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.