Come Back Home to California

I could blame it on being stoned at the time, and perhaps I should. The Nog-N has begun showing reruns of Laguna Beach, and there I was, unsuspecting, to catch a rerun of their second season premiere. Viewers of Laguna Beach - and, later, The Hills, the Laguna Beach spinoff featuring Lauren "LC" Conrad's new life as a Teen Vogue intern in Los Angeles - will remember this as the season premiere that introduced the world to Jessica and Jason, if they remember it at all.

Of course, logic would say they won't remember it at all. MTV shows show up on DVD, or certainly Laguna Beach does, but do not typically stick in the memories of their viewers. Laguna Beach is perhaps more effective and memorable for its core viewers than, say, The Real World or any of the latest Bam Margera/ Steve-O shows premiering, but I would hesitate to think of its viewers as containing a list in their minds of what occurred or when.

But this is where I was unsuspecting - minutes into the episode, past the Kristen Cavilleri voiceover of who all the "new people" were, there was a montage, set to the tune of Atherton's "California," a song I'd never heard before, but was so extraordinary I went home and downloaded it. In the montage: Steven, GQ-model heartthrob of season 1, skateboards out of his dorm in San Francisco. Trey, bad boy of season 1, packs up his room at Bard College in New York. Morgan, giddy chipmunk of season 1, drags a suitcase in the picturesque Utah mountains to her car. There's Lo and LC and Christina, all the faces of season 1 (conveniently titled for our short-term memories), packing up and heading home one by one.

There was a reason this sequence was so good: each of these people was quite simply themselves. Trey's room was a mess as he dug through shirts scattered everywhere. Morgan looked pooped and used both hands to lift up her hefty suitcase. Whatever the action, these were characters presented without judgment, without voiceover - simply as they were, one after the other, drawn with thoughts occasionally visible on their silent faces as a chorus of "Come back home to California" lulled each of them through trains and airports back to the shores of Orange County.

Laguna Beach is not a popular thing for people who are not in high school to admit to watching, and certainly not men. Its biggest fans, I have to believe, are women who identify with the LC's and Kristen's that it chronicles - white women of financial privilege and physical perfection who utter phrases like (as Kristen does, referring to Steven) "Boys are stupid, I'm giving up on them." I once said that the reason it was successful was that it was so beautifully shot, it made viewers forget they were watching a reality show, and MTV could essentially create a scripted show without approaching the need for an actual script.

But the lush, filmic cinematography of Laguna Beach does something more than hoodwinking - it, I believe, truly captures the experience of teenagers, and, perhaps of all of our most insecure behaviors. For those viewers that are not in high school, and are not female, and are not born of financial privilege, the most common derision of Laguna Beach must be that its characters are "spoiled" are "annoying" are "ditzy" are "superficial." These things are all true. Of course they are. Teenagers are awful, that's why we don't hang out with them much.

But what I think gets lost is that the show accepts each person in its cast for all of those traits, and, at times, even explores what it means to exhibit being annoying, or ditzy, or spoiled. These characters are simply who they are, and the show, unlike most reality shows, does not tell you with whom to identify or the "role" each plays. Perhaps to truly probe a teenager's personality, a viewer would have to give up the luxury of liking each of them all the time, as truly, no teenager is likable all the time.

In Season 3 of Laguna Beach, its stalwarts of season 2 make some appearances, then disappear again, moving along to a new group of high school "make-ups and break-ups." This was, I imagine, dismaying for some, but it thrilled me, as did every minute of the histrionic year - of Cami and Kyndra's degrading snickering and dismissal of the show's main characters, Tessa and Racquel, as well as their endless obsession with Tessa and Racquel's every move (how else would they know what to make fun of?). Of beautiful, naive, vacant Tessa's protective insecurities being so present and powerful, they begin to interfere with Racquel's outside friendships. Of Racquel's "love" for gorgeous, mute Alex, who in turn says - when he breaks his skater resolve and speaks - things like "I guess I'm just not expressive, you know?"

