Every year, I spend some time during the flurry of annual Best Of The Year lists is movies, music, and TV to reflect on what I think is the best of the year, at least, the most meaningful books, songs, albums, movies, TV shows, etc., that I had not known about or experienced a year ago. For most people, any year can include any number of works of arts from any number of years – this year, I saw for the first time the classic The Lion In Winter, which was entertaining and theatrical enough, and released 40 years ago. This year I saw The Rules of the Game for the first time, a seminal film released in 1939. I did not include either of those movies on my list because, as great as they were, they were works I appreciated without being moved, changed. These ten works, new or not, meant more to me.
1. Paul Bowles The Sheltering Sky (1949)
So often, I read a modern novel, and find a consciousness and character at work that I identify with immediately. I’ve fallen in love with works by Rick Moody, George Saunders, Paul Auster, Alice Munro, and read their books so precisely that I feel I have no tolerance for older works, works of the American and world lit canon that I feel like I missed out on because I wasn’t forced to read them in college.
That changed this year. The modern works I read that I was supposed to love this year – Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories, James McManus’s Positively Fifth Street, Neil Gordon’s The Company You Keep – I saw through, detested, or gave up on midway through. Instead, far and away the greatest book I read this year was the Paul Bowles classic The Sheltering Sky, published in 1949, a classic I didn’t even know I’d missed. The book explores Port and Kit Moresby, two Americans wandering Africa sometime after the war – for what reason? We’re not sure really, and neither are they, desperate to shed off the skin of the civility of their New York world.
The Sheltering Sky gives them what they’re looking for, in a way, and it’s an act of both great indictment and vindication to have a second act of your book titled “The Earth’s Sharp Edge” – that is, the edge with which Kit and Port fall off. In it, Port contracts a disease and Kit collapses under the pressure only to release herself in a way she certainly wasn’t expecting. Is society a lid that keeps down the madness of Port and Kit’s soul, or is it what makes them desperate, lonely, and vicious to one another? Bowles has some answers, but it’s the fact that the questions are asked, that madness is granted and warned against, and that it’s written in a style like Hemingway, minimal, cutting, giving you nothing but what you need to know, and letting the bleakness of the surroundings and the prose tell you everything you need to know and then some. Right now, just writing it, I want to reread every word and pick out the factors that made these characters delusional, angry, pitiful, and representative of all of us, protected by a sky above us that creates order.
2. Playtime (1967)
This year, a friend’s fantastic birthday purchase of a Netflix subscription has yielded me an opportunity to see a number of amazing movies I’ve always meant to see. I saw Tokyo Story and La Dolce Vita and Beauty and the Beast, and what a gift each of those movies are. The one that surprised me the most, though, is Playtime, a movie that pushes you right in the center of its wonderful concoction of modern metropolitan France and leaves you in awe and smiling for 2 hours. A world of an order, and of specific modes of movement and behavior, Jacques Tati’s Paris is bewildering, ridiculous, and full of people grasping for connection and understanding.
The movie is a love poem to modern society even as it spotlights the contrivances that keep people from connecting. In one of its many nimble, extraordinary sequences, a man and a woman in separate apartments engage in a bit of a seduction, as we watch from their outside windows. Yet they don’t actually interact, they’re separated by the wall and the televisions each are watching. The two complement each other without even being aware of each other’s existence. Tati created Playtime as absolutely a movie with no equal – a song of movement and interaction that moves, unconcerned with plot or character, simply wrapping us up in the world that we’re so lucky to live in.
3. “Forever” Walter Meego
The 80’s are everywhere, and for proof, line up the pop music of the year next to the indie music – you’d find the two not so distinct. Songs like MGMT’s “Electric Feel” and Hot Chip’s “Ready For The Floor” – songs, basically, about love and dancing – fit right in with Chris Brown’s “Forever” or Madonna’s “Give It 2 Me.” Of all of these, though, music made me dance, laugh, and appreciate all things indie, no single song moved better or excited more than Walter Meego’s “Forever.”
