The Prime Works

Movies

1. The Matrix
2. Jackie Brown/Kill Bill
3. Fight Club
4. Zodiac
5. Collateral
6. Escape From New York
7. Rocky Horror Picture Show
8. Paterson
9. El Mariachi
10. Goodfellas
11. I’m Not There
12. From Dusk Till Dawn
13. Everything Everywhere All At Once
14. Ghost Dog: Way Of The Samurai
15. Suspiria (1977)
16. Elvis (2022)

Television

1. The Simpsons/Futurama
2. The Shield
3. Mad Men
4. Community
5. The Venture Brothers
6. Neon Genesis Evangelion
7. Cowboy Bebop
8. Star Trek: The Next Generation
9. LOST
10. Blackadder
11. Stargate: SG-1
12. M*A*S*H
13. It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia
14. Monster
15. Breaking Bad
16. The Goodies
17. Clone High
18. Seinfeld
19. 30 Rock
20. Firefly
21. The Prisoner
22. Curb Your Enthusiasm

Literature

1. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
2. The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward, by HP Lovecraft
3. LA Confidential, by James Ellroy
4. Hitler, by Ian Kershaw
5. Animorphs, by KA Applegate
6. Discworld, by Terry Pratchett
7. “The Cat In The Wall” by Edgar Allan Poe
8. Horrible Histories, by Terry Deary
9. The Cornelius Quartet, by Michael Moorcock
10. The Way Of The Samurai, Inazō Nitobe
11. A Man With No Talents: Memoirs Of A Japanese Day Labourer, Shiro Oyama
12. The Prize: The Epic Quest For Oil, Money, And Power, Daniel Yergin

Video Games

1. Mass Effect
2. Metal Gear Solid
3. Gears Of War
4. Left 4 Dead 2
5. No More Heroes
6. Saints Row 2
7. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
8. Max Payne
9. Pokemon Red/Blue
10. Ratchet & Clank
11. Spec Ops: The Line
12. Super Smash Bros
13. Portal

Comics

1. Shortpacked!
2. 8 Bit Theater
3. Order Of The Stick
4. Watchmen
5. The Sandman

The Secondary Tier

Movies

1. Uncut Gems
2. Independence Day
3. My Dinner With Andre
4. Che
5. First Reformed
6. John Wick: Chapter 4

Television

1. The Wire
2. Deadwood
3. Battlestar Galactica (Ron Moore)
4. Scrubs
5. 12 oz Mouse
6. The Young Ones
7. The Sopranos
8. Dragon Ball Z
9. Arrested Development
10. Twin Peaks
11. Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
12. Death Note
13. The Office
14. Hannibal
15. Newsradio

Literature

1. On The Road
2. Blood Meridian
3. Hamlet

Video Games

1. Jak II
2. The Sims
3. Fallout

Comics

1. The Dark Knight Returns

Last year, I wrote that I seemed to be running out of things to say about the concept of a Personal Canon. This year, I’m back in full force. I have noticed two things regarding my personal canon. The first is that, when I show people the Canon, they note the order I appear to rank things in (me having forgotten to clarify that these are in no particular order with no explanation for their presence beyond intuition) and want to make sure I put things in the order they consider correct. The second is that I have become completely inured to any other ranking or list I come across, and indeed any other opinion on art of any kind. I said when I started this little project that I was fairly indifferent towards lists, and that indifference has mutated into acceptance.

One nice thing I’ve learned about creating things is that, past a certain point, you become more tolerant. Not only am I accepting of lesser-quality critical writing due to being able to understand where it comes from (the impulses that lead someone to nervously hedge their bets or pull back from saying something outrageous and courageous) and where it can go, I am also accepting of people who make the kind of criticism I wouldn’t. I don’t have to worry about other people writing with a mixture of geek mysticism, technical fascination, and cosmic indifference because I can generate that whenever I want. Instead I can just pull back and learn from people. I can use what they do – things I wouldn’t think of on my own – to achieve my own criticism goals. Diversity enriches everyone.