Season 3 made the smart move to begin following a cast in their Junior year, so as not to have to jettison its focus the following year, and in doing so made, to me, the most thrilling TV moment outside of The Sopranos in the past year. Its final montage, leaving its characters as they went off to college and prepared for a summer without one another, is breathtaking in its way of watching a group of teenagers, each completely incapable of expressing the crossroads each has come across. Cameron watches all his friends leave, and seems to have gained unexpected bursts of anger towards bratty, vindictive Kyndra. Tessa has had to accept that Racquel and Breanna (LC's dimwit little sister) have fixed their friendship, leaving her without exclusive rights to Racquel, and worse, her longtime male friend Chase has gone to Hollywood to start a band and didn't say goodbye. In the end, Tessa stands alone on a beach, listening to Chase's message of "I'll have to catch you next time I'm in town." Tessa closes her phone, and says something staring off at the sunset waves. What did she say? I can't remember - "yeah, see ya," I imagine it to be. I'm alone, I think, in recognizing that embroidered line, that gesture with her phone, clenched in her fist beneath her chin, as the sensation that all humans go through on occasion - the feeling of abandonment, of suddenly having to fend for yourself, of staring at that endless, unyielding ocean. That feeling doesn't just hit the capable, I suppose, and I also suppose that's why I love having Laguna Beach on reruns on Nog-N.

Don't Stop Believin

"That's what you said once, right? Remember the moments that were good?" This line, delivered in the last minute of The Sopranos "Made In America," the TV show's final hour, referred to a different final Sopranos hour, "I Dream of Jeannie Cusimano," season one's finale.

Remember the moments that were good - a little whistful breath of nostalgic advice coming from writer/creator/"Made" director David Chase. "Made In America" has been cited in the last 24 hours as the most frustrating hour in The Sopranos history, the "worst TV finale since Seinfeld," as a dig on the show's fans, as a way for Chase to "call attention to the show's creator rather than the characters." That last quote, by writer Jay Woodruff, said he would have preferred an "even quieter ending. would've been happier, I think, to have the camera pull back on the family snarfing down onion rings in the charming dive — with the emphasis on the characters in all their fully compromised glory, rather than on some jarring effect." That jarring effect? Tony, Carmela, and AJ sit at Hobart's, eating onion rings, listening to every last word of Journey's "Don't Stop Believing." The camera observes every USA hat-wearing face in the diner staring at the family as Meadow fails to parallel park outside and nearly gets hit by a car. The scene sets you up for a tense hail of bullets, especially in the face of one mysterious face at the counter who follows AJ in and then hits the bathroom just before Meadow enters, and the camera and sound cuts just at the final "Don't Stop" of the chorus. And then...?

In a report for Entertainment Weekly discussing watching the finale in a gathering of The Sopranos massive cast, Sharon Angela, who memorably played Rosalie Aprile, sad, hardened, widow of pre-Tony boss, Jackie Aprile, described the finale as excellent, or, "I think the ending is David Chase at his finest... It's not typical predictable dumb shit."

No, no it was not. In fact, I have to wonder if the amount of anger about the finale, the amount of web space, coffee shop discussion, and publication writing debating just how much David Chase has extended his middle finger to his fans, has "made the finale about David Chase and not about the characters," is possibly anything other than a mark of incredible artistic success with "Made in America." I have to wonder if the desire for an "even quieter ending" as a camera pulls back in sepiated Wonder Years style to reveal the family at a table would simply be an ending that everyone would "get." Had this ending aired, the complaints would not imply frustration with the final scene, but would instead imply frustration with the episode as a whole - why didn't Phil's death get more gruesome? Why didn't Silvio wake from his coma? Why didn't Dr. Melfi give a tearful re-acceptance of Tony as a patient and shirk her 11th hour ethical angst?