I heard it first at a concert I saw for no particular reason, and found Walter Meego’s guitar/voicebox/synth combo charming and fun. Yet “Forever” is more than that – it’s that sense of fun turned into something that elevates and restores. Its choruses are bracketed by the line “I can make you excited,” and it proves itself right – full of bass, pulse, and drive, the song is excitement, about music, about love, about being alive. Songs did better than “Forever” in both pop sales and indie recognition (although, I did see the “Forever” video playing in an American Eagle in LA, and later on an ad for Heineken), but none elicited more easy smiles than this one – and certainly, none meant more to me.
4. Penelope Cruz in Elegy
In this time of Oscar prognostication, people write about Best Actress contenders in terms of “slots.” Is there room for Meryl Streep in Doubt to be nominated without taking up Angelina Jolie’s “slot” for Changeling? We used to watch movies throughout the year and then decide who was deserving of nominations. I for one would ask that people remember a woman who seems to already have a “slot” for Best Supporting Actress – Penelope Cruz, who will be deserving, too, when she is nominated this year for her magnificently fiery work in Vicky Cristina Barcelona.
But her better performance was in a lead role, in Elegy, and she almost certainly won’t be nominated. As the young object of desire by a mid-60’s professor, played by Ben Kingsley, Cruz manages to be mysterious under his gaze, as well as gorgeously open and naïve. She is full of love, excitement, and desire, and it is perhaps her genuineness that, along with his own self-centered concerns about his age, keeps Kingsley’s David Kapesh from really understanding her. Cruz manages to convey everything through gorgeous glances and perfect smiles, but it’s one unforgettable, devastating scene towards the end of the movie in which Cruz gets very very naked, that we truly understand every emotion she feels. The scene is wordless, but loud – Cruz proved herself as capable and powerful as any working today.
5. Tina Fey as Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live
Without a doubt the single most important bit of fictional television all year. For around six weeks of completely inspired impersonations, Fey deeply wounded a political figure perhaps more than any actor, comedian, commentator, or talk-show host since Chevy Chase skewered Gerald Ford in 1975 – and she did it simply by mimicking her, by looking like her in stately dresses, and by sounding like her when she spoke. Her impersonation of Palin’s wild inconsistencies and quirky-moronic defense mechanisms during the Palin-Katie Couric interview were only hair’s breath from realty anyway, but it allowed for lines like “and now I’m going to impress you with some fancy pageant walking” or “For those of you Joe Six-Packs playing a drinking game at home? Maverick” to be even funnier because they didn’t seem all that off from the real thing. This was a moment that we can remember as the way true comedy, done well can really matter – and can matter more by being of high quality.
6. The Straight Story (1999)
Another great Netflix viewing that I didn’t expect to love and miss as much as I did. David Lynch’s The Straight Story seems like a joke on paper – a straightforward narrative of a nearly blind old man (Richard Farnsworth) driving his lawn mower across Iowa to see his dying brother – and perhaps that’s why it took me nearly ten years to see it. But the amazing thing about the movie is that Farnsworth, with his small, searing eyes, seems to be the only person capable of allowing Lynch to express his sincerity. Unlike his movies that, with varying success, plunge the duality of human desire and cruelty, The Straight Story is about the kindness and compassion that binds us all together. You see Lynch’s vision in his shots anyway, and maybe that’s the greatest aspect of The Straight Story – that kindness can exist in people you’re suspicious of, and that it can sustain you.
7. TV On The Radio Dear Science
Every year, it gets more and more exhausting to try and keep up with critical music tastes – even this year, when I feel I’ve been relatively up-to-date on music coming out in the world, I don’t recognize half the albums of most critic’s top ten lists. Usually, I pick whatever album meant the most to me as the album of the year – Neko Case or PJ Harvey or Blackalicious, or whomever I just happened to find give me the most sustained, exciting record of the year.
Well, I’m good and shocked to find that most critics seem to agree that Dear Science seems practically on another plane to every other mainstream release this year. “Halfway Home” opens the record with its furious guitars and drums, and shocks you with its lyrics of consternation at so many eternal questions. Science is TV’s eclectic, loud confrontation at the things that create meaning in our life – the threat of death, the existence of love. They do it with Tunde Adebimpe’s astonishing lyrical abilities, and with music that can be poppy, rap, punk, virulent, sexy, or lovely at any given moment. For a band that was already unique in their spot in modern music, Dear Science is their most listenable, and most ambitious record. When Return to Cookie Mountain was released in 2006 and everyone called it amazing, you sometimes had to work to enjoy some of its weaker cuts; it was excellent but cerebral. Dear Science is the first record of theirs I loved as much as I admired.
