What Kind of Year Has It Been?

With 2012 rapidly receding and 2013 inexorably encroaching in defiance of the Mayans' will, it's time for reflection and the arbitrary ranking of art. Since I primarily write about films, I'll be putting up my Top 20 of the year up on January 1st as per tradition, but before then, I wanted to talk about the non-cinematic stuff that delighted and enchanted me this year.

Most of it's TV related because TV is still the most exciting medium going - compared to the admittedly fairly good year in cinema, TV had another banner year in a steady succession of them - and because I read precisely one book released this year (Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise, highly recommended) but there's music, comedy and such mixed in as well so that the New Year can begin completely free of guilt over unacknowledged greatness.

Ante Up: Differing Depictions of Cards in Film and Television

To feed my already fervid anticipation for the third season of FX's Louie - which, so far, has been great - I recently rewatched the first two seasons. Whilst watching the second episode of the show, "Poker/Divorce", I was really struck by how, even though one of the segments of the episode unfolded entirely around a poker game between Louis C.K and his friends, hence the title of the segment, the game itself was completely incidental to the scene.