The Sopranos had no desire to do any of those things just as it had no desire to give us an ending - or, to be honest, a beginning or middle - that people would "get" because The Sopranos does not need to be a show in which you must get everything to marvel at the breadth of its accomplishment. I say "Made In America" was not only a good episode, not only the type of "quiet" ending Woodruff asks for, but more than that - the perfect ending, and I mean perfect by saying that what The Sopranos has accomplished definitively and bravely in 6 or 7 years is the knowledge that David Chase knows more than we do, and he just doesn't give a shit how people react to these characters' lives, because his job is to present them, not to conclude them.

I want to point out a few of those "quiet" scenes Woodruff complains about not seeing - quiet like life, not quiet like TV finales.

Tony, for his part, gets saved by Matt Servitto's Agent Harris - calling from a hotel room romp with his "Brooklyn Contact," revealed to be another FBI agent he is having an affair with. Harris had been getting more and more friendly with Tony since transferring to counterterrorism at the beginning of season 6. In the previous episode, Tony asked how that was going, to which Harris responded "Great, if you don't like sleeping or seeing your kids."

My response to Harris might be influenced by the rather useless knowledge that HBO has submitted Servitto's performance in "Walk Like A Man" (a thrilling episode involving Christopher's final failure with sobriety) for consideration under the Best Supporting Actor character. However, Servitto's performance ("Walk Like A Man" notwithstanding, for which he has one scene that I remember, in which he does very little) has grown to reveal the fraying tension of a man who doesn't sleep or see his kids. In "Made In America" (in which Servitto would be more deservingly submitted for Best Supporting Actor), it's revealed Harris just may be as conflicted as everyone else - he's a man attached to Tony with his own conflicting motivations. When he's told of Phil Leotardo's death, Harris looks elated and says "We just might win this thing!" That "thing" being the War on Terror for which he fruitlessly, deludedly fights, adding his part to a mob war out of friendship, and a trumped up tip from Tony used to help himself out of jail.

My gut reaction to this revelation was disappointment, but it is right in line with the existential malaise The Sopranos has revealed itself to chronicle - the anxiety of modern culture, the feeling, described in The Sopranos premiere, that the best days are behind us. That anxiety, I think, is the true subject of "Made In America," and the true subject of that final scene. Did Tony and his family get whacked after that abrupt cut? There is no answer, of course, but I'd say no anyway - That that anxiety lurks everywhere, even in a moment of great American family togetherness is more important than an actual conclusion. In fact, the episode is filled with unease - in every turn, we wonder whether the axe will fall, whether its fulfilled (Phil waving goodbye to his grandchildren seconds before he's shot in the head and run over by his own SUV) or false (Paulie walking, uneasily, into the Bing for a final time). Even that orange tabby who can't stop staring at Christopher's picture seems to be tuned into all that's wrong with what these people have done and what might await any person in Tony's life.

Other wonderful moments? Tony's bedsite visit to Sylvio, silently grabbing his hand in friendship. Sylvio made the same gesture to Tony when Tony lay in the same hospital bed during "Mayham." Tony's allegiance has flagged for so many of the people closest to him over the years - he nearly killed Paulie 6 episodes ago, after all, only to have him as his closest compatriot at series end, and his love for Christopher was so evident even seconds before Tony killed him - but his friendship for Silvio is lifelong, beyond trust. A shot of Tony and Paulie outside of Satriale's one last time. A sign behind them that reads "Italian Sausage," except the "sa" is covered by Paulie and the "age" covered by Tony - so it reads "Italian USA." Pair this with the shot of NY underboss Butchie wandering past a tourist bus in Little Italy, one in which a driver announces that Little Italy was "once a neighborhood, now reduced to one street of tourist shops," and we get a statement on the American experience now - once an identity, now simply an absorption of the American search for wealth and security.