8. Battles, Performance at Bumbershoot
This is a work of art that only those lucky enough to see Battles perform live can appreciate, as seeing music live is so different from listening to it on your own. Particularly at a setting like Bumbershoot – Seattle’s annual 3-day, outdoor music festival over Labor Day weekend – where the excitement of music and art is infectious for everyone wandering from one unheard act to another. I’d never heard of Battles before the show, and nothing could have prepared me anyway – a drummer, guitarist, and keyboard player who are maybe electronic, or maybe art-rock, or maybe industrial, or maybe hard rock, or maybe pop, and who each seem to play whatever they feel like, whenever they feel like it. It’s an art-rock version of a discordant jazz jam-band, but it requires the setting of a concert to really understand – to feel the volume that pulsates, the bass that moves your body, the noise that takes over. This is musical performance that’s beyond magnetism – it’s a release, a cleansing.
9. “The Children Stay” By Alice Munro (1998)
As I’ve written about “Cortes Island” from The Love Of A Good Woman collection by Munro on one of these lists, I wanted to avoid writing about a second story from the same collection – particularly when I could have written about “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” or “Post and Beam” or “Family Furnishings” or “Trespasses,” all by Munro, just as easily. But “The Children Stay” is the Munro story I think of most (including the other greats from Good Woman I read this year, “Save The Reaper” and “My Mother’s Dream” – each of which was astonishing).
Reading a great Munro story is a tapping into the desires and fears we all experience and consider too small to discuss, and “The Children Stay” is about an affair, of sorts, but it’s also about the non-reasons that could create its existence, about the way longing has a million reasons, or none at all. It’s three parts of this story that have stayed with me months after reading it. One, a quick reference to “talks like this” throughout the marriage of its two main characters – meaning late night talks about love, life, philosophy – as a force that sustained the marriage and masked its discontent. Second, a lengthy dining room conversation about the meaning of Orpheus. Third, a dizzyingly simple, haunting final line that shows the longing as lifelong, unanswerable. All I can say is that any reading that sticks with you months is a gift, but a story in which the individual moments that surprise you continue to register that surprise on their recollection is more than great writing – it’s great art.
10. Lawrence Lessig Free Culture (2004)
My strangest bit of popcorn reading for the year, Lessig’s Free Culture dissects the current (well, 2004 current, so current enough) conflicts of copyright violation, people’s fears of litigation, and what that means for how we express ourselves creatively. Free Culture is also a history of the way creativity has always been an act of piracy – or, at the very least, collaboration, and that as much validity that exists in cracking down on illegal, immoral piracy, the harms and the reality of that cracking down are far much worse for how we live, and how we express ourselves. Its legally precise prose that entertains because it makes us question at what point the hassle of the protection for expressing ourselves is enough to contain our best creative instincts.
Honorable Mentions: Great moments without much context? How about the Roger Ebert essay on why he won’t review Ben Stein’s Expelled (http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/12/win_ben_steins_mind.html), a gripping piece both on the importance of shaping arguments correctly, and defending moral beliefs? Ebert wrote up a storm this year, but of all of his memorable writings, this recent work moved me most.
The final montage of The Wire’s finale “-30-” in which we see, basically, a synopsis on everything and everybody. You could complain that this sort of thing was excessively summative, but it also created a compelling, singular moment of explanation to recognize the factors that create who we are, from our crackheads to our governors. As a philosophical text, this four minute piece of the 90 minute finale gave me more to think about than everything on television combined… except Tina Fey of course.
