Roger and Me

Six years ago, as a sophomore at the University of Colorado, I went to visit a career counselor. It was a time in my college career - the "sophomore slump," I suppose - when I no longer wanted to be in school. Instead, I thought, I should just find out now how to become a film critic, as I'd wanted to be forever. I went to a career counselor who recommended I take an interest inventory, which I demurred, as I knew what I was interested in. I wanted to know how to get started.

"Well, I hear Roger Ebert's in town," she said, referring to Ebert's annual appearance at the Conference on World Affairs, every April at CU. "Maybe you could ask him at one of those movie screenings he does."

The movie screening that year was more hopeless to get into than usual. "Those movie screenings he does," or did, before cancer operations sidelined him in 2006, and, earlier this year, permanently robbed him of his ability to speak, were five day screenings. On day 1, Ebert would show the movie, and on days 2-5, he and the rapt, overflowing auditorium in Mackey Hall would go back shot by shot and interrupt with any questions or thoughts the movie brought up. That year, 2002, Ebert showed Fight Club, by then one of the most popular movies in the world for disaffected college students, and I, really, didn't even like the movie all that much. I instead went to see a bizarre panel that included Ebert and three others (including on very eloquent stripper, who spoke all week) talking about sexual fetishes. Ebert, the writer of Beyond The Valley of The Dolls, came out as, unsurprisingly, a lover of huge breasts.

It would have been nice to have talked with Ebert that year, or the following year, showing Mulholland Drive (a movie I'd have even less of a chance of getting into). It would be more nice to talk to him now, whatever form that would take. In any case, I never met him nor asked him anything, and today, I am no longer a critic, except on here, which doesn't really count. For me, my thoughts on art, on movies, on writing often circle back to something he wrote in 2005. Then, Ebert had posted a no-star review to a movie called Chaos most have forgotten or never heard of in the first place. Ebert had found it repugnant and nihilistic, as did most everyone else who saw it, but the filmmakers had objected and written him at the Chicago Sun Times. Ebert posted a full page response, to which he climaxes with this paragraph:

>>>"Animals do not know they are going to die, and require no way to deal with that implacable fact. Humans, who know we will die, have been given the consolations of art, myth, hope, science, religion, philosophy, and even denial, even movies, to help us reconcile with that final fact. What I object to most of all in "Chaos" is not the sadism, the brutality, the torture, the nihilism, but the absence of any alternative to them. If the world has indeed become as evil as you think, then we need the redemptive power of artists, poets, philosophers and theologians more than ever."

What a magnificent piece of writing, and perhaps, it allowed me a sliver of insight as to why I've seen so many strange and different movies over the years, sought them out, fallen in love with them, been bored by so many I felt did nothing, giggled at some I shouldn't. We, as people, have the power to combat the knowledge that we will die by declaring our experiences now, and none do so more than movies.

I wanted to get some of this out while Ebert was still with us, because I suppose his reviews have left some questions for me over the years, as, with only Ebert and Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman, I read his reviews for pleasure, for argument's sake, and for the sake of hearing the love of movies delved into with eloquence and wit and excitement. I want to know why he wrote of the end of Michael Cuesta's L.I.E. that "the ending is a cheap shot." There are two plotlines tied up at the end of L.I.E., one ends bluntly with a gun shot, one ends eloquently with a declaration of personal strength and hope. L.I.E. is a movie I love because of the depth of the discomfort it brings me, and how it gives me hope through that for its main character, and though much of it doesn't work, some of it that does work haunts me, like that ending. I know Ebert knows what I mean - to me, if I can't watch a great movie, what I'd love to watch is a good movie that fails because of over-ambition, but gives us so much to soak in. I'm thinking of Spike Lee's Jungle Fever, which has too much plot, or Oliver Assayas's demonlover, which is too deliberately abstruse, or Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic, which is too whimsical and disconnected, or even Scorsese's King of Comedy, a rather facile indictment of pop culture with endless great moments.

