Input, Output, Electricity

The night I returned to Seattle from Boulder, it was 20 degrees outside. I came into my bedroom and discovered, to my dismay, that a friend from Boulder who'd visited before I left had forgotten to close my windows. My books were on the ground, knocked over off their shelf by the wind, and the room itself could not have been more than 35 degrees.

This type of extreme cold is not endemic to Seattle. In my week in Colorado, the temperature rarely dipped below the 60's, but here in Seattle, it had been proclaimed the wettest November in the history of the city on the 14th, a surprising claim certainly, but considering the record-setting blizzard that struck the city around Thanksgiving, it was upgraded to Seattle's wettest month ever. Returning to the airport at 12:15 am (luckily, only an hour or so delayed from my original flight), my friends and I faced an extra long journey home - the greater Seattle area had been wracked with ice, and no one was capable of driving on it. Schools were closed for days, and people routinely sat in their house rather than face the possibility of going/ having to stay at work.

I wonder about arriving in the city the same year as its worst weather occurs - I often wonder about the purpose of coincidences like those, testing my resolve, and leaving me wondering what significance it plays in my own life (a selfish consideration certainly, but one I have to face that I have). It's also been the month of the death of a beloved director, Robert Altman, who Pauline Kael once described as the "filmmaker who spoils all other filmmakers for me." It's also been a month that's gotten me obsessed with Joni Mitchell, and introduced me to Todd Field's Little Chidren, the best movie I've seen this year.

Of those things. Altman has been a source of arguments amongst myself and my friends over the years (in fact, a friend offered me personal condolensces on his death, thinking me personally affected). I am a stalwart lover of Nashville, of its anarchy and possibility, of the fullness of character that emerges in quickly observed actions. I love 3 Women, Altman's overwhelming, baffling, brilliant dream of family, birth, reflections, on the way humans turn on and comfort each other. I love Short Cuts so much, I've seen it 4 or 5 times, at the expense then of 12 or 15 hours of my life. This year, when Altman's A Prairie Home Companion came out, I loved that after a 40 year career, Altman still had the power to make people at their most ordinary fascinate - the backstage scene in which Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep, as sisters, break into harmony almost spontaneously, only to be comforting each other on their long history together, was as moving as any scene I can remember.

My favorite critic, Owen Gleiberman, recently wrote a memoriam of Robert Altman in Entertainment Weekly, and his focus - on watching Nashville for the first time, on meeting Altman in Ann Arbor once upon a time - is really about how Altman continues to inspire all these years. While home for Thanksgiving, there was something similar in a recording of Joni Mitchell's Blue I burned for my mother, watching her hit replay multiple times on the Mitchell classic "A Case of You."

Blue, which is considered amongst the greatest of all singer/songwriter albums, is undeniably perect, but it's perhaps that perfection that makes me prefer its follow-up, For The Roses, and Mitchell's second masterpiece, Court and Spark, an arguably more flawed but more accessible record. For The Roses is wracked with brilliant half compositions that are brave bits of poetry set to piano, letting the heights of Mitchell's soprano take them in whatever direction she feels like taking them. Like Altman, Mitchell is an artist who's most in control when she appears anarchic. The title track to that album sings of life in the spotlight - "Up the charts/ off to the airport/ your name's in the news/ everything's first class/ the lights go down and it's just you up there/ getting them to feel like that."

Something about that line kills me - the type of specifics that make even being famous and in a position to influence themost relatable thing in the world, of people focusing their gaze and you simply being you in the process. For The Roses inspires, I think, because Mitchell's specifics tap so deeply into the well of every day thought, pinpoint so precisely the sense of wandering and uncertainty that I've come to be so familiar with this past year. Those half compositions I mentioned each pop into an unexpected moment of brutal clarity: "Lesson In Survival" - "When you dig down deep you lose good sleep/ and it makes you heavy company." "Let The Wind Carry Me" - "I get that strong longing/ and I want to settle and raise a child with somebody/ But it passes like the summer/ I'm a wild seed again/ Let the wind carry me." "Blonde in the Bleachers" - "Because it seems like you've got to give up such a piece of your soul when you give up the chase."

For The Roses closes with "Judgment of the Moon and Stars," a song that has to be one of the most inspiring I've ever heard, in no small part due to the wanderlust of the album that precedes it. "Condemned to wires and hammers/ Strike every cord that you feel/ That broken trees and elephant ivories conceal" are the lines that close the song - a song about how the "gift," as she puts it, of music sometimes "just don't do it/ like the song of a warm body/ loving your touch." It tells me that if we're "condemned" to the things we do well, we simply have to do them better. The word "conceal" in the lyric says everthing, that our thoughts are simply brewing, waiting to strike at any moment.

Of course, thoughts brewing and waiting to strike is the more sinister theme of Todd Field's Little Children, starring Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson. It seems that every year, there's a movie or two about a couple of restless adults having an affair that could screw up everything, and as a movie, they tell us that people are sometimes nasty and awful. I'm thinking of or Closer or We Don't Live Here Anymore or Damage or even American Beauty. Yet those movies, as varyingly successful as they are, never really made me love any of its characters. Little Children gets as nasty as any of those movies, at times - even worse, perhaps, because one of its main characters is a convicted sex offender returning to his home neighborhood - and, unlike most movies you'll see, this one doesn't shy away from his nature.

In Little Children, Winslet and Wilson star as married people whose world opens up to them when one day at a park, for reasons neither of them quite get, they kiss in front of a crowd of housewives gathered with their children. Any number of movies talks about moments in which its characters "feel alive" or "rebel against society," yet something is immediate and pulsing with Winslet and Wilson. Winslet has an extraordinary monologue late in the film about Madame Bovary being a woman of bravery - being a woman willing to make her decisions to live even in spite of the obvious negative consequences - and Winslet's Sara in the movie is exactly the same, hurt by her own decisions, but also freed by them.

Little Children is brave in the way it faces people's most unhealthy instincts when feeling trapped, yet it also is moving and inspiring in the place it goes with its characters decisions - never sparing them what they cause, yet opening up a world of possibilities for each of them, fulfilling the things they can't quite say that they need. I think Altman and Mitchell have done the same thing over the years - they've analyzed our behavior in order to begin to describe what we're communicating beneath it, which is, over all, an exhausting and terrifying process sometimes. Still, listening to Mitchell and watching Little Children the day after Seattle's wettest month, there are similar conclusions to draw about my own decisions, whether I find them fulfilled is a separate issue, but I do not, being condemned to simply writing my words, find them concealed.