Experiments: Letters to my Father - Sidewalks of the City

Letters to my Father.

Part 1. Sidewalks of the City

Someday if you go, I wont’ be able to hear this song. Not in the same way. I came to love her all on my own, Lucinda Williams, at a different time and place from you. In 1997, we had that thin black radio with half an antenna broken off and the battery tray long missing. You’d come home at lunch and make a hotdog in beans or drowned in Spaghetti-O’s and go for a run. You’d only eat your oatmeal with hot milk, which you’d boil in a small saucepan, and leave it out on the counter the rest of the day, a soft white glaze on the surface of the metal. You’d listen to KBCO on the radio, and that was where I first heard her, at the time that Car Wheels On A Gravel Road became famous. I didn’t like it. I thought “Can’t Let Go,” the single that played on the progressive, KBCO-like hippie rock stations sounded like Bonnie Raitt, it was too “country” for me, at the time, who loved the trends of the day, ska and electronica (remember that one? Of course you don’t). And you agreed that you didn’t like the song – you liked her when she was more country. When you and mom would play “Passionate Kisses” by her and by Mary Chapin Carpenter, but it was her song. Even after I fell in love with Lucinda Williams, I didn’t start loving that song until now. What I’ve fallen in love with on Lucinda’s first two records, over time, is how happy she sounds, how in love with the world, how excited by life. Her records of aging have been extraordinary, but I’m so happy she had that excitement recorded.

Like this, I’m not talking about you, or maybe I am tangentially. Did we share an understanding over that time? We’ve had arguments since then, about Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, which I’d eventually believe was one of the greatest records of the 90’s, after I liked country a little more, and admired Williams for her conceptual wonder. I loved World Without Tears just as much, and that was actually my first record of hers. Still, Sweet Old World won’t leave me. I love it too much. Maybe from an artistic perspective, I can still argue that Car Wheels and World Without Tears are better albums, but what’s the point? Sweet Old World is like a great friend that I’ve had now for 7 or 8 years. Longer for you. You knew her when it came out, in 1992. You’d already made “Passionate Kisses” overplayed in the house. You could tell me that “Side of the Road” is the stuff of great songwriting, that it made her career.

It did, you’re right. You’re wrong, like you have been so many times, that it stopped when she moved away from country. The truth is you’re a purist, and not just in music, or in movies, or in art, or in writing, and I don’t even mean it as a compliment, although, perhaps I’ll tell you someday, that gave me taste. I have taste, Dad, I have the ability to parse through details, to have opinions, and it’s because of that, you’re purism, you’re ridiculous ridiculous purism. No, Essence and World Without Tears aren’t country, but they’re wonderful. They’re not as happy, but they are about something else we experience, loneliness and desire. The feeling that other people lift us into life and then push us away, because of a coldness in our souls. I love this theme, I love it expressed because people don’t say these things to each other. World Without Tears has a great song called “Atonement” that I’m sure you’d hate if you knew what it was. It’s all loud guitars and atonal singing, a yell, a fight. I love music that’s loud and atonal as much as I love the country that’s sweet and melodious that she used to sing. The truth is, I learned to appreciate, to find the good.

And you stayed pure. You wore it like your religion, the pure. Dylan you were willing to grow with, Van Morrison too, to let them get away with whatever they were working on at the time. You even defended Planet Waves and Infidels. Not anyone else. Not anything else. I wanted to explain to you after the surgery, after the last bout of radiation that left you so miserable, to love what you had, because that could leave you too. You wanted to run faster and longer. You wanted to feel like you felt before the cancer, before the last year put you so constantly at sanity’s back door. I cannot say that I would not be faced with the same grimness, I did not lose the things you lost, felt the way you felt. I would be miserable too, I know, and I also know that when you were at your worst, I couldn’t help thinking that I would not react the same way. I have forced myself, my whole life, to find the positive, to fixate on it. Some – Josh, you – would say I was being deluded. I do not think so.

