Best Music of 2007

As I look over the various top ten lists for the music of 2007 released in magazines, as well as my own below, there's a sensation that I cannot ignore - are we all kidding ourselves? 2007 has to be one of the weakest years in recent memory for music, and it's not because there weren't some great songs, but I can't think of a single great album, an album that I even really fell in love with. Last year, there were three, and I complained about not having ten.

This year, I sort of have two that I loved, or at least spent a lot of time getting to know and not minding that I was spending a lot of time getting to know them. There are a few more that I like a little less, but am still pretty fond of. And then there are albums with some great songs and lots of filler, which is unfortunate, but it's how it goes some years.

The truth is I find myself very removed from most of the well regarded records of the year. Artists I've loved made albums I thought were terrible this year - Bruce Springsteen's Magic, Kanye West's Graduation, Queens of the Stone Age's Era Vulgaris, Wilco's Sky Blue Sky; not just sub par records, terrible records. That's to say nothing of the artists I'm a fan of whose records were mostly positive mixed bags (Lucinda Williams, Ryan Adams, Radiohead, New Pornographers), and the artists I'm supposed to love but actively dislike - M.I.A., The White Stripes, or Arcade Fire, all of whom's popularity continues to elude me.

This year, I can at least be very very happy about White Chalk, P.J. Harvey's 7th full length album, even though I think it may be her weakest. When you're an artist as extraordinary as Harvey, "weakest" is a pretty relative term. At the time of its release, I thought White Chalk was like an extended character piece, of a repressed victorian persona released from an old Dorset attic on a rusting piano, like The Others: The Musical. It is, for a good half the album, but then it's something else also - a muted walk into adulthood. Midway through the record, at the title track, Harvey walks barefoot along the Dorset beach and sees blood on her feet. It's like that walk transforms her into an adult, and the remainder of the record is subdued and lovely, stately and mature. "Silence," I think, is another Harvey great, a sort of be-careful-what-you-wish-for ballad of wishing to be released from your memories. Its followed by the atonal "To Talk To You," which is like a dip back into Harvey's child persona from early in the record. And it ends with a lovely combo of "Before Departure," a sweet song that seems written in slo-mo at a train track, and "The Mountain," a song that's both hystrionic and wise, screamingly off-kilter and melodically just right, which just about sums up Harvey and White Chalk.

I also am happy to report that Me'shell Ndegeocello's The World Has Made Me The Man of My Dreams gets better with every play, just like all of her records. She's a major musician too, and I have yet to see her on any Best of the Year list, which is typical. I'll still campaign for her if she needs it. Same goes with Talib Kweli, who seems like he should be more well-regarded than he is, considering the pure ambition and skill of his verse.

When it came to singles, I for one love "The Way I Are" by Timbaland over all others rock, pop, or otherwise. "Rehab" had personality and tabloid joyousness, "Hot Thing" is like alterna-rap's hot dance track in waiting, and Hilary Duff surprised the crap out of me by releasing a song I can't help but love.

Top Ten Albums of 2007:

1. White Chalk P.J. Harvey

2. The World Has Made Me The Man of My Dreams Me'shell Ndegeocello

3. Eardrum Talib Kweli

4. Easy Tiger Ryan Adams

5. In Rainbows Radiohead

6. Back to Black Amy Winehouse

7. Challengers The New Pornographers

8. Sound of Silver LCD Soundsystem

9. Because of the Times Kings of Leon

10. West Lucinda Williams

Top Ten Singles of 2007:

1. "The Way I Are" Timbaland

2. "Rehab" Amy Winehouse

3. "Hot Thing" Talib Kweli

4. "Umbrella" Rihanna

5. "When Under Ether" P.J. Harvey

6. "Gimme More" Britney Spears

7. "Dignity" Hilary Duff

8. "Until The End of Time" Justin Timberlake & Beyonce

9. "Jigsaw Falling Into Place" Radiohead

10. "Bartender" T. Pain

Ten Perfect Songs You Might Not Have Heard On The Radio:

• "Are You Alright" Lucinda Williams (West)
• "Silence" P.J. Harvey (White Chalk)
• "True Love Way" Kings of Leon (Because of the Times)
• "My Love For You Is Real" Ryan Adams (Follow The Lights)
• "Go Ahead" Alicia Keys (As I Am)
• "Lovely Lovely" Me'shell Ndegeocello (The World Has Made Me The Man of My Dreams)
• "Radio Nowhere" Bruce Springsteen (Magic)
• "Misfit Love" Queens of the Stone Age (Era Vulgaris)
• "Someone Great" LCD Soundsystem (Sound of Silver)
• "Go Places" The New Pornographers (Challengers)

2007's Real Top Ten

Last year, I wrote a blog of what I thought were the ten most significant books/movies/tv shows/ music that I had encountered that year. Maybe this year was less significant than last, maybe not, that sort of thing is hard to judge. There were 10 more great works I encountered this year though, without a doubt, starting with the one that's earned more ink than anything else I own since I bought it in February. Then there are some others. It all makes me think that the greatest work isn't just timeless, it reopens what you thought you knew and updates your thoughts.

A Different 2007 Top 10 List.

• Hejira Joni Mitchell (1976)

Considering I already wrote a 6 page essay on the subject and posted it on here, I don't have much left to say. It's hard for me to imagine a 2007 without Hejira - without my initial indifference towards it, my falling in love with it, my needing to hear the sounds released by its unique guitar, and eventually my satisfaction with it as it fell into the realm of all the music so familiar and beloved to me. Two days ago, I was driving in the cold mountains of the Boulder Canyon when "Blue Motel Room" came on, and after I finished singing along to every punchy word of it (It contains this gem: "You and me are like America and Russia/ always keeping score/ we're always balancing the power/ and that can get to be a cold cold war/ we're gonna have to have ourselves a peace talk/ in some neutral cafe"), it struck me how perfect it was - breezy and calm, but so full of emotion and wonder. Hejira remains an imperfect record, but a perfect one at that.

• "Kennedy and Heidi" The Sopranos (2007)

I could write and write and write about each of the final 9 episodes of The Sopranos that aired this year. Let's just say that at the end of season 5, Johnny Sack gets indicted and Tony's lawyer tells him he dodged a bullet. This season was about the anxiety of not being able to dodge bullets forever, of "waiting for the other shoe to drop." "Kennedy and Heidi" goes beyond shock when, 3 minutes in, Christopher, Tony's "nephew" and a driving force of the show played by Michael Imperioli, is killed as his car flips over, seconds after perhaps the most loving look Tony's ever given anyone. Followed, of course, by Tony suffocating Christopher as Christopher tells Tony he'd never pass a drug test and needs to be put in a cab. That their tumultuous, essential relationship could be boiled down to that act of... well, what is it? Love? Anger? Hate? Tony confesses to his therapist that he feels relief, after all the stress Christopher causes him.

The Sopranos had done death many a time through many characters, but never with the discomfort of "Kennedy and Heidi," an episode that has Tony admitting the relief of not having Christopher in his life, fessing up to the anxiety of wondering each day if "today's the day one of my rat fuck friends is going to turn on me," and, ultimately, feeling below the real grief of everyone else, that causes him to, suddenly, jet to Las Vegas to take peyote, fuck Chris's ex, and declare before God and a desert mountain "I get it!" The episode is uncomfortable, but so slightly uncomfortable, it speaks to the anxiety just below the surface in everyone. It sees Tony sitting in an ornate plane as the loneliest image on the planet, and strums the opening guitar of "Are You Alright" as he drives through the city (a lonelier guitar part is hard to imagine). All of Tony's anxiety, perhaps for the show's 7 years, is summed up and puzzled at in this episode, and it is, for all its frustration and shock, impossible not to agree with him that there must be relief in letting go of it. For someone that just killed someone he loves, that's quite an agreement.

• I'm Not There (2007)

One reason people my age become so passionate about movies, I think, is that modern filmmakers have a potential for creativity that can open up movies in completely new directions. That's what happens in movies like Mulholland Drive or Boogie Nights or Pulp Fiction or Palindromes - movies that start as an experiment and end as truer than any "normal" movie you recall watching. I'm Not There is unlike anything I recall seeing, and it's because it's an idea guided by a biography, and fragmented intellectually. But what keeps the movie so unique and not simply esoteric (which, it must be said, it is - if you don't know the Bob Dylan biography, you truly won't enjoy it much) is that the passion, loss, and anger of the man and of its vignettes is the story already told by the music, and the music is some of the greatest ever created. Todd Haynes expands the idea of ideolizing Dylan, but then does something else - he uses Dylan to forge his greatest film yet about identity freefall, and he does it through profound senses of loss and confusion that we don't even realize we're watching. For me, the most heartbreaking moment is not any of the sad shots between Heath Ledger and Charlotte Gainsbrough as the fracturing Bob and his wife Sara, not Cate Blanchett's eerily accurate 60's train wreck, but a sad moment in which the Christian Bale character begins to sing "Pressing On," the best of Dylan's gospel songs, after disavowing all he's ever assumed to be true. Never has the song sounded so sad or so triumphant. What an experience.

• "Los Angeles Days" Joan Didion (1988)

It was my favorite of the After Henry essays even before this year's writer's strike, but Didion's take on 1988's writer's strike now reads with spooky precision, and that's because Didion, one of the greats, always sees a human struggle underneath a bureaucratic one. It's not 1988, but the following two paragrahs, that conclude "Los Angeles Days," are an unbearably true statement about our current strike:

>>I had gone to Atlanta in an extra-industry role, that of “reporter” (or, as we say in Hollywood, “journalist”), with credentials that gave me a seat in the Omni but access to only a rotating pass to go on the floor. I was waiting for this rotating pass one evening when I ran into a directior I knew, Paul Mazursky. We talked for a moment, and I noticed that he, like all the other industry people I saw in Atlanta, had a top pass, one of the several all-access passes. In this case it was a floor pass, and, since I was working and he seemed not about to go on the floor, I asked if I might borrow it for half an hour.

He considered this.

He would, he said, “really like” to do this for me, but thought not. He seemed surprised that I had asked, and uncomfortable that I had breached the natural order of the community as we both knew it: directors and actors and producers, I should have understood, have floor passes. Writers do not, which is why they strike.