(This has made me more enthusiastic about writing fiction)

Lists like this – especially with no commentary or analysis – are a little different, to the point that this year I frequently found myself toying with tossing my little tradition aside. Let’s face it, from a purely immediate and material consequential perspective, my lists have achieved nothing. Nobody has, to my awareness, gone through my list and watched/read anything on it, let alone everything on it. It makes sense; I think of myself as a pretty good writer, but I’m also incredibly obscure. Why would anyone care about anything I have to say, let alone offhand namedropping out of context? In fact, that’s why I put so much effort into my writing; I can’t fall back on the assumption that people will agree with everything I say on principle, and I have to put the effort in.

One could also look at it from a personal development perspective. I remember suggesting that perhaps my Personal Canon could be used to jumpstart my own creativity, and I have come to the conclusion that not only was I wrong about that, if anything these lists keep holding me back. There’s a few that work as Forms for the kind of thing I like making; The Shield has permanently set my standard for writing stories, and Always Sunny and Newsradio each work as models for different forms of comedy. But otherwise, it’s like… these cool things already exist. I don’t have to recreate how “Damn my wits!” made me feel because I can get that by just, you know, rereading the comic. It turns out I’m not very good at plagiarism, and I best recreate those effects by coming up with entirely new jokes based on basic comedy principles.

This has affected how I see those other ranking lists you see floating around the internet. 99% of them aren’t sincere attempts at self-expression, they’re engagement bait designed to enrage people, create clicks, and drive up some arbitrary number somewhere so some website can sell advertising space. From the perspective of self-expression, I think of myself as ‘someone not dumb enough to fall for cheap journalistic tricks’; from the perspective of punishing the wicked, I would rather deny these soulless pricks the attention they want; from the perspective of consequentialism, I see no positive outcome in engaging with it. At best, I can throw around some funny one-liners, but I can do that writing comedy and to much greater effect.

On top of that, I ask myself: what would I do with a ‘perfectly correct’ list, even if I had it? I see someone approve of a show I like, and I smile and nod and then move on with my life. I don’t need anyone to confirm the quality of my taste because a) I have an inner monologue that does that perfectly well and b) I take it as read that other people are going to have different feelings about things than I do. What, I should cry because Buttfuck Daily didn’t put Futurama in their top ten sitcoms of all time list? A show that made a millionaire of David X Cohen and a slightly-more-onaire of Matt Groening, a show that’s on rerun across the world, a show that has received many awards, that has made people across the globe happy, that gave me a network of references I can use to communicate with people vastly different from me, and most importantly made me laugh – I’m to consider its exclusion from some random website as an egregious insult worth more than a sideways glance???

(Buttfuck Daily being an otherwise fine publication)

The funny thing is, I find this kind of attitude extraordinarily helpful… as a creative. Obsessing over perceived slights and infuriating mistakes turns out to be a better spark for creativity than serenely basking in goodness; I’ve read that anger is the most motivating of all emotions. Part of the reason I accept lists I disagree with is because I know there’s exactly one time and place where I’ll see one list that conforms exactly to my tastes, and its mere existence (or even potential existence) is enough to emotionally counterbalance all the Incorrect Takes in the world. You can denigrate the works of Quentin Tarantino all you like, but you can’t take him off my list. This even extends to my criticism in general; I’ve found myself arguing with other people so much less because I know whatever angry thought I have can be best expressed in the form of TV criticism. I don’t yell at someone that her relationship with her daughter is bad because she refuses to treat her as a person; I write about Buffy The Vampire Slayer and, in the process, end up interpolating my criticism into criticism of myself and my parents and people I’ve observed, all into a beautiful object of Buffy The Vampire Slayer criticism.

From a creative standpoint, a Personal Canon is less effective than an anti-canon; a list of works that infuriate you and drive you to fix them. Of all things, I’m strongly influenced by Curb Your Enthusiasm and the seeming process of Larry David. It still thrills me that he doesn’t seem to write fiction to win fights – he doesn’t present himself in either a flattering or unflattering light, but is simply using as funny event for a funny comedy. Nevertheless, I find myself wondering if he feels a sense of spiritual relief in this – like, this humiliating thing happened to him, but at least he made something good out of it. You can’t take bad things out of the world, but you can put good things into it. And to riff on the most important line ever written in a work of fiction, you can’t control how others will act, and you can’t control how they feel about things, and you certainly can’t decide where they are in their spiritual journey, but you can decide how you’ll respond.