The 2024 Clinically Handsomes
Awards for everything in my life
February cartoon contest is available here.
Congrats to Tyler D. from Santa Barbara for winning the previous cartoon contest with the entry below.
Now onto the awards…
A Real Pain
Everyone is carrying around some kind of pain; generational, personal, or physical. That’s the conundrum of life in the information age, can we feel all the pain of the past and the present, truly feel it, and still be functional adults. And what do we sacrifice when we grin and bear it. What do we lose. What do the people around us lose.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, how is it possible to truly feel all the horrible shit constantly happening and keep logging into work. The Hills are on fire and I’m complaining that the J is running late.
A Real Pain explores this tension in a simple way. David (Jesse Eisenberg) has a good job and a family and palms down pills to keep his anxiety at bay. Kieran Culkin as Benji has been rightfully lauded, but I also love this performance. David gives the impression of someone who has accumulated so much pain his bones would crumble if he acknowledged it, keeping a straight face and saying sorry and thank you is his only agency.
On the other side, Benji feels everything. He weeps, throws tantrums, and walks around without socks.1 But despite being intensely difficult and abrasive, he is able to connect with himself and others in a deeper way than David can. David cut out those parts of himself to function in society, feeling everything all the time was clearly unsustainable.
This movie is a lot of things—a road trip movie, a Holocaust movie, and a buddy comedy; and it does all of these things really well. But at its core, A Real Pain is an exploration of what everyone in some shape or form represses to get through the day and what they gain and lose by doing so. I’m not sure I’ll rewatch anytime soon, but I’ll sure keep thinking about it.
Industry
I watched a lot of garbage in 2024. And there’s a bit of garbage amongst the nominees, but let me defend myself for a minute before you raise your voice. Shoresy is surprisingly emotionally poignant for a show about a team of philandering semi-professional hockey players, and I genuinely cannot wait for the next season to drop. Survivor is my favorite shared viewing experience when it’s on the air, I highly recommend doing a pool with your friends. And Rising Impact was the silliest binge watch of the year, but would probably only hit for the very rare likely virgin diagram of golf and anime lovers.
And I admit, The Traitors is unabashedly trashy television. It has an inherently flawed format—a game of mafia staged in a castle where “The Faithful” try to identify “The Traitors” based on absolutely nothing but vibes. And this goal is ultimately futile as the traitors can just recruit more traitors when one of them gets picked off, it absolutely makes no sense at all. But despite these fundamental flaws, a bunch of people accusing each other of lies based on nothing but a facial expression or if someone didn’t raise a glass to toast at dinner is unbelievable TV. There are several versions of this show available on Peacock, the US version has an all-reality cast from shows like Survivor and Big Brother. But I prefer the UK version, where the twenty contestants are actual civilians. Seeing unpolished personas on TV along with watching real-ass-shit like race and class relations play out in the group dynamic is fascinating. I recommend season 2 of the UK version where you can find one of the most diabolical, sociopathic traitor performances of all time; along with some other really competent and compelling gameplay.
Now that we got that out of the way, my winner for best show is far and away Industry on HBO. The show that was once branded as Skins at a bank has evolved significantly each season on air. I had high hopes and was not let down, season 3 absolutely rips. Ken Leung gives a generational performance as a long-in-the-tooth MD trying to keep up with a changing business, Harper Stern may be the best pro / antagonist on TV, and my sweet innocent boy Robert Spearing is the most heartbreaking fictional character to root for at the moment. It’s smart, it’s funny, every interaction and line feels significant and pays off down the line. It’s the best shit on TV2 and I don’t think it’s particularly close.
Mikey Madison
What makes a performance good or great or the best? Roughly once a week I leave a theater or turn off the Apple TV from my couch and say, wow, [insert name] was great. It’s almost always unclear what I’m responding to; is it the performance bringing out long dormant emotions, or maybe I’m intrigued by an actor stepping into a role opposite their public persona, or maybe, in the case of most Timothee Chalamet movies, I just fuck with the off-screen persona so anything goes.
I think awards like the Oscars follow similar subjective and illogical patterns. There are the “career achievement awards,” where an actor is given their flowers not necessarily for the film they were nominated for, but rather for a lifetime of solid performances and near-misses. This year, Ralph Fiennes is the odds-on favorite to win Best Actor for Conclave. He is excellent, but it’s a role he could sleepwalk through and still put on a very good performance. I believe he should have won an Oscar for Schindler’s List or The Grand Budapest Hotel, in which he brings a bizarre sort of twee gravitas to the iconic role of Monsieur Gustave.
Award show histories are also littered with wins for actors going through physical transformations—think Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers Club, Christian Bale in The Machinist, Charlize Theron in Monster, or Joaquin Phoenix in The Joker. Beautiful people going ugly (temporarily and with the help of doctors of course) has always been effective. We fall in love with the mythos of acting, the sickos who go fully method just to appear on-screen for fifteen minutes in a movie that might be mid. But for every Michael Fassbender in Hunger, there are ten Ashton Kutchers in Jobs3 or Shia LaBeouf in The Tax Collector.4
My rubric is a little different, I like to think about the truly great performances as so transcendent that the viewer couldn’t possibly imagine another actor in the role. Or indeed, the film would float away without the anchor of the performance. I think Adrien Brody in The Brutalist,5 Kieran Culkin in A Real Pain, and Mikey Madison in Anora all qualify here.
But Mikey Madison, as the titular Anora, absolutely turns in the (imho) best performance of the year. She is asked to cover a tremendous amount of ground as the film whiplashes between tones and locations. For the role to work, she simultaneously needs to be flashy and grounded, violent and vulnerable, and domineering and powerless.
Her performance also checks some Oscar voter boxes—perfecting a Long Island accent, studying Russian, executing a pole dancing routine, and of course, learning how to twerk. It’s a showy and brash performance, but also at points quiet and heartbreaking. Maybe it’s the advantage of casting a relative unknown, but I can’t imagine anyone else embodying the role with the same energy, almost singlehandedly at times carrying a slightly bloated script over the line to excellence.
MJ Lenderman
MJ Lenderman’s music kind of reminds me of David Foster Wallace’s writing. Your mileage on whether that comparison is positive or negative may vary, but I don’t think there’s a songwriter that captures consumptive yearning better than him. Some lines from the album that have stuck with me:
“We sat under a half-mast McDonald’s flag”
“So you say I’ve got a funny face/It makes me money”
“I know going on vacation brings out the worst in everyone”
“You said Vegas is beautiful at night/And it’s not about the money/You just like the lights”
This album is an economical nine songs. There’s no space wasted, I think you could tattoo the lyrics to the entire album on one arm.6 This album is like the book that made you feel a little weird when you read it but you can’t stop thinking about it years later. That is, to me, the highest praise.
"Little Homies”, Vince Staples
The commonality between the songs I fucked with this year is they are all mood-changers. Like I can feel my brain moving and mushing into different spots once these tracks hit my ear canals.7 If I want to get in a self-love mood I flip on “Treat Myself” by Chief Keef. Listening to him gleefully exclaim “Bitch, I wake up in the morning, spark a blunt, and be myself/ take a look up in the mirror, I just wanna squeeze myself,” absolutely gets me going. By the time he shouts, “I start wearin' yellow diamonds, it look like I peed myself,” I am ready to run through the virtual wall to my Zoom therapist’s office.
Opposite to that, when Bon Iver moans “I’ve really damn been on such a violent spree,” I snap out of whatever mood I was in and return to the suffocating atmosphere of self-awareness and regret. Malcolm Todd, a new-to-me artist, makes me want to hop on an e-bike and go on a first date with someone I’m wholly incompatible with when “Roommates” plays.
All of these tracks tickle my brain but none had a measurable, and almost embarrassingly so, therapeutic impact on me like “Little Homies” by Vince Staples.8 Over groovy, vaguely ominous production, Vince eschews a traditional hook in favor of a simple mantra: “Life hard, but I go harder.” This shit is more effective than any self-help. Life hard, but I go harder! Get out of bed.
The Winner by Teddy Wayne
I don’t typically use Goodreads. I enjoy the experience I rarely get with any media these days, coming in completely blind to what other people might be fucking with. But immediately after finishing The Winner, I had to take a look. I thought people would be pissed, and I was not disappointed. A bunch of one and two-star reviews with comments like, “only a man could have written this,” “misogynistic drivel,”9 and my personal favorite, “After reading this book I even found the title to be repulsive.”
