A longer and more accurate best of the year list

The top 10 lists I love so much tend to not do much justice for the type of actual movies, music, TV, and books a regular person might encounter in a year - they may tell you an opinion on what had a 2006 release date, but not much else (not that that's ever stopped me). An actual person comes into new old things all the time - this year, the best album I heard for the first time was not my #1 album pick, Taking The Long Way, but Joni Mitchell's 1972 classic For The Roses. This year, the most moving movie I had the pleasure of watching was Mon Oncle, a movie released in 1958. This is a list of those things that I encountered this year that were life changing. It's a propos that some were released this year, but that's more coincidence than a statement. What I mean is that it was an important year for me, a year of analyzing who we I am and what I do. Perhaps it was for many people. For one person with a lot of questions in his head, there won't be ten better pieces of work to be found.

The ten works that changed my life this year.

1. “Join The Club” The Sopranos (2006)

This was the exchange of dialogue:

- Woman: “We’re just happy to be in the presence of the man whose sales team stole the brass ring for twelve straight quarters.”

Tony: “It’s not so impressive. There’s always a faster gun. I’m 46 years old. I mean, who am I, where am I going?

Woman: “Join the club.”

The episode has to be the beginning of where the hatred for The Sopranos sixth season begins. For close to 15 minutes, you’re locked into an alternate world of Tony’s comatose subconscious – he’s reimagined himself a businessman out west on conference, he’s been stripped of his New Jersey accent. His wife’s voice is stern and foreign, his kids generic and young. And Tony, Tony’s been replaced by Kevin Finnerty, or …inFinnerty, or, infinity, a confrontation with the end of his times. Still David Chase writes it like a plausible scenario – a dense text of the everyday, a bar, a beacon spinning out the window somewhere far off. He’s confronted by Buddhist monks (“Lose your arrogance!” they yell and push him down), a TV screen of a burning bush, a pro-Jesus ad declaring “Are sin, death, and disease real?”

And that dialogue. A simple confrontation. Tony is indeed a businessman, the me-first representation of American capitalism, and there’s still a faster gun (he’s just been shot, after all, by a demented old man who’s lost his mind). It begins intense speculations – are our accomplishments generic when it counts, in dark bars and dark times. They ask Tony how he, “made the leap from selling patio furniture to fiber optics,” a more businesslike way of saying how he became someone.

But he’s not certain he’s become anyone, not certain he can live with the weight of what he’s done, confounded by the notion that he’s done anything, or that maybe he hasn’t. He loses his identity, which, for a businessman, is his briefcase – “My whole life was in there!” he declares, and indeed it is. His life is his possession, the thing he’s cultivated, and yet it could mean nothing, the cultivation replacing the experience of living.

There’s no way to begin with the ways this type of speculation fueled my year – the times I stood apart from my life and imagined it somewhere else entirely. Tony’s 46, I’m 24, I feel the equally confounded. What was it, what is it, what’s ahead. Life inevitably, whatever confrontations arise, leads you to ask the same question.

I lose myself in those words – the brass sales ring for 12 straight quarters. Some type of success, some type of golden life, for some amount of time. But what is it. What.

2. “For The Roses”/ “Judgment of the Moon & Stars” Joni Mitchell (1972)

“Heard it in the wind last night, it sounded like applause

Did you get a round resounding for you way up here.”

“Condemned to wires and hammers, strike every chord that you feel.”

I knew Joni Mitchell was a poet, but I didn’t know Joni Mitchell was a poet. I think For The Roses is an album of profound bravery, a declaration, and it still speaks of the same confusion Tony speaks of. The song, “For The Roses,” is a song that’s baffled in the face of fame: “Up the charts, into the airport/ your name’s in the news, everything’s first class/ the lights go down and it’s just you up there, getting them to feel like that.” What an evocation of that sensation, of the sense of a loneliness getting channeled into people, of one self connecting to others. Because everyone’s a lone like that.

And it’s about speaking some truth, or some things you think are truth. You’re faced with the judgment of the moon and stars, an eternal critic living inside that sounds like infinity declaring its assessment. Life has condemned Joni to a piano, to words, and though she declares “It just don’t do it/ like the song of a warm body loving your touch.” That if you’re stuck with one ability, create and harbor that ability.

I suppose I think of it as writing. I suppose in my life, writing about music and TV and movies and books is the thing that makes sense to me. I suppose that if I saw life explained in the sixth season of The Sopranos, personal risk in For The Roses, it leaves me obligated to say so, or write so. So I do, and though I am essentially nobody, it gives me the obligation to attempt anyway.

There are souvenirs of life, Joni says – “So you get to keep the pictures, that don’t seem like much.” Yet if we are condemned to our memories, to who we are, we must be it. Because we will be dead. The moment terrifies we declare some truth, it terrifies. It also makes us who we are – hearing it in the wind, the sound of applause, in whatever form, that follows us.

3. Fox Confessor Brings The Flood & Blacklisted Neko Case (2006, 2002)

There simply is no artist like Neko Case, but I did not know that, or even hear of her a year ago. “I am the dying breed that still believes/ hunted by American dreams,” she sings in “Things That Scare Me,” Blacklisted’s first song.

But you cannot simply sing a line like that. That is not something you just say. She earns it – “Fluorescent lights engage/ black birds frying on a wire/ same birds that followed me to school when I was young” is the first line. In it is paranoia, in it is the sense that all things are true, in it is the sense that it is a struggle to even see, to make sense of all that’s before us.

Blacklisted – with songs of Lady Pilots not afraid to die, of red wine teasing with “I’m gonna ruin everything,” of bodies murdered on the interstate, of a city of gloom and anger existing in our absence, of fast trains – is an album of trying to live both within and outside society’s boundaries. It’s not a work of marginalization in the regular sense, it is just about being true to who you are while being bound to a certain type of expectations. When, in “I Wish I Was The Moon,” she sings of loneliness – “God bless me I’m the free man/ with no place free to roam/ I’m paralyzed and collared-tight/ no pills for what I fear.” She wishes she was a source of light, something that rises and falls, something of its own accord, of order.

Fox Confessor Brings The Flood pushes that notion a step further, into speaking the truth and meeting fate. Its opener, “Margaret Vs. Pauline” is about the girl whose “love pours like a fountain, love steams like rage” who simply is denied by fate, as “everything is so easy for Pauline.” From there, it’s sudden madness, it’s the “Star Witness” who watches as all she loves dies, it’s the widows of St. Angel imagining a world scattered by the vapor of their lovers, John the Baptist saying “no man can do such miracles without the Lord to entreat him.” They are people whose fate was to speak, and to suffer because of it, people who met a destiny they were bound to oblige.

Neko Case could be said to have a voice like Patsy Cline’s, and it would be true, but Neko’s is more passionate, because it too is her destiny to speak, and she does it with power, with conviction. In “That Teenage Feeling,” she sings with a late-night sorrow, “Nothing comforts me the same as my brave friend who says/ I don’t care if forever never comes, ‘cause I’m holding out for that teenage feeling.” She uses her bravery to hold out for life.

4. “The Long Way Around” Dixie Chicks (2006)

For a while, I judged my time and mood and attitude by how large my smile was hearing the guitar strum that opens “The Long Way Around.” Poor Natalie Maines was vilified for saying the most innocent of political comments, and she muses as the song opens that her friends from high school “married their high school boyfriends/ moved into houses in the same zip codes where their parents lived,” and “I could never follow.”

There was something elemental and thrilling about the revived, unashamed Dixie Chicks, women speaking on the importance of hearing your voice, of being true to who you are, of making your decisions and showing yourself and shrugging off what comes along with it. The album is wonderful, the movie, Shut Up and Sing, chronicling their years of controversy and rebirth with Taking The Long Way is inspiring. Yet what makes “The Long Way Around” their best and most invigorating song is its break from the high drama of their career to establish a sense of pride and bewilderment at all they’ve been through, of the flawed and wonderful thing they did – “I opened my mouth and I heard myself.” She reminds us “Guess I could’ve made it easier on myself, but I could never follow.” It makes you want to never follow either.

5. Ghosts Paul Auster (1986)

A man hides on a park bench and pretends to be another man, or a man in place to be watched by the man he supposedly needs to watch. He watches him from a Brooklyn apartment, wanders across the Brooklyn Bridge and remembers his walks with his father, but as his identity becomes more entwined with being observed, he begins to wonder who he really is. The beauty of Paul Auster working at his mind-bending best is all evident in this, the second of his New York trilogy – of sounds that wander New York waiting to be heard, of the process of observation being simultaneously what keeps us imprisoned and proves that we exist. Reading the short 90 pages of Ghosts is to get clued into the literal shades of your consciousness you never quite want to venture towards. I was reading it one day in October at the Lighthouse on 43^rd and Phinney when a woman saw it lying on my table and told me how “festive” it was to be reading a book called Ghosts just before Halloween. What I could not share was the chill of the book’s real sense of haunting, or it guidance.