Another thing I got from you: Taoism. Sorta. At least, I know that through you I got supported to look into it. Taoism, I’m sad to find, has so much of its thoughts locked up in detachment and dismissal of all that is great in the world. I took it as the opposite – to find love and warmth in the worst of moments. To see what great sadness can offer us, to find the hope when all is bleak. I do not think this is a bad thing. I want kids so I can teach them to see the world like this. But perhaps they’d need a consciousness that’s as haunted as yours to get to the place I got. Because yours in the consciousness that formed in me.

Sidewalks of the city. You’d look back on that record, on Sweet Old World, and it would be the song you’d remember, though you remembered that she’d written a song, “Little Angel, Little Brother,” about her brother’s suicide. You remembered he was a poet. So was her father. You remembered she did a beautiful cover of Nick Drake’s “Which Will” that she recorded in one take at 2 in the morning. You thought “He Never Got Enough Love” was a pretty great song for a defense attorney, maybe you’d break it out in trial.

“Sidewalks of the City” is a song that should evoke my viewpoint on life. It’s a song of sad, uncertain observations – a man with hunger in his face, crumbling buildings and graffiti. Women sleeping in doorways. “Somehow you just don’t feel right,” she says compendiously. Yet is this a song of fear, of uncertainty? Not really. What a grand chorus – “Hold me, baby, give me some faith. Let me know you’re there, let me touch your face. Give me love, give me grace. Tell me good things, tell me that my world is safe.” The fiddles swell, the guitar cascades in scales, the drums come in. Dr. John plays bass. I’m amazed you never told me that – he was, after all, a friend of The Band’s, and you love to point out any friends of the Band, anyone who’s ever mentioned The Band, anyone who ever held a Band album in their hand, even for a second. Some day, actually, Lucinda Williams would write for Rolling Stone’s issue on the greatest rock artists a tribute to The Band. Still, you don’t give her a ton of credit past 1992. Purist.

This song is so pure. That fiddle is so beautiful. This is not lyrically a warm song, it’s the grandeur of the chorus, the sweet rise of her voice, that high, wise fiddle that makes the song warm. I may have never been willing to acknowledge it, but it’s one of Williams’ most perfect songs. Like “Side of the Road” and “Jackson” and “I Lost It.” I played one for you from World Without Tears you actually liked – “Fruits of My Labor,” another one of great, wounding simplicity that breaks hearts. Actually we saw her perform it, at the Boulder Theater. You leaned over to me and said, “She’s got a great voice, doesn’t she?” It makes sense you’d love this song, it’s a pure soul number. I love it when Lucinda gets experimental, but you only like the experiments that wind up in determined genres. At least you’re consistent.

Your taste is what made me. In the same way it limits you to not see the greatness in the world, it allowed me to pick it out when I saw it, to be a man of taste, to discern. You talked to me in college when I was reading The Sun Also Rises about Jake’s rituals – the way he shaved, the order and exactitude with which he admired bullfighters. This was what it meant to be lost, you said, to take comfort in the patterns and rituals that help you organize the world, to admire the things that made exact sense. I suppose I sought the opposite, disorder, and acknowledged disorder was best when it went down with a spoonful of order. Like Sonic Youth or “Atonement” or Joni Mitchell’s Mingus, there are elements of pop, of structure, of wisdom there, and I learned to love what took me a while to get to know. You, I think, sought beauty and expression, but needed to see it right away. You found hope in Before Night Falls, which you made me see a second time – this poor, persecuted, gay Cuban writer, whose life was one big kick in the pants, as life is for many, but he found his soul through writing, through expression. It’s the same reason you loved Look Homeward, Angel and Go Tell It On The Mountain. This was your pet theme, people who learned to express through the indignities of life. Beauty that rose from ugliness.

The purist, always. “Sidewalks of the City” is the rose that grows out of the concrete where it lies. Tell me good things, tell me that my world is safe.

A letter to Ryan Adams, who announced his retirement on his blog this week

Ryan Adams announced his retirement on his Cardinals blog earlier this week. He's since taken it down, but not before I could write the following letter. It was, however, before I could figure out how to send it to him.