Because that, truly, is the statement of the series - that American life in modernity is about an escape from anxiety, and America has made that escape through money, through legitimate forms of profiteering (seen in both parts of season 6 through insurance agents, movie producers and actors, real estate brokers, big business mergers, and, in one unforgettable shout-out, Dick Cheney), and in willingness to abandon tradition for security's sake. Phil is a relic from another era, complaining that Tony has "no respect for this thing," and in the end he's killed - decapitated! - by his own modern indulgence, a giant white SUV.

There's no shortage of what I could write about The Sopranos, and especially season 6 of The Sopranos. Someday perhaps I will. I think the fan frustration of "Made In America" will fade, as it likely already is. People complained about every step David Chase has made over the year - the slow pace of Season 4, the extended comatose hallucination of season 6, the non-Adriana focused episodes of Season 5 - but they get forgotten about eventually, and that's because what Chase does best is ignore criticism and make the show he has to make.

The best turn in the final episode, though? Tony's mix of panic and loss at knowing that Carlo, a lifelong friend, has flipped, leading to what his attorney describes as a "80-90% chance you'll get indicted." In "Kennedy and Heidi," Tony revealed that every day he wakes up wondering which "piece of shit" is going to kill him or turn him in. We, like him, finally saw that other shoe drop. We, of course, know Tony to be deserving, to be as sociopathic as he is human. Tony - and later, Carmela's - uncertain but protective reaction to this news that will change their lives is a fulfillment of all their worries, the "it" Carmela awoke to in "Soprano Home Movies" when, startled by the FBI at Tony's door, she says "Is this it?" It is.

Some Music Top Ten Lists

KISW 99.9, A local Seattle station, today played a list of the top ten Pearl Jam songs, and this being Seattle, the place where grunge did not die it just shrunk its pant size, this can't be too surprising. Is Pearl Jam in town soon? One has to assume. In any case, it got me to thinking about the process of deciding an artist's ten best works - a fun, mostly irrelevant game of music-lover opinion-making.

Every now and again, Rolling Stone or Entertainment Weekly will come out with a "definitive" list of, say, the Greatest Songs in Rock and Roll or the Greatest Sci-Fi works, and all they spotlight is just how desperate each magazine is to show their understanding of current trends. A few years go by, and each magazine presents a new "definitive" list of those things, and those of us more instinctually tuned to those trends notices the way the more contemporary choices seem to have vanished.

It leads me to conclude that top ten lists are only accurate when they are the most honest, and when they are the most honest they cannot take into account cultural impact - that the work had cultural impact is possibly important, but that impact is temporary and forgettable. The only true top ten list is one that reflects honest opinions of how "moving" the work is, but that would only be true insomuchas it displays that creator's opinion. KISW 99.9 and I agree that "Even Flow" is the best Pearl Jam song, but it seems the most useless of views - of course "Jeremy" is the essential Pearl Jam song, but that is the most useless of the most useless of views considering how much the days in which "Jeremy" was a relevant song seem such a historical product existing in days which are faraway, invisible. KISW might have been trying to break this view of Pearl Jam by putting "Even Flow" at #1, but it hardly changed the view - 4 of the 5 top songs were from Ten, their quintessential grunge record.

In any case, I enjoy this type of opinion making, so I'm including my top Pearl Jam choices, and then a few more artists who I think about often. After Pearl Jam, the ranks proved to be less and less useful, and I just started to list songs chronologically (it's easier for me to think of them that way), and anyway, narrowing these artists to ten is an impossible game anyway, one in which my answers could change with the weather - some are so challenging, it's fun: seriously, what ten Bob Dylan songs could you narrow yourself to? In each case, I like to think the ten songs I chose represent the capabilities of that artist, that they highlight the reasons each is so relevant and powerful - why, in short, they become artists you love, not merely artists you listen to.