Ebert comes to life when movies make him talk about life, and those movies have so much life to discuss. I loved the scenes he chose to discuss in his 1991 review of Jungle Fever, highlighting an extraordinary scene of a group of African American women discussing what dating has been like for them. I loved his dead-on statement of The Life Aquatic: "But it does so many other things, does it really have to work?" Ebert did not like demonlover, and has not liked many other movies I've loved. He does like movies, all the time, that I can't stand. So be it. I remember reading a fairly positive review he wrote once of another forgotten indy - James Mangold's 1996 debut feature Heavy. Of the sad lives depicted in it, he wrote, as his final sentence that we can be thankful - "We're not like that, are we?" What a question for movies to make us ask. I don't have people to discuss my thoughts of these movies with - most haven't seen most of these movies, and certainly no one saw them like I did then. Ebert's archive has been my friend to discuss every movie thought I've had.

And why not, since they've been his forum too. I love it when he gets snooty and mocking and mean (saying of the awful Evening last year that it follows a woman "who is dying in a Martha Stewart bedroom. She takes a very long time to die"), and I like it more when his reviews of good movies aren't full of superlatives and meaningless platitudes - they're dissections of what living and life means. His Great Movies column does that every week so successfully, it wound up in two published volumes. He once discussed Krzyzstof Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique, a story of a woman who glances herself, for a fraction, on a bus, heading to a different reality - in the beautiful essay, he writes of being in a cafe in Paris, "I wouldn't be suprised to have missed myself by so little."

Across the country, film critics are disappearing, or consolidating, and while they probably won't go away, and piece after piece laments the loss of banal, glib asides, I hope we get a chance to say to our leading critic while he is still with us what he has meant to us - or, myself, to me. When he goes, we'll lose the greatest resource we have not simply on the movies that are available to be seen, but what it means to have seen them.

Great Albums: Jacksonville City Nights

Last year, I wrote a long long essay about Joni Mitchell's Hejira, an album that came to mean quite a bit to me. Since then, an album in the same vein would be Ryan Adams & The Cardinals' Jacksonville City Nights. I wrote a very long essay to accompany the thoughts this record stirs up in me, and maybe it reveals something of my personality that this is an album that's come to be so meaningful in my life. So, read on if you're interested.

Great Albums: Jacksonville City Nights

Ryan Adams is about something, I can say it with some certainty. Jacksonville City Nights is not Adams’s most well-regarded album – critically, that would likely be Gold or Cold Roses, although, none of his albums have ever received universal or overwhelming support. Jacksonville City Nights is not an album that represents Adams’ typical sound, sounding, as it does, like a night in a local country bar. Jacksonville City Nights is not Adam’s best selling record – Gold or Cold again take that title (Gold has sold 384,000 copies, Cold 185,000. Jacksonville has sold 100,000). It is not even the first or last album Adams released in 2005 – coming amidst an insane period of productivity for Adams and his new backing band, The Cardinals, it is in the middle of Cold Roses and 29, his three releases that year. Most people prefer Cold Roses of that bunch, the alt-country double album that really has become the Adams standard, a representation and “branding” of what his sound typically is.

But Jacksonville City Nights is truly my favorite Ryan Adams record, and I do think it is, in its way, his best and most complete single album experience. And I don’t mean that simply because its sound is such an aberration for Adams, I think that if sonically it is a different record, it is the most representative of the type of music he made – 3-4 minute guitar driven songs about angst, bad relationships, drinking, exhaustion, and self-destruction. Classic songs with a kick of addiction and recovery. Once in 2003, Adams made a loud, hard rock record called Rock N Roll, and on its final number, “The Drug’s Not Working,” we heard Adams at his most uncouth, shooting up in the back of a car, riding around the streets of LA in full desperation. Jacksonville City Nights is about that same desperation, but this time, he’s in the sticks. He’s just as drunk, mind you, and in truth the rest of his mentality is about the same, but he’s somewhere else entirely. But where Rock N Roll represented its self-destruction in loud guitars and screaming melodies, Jacksonville buries its self-destruction in fiddles and pianos. I loved Rock N Roll because it indulged Adams’s junkie self destruction. But Jacksonville is better, because it makes it beautiful.

Start with “A Kiss Before I go.” A quick “one, two” count, a twangy guitar and organ, and a piano that sounds like it’s made of broken glass. “The engine turns on a dime/ but I ain’t goin’ nowhere tonight/ I ain’t been goin’ nowhere for quite a while.” The melody is jaunty and backwoods, sweet even, but it’s a song about meaninglessness. “Can’t tell the truth in a house of lies/ Can’t see tomorrow with yesterday’s eyes,” sings Adams, who fondly remembers his nights “at the bar with every girl all loaded like freights,” just can’t do it anymore – one more drink and a kiss before he goes, moves on away from Jacksonville and begins to do something with his life.

