but it’s all intoxicating, quietly offering its female characters a voice while delving into the mysterious process of growing up, which is the same the world over. It’s almost 100 years old (first printing was in 1918), but it’s a fine find for 2013.
John Teti
Netflix recently added the 2006 British comedy series Snuff Box to its streaming library, and when I gave it a try, I discovered a dark sketch show with a rhythm that was truly its own. The show ostensibly follows the life of a sneering professional hangman (Matt Berry) who hangs out with his assistant (Rich Fulcher) in a gentlemen’s club for hangmen. But that premise is merely the nexus around which it weaves surreal flights of fancy that are often dark and crude and almost always fascinating. Snuff Box is so unusual that for the entire first episode, I struggled to get my bearings, in part because Berry and Fulcher tend to smear each sketch into the next, so it’s hard to tell whether you’re coming or going. Many sketches start out with a simple game that transforms into something far more elaborate—such as a sequence in which yelps of profanity from people on a park bench are woven into a five-part harmony. Other times, Snuff Box will juxtapose disparate pieces that would be moronic on their own and lend them a giddy strangeness by treating them as routine. One recurring gag sees Fulcher traveling back in time to chat with an ancestor hangman who has two specialties: black magic and prostitutes. This isn’t mere “random” comedy—what makes the weirdness so strong, in fact, is the incongruent yet unblinking sense of purpose that Berry and Fulcher bring to it. A show this bizarre is destined to be a cult affair. I’m just glad to be part of the Snuff Box cult.
Sean O’Neal
Thanks to the surprisingly on-point algorithms at Spotify—and, no doubt, some promotional magic—I finally listened to Eduard Artemyev’s scores for Solaris, Stalker, and The Mirror, just in time for them all to be reissued on vinyl. In retrospect, it seems sort of obvious I’d be drawn to Solaris, considering I’m already a fan of Cliff Martinez’s score for the Steven Soderbergh remake, as well as the 2011 Solaris tribute from Iceland’s Daníel Bjarnason and Ben Frost. (Frost is a frequent Tim Hecker collaborator whose hypnotically unsettling industrial drones I’m also glad to have discovered this year). For decades now, Andrei Tarkovsky’s moody sci-fi meditation has inspired music that similarly balances futuristic landscapes with human vulnerability, so it’s no surprise Artemyev’s original is equally worth hearing on its own—not only for its inventiveness, with the Russian composer filtering classic Bach chorales through some of the first-ever synthesizers, but for its continued emotional resonance. The new, lovingly packaged editions of that, his work on Tarkovsky’s Stalker and The Mirror, and Artemyev’s own 1989 re-recording of Solaris using new technology, have all been on constant late-night rotation at my place for most of the fall.
A.A. Dowd
Much as I’d like to claim that 2013 was the year I finally tackled Ulysses, it was a different portrait of heavy drinkers that occupied my sparse spare time these past 12 months. Why, I now wonder, did it take me so long to get into Cheers? For years, I harbored sight-unseen indifference to the long-running NBC sitcom, as though cultural osmosis had told me all I needed to know about it. So it was surprising how quickly I fell for the show’s wit and charm once I finally sampled it: The pilot, which I watched on a whim one restless night, reminded me more of Neil Simon than most of what I had seen of the era’s other small-screen comedies. Like the perfect watering hole, Cheers is immediately inviting; by the third or fourth episode, its cast of characters—know-it-all Cliff, wise fool Coach, brassy Carla—had become old friends. I also dug the show’s one-setting purity, so much so that I felt a little betrayed when the show cut to Diane’s apartment at the top of season two. Cheers, it’s clear to me now, established the template for most of the sitcoms I’ve loved over the past two decades. But none of the great shows it spawned have cultivated such a warm, welcoming sense of community—not even Community, which totally owes the initial Jeff and Britta dynamic to Cheers. Also, an added bonus: I can finally, with confidence, say that people have a Sam-and-Diane thing going.
Erik Adams
I didn’t see nearly as many new movies as I should’ve this year. Put the blame on lack of effort—though I could just as easily say that no number of fresh cinematic offerings could stack up to the experience of seeing Playtime in 70mm. As the pop culture we consume becomes increasingly bite-sized, it’s fascinating to see a film that goes to such lengths to capture so much: the undulating waves of activity in a crowded restaurant, the carnival-like atmosphere of a Parisian traffic circle. There’s a lot of information crammed into the frames of Jacques Tati’s impishly satirical masterpiece, to the point that it merits multiple viewings—too bad repertory screenings in its original format are so hard to come by. If I ever get the chance to see Playtime again, I feel like I could see an entirely different movie by focusing on different parts of the screen, just the kind of glance beneath the surface encouraged by the film and its glass-and-steel mazes.
Todd VanDerWerff
Thanks to Spotify and Rdio, I’ve been getting less into playing the tracks I want to hear, when I want to hear them, and more into throwing all of the music I like into a giant blender and seeing what happens. This means that I’ve been getting a lot more into Spoon in the last year. Now, I can’t say that I didn’t know about Spoon, or listen to them before this year. They have several tracks I’ve always loved. But this was the year when a song would come on my giant shuffle list, and it would be something I really loved, and it would inevitably be by Spoon, and I would say, “I should really listen to more Spoon!” I think this marks the band as the ideal indie rock act for this digital age: parceling out greatness into tiny morsels and dropping them along a breadcrumb trail for all of us to find.