Fluxblog 580: these are a few of my favorite things

Plus some of my most popular playlists from 2025

A few of my favorite things from 2025…

My favorite new show of 2025 is Interior Motives, a YouTube game show in which Seeking Derangements co-host Ben Mora and two contestants attempt to glean a person’s age, gender, sexuality, and location from looking at images of their living space and the contents of their refrigerator. Because the show is a spin-off of Seeking Derangements, the guests and submissions tend to be extremely queer and chaotic, which makes it even more fun to watch. I highly recommend watching this someone else and playing along – I always watch it with my girlfriend, and it’s basically our sports. I think you can jump in on any episode and have a good time, but if you’d like to see the single most deranged apartment to appear in the show thus far, you should start with the episode featuring Will Menaker and Felix Biederman.

I have been loving The Power Fantasy, an Image Comics series by Kieron Gillen and Caspar Wijngaard. It’s a sci-fi comic set in 1999 about a handful of superhumans so immensely powerful that if any of them came into conflict, it would basically destroy the planet. It’s very smart and fun and fast-paced, with a lot of payoffs spread evenly through the series. (Issue #13 ends with one of the best “uhhh…ok, now what?” scenes I’ve read or seen in a long time.) In many ways it’s a continuation of what Gillen was doing structurally/thematically with his excellent Immortal X-Men series, but it has a lot more going on in terms of playing with alternative histories, engagement with culture, exploring the dynamics of cults and cults of personality. But as far as the X-Men go, the character Etienne Lux is basically Gillen going allllll the way to the logical conclusion of Charles Xavier’s powers and personality, but he looks like a mashup of both Tunde and Kyp from TV on the Radio.

I also highly recommend Assorted Crisis Events, a new anthology series by writer Deniz Camp and artist Eric Zawadzki. Each issue is a self-contained Twilight Zone-style short story set in a world in which time is broken and people get trapped in time loops, face alternate versions of themselves, or get forced to look after a spouse who could be a baby, a teenager, middle-aged, or elderly at any moment. It’s very clever, expertly crafted, and has a lot of heart. Camp is the new hot rising star writer in comics at the moment, so if you enjoy this, you should probably also check out his psychedelic Absolute Martian Manhunter book with Javier Rodriguez or his overtly leftist Ultimates series with Juan Frigeri.

I loved Burning Down the House, Jonathan Gould’s unauthorized biography of Talking Heads. It’s exhaustively researched and exceptionally well written, making a point of balancing the perspectives of each member of the band. Gould is so good at this that you never quite know who to believe when it comes to the group’s many conflicts – at some points you may sympathize with David Byrne or Tina Weymouth, but then he’ll flip things so you can see how either might be brilliant or extremely annoying and self-absorbed. My main takeaway from this book is that Talking Heads is basically the story of a very talented guy who is fundamentally not suited to being in a band but is always better for being part of one, and that band doing everything it can to accommodate him until they just can’t do it anymore.

Kind of a rough year for movies, though there were a few that I loved. I share the consensus opinion that Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is one more banger in a career almost entirely comprised of bangers, and I quite liked Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, though not quite as much as his previous film with Renate Reinsve, The Worst Person in the World. Reinsve also appears in Aaron Schimberg’s delightful A Different Man, technically a late 2024 film about the downside of believing transforming your body will make you a happier person that’s an interesting contrast with Coralie Fargeat’s film The Substance and Madgalena Bay’s concept album Imaginal Disk. Two low-key movies I liked a lot – Carson Lund’s extremely chill and ultra low-stakes baseball comedy Eephus, and Sophie Brook’s darkly comedic rom-com Oh, Hi!, starring co-writer Molly Gordon.

A few of my most popular playlists from 2025…

PLACE SERIES #9: MILDLY FUNKY WORKPLACE, 3 hours of funk, jazz, fusion, and grooves conducive to a fun, productive environment. In case you missed it, I published an issue earlier this year collecting all 9 of my previous Place Series playlists, which are intended for specific environments and situations. [Spotify | Apple | YouTube]

BRATTY CHEERLEADER POP, a collection of songs with that “Hey Mickey” cheerleader spirit. It includes music by Chappell Roan, Sleater-Kinney, Avril Lavigne, Lil Mama, Sleigh Bells, Gwen Stefani, Charli XCX, Rosé, The Go-Go’s, and many others. [Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube]

NYC NOW 2025, an attempt to sketch out the current indie/DIY scene in New York City. Please note that I updated the Spotify version several times, but the other two are frozen in early 2025. [Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube]

100 ART ROCK CLASSICS, which is basically just 10 hours of arty bangers by artists from the 60s up through the present. [Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube]

50 POST-PUNK ART FUNK GREATS, which is exactly what it says it is and includes classics by the likes of Liquid Liquid, A Certain Ratio, The Slits, ESG, Public Image Ltd, The Clash, Joy Division, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, and more. [Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube]