Oscar Picks

I can't resist picking things and giving my opinions, as I say every year, on every possible occasion. I've lived for the Oscars forever, and I'll be glued to my television for this year's telecast, this year from my grandparents' house in Phoenix - a place I can't remember watching an Oscar broadcast from, but a place I once remember hiding from a painful dinner party to watch the 1992 Winter Olympics.

In any case, I can't remember a year I've cared less about the following races, virtually none of the performances and movies nominated stirred my biggest moviegoing passion, but some were, at the very least, very good.

Best Actor
Will Win: Forrest Whitaker The Last King of Scotland
Should Win: Ryan Gosling Half Nelson
All of my disdain for this year's Oscar season could probably be localized to this race. Here's why - I would fall out of my chair right now if a single moviegoer anywhere saw Peter O'Toole in Venus, Will Smith in The Pursuit of Happyness, Leonardo Dicaprio in Blood Diamond, or even Gosling, and especially Whitaker. The Last King Of Scotland was less than a blip of a movie, yet due to hype and goodwill towards Whitaker, it'll soon be an Oscar winner. And even as a major blockbuster, as The Pursuit of Happyness was, I can't name 5 people that've seen the thing. Gosling's work in Half Nelson - brave, lived-in, sympathetic in its ragged humanity - is my favorite by virtue of default, I haven't seen the other four movies. Why, I wonder, was Dicaprio not nominated for his frayed stress in The Departed? That question is for another year.

Best Actress
Will win: Helen Mirren The Queen
Should win: Kate Winslet Little Children
In the least contested Best Actress race since... well, last year, Helen Mirren is virtually guaranteed to win - not much of a shame, as her stalwart presence is the crux of The Queen, a competent enough movie that doesn't inspire much of anything but talks about its competence. The other nominees - Judi Dench in Notes on a Scandal, Penelope Cruz in Volver, Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada - were all wonderful, but its Kate Winslet in Little Children that truly transcended. Her Kathy is a mess of conflicted emotions, but one whose desire to live at all costs makes her boredom ferocious. Winslet's been working towards an Oscar it feels like forever now, and this is the first one she's deserved - even more than a slew of overlooked indy performers - more than Elizabeth Reeser of Sweet Land or Ashley Judd of Come Early Morning or Laura Dern of Inland Empire or Maggie Gyllenhaal of Sherrybaby. Winslet is, quite simply, the best.

Best Supporting Actor:
Will Win: Eddie Murphy Dreamgirls
Should Win: Jackie Earle Haley Little Children
I don't feel the same disconnect to this category as I did a year ago, when looking at George Clooney, Matt Dillon, and William Hurt performances I was supposed to love in movies I was supposed to like, I found myself ready to give up on the movie industry altogether. Then I wondered why couldn't the same forces that annointed a Clooney to Oscar-winning status have conveined around, say, Christian Bale in The New World or Scott Wilson in Junebug? This year, far more lackluster, I can't imagine anyone I'd like to win more than the surprise-beneficiary-of-hype Jackie Earle Haley, the former Bad News Bear whose disturbing emergence into registered sex offender Ronald McGorvey in Little Children is so successful, perhaps, because Haley looks the part - his tiny body and devil face gives the hope of good intentions beneath a veneer of antiseptic intentions. Murphy's work in Dreamgirls is ferocious and funny, sad and exciting, and very little injustice will be done when he wins the Oscar, but there will be some - just a little. With those two mentioned, I can't think of any comparably great performances - that Mark Wahlburg winds up being The Departed's only acting nomination should be a surprise to its leads, after all. In its dense cast, I wonder, was it just his foul-mouthed, credibility-stretching diatribes that got him noticed (come to think of it, that worked for Alan Arkin, nominated for Little Miss Sunshine, also)? They certainly didn't make him superior to his boss, Martin Sheen, who, buried beneath some huge performances, may have been just too small for anyone to even mention the subject. And I did not see Djimon Honsou in Blood Diamond, but I'm certain he's saintly in it.

Best Supporting Actress
Will Win: Jennifer Hudson Dreamgirls
Should Win: Jennifer Hudson Dreamgirls
Well that's what I call an uninspiring list of nominees: Sure Abigail Breslin's adorable Olive of Little Miss Sunshine is the strongest person in her cast, but save for a killer "Superfreak" dance number, she's just a pretty solid beaming 10-year-old. Sure, Cate Blanchett, one of the world's best actresses, gives her flightiness real human vulnerability in Notes On A Scandal, but her part fails to rescue the movie from sensationalism the way Judi Dench's extraordinary performance does. Sure, Babel puts Adriana Barraza through hell, and she can certainly cry well, but her part is such saintly torture, I'd rather wander the California desert myself than watch it again. Babel's other nominee, Rinko Kikuchi, is as brave a study in loneliness and isolation as any this year, but please, next to Jennifer Hudson? Her iconic "I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" would earn an Oscar all by itself, but it's not simply that she sings the hell out of the song, it's that she lives it, inhabits its desperation as much as its will. In fact, she does it the second she shows up on screen - her song numbers are more than musical breaks, they're visions of life. There were a number of other great supporting female performances this year - none more glaring an omission than Catherine O'Hara's brave to-the-bone tragicomedy in For Your Consideration - but Hudson's is a moment of star perfection.

Best Original Screenplay:
Will Win: Babel
Should Win: Pan's Labyrinth
Pan's Labyrinth is a true original: a greusome fairy tale that masks, interweaves, and finally reveals a greusome reality. It's images are so powerful, so jolting and suprising, it's easy to pass the movie off as a technical revelation, but its revelation begins in a conceptualized zen, it's a movie structually conceived, and that is a written triumph. Plus, Babel is a joke passed off as a structured "statement," The Queen certainly hears British dullness correctly, and Little Miss Sunshine should apply for the sitcom writing Emmy next year. Letters From Iwo Jima, enlivened as it is by wartime formula, is still written in formula - it's triumph is Clint Eastwood's, not Iris Yamashita's.

Best Adapted Screenplay:
Will Win: The Departed
Should Win: Little Children
Here's what I like - a book adaptation turned into a screen adaptation and, although preserved with narration, it becomes its own visual work based on how it transfers from one to the other. You wonder if Todd Field and Tom Perotta did as much work as, say, Children of Men's five writers, but there's no denying the writing is superior. Borat's nomination is a sort of throw-the-maverick-a-bone nomination (Borat's appeal is certainly not in what was scripted beforehand), but it at least embraces creativity. Notes On A Scandal is an acting success, The Departed a directing one, and that's partly because both are limited by their writing.

Best Director:
Will Win: Martin Scorcese The Departed
Should Win: Paul Greengrass United 93
I don't want to be the one to say that Martin Scorcese doesn't deserve an Oscar, but Martin Scorcese doesn't deserve an Oscar this year. Give Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu credit for helming the ambitious chaos of Babel, but his movie is terrible. Give Stephen Frears credit for, well, capturing Helen Mirren, but his movie is... well, it's The Queen. There's a case to be made for giving Clint Eastwood his third directing Oscar - Letters From Iwo Jima is what Saving Private Ryan attempted, but with arguably more at stake. However, Greengrass is the real artist of the bunch, monitoring the exact pitch of tension United 93 needed, rendering accuracy in our darkest voyeuristic needs.

Best Picture:
Will Win: Letters From Iwo Jima
Should Win: Letters From Iwo Jima
As this is the first race in memory with a real 5 (well, 4 - there is simply no way to muster passion over The Queen) way possibility, I want to take a chance to say that this year, unlike last... and the year before that... the quality picture will win. Letters From Iwo Jima seems the perfect chance for voters to exercise discerning tastes over hype- it's nomination over Dreamgirls already affirms that that's a possibility. The conventional wisdom holds that Little Miss Sunshine, which I found false and obnoxious, has the edge, but it's sort of like letting Yes, Dear win an Emmy over The Sopranos. Babel is a mess, and a mean-spirited, incoherent-on-investigation mess at that. The Departed, for all it does right, is autopilot Scorcese, hammy at times, and collapsed by its concluding bluntness, and, truthfully, by Jack Nicholson's Scarface-was-for-pansies hamminess. Where, I wonder, was the support for a better piece of intrigue, Robert DeNiro's murky, unnerving The Good Shepherd? Where, I wonder, was the support for the virtually unheard of magic of Sweet Land? The DV breakthrough of Bubble? Or even Best Picture support for Little Children? These things were not even possibilities as far as I could tell, and perhaps any of them would deserve to lose to Letters From Iwo Jima, but its worth pointing out that great films, however absurd their "chance" are worth mentioning in the Best Picture category.

To the left, to the left

As I work around middle schoolers, and, perhaps more than that, have a job that requires me to drive and wander around the bedrooms and common areas of middle schoolers, I have, like few other times in my life, a direct pipeline into the trends of current pop radio. As is perhaps well known to anyone whose heard any type of radio these past few (five? ten? fifteen?) years, top 40 radio, dictated by market shares and contractual obligations to play the same certain popular songs repeatedly within an hour placate to the needs of teen audiences, as teen audiences are the only subset of the population willing to hear the same certain popular songs repeatedly withan an hour.

This week, Nelly Furtado's "Say It Right" ends a ten week run at #1 on Billboard's Hot 100 by Beyonce's "Irreplaceable." Things weren't looking great for Beyonce 6 months ago - her B'Day album, successful enough, wasn't taking off the way Dangerously In Love was. "Deja Vu" and "Ring The Alarm" were top 20 singles, but the first was forgettable and the second, as daring as mainstream radio gets, must've freaked out listeners with all that yelling. Then comes "Irreplaceable." Beyonce herself called it her "secret weapon."

Every so often, a single comes along that isn't just successful because people can't get it out of their heads, but also because a certain sensation strikes - in each instance the song pops up, which is quite frequently, a listener finds him/herself reluctant to change the channel. The listener finds him/herself singing the song and not feeling embarassed about it. The listener finds him/herself downloading the thing or even buying the record. The listener, it seems, turns out to really like the popular song, only escalating its popularity.

Songs like these play all the time, as any popular song, but you find yourself not objecting so much, and even enjoying its ubiquity for a while. These songs are rare, but what they have the power to do is to, briefly, register excitement at radio - to hear a song and be thrilled at the capabilites of music, to remind listeners why they started to hear music in the first place. To say this is rare in pop music is an understatement. I can think of only a handful of examples from the past ten years - Outkast's "Hey Ya," for one, or Moby's "Southside," or Nelly's "Hot in Herre," or even Beyonce's first #1 "Crazy In Love." Billboard points out that Beyonce's ten week run with "Irreplaceable" was the longest of any single since Kanye West's "Gold Digger." I guess that was the last one.

Take a look at that group of songs - each song has in common that it spurred that excitement and that that excitement spurred its popularity. Yet even though that excitement was present once upon a time, it's also true that each of those songs despite holding off the sledge and anger of overplaying for much longer than would be expected, each eventually wore its listeners down into distaste. For West, he nearly ruined any goodwill I had towards Jamie Foxx. For Moby, since the popularity of "South Side," I seem to have never ceased finding the little guy an annoying munchkin of chest-pounding dullness. Perhaps "Hey Ya," a song that will be a top contender for the best of the decade - if not simply as one of the most memorable in the history of rap music - fares better, but, as my praise might indicate, not every song is a "Hey Ya."

When a song like "Irreplaceable" becomes that popular, though, it takes on a unique trajectory, as its biggest fanst tend to be under 18 (not its only fans though, certainly). Spending half my time around teenage boys for work, I've had plenty of time to monitor their reactions to the song - the inability to quit singing it, the sudden cessation of that singing when its clear people are noticing that a teenage boy singing Beyonce, the ad hoc caveat of "Damn, Beyonce's so hot."

I love Nelly Furtado's "Say It Right," a sensual chunk of electro-hip hop that acts like a sad complement to her mega-hit "Promiscuous," but it doesn't have that quality that made "Irreplaceable" so difficult to dislike, and what now makes it so difficult to not find annoying when the "to the left"s start up at, seemingly, every turn. That radio remains a wasteland is so accepted these days it can begin to sound like griping to mom about how she makes her mac & cheese. Still, the other songs I hear endlessly in a day's work - say, Ludacris and Mary J. Blige's "Runaway Love," whose alternate title must have been "poor people are sad," or, anything by Akon - lead to that other old feeling of listening to the radio, the one of frustration and cynicism. That the excitement of an "Irreplaceable" can get dulled down into that frustration I take as a good sign - that it's only more real in its changing nature, like a love affair deadened in the day to day.

A Belated Birthday Note to Shawn Colvin

Shawn Colvin turned 51 on January 10th. That makes her a Capricorn like me - I turned 25 on January 17th, after all. Perhaps it is the state of my time availability that it takes me three weeks to write this, but the day that NPR told me that tidbit - January 10th was that day, it turns out - I felt compelled to wander to a bus listening, for the hundredth time, to Colvin's "Polaroids."

I want to write out a verse of "Polaroids."
"I was so weary then
the ugly American
thinner than oxygen
tough as a whore

I said you could lie to me
I own what's inside of me
and nothing surprises me
anymore"

The verse, and I suppose the song, is a type of autobiography - a time in New York as an artist and a type of life spent on the edge, poised for a purpose of making art, of "speaking truth" and all those wonderfully appealing and embarrasing-to-say Bohemian lifestyle choices. It's interesting that I was listening to the song 13 or 14 years ago, from her album Fat City on a tape deck in my mom's Toyota Previa as she drove everywhere, humming along to its tune. It's interesting that anyone can write a song whose relevance would not be clear to a listener over a decade later. It required context, though - tough thoughts on life's choices, and some education and thought on great verse. She composes great verses - they're lines that carry you from one glorious, profound idea to another.

Yet Shawn Colvin is not the sort of person who one would think of writing essays about, or birthday notes to. Shawn Colvin is a sort of Lillith-era fluke of a success, winning her 1997 Grammy for Record of the Year for "Sunny Came Home" and going platinum with its album A Few Small Repairs. The year that "Sunny Came Home" was a hit, in fact, I remember friends laughing at the line "Sunny came home with a vengeance" - asking, I suppose reasonably, "how do you come home with a vengeance?!"

Setting aside that I personally enjoy that play on words and phrases, and think "Sunny Came Home" a fairly moving and intricate song, it wouldn't surprise me much if she'd been utterly forgotten. She is, after all, the type of person a young person might hear in his mother's car on her tape deck. Her music is sonorous and pleasant, melodically not risky. She, in a move her managers later described as "ill-advised," made an album of covers in 1994 called Cover Girl - it was bland and poorly timed for her career.

She simply is not the type of artist that takes the type of risks that get a female artist noticed. She is not as meticulous as Lucinda Williams, not iconoclastic like Liz Phair or PJ Harvey, not even ambiguous like Neko Case. She is, simply, a professional. I left her album this past year, These Four Walls, off of my list of the albums of the year simply because it was not, in fact, all that memorable. Yet for the life of me, I can't pick out a bad song on its set.

A couple of years ago, I pulled up an Entertainment Weekly archive of the review of Fat City - a review that gave the album a D+. The writer, Billy Altman, clearly had a bone or two to pick with a certain brand of folk singers. "Things that make you squirm: songwriters who seem to think it's not a song until the page is filled with words; songwriters who seem to think music and lyrics need not be wedded or even living together."

I might not have found that conclusion so far off base the first two times I heard the Colvin song "The Facts About Jimmy." I might have wondered, as I do often about many conventional aritsts, what the appeal of a square, verse-bridge-chorus type female-led song is after a while. Recently I drove home on a Friday night from the U District in Seattle - it was hopping, and people were everywhere, and I, on the way to a friend's house with Korean take-out, did not quite have that type of energy. I heard the song. Colvin's voice in it is thinner than usual, frailer. She sings, at one point, "I used to get drunk to get my spark/ And it used to work just fine/ It made me wretched but it gave me heart/ I miss Jimmy like I miss my wine." She sings of Jimmy as the type of person who says, in the line that concludes each chorus, "There's somebody for everyone." The guitar was safe and soothing. The song has, I think, a loneliness that cannot be described in words. It is a feeling one gets driving home from the U District on a busy Friday night. It is a thinness in a voice that misses Jimmy like it misses wine.

Notes on a Scandal-less movie season

At my 25^th birthday party this week, I knew I must be turning some nondescript adult age as in my kitchen, 5 people were discussing grad school, by the dining room table, 2 guys talked about the recent Seahawks loss, between the two, my friends Dan and Aaron wondered about the real estate future of a new townhouse in Phinney Ridge. So it went. During the week I turned 25, I had a chance to get caught up on movie watching – the Oscars this year essentially predetermined anyway (you heard it here fifteenth! This year’s best picture race will be: The Queen, The Departed, Little Miss Sunshine, Babel, and Dreamgirls!), it made sense to try and watch some of the movies doomed to being nominated.

Because movies of this kind come with a storm of press and expectations these days, it’s difficult to make objective judgments about them. At least on first glance, or for those paying attention. The end of this past year wasn’t marked by much ceremony for me – I happened to work 16 hours on Christmas Day, 60 the week between Christmas and New Year’s. My yearly sojourn with Entertainment Weekly’s Best of the Year issue was delayed, and if it weren’t, I still would have likely felt disconnected with the year that saw Grey’s Anatomy, a show I don’t care for much, turn into a phenomenon and, as such, find itself and its cast named the Entertainers of the Year by, and thus appearing on the cover of, Entertainment Weekly’s Best of the Year issue.

The thing that drives me nuts about Grey’s Anatomy is something that would likely not have bothered me 5 or 6 years ago. It’s a show with a hint of bravery in that its characters are always seemingly making terrible decisions, as people do. But it seems like bad decisions of its type are more proscribed than they used to be – more “sexy” and made-for-TV salacious, grandly melodramatic, and irritatingly devoid of life. There is, for example, none of the silent gestures employed by the cast of its brilliant timeslot competitor The Office – a show that I wrote had entered sitcomville and headed for death three months ago, only to find itself beyond reinvigorated in its branch closing/ merger with Stamford plotline, becoming something like the most riveting and honest television on the air. Allegedly taking place in Seattle, it has nothing that resembles anything of the life of a person in Seattle. There is, for example, none of the expressway-and-bird-shit-on-strip-club-signs specificity of The Sopranos’ New Jersey, the hide-behind-the-Lincoln-Center marquis cleverness of the far soapier Sex And the City. Grey’s Anatomy annoys twice as often as it succeeds, but more importantly – and this says more about me than it – it just represents too much of a false reality while claiming to comment on the behavior of actual people. When I watch it I see its designer sweaters and elegantly rehearsed brattiness passing off as personality.

What I missed in the convocation of Grey’s Anatomy is the same thing I tend to miss around Oscar time these past few years – a shared knowledge of the obvious conclusion. Each year of the revamped Oscar schedule, the ones that occur in late February as opposed to Spring Break time in March, Oscar voters are required to submit their choices for nominations a week into the new year, meaning that by sheer amounts of time available, only the already-hyped movies will get seen, perpetuating the same myths of what the year’s best work was. These conclusions lead in odd directions – George Clooney’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar last year, for example – directions I never feel particularly inclined to agree with. So, I saw some of those movies that, until recently, were just names in Oscar Hopeful articles. Each one had something of a surprise involved.

Notes On A Scandal: It’s pure sensationalism – a teacher fucks her 15 year old student! A crazy spinster older teacher uses it to enact an obsession with the teacher! The plot that should be pure kitsch, though, is something else – with Judi Dench as Barbara, the older, obsessive, note-taking teacher, it becomes a puzzled, fascinating study of loneliness. In voiceover, Dench says, in one scene, that the younger teacher, Sheba, played with Grey’s Anatomy flightiness by Cate Blanchett (a good thing, in this case, as the character demands it), has “never known the long term sting of loneliness… She’s never known what it’s like to arrange one’s weekend around a visit to the launderette.” The image shown during this monologue is Barbara in a bathtub, smoking. The face Dench shows us is embittered, wrinkled, completely free of hope or possibility. What I love most about Dench’s performance is the way that as the movie erupts into histrionics, her brave depiction of loneliness at its coldest makes the chaos seem like a natural reaction. May none of us be forced into the type of desperation that creates that face.

Children of Men: Declared by Entertainment Weekly and the Los Angeles Times as a masterpiece weeks before it was released, what Children of Men is to me is a damn bitter breath of well created recycled air. It is rather shapeless paranoia – what are we supposed to determine from this bleak future, a future done in by the impending end of humanity (it is about the year 2027, 18 years after women on the planet became infertile). The director, Alfonso Cuaron, proves himself a magnificent orchestrator of chaos and paranoia, tapping into a sense of dread never even hinted at in his other movies – even the good ones like The Others or Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Thinking about Children of Men, I like it more and more. Watching it, though, I don’t actually remember enjoying it, and I think that’s because I never really bought the premise the way it was sold – people get desperate, people do each other in, and that’s about the extent of what it says, which makes it morose for the sake of being morose.

Little Miss Sunshine: You know you’re in quirky Sundance sitcom hell when there’s a character who doesn’t talk, but limits all communication to hilarious asides on notebook paper. Speaking of not buying premises, the idea that chunky little Olive was ever in and prepared for a beauty pageant is a tough swallow. I think I’m supposed to find Little Miss Sunshine endearing because all of its so clearly flawed family members are alright with who they are at the end of the movie (for glum, mute Paul Dano, it’s convenient his sister picked up an eye chart so his oh-so-believable dream of being a pilot could be dashed in a timely manner), but I disliked every false minute of it… that is, up until the raucous “Superfreak” dance number at the end. Even I couldn’t resist.

Pan’s Labyrinth: I admit I shouldn’t watch movies after long days of work, so it might not do me much good to comment on the first 45 minutes or so of Pan’s Labyrinth as my viewing was so often punctuated by bouts of narcolepsy. However, Pan’s Labyrinth strikes me as the most fantastically assembled movie of the year – a gruesome fairy tale contrasting with a far more gruesome reality. It follows a young girl named Ofelia as her magical world becomes increasingly related to revolutionary Spain. What works about it, and especially about Guillermo Del Toro’s direction, is the way that the queasiness never seems to end – inside her mind, the good and bad creatures alike are horrifying, allegorical creatures of suspicious allegiances. Outside, the violence becomes rapt and overwhelming – a note on this one, for viewers used to the most violent moments of torture and violence shown in film, there will be an expectation that the camera will cut away, leaving things to your own queasy imagination, but this one will, shudderingly, not give you such an option. See it anyway.

Dreamgirls: I had heard that some 7^th place finisher of American Idol is about to win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, and that Eddie Murphy, her counterpart in the movie, was about to win an Oscar too. Crazy, eh? That version of “I Am Telling You I Am Not Going” is iconography already, and Jennifer Hudson, that 7^th place finisher of American Idol, tones down the stuttery, passionless delivery of her AI days and acts with a ferocity I couldn’t possibly believe she could conjure. I find Dreamgirls second hour a little miserable, very much a let down after its blast of glitz for its first hour. As soon as the movie turns on the sainthood of Beyonce’s Deena, I began to check out. Still, Bill Condon knows how to work with actors – beyond Hudson, beyond an eerie and astonishing Murphy, Foxx holds his own, and Beyonce herself proves an actress capable of an understanding that her Deena, a whitewashed and uninteresting version of Diana Ross, doesn’t need.

The Trailer for Inland Empire: Of all the movies I’ve seen this Winter, nothing quite compares to the 1 minute that is the trailer for David Lynch’s Inland Empire. And by nothing comparing I mean no other minute inside the cinema will require you to ask the question with such vehemence. That question? What the fuck was that? Reading about it recently, I discovered that Inland Empire started as a 14 page monologue for Laura Dern that was meant to be released online only. The other story about Inland Empire lately? My brother took a date to see the movie with him at a movie theater in Manhattan. That she sat through all three mind-narcotizing hours with him makes me wonder when the wedding will be. I haven’t seen the movie, but anything whose minute of pre-release press makes me long for the clarity of Lost Highway must be… well, something.

Lost Battles

When I was in middle school, there was no comparing my obsession with Wings to anyone's obsession with any other TV show.

Come to think of it, it was a time of rather intense viewership for me anyway. Wings towered above all others as my favorite comedy, but thinking back on it, I tended to organize my time in those days around TV shows. Nowadays, I catch up on the few TV shows I watch on DVD and downloads, and even those are slow to plod through. Then I had a listings grid organizing my thoughts - I'd see a 7-7:30 block on Tuesdays, for example, and know what my options were. I was up to date on every time slot Empty Nest was shifted to. I knew the name of the wife that Anthony suddenly picked up in Vegas on a very special Blossom. I had arguments with myself about who was better comic relief, Alfonso Ribero in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, or, the king of spastic cluelessness, Thomas Haden Church on Wings.