6. “On The Morning After The Sixties” Joan Didion (1970)

It speaks to a between-era confusion that only Joan Didion knows how to muster, but that also speaks to an anxiety I so closely understand. She never identified with the generation that followed her, she realized, as she could never find hope in their protests, never find it so easy. “If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man’s fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending.”

That happy ending specifically is a life of clear and defined purpose, or at least the sense that such a thing exists, and it must be true that our generation is hers too, equally poised between times of clarity (or, more likely, an illusion of clarity – however a convincing one). Or, Didion, the most eloquent of writers anyway, simply perfectly capitulates the sense that experience will outrun purpose, leaving such a thing opaque and foreign. To say that this sense, this sense that Didion woke up to New Year’s Day 1970, is mine would be accurate, but it’s more accurate to say that the 60’s end for us in our twenties.

7. “Cortes Island” Alice Munro (1997)

Simply one line, buried amongst the (as always, for Munro) perfect details of an elderly couple its narrator scrutinizes from afar: “Did you ever think people’s lives could be like that and turn out like this?” Like all of Munro’s astonishing short works, they marvel in the support systems human behavior have created, the baffling, fascinating ways we become who we are. The character, Mrs. Gorrie, reminds me of so many older women I know, and it’s a mix of fascination, revulsion, and familiarity that make it all so affecting, all so indicative of who we are.

8. “Moonlight Mile” The Rolling Stones (1973)

I’m always proud when I beat The Sopranos to a song. They used it in “Kaisha,” their unpopular but brilliant season finale, scored to a long nighttime drive – cold roads and dirt illuminated by headlights. What it captures is the proud weariness of “Moonlight Mile.” I listened to it too, repeatedly, for a while, on my way back from Israel – a whirlwind, and a time of separation, of confusion, and of lots of happiness. For Stones fans, it comes at the end of Sticky Fingers, a record that’s always been a little revoltingly perfect – a time when the Stones were matching brilliance with cockiness in a cycle that only made each more potent. “Moonlight Mile” should be excessive, but instead, it laments and seduces at once, Mick Jagger singing “Oh I am sleeping under strange strange skies” the most human statement of his life.

9. Catherine O’Hara in For Your Consideration

Say what you will of this latest Christopher Guest movie, none will be able to shake the image of O’Hara as Marilyn Hack watching the year’s Oscar nominations in blank horror to not see her name announced – as the nominations proceed to the Best Actor category, she mutters, from behind a terrifying facelift, “Marilyn Hack, just say Marilyn Hack” in full tragicomic terror.

I love the cynicism of For Your Consideration, but O’Hara makes it something else, makes it a story of wanting fulfillment to the point of derangement, a humanity that stems from need in a process gone terrifying. For all of For Your Consideration’s rather eerie recreations of Hollywood hype, it allows its characters to seem more understood by representing the hype accurately – how could anyone be sane in such an environment. O’Hara is the crux of all of that – her final monologue to a classroom of acting students makes you want to weep, or laugh, or run far far away from Hollywood, and each is an appropriate response.

10. Mon Oncle

The 1958 Jacques Tati classic is quirky and hilarious – it’s staged and scored with such whimsy, there are moments you’re amazed its entire cast of geometrically distinct people and weiner dogs don’t simply break out in an elaborate choreographed dance. They don’t because that elaborate choreographed dance is life, and everyone in the movie who seems in tune with it is far too deluded to notice it. The comedy exists at a futuristic house of a million automated gizmos (the kitchen appliances alone are beyond ridiculous), and sits on a lot with windows like eyes, a garage like a giant mouth, a hideous fish fountain that needs to be turned on before doors can be opened, a neighbor so posh she sometimes is mistaken for a wandering rug salesman, and a walkway so elaborate, people greet each other on it while walking in opposite directions.

Hulot, the protagonist of all of Tati’s movies, is on the outside of every modern contrivance, always wandering with his umbrella, always seemingly messing up every situation he wanders into. Yet simply by virtue of his goodwill, he survives, and even helps. A drama would make the sort of story of an outsider at odds with modern times a story of marginalization. A satire would make Hulot less charming than he is. Yet by saying almost no words in the movies, Hulot is something else – a slapstick philosopher, making his good nature so evident by its contrast to the bizarre and inexplicably complicated world around it. Few movies give you such nimble laughs while, essentially, giving you – or, I should say, giving me – advice. This is the type of movie that makes you believe in who you are in a senseless environment, and it does so by keeping you on a giddy high the entire time.

Best of the year lists

Once upon a time, it was my favorite nervous passtime to make lists. Growing up, I kept weekly tabs of my own personal Top 20 music countdown on folded paper hidden in my desk drawer. I wrote lists on every subject - top 10 Star Trek: TNG episodes, top 10 Sonic Youth songs, top 100 songs ever made (looking dramatically different every few years), top 100 movie scenes.

So it's always been my favorite time of year to see the short list of movies and music of the year, and I've written my own every year, digressing into top performances, rushing to see the onslaught of Oscar bait in December. In this blog, I will write my opinion of the ten best movies, albums, and singles of the year, and as I prepare a separate list on the 10 most meaningful pieces of music/movies/writing to me personally this year - a pivotal one for me, a not entirely interesting one for movies or music - I stop to wonder a bit about making the lists at all.

It is, above anything, a method of opinion setting, of stratifying what I saw, and, in a fashion that the critic in me is always placating, of validation that my opinion is the most important and well thought out opinion of all. By placing things in lists, you create quick references for this sort of thing - you start to think that a #1 or #4 placement of a certain work says something of who you are. Or, perhaps more innocently, it's a way to play important, a method for asking that my thoughts on the year be heard. I've moved my thoughts over here this year, for the brief amount of time I can devote to them, and for very few to register that they're being written. Yet here they are, a document of some kind that at least they were there.

In any case, my thoughts on the year.

Movies:

Movie lists are bound to be incomplete - studios save their best movies for December anyway, and it never seems to work out to see that movie you'd been waiting for while it remains in town. This year, more than ever, I feel like I missed all the best ones, and it's not entirely because I simply didn't have the time. Sherrybaby never came to Seattle, to my knowledge, Deliver Us From Evil left in a week, and quite honestly, the great independent movies that surprise me I'll catch up on months down the line. A couple years back, I was stunned after watching The Door On The Floor to discover it truly was one of the finest movies of that year, and I'd ignored it entirely when it was around. Those surprises are why I love movies, and I haven't had many of those in movies that came out this year.

That is also because nothing made me too extraordinarily excited this year. Even looking at the top of my list this year, almost nothing grabbed me as much as Junebug, The New World, or Brokeback Mountain did last year. The one above all others that did was Ali Salem's Sweet Land, a movie that attempts to do nothing else but tell a love story against the backdrop of a 1920 farm run by two immigrants who barely know enough English to speak to each other. It follows a simple, good natured farmer named Olaf, his mail-order bride, Inga, and the ways in which they learn to harvest, communicate, and connect. It's a movie that sounds like nothing, yet in following two characters forced to the bare minimum of communication, it forces them to communicate in tiny, forceful actions, something that makes the gestures of love and the nature of dreams the most definitive presence on screen, even as it makes its period tropes - an erotically exposed ankle! A subtext-loaded meal! - electric and spellbinding. It's a movie in which an older Inga, uttering the phrase "I know," has the power to devastate the viewer. Thinking about it, by barely trying, it tackles the language-as-divider themes of Babel, the value changes of The Queen, the strained family dynamics of Little Miss Sunshine, but makes each of those look like the most contrived of creations - in a year where the most ambitious movies looked to be the height of unconvincing showmanship, a movie like Sweet Land quietly proves itself braver, truer, and more moving than anything I saw this year. One scene - in which Inga, played beautifully by Elisabeth Reaser, silently shares an apple pie with her neighbor - speaks to the need for validation and connection amongst people, as well as to the reasons we act as people, even as it technically barely speaks at all.

Besides that, Todd Field's Little Children, is extraordinary because it might be the first movie I've seen surrounding a sexual affair in which those impulses were life affirming and escapist at once, in which the power of sexual compulsion was made sinister and human in the same breath. Quite simply, it made you feel its characters' compulsions were your own, and that it was the height of understanding to accept and disagree at once with what you were watching. It also features a performance of magnificent humanity by Kate Winslett, who deserves an Oscar. I say that having seen Steven Frears' The Queen, a fine movie I'm supposed to love, with a very good performance by Helen Mirren I'm also supposed to love. The Queen will be on more Top 10 lists this year, but it is not a superior movie.

