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 And Tony, Tony’s been replaced by Kevin Finnerty, or …inFinnerty, or, infinity, a confrontation with the end of his times.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.