• Jacksonville City Nights and Rock N Roll Ryan Adams (2005, 2003)

I became more obsessed with Ryan Adams this year than any other artist, and began tracking down all his records. To me, Jacksonville City Nights and Rock N Roll are both Adams' great extremes, and are two takes on the same album. Jacksonville is his purist country record, full of twang and pool-hall pianos, and Rock N Roll is all loud bravado and punk guitar, but each are records about self destruction, the voice of a record at once fiercly alive and ready to collapse at any given moment (one of Rock N Roll's highlights is a song called "Note To Self: Don't Die"). In that way, Rock's "This Is It" and Jacksonville's "Peaceful Valley" are like widening explorations of the same theme - excitement and anxiety rolled into on combustive expression. And they're so vibrantly different and vivid, they're the work of an artist whose breadth and abilities alone would astonish if his songs weren't as astonishing as they are.

• "Bring It On Home To Me" Sam Cooke (1961)

I must have had "Bring It On Home To Me" in my collection before, but this year, after buying a collection of Cooke's greatest hits, I truly understood the song for the first time. Amidst Cooke's hits - some bouyant examples of 50's and 60's doo wop, some great soul and gospel, some sorta generic - "Bring It On Home" comes alive with harmony. Cooke had the best voice of all of the male 60's soul singers, but it took harmony to make it so evident and heartbreaking. Hearing "Bring It On Home to Me" now is to hear one of the greatest songs ever made, without a doubt.

• The Brief and Hideous Reign of Phil George Saunders

Saunders is a punchy writer of tragicomedies as bleak and upsetting as they are hysterical. My favorite short story of his, "The 400 Lb. CEO" makes you ache and laugh at once, wincing with pain as the pure human cruelty flies by with one brittle jab after another. Phil is one of his longer works, but it's barely 100 small pages long with crazy illustrations, and it's hard to say when its creativity turns into lunacy, but it does, brilliantly. In this political fable about a country so small, only one person can fit inside it at a time, he invents crazy robots (the "media" are represented by creatures who communicate through giant headlines coming out of megaphones in their ass), and has them led by Phil, a robot whose brain keeps falling off, making him more dangerous and incoherent as time passes. If it sounds like a punctillious allegory of Bush, it both is and isn't, it's more - it's about our fears that go along with lunacy, that make us subject to it. Yet in its apparent bleakness, Phil has a savvier, more moving twist in it than in any work of his previously - a twist that makes us think there's hope for all of us.

• The Wire Season 2 (2003)

You've been told you're supposed to watch The Wire, right? One renegade friend of yours has seen it, or you read the reviews that often proclaim it a "highwater mark for dramatic television" (as Entertainment Weekly stated this last year when it failed to earn any Emmy nominations). Well, it happened, I got into The Wire in a major way this year, and it's every bit as great as you've heard, and for none of the reasons - it's plots are not "too complex" or "too labyrinthine," rather they have a lot of characters and a lot to keep track of, with details so nuanced and true to life you don't really notice you're paying attention to them.

The biggest surprise for me watching The Wire is the renewed love you find for police investigation shows. By opening the show up to, basically, the entire real world, there's incredible mystery behind the "well how will they figure this out" premise; it renews it entirely. Each of the three seasons I've watched so far has been brilliant, but in season 2, the season that focuses on Baltimore's dock workers (or, as one of my friends put it, "the season with all the white people"), that mystery was matched fully by its human story at the center. Following Frank Sabotka (Chris Bauer - see below), his nimwit son Ziggy (James Ransone), and his meathead nephew Nick (Pablo Schreiber), the show made its corruption a drama of family and collapsed expectations, all while never losing focus on its drug runners of season 1.

• "Are You Alright" Lucinda Williams

The greatest, loneliest, sweetest composition of the year. There's a thing about a great Lucinda Williams song that you might not grasp until having absorbed it a few times - her simplest words are her best. I remember years ago riding with a friend in my car who made me listen to "Side Of The Road" over and over again, wallowing in amazement at the way a simple description of staring at a farmhouse can evoke a longing for freedom. That's true of songs like "Memphis Pearl" or "Sidewalks of the City" or "I Lost It" or "Jackson" or "World Without Tears" or any of the other dozen masterpieces Williams has written. "Are You Arlight" stands with the best of her work, and it starts with that mournful but sweet guitar that segues into a natural enough question - "Are you alright, all of the sudden you went away." Yet in asking in its chorus, beautifully, "Are you sleeping through the night? Do you have someone to hold you tight? Do you have someone to hang out with? Do you have someone to hug and kiss you?" she not only creates sweet sing-songy lyrics, but asserts the real needs everyone has, and creates a universal longing for understanding. West doesn't quite match the promise of "Are You Alright," but it does show that no artist can cut to the core of human needs so simply.

• "The Deposition" The Office (2007)

People began whining about the fourth season of The Office, especially in those padded hour-long premiere episodes, but I didn't see much wear on the show - what I saw was growth. Just before the strike ended new episodes of The Office in November, the show aired what might be its funniest, most stunning episode yet in "The Deposition," which sees Michael (Steve Carrell, having a very good year) having to testify before his bosses, girlfriend, and least favorite person in the office, Toby. The things that come out of Michael's journal scald ("Who's this other girlfriend of Michael's, this Ryan?"), a court-transcript mediated "That's what she said joke" turns the shows geeky running gag on its ear, and its climax is the epitome of this season's attempt to humanize Michael - which is to say, the sympathy you feel for Michael might, for the first time, be real.

Great Performances I Saw This Year:
- Tony Sirico The Sopranos - Each actor on The Sopranos is brilliant, but Sirico is the most overlooked because he makes what should be The Sopranos most peculiar character, Paulie Walnuts, into a pile of old-age agita and crankiness that's completely recognizable. Funny, irascible, completely illogical, cold but loyal - Paulie and Sirico helped create a life on screen, so well you barely notice. One shot in "Walk Like A Man," in which a furious Paulie drives all over Christopher's lawn, is told entirely with the flare of his nostrils. But its his fear and childish idiosyncrasies becoming one in "Remember When" that was his real triumph as an actor this year - a one-hour duet with Sirico and James Gandolfini as Paulie and Tony evade feds by driving to Miami. It was a gift to Sirico, and a gift to us.

- Andre Royo (2002), Chris Bauer (2003), Idris Elba (2004) The Wire - Each season, The Wire's universally perfect cast has one performance that seems to step out and present itself as one of the best you can recall. In season 1, it was Royo's heroin-addicted snitch Bubbles, who, at an NA meeting, revealed his buried desire to live, and the need in his eyes has informed his character ever since. In season 2, it was Bauer, playing dock leader Frank Sabotka with fury and fatherly disappointment rolled into a seething triumph. And then there's Elba's Stringer Bell, the smooth dealer of seasons 1 and 2 who gets unravelled and feisty in season 3. In one extraordinary scene with lonely widow Donette, Stringer unleashes the real terror he's capable of, and you get a glimpse, finally, of what an extraordinary presence he's been all along.

- Molly Shannon Year Of The Dog, Steve Carrell Dan In Real Life - It's said the key to great comedy is playing crazy characters straight, which makes me think the best comedians have a fairly good grasp of internalizing outlandish characteristics. So, when two wonderful comedians turned in serious performances in two dramedies, I guess I couldn't be too surprised. Shannon in Year of the Dog seems like an apple of the regular Shannon-lunatic tree, except that we wind up so deeply identifying with her Peggy's search for meaning and companionship that it turns Mike White's comedy into a vital story of self-discovery. And Carrell in Dan In Real Life reminds me of a calmer Woody Allen in the 70's, a man torn by desire and obligation, revitalized by a taste of love then forced to swallow it back down again. His torment turned Dan In Real Life into a wounding comedy of family and romantic dynamics.

Remakes in the image of

It's easy to come out against remaking old songs and artists that get rich off those remakes - certainly in the history of music, there are more bad than good ones. I remember catching the old Leif Garret episode of Behind The Music in which a poor, awkward teenage Garret is forced to stand up for the practice of remaking that made him a teen heartthrob. Now I think no one would be put in that same position - remakes are beyond common, samples are even more rampant, and no one would confuse a Garret with an "artist" that needs to defend his approach to old songs.

Right now, two albums are making me think quite a bit about remakes though. One, Herbie Hancock's River: Letters to Joni is a jazz recapitulation of an odd, interesting selection of Joni Mitchell's songs, and has just been nominated for a Grammy for Album of the Year (dubious honor as it may be), and is described by Hancock as his "meditation" on Mitchell's work. The other is the soundtrack to Todd Haynes's I'm Not There, the deep vision creation about Bob Dylan is much more of a "meditation" - a brave, mind-bending one that is truly a film experience apart from any other you'd encounter. But it's that soundtrack of good and forgettable Dylan remakes that I'm thinking about. To think that in the same month, these two songwriters who take up so much of my thoughts are getting so much remade attention. One wonders when I'll have time to work or bathe with all the attention to strange details this is going to require.

Hancock's album came to my attention about a month ago in the form of a "song of the day" email featuring its version of "Edith and the Kingpin" featuring a guest vocal by Tina Turner. The song was beloved by that email's writer, but the truth is it doesn't really work. Turner, call it a product of old age, seems baffled by all of words - and lord, are there a lot of words. But that's what interested me about the remake - who in the world would conquer "Edith and the Kingpin," of all songs? That song, one of the more overtly moralistic of The Hissing of Summer Lawns, is the definition of an esoteric choice - it's not famous, not flashy, not memorable, and from a period of Mitchell's career that is still contentious.

Yet what the Herbie Hancock version did for that song is to remind me how great a bad Joni Mitchell song can ben. That song is so narrative and unusual, so descriptive and evocative. And the reason, I think, that the album has been so much more successful than any average tribute record is that Hancock knows what he is replacing by creating jazzy piano and clarinet arrangements. In this case, he strips away the 70's orchestration of guitar and synths and turns them into something, arguably, more interesting. Hancock has internalized, ripped up, and rebuilt the structure of Mitchell's songs and found an instrumet to replace each piece he's found.

That's more of a compliment to Hancock's ambition than his result. I hate most of the songs on the record. He and Luciana Souza bore me to death trying to rebuild "Amelia," and Corinne Bailey Rae, with her obnoxious 5-year-old squeakiness, seems simply undeserving of singing "River." Yet when he does right, he's really onto something. He and Leonard Cohen turn "The Jungle Line" (maybe the second most esoteric choice from Hissing of Summer Lawns) into a spoken word jazz piece, and it emphasizes the beat nature of that song, but also emphasize its poetry and rhyme scheme. Best of all, the album opens with a glorious expansion of "Court and Spark" with a magnificent vocal by Norah Jones.

What is it that those songs get right that "Amelia" or "River" get wrong? What I think it is is a couple of things - the courage to expand the original coupled with the understanding of exactly what made it work. The greatest remakes, truly, are ones that respond to elements in the original that are hard to see and then creates a song around them, exposing what was there all along. "Court and Spark" is one of my favorite Mitchell songs, a song as creative as it is honest, a song as human as any I can recall, and Jones deserves it. For those of us that love that song, there are a couple of slight changes to its words that she may not have noticed, but I think alter the meaning - she turns "He saw how I worry sometimes - I worry sometimes" into pure repitition, adding a second "how" before the second "I," which diminishes the innate poetry of that line. Ditto for calling LA the "city of the falling angels" rather than the "fallen angels."

But I love that I can speculate on meaning that specific to the song - that's what a good remake can do, too - continue the conversation about a great song. Unfortunately, very few songs on the I'm Not There soundtrack figure that out, which is especially disconcerting as the movie from which it comes is a once-in-a-lifetime deep meditation on an artist and all his meaning - it expands and obsesses over Dylan, and is, truly, unlike any movie experience you can recall having. The album, however, is like every tribute experience you remember having. Not every song is as dull as, say, Jeff Tweedy's version of "Simple Twist of Faith" or Eddie Vedder & Calexico's of "All Along The Watchtower" (a song nonpareil in how unnecessary it is to have another remake). Some are interesting - Richie Havens bluegrasses up "Tombstone Blues" thrillingly, Yo La Tengo has just the right mellowness to make "4th Time Around" as comforting as it needs to be.

Yet even those rare gems on the soundtrack only reminded me how many great Dylan remakes there already are, and how none of these deserves to stand with those. Nina Simone doing "Just Like A Woman" internalizes that song's vulnerability, Joan Osborne doing "Make You Feel My Love" makes the song so warm and sexy, Them's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" makes the song expansive and desperate, R.L. Burnside's "Everything Is Broken" that turns the song into the best blues jam you've never heard, Norah Jones (again - for a simply good artist, her sense of remakes is top notch) turning "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" into a sensuous lullaby. And it reminds me of how many bad and irrelevant Dylan remakes there are - from Hole's own "It's All Over Now" to that obnoxious Guns N Roses version of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door."

Each of those great songs that I can recall (to say nothing of the dozens of hits other artists, like Peter, Paul, & Mary or Joan Baez had with his work in the 60's) responds to elements in the song that need to be contemplated - much like the movie does. That makes me think what an act of interpretation and reconstruction a great remake is. The way that, say, Me'shell Ndegeocello turned Jimi Hendrix's "May This Be Love" on its ear by making its guitars into a piano and string arrangement, or how Emmylou Harris used that song to soften it into gliding harmonies on Wrecking Ball - songs like that seem just as much work to create correctly as an original work.

I think that's why remakes are degraded and forgettable for the most part - no one's willing to do the work they require. Did Ndegeocello hear the Hendrix original and realize how sexy it could be? Did Hancock hear Mitchell's "Court and Spark" and think of ways that a jazz vocalist could expand it? I have to say yes and no - those artists heard those originals like true fans, injested them, and remade them in their own image. Good thing it's a worthwhile image.

Alicia Keys for beginners

I started writing the following blog sometime last December, but was interrupted by a need to go get beer with my friend Mike. Now I have returned....

If I were to make an Alicia Keys mixtape, it would be around 10 songs long. If that mixtape were an album, it would have to be the great soul album of the decade, somewhere with D'Angelo's Voodoo. That's because buried in Alicia Keys's mediocre albums are some of the great soul songs written in the last 30 years - she's an artist beyond talented, if talent for an r/b star is to be judged on an extraordinary voice and musicianship, on the ability to forge the simple, sing-songy truths of pop songs with a voice and structure that makes them something more.

Not to brag, but I knew that years ago. And I think it is not bragging to say that because it seems like reviews of her new album As I Am are surprised to find out that she has talent - just before they conclude with the same lukewarm approval her albums have always gotten. I don't necessarily blame reviewers for feeling so ambivalent about Keys - I've never owned a record of hers myself. But I'm always a little surprised by the summarial dismissals of her work.

David Browne, in Entertainment Weekly, once described her attempts at old-school soul as "like a jogger who runs out of steam quickly," The Guardian said she's a fan of "the familiar and the bland" and even of As I Am, which, by all accounts is a more modern record, is described as "having lots of confidence and volume, but less of the shades in between" (says Mojo). The girl can't win - when she's confident, she's dull, when she's loud, she's not confident enough... I think.

I can't keep track of what I'm supposed to think of Alicia Keys - certainly not by Keys, who is a smoldering beauty, to be certain, but is also a little era-less. During "You Don't Know My Name"'s reign as a single, she was Foxy Keys with an afro. Nowadays, you catch her on the bizarre Dove marketing campaign "Short Takes" in the commercial breaks of The Hills, and she's a modern city woman, advocating for respecting your mother and (I think) not doing yoga. Her message, even in those "love your man" tracks, is to believe in yourself... again, I think, because of so many "love your man" tracks.

Still, if I go under the Alicia Keys category as artists in my iPod:
1. "Prelude to a Kiss" (from As I Am)
2. "Go Ahead" (As I Am)
3. "Wreckless Love" (As I Am)
4. "Diary" (The Diary of Alicia Keys)
5. "Dragon Days" (Diary)
6. "Fallin'" (Songs in A Minor)
7. "Unbreakable" (Unplugged)
8. "Heartburn" (Unplugged)
9. "You Don't Know My Name" (Unplugged)
10. "Mr. Man" (Songs)
11. "How Come You Don't Call Me" (Songs)
12. "If I Ain't Got You" (Diary)

When I look at those songs, I don't see a lot of variety - they're songs either about being in love, falling in love, hoping to fall in love, or telling a dude that you don't even need love. I think with "Go Ahead," "Dragon Days," and "Hearburn," I have every fast-paced song Keys has recorded (besides "Karma," which I don't like much). I see that the songs got more soulful with the move to The Diary of Alicia Keys.

And I see that I just love a lot of those songs, above all else. When I see Keys smile in public appearances, and even - god forbid - on those damn Dove commercial breaks, I know I'm supposed to see her as another pop star, as disingenuine of all the rest - but Keys, I think, is so beautiful, you simply want to believe and support her. That's so true of those songs, too. "Diary" remains in my top-played iPod playlist, and why wouldn't it - the song is as great a soul song as you can remember hearing. I've never heard an Alicia Keys album straight through, and perhaps if I did, I'd find her as dull or over-confident as I'm supposed to, but in the format of just having a selection of songs available, the truth is I kind of love her. So be it - I guess I'm a fan.

Lessons In Adaptation: No Country For Old Men

No Country For Old Men is earning more speculation than any other movie released this year - it's a return to form for the Coen Brothers of Blood Simple! It's a break in form for the (unwatchable) Coen Brothers of Intolerable Cruelty and O Brother Where Art Thou! It's Fargo but not at all funny! Many reviews are proclaiming, as Peter Travers did, that it's the best movie of the year, and in those already-plentiful early Oscar predictions, No Country is the movie to predict - Best Actor for Josh Brolin! Best Supporting Actor for Javier Bardem and Tommy Lee Jones! Joel and Ethan Coen are finally sharing director credits which means that it'll be rather difficult to put caveats before their lock Best Director nomination - it'll be Joel's second and Ethan's first.

Like so much of this end of the year talk, it's the tail wagging the dog - positive praise that shapes the percpetion of the movie for anyone watching. Because so many people dread that ironic Coen Brothers form of late that produces disasters like Intolerable Cruelty, critics tend to over-praise moments of Coen sincerity, and one thing No Country certainly is is sincere - it's positively bashful, devoid of ostentation of any kind. The shots of its South Texas landscape are as spare as the Cormac McCarthy prose from which it came, full of mise-en-scene that draws you in in its geometry, symmetry, and design. Roger Deakins, long-time Coen Director of Photography with five Oscar nominations and no wins, is bound to wind up with an Oscar this year, if not for No Country, for that other stark Western he shot, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

But the spare images are not what i want to discuss, although they are terrific, and much should and will be written about them. It's the spare words that I care about. Having finished McCarthey's No Country For Old Men (a book I started due to catching the spare images in the No Country trailer, playing before a third Western released this year, 3:10 To Yuma) just two weeks before I saw the movie, I've had my perception as equally colored by those Coen junkies desperate for a third masterpiece by the duo (after Blood Simple and Fargo, that is). It's always said that you should not see the movie of a book you love, but I wonder if you can go further - it's never possible to make an honest assessment of any book you've read and know. I didn't love No Country For Old Men, but there's interest dervied in its construction, and how it's adjusted in the movie, which I also didn't love. Seeing the movie made me admire the Coens for their utter lack of ostentation, admire Deakins for his astonishing compositions, admire, even, Josh Brolin for the expressiveness of his eyes. The movie drew me into the incredible suspense built through the room tone, light, and shadows that define its central cat-and-mouse story. But it made me admire what McCarthy did in his novel even more.

No Country For Old Men the book is a vignette-structured book in which each chapter begins with a lengthy italic monologue by Sherrif Ed Tom Bell, played in the movie by Tommy Lee Jones before creating a section break and moving into the action of the chapter. A monologue of Bell's verbatim opens the movie, but those incongruous voiceovers don't return. Sometimes you see Jones's Bell talking to a fellow cop in a restaurant or coffee shop, and they're recognizably drawn from that same material of Bell's monologues, but they are not the same. There is a reason for this.

Cormac McCarthy's No Country is a three-man story, or, rather, it's a story in which Bell is the lead and the cat-and-mouse of Llewellyn Moss (Brolin) and psychopath assassin Anton Chigurh (Bardem) is the tense vehicle for which Bell addresses with pain and agita the true source of his concern - the country's end of morality, the sense that we've all gone to hell. For Bell, his obligation as sheriff is a call to protection of the citizens of his town, and as backwoods as it seems, that obligation is a potent force in the novel - so too is that sense of degradation, and I say that as a person who is totally incapable of hearing doddering old men rant about how things change.

The problem is that Bell in the Coen's No Country is a doddering old man ranting about how things change. The Coen's might be back to sincerity, but their scenes with Jones are shot with their usual medium-shot irony - his rants are suddenly made "funny," the source of crotchety whining without much context, turning him into this year's version of those funny Minnesota accents in Fargo. In a dramatic moment at the end of the book and movie, Bell talks about his need to retire. In the book, this scene is a moment of great weight, of failed obligation and pain. In the movie, this scene is just a bore - a fact emphasized by what's been chopped out of it, which is to say, the vast majority of its length. The Coens seem to know that we can't sit through it.

That's all because Bell is such a secondary character in the film version - and "secondary" is a polite way to put it. Truly, he's an irrelevant character - his police work is minimal, his obligation to Moss is not actually explored, and without truly feeling where his concerns on morality come from, his scenes serve only as dull, grim Greek chorus breaks to let time pass on the more interesting Moss-Chigurh story line. Because of that, when the third act shock resolution of that cat-and-mouse story is revealed, it doesn't make you empathize with Bell's obligation and share his pain at moral decay, it simply lets the air out of the movie - its main storyline turns into a cynical action story in which the bad guys win, but rather undramatically.

This change in Bell is, I think, the result of some pruning. I have ot imagine Bell's presence was more emphasized in an earlier draft of the script, but then was changed due to seeming too close to the novel. And No Country is very very close to the novel, which makes sense as reading No Country, it feels like a book written merely to be adapted later. That's a limitation for the book as well - McCarthy's stoic prose is wonderful for vertical stories in which you don't mind that nothing much happens, but this is all plot, and sometimes his poetic ruminations just get confusing on what's going on. And that confusion isn't cleared up in the movie.

While not following the book around Bell's character, the movie is rather stubborn about following the rest of the book. That only points out how implausible much of the book is. Sure, Chigurh, and, later, Carson Wells are master criminals, but seriously, how do they always track Moss down, even after he's lost his transponder? They just always seem to show up in the right spots. And who even hires Chigurh in the first place? How do they get ahold of him? The drug-running maguffin for this story is beyond convoluted - it doesn't exist. And that Carson Wells character (played in the movie by Woody Harrelson)? He's just as stupid as he is in the book - the most generic of slick, holier-than-thou criminal cliches.

Which is to say, there are some fundamental flaws in No Country For Old Men, but it's also accurate to say I may have never concluded such a thing without reading the book. I find it interesting the way the entire storytelling dynamics visually shift in the movie simply by decreasing our identification with the Bell character. And it's somewhat comforting that the moments I found confusing in the book are just as confusing in the movie - at least I wasn't missing something.

Some reasons why Peter Travers is my least favorite person alive

I owe a lot to Peter Travers, the long time film critic for Rolling Stone. In 1995, a long long essay he wrote about the year in movies (it began with the fairly typical, heavily punctuated first line "Hollywood screwed up this year. Big time.") essentially started my life-long obsession with film criticism. I remember a time, then I was 13 years old, when I read his list of the worst movies of the year over the phone to a friend - I thought he was hilarious, and, with all that cussing and vituperative bullying, clearly onto something the establishment was missing out on.

It didn't really take me long to notice, however, that Peter Travers seemed to never NOT do all that cussing and vituperative bullying. Sometimes it seemed that Peter Travers didn't even like the movies he liked (in 1997, I recall, baffled, that his praise for LA Confidential was "It lurks in Chinatown's shadow), or at least was willing to get amnesia about previous opinions - despite, in 1995, praising Sean Penn's devastating performance in Dead Man Walking, he said later that the performance wasn't worthy of its Oscar nomination. That goes double for Elisabeth Shue in Leaving Las Vegas that year - a performance also, apparently, undeserving of an Oscar nomination, despite his end of the year piece stated was the best acting that year. Actually, that might be too positive a characterization of his writing - it read, "Some will tell you these performances are just for movie masochists. Bullshit."

Something happened the more I got involved in reading and obsessing over film criticism - I started to really really hate Peter Travers. It seemed, to me, that his reviews, truly, said nothing. He'd complain (of course) that the Hollywood establishment took his quotes out of context for movie posters, but then he'd seem to write exclusively in angry ranting, and movie-quotable nothingness. Today, I clicked on Rolling Stone's review of No Country For Old Men, and here is his first paragraph:

"Misguided souls will tell you that No Country for Old Men is out for blood, focused on vengeance and unconcerned with the larger world outside a standard-issue suspense plot. Those people, of course, are deaf, dumb and blind to anything that isn't spelled out between commercials on dying TV networks. Joel and Ethan Coen's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel is an indisputably great movie, at this point the year's very best. Set in 1980 in West Texas, where the chase is on for stolen drug money, the film — a new career peak for the Coen brothers, who share writing and directing credits — is a literate meditation (scary words for the Transformers crowd) on America's bloodlust for the easy fix. It's also as entertaining as hell, which tends to rile up elitists. What do the criminal acts of losers in a flyover state have to do with the life of the mind? "

Wow. Who knew you could impugn Hollywood, television, indie movies, fans of Transformers, people who dislike violence, and people who dislike "literate meditations" in one fowl swoop.

Travers's writing is all movie-slogan cliche, portable jargon, and atrebillious crankiness aimed at whatever will fill column space. It seems to me as though the ways in which criticism can be itself an art should be manifest (read a review by Owen Gleiberman, or Roger Ebert, or A.O. Scott sometime), but Travers is worse than a bad critic, or even a bad writer - he's a flashy provocateur, but he's as substanceless as he is contentious. He says nothing, but manages to say too much of it, ruining the movie and annoying you - often within the same sentence! One rather vapid bit of praise for Tommy Lee Jones's performance:

" On the page, the sheriff is a tad too folksy, dishing out cracker-barrel wisdom to his good wife, Loretta (Tess Harper), with a twinkle written into his homespun truths. As you already know by now (and In the Valley of Elah categorically proves it), Mr. Jones does not do twinkle. He's a hard-ass. And when he chews into a good line, you can see the bite marks. "

Again, Travers' compliment is actually a dig on the Cormac McCarthy novel No Country For Old Men - except, of course, when it's obnoxious. A hard ass? Seriously? Bite marks?

My guess is that you do not see bite marks from Tommy Lee Jones, who is a terrific actor who I'm sure does his grizzled best with the best part from McCarthy's book. I don't know what twinkling, hard-asses, or chewing into lines looks like, but it isn't really what Jones does best- Tommy Lee Jones is a man of telling reserve, of eyes sunken behind fields of wrinkled, depressing skin, of a face for which his voice does the least of the talking. However, I believe he could give a (egads) hard-assed performance, though with Travers' description of that performance ending there, it's hard to say what one would look like.

Travers, I say without any evidentiary support, is still somewhat popular, listed amongst the critics whose word influences the marketability of certain movies. In a way, that makes sense - Travers doesn't make a lot of opinions of his own, and if popular support changes with a movie, he tends to change with it - for example, in 2001, he listed A Beautiful Mind as the #5 movie of the year. However, when popular sentiment soured on that movie as it became an Oscar favorite, so did he, trashing the movie in his Oscar report, neglecting to mention his own four-star review of the thing three months earlier. So, I'd have to assume a four-star review for No Country For Old Men is a good sign of what advance public word on the movie is, but I sorta already knew that.

I can say from experience that it's typically easier to write something punchy and evidentiary if you can create an argument with it rather than finding and elucidating strengths - especially a review of a new movie, in which your initial reaction might be as simple as "wow, that was upsetting." Maybe it's because he works for Rolling Stone and has to have a certain provocative edge to him. Maybe that's why Peter Travers's reviews are, ya know, terrible.

Fall songs

There was a time in late October 2005 when I was riding my bike across 36, and down its frontage road Moorhead on which I lived, and Billie Holiday’s “As Time Goes By” came on my iPod. Now, there is not much of a Fall in Colorado, before the snow sets in, but there was sort of one that week – golden Cottonwood leaves that were quickly swept to the side of convex streets and were brittle and crunched like tight plastic when you stepped on them. Of course, I was riding to my bike and listening to my iPod so the sound was a figment then. Billie’s voice was the only sound I heard.

I’d downloaded the song from a number of things I stole off my friend Mitchell’s computer in Washington, D.C., and, sure enough, this was the first time the song had played on my iPod, which was always on shuffle. Now, that iPod at that time seemed always to know the right song to sing, like a friendly bartender, but this was a pretty incredible moment. “You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss, on that you can rely.”

I was wearing a lightweight t-shirt and no jacket, and it struck me at the time that it was late in the year to not need a jacket of any sort. I thought it wouldn’t be like that for long, most certainly not, maybe within the week the snow would fall. Maybe it did, it’s hard to remember now. The truth is it wasn’t important what happened afterwards, it was the moment – the last moment of calm breezes and atmospheres, of things feeling just as they should be, with an understanding of discomfort to come but pleasant and warm right then – something that was, for the last time that year, just right.

That’s what the song is, I think – just right. It is a song that hardly needs my input. I couldn’t possibly count the versions of it that have been recorded after Humphrey Bogart asked Sam to play it again back in 1941 – most recently, that Casablanca version acted as ironic commentary during the ending credits of The Sopranos’ “Cold Stones” episode in 2006 – a literal comment on Carmela’s visit to Paris combined with the stinging line “the world will always welcome lovers,” which spoke brutally to the fatal beating of Vito, the outed mobster killed by Phil Leotardo’s goons (the world most certainly did not welcome those lovers). That was a thrilling use of the song, but then too it was perfect, and then too, it felt like Fall – the episode took place, in that Sopranos storyline, just before Thanksgiving.

That is what I think a Fall song needs to be – calm and accepting in the fate of oncoming gloom. Today I played the Billie Holiday version on a rare warm October day. For us in Seattle this year, there wasn’t much of a summer as we rushed into a perennial autumn, beautiful, enormous, kaleidoscope of leaves that mat streets and sidewalks in gooey glaze. On your shoes the leaves don’t crackle, they feel like bug guts smashed in your soles, and make you wonder the nature of the grime they track onto your rug. I rolled the windows down in my car and blasted the song along 45th Street through Wallingford. Again, it was perfect.