The rest of my top ten list? There are great moments on there. United 93 faces directly the tension of not wanting to see what happened on September 11th, and also needing to see, to visualize what occurred. It is so powerful that at times, you may find yourself crying, or stirring, or desperate to do anything else, and this is, in its squirmy specificity, a triumph. Bubble, Steven Soderbergh's experiment in DV realism and distribution, is unmatched in its original vision of small town cynicism. The Good Shepherd brims with shadows and ideas, allowing the remoteness of its center to be a cipher of fascinating insight - the world, it seems, exists in the movie only in the magnification of Matt Damon's glasses lens. And For Your Consderation drops the interviews from the Christopher Guest movie, but gains in cynicism - it's an easy story of Hollywood hype, perhaps, but it also is a nasty and humane look at trying to find any way to keep your headin the movie industry (nasty because each of the characters sort of fail, and sort of succeed).

The rest? They're fine movies, I suppose - each has something fascinating about it, but none are movies I love.

Ten Best Movies of 2006:
1. Sweet Land
2. Little Children
3. United 93
4. Bubble
5. The Good Shepherd
6. For Your Consideration
7. Volver
8. Borat
9. Half Nelson
10. The Departed


Music:

There are a number of reasons I wouldn't make a great music critic, but chief amongst them is that I have no desire to do anything beyond following my instincts on music. I hate The Arctic Monkeys because they sound like everything else, but I haven't listened closely enough to know that specifically, and I don't think I ever will. I hate the Raconteurs because I don't much care for Jack White, and I have no desire to change that.

The other question one has to ask when writing these lists is, considering music is the most emotional, the most subjective of any medium, should you list the album that meant the most to you emotionally, or the one that's the most "important"? If I chose the latter, certainly Dylan's Modern Times - a magnificent updated text of covers and reappropriations to comment on modernity - would be #1 and not #3, and if I totally followed my emotions, certainly Neko Case's Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, an album I've written extensively about already, would tower over all others this year - it's an album of conceptual daring as well, it just happens to have been less heard. Instead, I chose The Dixie Chicks, a band of inspiration this year because Taking The Long Way is a little of both importance and emotion. It's second half gets weighty with filler, but Taking The Long Way is so moving and extraordinary because of what works on it - the brim of earned self-righteousness, confidence won and lost, the liberation and loneliness of speaking the truth, and, simply, beautiful melodies on what becomes important and powerful in life. "The Long Way Around," its opening number, is truer and more beautiful than every other song released this year.

As for singles, the pop ones that ruled the radio tended to be pretty charming (Yung Joc's mind-numbing cell phone ring "It's Goin Down" notwithstanding). The summer's two biggest songs, "Crazy" and "Promiscuous," prove us to be lucky to still be hearing things on the radio this punchy, and the rest of 'em - the techno-Jacko of "My Love," the motor-boating lunacy of "London Bridge" - aren't so slow on the uptake either.

I also included a quick list of some other great songs form imperfect albums, because it's always better those songs get heard too, no?

Five Best Albums of 2006:
1. Taking The Long Way Dixie Chicks
2. Fox Confessor Brings The Flood Neko Case
3. Modern Times Bob Dylan
4. The Information Beck
5. I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass Yo La Tengo

Ten Best Singles:
1. "Crazy" Gnarls Barkley
2. "Promiscuous" Nelly Furtado
3. "Gold Lion" Yeah Yeah Yeahs
4. "Not Ready To Make Nice" Dixie Chicks
5. "Sweet Talk" Spank Rock
6. "My Love" Justin Timberlake
7. "Ain't No Other Man" Christina Aguilera
8. "Unwritten" Natasha Beddingfield
9. "Irreplaceable" Beyonce
10. "London Bridge" Fergie

A mixtape of ten other terrific songs:
1. "Conceived" Beth Orton (from Comfort of Strangers)
2. "Summer Dress" Shawn Colvin (from These Four Walls)
3. "Modern Times" The Black Keys (from Magic Potion)
4. "My Mind Is Rambling" The Black Keys (from Chulahoma)
5. "Turquoise Boy" Sonic Youth (from Rather Ripped)
6. "The Mistress Witch From McClure" Sufjan Stevens (from The Avalanche)
7. "The Day Is Short" Jearlyn Steale (from A Prairie Home Companion Soundtrack)
8. "Sign On The Door" Kasey Chambers (from Carnival)
9. "Sidewalk" The Starlight Mints (from Drowaton)
10. "Bout It" Yung Joc (from Step Up Soundtrack)

Input, Output, Electricity

The night I returned to Seattle from Boulder, it was 20 degrees outside. I came into my bedroom and discovered, to my dismay, that a friend from Boulder who'd visited before I left had forgotten to close my windows. My books were on the ground, knocked over off their shelf by the wind, and the room itself could not have been more than 35 degrees.

This type of extreme cold is not endemic to Seattle. In my week in Colorado, the temperature rarely dipped below the 60's, but here in Seattle, it had been proclaimed the wettest November in the history of the city on the 14th, a surprising claim certainly, but considering the record-setting blizzard that struck the city around Thanksgiving, it was upgraded to Seattle's wettest month ever. Returning to the airport at 12:15 am (luckily, only an hour or so delayed from my original flight), my friends and I faced an extra long journey home - the greater Seattle area had been wracked with ice, and no one was capable of driving on it. Schools were closed for days, and people routinely sat in their house rather than face the possibility of going/ having to stay at work.

I wonder about arriving in the city the same year as its worst weather occurs - I often wonder about the purpose of coincidences like those, testing my resolve, and leaving me wondering what significance it plays in my own life (a selfish consideration certainly, but one I have to face that I have). It's also been the month of the death of a beloved director, Robert Altman, who Pauline Kael once described as the "filmmaker who spoils all other filmmakers for me." It's also been a month that's gotten me obsessed with Joni Mitchell, and introduced me to Todd Field's Little Chidren, the best movie I've seen this year.

Of those things. Altman has been a source of arguments amongst myself and my friends over the years (in fact, a friend offered me personal condolensces on his death, thinking me personally affected). I am a stalwart lover of Nashville, of its anarchy and possibility, of the fullness of character that emerges in quickly observed actions. I love 3 Women, Altman's overwhelming, baffling, brilliant dream of family, birth, reflections, on the way humans turn on and comfort each other. I love Short Cuts so much, I've seen it 4 or 5 times, at the expense then of 12 or 15 hours of my life. This year, when Altman's A Prairie Home Companion came out, I loved that after a 40 year career, Altman still had the power to make people at their most ordinary fascinate - the backstage scene in which Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep, as sisters, break into harmony almost spontaneously, only to be comforting each other on their long history together, was as moving as any scene I can remember.

My favorite critic, Owen Gleiberman, recently wrote a memoriam of Robert Altman in Entertainment Weekly, and his focus - on watching Nashville for the first time, on meeting Altman in Ann Arbor once upon a time - is really about how Altman continues to inspire all these years. While home for Thanksgiving, there was something similar in a recording of Joni Mitchell's Blue I burned for my mother, watching her hit replay multiple times on the Mitchell classic "A Case of You."

Blue, which is considered amongst the greatest of all singer/songwriter albums, is undeniably perect, but it's perhaps that perfection that makes me prefer its follow-up, For The Roses, and Mitchell's second masterpiece, Court and Spark, an arguably more flawed but more accessible record. For The Roses is wracked with brilliant half compositions that are brave bits of poetry set to piano, letting the heights of Mitchell's soprano take them in whatever direction she feels like taking them. Like Altman, Mitchell is an artist who's most in control when she appears anarchic. The title track to that album sings of life in the spotlight - "Up the charts/ off to the airport/ your name's in the news/ everything's first class/ the lights go down and it's just you up there/ getting them to feel like that."

Something about that line kills me - the type of specifics that make even being famous and in a position to influence themost relatable thing in the world, of people focusing their gaze and you simply being you in the process. For The Roses inspires, I think, because Mitchell's specifics tap so deeply into the well of every day thought, pinpoint so precisely the sense of wandering and uncertainty that I've come to be so familiar with this past year. Those half compositions I mentioned each pop into an unexpected moment of brutal clarity: "Lesson In Survival" - "When you dig down deep you lose good sleep/ and it makes you heavy company." "Let The Wind Carry Me" - "I get that strong longing/ and I want to settle and raise a child with somebody/ But it passes like the summer/ I'm a wild seed again/ Let the wind carry me." "Blonde in the Bleachers" - "Because it seems like you've got to give up such a piece of your soul when you give up the chase."

For The Roses closes with "Judgment of the Moon and Stars," a song that has to be one of the most inspiring I've ever heard, in no small part due to the wanderlust of the album that precedes it. "Condemned to wires and hammers/ Strike every cord that you feel/ That broken trees and elephant ivories conceal" are the lines that close the song - a song about how the "gift," as she puts it, of music sometimes "just don't do it/ like the song of a warm body/ loving your touch." It tells me that if we're "condemned" to the things we do well, we simply have to do them better. The word "conceal" in the lyric says everthing, that our thoughts are simply brewing, waiting to strike at any moment.