Such searching is not unusual for any musician, but coming as it does with its lively melody and country production, it becomes an evocation of a rambling spirit, and of the persona Adams cultivates on this record – a worn out rambler dealing with the issues of life, death, love, and loneliness; it’s a persona of desolation and wanderlust, confusion and uncertainty. “A Kiss Before I Go” is the persona ready to wander, and “The End,” the true thesis-piece for the record, is the persona unable to. Even if he were to leave, “The End” seems to say, our main character is haunted by a world he inhabits regardless of where he is. “In the cotton fields out by the house where I was born/ the leaves burn like effigies of my kin.” This is Jacksonville, Adams’ home town. “Oh Jacksonville, How you burn in my soul, how you hold my dreams captive,” he sings – and it’s true. This Jacksonville is the center of Adams’ mentality, on and off this record. If Rock N Roll explored the destructive end of Adams’ demons, Jacksonville City Nights takes them from the beginning and feels their origins out – but they’re just as desperate here. In one comic moment on “The End,” Adams’ sings of a drunk morning at a diner, “The waitress tries to give me change/ and I say ‘nah it’s cool, just keep it,’” but he doesn’t just say it, he gives that line the exact dismissive slur he pictures it representing.

That moment adds to the centerpiece feeling of “The End” – a sublimation and glorifying of Adams’ addictions, Adams drops the countried-up guitar of his private thoughts and sings, instead, what must be the perception for everyone else – this dude is wasted. And when that chorus comes amidst wistful fiddle, organ, and piano, Adams seems to be singing in a tired, worn out cadence he doesn’t normally sing in – he warbles with perfect backwoods isolation. The nostalgia and the desperation are actually a great combo, however – they seem incomplete without each other, and together they’re a type of fulfillment. If “A Kiss Before I Go” is the persona of Adams wanting to break free of the meaninglessness of his life, “The End” is the truth that he can’t shake it off, that he’s stuck with it, his heart going back “suffocating on the pines/ in Jacksonville.” The song is, despite its melody then, quite miserable – a song of resolute surrender. “The End!” he screams and moans; he is stuck.

This sound must be the sound of Adams’s thoughts. He never made a record of the sound he has here. That piano in particular is such a jolt – I recall none on record that sound like it, its high country pitch so perfectly sounding like the back of a wooden country hall stage. “Dear John,” the record’s sad fourth track is perhaps the most striking and organic of each on the record. Norah Jones co-wrote the song with Adams and sings harmonies with him, but strangely, sings the lower register, with Adams’ warble taking the high part – her voice is a form of serene stability, while his voice is the loose cannon. In the recording as the piano picks up, you can hear chords moving around, or people, or the clicks of something you’re catching in action. The two together aren’t necessarily even creating a harmony, it seems something else, two voices in tandem singing of loss and missing, “I got a nice bed to sleep on/ and a chest of drawers where I keep these dreams of yours.”

But when the chorus comes, a new type of harmony takes hold, “You’re always mine to keep when you’re gone,” the two sing, but joined in full by the remainder of The Cardinals – J.P Bowerstock on electric guitars, Catherine Popper on bass and vocals, Brad Pemberton on drums, and Jon Graboff on pedal steel – it’s not simply harmony, it’s an idea that expands in beauty and seriousness. What a moment and a thrill it is – if “Dear John” is a song of missing someone, it is the organic combination of its instruments and the strangeness of the vocals that turn into longing, an idea that skulks like a ghost. You want to sing along with it, but you’re not entirely sure how – the music causes such a swell in your emotions you can’t put words to it. I picture myself sometimes listening to “Dear John” in the back of an empty hall, closing my eyes, crying a little.

Jones is a beautiful woman, but she’s most beautiful when she sings, and the two voices together create something I can’t put a name on, but it is, at its heart, the reason Jacksonville City Nights means so much to me. When I first bought Jacksonville, I was just in the beginning of my fandom of Adams. I bought Cold Roses and, though I initially resisted it – the album seemed full of great songs but lacked cohesion and vision – I had fallen in love and took a chance on Jacksonville for no particular reason. I thought of Adams as an artist with one great song in him after another, but wondered about his ability to create a sustainable vision on a complete album.