Ten Best Pearl Jam Songs:
1. "Even Flow" (Ten)
2. "Red Mosquito" (No Code)
3. "Animal" (Vs.)
4. "Jeremy" (Ten)
5. "I Am Mine" (Riot Act)
6. "Wishlist" (Yield)
7. "Elderly Woman Behind A Counter In a Small Town" (Vs.)
8. "Yellow Ledbetter" (B-side)
9. "Hail, Hail" (No Code)
10. "Whipping" (Vitalogy)

Ten Best Joni Mitchell Songs (Chronological)
"Cactus Tree" (Song To a Seagull)
"Both Sides, Now" (Clouds)
"River" (Blue)
"A Case Of You" (Blue)
"For The Roses" (For The Roses)
"Judgment Of The Moon and Stars" (For The Roses)
"Help Me" (Court and Spark)
"Free Man In Paris" (Court and Spark)
"The Hissing of Summer Lawns" (The Hissing of Summer Lawns)
"Refuge of the Roads" (Hejira)

Ten Best Sonic Youth Songs
"Kill Yr Idols" (Confusion is Sex/ Kill Yr Idols)
"Death Valley, '69" (Bad Moon Rising)
"Expressway to Yr Skull" (EVOL)
"Cotton Crown" (Sister)
"The Sprawl" (Daydream Nation)
"Kool Thing" (Goo)
"Bone" (Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star)
"Skip Tracer" (Washing Machine)
"The Diamond Sea" (Washing Machine)
"Unmade Bed" (Sonic Nurse)

Ten Best Bob Dylan Songs
"It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" (Bringing It All Back Home)
"It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" (Bringing It All Back Home)
"Like a Rolling Stone" (Highway '61 Revisited)
"Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands" (Blonde on Blonde)
"I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine" (John Wesley Harding)
"New Morning" (New Morning)
"Tangled Up In Blue" (Blood On The Tracks)
"If You See Her, Say Hello" (Blood On The Tracks)
"Isis" (Desire)
"Shooting Star" (Oh Mercy)

Ten Best Rolling Stones Songs
"Honky Tonk Women"
"Loving Cup" (Exile On Main St.)
"Tumbling Dice" (Exile On Main St.)
"Gimme Shelter" (Let It Bleed)
"You Got The Silver" (Let It Bleed)
"Sympathy For The Devil" (Beggar's Banquet)
"Moonlight Mile" (Sticky Fingers)
"Beast of Burden" (Some Girls)
"Emotional Rescue" (Emotional Rescue)
"Slave" (Tattoo You)

Ten Best PJ Harvey Songs
"Dress" (Dry)
"Rid of Me" (Rid of Me)
"Dry" (Rid of Me)
"50 ft. Queenie" (Rid of Me)
"To Bring You My Love" (To Bring You My Love)
"Send His Love to Me" (To Bring You My Love)
"Heela" (Dance Hall at Louse Point)
"Angelene" (Is This Desire?)
"We Float" (Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea)
"Uh Huh Her" (B-Side)

Ten Best Bruce Springsteen Songs
"Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)" (The Wild, The Innocent, & The E-Street Shuffle)
"Thunder Road" (Born To Run)
"Born To Run" (Born To Run)
"Badlands" (Darkness on the Edge of Town)
"Drive All Night" (The River)
"Atlantic City" (Nebraska)
"Reason to Believe" (Nebraska)
"Dancing In The Dark" (Born In The USA)
"Tunnel of Love" (Tunnel of Love)
"All The Way Home" (Devils & Dust)

Ten Best Madonna Songs
"Burning Up" (Madonna)
"La Isla Bonita" (True Blue)
"Like A Prayer" (Like a Prayer)
"Express Yourself" (Like a Prayer)
"Pray For Spanish Eyes" (Like a Prayer)
"Waiting" (Erotica)
"Ray of Light" (Ray of Light)
"Music" (Music)
"Don't Tell Me" (Music)
"How High" (Confessions On a Dance Floor)

Arguments? Your own lists?

My first letter to a senator!