Of course, thoughts brewing and waiting to strike is the more sinister theme of Todd Field's Little Children, starring Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson. It seems that every year, there's a movie or two about a couple of restless adults having an affair that could screw up everything, and as a movie, they tell us that people are sometimes nasty and awful. I'm thinking of or Closer or We Don't Live Here Anymore or Damage or even American Beauty. Yet those movies, as varyingly successful as they are, never really made me love any of its characters. Little Children gets as nasty as any of those movies, at times - even worse, perhaps, because one of its main characters is a convicted sex offender returning to his home neighborhood - and, unlike most movies you'll see, this one doesn't shy away from his nature.

In Little Children, Winslet and Wilson star as married people whose world opens up to them when one day at a park, for reasons neither of them quite get, they kiss in front of a crowd of housewives gathered with their children. Any number of movies talks about moments in which its characters "feel alive" or "rebel against society," yet something is immediate and pulsing with Winslet and Wilson. Winslet has an extraordinary monologue late in the film about Madame Bovary being a woman of bravery - being a woman willing to make her decisions to live even in spite of the obvious negative consequences - and Winslet's Sara in the movie is exactly the same, hurt by her own decisions, but also freed by them.

Little Children is brave in the way it faces people's most unhealthy instincts when feeling trapped, yet it also is moving and inspiring in the place it goes with its characters decisions - never sparing them what they cause, yet opening up a world of possibilities for each of them, fulfilling the things they can't quite say that they need. I think Altman and Mitchell have done the same thing over the years - they've analyzed our behavior in order to begin to describe what we're communicating beneath it, which is, over all, an exhausting and terrifying process sometimes. Still, listening to Mitchell and watching Little Children the day after Seattle's wettest month, there are similar conclusions to draw about my own decisions, whether I find them fulfilled is a separate issue, but I do not, being condemned to simply writing my words, find them concealed.

The Season

I remember the first episode I saw of the NBC version of The Office. It was their season 2 Christmas episode, and I was in Los Angeles, refusing to go outside, as I often felt the need to do in Los Angeles, and I found myself stuck to the hour of comedy that was My Name Is Earl and The Office - first, because nothing else was on, later, because each was so funny.

But The Office wasn't just funny. The thing that caught my attention was one of the fake interview scenes between Jim (John Krasinski) and Pam (Jenna Fischer) - the two simply talked, laughing at each other in spots, but mostly, they spoke like human beings, two voices of reason in a ridiculous environment. I didn't know Jim and Pam would become the driving "drama" of the comedy, the couple that I and its entire audience would root for, propelling The Office beyond its "is it as good as the UK version" talk to the forefront of American comedy, and eventually winning the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series. That was what made The Office such an addiction, and such a treat - it was hilarious, sure, but it was also just so average - you were giddy at the coworkers who wouldn't shut up about their banal weekend plans and love interests, the silently judgmental coworkers, the thin acknowledgment of secret lives, of working a job that, it was barely a secret, no one gave much of a rat's ass about.

That's The Office I love. The Office NBC has trotted out this season is some through-the-looking-glass joke, Reno 911 does Caroline In The City. It might be a plot line of Pam getting especially inspiration at the funeral of a bird, or, Dwight (Rainn Wilson) staging a coup and Michael (the star Steve Carrell) weirdly seeking revenge, or - god almighty - Dwight training new salesman Ryan (BJ Novak) to sniff fertilizer (seriously), but eventually, the rest of its audience might have to start saying, "well, that never happened at any job I worked at."

No, it didn't. The Office this season has been wildly off the mark, but it's still funny sometimes, and its failure - and it is a failure, the rest of the world will say so soon enough if it doesn't improve - is indicative of a TV season that seems all talk. Those hit dramedies that are returning - Desperate Housewives and Grey's Anatomy - seem to be hits only on the distant memory of good episodes past, and the new slate of wild, kooky shows were pronounced failures before September ended - one of the strangest offenders, Tina Fey's backstage comedy 30 Rock is so strangely awful that even its inclusion of big talent in its cast (Alec Baldwin and Tracy Morgan, in funny performances) can't give you the sense that you're actually watching anything.

I wanted to love The Office this year, though - wanted to organize groups around watching it. Worse, I wanted to love that notoriously hyped-and-underperforming other backstage drama, Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip. In my last blog, I wrote of it, "It occurs to me I don't actually like Studio 60. In fact, I actually don't like Studio 60, but I believe in it." This is true still - I remember hating the first slew of West Wing episodes, but what The West Wing had that counters Studio 60 was a surprise in its cast - its big name stars (big name for TV, that is - Rob Lowe, Moira Kelly, Martin Sheen) were its weakest links, and its more unknowns (John Spencer, Allison Janney, Bradley Whitford, Richard Schiff, Janel Maloney, Dule Hill) each stole their respective scenes. On Studio 60, the cast, besides a brilliant Matthew Perry, might as well all disappear into their LA backlots, and I can't imagine anyone would notice that Perry would be simply talking to himself.

It's because Studio 60 is full of ideas - about television, about the morality of art, ideas about passion, ideas about ideas - that people seem stunned as to how little it seems to resemble an actual world with actual celebrities. The West Wing by comparison should have been more oblique, more tangential inside a liberal la la land that would never exist, but that thought never crossed my mind during The West Wing. That I'm not watching any world I know crosses my mind all the time during Studio 60; it is a fantasy of television masquerading as loquacious reality.

I doubt Studio 60 will make it out of the season, at this point, and maybe that's for the better. I already need a new thing to care about in television, something to come home to. For me, that show on network TV this season has been, strangely, My Name Is Earl, that other NBC comedy whose loopiness this season has only revealed the gifts of its supporting cast. It is still too sermonizing, too pat, and often not funny enough to justify it. But what it never does is play something it's not - a joke on reality, or reality as a joke. It is, mostly, pretty clever, which is its own accomplishment.

Still got that dirrty degree

We approach some ambiguous history, coming upon 2007: the first time anyone heard Britney Spears' "Baby One More Time," which is to say, the resurrection of pure pop, of bubblegum if no other word will do, as the main form of commercial music making.

Remember the first time you heard it? Surprisingly, you might. It had already hit #1 (a feat that happened long before anyone knew what was going on, I might add) before I did, and heard it announced on The Peak 95.1, a "light rock" station in Colorado Springs that abandoned its adult-contemporary format for Top 40 at roughly the same time. I was in a car in downtown Colorado Springs, a Junior nearing the end of my third year in high school. The car was Brandon Camarillo's, a green Celica or Pontiac or in any case, a two-door. The day was sunny. The day before I'd heard Courtney Love mention her unabashed love of the song, and I, despite what I said to the contrary, loved it immediately.

Despite what many people said to the contrary, they loved it immediately. Britney beamed so innocent on the Baby One More Time cover, a smile right off the cover of Barely Legal 14, or worse, as Britney wasn't legal in any way. Today, I heard "Stronger" while walking home from Wallingford, and remembered just what a terrific pop song it was - sexy, propulsive, just the right dash of screw-you defiance in the tone. Friends will attest I was a bit obsessed with it when it came out, downloading the incredibly sexy chair-and-rainfall video and playing it on a dozen dorm computers. I'd say I was the perfect age for the Britney phenomenon - not the least of which is because I was her age. Still, she's significant in those significant years; her VMA striptease came early in my entry into the College dorms, "I'm A Slave 4U" the first song I downloaded at my new apartment sophomore year (my cheese-loving ex-roommate, Peter, was actually a bigger fan of "I'm Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman," the rare Britney song - like "From The Bottom of My Broken Heart" or "Lucky" - that I'd prefer to forget). "Toxic," her absolute best song, induced something like a fever at the party commemorating my graduation from college (which would perhaps be more remarkable if the same fever were not also induced by any song by Outkast, Squirrel Nut Zipper's "Put A Lid On It," and Wilson Phillips' "Hold On").

I bring this up because it surprises me that, despite Britney's importance in the world of pop culture for the majority of so many of our adult lives, she can still inspire intense vitriol. At a party last month, a friend's sister, upon hearing the opening bars of "Stronger," leaped from her seat on the couch to run across the living room and into the bedroom where my iPod was, to change the song - "I can't stand Britney Spears, I'm sorry," she said. Mention her in public these days, and she'll get lobbed with a few familiar epithets - white trash, whore, fat pig. In fact, if it was not fashionable for a while to pick on Britney, who was always an easy target anyway, she seems the easiest of targets these days. Her sin now? She let her hair get long and brown, had babies, married someone who's clearly talentless and clueless. Were this amount of anger given to every woman in California who did those three things, I believe much of the state would find their heads exploding.