Plenty of people talk about Summer songs, and even Winter songs – songs that are frothy and fun, or spare and cold. Fall is something different, a calm aware of the storm. I’ve heard songs that strike that mood before too, but not often. They certainly aren’t like Billie’s version of “As Time Goes By,” but they come to mind – songs I’ve heard during the same time of year to the same effect. Leona Naess’s “Calling,” which played its bittersweet piano cords to me on a bus ride through the changing trees around Green Lake. Neko Case’s “Fox Confessor Brings The Flood” driving through rain storms. They’re there, Springsteen’s “Two Faces,” Dylan’s “Shooting Star,” Fiona Apple’s apropos “Pale September.” They’re the leaves as they near the end of their year, beautiful and final, unconcerned by everything that might be ahead.

Radio Nowhere

I've said it before that music is, in a sense, impossible to review since it's the most subjective of all media, but at the same time you know the experience of reading a review you think captures the truth - and one that seems to be on Mars. They're all on Mars these days - in taking a quick look at the responses to some recently released albums by artists I love, I've found, I think, some proof that the reviews have mostly missed the boat. Here is my take.

The World Has Made Me The Man of My Dreams Me'shell Ndegeocello
She's not the most fashionable woman to get behind, but I truly believe Ndegeocello is one of the great female artists of our time, and our time is the one when there are a million of them to choose from, so that's a worthy distinction. She's done it subtly - becoming an indie star in the 90's through her funk albums Plantation Lullabies and Peace Beyond Passion, but somehow managing to get even more popular with her acoustic, piano-and-string soul disc Bitter in 1999, which probably sold less than 100,000, but leads to seething allegiance, and got her a Grammy nomination.

But that was just her first about face - in 2002, she released Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape, a masterpiece of Jazz, hip-hop, spoken word, and social consciousness - it was, for an artist of eclectic provocation, an album that one works up to. 2002 was secretly a terrific year for music, and Cookie is one of its best albums. Listen to a song like "Hot Night" and try not to feel revolutionized, or a song like "Trust" and not feel a little titillated. Still, that wasn't enough either - her 2003 release, Comfort Woman, was all spaceage, synth-driven reggae full of stoner love songs (its best song is the supremely seductive "Come Smoke My Herb"), and 2005 saw her releasing Dance of the Infidel, full of Jazz of such purity, she doesn't even sing on the album (however, the singing, when it occurs by artists like Lalah Hathaway or Cassandra Wilson, is extraordinary - "The Chosen" from that record has to be one of the finest modern jazz compositions you're likey to encounter).

So here she goes again with her consciousness raising genre-bending. The World Has Made... reflects her interests in Afro-punk and reggae, but also political ire. Her first song, "The Sloganeer: Paradise," incites Muslim suicide bombers to kill themselves already and save us the trouble. "Headline" rallies with a sneer, "I heard in the paper/ that war will bring peace." "Evolution" sings with subtlety that it all signals the end of times as "Evolution's ending," and it opens with a sound clip called "Haditha," in which a voice describes the Muslim signs of the end of time - wearing shorts in public, having sex in front of other people, having headphones on your head.

It has to do with Ndegeocello's lingering popularity - which is to say, her lack of it - that leads to the size of reviews publications can devote to her records, but the scant coverage is surprising. I'm happy at least Entertainment Weekly gave the record an A and is on the right track with a review noting, "her eye on global events and her heart gnawed at by mixed emotions," but I'm afraid it's a little too lavish in the name of promoting Ndegeocello. EW has long been a fan of Ndegeocello - the only one, I think, that follows her work so closely - but I think it speaks to support to devote more column inches and detailed analysis.

The truth is the record is highly ambitious and nearly great but suffers from a lack of direction. In its first half, you feel like you're listening to Ndegeocello's second work of consciousness-raising greatness, a more outraged Cookie. It climaxes in the sweet soul-jazz "Lovely Lovely" and moves into the more gentle "Elliptical," a beautiful song hard to take seriously with its refrain of "I received a message from god/ in the form of a rainbow/ instructions from Captain Gerard who said - 'see how it feels/ when you make love/ and you look them in the eyes'" (that's a lot of layers to go through for a pretty simple sex tip - god, her rainbow, and her captain could have just pointed her to a Barnes & Noble), gets more gentle on "Shirk," and then moves into its hardest-hitting, most energetic number "Article 3." The combination is tonic, but its second half is rather lackluster and makes you feel like a journey with no discernable destination - all buildup to lots of filler. Her climactic song should be "Michele Johnson," an ostensibly personal statement, but its "I do some right/ I do some wrong/ I pray/ I'm just a soul on the planet trying to do good" falls pretty far short of her declaration on Cookie "Let's talk about the sign of the time - politics, and the fight of a revolution era soul singer" on "Hot Night." It ends in the bizarre bonus track of "Soul Spaceship," that's a funky, catchy nothing. As a record, it works, but not entirely if you stopped to look at Ndegeocello's work - she's a born provocateur and her music is alive on her endless, fearless reinventions, but this album isn't the complete work like her others. It is, however, the work of a real artist - would anyone mind hearing that?



White Chalk P.J. Harvey
If Ndegeocello is ambitious but flailing without direction, Harvey's White Chalk is the opposite - minimalist in scope, and fulfilled and made thrilling by strong direction and drive. You hear it in the opening track - the piano keys that come floating in on "The Devil" with its high, girly singing, like a quaint and uneasy dream escaping a Victorian attic - it's like The Others set to music. "As soon as I'm left alone/ the devil wanders into my soul," she sings with a high mutter climaxing, in a way, into a cry of "Come here at once!" The woman who 12 years ago, in "Meet Ze Monsta," cried "Big black monsoon/ take me with you" is hardly, at this point, courting new territory asking to be whisked away by the devil. But this is long after the dark, grinding punk guitars, and it sounds like a Harvey you've never heard before - quiet, imposed, a soul suffering
with such unease that the only word she can find to describe her hidden desire is "the devil."

Harvey states that she's so proud of this record that she's shocked she can listen to it on her own. I think what she's responding to is her lack of personal connection to it - she stated she can't listen at all to To Bring You My Love and Is This Desire? because they were made at such low points in her life. This is an album that's entirely persona, entirely locked in that Victorian attic with an old piano and a broken harp. Yet what a thrill - if this is an exercise in characterization, no one does dramatics like Harvey. More than that, this album is evidence of what a truly great artist can do with absolutely anything, and the truth is that Harvey is one of the greats - not just one of the great women of the 90's or great women in rock, but one of the great artists in rock music, a pillar by which all rock since 1980 can and should be judged by.

The reviews on it are small, however, and I suppose that's how it should be - the album is, truly, not that ambitious, and will not be one of the important records of Harvey's career. But then again, neither was Dylan's Desire or X's Under The Big Black Sun, but those albums are astonishing too. The reviews are positive, for the most part, but a couple surprise me - an EW review, for example, that gives the record a C, saying her "high key strangles the most powerful weapon in her arsenal: her voice." Really? Harvey's voice has always been part of creating the persona in her songs - her melodramatic moan in "Legs," her masculine bounce in "I Think I'm a Mother," her rock star angst in "Big Exit," her timidity in "Pocket Knife." Her voice is a powerful instrument, but she's used it in every conceivable fashion, and this is just another one, creating a sustained atmosphere of anxiety with its spare falsetto.

I'm afraid that Harvey's reviews have long suffered from praise fatigue. People are so busy congratulating her on making another terrific record that they fail to talk about her work as one long, continuous project, taking on new ambition and directions with each album - reviewers like her, but they don't know her that well. White Chalk is another terrific record, to be sure, but what works is Harvey's sense of structural drama - its first half climaxing with the pulse-like nightmare of "When Under Ether" and a ghostly walk on the sand in its title track, and its second half working up to and away from "Silence," the most powefully percussive and theatrical song on the record. This is a record of real conceptual drive, practically scripted in the ebbs and flows of the persona at its center. Even I get weary of naming every Harvey album as the best or second best album of its year, but I think of Harvey releasing another album now as Bergmann releasing another movie - this is another in the grand scheme of advancing Harvey's varied, vital world view.


Magic Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Springsteen's inclusion as an all-time rock great is not very much in question, nor is there a shortage of column inches with which his work can be discussed in popular publications. Its praise is mostly universal (it has a 76 Metacritic rating, which, I have to add happily, is lower than PJ Harvey's), and its most positive press is certainly not short on Grand Statements: Says EW's Chris Willman, it's his "Best record since The River in 1980."

I'm a fan of Willman's writing, so it pains me to say that that assertion is crazy, but that assertion is crazy. For one, The River has to be Springsteen's weakest record of that period - I would think that the best Springsteen record since The River would be Nebraska, released immediately after The River. But that's nitpicky. What drives me nuts about Magic exactly? I think it starts with the glossy cover picture of Springsteen, now 58, staring out with well-groomed hair and too-worked-out shoulders like he's been watching too much of Little Steven's work as Silvio on The Sopranos. That cover and its flip-side back cover - of Springsteen's toned back in a tight white T covered with the track list - are something like the attempt in 1984 to turn Springsteen's ass into a working-class symbol on Born In The USA.

Springsteen's ass, of course, was a working-class symbol with Born In The USA, but now the tough-goombah-Jersey Springsteen presented here symbolizes, to me, the cynicism that pervades the record. Longtime Springsteen producer Jon Landau (The man who, as a rock critic, made famous in 1974 the statement "I have seen the future and his name is Bruce Springsteen") describes the recording sessions for Magic as very pared down, very structured - not a lot of extra material, not a lot of experimentation on the songs, a very clear, goal-oriented recording that went by quickly. This too symbolizes the same cynicism.

These songs are, frankly, the most transparent of Springsteen's career - and I say that loving most of his work. Even on The Rising, I felt like the Springsteen of old was alive and well, if showing his bones a little. Here, it's all bones - songs like "Your Own Worst Enemy" and "Girls In Their Summer Clothes" wear their generic pop dress proudly and Bruce sounds bland over them. Songs like "Gypsy Biker" and "I'll Work For Your Love" are even half as interesting as that, sounding like democratic E-Street Band jigsaw songs - each band member adds his/her portion dutifully, and the result is as it should be, I suppose - it sounds as natural as a Destiny's Child song.