Dear Ryan,

A friend who works for Jambase forwarded me the link to your blog saying that you’d like to retire from music. In it, you spoke of the pressures of being on the road, of health that needed attention, of fans and journalists speculating on your behavior and calling you an asshole for things you said. You spoke of someone you loved that you’ve lost, and of appreciating the day to day things that a life on the road never allowed to appreciate.

I’ve looked at your website exactly one time in my life, to find the set list for the one show of yours I was able to go to, at the Paramount Theater in Seattle in late January 2008. Because of this, I’ve never seen any of your comments you’ve made on your blog, not about your loss, for which I don’t know what you’re referring to, but I’m also very sorry; loss is difficult. I don’t know what you’ve written that’s been taken out of context, and I don’t know why you’re labeled an asshole, although I admit that stories of you freaking out on stage are sometimes kinda funny, and only illustrate the things I love about you, and maybe musicians in general. I mean, if those of us that are fans of musicians are allowing our pain and uncertainties be sublimated into music, it only makes sense that the people that create that sublimation would sometimes act out of pain and uncertainty. They speak to the irrationality that we’re not all that good at expressing.

But back to the one time I went to your website, to find that set list. That concert is still the only concert I’ve been to in my life, by anyone, that started on time. My friends and I arrived at 8:05 p.m. and already found you midway through your first song – which apparently was “Bartering Lines,” although I didn’t see it. We were quickly ushered to our seats as you segued seamlessly into “Peaceful Valley.” I see that you perform “Peaceful Valley” quite often, but I didn’t know how you’d morphed the violins into guitars when performing it live. Nothing had ever sounded like this in all of your songs – with the guitars so expressive, loud, and mournful. Your voice was always plenty expressive in that song’s silent bout of “Trying to find a peaceful song/ to sing when everything goes wrong,” but in harmony with the Cardinals, it was also sweet, soothing, and entirely complementary of the new guitar part. “Peaceful Valley” was already my favorite song on Jacksonville City Nights– a tall order, but more on that later – but this was incredible. Segueing into “Mockingbirdsing,” also, it was a great comfort – you sang “Mockingbirdsing” in your highest register, and the “Don’t give up on love” climax was more sweet and emphatic than usual. In a way, the thought hadn’t occurred to me – not giving up on love. I guess I’m not in love now, I have no relationship to speak of, and when I was in love before, it didn’t really last. It’s nice to know I should hold out for a little bit more.

I’m a big fan of yours, but not enough to follow the blogs, the media interpretation of the blogs (yawn), the every tribulation of rumor that following someone online entails. I haven’t seen you enough (I haven’t seen you twice, for that matter) to say, as one fan did of the show you did, that the version of “Cold Roses” you performed lacked passion. I don’t know how it would be possible to reach that conclusion, but more importantly, what a dumb, snobby thing to say – and what a revocation of the gift that is that song. “Cold Roses” is brilliant, brilliant. What a song, what a guitar part, what a harmony. I don’t think you’re capable of singing it without passion, and I don’t know what that would sound like. I think it’s nuts to imply that any and every appearance of that song everywhere is not a gift to people who love music. I’m thankful for that song, as I am of so many of your great songs, and I will likely put it on in my car when I decide to stop writing this and leave my office to go get lunch.

Let me explain how I became a fan of you, and what your music means to me. I’m not going to say some things that get said that I find untrue – your music did not help me through the darkest parts of my life. I’m not your #1 fan. I haven’t followed every word you’ve written. I don’t even own Demolition.

I was in a coffee shop, sometime in early 2005, when someone played “Let It Ride.” I went home and downloaded it illegally (sorry. But you’ve gotten plenty of my money since then). I couldn’t get enough of it – what a song! It’s still, I think, your most perfect song, full of energy and excitement. When I downloaded it, I couldn’t seem to find a version that started from the beginning, with the full guitar flourish with which it begins. So, I paid to download the song. I loved it so much, I figured there had to be more songs from Cold Roses I would like, so I downloaded “Friends” and “If I Am A Stranger.” I got laid to “Friends” once, and it seemed to put in context to me all the sweetness and warmth of that song. The truth was, though I’d always avoided listening to you (I mean, so many albums, so much effort to get to know them), you could create a brilliant song, you had a gift – a song that, like all great songs, could make concise and clear a simple emotion, and make you return, melodically, to it over and over in your head. Songs that affected your thoughts and ideas and your heart and your mind.