Ethan Kutinsky

725 N. 43^rd St.

Seattle, WA 98103

ekutinsky@gmail.com

Dear Senator Cantwell:

On a recent episode of Real Time With Bill Maher, GOP Strategist Amy Holmes asked of Harry Reid that, at the point in which he’s voted for the war in Iraq, voted to confirm General Petraeus, and continues to find the war “lost,” then why hasn’t he asked “his friends in Congress” to start moving towards impeachment? I believe Holmes was onto something, and that question speaks to the flaws at the center of the Democratic party – at what point during this party’s and this country’s deep, unwavering dissatisfaction with President Bush and the Republican leadership in America, do we stop complaining and start to take actions to check and rebuke that leadership? In other words, when do we begin to show as Liberals in America that we too care as much about action as we do about criticism?

I moved to Seattle in August of last year, so in the midterm elections, I voted absentee from Colorado – it was important to me at the time to vote for a Democratic governor there as well as on the amendments covering social issues and educational packages. I worked in mental health in Boulder, Colorado prior to moving to Seattle and work within the foster system here in residential behavioral counseling with at-risk teenagers. I bring my background up for a couple of reasons: first, I am new to your electoral base and I vote. Secondly, I mention my background because in work with children, it is assumed that if there is not adequate supervision and disciplinary action taken immediately with employees who are simply not doing their job, unacceptable behaviors go unchecked and have the chance to become the norm in daily operations, and this puts the kids that we represent at risk. Strong leadership requires that the best interest of our clients remain our highest responsibility.

I do not believe Democrats in Congress share a similar philosophy towards their clients, the electorate in their districts – Holmes is correct to point out that Democrats are willing to make symbolic gestures rather than necessary action. This does not need to be the case. As Americans, and as our leadership in Washington, there is a responsibility when our voices are not being heard to move towards real, undismissable actions.

In this case, that action is impeachment. Currently, 71% of Americans are dissatisfied with President Bush’s leadership. This past week, President Bush once again showed disregard for Congressional reproaches by vetoing the war funding bill that included a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. Americans continue to express their concern that there is no plan for salvaging American involvement and protecting troops and Iraqi civilians under this administration, and why shouldn’t we? There is no plan, and this President is not interested in the criticism necessary to hear in order to formulate any sort of strategy.

The information I have is incomplete as it is not my job to keep a check on President Bush, but you do have access to that information because that is part of your job. As a reasonably informed citizen, I know about things like the Walter Reid scandal, the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame, the illegal NSA wire taps, the humiliation of the justice department, and the unyielding escalation of violence in Iraq – and these are simply the scandals of the past year. How many of these presidential scandals does it require before Congress confirms what America sees fairly plainly – this president is in violation of the law and needs to be removed from office. It is disconcerting that a president as disastrously inept as this one will be listed in history as a successful two-term president for whom no congressional disapproval beyond nonbinding resolutions was ever logged. As a nation, our check on our dissatisfaction is exactly this – to pressure our elected representatives to log their own discontent in the form of impeachment. As our elected representation, it is your obligation to take forth legislation, disregarding how unpopular it has the potential of being, and help to begin the process to impeach President Bush with cause and remove him from office. These are the times in which your obligations are most important, and definitive, clear action is essential.

Sincerely,

Ethan Kutinsky

Somewhere with your wings on time you must be laughing

Joni Mitchell stares off on some unnamed vista at the beginning of Hejira and observes of a coyote "We just come from such different sets of circumstance." Lucinda Williams, on her new album West, released in February, wonders "Is my love in Helena, eating sweet potato pies." Kim Gordon, on last year's Sonic Youth release Rather Ripped, found herself in earnest-love-song land when she said of her lover (presumably, husband/ guitarist/ fellow lead-singer Thurston Moore) "He's not a poet or a mystic with his cigarette unglued/ he's just neutral."