But I think the problem persists even in the good songs, and that problem is that the thing is too calculated, playing like Springsteen at his least convincing and most arrogant. The emotional closer "Devil's Arcade" stings, in its way, but it's also too coyly constructed - it's a first date! It's a dying soldier! I found myself equally liking the song and feeling manipulated by it, and knowing that so much of Springsteen's career has been calculated, this one felt more intrusive. The opening rocker "Radio Nowhere" is wildly energetic, but it's also standard for Springsteen, and a little cloying at that - described by some as a "plea" (the chorus rings "is there anybody alive out there"), I hear it as Springsteen's taunt of modern music, a song, truly, about there being 57 Channels with nothing on.

But should he really be objecting so much making music that sounds this standard? 2005's Devils and Dustwas derided by money, but I have to say I loved that record, and it was for exactly what's missing on Magic - the spirit of invention. In fact, prior to writing this, "All I'm Thinking Bout" popped on my iPod, and with its high-pitched squeal sounding much like Bruce walking the Vegas strip at 7 a.m., it conveyed the feeling of real romantic longing. That album was decried by many as one Bruce-goes-acoustic record too many, but the surprise with that record is how much more than acoustic it is - the sexy "All The Way Home," the strings and harmonica of "Jesus Was An Only Son," the shouldn't-have-seen-this-hooker tale, "Reno" - it was, truly, a risky and bold record that sounded like Bruce just wanted to do something he hadn't before. Magic is the opposite - a calculated, dull record of Bruce trying to prove he can sound like he always did. It'll sound great in concert, I'm sure - this is Bruce Springsteen, after all - but I think it's the least interesting work of his career.

The foreign film section

As someone who listed "list making" as one of my favorite activities well into my life in college, it gets hard for me to admit how obnoxious I find "best of" lists for movies and entertainment in general these days. Maybe it comes from an understanding of the mindset for these things - the need for list makers to vaunt themselves into a position of expertise simply by creating a list, the need to manufacture contraversy to by creating a few "edgy" choices in order to defend their viewpoint, thereby exerting that expertise again. I know because I've done it, and because I still do it, really - make lists at the end of every year of the best movies and music. I still love those lists, honestly, and it may be because I just think in lists, or maybe things on an annual basis are just manageable enough that I don't feel like I'm straining, and I can still write an opinion or two, which is clearly something I love.

But in any case, I found myself upset about one of those lists recently - a daily IMDb link to eddieonfilm.com, another blog on this site, which listed the "Top 100 Foreign Films Ever Made." I read lists like those (and they pop up every damn day by some blogger and get linked to IMDb, whose daily posts these days are half E! news castoffs, half geeks-only contentious minutiae) to get movie recommendations, as much as to cringe of the idea. I made a post on there, actually, first because the description of Jean-Luc Goddard's Contempt read "more terrifying than a Joan Didion novel" as if she were Dean Koontz (was the history of Caliornia pioneers in Where I Was From supposed to be terrifying? The description of rain in Run River?), but also at the idea in general:

"Joan Didion novels aren't terrifying, that's a weird comparison.

And "foreign movies" isn't a genre - why are you putting so much privilege on the American movie, making it the default from which these other movies compare to. Those Top Ten movies are just great movies and are each pretty essential to the history of all movies. This list seems like an elaborate way to brag about an inclusive knowledge of movies, but it only points out how ghettoized you see non-American movies."


The writer of the website, Edward Copeland, points out that I really meant non-English Speaking movies (guess I see movies as pretty American by default too), but still - the list is strange when it's not just self-important. Of those top ten movies, it seems to me that 9 are obvious, as they helped change the history of movies, and the tenth - Warner Herzog's Aguirre: The Wrath of God - is thrown in for good measure, to add a movie shot in color, a movie that feels "modern" in order to disguise the list as something other than fodder for film majors discussing the same "important" international releases over and over again. Don't get me wrong - Aguirre is an auterist masterpiece, a distinctive work made unlike any other movie before or since, and is the central movie of Herzog's incredible career. But it is a kind of ahistorical film classic - it's not The 400 Blows or 8 1/2 or The Rules of The Game, it's just its own entity.

Not that these sort of unique aberrations can't stand alone on top ten lists, but it leads to the central problem of Best Ever lists - it says more about popular opinion at the time the list is being made than it does about "Ever." My dad pointed out to me once that on the lists of "Best Ever" albums, there's a rotation every decade of which Beatles album tends to show up on top - in the 70's, it was Sgt. Pepper's, in the 80's it was Abbey Road, in the 90's The White Album, and now Revolver. Just like the most recent Best Ever list of songs in Rolling Stone - these days the popular opinion on Bob Dylan is so high that "Like A Rolling Stone" feels appopriate on top (and why wouldn't it appear on top then - when compiling lists from any number of sources, they are popular opinion, and the list is compiling those opinions), whereas even five years earlier, the same magazine said the Best Ever song was the Beatles' "Yesterday."

In the same sense, Herzog is perhaps more popular a filmmaker now than ever - after Grizzly Man and Rescue Dawn, two of the most accessible movies of his career. How strange was it two years ago in that summer o' documentaries that Grizzly Man, a movie about man's imbecility in the face of nature, became a crowd pleaser. The eddieonfilm.com list also represents the current strain of popular opinion about Ingmar Bergman (always amongst the greatest of all filmmakers, but, it must be said, is perhaps more popular now due to his still-fresh death), that Persona is his best movie, and not The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries.

But what I was initially calling ghettoizing non-English speaking movies I think is true, but also shortsighted. The truth is the history of movies is one tennis match between the English language movies and the international movies - those obvious 9 of the top 10 in the eddieonfilm.com list come from times in which international cinema was such a force that it influenced every American director who watched those movies - they may not look the same, but it's true: without Bicycle Thieves there is no Midnight Cowboy, without Breathless there is no Mean Streets, without Belle du Jour, there is no Blue Velvet.

However, when including non-English movies after the 70's, the opposite is true - Herzog notwithstanding, these are artistic accomplishments made becasue of American movies. Run Lola Run or Croughing Tiger, Hidden Dragon are movies made for international audiences. Almodovar, probably the most famous of European directors in the past 25 years, is an admitted film packrat, a postmodern collector of intertexts using old movies to create modern pastiche.

Frankly, the only thing that connects pre-1970 and post-1970 foreign movies is a subtitle. International movies after that point are often great, of course, but they're typically made as movies for the international marketplace and are made of certain recognizable tropes - the Cinema Paradisos or Burnt By The Suns or Central Stations that are typically congenial movies about cranks and the kids who soften them up, and wind up winning Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film. Or, they're the Asian regime-change epics - Farewell My Concubine or The Emperor and the Assassin or Yellow Earth or Not One Less or Raise The Red Lantern or... well, you get the idea.

Even the distinctive foreign movies get churned into international commodities these days - Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was famously a bomb in China, but it hasn't stopped China from trying to make that thing a dozen times since with diminishing effect each time. Tom Tykwer, the German kineticist of Run Lola Run could easily be prosecuted for plaigarizing himself in movie after movie since then (although, I sort of like that movie he keeps remaking, The Princess and the Warrior is just as good). Danish Dogmatists made Breaking The Waves a masterpiece, but then just added their poorly lit aesthetics to movies you swear you've seen made in English. And then of the real international artists? There should be no distinction in discussing their careers or American movie director's careers - take Almodovar or Krzysztof Kieslowski for what they are, modern auteurs, just like Robert Altman or David Lynch or Spike Lee (and often times, even more popular).

I pick this battle because ultimately, I think, while Best Ever foreign film lists do ghettoize foreign movies, it limits them even more to think of non-English movies throughout the history of film as a continual experience - there's a million stories waiting to be told about each era of movies, and continuing to think of them all as the same thing means only nitpicky film geeks will get to it - or worse, apparently, they're not getting to it either.

One night I wrote an essay...

On an overnight, about Joni Mitchell's Hejira, a flawed album that, it turns out, would be the most important one I've bought this year. I called it "Story Of A Song," because at one point it was just going to be about "Refuge of The Roads," that album's final song, but you can't tell that story without telling all the others. So, no title.
__________________________________________________________

Story Of A Song: “Refuge Of The Roads” Joni Mitchell

Something is off about Joni Mitchell’s voice for the first 8 songs of Hejira. It’s been getting progressively deeper in every album after her last “Hippie” period release Ladies From The Canyon. Perhaps it reached its zenith in 1975’s The Hissing Of Summer Lawns the previous year, when it was deeper than in previous records, but still a pitch-perfect Soprano act of flawlessness. Hejira is only a year newer, but the voice is now scattershot and, in its way, lucky – it hits notes correctly as if by serendipity. As “Coyote” opens, Joni reaches one high note – “There’s no comprehending/ just how close to the skin bone and the skin and the eyes and the lips you can get/ and still feel so alone.” That “alone” is heavenly in a sense, but it’s also its own accident, appealing in its humanity, not in the sonorous ease of her voice up to this point.

It just gets worse from there, and I’m saying that as a fan of Hejira – “Amelia,” lyrically poignant and evocative as it is, is, up to this point in her career, the worst vocal performance she’s ever recorded. The smoke has taken hold – her notes are faltering, and though her voice is magnificent compared to where it would wind up some 15 years later at the dawn of the 90’s, it’s not what it was. But that’s appropriate – this Joni is not who she was. Hejira will not be a particularly successful record commercially, and it isn’t even entirely successful in intent, but something does work about it, and that starts with the flaws in the voice.

From its journey-as-spiritual-myth title (its origin is as a Muslim word meaning a journey away from danger) to its dated, literal cover image of a road arising from Mitchell’s torso, Hejira is (to quote Mitchell’s own description of Summer Lawns) “a concept from start to finish.” That sort of thing is a bonus, of course, but it’s also a limitation – Hejira, each song its own landmark and quizzical document of wanderlust, is so set on being the Joni Mitchell travel itinerary document, the road becomes a little suffocating, or at least, bordering on embarrassing. With “Coyote” contrasting with a coyote, “Black Crow” identifying with the crow, “Amelia” inspired by the vapor trails of passing jets, “Song For Sharon” by a wedding dress in a Staten Island storefront display, and even “Refuge Of The Road’s” final, magnificent verse begun by viewing a calendar in a highway service station, Mitchell risks psuedointellectual overidentifying – you wonder when she’ll pass a fire hydrant and write a deeply personal song about high water pressure.