The more I listen to him, however, the more I think that is beside the point. For Adams, the song is the vision, the putting of every inane thought into melody, the expanding of words into ideas. Jacksonville seemed like a lunatic experiment of a record, but it’s “Dear John” that truly convinced me it was on to something, creating a sound that rises from the ground, an organic experience that leapt far beyond a song-to-song collection; this was a concept, a feeling, a character set to music. Whatever I thought of Adams before Jacksonville was not what I thought of him afterwards. Jacksonville was not a perfect record, and neither is Cold Roses or Easy Tiger or Rock N Roll or any other album of his I love. Adams is not a perfect man. These albums, different as each is, are him, are his thoughts and dreams and fears and loves, which is what music is, after all.

You reel from “Dear John” for a while, so it’s nice that it is surrounded by two neat, enjoyable country songs. “Hard Way to Fall and “The Hardest Part” are love-is-hard numbers whose desperate element is at its most fun. To me, “Dear John” is so strong that it creates the mood that retains the middle of the record – “The Hardest Part” and “Games” are lesser songs, certainly, but they are also sweet and, frankly, easier – as much emotion as “Dear John” packs, I would not be able to handle it if each song matched its intensity.

When “Silver Bullets,” the album’s 7th track, begins, I always feel like I’m in a car driving in the gloom. The piano is low and plaintive and sad, and the lyrics are Adams’ saddest too – “Go and get the gun, ‘cause it’s only getting worse,” he sings. How can any song be this sad, I have to wonder? “I can’t make you love me, if you won’t let me stay,” he sings, and the violins kick in. All desperation is sadness on some level. Sometimes on Jacksonville, as in “The End,” it’s sublimated, or, like on “The Hardest Part,” it’s joyous. “Silver Bullets” is what it truly must be – desperation that is a sadness. Later in the year, on the uneven but fascinating 29, Adams did a song called “The Sadness,” which sounds like a bullfight set to music of Adams fending off an impending, dooming depression. “Silver Bullets” is the gray extreme of that feeling. If you’ve ever seen a drunk man having a bad night and seen his eyes, they seem set to the tune of “Silver Bullets.” In other words – he was bound to get to a song this upsetting eventually.

If Jacksonville City Nights were a record or tape, “Silver Bullets” would end side one. As it is on CD, “Peaceful Valley” simply opens up a new direction for the record. “Lord take me on to the peaceful valley,” Adams seems to be pleading. “All my life I’ve longed for forgiveness/ but I can’t ever seem to get enough,” he sings. “Peaceful Valley” is a song made up of high-pitched fiddles, but it’s also surrounded by a vocal that’s just as high pitched. So central on the record, “Peaceful Valley” is a song of confusion, a song that pleads for the end of times, a song of profound desperation and anguish. Each chorus comes to the same, terrified conclusion: “All my life/ I’ve been rocked into the darkness/ with a gun to my head/ trying to find a peaceful song/ to sing when everything goes wrong/ till the peaceful valley calls me home.” Those words are a little frightening, and they’re sung as the music drops away, except for a simple country guitar that trails behind them, and the words “calls me home” are sung in Adams’ highest pitch possible, rising like the valley he expects to be taken to.

“Peaceful Valley” is Adams laying down the gauntlet, a drunken man stumbling and yelling at his God to end his confusion and longing. It is, I think, the song that defines Adams most thoroughly. His early records, Hearbreaker, Gold, and Love Is Hell are good, rather prosaic records of alt-country charm. There are great moments of pop and of sadness on those records – Adams is a terrific craftsman of songs – but my favorite from all three of those records is still Heartbreaker’s “Come Pick Me Up,” which lets its desperation loose. Adams freed himself some after Love Is Hell by making Rock N Roll, but he must have done it just because he had no other choice – at the time a raging drug addict and alcoholic, making songs like “Note To Self: Don’t Die” or “Wish You Were Here” (its chorus: “I’m totally fucked up/ wish you were here”) made exact, defiant sense. He gave himself a rebirth with the cardinals in 2005, and Cold Roses has, I think, Adams’ most perfect songs, with extraordinary alt-country numbers like “Let It Ride,” “Cold Roses,” and “Life Is Beautiful.”