Kim Gordon, back in 1981 when Sonic Youth was at the forefront of groundbreaking, avant garde music, used to scream into the mirror with chilling ferocity, "Take off your dress! I'll shake off your flesh!" That she now observes with rosy eyes has to be a sign of the way artists change as they spend such a significant portion of their life making music - the truth is the interesting songs, the years of productivity come to a halt.

Or, in the case of great artists (as Mitchell and Williams and Sonic Youth are), they take the form of experimentation, of wandering, of albums that are incomplete at best. I have to mention Hejira, an album I can't stop listening to lately. There is so much wrong with Hejira - its rambling that borders on catatonia in dull moments. Made as a collaboration with bassist Jaco Pastorus, it's an album that rather slavishly builds itself as a road diary, a consternated travelogue.

It's not a huge leap for an artist like Mitchell, but the Mitchell you hear on Hejira is not the legendary Joni Mitchell. That legend of Joni Mitchell sings masterfully poetic, plaintive songs on guitar and piano, and she existed from whenever it was she got discovered (Clouds in 1969?) through Court and Spark in 1974. The Joni of The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975) and Hejira (1976) is a different, less talked about Joni.

Much like the Sonic Youth that's now been making records for 12 years, since Washing Machine in 1995 bookended a ten year period of rock mastery that, from the underground up, helped shape rock music. Much like the Lucinda Williams who surfaced this year on West.

What I think is that all great artists climax at some point, finish their run of great records with a masterpiece that cannot be replicated, and break free, become something else entirely. You can see it in any artists catalogue - the great, world-changing Led Zeppelin up through Led Zeppelin IV and the pretty good rock band that continued afterwards. The Who lost to drug addiction and bad ideas after Who's Next. The poet laureate Bob Dylan who never reemerged after Blood On The Tracks.

People talk about transitions, or they at least see them. For Sonic Youth, perhaps they don't. I see their epic decade - the one that began with Bad Moon Rising in 1985 and Evol in 1986 as a selection of great beginnings, and ended with Washing Machine in 1995, an album, that seems, about endings, about fulfillment. When A Thousand Leaves was released in 1998, they were somthing else - you can hear it in the music, and in the album, which is, simply, less than the ones that preceded it.

Yet what I've noticed is how great this Sonic Youth can be. A Thousand Leaves was a fraction of the album that the 9 released in that previous decade were, but it opened up a sound of indie calm, plaintive, beautiful songs like "Snare, Girl" and "Hoarfrost" helped define the direction the band would take. Their albums this decade have been occasionally half-cooked, but also occasionally unnerving - the deeply unpopular 2000 release NYC Ghosts and Flowers remains to me one of the more ambitious takes on regret of any major artist I've heard. Since then, the drama is absent, but what's taken its place is a sense of ease and fun - Murray Street, Sonic Nurse, and Rather Ripped have digressions into the "he's not a poet or a mystic" land of pleasant nothingness, but they also have some masterpieces - "Unmade Bed," "Do You Believe In Rapture?" "I Love You Golden Blue," "The Empty Page," "Karen Revisited." These are songs made by stealthy artists making strong adult statements, and surprisingly, that adulthood looks good on the Youth.

Because that's what it is that separates one set of albums from the next - adulthood. Frankly it's less interesting when music's at stake. "Older" artists, after a while, set into a friendly, predictable mode of adult songs eventually. Lucinda Williams had been challenging this for a while - with World Without Tears in 2003, she made an adult record wreaking of hidden desires and lonely impulses more powerfully alert and honest than her previous, already perfect work. I think of World Without Tears as one of the few masterpieces of this decade, a record of poetic importance, an album that makes lines like "I have been so fucking alone" sound like the most primal of adult experiences.