Musically, Hejira is Mitchell’s first record with bassist Jaco Pastorius, and it’s also sonically the most distinctive of their sound together. His bass sounds steely and low, a rumbling from the soul stirred by the passing lines on the freeway. The notion of travel, of deep contemplation gets locked into that sound, the thick stringed sound of thoughts weighing the conscious. In “Hejira,” Mitchell sings “There’s comfort in melancholy/ when there’s no need to explain,” and Pastorius’s troubled bass is the sonic embodiment of that notion. His movement in each song is so unique, his guitar is the uniting thread that makes the concept such a potent force, allowing Hejira to form its indelible, imperfect impression as a whole. Mitchell’s description of Summer Lawns might have been that “This record is a concept, from start to finish,” but she always felt like she was straining at selling that song to song. Hejira needs no such disclaimer – it has Pastorius instead.

What was Mitchell thinking with Hejira, I wonder sometimes. Some years after Court and Spark’s release, she described that record as a “dialogue” of identity vs. love in the modern era, and the truth was that was far too cerebral for the effortlessness of that record. It was true, of course, but it was also unnecessary, a step backwards into the irrelevant land of explanation. Great records need no capitulation of their success as a complete work. Hejira needs some explanation – more than Court and Spark and For The Roses, less than The Hissing of Summer Lawns (and, depending on your view, more or less than every subsequent record – no explanation can justify Wild Things Run Fast or Chalk Marks In a Storm).

The central song of what it embodies has to be, appropriately, the title track. Track 5 of 9 makes it literally central, but it’s also built up to and deflated from afterwards – and that’s because it is, honestly, not really a song, but an idea. The central motif of the guitar is repeated over and over again, itself a “prisoner of the white lines on the freeway” (the central refrain of “Coyote,”). “I’m driving in some vehicle, I’m sitting in some café,” is the lyric opening the song, and it speaks to the endlessness of the road sinking in. “I’m porous with travel fever,” she sings, passionately, and who wouldn’t be at this point in the album? She’s danced with coyotes, stared off at planes and thought of being swallowed by the sky or the sea, wandered around Beal Street, and observed with skeptical removal a strange boy skating the streets of his home. Those two previous songs, “Furry Sings The Blues” and “A Strange Boy,” are not particularly memorable, but they are consistent – the same thread of travel of Pastorius’s guitar defines them, like a pencil tracking progress on a map. “Hejira,” so contemplative and passionately felt, is the climax of the wanderlust, a breakthrough in sameness. It ends the first side of the record, and the four songs on side 2 are far more specific in their goals – weddings, crows, blue motel rooms, etc.

A song like “Hejira” is soft, sure, a repetitive, comforting guitar progression, but what’s far more important is the collision of themes and ideas coming, in their way, to the forefront – perhaps not simply on Hejira, but in Mitchell’s career. That vehicle she’s traveling and that café she sits in are the stage, but they’re only the beginning of this evocative setting – a melancholy so comforting it’s described as “as natural as the weather/ in this moody sky today.” I hear that line, that personification of a sky as moody, as the proverbial punch on the back of the ketchup bottle – everything comes out afterwards. Porous with travel fever and climaxing the wanderlust, it also seems to unleash, there beneath the surface, all that Mitchell’s been uncertain of saying about life.

She observes, “A man and a woman sitting on a rock – they’re either gonna thaw or freeze.” I think that image is the nature of this hejira, the nature of the spirit awash in indefinable possibility. All Mitchell says is “Strains of Benny Goodman coming through the snow and pinewood trees” as a delicate saxophone insertion seems to trail you off away from that rock. All there are, truly, are possibilities, Mitchell seems to tell us – “we call come and go unknown/ each so deep and superficial/ between the forceps and the stone.” This is, truly, Mitchell’s most clearly stated positions on life, the fear of being unknown amongst her choices when death (the stone) arrives. One verse, I think, lays the argument bare, while also laying the path for endless, spooky existential rumination:

"Well I looked at the granite markers/ Those tribute to finality - to eternity/ And then I looked at myself here/ Chicken scratching for my immortality/ In the church they light the candles/ And the wax rolls down like tears/ There's the hope and the hopelessness/ I've witnessed thirty years/ We're only particles of change I know, I know/ Orbiting around the sun/ But how can I have that point of view/ When I'm always bound and tied to someone/ White flags of winter chimneys/ Waving truce against the moon/ In the mirrors of a modern bank/ From the window of a hotel room"

Mitchell registers only surrender in the world around her, the waving of truce against the moon, and she, to counter, has chosen to travel in some vehicle and sit in some café, and “chicken scratch” for immortality – which is to say, to write her experience and fight the endless white flags she sees in the world waving truce. The image is at once a work of argument and a work of calm beauty – there is a comfort in that world too, but Mitchell prefers her path, that path of being “a defector of the petty wars.”

In the year I bought Hejira, I was 25 – or, I should say, I bought Hejira this year. I’m 25 now. What is it in a 25-year-old, a year in which adulthood can no longer be ignored. I wrote about my 24th year as the year in which old assumptions are thrown out, when the short term groups of time concluded and restarted by the structure of school years are no longer, and so the only real conclusion is death, and the meantime becomes tougher, more abstract, more unfamiliar. I had moved that year across the country to Seattle, perhaps for no real definable reason. What is a definable reason anyway – all it would truly be was a socially acceptable salve for the wound of personal longing, of too many nights sleeping on “the strange pillows of my wanderlust.” Of feeling that I, too, could be a defector of a petty war.

Maybe it was the year. Maybe it was the month – February. February is lonely for the single, and, as would follow, lonely for the lonely. Mitchell said of “Amelia” that it was a song she wrote “from one solo pilot to another.” It would make sense that it would take a solo pilot to identify with the record as well. Maybe it was the city, the rain. “Here in Savannah it’s pouring rain,” Mitchell sings evocatively on “Blue Motel Room.” You can see her in blue motel rooms writing lyrics, staring at “slick like cellophane” treetops from the storms. You can hear it from within those same windows wondering at the rest of the world, an imaginary “you” to still love you when you come back home, wherever that is. In any case, I can hear the crescendo of “Hejira”’s guitar in times of formless consternation, times in which certainties are vague and inaccurate – driving in some vehicle, sitting in some café. You are somewhere – “You know it’s never been easy/ whether you do or do not resign/ whether you travel the breadth of extremities/ or stick to some straighter line.”

A song like “Hejira” is the way not to resign. Perhaps to understand it is, too.

Side two bounces to the breadth of extremities. “Song For Sharon” is an 8-minute poetic evocation of marriage and personal choices. “I went to Staten Island, Sharon, to buy myself a mandolin,” the song opens simply. Sharon is married with a husband and a family, and sings to them. Her choices are the “other road” Mitchell could have taken, and she sees their appeal in her past – she talks of chasing boys on ice skating rinks and says “It was white lace I was chasing.” She’s fascinated by every choice – “A woman I know just drowned herself/ the well was deep and muddy/ she was just shaking off futility/ or punishing somebody/ my friends were calling me up all day yesterday/ all emotions and abstractions/ it seems we all live so close to that line/ and so far from satisfaction.”

If I am criticizing Mitchell’s evidently wearing voice, let me affirm the extraordinary quality of her verse. To read that stanza is to puzzle yourself at “that line” far from satisfaction, and to honor that sense of confusion, to feel it manifest. “Song For Sharon” is such a standout track because the length of thought of marriages and choices is given room for implication, room for expansion. It’s what the second side does without realizing – expand.

Of that, there’s a relief in “Blue Motel Room,” a more classic jazz song, and a punchy burst of humor. The song’s title is literal and punchy – “I’ve got a blue motel room, with a blue bedspread/ I’ve got the blues inside and outside my head.” It doesn’t work very hard at it – which is a compliment – but the song is the moment of accepting all the wandering of the record. Its final verse is a joke, but a giddy one: “You and me, we’re like America and Russia/ always keeping score… gonna have to have ourselves a peace talk/ in some neutral café.” Its singability and standup bass leaves you happy and warm, but it can only do it with the compounding feeling of identity in motion that the record conjures. And it lightens the load a bit for the song that sums up everything, one of Mitchell’s finest songs ever, “Refuge of the Roads.”

“Refuge of the Roads” is the synopsis of all of Joni Mitchell’s attempts on Hejira. In it, her economy of phrase becomes essential - she describes meeting a “friend of spirit” and says in speaking with him that he “mirrored me back simplified,” that they “laughed how our perfection would always be denied.” Such an understanding of life, such an evocation of meeting a person with whom your thoughts can share space and understanding. Yet she rejects it, always the solo pilot – “Hard of humor and humility, he said we’ll lighten up your heavy load/ I left him there for the refuge of the road.”

I mentioned in the beginning of this essay that something is off about Mitchell for the first 8 songs of Hejira. “Refuge of the Roads” is track 9. Her voice has found a home finally, and it’s in the peace of the roads – the acceptance of the way in which perfection will always be denied. In its way, “Refuge of the Roads” is a song like “Tangled Up In Blue,” a work of timeframe and experience following one magnificent vignette after another, each one concluding with that same idea of taking refuge in the movement and vastness of experience that is travel. Of that, the verses get more and more elated. In its penultimate sketch, Mitchell pulls off into a forest: “And I went running through the forest/ I was running like a white ass deer/ running to lose the blues/ to the innocence in here.” She says of this stop “Like a wheel of fortune/ I heard my fate turn turn turn.”
To say that Mitchell has found enlightenment, or at least perspective on her road trip becomes an understatement. The album’s final verse is a mind-opener:

“On a highway service station
Over the month of June
Was a photograph of the earth
Taken coming back from the moon
And you couldn’t see a city
On that marble bowling ball
Or a forest or a highway
Or me here least of all
You couldn’t see this cold water restroom
Or this baggage overload
West bound and rolling
Seeking refuge in the roads.”

There’s so much striking me in that final verse. That marble bowling ball. This baggage overload. Even the words “over the month of june” as opposed to “on a calendar.” It’s mostly, though, finding hope and elation in a sense of insignificance, in marking the specificity of an individual experience despite the grand anonymity of it all, of beginning to understand the vastness of it all. In it, the final refrain is enormous – the “u” in refuge is held for two to three times as long as in previous refrains, allowing the guitar and drums to crescendo louder as well, creating the sense of riding, speeding towards the sunset.