The last quote sums up why I think this book is so successful. It follows a similar character to the ones found in Wayne’s other novels; a bland and white everyman whose affability conceals a rotten core. My first experience with Teddy Wayne was reading the novel Loner, a novel which builds to an act so disturbing I had to take a break before reading the last ten pages or so. This is the Teddy Wayne feeling—the disgust of realizing you were rooting for or at the least empathizing with a person whose soul has gone bad. His follow-ups The Apartment and Great Man Theory cover similar thematic ground of class, artistic jealousy, technology, and what happens when mediocre men reach the end of their rope.
The Winner feels a little different; for one, the cover looks like any generic thriller you might see poolside at a resort on Turks and Caicos.10
But like it’s main character, the surface conceals something much meaner—a thriller, yes, but also a class critique, a police procedural, a smutty mess that makes you want to take a shower after reading. Early on, a girl texts our protagonist after a one-night-stand something along the lines of, “You think you are a good person, but you aren’t.” This could be thesis of a personal essay for most characters in the Teddy Wayne universe—people who, in their desperate attempts to maintain social or economic status, slowly corrode. I won’t spoil the ending, but after reading it I also found the title repulsive, it’s supposed to be.
Sappe
Most of my picks this year are repeats, but goddamn do they still hit. The lamb ribs at Eyval are still my favorite bite in the city, dahi puri at Usha’s is the closest I get to God all year, and there isn’t a better place in the world to chat absolute shit and split a massive Caesar than at Bernie’s.
I also loved new-to-me Huda in East Williamsburg, recommended by a friend of the blog, which has my favorite eggplant dish in the city.
But, maybe due to my increasing new restaurant and experience fatigue, only one meal really blew me away: the one I had at Sappe in West Village. I wasn’t expecting a great meal, I was running late to a birthday dinner, and as I crossed 8th ave from the Fancy CVS side onto the vibe desert of 14th street, I had low expectations. When I finally stumbled in, I was thrown off by the brightly colored, kitschy, buzzing, Instagrammable interior.
I sat on one end of the table with half my view obscured by a large plant, conferred with the manager about my nut allergy, and commenced the most flavorful meal in recent living memory. Soon enough I was shoveling my face with skewers of anything I could grab, which reminded me of a more heavily seasoned, spiced, and seared version of my beloved yakitori. The wings, fried and sprinkled with some kind of chili-lime-salt powder, were the best I’ve had in my life. And the Tom Yum, oh Lord the Tom Yum! Despite my small intestine organizing a preemptive peaceful protest inside me, I persisted and consumed no less than four bowls.
I thought I might have walked in to some kind of sceney and bland influencer trap. How happy I was to be wrong.
Nakameguro
Hanging out in Nakameguro feels like having a dream so pleasant you’d rather not wake up. I don’t even have distinct memories of what I did when I was chilling there. For sure I hit the excellently curated J’antiques, the rare vintage store that doesn’t suck. I probably walked along the canal, sipped an overpriced matcha, and commented on the ‘fits of some exceedingly well-dressed toddlers. I don’t remember, I just remember feeling true contentment. For people like me who yearn to walk around and talk shit, it’s the perfect playground.
Smooth Landing
I spent a solid chunk of the year trying to recreate the famous (in my world) saffron martini at the excellent Eyval in East Williamsburg. My third attempt actually came close—the secret was using a fancy-ass gin (Bar Hill) and infusing the saffron for longer. I also found that a tiny bit of maple syrup balanced it all out. But honestly, it’s less work and more delicious to just go to Eyval.
The 50/50 martini at Cervo’s is damn near perfect; strong, subtle, and refreshing. It’s blasphemous to serve a martini on the rocks but this one hits hard. I haven’t seen martini variants on ice elsewhere in the city, but I’d welcome more in the eternal battle against lukecold martinis.
But my drink of the year is the Smooth Landing at Otis in East Williamsburg. The menu describes it as a gingery twist on a paper plane, but unlike a paper plane, it’s served on the rocks with yuzu in place of lemon. The result is a refreshing and balanced drink, perfect for sipping while you not condescendingly at all explain that the restaurant location used to be a tailor shop.11
Shout-out friend of the blog Yuzu Co, highly recommend subbing yuzu juice for lemon for a more zingy, but most importantly, more ~Japanese~ cocktail.
Rap Beef
What a weird year to be online. Every minute you are just one scroll away from discovering a new animal obsession or conspiracy theory or footage of a presidential candidate literally getting shot in the face. I reflected a lot this year on what over a decade of being chronically online has done to my neural pathways. The main thing is my capacity to be shocked; by either an event, a joke, or the capacity of other people to be shitty, is truly cooked. The exceptions are our nominated moments.