I was fascinated by the change in public Britney talk because the opposite has happened to her "rival," Christina Aguilera. In 2002, with the release of Stripped, Christina, revamped in assless chaps with a hairdo looking like a skunk breathing too much spraypaint, earned similar epithets. I loved Christina then, not because her songs were good (although, they were - any popstar would be lucky to make a song half as good as "Dirrty," or "Can't Hold Us Down" or "Beautiful"), but because she was responsible for her celebrity. Britney, catchy as her songs were, acted demure and non-responsive to her songs' contents - "I'm a Slave 4U," she said coyly, was - despite its provocative title, hard breathing in the chorus, and an orgy in the video - about dancing, or, was the product of a sexually promiscuous character having nothing to do with her. Even sexpot Beyonce would rile around and, basically, masturbate in the video for "Baby Boy" and coyly deny its nature, "I like to stay home and read, mostly," she'd say later, when questioned about it.

Christina, on the other hand, owned "Dirrty" and its contraversy, labled herself proudly sexual, wondered publicly and often why contraversy erupted when a woman made a bold and provocative song with hot dancers when men did it all the time. Christina released "Can't Hold Us Down," and made the lyric "it's a common double standard of society/ the guy gets all the glory the more he can score/ the girl could do the same and yet you call her a whore" singable. She took shit left and right and only made her message public. I can't imagne how many insults, how much hate mail Christina received in 2002-2003, the year "Beautiful" hit #1 and "Dirrty" ran on constant rotation at any danceclub in America, and she never once demured from the discussion that that could start.

Christina this year has been greeted like a returning friend. Back To Basics, a smash for a double-record already, revived the old Britney-Christina who-sings-better debate, and produced an instant top-10 hit in "Ain't No Other Man." The record isn't good - each disc has a rather interchangeable nature in its songs - but it is somewhat astonishing, her disc 2 impersonations of Fiona Apple, Etta James, and Bessie Smith calculated, but accurate, catchy, and even in some spots, moving.

I don't expect Aguilera to be a big seller in another ten years, but that she's one now, and only releasing her third album, is a statement to the way she's handled her career. Spears, ever the sucker for the media attention she rallies against, has likely concluded her recording career, at least as far as successful and culturally relevant records go. I don't much care that Spears had a baby or married a dufus, or that Aguilera married a nice Jewish boy and re-imagined herself a 40's starlet (the first time, by the way, the either seemed to have helped jumpstart fashion trends - unless you count schoolgirl outfits or enormous snakes). Looking back, all I wonder is that if Spears had dropped that innocent we-swear-it's-not-porn smile after she made "I'm a Slave 4U," or tried to agree with and not counter the "I'm not that innocent" promise of "Oops I Did It Again," would she have been able to overcome her bad press? It seems that all she knows how to do, anyway, is demure, which is fine, except that it makes me wonder if Spears herself was always a little ashamed of her career and could've used a dose of Aguilera's aggressive, useful egomania all along.

Studio 60

Aaron Sorkin believes in America and he's not going to let you forget it. He believes in entertainers, in sports fans, in the president, and writing, as he does, with incredibly jaunty, fast, ribald, theatrical rhythm, Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip premiered, a week ago, an apparent salve to television. It's irreverent! It bites the hand that feeds it! It shows that television must not be bereft of integrity and ideals and a modern pulse because it's about a TV show and network attempting fight to not be bereft of ingtegrity and ideals and a modern pulse!

Considering the ratings for the first two episodes of the series, it's likely that you've seen at least a few minutes of Studeio 60, but more likely you've heard about it in some respect. Sorkin being one of the very few household names in television writing, the show's been the "next big thing" of American drama probably since its pitch meeting, and it received all the pre-upfront press clippings and bidding wars that accompany these "next big things." It features a $3-million-per-episode price tag and boasts the largest set on network television, not to mention its A-list cast stuffed with names like Matthew Perry, Bradley Whitford, Stephen Weber, D.L. Hughley, Amanda Peet, and Timothy Busfield.

What it is, then, is a drama about creating comedy - the show is a fictional competitor of Saturday Night Live on a fictional competitor of NBC called NBS (National Broadcasting System, that is). You could call it brave of NBC to let its flagship show of the new season be so self-referential and self-effacing, and to an extent it is.

But more than that, it's a show whose largest purpose isn't necessarily even to be good, but to present the image that NBC is irreverent and self-referential, and that they are, above all, about quality and care little about image - that they are the network on the edge.

It occurs to me, after a ceremonial devotion to the first couple of episodes, that I don't actually like Studio 60. More than that, I actually don't like Studio 60, but I sort of believe in it. It's arrogant, it's too high-falootin', and I'm not certain if Amanda Peet's performance as NBS president Jordan McDeere (how a woman as young as Peet gets to be network president is a different topic, but one that, I imagine, will be addressed) is deadpan or just terrible, which is more than I can say for Steven Weber's chairman of NBS, who's just a cranky and stern-looking nothing on the show. For it, its much-hyped Sarah Paulson character Harriet - a Christian! and a great person! - is based on Sorkin's real life ex and former West Wing co-star Kristen Chenoweth, and I'd much prefer Kristen Chenoweth in the Kristen Chenoweth part - Paulson is sexy alright, but she doesn't seem to muster up the type of brash spunk Chenoweth brought to Annabeth, a part that barely even existed on The West Wing, but was still memorable. In any case, it's hard to even register my own thoughts on the matter what with constantly being reminded by NBC to compare how it's living up to expectations.

Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing, I recall, was greeted with similarly obtuse fanfare - back in 1999, NBC's pre-pilot ads boasted lines like, "Every era has a great drama - LA Law! ER! NBC now invites you to the next great American drama!" It's helpful too to remind myself I never saw those original episodes of The West Wing as they aired, that I became a fan at the end of the second season and worked my way backwards. Had I watched from the beginning, I surely would have actively disliked The West Wing too - its initial episodes are pretentious and ham-handed, ostentatious about its own importance, and written with one grandstanding bit of oration after another (this was, to be fair, also the case with the pilot of Sorkin's first network dramedy Sports Night). In fact, looking back at it, I don't even like that first, multi-Emmy winning first season very much. And Studio 60's identical gambit - a male and female lead who used to date but now work together - then: Bradley Whitford's Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman and Moira Kelly's media consultant Mandy, now, Matthew Perry's head writer Matt and Paulson's Harriet - seems altogether much more successful on Studio 60, which Sorkin must know, as Kelly barely lasted the season on West Wing and Paulson seems poised to be part of the show's main focus.

So it's important to remember that, begrudgingly, The West Wing was the next great network drama, that its second season is a monument to which all dramas whould have to strive for, and that it was so doused in magnificent production values that when it was revived in its final season by writers other than Sorkin, the job seemed to have been easily accomplished by all the quality left behind from its inception.

The problem, I think, is that we may have already moved to a more rapid era of television consumption - every television report every tells you that year is unlike the years of the past, that TV's golden age is behind them, but I'm starting to think 2006 is not even 1999 anymore. Studio 60 earned 16.9 million viewers in its first episode, but, as was reported today, there are "no breakouts" amongst the new crop of fall premieres this year - "no surprises that capture the zeitgeist with instant high ratings like My Name Is Earl last year and Desperate Housewives the year before that," says a Reuters report quoting an NBC executive. That September is not even over and that no TV show has had more than 3 airings thus far does not seem to matter much in these pronouncements.

In fact, Studio 60's audience for the pilot dipped slightly from its first half hour to its second, and this is indication that it, too, will not be a hit (but this is not altogether an unreasonable projection - ABC's Six Degrees lost its viewers by 47% from one half hour to the next, its viewers no doubt worn out by an abyssmal premiere of juggernaut Grey's Anatomy followed by the even-more-abyssmal experience of watching any of Six Degrees). Still, I hope that the pressure gets taken off Studio 60 at some point so it can flatten out into something resembling normal episodes, something where the honestly obnoxious amount of self-referentiality can peter out a bit. One of the early death knell pronouncements for Studio 60 claims that normal, non-industry people "just don't connect to that much 'insider talk.'" This, if true, means only that NBC should cancel the show immediately, insider talk being all there actually is, besides a terrific set.

Then again, I recall early reviews of The West Wing wondering if people could give a damn about Washington "insider talk," a brand of talk that includes discussions of wheat subsidies and road tolls. An interesting thing: when TV shows try and recreate the actual day-to-day experiences of people - politicians or cops or mobsters or high schoolers or executives - audiences tend to show up.

Notes From The First Days In Seattle

1.
Las Vegas wants your sins. Around town, the billboards scream for your attention and for your desires - on Nickerson at the Fremont Bridge, a white quote amongst purple and blue show lights reads "I had to unbutton my pants!" On 4th and Bell, another white quote, "I joined a threesome." In Ballard, "We tried things we don't do at home!" You may have to look at these billboards three or four times before you realize they're attempting double entendre - in small print towards the bottom of the unbuttoning-my-pants billboard reads the quip "Dining can be your excuse." The threesome billboard says "Golf can be your excuse."

