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 And Tony, Tony’s been replaced by Kevin Finnerty, or …inFinnerty, or, infinity, a confrontation with the end of his times.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