West is an attempt in this vein, an album who wears its loneliness on its sleave - look at the titles: "Learning How To Live," "Unsuffer Me," "Rescue" and "Where Is My Love." It is, however, about half the experience of her previous attempt, and it hurts me to admit that for an artist of Williams track record. She's made, essentially, World With Less Tears, each song finding a better corollary here. "What If" a blander, misfiring imagistic version of "World Without Tears, "Unsuffer Me," though tonic, is less intoxicating than "Righteously" was. "West," beautiful album-capper it is, makes me think of the more vivid soul of "Fruits Of My Labor." Songs that aren't reminiscent of World Without Tears? Well, there's the blunt "Fancy Funeral," about not buying yourself a fancy funeral, or "Words," a song about Lucinda Williams love of writing. Both have lovely melodies. Both are nothing special.

Yet into this adulthood comes an old, wise Williams making one song of youthful questioning that sounds about as strong as anything she's ever made - its opener "Are You Alright" sounds, gruff smoke-voiced baritone aside, as if Williams could have written it 15 years ago. Except she couldn't have. The longing of its simple lines "Are you alright, haven't seen you in a real long time" is something only the weather of age can create.

That weather is what makes artists caterwauling into adulthood interesting. Joni Mitchell, in the past ten years, made recordings of her old songs in ways that make her sound like an entirely different person - a husky, deeply-bruised-by-cigarettes voice travels through the songs of Blue and For The Roses and Court and Spark on her records The Beginnings of Survival and Both Sides, Now, to mixed, mostly upsetting effect. But what they mostly do is point out the innate youthfulness of those records, showing Mitchell to be better at looking at life coming up, at anticipating and philosophizing.

Yet there were two records there after those masterpieces that showed an entirely different Mitchell. The Hissing Of Summer Lawns and Hejira don't have the fans of those records. "In France They Kiss On Main Street," the song that opens Lawns, is so tuneless you'd think Mitchell hummed an idea in the car on the way to the studio and it got included on a record. Yet something is conceptually ablaze in this record, even though the entirety of it isn't. "The Hissing Of Summer Lawns," its images of contained femininity ("He bought her a diamond for her throat/ put her in a ranch house on the hill/ she could see the valley barbecues/ from her windowsill"), is an extraordinary, cutting piece of sociological observation, even amidst its Steely Dan synthesizers of 1975. Its penultimate song, "Sweet Bird," must be something Mitchell worked towards her whole career - few songs look back on life's choices with such sadness and awe, such fascination and confusion - "Sweet bird of time and change you must be laughing," she says of the bird that represents time, flying forever forward.

And Hejira? I haven't stopped listening to it, even if songs like "Black Crow" and "Furry Sings The Blues" are as forgettable as any coffee-house junk pile. This is the subdued Mitchell of the road. Her voice begins to crack here, in the great "Amelia," a song Mitchell described as "that song to Amelia Earhart, I was singing as one solo pilot to another." Sometimes she can't hit the notes anymore. Mitchell drove from coast to coast and put a photo of a road coming out of her chest on the cover. In a song like "Blue Motel Room," Mitchell focuses on the near-ending of her trip, imagines a lover back in LA while she's in Savannah and thinks "I've got road maps of a dozen states I've got coast to coast just to contemplate/ will you still love me."

You might have thought the answer was no - the music sleepy, with Jaco Pastorius's bass keeping the tone jazzy and light, ever eerie like clouds that won't rain. The album ends with "Refuge Of The Roads." In it, Mitchell creates her own travelogue, her own solo pilot journey - trips from California, fishnets on the Gulf of Mexico, Spring along the ditches. As the song nears its end, she spots on a service station calendar a photograph of the earth coming back from the moon: "And you couldn't see a city/ on that marble bowling ball/ or a forest or a highway/ or me here least of all/ You couldn't see these coldwater restrooms/ or this baggage overload/ westbound and rolling seeking refuge in the roads." That u in refuge may sound like the longest note in history when you hear it, and Mitchell sounds like she's young again when singing it - no cracks, no slip-ups, just a perfectly hit note trilling out along the highway, zooming to oblivion. To say that the moment is electrifying is obvious. To say that it is perfect takes the knowledge of something, an adulthood that calms, and fumbles around a bit.

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.