Speaking of Luigi, big shoutout to him for getting multiple beautiful women to reach out asking if I knew him.12 This tale had many shocks—a murder in broad daylight, scraping Citi Bike data… wait he’s hot? Wait, I went to school with him? Wait, he also lived in Honolulu? Wait, his Goodreads presence is fire. Wait, he’s really hot. This moment might sum up 2024 to me—a coldblooded murder in broad daylight happens and my first instinct is to make a meme.
The Trump assassination attempt was another odd one. Again, my Reddit-infested brain went straight to conspiracies. Makes sense given the first comment at the dinner table that night was how he essentially had locked up a presidential win. One thing about Trump is he takes advantage of every moment, fist-pumping the air with blood running down his face was more effective than any paid ad attacking immigrants or trans people. I haven’t been able to listen to “Many Men” since.
Hawk Tuah lived the American dream in two months: go viral for sex shit, make podcast, create meme coin, rug-pull meme coin, disappear with the money and Pookie. Honestly good for her. Not sure if Moo Deng belongs on this list, but she was doing her thing. Shouts out Moo Deng.
But Kendrick vs. Drake eclipsed all of this, the first domino of this saga (the release of “Like That”) was in March of 2024, which might as well be prehistorical in internet time… and yet, we are still talking about it! Kendrick just performed at the Super Bowl off the back of winning five Grammys for “Not Like Us.” Side note, I feel like “Euphoria” deserved at least three of those five wins. And if I’m being completely honest, the excellent and forgotten “Family Matters” deserved a nomination.
I wrote about this previously, but the Rap Beef captured everything that I actually like about the internet. It created genuine anticipation, fostered (theoretically) respectful debates and arguments, and most importantly, incentivized the homies to spend more time together bumping music and talking shit. It feels very rare these days that the internet brings people together in a real way, so shout out Kendrick and Drake for giving us a group chat topic that wasn’t a murder or an attempted murder. Also I don’t think it’s done quite yet, a friend of the blog has recently informed me that Drake is cooking up something diabolical on his travels in Australia. Until that drops, I’ll keep refreshing Reddit.
Kapital
I was slightly less into clothes this year. I’m not sure why. I had a nightmare recently where I bought a replica of a jacket I already owned, my brain overtaken by some kind of consumption dementia. I have everything I need; a tastefully oversized tux for black tie weddings, formal loafers, casual loafers, three-season jackets, zero-season jackets, ugly footwear, and big ass pants in damn near every color.
Without the organization help of an ex-of-the-blog, my closet has become its own delicate natural environment. If I open a door the wrong way or shift a shirt surreptitiously, the entire deck of cards will collapse, cascading cavalcades of cashmere off the shelves and onto my shamefully dusty floor. With this logistical challenge in mind, my consumption patterns have changed slightly. Whereas my focus in previous years was on the (completely imaginary) “gaps” in my wardrobe by stocking up on basics and theoretical fits for events that would likely never happen, this year I was more drawn to garments that are, for lack of a better word, fun.
All the brands on this list are fun in their own way. Auralee has, in my opinion, the most touchable clothes on the planet and the best color palate. Rich reds, dusty purples, and pale greens will always hit for me. This shit is costly as hell, but I highly recommend trying stuff on, getting sticker shock, and setting google alerts to see if the item you are lusting after ever hits an acceptable price point.
Our Legacy continues to make great jeans and the most fun footwear in the game. It remains to be seen how the brand changes under LVMH ownership,13 but I have faith they will keep pumping out voluminous and off-kilter garments. James Coward makes you look like a swagged-out railroad conductor, and Cale produced by single favorite item14 I touched this year. And Lady White Co. is still my beloved and trustworthy provider of quality garments—always unbranded, consistent, and fits perfectly. I could wear all LWC and be happy as a clam assuming that said clam has health care and isn’t shouldering the downstream consumer impacts of foreign tariffs.
But none of these brands do fun as well as Kapital. On my pilgrimage to all six Kapital stores in Tokyo, I saw a plethora of truly head-scratching garments. Fun doesn’t always work! Some of this shit seemed barely wearable. I tried on a trench coat that in its smallest size, still dragged on the floor. I tried on a souvenir jacket that for some godforsaken reason can be converted into a pillow. And the famous Kapital trucker hats feature some of the worst Japanese to English Google Translate money can buy.