Finally, the cinematography of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky. It was not showy and will likely not win any awards, but the filming was a frame by frame evocation of that movie’s wonderful advocacy for being positive and caring. One beautiful shot of its lovely protagonist Poppy (Sally Hawkins) walking onto her new boyfriend’s balcony after a wonderful date is like a vision of tranquility – her hair flowing as the sun sets on her beautiful city. Leigh gets much credit for the subtle and true improvisation he brings to the actors of his movies, but I hope people begin to see Happy-Go-Lucky as proof of his subtle and true visual capabilities, too.
1. Paul Bowles The Sheltering Sky (1949)
So often, I read a modern novel, and find a consciousness and character at work that I identify with immediately. I’ve fallen in love with works by Rick Moody, George Saunders, Paul Auster, Alice Munro, and read their books so precisely that I feel I have no tolerance for older works, works of the American and world lit canon that I feel like I missed out on because I wasn’t forced to read them in college.
That changed this year. The modern works I read that I was supposed to love this year – Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories, James McManus’s Positively Fifth Street, Neil Gordon’s The Company You Keep – I saw through, detested, or gave up on midway through. Instead, far and away the greatest book I read this year was the Paul Bowles classic The Sheltering Sky, published in 1949, a classic I didn’t even know I’d missed. The book explores Port and Kit Moresby, two Americans wandering Africa sometime after the war – for what reason? We’re not sure really, and neither are they, desperate to shed off the skin of the civility of their New York world.
The Sheltering Sky gives them what they’re looking for, in a way, and it’s an act of both great indictment and vindication to have a second act of your book titled “The Earth’s Sharp Edge” – that is, the edge with which Kit and Port fall off. In it, Port contracts a disease and Kit collapses under the pressure only to release herself in a way she certainly wasn’t expecting. Is society a lid that keeps down the madness of Port and Kit’s soul, or is it what makes them desperate, lonely, and vicious to one another? Bowles has some answers, but it’s the fact that the questions are asked, that madness is granted and warned against, and that it’s written in a style like Hemingway, minimal, cutting, giving you nothing but what you need to know, and letting the bleakness of the surroundings and the prose tell you everything you need to know and then some. Right now, just writing it, I want to reread every word and pick out the factors that made these characters delusional, angry, pitiful, and representative of all of us, protected by a sky above us that creates order.
2. Playtime (1967)
This year, a friend’s fantastic birthday purchase of a Netflix subscription has yielded me an opportunity to see a number of amazing movies I’ve always meant to see. I saw Tokyo Story and La Dolce Vita and Beauty and the Beast, and what a gift each of those movies are. The one that surprised me the most, though, is Playtime, a movie that pushes you right in the center of its wonderful concoction of modern metropolitan France and leaves you in awe and smiling for 2 hours. A world of an order, and of specific modes of movement and behavior, Jacques Tati’s Paris is bewildering, ridiculous, and full of people grasping for connection and understanding.
The movie is a love poem to modern society even as it spotlights the contrivances that keep people from connecting. In one of its many nimble, extraordinary sequences, a man and a woman in separate apartments engage in a bit of a seduction, as we watch from their outside windows. Yet they don’t actually interact, they’re separated by the wall and the televisions each are watching. The two complement each other without even being aware of each other’s existence. Tati created Playtime as absolutely a movie with no equal – a song of movement and interaction that moves, unconcerned with plot or character, simply wrapping us up in the world that we’re so lucky to live in.
3. “Forever” Walter Meego
The 80’s are everywhere, and for proof, line up the pop music of the year next to the indie music – you’d find the two not so distinct. Songs like MGMT’s “Electric Feel” and Hot Chip’s “Ready For The Floor” – songs, basically, about love and dancing – fit right in with Chris Brown’s “Forever” or Madonna’s “Give It 2 Me.” Of all of these, though, music made me dance, laugh, and appreciate all things indie, no single song moved better or excited more than Walter Meego’s “Forever.”
I heard it first at a concert I saw for no particular reason, and found Walter Meego’s guitar/voicebox/synth combo charming and fun. Yet “Forever” is more than that – it’s that sense of fun turned into something that elevates and restores. Its choruses are bracketed by the line “I can make you excited,” and it proves itself right – full of bass, pulse, and drive, the song is excitement, about music, about love, about being alive. Songs did better than “Forever” in both pop sales and indie recognition (although, I did see the “Forever” video playing in an American Eagle in LA, and later on an ad for Heineken), but none elicited more easy smiles than this one – and certainly, none meant more to me.