I've gone to Vegas two or three times, and I may not have joined a threesome or spent an unusual amount of time unbuttoning my pants, but I did feel the need to smash every beer bottle I passed along Flamingo Ave. at 6 in the morning, and I did once break a vow to not gamble, drink, or smoke cigarettes during an hour-long dinner with my unlce on my way to Los Angeles, only to find myself doing all three within 5 minutes and, in fact, delaying my call to meet my uncle so I could do it. So I can't necessarily say the scent of sin is all that far off, or that the billboards are lying.

They are, however, clearly meant to stir the rapaciousness out of the corporate bore that's taken over. This makes enough sense - to many, at least. Perhaps I'm less romantic than I used to be about Vegas. Once, the brother of a friend from high school was describing his time in Vegas and nonchalantly ended a sentence with, "because, in Vegas, you have to do an eightball in the Caesar's bathroom."

I suppose everyone's Vegas sins are different, but they come from the same place - the desire to shake things up, to release whatever inhibitions keep us from, say, doing coke in the bathroom at Macy's. As for me, things are shaken up enough for one season, I can't see me returning to Vegas anytime soon, even if threesomes are a possibility.

2.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about Beyonce's new single "Ring The Alarm" lately. It's catchy, to be certain, but it's not simply a catchy melody. What works about the single is Beyonce's aggression - the chorus isn't sung, it's shouted, the verses more accurately described as a passionate shout than as singing. Yet you can't turn away from it, from its periodic loud claps that could be thunder or jail doors or even a gun shot. I'm amazed that this song hasn't hit #1, as thus far I wouldn't even describe the song as particularly successful. I'm amazed that everyone isn't at least drawn to that anger, that the anger itself isn't getting stuck in people's heads.

3.
When I think about Fremont, the artsy Seattle neighborhood north of Lake Union, I sometimes hear the clop of horses, as if when I was there last, carriages were wandering 36th Street. A good friend lives there with a balcony giving him a perfect view of the Seattle skyline, and my favorite coffee shop since I moved here has a deck that peacefully looks towards the almost absurdly high Aurora bridge. Here as in Boulder I find myself going to the least conveniently located coffee shop imaginable (I am staying in Magnolia, southwest of the lake), but Fremont is the place in Seattle where most things seem possible.

This week I house sat at a friend's coworker's townhome on 43rd street. At 5 in the morning her grey cat, speckled like a cow, started meowing from her rooftop deck. I opened the door, and felt greeted by the dull grey light, the otherworldly glow of the skyline, the green hills built in every direction regardless of how possible it seemed to build houses or buildings or roads. I thought the cat should never want to be inside, Seattle this time of the year being the only comfort a person could need.

This is, of course, nonsense. I've walked all over this city now and know even a beautiful locale (and, in the late months of summer, during its rare stretches of sunshine, no city is more beautiful), and know that, without a job and a place to live, I can feel as rafish and lost as I did when I was unemployed and sick in Boulder. At least I have more options for coffee.

I left the cats outside when locking up the coworker's house for the last time. I wondered if that would be a problem, knowing the unlikelihood anything would ever happen to a cat - these things that seem unikely to blink at falls from trees, at balancing high above the ground on pieces of wood two centimeters across. It seems that everyone seems a little happier in Fremont, though, and maybe she'd barely think of anything wrong when she could simply go to her roof and watch the city.

4.
If I see a few more of his movies, I think I'll be compelled to write the longest, dullest treatise on the movies of Tsai Ming-Liang. I caught his The River this week and am in love with the way he makes his characters move. Like he did to astonishing effect in What Time Is It There and its perfect epilogue of a short film "The Skyway Is Gone" and to occasionally ass-numbing effect in Goodbye, Dragon Inn, his characters seem to move fully ignoring each other's awkwardness and solipsistic quirks. Characters walk past each other, follow each other, run literally into one another and carry on their blinded way. No one speaks to each other usually, and certainly never about major events.

I must say I love the way in his movies people continue to act in spite of all logical intuition. His movies all have moments that shock or sadden or seem to happen simply because nothing else is happening, and what's most interesting about his movies is that people's best approximation of following each other around makes up the majority of their lives. The rest can so often decoding the bizarre events occurring everywhere, silently, even the ones we're inexplicably in the middle of.

5.
Back in Boulder, I'm told the kid I spent the bulk of my time with at work is doing well. Not just well, I'm told I wouldn't recognize him - that he's participating in class and engaging people in conversation. Back in Boulder, a good friend of mine has decided to move out of the apartment he just moved into and head to Chicago or Dallas, he should decide which this week. Back in Boulder, the second baseman on my old Softball team broke her nose when hit in the face with a baseball. Back in Boulder, a friend called me to tell me he'd just finished surgery correcting his knuckles from "that time I punched a wall in Dublin." Back in Boulder, a friend noticed smoke from his engine and flames behind his dashboard as he pulled up to his girlfriend's apartment; when he got out, he watched his car burn before his eyes. Back in Boulder, a therapist I used to work with died suddenly of a heart attack on the middle of a Monday. It was my replacement's first day of work.

It was a summer in which weird, tragic, funny, or just puzzling things happened everywhere, that everyone seemed to be on the verge of major life decisions, catastrophes, or both. If you wanted to leave your longtime lover or fly suddenly to Portland or start a long distance relationship with someone you met for 10 days in Israel or start crying again or, why not, uproot your life and move to Seattle or New York or Chicago or Dallas or (in one especially unusual decision of a friend of mine) Mauritania, this was the summer for it. The days were longer than usual, hotter than usual, more chaotic than usual, but things getting too hot and too long and too chaotic is often what leads us to getting things done in the first place.

Black Birds frying on a wire

It is far from an overstatement to say that the vast majority of writing I do focuses on media - on music and movies and television, books, or celebrities. It is true that since I was 13 years old, I wanted to be a film critic. I was a film critic, in fact, for some time, and hope to find work in that field in the future. It is also true, then, that virtually all of my public writing deals with my personal life only insomuch as it relates to whatever media topic I feel like writing about.

This is my approach, and "approach" would be the word I would use when getting defensive, although I'd most prefer to not defend this decision at all.

At age 24, things get difficult for a person, and although this sense is perhaps well documented by now, I localize my own experience to this age. At age 23, I had just graduated college, worked at a photo lab for some time, spent some more time unemployed, worked briefly in the corporate world, and settled, 9 months later, at a comfortable job working with emotionally disturbed adolescents. I also ended a year-and-a-half long relationship, decided against an impulsive move to New York, took a mind-scrambling vacation to Los Angeles (a place, I find, where mind-scrambling is an endemic sensation) where I thought for a brief week or two I'd fallen in love again, but none of that had the intellectual impact of turning 24.

At 24, things start to feel important because nothing seems to have much weight anymore. Or at the very least, at 24, a veil of order gets lifted, and things seem confusing only when words get put to them. For a while, I was listening to Neko Case's "Things That Scare Me" because the line "Flourescent lights engage/ black birds frying on a wire" seemed an image of actual substance. The song concludes with the line "I am the dying breed who still believes/ hunted by American dreams," which I identified with but less so than an image of man's conventions having a stranglehold of nature, of birds being electrocuted at the flick of a switch.

In this year, all that truly made sense was my confusion. I took a trip to Israel, where I cried at a Holocaust memorial (crying being the rarest of events for me), and where I felt, for the first time ever, linked to a community, which I suppose is the reason young Jews are encouraged to take trips to Israel. I was being groomed for promotion with at my day treatment center, I had my first essay published (on Fiona Apple, of course), and I decided, as if the most natural of whims, to pick up and move to Seattle, a city that, at the time of my decision, I had never been to, and before my move (this coming Tuesday), I'd spent only 3 days in.

I don't truly know how to discuss the thoughts of my move, or, truly, how to represent my thoughts in any particular light because the thoughts are of such a peculiar shape. What I can say is that I feel elation about moving only as much as it can share space with my terror on it - of leaving the kids I worked with, of leaving my amazing cadre of friends, of leaving the comfort and ease of living in a city like Boulder, which is, it seems, about the easiest place on the planet for a confused white liberal to live.

I bring up this subject thinking about a couple of - naturally - some television. This past season of The Sopranos has been derided by many, but it may be my favorite. I'm thinking of an image in the episode "Cold Stones" - Edie Falco's troubled Carmela stands in Paris looking at the turning beacon atop the Eiffel Tower early in the evening. The scene cuts from her position on her sidewalk to returning to the living room of her New Jersey home. Carmela had been brought to tears at a site of millenia-old ruins ("All the things we do, in the end, it just gets washed away," she said).