To me, the greatest albums match me philosophically – they’re albums that see the world for what it is and are excited by it despite the “complications.” Tom Waits’s Bone Machine is like that – journeying through hell to register that “You must risk something that matters.” PJ Harvey’s Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea as well – an album beginning with “This world’s crazy/ give me the gun” and concluding with “Now we’ll float, take life as it comes.” Mitchell’s own masterpiece (in my opinion) For The Roses is similarly conclusive on its search for identity. There isn’t brutality on Hejira, but there is enough angst and confusion to fill albums with twice its length and half its flaws. To conclude with “Refuge Of the Roads” is to find hope somewhere in the interior of America, which is to make peace of getting close to the bone and the skin and the eyes and the lips and still feeling so alone. There’s refuge in life, it turns out.

Gotta keep the devil way down in the hole

So you've heard of The Wire, right? The HBO show every TV critic hails as the greatest drama in TV history, and you know about three people who have ever seen the thing, right? Those three people say it's the most amazing thing they've ever seen, right?

Well, let me be among the three people you know who tell you it's the most amazing thing I've ever seen. I say these days that I don't have time in my ridiculous schedule to watch entire movies, or that when I start to watch any movie I would just fall asleep, which is true and I would, but it's telling that in the week in which Ingmar Bergman and Michalangelo Antonioni died within a 24 hour period, I haven't rewatched any of their movies. There are images from Wild Strawberries and Persona - the two Bergman masterpieces I find most astonishing - that I cannot shake, of course, but I have not rewatched either, and I own both. Reading of Antonioni's death, Gary Susman began to write of L'Avventura: "L'Avventura changed the rules of movie narrative with its unresolved ending (a young woman goes missing early in the picture; she is never found, and her disappearance is never explained). The film was both a parable of human existence and a specific dissection of the society of his day, in which affluence and permissiveness had replaced humane values."

This is true. Also, until I read this, I'd forgotten I'd seen L'Avventura, a movie I now remember thrilled me. Oops.

What I'm not forgetting this week? To slip in hour periods into my schedule, sometimes at the expense of lseep, to watch another hour of The Wire. The Wire especially gets praise for its most recent fourth season, however, being where I am now, on episode 7 of the second season (just past half way), I cannot possibly imagine the show being any more perfect than it is right now.

The Wire in its first season introduces us to the two sides of Baltimore's war on drugs. First, the detectives of various moral fortitude, driven by ambition, greed, seniority, luck, nepotism, career aspirations, anger, sleaze, and everything in between - which is to say, it mirrors reality. Then, the dealers of west side housing projects - some with moral questions, some third generations of drug slingers, some secretly in business classes, some holding up lost in paranoia in strip club back rooms. Which is to also say, it mirrors reality.

I can't say that enough. The Sopranos, by virture of comparison, managed to be so incredbile because of its breadth of detail, and because it featured the full length of human personality in its group of mobsters, allowing their humanity and human-ness to exist so thoroughly over a realistic portrayal of time - it proved TV could be the real great mechanism to tell stories by telling a 7-year story in 7 years.

The Wire was touted as "difficult to follow" when it premiered, but I do not think The Wire was at all more difficult to follow than The Sopranos. It is incredbily detailed, often letting plot lines reveal themselves over many episodes. It is less flashy than The Sopranos, and is, if anything, even less respectful about the rules of narrative television - of what dramatic tics an hour of television is supposed to display. What a thrill that is, though - moments explode and shock, and do so with no way of knowing what will happen. It is, I must say, as unpredictable as life. I remember one extraordinary moment in the first season in which Bubbles, the heroin-addict police informant played fearlessly by Andre Royo, goes to an AA meeting, and, hearing a speaker, accidentally reveals his lost desire to live - it's told with a walk to a podium and just a flicker of the eyes during a ribbon presentation, but who could have expected that that scene would lead to that reaction? I like to think I'm good at that sort of thing, but I sure didn't see it coming.

What that life-like unpredictability does is re-assert the draw of the police show - if anything is possible, how do you solve crimes? The Wire frees itself from whodunnit sameness, making every uncovered bit of information hard-fought and stunning. In fact, it unfolded its myserties so precisely in season one, that I was at first reluctant to get into the change presented in season 2 - a focus on Baltimore's ports, and their effects on the drug and police world. Yet as that mystery's unfolded, I've begun to like it even more. And the breadth and unfamiliarity of its central case - about 13 murdered Eastern European sex trade workers smuggled in on the port - only make it more unmissable.

Season 2 appears, at first, to be about Frank Sabotka, played by Chris Bauer, the Polish boss of the ports for whom the detectives of season 1 re-assemble to investigate, but its focus has really been Sabotka's idiot son Ziggy (James Ransone) and trailer-bred badass nephew Nick (Pablo Schreiber) as they, out of desperation for more money, get deeper and deeper into smuggling. Ransone and Schreiber are key in the incredible vividenss of those characters, but its Bauer's Sabotka that is making this season such a mystery and an accomplishment - an episode-7 scene in which he rails at a Baltimore Congressman about the implications of a system of robotic dock equipment (meaning less work for the union, and less ways to smuggle goods) is amongst the most thrilling moments of rage I've witnessed. A climactic moment in which he throws a shoebox of money on the table is chilling in its anger, disappointing in its amorality, and full of human things like obligation and fear. Bergman and Antonioni helped us be able to express those emotions on screen. The Wire helped fulfill them.

Come Back Home to California

I could blame it on being stoned at the time, and perhaps I should. The Nog-N has begun showing reruns of Laguna Beach, and there I was, unsuspecting, to catch a rerun of their second season premiere. Viewers of Laguna Beach - and, later, The Hills, the Laguna Beach spinoff featuring Lauren "LC" Conrad's new life as a Teen Vogue intern in Los Angeles - will remember this as the season premiere that introduced the world to Jessica and Jason, if they remember it at all.

Of course, logic would say they won't remember it at all. MTV shows show up on DVD, or certainly Laguna Beach does, but do not typically stick in the memories of their viewers. Laguna Beach is perhaps more effective and memorable for its core viewers than, say, The Real World or any of the latest Bam Margera/ Steve-O shows premiering, but I would hesitate to think of its viewers as containing a list in their minds of what occurred or when.

But this is where I was unsuspecting - minutes into the episode, past the Kristen Cavilleri voiceover of who all the "new people" were, there was a montage, set to the tune of Atherton's "California," a song I'd never heard before, but was so extraordinary I went home and downloaded it. In the montage: Steven, GQ-model heartthrob of season 1, skateboards out of his dorm in San Francisco. Trey, bad boy of season 1, packs up his room at Bard College in New York. Morgan, giddy chipmunk of season 1, drags a suitcase in the picturesque Utah mountains to her car. There's Lo and LC and Christina, all the faces of season 1 (conveniently titled for our short-term memories), packing up and heading home one by one.

There was a reason this sequence was so good: each of these people was quite simply themselves. Trey's room was a mess as he dug through shirts scattered everywhere. Morgan looked pooped and used both hands to lift up her hefty suitcase. Whatever the action, these were characters presented without judgment, without voiceover - simply as they were, one after the other, drawn with thoughts occasionally visible on their silent faces as a chorus of "Come back home to California" lulled each of them through trains and airports back to the shores of Orange County.

Laguna Beach is not a popular thing for people who are not in high school to admit to watching, and certainly not men. Its biggest fans, I have to believe, are women who identify with the LC's and Kristen's that it chronicles - white women of financial privilege and physical perfection who utter phrases like (as Kristen does, referring to Steven) "Boys are stupid, I'm giving up on them." I once said that the reason it was successful was that it was so beautifully shot, it made viewers forget they were watching a reality show, and MTV could essentially create a scripted show without approaching the need for an actual script.

But the lush, filmic cinematography of Laguna Beach does something more than hoodwinking - it, I believe, truly captures the experience of teenagers, and, perhaps of all of our most insecure behaviors. For those viewers that are not in high school, and are not female, and are not born of financial privilege, the most common derision of Laguna Beach must be that its characters are "spoiled" are "annoying" are "ditzy" are "superficial." These things are all true. Of course they are. Teenagers are awful, that's why we don't hang out with them much.

But what I think gets lost is that the show accepts each person in its cast for all of those traits, and, at times, even explores what it means to exhibit being annoying, or ditzy, or spoiled. These characters are simply who they are, and the show, unlike most reality shows, does not tell you with whom to identify or the "role" each plays. Perhaps to truly probe a teenager's personality, a viewer would have to give up the luxury of liking each of them all the time, as truly, no teenager is likable all the time.

In Season 3 of Laguna Beach, its stalwarts of season 2 make some appearances, then disappear again, moving along to a new group of high school "make-ups and break-ups." This was, I imagine, dismaying for some, but it thrilled me, as did every minute of the histrionic year - of Cami and Kyndra's degrading snickering and dismissal of the show's main characters, Tessa and Racquel, as well as their endless obsession with Tessa and Racquel's every move (how else would they know what to make fun of?). Of beautiful, naive, vacant Tessa's protective insecurities being so present and powerful, they begin to interfere with Racquel's outside friendships. Of Racquel's "love" for gorgeous, mute Alex, who in turn says - when he breaks his skater resolve and speaks - things like "I guess I'm just not expressive, you know?"

Season 3 made the smart move to begin following a cast in their Junior year, so as not to have to jettison its focus the following year, and in doing so made, to me, the most thrilling TV moment outside of The Sopranos in the past year. Its final montage, leaving its characters as they went off to college and prepared for a summer without one another, is breathtaking in its way of watching a group of teenagers, each completely incapable of expressing the crossroads each has come across. Cameron watches all his friends leave, and seems to have gained unexpected bursts of anger towards bratty, vindictive Kyndra. Tessa has had to accept that Racquel and Breanna (LC's dimwit little sister) have fixed their friendship, leaving her without exclusive rights to Racquel, and worse, her longtime male friend Chase has gone to Hollywood to start a band and didn't say goodbye. In the end, Tessa stands alone on a beach, listening to Chase's message of "I'll have to catch you next time I'm in town." Tessa closes her phone, and says something staring off at the sunset waves. What did she say? I can't remember - "yeah, see ya," I imagine it to be. I'm alone, I think, in recognizing that embroidered line, that gesture with her phone, clenched in her fist beneath her chin, as the sensation that all humans go through on occasion - the feeling of abandonment, of suddenly having to fend for yourself, of staring at that endless, unyielding ocean. That feeling doesn't just hit the capable, I suppose, and I also suppose that's why I love having Laguna Beach on reruns on Nog-N.