4. Penelope Cruz in Elegy
In this time of Oscar prognostication, people write about Best Actress contenders in terms of “slots.” Is there room for Meryl Streep in Doubt to be nominated without taking up Angelina Jolie’s “slot” for Changeling? We used to watch movies throughout the year and then decide who was deserving of nominations. I for one would ask that people remember a woman who seems to already have a “slot” for Best Supporting Actress – Penelope Cruz, who will be deserving, too, when she is nominated this year for her magnificently fiery work in Vicky Cristina Barcelona.
But her better performance was in a lead role, in Elegy, and she almost certainly won’t be nominated. As the young object of desire by a mid-60’s professor, played by Ben Kingsley, Cruz manages to be mysterious under his gaze, as well as gorgeously open and naïve. She is full of love, excitement, and desire, and it is perhaps her genuineness that, along with his own self-centered concerns about his age, keeps Kingsley’s David Kapesh from really understanding her. Cruz manages to convey everything through gorgeous glances and perfect smiles, but it’s one unforgettable, devastating scene towards the end of the movie in which Cruz gets very very naked, that we truly understand every emotion she feels. The scene is wordless, but loud – Cruz proved herself as capable and powerful as any working today.
5. Tina Fey as Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live
Without a doubt the single most important bit of fictional television all year. For around six weeks of completely inspired impersonations, Fey deeply wounded a political figure perhaps more than any actor, comedian, commentator, or talk-show host since Chevy Chase skewered Gerald Ford in 1975 – and she did it simply by mimicking her, by looking like her in stately dresses, and by sounding like her when she spoke. Her impersonation of Palin’s wild inconsistencies and quirky-moronic defense mechanisms during the Palin-Katie Couric interview were only hair’s breath from realty anyway, but it allowed for lines like “and now I’m going to impress you with some fancy pageant walking” or “For those of you Joe Six-Packs playing a drinking game at home? Maverick” to be even funnier because they didn’t seem all that off from the real thing. This was a moment that we can remember as the way true comedy, done well can really matter – and can matter more by being of high quality.
6. The Straight Story (1999)
Another great Netflix viewing that I didn’t expect to love and miss as much as I did. David Lynch’s The Straight Story seems like a joke on paper – a straightforward narrative of a nearly blind old man (Richard Farnsworth) driving his lawn mower across Iowa to see his dying brother – and perhaps that’s why it took me nearly ten years to see it. But the amazing thing about the movie is that Farnsworth, with his small, searing eyes, seems to be the only person capable of allowing Lynch to express his sincerity. Unlike his movies that, with varying success, plunge the duality of human desire and cruelty, The Straight Story is about the kindness and compassion that binds us all together. You see Lynch’s vision in his shots anyway, and maybe that’s the greatest aspect of The Straight Story – that kindness can exist in people you’re suspicious of, and that it can sustain you.
7. TV On The Radio Dear Science
Every year, it gets more and more exhausting to try and keep up with critical music tastes – even this year, when I feel I’ve been relatively up-to-date on music coming out in the world, I don’t recognize half the albums of most critic’s top ten lists. Usually, I pick whatever album meant the most to me as the album of the year – Neko Case or PJ Harvey or Blackalicious, or whomever I just happened to find give me the most sustained, exciting record of the year.
Well, I’m good and shocked to find that most critics seem to agree that Dear Science seems practically on another plane to every other mainstream release this year. “Halfway Home” opens the record with its furious guitars and drums, and shocks you with its lyrics of consternation at so many eternal questions. Science is TV’s eclectic, loud confrontation at the things that create meaning in our life – the threat of death, the existence of love. They do it with Tunde Adebimpe’s astonishing lyrical abilities, and with music that can be poppy, rap, punk, virulent, sexy, or lovely at any given moment. For a band that was already unique in their spot in modern music, Dear Science is their most listenable, and most ambitious record. When Return to Cookie Mountain was released in 2006 and everyone called it amazing, you sometimes had to work to enjoy some of its weaker cuts; it was excellent but cerebral. Dear Science is the first record of theirs I loved as much as I admired.