I know what Carmela is thinking in this scene, and if you believe myself to be projecting life unto a fictional character, I think you are missing the point, and the thing that makes The Sopranos such an accomplishment. I know what Carmela is thinking because it is not representable in a sentence, not in words, simply the notion of confusion, of being allowed to see a distant place and forced, in that space to confront the theme of this Sopranos season: who am I, where am I going. Let me simply say this about The Sopranos, because it is not, directly, my purpose here to talk about it: To know, even approximately, by simple observation the thoughts of another human being is the most important of artistic accomplishments. It requires an understanding of the human experience that is beyond familiarity, because only experience can create it. That it does this is impressive, but that it sometimes flits around the edges of thoughts which cannot be fully elucidated makes it the most triumphant of works.

What I am saying is that confusion about life is sometimes the thing of the most palpability and substance, but it is not often a topic of conversation because its very existence denies understanding what it is. One could say "I am confused," but even that would undersell the actual sense that invades and alters behavior. What I mean is that in human events, sometimes the action and the thought are related, sometimes they are bound even in the absence of any clear connection. I am moving in three days, and I hope sincerely the move pays off for me personally, that I am not defeated by the circumstances I've created for myself. The reason why, although I can't reasonably articulate it, flits around me every day in this incredible year I've had, and it is not because I am unhappy (I am not), bored, or full of malaise. In truth the best explanation I have is just that I am 24 years old, which is for me the age when people are compelled to do this sort of thing, and the "why" of it either manifests itself or does not.

Joe's Daughters

I confess it feels, at times, like the right thing to do to rush to the defense of one pop celebrity or another. Those shows on E! or Vh1 where C-level comedians in need of day jobs trash, say, Shannen Doherty's recent trip to the supermarket or Eva Longoria's choice in car paint, only wind up making me sympathetic with whichever lousy celebrity seems to be the focus of ironic commentary - I may never have been a fan of Longoria or Doherty or Paris Hilton or Winona Ryder, but I start to think, in flipping past Awesomely Badder Girls 4 or whatever Vh1 programs for my wakeup time on Sundays, that at least those celebrities did something, anything, besides whine about people more recognizable than themselves.

I say this because no celebrity at this point should be more ripe for sympathy than either one of the Simpson sisters, Jessica or Ashlee. Either one of them should have me secretly singing their songs to myself, or surrepticiously slipping them onto a party playlist on my iPod. This being the sort of thing I would do - at last count, my iPod of 7062 songs features 10 Britney Spears songs, she, never a kind word said about her in public, happens to make terrific pop music on occasion.

Yet with Jessica turning her divorce into a song of confectionary drivel about dancing or roller skating or whatever "A Public Affair" is supposed to be about, and Ashlee's recent identity -altering plastic surgery, I wonder if these aren't the two celebrities most in need of immediate relocation to a Mediterranean island somewhere, women whose presence and celebrity is maddening only when it's not terrifying.

What is it about Jessica, I wonder - the more I consider her existence, the more ponderous it gets. The woman has never had any singing talent, not really. She doesn't hit notes so much as warble around them, which might be ok (after all, the 90's were full of astonishing female artists who couldn't sing well, exactly, but sang their songs exactly right), except that her music is of such a bland variety, made to be only catchy, hummable, and unnoticed as it skates to familiarity on radio airwaves, that her lack of talent seems to be the music's only mark of uniqueness.

In fact, can you even remember a Jessica Simpson song? Could you sing one to yourself? The truth is, she was a failing pop star before she was a celebrity, and she'll always make a far more interesting celebrity than pop star. She boasts as her biggest hit, I think, "With You," which owes its success to a video trumpeting all of her dumb-blonde catchphrases from her reality show Newlyweds, including stinky farts and mistakes about tuna. That video, if you recall (and likely, you can't), played at the end of every Newlyweds episode for months, and it seemed the aggressive marketing for the single wasn't going to stop until the song cracked Billboard's Top 10 - it did, eventually, which may or may not have been an act of mercy.

I heard "With You" on a 90's music program a few weeks ago, and it took that insecure warble to remind me which generic love ode it was. I'd have no desire to ever hear the song in any context otherwise, and that seems pretty clear with all of her songs. Now, "A Public Affair" has cracked the top 20, and the marketing is just as aggressive - its roller-rink video features Christina Applegate and Eva Longoria skating in perfectly-coifed synchronicity with Simpson, and it is one of those videos that MTV shows in 30-second clips whenever possible.

This must be the work of the Simpsons' father/manager Joe Simpson. I wonder what it's like to be Joe Simpson. Jessica tried out - and failed - for Star Search and The Mickey Mouse Club as a child, her breasts expanded overnight (I do think they're real though, to her credit - and to credit her truly astonishing physical appeal), and he found there was more money in marketing her as a pop star than a Christian music star. Joe Simpson is probably amongst the wealthiest managers in the music business, but what must it be like to force your daughters to strive towards fame before they even hit puberty?

I wonder this mostly because the now-infamous image of a stately Ashlee Simpson that seems to be everywhere - there she is, a blonde now, small-nosed now, big-breasted now. Ashlee had botox, Ashlee had a boob job, Ashlee had a nosejob and lip work. I don't know exactly which rumor is true, nor do I care to.

I do, however, note the irony of a woman who will declare, from every microphone possible, that she is "her own woman," that she "won't change for anybody," that she "cannot be told who she is." I didn't buy that when she said it, of course (who could?), yet I did think that was at least a message of confidence she wanted her fan base to share with her. I have no doubt that message will continue when "the new Ashlee" unveils her third album.

This is where things get harmful, I believe, and it also treads on my own moral beliefs about plastic surgery. I do believe that women of all ages should be "her own woman," should "not change for anybody," and should "not be told who they are." Yet if Ashlee's looks were keeping her from being the sex symbol her sister is, it seems to me the exact wrong message to turn her into one - wasn't the notion from the beginning that Ashlee, with her black hair, would stand as the "edgy" counterpart to her sister's glitz? Perhaps Joe realized his marketing strategy was underperforming when Ashlee's SNL snafu helped I Am Me, her sophomore album, underperform.

If this seems like a lot of energy to go through for middling and forgettable pop stars, it most likely is, however I think Jessica and Ashlee Simpson are the stars most indicative of the cynical, market-driven business of celebrity. They are women who are most successful when commodities, most appealing when reflecting the messages we like to believe in. What makes them harmful, I believe, is the expansion of those messages - independence is great, but that includes the "independent" decision to alter your looks and identity. Art and music are great, but really, they are just means to present best Celeb persona. They are, I think, less musicians than cautionary tales for parenting.

Indefinite hiatus

I actually got to meet Corin Tucker once. Her hair was indeterminately red or brown or blonde, but like any woman these days, it's probably been definitively all of those colors at some point. Her face is still as beautiful as it always was, but it would never qualify as conventionally beautiful - a little pouty and suspicious, always seeming to be angry with you in whatever picture of her is available. At the Sleater-Kinney concer att he Gothic Theather in Denver (or, Englewood) in September of last year, I went to buy a t-shirt (true to their activist ways, their t-shirts are only manufactured by American Apparrel), and I ordered one without looking, trying to find my credit card in my wallet. I looked up and was speechless - there she was, a satisfied smirk on her face, flowing purple top, breasts smaller in actual life than I would have guessed. Me, mumbling, or baffled, or simply trying to determine what method to approach the situation, only mustered saying, "You're Corin Tucker!" I said I was a huge fan, I pointed to a laminated LP of The Woods glued to the merchandise counter and told them the new album was amazing. I mentioned that once I wrote a ten page essay about wandering around Copenhagen and listening to One Beat constantly.

This was all I could really say about my relationship to Sleater-Kinney at the time. I could have also told Corin (one of its two lead-singer/ guitarists, along with Carrie Brownstein) I caught them on tour in 2000 in support of All Hands For The Bad One, that their albums seem to consistently mark changes in my life, but that may simply be my own inability to ever turn them off. I could have said I was once so obsessed with the band that I tracked down old demos of Heavens to Betsy and Excuse 17 (Tucker and Brownstein's Riot Grrrl bands before forming S-K), but that would not have been particularly original.

Sleater-Kinney announced a couple of weeks back that they were going on "indefinite hiatus." This cannot be too surprising, in any scenario; while making The Woods, the band - Tucker and Brownstein, and also drummer Janet Weiss since 1997 - went into couple's therapy, and came out of those sessions so angry, they made The Woods, an album for which adjectives like "loud" and "angry" were invented. An album that recalled, at any given moment, the most firey moments of Jimi Hendrix or The Velvet Underground or Sonic Youth or Jefferson Airplane or even The Who. An album I was alone in naming the best album of last year.

I will start with, and perhaps only talk about, The Woods. Not 1997's Dig Me Out, a 90's post-punk classic, and an indie icon. Not 1999's The Hot Rock and 2000's Bad One, fine albums, but mostly irrelevant. Not 2002's One Beat, a vituperative political record that is the culmination of all of their efforts as indie superstars, and another album I named the best of its year.

