Please Kiss My 2009 Away
The year dragged itself across the finish line like something that’s been dying since February—upright, technically, but nobody’s impressed. 365 days of laughing until something hurt, crying until something stopped, drinking until the body made decisions the brain hadn’t signed off on. Before the new decade shows up and erases whatever this was, I asked a handful of people to help me sort through the rubble.
Filippa Smeds had a year that crammed everything significant into a single terrible month: a breakup, her grandmother dying, and a best friend who completed a full transformation into a complete idiot.
Somehow the same 365 days also contained Peaches Geldof, a particular boy whose name she kept to herself, and a genuine love for the debut record from Name The Pets. Best film: The Boat That Rocked—because it has the best soundtrack of all time.
Can’t argue.
Nicholas Gazin, an artist from New York, DJed the Vice Holiday Party while his artwork appeared on the liquor bottle label and generally had a busy year working alongside musicians and known names. But the peak was his birthday dinner at Ninja—a restaurant where the staff dress as ninjas, which is the correct way to run a business. Some sweet girls took him out. He ate a steak the size of a laptop, got completely obliterated, fell over, and cried from joy. It was great.
Drink of the year: Jameson and ginger ale, which he described as tasting like hell in the best possible way—something you can keep ordering until you’re drunk enough to bother everyone in the room and fall down the stairs with your pants around your ankles. He filed a defense of Pabst Blue Ribbon for hot days—watery and cheap, which is exactly the point—while acknowledging Guinness increasingly feels like effort.
Alex Sim-Wise played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on a massive television in the nicest hotel room she’d ever been in and called it the best day of her life. Game of the year: Batman: Arkham Asylum—somehow stupid but beautifully made.
Song on repeat: Pictures of Me by Elliott Smith. Hottest person of 2009: Michael Cera, which is a perfectly reasonable answer and says something true about where the culture was sitting that year.
Juliet Elliott’s year was defined entirely by movement. Five days in New York with her closest friends—biking through Manhattan and Brooklyn from morning until the bars opened, then out every night. She also quit her job at Warner Records, an act she described with the reverence most people reserve for religious conversion. I work for myself now. Thank God. I’m so much happier.
Album of the year was Sleep’s Holy Mountain—not a recent release, but her friend Jack flew in from the States specifically to catch Sleep’s first shows in years at All Tomorrow’s Parties in Minehead. They rented a caravan, watched two sets in two days, one of them the full album start to finish. She met her boyfriend Steve at the festival; they bonded over that record and became close. She almost claimed she’d made it through the year unscathed, then remembered: split chin, burst eardrum, six stitches, weeks of impaired hearing. It had genuinely slipped her mind.
Carolin, who wrote for this journal, handed me the year’s best quote collection. Her personal highlight was the aftermath of a long breakup, friends arriving in force—as cliché as it sounds, that’s just how it is.
Album: The ’59 Sound by The Gaslight Anthem. And then the quotes. An anonymous acquaintance approached her and opened with: You’re basically a normal girl, except you drink like a man, look like a cartoon elf, and talk more than I could read in a lifetime. Want to sleep together?
The same person later assessed her academic aura: You look like you study renewable energies. Am I right?
The Apple Store clerk who refused to hand over brochures because we don’t cut down trees.
The neighbor appearing in his doorway in his underwear: Have you seen my washing machine?
And Hannah’s perfect summary of what this site was always going for: We’re just normal people who want to take over the world. Like Pinky and the Brain. Or Hitler, back in the day.
I also got a mention: apparently I grabbed Nora Tschirner’s chest through the cinema screen at the premiere of a German romcom—physically impossible, spiritually achieved—in front of several hundred people. I stand by every second of it.
Palina Rojinski, then hosting for MTV, told me her year’s finest moment was Shakira noticing her earrings. H&M, three euros,
Palina said. Shakira asked if they still had them. Album on permanent repeat: Rules by The Whitest Boy Alive. Film: Slumdog Millionaire—a moving, colorful, modern fairy tale. My emotions went on a carousel ride for two hours.
Drink: vodka soda with lemon or lime, for the freshness and because it gets you properly wrecked.
My own year. Best moment: drunk, camera in hand, roaming the city at some hour I can no longer reconstruct, asking complete strangers the most idiotic questions I could think of. That I didn’t get hit remains 2009’s most unlikely miracle. Best film: Avatar—bloated, spectacular, practically evangelical in its optimism, and I sat there loving it anyway. I’m choosing to blame Michelle Rodriguez entirely, who reminded me of someone I used to know in a way that made the whole thing feel more personal than it had any right to. Best album: Two Suns by Bat for Lashes. No surprises there, but Daniel is the song of the decade and I’m not taking that back. Best thing about 2009? It’s over.