Still, I resisted buying an album. Then, my father saw you on Letterman, which he always watches, playing “Come Pick Me Up.” He told me I’d love the song. I downloaded that one, too. It immediately became one of my most played songs on my iPod. I picked up and moved to Seattle (unrelated to you, sorry), and decided the first album I needed to buy was Cold Roses. Though I didn’t love it immediately, I fell in love with it one song at a time, realizing each one’s perfection. I realized, actually, there wasn’t a bad song on it. Then I bought Rock And Roll after downloading “So Alive.” I realized there actually wasn’t a bad song on there either. Then, by then, to Easy Tiger, which I bought the day it came out. Then to Jacksonville City Nights.

I’d like to send you, someday, the 6 page essay I decided to write on Jacksonville City Nights, which I would actually include in a list of the most influential albums of my life. What a brave, weird, confused, varied, unique record. There is much I want to say about it, except that I identified with its frayed nerves and broken-glass pianos. I wanted to cry at the harmonies in “Dear John.” I’d listen to “Don’t Fail Me Now” when it was cold and feel understood. I’d loved “A Kiss Before I Go” nearly as much as “Let It Ride” and sang like an asshole to the harmonies in “Withering Heights” as loud as I could in my car. And then there was “Peaceful Valley,” the most frayed, and yet the most hopeful of all of the songs on the record – is it a song that seeks death as solace, or is it something that creates what it’s looking for, a peaceful song to sing when everything goes wrong? I didn’t quite feel, as crazy as I felt at the time, that everything had gone wrong for me, but I did feel like the song protected me some, blanketed me from forces driving me on to seek a peaceful valley somewhere.

My dad, who loved you on Letterman, went out and bought 29, an album he didn’t care for, so I stole his copy, and I made him copies of Cold Roses and Jacksonville City Nights, which he loved. Luckily, I loved 29 enough for the both of us. I’ve written extensively about that record too, which I see as a primer on survival. “Most of my friends are married and making them babies. To most of them I’ve already died.” Sometimes I look back on life and I marvel at my ability to stay alive, to look back at my dead dog’s pile of bones and be shocked that they represent the passage of time, that time has passed at all. “Strawberry Wine,” though “imperfect,” I guess, in a way that “Let It Ride” or “A Kiss Before I Go” are not, might be my favorite of all of your songs – I love how your voice trembles in the “Don’t spend too much time on the other side/ let the daylight in” chorus, and I think the line is, in its way, how you’ve survived. I guess I can’t say the imperfections in “Strawberry Wine” are my favorites – because I love “Carolina Rain” so much. And because I love “Voices” so much. And because I think “Elizabeth, You Were Born To Play That Part” was born to play in my car while it’s gray and raining (I live in Seattle, after all, so that’s often).

Since then, I’ve gotten caught up on the pre-Cardinals albums. Let me tell you that I don’t see them on playlists of your shows much (I don’t really know your playlists that well anyway), but “My Winding Wheel” and “The Avalanche” and “Hotel Chelsea Nights” are also songs I feel are perfect, even if they’re more direct than some of your braver works. I think “My Love For You Is Real” is a great song to get high to – you can’t stop smiling at it. I love working out to “The Drug’s Not Working” and to “Shakedown on 9th Street.” The truth is, it’s destiny for me to be a fan of your music, and I don’t much care about the other stuff.