The reason I want to talk about The Woods some 14 months after its release is because I believe it to be not simply the type of album that bands spend their entire career working up to, but the type of album all of rock music seems to have been leading up to. This is only talking about its music, of course - The Woods was not particularly successful and is also not particularly popular. In fact, a friend of mine who worked forever at Albums On The Hill in Boulder told me I'm the only person he knows that even likes the thing (not entirely surprising - most fans of any art do not appreciate their artists abruptly changing their defined style and doing something different. These are the artists I appreciate most). He gave me a poster that's like a more cinematic rendering of its cover - a painted field of trees on a wood floor behind a parted red curtain.

Start with "The Fox." If you hear this song, I can guarantee you what your initial physical response to this song will be: you will turn down the volume on your stereo. A screech of feedback begins it, as though a warning of the ferocity to come. The guitars chug at such a volume you swear you hear planes taking off in the background, but would not be allowed to hear such things. Janet Weiss's drums are rifle-like, fast, and overwhelming. There is more to it of course - a weird morality tale of a duck and fox, spotting each other on the day of the duck's birth, but it is about the biggest jolt to the system a song can provide: Corin Tucker, whose shriek helped define the Riot Grrrls of the early 90's, is louder, more pleasing, and more precise than it's been before (a product, the band says, of forcing Tucker to sing in tones she hadn't tried before, pissing her off and confusing her to no end). In the song's scorching bridge, she's screaming some incomprehensible words at the top of her lungs.

I could say that my response to noisy music is unique, but to an extent, it's the only way to really approach the more ferocious emotions of rock music. That can be said of Velvet Underground or Sonic Youth, bands who trafficked in noise. Noise distances the listeners, but it also speaks to a general sense of feeling askew, of defiance, of working against an instruments' supposed purpose. It also speaks to the eventual indistinguishable nature of guitar riffs or guitar solos - sometimes noise is the only way to make any sort of notice in music.

But that's much too cerebral. I respond to noise. I walk easier when hearing it. I feel better listening to it, because at its core it means that the rules of guitar and of music are as made up as the ones in life. I find the notion of all things being made up about as comforting as any other.

The politics begin in track 2, "Wilderness," an allegory of a couple going nowhere and bickering the entire way - "It's a family feud/ the red and the blue now/ a two-headed brat/ tied to the other for life," Brownstein characterizes a country stagnant and whiny about it as Weiss's drums shoot away. In track 3, "What's Mine Is Yours," the one with a screeching minute-long solo that destroys and rebuilds the song, Tucker's voice has never sounded sexier. And by track 4, "Jumpers," - an eerie and explosive song about the thoughts of those leaping from the Golden Gate bridge - it should be clear that you may have never heard an album of such ferocity, an album of such well-ordered noise and defiance, and it makes sense to feel that way - these girls wear their influences on their sleeve, but the combined passion of these three influence sounds like nothing else.

In fact it occurs to me that there can be no slacking on the part of any of the three women for this type of thing to work - as Tucker wails differently now, Brownstein's typically-deadpan second vocals are now as empassioned as Tuckers, but directand cutting where Tucker's are high and elusive. David Browne in his review said he thought Weiss had spent the 3-year break between albums, "listening to nothing but Keith Moon recordings." Her drums are about as loud and fast and invigorating as anyone's since Moon died.

There are three songs on the second half of the record that are about as exciting as any I've heard. "Let's Call It Love," the 11-minute opus that defines the record, a song of exploding sexuality, and perhaps the only song on the record whose noise dominates the song structure, one that doesn't wind up coming back to a central refrain. It takes the gimmick of its noise and allows it to run free, experience all of the "love" emotions the writing speaks of - "A woman is not a girl/ I could show you a thing or two," Tucker sings, and damned if she doesn't show you a thing or two. It segues immediately into "Night Light," a three minute anthem that speaks of the forces of life and death, if not the ultimate conflict of all things. Tucker looks up to the sky and asks, "how do you do it/ with visions of worse to come/ live in the present/ and spin off the rays of the sun?"

But mostly there's "Entertain." I think this song will, amongst the few of us that knew of their existence, define Sleater-Kinney until the end of time. The drums pound in its opening seconds in a manner that subdues the listener, and Brownstein launches into "So you're here 'cause you want to be entertained/ please look away/ we're not here 'cause we want to entertain." This, of course, cannot be true of any band - after all, if you didn't want to entertain, why go on tour? Why release records? Why write, in 2000, a song about whiny boy rockers called "You're No Rock N' Roll Fun"?

However that thought will not arrive when listening to "Entertain." No thoughts will, really, besides those ones that keep us going, those thoughts that make us want to accomplish anything, those thoughts about not dying slowly, not giving into to the forces that oppress, the ones that keep all people from living their lives, from trying to find truth, from doing anything really. "Entertain," with its rallying cry of "Don't tread me down, I'm not falling down," is about the most exhilerating recording I've ever heard. It's a song of such ferocity that after the guitar and drums stop abruptly in its 6th minute, the recording lingers on a clank of the amps recovering, the equipment itself responding to the galvanic intensity of their own creation.

I wish I could have said that to Corin Tucker. That with The Woods, Sleater-Kinney made the type of album that inspires on the deepest of sensory level, but these things do not mean much when said, so I simply told her the album was "amazing." It speaks to the ongoing irrelevance of music critics everywhere that most of them named albums like Kanye West's Late Registration or Sufjan Stevens' Illinois or The New Pornographers' Twin Cinema as the album of the year. I like all of those albums, but they are, despite their various accomplishments, simply records. The Woods is not.

Me and Joan

I've probably read close to 1000 pages of Joan Didion's nonfiction work (which, doing the math, is not a great proportion), but it was only today that I found the piece with which I most closely identified.

"On The Morning After The Sixties" ends like this: "If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man's fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending." Reading just this sentence it would be easy to assume Didion was talking about 60's foolishness, saying a giant ba-hum-bug to the 60's - or, really, the young - change-the-world mentality, but that is not the subject of Didion's essay. Instead, she's talking about the peculiar, lost mentality of a peculiar, lost generation - one nestled uncomfortably in the comfortable 50's. Without saving you the necessity of reading the essay (not to mention ease - the thing is, like much of her most stunning work, under 4 pages long), I'll say it evokes a time for her that is like its titular morning, a time of her youth in which the isolation of man's long-term situation was an assumption, a time for which the Lost Generation was a foundation of thought.

It's interesting, as a person raised in the 90's, to think that this mentality even had room to exist in the smiles-and-hair-curlers vision of the 50's we're most presented with. What I identified most closely with is something I think the people of my age identify with quite closely, and the thing that I've spent the bulk of my own writing trying to make sense of - that is, a time of vague, unoriginal, baffling thoughts, a mentality for which the only assumption we can all agree on is that things, in general, are going to spend a long time not making much sense.

So what is it of our generation? I would say I - born in 1982, raised in small town Colorado - am of a generation in which irony is our preferred coping skill - things don't have to necessarily make sense if we can mock them and, by proxy, be above them. Therefore, there is no thought left to think nowadays, it's already been thought, rejected, and turned into an ironist punchline starting with the words, "He's one of those people who..." Being "one of those people who..." is about the worst punishment one of our age can work to avoid. For example, I right now am someone placing value on writing my thoughts down in a spot which few people will read (just then I had to fight the ironist instinct to replace "thoughts" with "inane thoughts"), and those that do will most certainly be people who already know me, are mostly fond of me, and will shrug and not think much of their existence. Which is a fine reaction to have.

The first time I read Joan Didion was for an assignment in a nonfiction writing class, and of that, I'll simply say "assignment" would be a less accurate word than "gift," and that I should send Peter Michelson a candy-gram for forcing "Goodbye to All That" into my life, thereby uprooting my sense of writing. I followed that reading with a ten-page essay about Bob Dylan and my father that was syntactically identical to her essay. To say I have plagiarized her in my writings since then would not be true, but also not entirely false - I've seeped in the way Joan writes, I've taken it in via every sense, and I know think and sweat in the precise and evocative syntax she created. She's made me learn the value of a well-placed "and," made me write down seemingly irrelevant details at parties, made me find the most emotive and honest way to describe a generality when those details are unavailable.

What that is, I think, is what Joan excells at, and why I'd like to think my generation is hers, on the morning after the 60's, the endless 60's, and the endless spectre of someone else's idealism - a sense of lost sincerity. I can't stop reading her descriptions and the descriptions like hers, things respecting the quizzical aspects of human nature embedded in every experience - the every-string-of-the-tapestry-counts depiction of observations and detachments, the way they add to and complete our longterm sense of confusion, and the way that acknowledging that confusion is, somehow, party to its own dissipation.