No brand on this list put out as many stinkers, but none have as good a time doing so. And when Kapital hits the sweet spot, there’s truly nothing like it. I wore my century denim jeans more than any other pant this year; the undoubtedly unnecessary sashiko stitching covering every inch makes it feel like I’m wearing full chain-mail on my way to pick up grass-fed whole milk from the grocer. The track jackets make me feel aerodynamic as fuck. And the Frankenstein-bandana motif on the puffer below makes me happy, it’s rare you get to rock five different shades of your favorite color at once. Most of this shit is not functional or practical, but isn’t it practical to make yourself grin on the last look in the full-length mirror before you leave the crib. Seems practical to me.
Donald Tr**p
This may violate the rules of this awards blog, as 95% of what makes our 47th President the Bozo of the Year has gone down since he took office again in 2025, but fuck it, I need a place to vent. Fundamentally, many conservatives believe that the government scope should be limited. I don’t think government is shrinking; rather, all that power is just being consolidated and hoarded in the executive branch.
He started off hot with a proposed federal spending freeze that’s already had concerning downstream effects.15 Public health care was jeopardized, infrastructure projects were paused, and food stamp programs like SNAP were put at risk. These programs cover a lot of ground but I think the best example of the disconnect here is in the discourse around federal funding for free lunches for kids. The funding freeze put these programs at risk, which would potentially eliminate school lunches for millions of children across America. Seems like it should be a pretty cut-and-dry issue, no? No, Republican Rep. Rich McCormick suggested on CNN that impacted students should get jobs. These programs serve kids as young as four or five, but if Project 2025 fully plays out, the dude flipping your burger at McDonald’s might be a little greener than you’d expect. They should start playing Cocomelon in the break room.
Known bozo Elon Musk, when he takes breaks from Zooming into alt-right rallies in Europe to condemn multi-culturalism, has been given permission to hold a fraud-finding hackathon in the West Wing. Keeping up with his Tweets and trying to parse what’s real and what’s not is a full-time affair. An unelected billionaire having this much power seems bad though, right?
The administration has launched not only a war on diversity and inclusion, but a war on information. Thousands of government webpages have been edited to remove information related to diversity and other controversial topics, and many of these webpages have been scrubbed from the net altogether.16 After Trump’s two-gender executive order, there’s also been extensive effort to remove references to the transgender community in government documentation. Government travel advisories now refer to the “LGB” community. The irony of trans erasure is it’s the one group of people they can’t fucking stop talking about.
Perhaps most ghoulish was his brazen TV appearance where, alongside Netanyahu, he proclaimed his desire to “buy and own Gaza,”17 permanently displacing the Palestinian people in the process. I’m not sure what the diplomatic solution is for this region, but I’m fairly confident a Trump casino and golf course on the Gaza strip is not the answer. But who knows, maybe many years and wars later, Gaz-a-lago will just be another part of the new American Empire.
Thank you for your continued support.
You can get in touch with me via email at clinicallyhandsome@substack.com or via IG DM @clinicallyhandsome.
I think this movie has a foot thing. I have a thing for my foot doctor. Dr. K if you are a friend of the blog please DM me
Excited for the return of Severance and my beloved disaster House of the Dragon this year
Went to the hospital with pancreatic failure after recreating the all-fruit diet of Steve Jobs
Got a very real full chest tattoo for a movie with 17% on Rotten Tomatoes
AI accent aside
Y’all think it’s a bible verse tattoo and it’s just the complete lyrics to Manning Fireworks 🤣
I have no idea how hearing works
Side note I recently heard this shit in a Taco Bell commercial
Open to a debate on whether art with intentionally misogynistic narrators is at its core misogynistic
Shout out Sandals resorts, please sponsor the blog
Took my parents here on their anniversary once and my mom loved this fact, don’t hate
I went to Penn but did not know him, we had a single IG mutual that he was following
First big change is no VAT discount for US customers. Also it’s more expensive :(
I will not be buying this, don’t worry
As of Feb 10 a judge has ruled to restore frozen funding. But JD Vance also tweeted some nonsense about the judicial branch’s inability to control the executive branch. So we shall see
The much maligned USAID government site (https://www.usaid.gov/) is currently down
Yeah he actually said this shit
Anyone But You and Moo Deng absolutely robbed