So, I wanted to write you to take objection with your feeling that nothing you did mattered, or any of the “art will set you free” bullshit self-pitying artists can’t seem to take as truth. You are forced to feel how you do about the work that you’ve done, but I don’t have to accept it. Your music has been a part of my life, it has been my friend, it has known more of my thoughts than most people ever will. I’ve defended you against detractors. I’ve said, to many people, that the show at the Paramount in January of 2008 was possibly the best concert of my life. I wrote about “Elizabeth…” in my Great Songs series that I write for, 29 for my blog, and tried to get my essay on Jacksonville published. I hope you take some pride in the work you’ve done, and I hope you matter to yourself, but ultimately it’s irrelevant because your music matters so much to me.

With love and respect,

Ethan Kutinsky
Seattle, WA 98103
ekutinsky@gmail.com
ohsweetnuthin.blogspot.com

Best Movies of 2008

I had to wait a bit to make my list, which is perhaps realistic for movie goers who aren't paid to see movies. Since the Oscar-consideration calendar has now crept back into, like, October, keeping up with the "prestige" releases is a little exhausting. Luckily, I disliked both The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (It's Old Man Does Forrest Gump for far too long... before it's a totally unconvincing love story. Although, the aging trick is pretty spectactular) and Revolutionary Road (just mean spirited), so, my list didn't even undergo many adjustments recently. I still, however, haven't had a chance to see some movies I'd like to - The Wrestler, Nothing But The Truth, Frozen River, The Class, Frost/Nixon, and, I think more importantly, a number of smaller, independent releases that have a chance to truly impress me. That's why I think the truest Best of the Year lists are ongoing. And that the only real #1 of any year is the movie that moved you the most, which is perhaps why my #1 pick this year has 0 Oscar buzz. It is, however, closest to my heart.

Best Movies of 2008:
1. Elegy
Perhaps 2008 is the year of getting old. As Benjamin Button's shallow ruminations on getting old soar to Awards victory, Roger Ebert pointed out that the movie about aging people will really remember is Charlie Kaufmann's Synecdoche, NY. Well, I didn't love that one either. What I did love was Elegy, a disquieting, magnificently powerful movie not simply of aging, but of the concept of aging. Following David Kapesh (Ben Kingsley), a mid-60's professor who begins in affair with Consuela, a much younger student played by Penelope Cruz, Elegy is the story of the way not just age affects their romance, but of Kapesh's own understanding of age, his own hangups about how old he looks and appears to others. It's a movie about the way constant anxiety over that appearance clouds what actually exists.

Isabel Coixet is a first time director, but she makes the sweet, soft images of Elegy combine with two magnificent performances to discuss what love, friendship, desire, and even our interactions with each other mean, past our own understanding of them. In fact, it makes a fairly convincing argument that our understanding gets in the way of actual interactions. I was left with more to think about after Elegy than any other movie I saw all year, and it's because it simply told a story of its characters that respected their humanity, their mystery, their desires, and their misconceptions. I dare you to find any moment in any of the eventual Best Picture nominees that disarms more than the truly astonishing scene in which Consuela, now desperate, with short hair, returns to David and strips for him. If you've seen the movie, you know why this scene is so wrenching and unforgettable. If you've seen Penelope Cruz's face in it, you know why she gave the performance of the year. Little did I know while seeing that scene, the movie would be impossible to top too.

2. Milk
The prestige movie that actually delivers. Gus Van Sant's Milk makes two very smart decisions in chronicling the life of slain San Francisco politician Harvey Milk - first, to focus on the nuts and bolts of the political process, on the greased hands, illogical causes, and the piecemeal way in which Milk rises to more and more prominent posts. Second, in the astonishing work of Sean Penn, whose nebbishy tics and passion make his joy and nervousness ours. Milk gets very personal towards the end, and it works and wounds because the process of believing in something is given such specific, grand weight - and because we believe right along with him.

3. Pineapple Express
Secretly the best of the "Apatow gang" comedies, Pineapple Express did something no other comedy this year made me do: make me laugh. Not just laugh, but double over laughing, with stoners, at stoners, with action movie fans, at action movie fans. Pineapple Express loves the bonds stoners and friends create and never lets you believe that bond is less than real. James Franco, Seth Rogen, and Danny McBride are great, but only because their weird love of each other and occasional hatred of themselves makes their bond in the movie surprisingly effective and totally believable. It might have taken the breezy, drama-helmed direction of David Gordon Green to make a story of friendship outshine a dopey action-buddy narrative - and still be hilarious.