Because Wings was the top contender for any prize then. It's interesting to think of Wings now alongside The Fresh Prince of Bel Air because they are, in fact, once again neighbors on Nick At Nite. And, more importantly, they can be viewed now, a good 10 to 15 years later, and be exposed - at least to people of similar backgrounds as myself - as the absolute least funny things this side of slavery.

I've always remembered a joke that Wings tried to pass off as funny, but it made little sense to me even then. Lowell is asking for time off to go to his cousin's wedding. "What's her last name?" Fay asks. "Hmm. Mather," Lowell answers. "No, what is it going to be," Fay asks. "Hmm, Mather," Lowell answers. The bride and groom, you see, are both Mathers - cousins, Lowell tells us. "Kissing cousins?" asks Fay. "Well, they did a lot more than that, that's why they have to get married." Zing.

To succeed, if such a thing were possible, this joke requires two things - the assumption that one might ask with total sincerity if two people were, in fact, "kissing cousins," and two, that the audience is so familiar with calling any two distantly related people kissing cousins that there would be no question as to what Fay would be referring to in this situation. You see, it's funny because Lowell took "kissing cousins" literally and we, the country of kissing cousins, would never do such a thing.

At the time, I assumed something must be wrong with me for not laughing at this joke. In truth, I still have no idea what a kissing cousin is, but more to the point, I can't imagine anyone bringing the term "kissing cousins" up in any type of conversation, and if they did, I cna't imagine anyone not seizing the opportunity to make a sexual joke (né, an incest joke) on sight.

In fact, Wings trafficked in this type of mistaken-assumption humor. The other terrible joke I recall involved an episode in which Joe and Brian decide they must, for the sake of their dear friend Helen, buy Helen a cello. Brian has looked into the price. Joe asks what it is, and Brian answers, "Fifteen." Joe shakes his head in disbelief. "Well, I guess you can't put a price on friendship - $1500 is a lot of money, but we can do it." "That's good," Brian answers, "because it's $15,000."

Once again, this assumes, to be funny, that a person simply saying "15" about the price of cellos brings up an automatic assumption in the hundred rather than thousand dollar range. Once again I did not laugh at the time, not knowing, in fact, that Brian did not simply mean $15. Once again, this is still not a remotely funny joke.

It may seem like the dregs of minutiae to pick fights with long defunct sitcoms that weren't particularly popular to people other than me. It is, in fact, the dregs of minutiae. Yet I wonder why no one said anything at the time. In fact, watching Wings and The Fresh Prince (of which, seriously, don't get me started) today makes a person wonder why someone didn't say the obvious now or then - that watching a half hour of those programs is something like a perverse form of torture. To be stuck in an episode is to be stuck in a nasty parallel world where people stop having reactions and act like clueless cartoons. I cannot even describe my discomfort in a sitcom of this type except to say that a sense of frustration burrowed deep within myself takes over after even a minute of watching one.

A few years ago, in my heyday of being a film critic, I wrote a DVD review of 1998's Central Station, a Brazillian movie that was marginally successful in America at the time, earning its star, Fernanda Montenegro, a Best Actress Oscar nomination - rare for a foreign language film. This was, I am certain, the result of an especially successful Miramax ad campaign, but that is not the point. My review was patently negative - I greatly dislike Central Station and the type of patented successful-international-release formula it represents: one wise, down-on-his-luck, plucky, misunderstood kid meets one cranky, Scrooge-like curmudgeon of a woman, and despite her initial reservations, she warms to the kid, allowing him to teach her a valuable lesson on life.

A question I never received at the time of that review (and to have received questions about my reviews would have been shocking anyway - that anyone read the things came as a surprise) was why bother, in a DVD recommendation column, to hash out a 6-year-old grudge against a movie that wasn't all that successful in the first place? The next logical question is why pick on Wings or The Fresh Prince of Bel Air? They were enjoyable enough at the time, weren't they?

Perhaps they were, I remember some belly laughs during Wings episodes, but for the life of me I couldn't pick them out today. These fights got lost because the context shifted, but it would make me a little sad if the fights got lost altogether - I think the errors in Wings are instructive for writers, and the last thing anyone should have to do is watch the goddamn thing to find those errors out. I think a successful international release of a foreign language film should not, in fact, have a wise or plucky kid involved. And I think writers and viewers should mock these things until they don't exist anymore, they should get the cliches out in the open until no writer would dream of even typing the things. We should pick the lost fights, the easy fights to knock out creative laziness, or at least, to save our children from canned laughter.

A longer and more accurate best of the year list

The top 10 lists I love so much tend to not do much justice for the type of actual movies, music, TV, and books a regular person might encounter in a year - they may tell you an opinion on what had a 2006 release date, but not much else (not that that's ever stopped me). An actual person comes into new old things all the time - this year, the best album I heard for the first time was not my #1 album pick, Taking The Long Way, but Joni Mitchell's 1972 classic For The Roses. This year, the most moving movie I had the pleasure of watching was Mon Oncle, a movie released in 1958. This is a list of those things that I encountered this year that were life changing. It's a propos that some were released this year, but that's more coincidence than a statement. What I mean is that it was an important year for me, a year of analyzing who we I am and what I do. Perhaps it was for many people. For one person with a lot of questions in his head, there won't be ten better pieces of work to be found.

The ten works that changed my life this year.

1. “Join The Club” The Sopranos (2006)

This was the exchange of dialogue:

- Woman: “We’re just happy to be in the presence of the man whose sales team stole the brass ring for twelve straight quarters.”

Tony: “It’s not so impressive. There’s always a faster gun. I’m 46 years old. I mean, who am I, where am I going?

Woman: “Join the club.”

The episode has to be the beginning of where the hatred for The Sopranos sixth season begins. For close to 15 minutes, you’re locked into an alternate world of Tony’s comatose subconscious – he’s reimagined himself a businessman out west on conference, he’s been stripped of his New Jersey accent. His wife’s voice is stern and foreign, his kids generic and young. And Tony, Tony’s been replaced by Kevin Finnerty, or …inFinnerty, or, infinity, a confrontation with the end of his times. Still David Chase writes it like a plausible scenario – a dense text of the everyday, a bar, a beacon spinning out the window somewhere far off. He’s confronted by Buddhist monks (“Lose your arrogance!” they yell and push him down), a TV screen of a burning bush, a pro-Jesus ad declaring “Are sin, death, and disease real?”

And that dialogue. A simple confrontation. Tony is indeed a businessman, the me-first representation of American capitalism, and there’s still a faster gun (he’s just been shot, after all, by a demented old man who’s lost his mind). It begins intense speculations – are our accomplishments generic when it counts, in dark bars and dark times. They ask Tony how he, “made the leap from selling patio furniture to fiber optics,” a more businesslike way of saying how he became someone.

But he’s not certain he’s become anyone, not certain he can live with the weight of what he’s done, confounded by the notion that he’s done anything, or that maybe he hasn’t. He loses his identity, which, for a businessman, is his briefcase – “My whole life was in there!” he declares, and indeed it is. His life is his possession, the thing he’s cultivated, and yet it could mean nothing, the cultivation replacing the experience of living.

There’s no way to begin with the ways this type of speculation fueled my year – the times I stood apart from my life and imagined it somewhere else entirely. Tony’s 46, I’m 24, I feel the equally confounded. What was it, what is it, what’s ahead. Life inevitably, whatever confrontations arise, leads you to ask the same question.

I lose myself in those words – the brass sales ring for 12 straight quarters. Some type of success, some type of golden life, for some amount of time. But what is it. What.

2. “For The Roses”/ “Judgment of the Moon & Stars” Joni Mitchell (1972)

“Heard it in the wind last night, it sounded like applause

Did you get a round resounding for you way up here.”

“Condemned to wires and hammers, strike every chord that you feel.”

I knew Joni Mitchell was a poet, but I didn’t know Joni Mitchell was a poet. I think For The Roses is an album of profound bravery, a declaration, and it still speaks of the same confusion Tony speaks of. The song, “For The Roses,” is a song that’s baffled in the face of fame: “Up the charts, into 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.” What an evocation of that sensation, of the sense of a loneliness getting channeled into people, of one self connecting to others. Because everyone’s a lone like that.

And it’s about speaking some truth, or some things you think are truth. You’re faced with the judgment of the moon and stars, an eternal critic living inside that sounds like infinity declaring its assessment. Life has condemned Joni to a piano, to words, and though she declares “It just don’t do it/ like the song of a warm body loving your touch.” That if you’re stuck with one ability, create and harbor that ability.

I suppose I think of it as writing. I suppose in my life, writing about music and TV and movies and books is the thing that makes sense to me. I suppose that if I saw life explained in the sixth season of The Sopranos, personal risk in For The Roses, it leaves me obligated to say so, or write so. So I do, and though I am essentially nobody, it gives me the obligation to attempt anyway.

There are souvenirs of life, Joni says – “So you get to keep the pictures, that don’t seem like much.” Yet if we are condemned to our memories, to who we are, we must be it. Because we will be dead. The moment terrifies we declare some truth, it terrifies. It also makes us who we are – hearing it in the wind, the sound of applause, in whatever form, that follows us.

3. Fox Confessor Brings The Flood & Blacklisted Neko Case (2006, 2002)

There simply is no artist like Neko Case, but I did not know that, or even hear of her a year ago. “I am the dying breed that still believes/ hunted by American dreams,” she sings in “Things That Scare Me,” Blacklisted’s first song.

But you cannot simply sing a line like that. That is not something you just say. She earns it – “Fluorescent lights engage/ black birds frying on a wire/ same birds that followed me to school when I was young” is the first line. In it is paranoia, in it is the sense that all things are true, in it is the sense that it is a struggle to even see, to make sense of all that’s before us.

Blacklisted – with songs of Lady Pilots not afraid to die, of red wine teasing with “I’m gonna ruin everything,” of bodies murdered on the interstate, of a city of gloom and anger existing in our absence, of fast trains – is an album of trying to live both within and outside society’s boundaries. It’s not a work of marginalization in the regular sense, it is just about being true to who you are while being bound to a certain type of expectations. When, in “I Wish I Was The Moon,” she sings of loneliness – “God bless me I’m the free man/ with no place free to roam/ I’m paralyzed and collared-tight/ no pills for what I fear.” She wishes she was a source of light, something that rises and falls, something of its own accord, of order.

Fox Confessor Brings The Flood pushes that notion a step further, into speaking the truth and meeting fate. Its opener, “Margaret Vs. Pauline” is about the girl whose “love pours like a fountain, love steams like rage” who simply is denied by fate, as “everything is so easy for Pauline.” From there, it’s sudden madness, it’s the “Star Witness” who watches as all she loves dies, it’s the widows of St. Angel imagining a world scattered by the vapor of their lovers, John the Baptist saying “no man can do such miracles without the Lord to entreat him.” They are people whose fate was to speak, and to suffer because of it, people who met a destiny they were bound to oblige.

Neko Case could be said to have a voice like Patsy Cline’s, and it would be true, but Neko’s is more passionate, because it too is her destiny to speak, and she does it with power, with conviction. In “That Teenage Feeling,” she sings with a late-night sorrow, “Nothing comforts me the same as my brave friend who says/ I don’t care if forever never comes, ‘cause I’m holding out for that teenage feeling.” She uses her bravery to hold out for life.

4. “The Long Way Around” Dixie Chicks (2006)

For a while, I judged my time and mood and attitude by how large my smile was hearing the guitar strum that opens “The Long Way Around.” Poor Natalie Maines was vilified for saying the most innocent of political comments, and she muses as the song opens that her friends from high school “married their high school boyfriends/ moved into houses in the same zip codes where their parents lived,” and “I could never follow.”

There was something elemental and thrilling about the revived, unashamed Dixie Chicks, women speaking on the importance of hearing your voice, of being true to who you are, of making your decisions and showing yourself and shrugging off what comes along with it. The album is wonderful, the movie, Shut Up and Sing, chronicling their years of controversy and rebirth with Taking The Long Way is inspiring. Yet what makes “The Long Way Around” their best and most invigorating song is its break from the high drama of their career to establish a sense of pride and bewilderment at all they’ve been through, of the flawed and wonderful thing they did – “I opened my mouth and I heard myself.” She reminds us “Guess I could’ve made it easier on myself, but I could never follow.” It makes you want to never follow either.

5. Ghosts Paul Auster (1986)

A man hides on a park bench and pretends to be another man, or a man in place to be watched by the man he supposedly needs to watch. He watches him from a Brooklyn apartment, wanders across the Brooklyn Bridge and remembers his walks with his father, but as his identity becomes more entwined with being observed, he begins to wonder who he really is. The beauty of Paul Auster working at his mind-bending best is all evident in this, the second of his New York trilogy – of sounds that wander New York waiting to be heard, of the process of observation being simultaneously what keeps us imprisoned and proves that we exist. Reading the short 90 pages of Ghosts is to get clued into the literal shades of your consciousness you never quite want to venture towards. I was reading it one day in October at the Lighthouse on 43^rd and Phinney when a woman saw it lying on my table and told me how “festive” it was to be reading a book called Ghosts just before Halloween. What I could not share was the chill of the book’s real sense of haunting, or it guidance.

6. “On The Morning After The Sixties” Joan Didion (1970)

It speaks to a between-era confusion that only Joan Didion knows how to muster, but that also speaks to an anxiety I so closely understand. She never identified with the generation that followed her, she realized, as she could never find hope in their protests, never find it so easy. “If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man’s fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending.”

That happy ending specifically is a life of clear and defined purpose, or at least the sense that such a thing exists, and it must be true that our generation is hers too, equally poised between times of clarity (or, more likely, an illusion of clarity – however a convincing one). Or, Didion, the most eloquent of writers anyway, simply perfectly capitulates the sense that experience will outrun purpose, leaving such a thing opaque and foreign. To say that this sense, this sense that Didion woke up to New Year’s Day 1970, is mine would be accurate, but it’s more accurate to say that the 60’s end for us in our twenties.

7. “Cortes Island” Alice Munro (1997)

Simply one line, buried amongst the (as always, for Munro) perfect details of an elderly couple its narrator scrutinizes from afar: “Did you ever think people’s lives could be like that and turn out like this?” Like all of Munro’s astonishing short works, they marvel in the support systems human behavior have created, the baffling, fascinating ways we become who we are. The character, Mrs. Gorrie, reminds me of so many older women I know, and it’s a mix of fascination, revulsion, and familiarity that make it all so affecting, all so indicative of who we are.

8. “Moonlight Mile” The Rolling Stones (1973)

I’m always proud when I beat The Sopranos to a song. They used it in “Kaisha,” their unpopular but brilliant season finale, scored to a long nighttime drive – cold roads and dirt illuminated by headlights. What it captures is the proud weariness of “Moonlight Mile.” I listened to it too, repeatedly, for a while, on my way back from Israel – a whirlwind, and a time of separation, of confusion, and of lots of happiness. For Stones fans, it comes at the end of Sticky Fingers, a record that’s always been a little revoltingly perfect – a time when the Stones were matching brilliance with cockiness in a cycle that only made each more potent. “Moonlight Mile” should be excessive, but instead, it laments and seduces at once, Mick Jagger singing “Oh I am sleeping under strange strange skies” the most human statement of his life.

9. Catherine O’Hara in For Your Consideration

Say what you will of this latest Christopher Guest movie, none will be able to shake the image of O’Hara as Marilyn Hack watching the year’s Oscar nominations in blank horror to not see her name announced – as the nominations proceed to the Best Actor category, she mutters, from behind a terrifying facelift, “Marilyn Hack, just say Marilyn Hack” in full tragicomic terror.

I love the cynicism of For Your Consideration, but O’Hara makes it something else, makes it a story of wanting fulfillment to the point of derangement, a humanity that stems from need in a process gone terrifying. For all of For Your Consideration’s rather eerie recreations of Hollywood hype, it allows its characters to seem more understood by representing the hype accurately – how could anyone be sane in such an environment. O’Hara is the crux of all of that – her final monologue to a classroom of acting students makes you want to weep, or laugh, or run far far away from Hollywood, and each is an appropriate response.

10. Mon Oncle

The 1958 Jacques Tati classic is quirky and hilarious – it’s staged and scored with such whimsy, there are moments you’re amazed its entire cast of geometrically distinct people and weiner dogs don’t simply break out in an elaborate choreographed dance. They don’t because that elaborate choreographed dance is life, and everyone in the movie who seems in tune with it is far too deluded to notice it. The comedy exists at a futuristic house of a million automated gizmos (the kitchen appliances alone are beyond ridiculous), and sits on a lot with windows like eyes, a garage like a giant mouth, a hideous fish fountain that needs to be turned on before doors can be opened, a neighbor so posh she sometimes is mistaken for a wandering rug salesman, and a walkway so elaborate, people greet each other on it while walking in opposite directions.

Hulot, the protagonist of all of Tati’s movies, is on the outside of every modern contrivance, always wandering with his umbrella, always seemingly messing up every situation he wanders into. Yet simply by virtue of his goodwill, he survives, and even helps. A drama would make the sort of story of an outsider at odds with modern times a story of marginalization. A satire would make Hulot less charming than he is. Yet by saying almost no words in the movies, Hulot is something else – a slapstick philosopher, making his good nature so evident by its contrast to the bizarre and inexplicably complicated world around it. Few movies give you such nimble laughs while, essentially, giving you – or, I should say, giving me – advice. This is the type of movie that makes you believe in who you are in a senseless environment, and it does so by keeping you on a giddy high the entire time.

Best of the year lists

Once upon a time, it was my favorite nervous passtime to make lists. Growing up, I kept weekly tabs of my own personal Top 20 music countdown on folded paper hidden in my desk drawer. I wrote lists on every subject - top 10 Star Trek: TNG episodes, top 10 Sonic Youth songs, top 100 songs ever made (looking dramatically different every few years), top 100 movie scenes.

So it's always been my favorite time of year to see the short list of movies and music of the year, and I've written my own every year, digressing into top performances, rushing to see the onslaught of Oscar bait in December. In this blog, I will write my opinion of the ten best movies, albums, and singles of the year, and as I prepare a separate list on the 10 most meaningful pieces of music/movies/writing to me personally this year - a pivotal one for me, a not entirely interesting one for movies or music - I stop to wonder a bit about making the lists at all.

It is, above anything, a method of opinion setting, of stratifying what I saw, and, in a fashion that the critic in me is always placating, of validation that my opinion is the most important and well thought out opinion of all. By placing things in lists, you create quick references for this sort of thing - you start to think that a #1 or #4 placement of a certain work says something of who you are. Or, perhaps more innocently, it's a way to play important, a method for asking that my thoughts on the year be heard. I've moved my thoughts over here this year, for the brief amount of time I can devote to them, and for very few to register that they're being written. Yet here they are, a document of some kind that at least they were there.

In any case, my thoughts on the year.

Movies:

Movie lists are bound to be incomplete - studios save their best movies for December anyway, and it never seems to work out to see that movie you'd been waiting for while it remains in town. This year, more than ever, I feel like I missed all the best ones, and it's not entirely because I simply didn't have the time. Sherrybaby never came to Seattle, to my knowledge, Deliver Us From Evil left in a week, and quite honestly, the great independent movies that surprise me I'll catch up on months down the line. A couple years back, I was stunned after watching The Door On The Floor to discover it truly was one of the finest movies of that year, and I'd ignored it entirely when it was around. Those surprises are why I love movies, and I haven't had many of those in movies that came out this year.

That is also because nothing made me too extraordinarily excited this year. Even looking at the top of my list this year, almost nothing grabbed me as much as Junebug, The New World, or Brokeback Mountain did last year. The one above all others that did was Ali Salem's Sweet Land, a movie that attempts to do nothing else but tell a love story against the backdrop of a 1920 farm run by two immigrants who barely know enough English to speak to each other. It follows a simple, good natured farmer named Olaf, his mail-order bride, Inga, and the ways in which they learn to harvest, communicate, and connect. It's a movie that sounds like nothing, yet in following two characters forced to the bare minimum of communication, it forces them to communicate in tiny, forceful actions, something that makes the gestures of love and the nature of dreams the most definitive presence on screen, even as it makes its period tropes - an erotically exposed ankle! A subtext-loaded meal! - electric and spellbinding. It's a movie in which an older Inga, uttering the phrase "I know," has the power to devastate the viewer. Thinking about it, by barely trying, it tackles the language-as-divider themes of Babel, the value changes of The Queen, the strained family dynamics of Little Miss Sunshine, but makes each of those look like the most contrived of creations - in a year where the most ambitious movies looked to be the height of unconvincing showmanship, a movie like Sweet Land quietly proves itself braver, truer, and more moving than anything I saw this year. One scene - in which Inga, played beautifully by Elisabeth Reaser, silently shares an apple pie with her neighbor - speaks to the need for validation and connection amongst people, as well as to the reasons we act as people, even as it technically barely speaks at all.

Besides that, Todd Field's Little Children, is extraordinary because it might be the first movie I've seen surrounding a sexual affair in which those impulses were life affirming and escapist at once, in which the power of sexual compulsion was made sinister and human in the same breath. Quite simply, it made you feel its characters' compulsions were your own, and that it was the height of understanding to accept and disagree at once with what you were watching. It also features a performance of magnificent humanity by Kate Winslett, who deserves an Oscar. I say that having seen Steven Frears' The Queen, a fine movie I'm supposed to love, with a very good performance by Helen Mirren I'm also supposed to love. The Queen will be on more Top 10 lists this year, but it is not a superior movie.

The rest of my top ten list? There are great moments on there. United 93 faces directly the tension of not wanting to see what happened on September 11th, and also needing to see, to visualize what occurred. It is so powerful that at times, you may find yourself crying, or stirring, or desperate to do anything else, and this is, in its squirmy specificity, a triumph. Bubble, Steven Soderbergh's experiment in DV realism and distribution, is unmatched in its original vision of small town cynicism. The Good Shepherd brims with shadows and ideas, allowing the remoteness of its center to be a cipher of fascinating insight - the world, it seems, exists in the movie only in the magnification of Matt Damon's glasses lens. And For Your Consderation drops the interviews from the Christopher Guest movie, but gains in cynicism - it's an easy story of Hollywood hype, perhaps, but it also is a nasty and humane look at trying to find any way to keep your headin the movie industry (nasty because each of the characters sort of fail, and sort of succeed).

The rest? They're fine movies, I suppose - each has something fascinating about it, but none are movies I love.

Ten Best Movies of 2006:
1. Sweet Land
2. Little Children
3. United 93
4. Bubble
5. The Good Shepherd
6. For Your Consideration
7. Volver
8. Borat
9. Half Nelson
10. The Departed


Music:

There are a number of reasons I wouldn't make a great music critic, but chief amongst them is that I have no desire to do anything beyond following my instincts on music. I hate The Arctic Monkeys because they sound like everything else, but I haven't listened closely enough to know that specifically, and I don't think I ever will. I hate the Raconteurs because I don't much care for Jack White, and I have no desire to change that.

The other question one has to ask when writing these lists is, considering music is the most emotional, the most subjective of any medium, should you list the album that meant the most to you emotionally, or the one that's the most "important"? If I chose the latter, certainly Dylan's Modern Times - a magnificent updated text of covers and reappropriations to comment on modernity - would be #1 and not #3, and if I totally followed my emotions, certainly Neko Case's Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, an album I've written extensively about already, would tower over all others this year - it's an album of conceptual daring as well, it just happens to have been less heard. Instead, I chose The Dixie Chicks, a band of inspiration this year because Taking The Long Way is a little of both importance and emotion. It's second half gets weighty with filler, but Taking The Long Way is so moving and extraordinary because of what works on it - the brim of earned self-righteousness, confidence won and lost, the liberation and loneliness of speaking the truth, and, simply, beautiful melodies on what becomes important and powerful in life. "The Long Way Around," its opening number, is truer and more beautiful than every other song released this year.

As for singles, the pop ones that ruled the radio tended to be pretty charming (Yung Joc's mind-numbing cell phone ring "It's Goin Down" notwithstanding). The summer's two biggest songs, "Crazy" and "Promiscuous," prove us to be lucky to still be hearing things on the radio this punchy, and the rest of 'em - the techno-Jacko of "My Love," the motor-boating lunacy of "London Bridge" - aren't so slow on the uptake either.

I also included a quick list of some other great songs form imperfect albums, because it's always better those songs get heard too, no?

Five Best Albums of 2006:
1. Taking The Long Way Dixie Chicks
2. Fox Confessor Brings The Flood Neko Case
3. Modern Times Bob Dylan
4. The Information Beck
5. I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass Yo La Tengo

Ten Best Singles:
1. "Crazy" Gnarls Barkley
2. "Promiscuous" Nelly Furtado
3. "Gold Lion" Yeah Yeah Yeahs
4. "Not Ready To Make Nice" Dixie Chicks
5. "Sweet Talk" Spank Rock
6. "My Love" Justin Timberlake
7. "Ain't No Other Man" Christina Aguilera
8. "Unwritten" Natasha Beddingfield
9. "Irreplaceable" Beyonce
10. "London Bridge" Fergie

A mixtape of ten other terrific songs:
1. "Conceived" Beth Orton (from Comfort of Strangers)
2. "Summer Dress" Shawn Colvin (from These Four Walls)
3. "Modern Times" The Black Keys (from Magic Potion)
4. "My Mind Is Rambling" The Black Keys (from Chulahoma)
5. "Turquoise Boy" Sonic Youth (from Rather Ripped)
6. "The Mistress Witch From McClure" Sufjan Stevens (from The Avalanche)
7. "The Day Is Short" Jearlyn Steale (from A Prairie Home Companion Soundtrack)
8. "Sign On The Door" Kasey Chambers (from Carnival)
9. "Sidewalk" The Starlight Mints (from Drowaton)
10. "Bout It" Yung Joc (from Step Up Soundtrack)

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.

The Season

I remember the first episode I saw of the NBC version of The Office. It was their season 2 Christmas episode, and I was in Los Angeles, refusing to go outside, as I often felt the need to do in Los Angeles, and I found myself stuck to the hour of comedy that was My Name Is Earl and The Office - first, because nothing else was on, later, because each was so funny.

But The Office wasn't just funny. The thing that caught my attention was one of the fake interview scenes between Jim (John Krasinski) and Pam (Jenna Fischer) - the two simply talked, laughing at each other in spots, but mostly, they spoke like human beings, two voices of reason in a ridiculous environment. I didn't know Jim and Pam would become the driving "drama" of the comedy, the couple that I and its entire audience would root for, propelling The Office beyond its "is it as good as the UK version" talk to the forefront of American comedy, and eventually winning the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series. That was what made The Office such an addiction, and such a treat - it was hilarious, sure, but it was also just so average - you were giddy at the coworkers who wouldn't shut up about their banal weekend plans and love interests, the silently judgmental coworkers, the thin acknowledgment of secret lives, of working a job that, it was barely a secret, no one gave much of a rat's ass about.

That's The Office I love. The Office NBC has trotted out this season is some through-the-looking-glass joke, Reno 911 does Caroline In The City. It might be a plot line of Pam getting especially inspiration at the funeral of a bird, or, Dwight (Rainn Wilson) staging a coup and Michael (the star Steve Carrell) weirdly seeking revenge, or - god almighty - Dwight training new salesman Ryan (BJ Novak) to sniff fertilizer (seriously), but eventually, the rest of its audience might have to start saying, "well, that never happened at any job I worked at."

No, it didn't. The Office this season has been wildly off the mark, but it's still funny sometimes, and its failure - and it is a failure, the rest of the world will say so soon enough if it doesn't improve - is indicative of a TV season that seems all talk. Those hit dramedies that are returning - Desperate Housewives and Grey's Anatomy - seem to be hits only on the distant memory of good episodes past, and the new slate of wild, kooky shows were pronounced failures before September ended - one of the strangest offenders, Tina Fey's backstage comedy 30 Rock is so strangely awful that even its inclusion of big talent in its cast (Alec Baldwin and Tracy Morgan, in funny performances) can't give you the sense that you're actually watching anything.

I wanted to love The Office this year, though - wanted to organize groups around watching it. Worse, I wanted to love that notoriously hyped-and-underperforming other backstage drama, Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip. In my last blog, I wrote of it, "It occurs to me I don't actually like Studio 60. In fact, I actually don't like Studio 60, but I believe in it." This is true still - I remember hating the first slew of West Wing episodes, but what The West Wing had that counters Studio 60 was a surprise in its cast - its big name stars (big name for TV, that is - Rob Lowe, Moira Kelly, Martin Sheen) were its weakest links, and its more unknowns (John Spencer, Allison Janney, Bradley Whitford, Richard Schiff, Janel Maloney, Dule Hill) each stole their respective scenes. On Studio 60, the cast, besides a brilliant Matthew Perry, might as well all disappear into their LA backlots, and I can't imagine anyone would notice that Perry would be simply talking to himself.

It's because Studio 60 is full of ideas - about television, about the morality of art, ideas about passion, ideas about ideas - that people seem stunned as to how little it seems to resemble an actual world with actual celebrities. The West Wing by comparison should have been more oblique, more tangential inside a liberal la la land that would never exist, but that thought never crossed my mind during The West Wing. That I'm not watching any world I know crosses my mind all the time during Studio 60; it is a fantasy of television masquerading as loquacious reality.

I doubt Studio 60 will make it out of the season, at this point, and maybe that's for the better. I already need a new thing to care about in television, something to come home to. For me, that show on network TV this season has been, strangely, My Name Is Earl, that other NBC comedy whose loopiness this season has only revealed the gifts of its supporting cast. It is still too sermonizing, too pat, and often not funny enough to justify it. But what it never does is play something it's not - a joke on reality, or reality as a joke. It is, mostly, pretty clever, which is its own accomplishment.

Still got that dirrty degree

We approach some ambiguous history, coming upon 2007: the first time anyone heard Britney Spears' "Baby One More Time," which is to say, the resurrection of pure pop, of bubblegum if no other word will do, as the main form of commercial music making.

Remember the first time you heard it? Surprisingly, you might. It had already hit #1 (a feat that happened long before anyone knew what was going on, I might add) before I did, and heard it announced on The Peak 95.1, a "light rock" station in Colorado Springs that abandoned its adult-contemporary format for Top 40 at roughly the same time. I was in a car in downtown Colorado Springs, a Junior nearing the end of my third year in high school. The car was Brandon Camarillo's, a green Celica or Pontiac or in any case, a two-door. The day was sunny. The day before I'd heard Courtney Love mention her unabashed love of the song, and I, despite what I said to the contrary, loved it immediately.

Despite what many people said to the contrary, they loved it immediately. Britney beamed so innocent on the Baby One More Time cover, a smile right off the cover of Barely Legal 14, or worse, as Britney wasn't legal in any way. Today, I heard "Stronger" while walking home from Wallingford, and remembered just what a terrific pop song it was - sexy, propulsive, just the right dash of screw-you defiance in the tone. Friends will attest I was a bit obsessed with it when it came out, downloading the incredibly sexy chair-and-rainfall video and playing it on a dozen dorm computers. I'd say I was the perfect age for the Britney phenomenon - not the least of which is because I was her age. Still, she's significant in those significant years; her VMA striptease came early in my entry into the College dorms, "I'm A Slave 4U" the first song I downloaded at my new apartment sophomore year (my cheese-loving ex-roommate, Peter, was actually a bigger fan of "I'm Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman," the rare Britney song - like "From The Bottom of My Broken Heart" or "Lucky" - that I'd prefer to forget). "Toxic," her absolute best song, induced something like a fever at the party commemorating my graduation from college (which would perhaps be more remarkable if the same fever were not also induced by any song by Outkast, Squirrel Nut Zipper's "Put A Lid On It," and Wilson Phillips' "Hold On").

I bring this up because it surprises me that, despite Britney's importance in the world of pop culture for the majority of so many of our adult lives, she can still inspire intense vitriol. At a party last month, a friend's sister, upon hearing the opening bars of "Stronger," leaped from her seat on the couch to run across the living room and into the bedroom where my iPod was, to change the song - "I can't stand Britney Spears, I'm sorry," she said. Mention her in public these days, and she'll get lobbed with a few familiar epithets - white trash, whore, fat pig. In fact, if it was not fashionable for a while to pick on Britney, who was always an easy target anyway, she seems the easiest of targets these days. Her sin now? She let her hair get long and brown, had babies, married someone who's clearly talentless and clueless. Were this amount of anger given to every woman in California who did those three things, I believe much of the state would find their heads exploding.

I was fascinated by the change in public Britney talk because the opposite has happened to her "rival," Christina Aguilera. In 2002, with the release of Stripped, Christina, revamped in assless chaps with a hairdo looking like a skunk breathing too much spraypaint, earned similar epithets. I loved Christina then, not because her songs were good (although, they were - any popstar would be lucky to make a song half as good as "Dirrty," or "Can't Hold Us Down" or "Beautiful"), but because she was responsible for her celebrity. Britney, catchy as her songs were, acted demure and non-responsive to her songs' contents - "I'm a Slave 4U," she said coyly, was - despite its provocative title, hard breathing in the chorus, and an orgy in the video - about dancing, or, was the product of a sexually promiscuous character having nothing to do with her. Even sexpot Beyonce would rile around and, basically, masturbate in the video for "Baby Boy" and coyly deny its nature, "I like to stay home and read, mostly," she'd say later, when questioned about it.

Christina, on the other hand, owned "Dirrty" and its contraversy, labled herself proudly sexual, wondered publicly and often why contraversy erupted when a woman made a bold and provocative song with hot dancers when men did it all the time. Christina released "Can't Hold Us Down," and made the lyric "it's a common double standard of society/ the guy gets all the glory the more he can score/ the girl could do the same and yet you call her a whore" singable. She took shit left and right and only made her message public. I can't imagne how many insults, how much hate mail Christina received in 2002-2003, the year "Beautiful" hit #1 and "Dirrty" ran on constant rotation at any danceclub in America, and she never once demured from the discussion that that could start.

Christina this year has been greeted like a returning friend. Back To Basics, a smash for a double-record already, revived the old Britney-Christina who-sings-better debate, and produced an instant top-10 hit in "Ain't No Other Man." The record isn't good - each disc has a rather interchangeable nature in its songs - but it is somewhat astonishing, her disc 2 impersonations of Fiona Apple, Etta James, and Bessie Smith calculated, but accurate, catchy, and even in some spots, moving.

I don't expect Aguilera to be a big seller in another ten years, but that she's one now, and only releasing her third album, is a statement to the way she's handled her career. Spears, ever the sucker for the media attention she rallies against, has likely concluded her recording career, at least as far as successful and culturally relevant records go. I don't much care that Spears had a baby or married a dufus, or that Aguilera married a nice Jewish boy and re-imagined herself a 40's starlet (the first time, by the way, the either seemed to have helped jumpstart fashion trends - unless you count schoolgirl outfits or enormous snakes). Looking back, all I wonder is that if Spears had dropped that innocent we-swear-it's-not-porn smile after she made "I'm a Slave 4U," or tried to agree with and not counter the "I'm not that innocent" promise of "Oops I Did It Again," would she have been able to overcome her bad press? It seems that all she knows how to do, anyway, is demure, which is fine, except that it makes me wonder if Spears herself was always a little ashamed of her career and could've used a dose of Aguilera's aggressive, useful egomania all along.

Studio 60

Aaron Sorkin believes in America and he's not going to let you forget it. He believes in entertainers, in sports fans, in the president, and writing, as he does, with incredibly jaunty, fast, ribald, theatrical rhythm, Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip premiered, a week ago, an apparent salve to television. It's irreverent! It bites the hand that feeds it! It shows that television must not be bereft of integrity and ideals and a modern pulse because it's about a TV show and network attempting fight to not be bereft of ingtegrity and ideals and a modern pulse!

Considering the ratings for the first two episodes of the series, it's likely that you've seen at least a few minutes of Studeio 60, but more likely you've heard about it in some respect. Sorkin being one of the very few household names in television writing, the show's been the "next big thing" of American drama probably since its pitch meeting, and it received all the pre-upfront press clippings and bidding wars that accompany these "next big things." It features a $3-million-per-episode price tag and boasts the largest set on network television, not to mention its A-list cast stuffed with names like Matthew Perry, Bradley Whitford, Stephen Weber, D.L. Hughley, Amanda Peet, and Timothy Busfield.

What it is, then, is a drama about creating comedy - the show is a fictional competitor of Saturday Night Live on a fictional competitor of NBC called NBS (National Broadcasting System, that is). You could call it brave of NBC to let its flagship show of the new season be so self-referential and self-effacing, and to an extent it is.

But more than that, it's a show whose largest purpose isn't necessarily even to be good, but to present the image that NBC is irreverent and self-referential, and that they are, above all, about quality and care little about image - that they are the network on the edge.

It occurs to me, after a ceremonial devotion to the first couple of episodes, that I don't actually like Studio 60. More than that, I actually don't like Studio 60, but I sort of believe in it. It's arrogant, it's too high-falootin', and I'm not certain if Amanda Peet's performance as NBS president Jordan McDeere (how a woman as young as Peet gets to be network president is a different topic, but one that, I imagine, will be addressed) is deadpan or just terrible, which is more than I can say for Steven Weber's chairman of NBS, who's just a cranky and stern-looking nothing on the show. For it, its much-hyped Sarah Paulson character Harriet - a Christian! and a great person! - is based on Sorkin's real life ex and former West Wing co-star Kristen Chenoweth, and I'd much prefer Kristen Chenoweth in the Kristen Chenoweth part - Paulson is sexy alright, but she doesn't seem to muster up the type of brash spunk Chenoweth brought to Annabeth, a part that barely even existed on The West Wing, but was still memorable. In any case, it's hard to even register my own thoughts on the matter what with constantly being reminded by NBC to compare how it's living up to expectations.

Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing, I recall, was greeted with similarly obtuse fanfare - back in 1999, NBC's pre-pilot ads boasted lines like, "Every era has a great drama - LA Law! ER! NBC now invites you to the next great American drama!" It's helpful too to remind myself I never saw those original episodes of The West Wing as they aired, that I became a fan at the end of the second season and worked my way backwards. Had I watched from the beginning, I surely would have actively disliked The West Wing too - its initial episodes are pretentious and ham-handed, ostentatious about its own importance, and written with one grandstanding bit of oration after another (this was, to be fair, also the case with the pilot of Sorkin's first network dramedy Sports Night). In fact, looking back at it, I don't even like that first, multi-Emmy winning first season very much. And Studio 60's identical gambit - a male and female lead who used to date but now work together - then: Bradley Whitford's Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman and Moira Kelly's media consultant Mandy, now, Matthew Perry's head writer Matt and Paulson's Harriet - seems altogether much more successful on Studio 60, which Sorkin must know, as Kelly barely lasted the season on West Wing and Paulson seems poised to be part of the show's main focus.

So it's important to remember that, begrudgingly, The West Wing was the next great network drama, that its second season is a monument to which all dramas whould have to strive for, and that it was so doused in magnificent production values that when it was revived in its final season by writers other than Sorkin, the job seemed to have been easily accomplished by all the quality left behind from its inception.

The problem, I think, is that we may have already moved to a more rapid era of television consumption - every television report every tells you that year is unlike the years of the past, that TV's golden age is behind them, but I'm starting to think 2006 is not even 1999 anymore. Studio 60 earned 16.9 million viewers in its first episode, but, as was reported today, there are "no breakouts" amongst the new crop of fall premieres this year - "no surprises that capture the zeitgeist with instant high ratings like My Name Is Earl last year and Desperate Housewives the year before that," says a Reuters report quoting an NBC executive. That September is not even over and that no TV show has had more than 3 airings thus far does not seem to matter much in these pronouncements.

In fact, Studio 60's audience for the pilot dipped slightly from its first half hour to its second, and this is indication that it, too, will not be a hit (but this is not altogether an unreasonable projection - ABC's Six Degrees lost its viewers by 47% from one half hour to the next, its viewers no doubt worn out by an abyssmal premiere of juggernaut Grey's Anatomy followed by the even-more-abyssmal experience of watching any of Six Degrees). Still, I hope that the pressure gets taken off Studio 60 at some point so it can flatten out into something resembling normal episodes, something where the honestly obnoxious amount of self-referentiality can peter out a bit. One of the early death knell pronouncements for Studio 60 claims that normal, non-industry people "just don't connect to that much 'insider talk.'" This, if true, means only that NBC should cancel the show immediately, insider talk being all there actually is, besides a terrific set.

Then again, I recall early reviews of The West Wing wondering if people could give a damn about Washington "insider talk," a brand of talk that includes discussions of wheat subsidies and road tolls. An interesting thing: when TV shows try and recreate the actual day-to-day experiences of people - politicians or cops or mobsters or high schoolers or executives - audiences tend to show up.