8. Battles, Performance at Bumbershoot
This is a work of art that only those lucky enough to see Battles perform live can appreciate, as seeing music live is so different from listening to it on your own. Particularly at a setting like Bumbershoot – Seattle’s annual 3-day, outdoor music festival over Labor Day weekend – where the excitement of music and art is infectious for everyone wandering from one unheard act to another. I’d never heard of Battles before the show, and nothing could have prepared me anyway – a drummer, guitarist, and keyboard player who are maybe electronic, or maybe art-rock, or maybe industrial, or maybe hard rock, or maybe pop, and who each seem to play whatever they feel like, whenever they feel like it. It’s an art-rock version of a discordant jazz jam-band, but it requires the setting of a concert to really understand – to feel the volume that pulsates, the bass that moves your body, the noise that takes over. This is musical performance that’s beyond magnetism – it’s a release, a cleansing.
9. “The Children Stay” By Alice Munro (1998)
As I’ve written about “Cortes Island” from The Love Of A Good Woman collection by Munro on one of these lists, I wanted to avoid writing about a second story from the same collection – particularly when I could have written about “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” or “Post and Beam” or “Family Furnishings” or “Trespasses,” all by Munro, just as easily. But “The Children Stay” is the Munro story I think of most (including the other greats from Good Woman I read this year, “Save The Reaper” and “My Mother’s Dream” – each of which was astonishing).
Reading a great Munro story is a tapping into the desires and fears we all experience and consider too small to discuss, and “The Children Stay” is about an affair, of sorts, but it’s also about the non-reasons that could create its existence, about the way longing has a million reasons, or none at all. It’s three parts of this story that have stayed with me months after reading it. One, a quick reference to “talks like this” throughout the marriage of its two main characters – meaning late night talks about love, life, philosophy – as a force that sustained the marriage and masked its discontent. Second, a lengthy dining room conversation about the meaning of Orpheus. Third, a dizzyingly simple, haunting final line that shows the longing as lifelong, unanswerable. All I can say is that any reading that sticks with you months is a gift, but a story in which the individual moments that surprise you continue to register that surprise on their recollection is more than great writing – it’s great art.
10. Lawrence Lessig Free Culture (2004)
My strangest bit of popcorn reading for the year, Lessig’s Free Culture dissects the current (well, 2004 current, so current enough) conflicts of copyright violation, people’s fears of litigation, and what that means for how we express ourselves creatively. Free Culture is also a history of the way creativity has always been an act of piracy – or, at the very least, collaboration, and that as much validity that exists in cracking down on illegal, immoral piracy, the harms and the reality of that cracking down are far much worse for how we live, and how we express ourselves. Its legally precise prose that entertains because it makes us question at what point the hassle of the protection for expressing ourselves is enough to contain our best creative instincts.
Honorable Mentions: Great moments without much context? How about the Roger Ebert essay on why he won’t review Ben Stein’s Expelled (http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/12/win_ben_steins_mind.html), a gripping piece both on the importance of shaping arguments correctly, and defending moral beliefs? Ebert wrote up a storm this year, but of all of his memorable writings, this recent work moved me most.
The final montage of The Wire’s finale “-30-” in which we see, basically, a synopsis on everything and everybody. You could complain that this sort of thing was excessively summative, but it also created a compelling, singular moment of explanation to recognize the factors that create who we are, from our crackheads to our governors. As a philosophical text, this four minute piece of the 90 minute finale gave me more to think about than everything on television combined… except Tina Fey of course.
Finally, the cinematography of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky. It was not showy and will likely not win any awards, but the filming was a frame by frame evocation of that movie’s wonderful advocacy for being positive and caring. One beautiful shot of its lovely protagonist Poppy (Sally Hawkins) walking onto her new boyfriend’s balcony after a wonderful date is like a vision of tranquility – her hair flowing as the sun sets on her beautiful city. Leigh gets much credit for the subtle and true improvisation he brings to the actors of his movies, but I hope people begin to see Happy-Go-Lucky as proof of his subtle and true visual capabilities, too.
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