4. Rachel Getting Married
Jonathan Demme's story of a recovering, self-obsessed, frazzled woman returning from rehab to attend her sister's wedding is a gritty, shaky-cam excuse for great performances. But it's also a simple, breezy, occasionally gripping-with-awkwardness story of accepting people, of how we're our own worst enemies, of blame and love and caring for the people around us. Plenty argued that they found the family of Rachel obnoxious, or couldn't deal with the jutting, rough camera work, but it all seemed to me a grand exercise of getting in the lives of the people it chronicled with great respect and sincerity. Maybe its crew is self-obsessed and crazy, but then maybe all of us are too - at least they know how to throw a loving, honest wedding, and we just got to watch.

5. Happy-Go-Lucky
Mike Leigh's most loving, human movie, Happy-Go-Lucky has the good sense to give us a woman who is happy, positive, and improves the lives of everyone around her, and not punish her for it. Sally Hawkins as Poppy, with her great boots and clangy arm of bracelets, flitters like a lawn ornament, but she also helps and cares and stands up for herself and people around her. Shot with Leigh's most gorgeous cinematic eye yet, Happy-Go-Lucky is magnificently warm, well crafted, and deserving to be told; it's the first movie of his I've seen that didn't ever have me looking at my watch, and it's one I'd watch again. I wish it didn't get a little too easy in its final minute, but Happy is a true triumph of people acting warmly towards one another.

6. Wall-E
Maybe as usual with Pixar movies, I'm gaga for it without feeling the grip I felt in better movies, like Elegy and Happy-Go-Lucky. I too gazed lovingly at the bleak but warm view of the future - fat people flying around with constant giant sodas, a world abandoned into garbage and soullessness. It's the hater in me that points out that Wall-E is better social satire than romance, but with images of the future this indelible, there's no doubt Wall-E is bound to be one of the most significant Pixar movies yet, a grand leap in ambition and scope, and, robot or no, made animation even more able to tell important human stories

7. Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist
Even if you're sick of Michael Cera playing the most adorable teenage nerd in the world, Nick & Norah's story of streetwise privileged New York teens is a wild and wonderful story of a great night out. I wish that all of the supposed 17 and 18 year olds didn't look and act like they were in their mid-20's, but maybe New York's teenagers age faster than the rest of us. Regardless, Nick & Norah is the movie I went in grouchiest and came out most excited this year - a bit of young romance and wonder at the world illuminating the possibilities of night life in any city.

8. The Dark Knight
Ignoring the ass-busting running time and the rather unnecessary Two Face plotline, The Dark Knight is the most credible "dark" superhero story, perhaps ever, because of Heath Ledger's combination of blissful anomie and Christian Bale's stolid righteousness. Ledger takes his Joker to such horrific, lived-in dispeptic superiority, far more than any performer would ever be expected of. But it's easy to overlook that it's truly the combination of Ledger and Bale that makes the movie so gripping - its humanist message only works if you root for the Bat, too.

9. Doubt
The prestige movie I'd dismissed as stagebred fodder turned out to be far more than expected, not about doubt, certainty, religion, or Catholic church sex scandals, but about the world of suspicion and responsibility. Meryl Streep - who is, after all, Meryl Streep - gives such a harrowingly cruelty-laced performance that it overshadows the doubt and certainty of everyone else in the movie (with the possible exception of the wonderfully sensitive Viola Davis), and it allows her remaining humanity to underscore the film's brilliant sense of parochial duty.

10. The Edge of Heaven
Touching on religion, politics, nationalism, the illusion of geographical line, language, and the frail bonds of child and parent, it would be easy to paint The Edge of Heaven, from Turkish director Fatih Akin, as the grand European answer to Babel. And it is - grand in that it's quiet, intimate, unflashy, a criss-cross of love, concern, and a desire to reconnect that respects the grand, small connections of us all.