But each has its element of desperation, which is what Jacksonville is about, and especially “Peaceful Valley.” I saw Adams, now 2 years sober, in January 2008, and “Peaceful Valley” was the second song of his set. The Cardinals now play it without fiddles, with loud, scorching guitars taking over their part, and the song is an invigorating live number. There is not even the acoustic country chord that follows the “Trying to find a peaceful song” lines around – they drop the guitars entirely and sing the song in four part harmony. What a thrill and what a confrontation – it puts the song’s desperation into an antagonistic perspective. It makes sense to me Adams would sing it early on in his sets too – this is, simply, who he is. Trying to find a peaceful song. To sing when everything goes wrong.

Till the peaceful valley calls him home.

You don’t quite know that the song has hit you, but the second side of Jacksonville City Nights takes a lot of time recovering. “September” is a nice, soft song that is not the album’s most memorable. “My Heart Is Broken” sounds just like the old country bar sing-along you never you knew, a steel guitar-led song of pure country heartbreak. “Trains” turns its guitars into the sound of train tracks running out a window, and is fun and dashing, and gets stuck in your head with no effort. “Pa,” which follows it, is more classic country – by that I mean it’s a tale of a dying dad, and the passing of a morbid legacy. It fits Adams’ attempt perfectly, but it’s also not exactly the record’s most memorable moment.

That true thread of the record is picked up again so memorably in its final two numbers, “Withering Heights” and “Don’t Fail Me Now.” “Withering Heights,” like “Dear John,” is a song whose piano and harmony seem to rise and elevate. This is a song that the record works up to, an actual quest for a solution to the desperation – “I’m a little shaky, gotta learn how to fight,” Adams sings. Adams and the Cardinals join together to sing, “It’s hard to see the ground from the withering heights,” and the four-part harmony that creates those words represents a sort of conclusion of the record’s ideas – the harmony is beautiful, it is expressive, and it is, in its way, conclusive and understanding. The “Withering Heights” he sings is shorthand for Adams’ longing and sadness, the drunken, elevated loneliness from which he sits with his dreams held captive.

Perhaps that is the feeling I identify with the most, a spot on which longing to be understood and set free keeps a person even more incarcerated in longing and misunderstanding. Jacksonville is the place Adams cannot escape from, and that captivity has created his personality – it has saddened him, sent him for the gun, and also made him who he is. “Withering Heights” is slow, full of lamenting guitar, and tough admissions, but it is, undeniably, hopeful and beautiful. It accepts his sadness for what it is. And that is, I think, what distinguishes Jacksonville City Nights from Adams’ other records. Though all of them are good, they don’t seem like a journey, and they are defiantly inconclusive. “Withering Heights” is a song you feel like you earn, a song that makes you happy for who you are, even though it is characteristically downbeat.

And lest you think Adams would capitalize on a small sense of hope, he closes his record with “Don’t Fail Me Now,” and begins the song with a dramatic piano entrance of foreboding and follows it with an equally foreboding string section. He drops the melody to a spare guitar and sings, “Oh gal oh gal with your darkened eyes/ kindle the woods and prepare the lies/ and don’t fail me now.” “Don’t Fail Me Now” have to be four of the least hopeful words in the English language. If “A Kiss Before I Go” starts Adams’ idea to be rambling and free, “Don’t Fail Me Now” finds desperation fueling his journeying, sustaining him, leaving him with a misery that keeps him going – a thing that is terrible, sure, but one he counts on that he cannot imagine being abandoned by. That “Don’t Fail Me Now” is in small, two-part harmony, and punctuated by a percussive three note bit on the piano, and segues into simply singing “You don’t do me right” repeatedly and then, “Why you do me wrong when the rope gets tight.” It’s a song of a cowboy facing a long night ahead of him and pondering the simplest of questions – why you do me wrong. Adams cultivates a desperate rambling persona so successfully on Jacksonville, that “Don’t Fail Me Now” is the exact right bit of desperation to leave him, lonely and stranded, somewhere out where the ropes are tight. Rock N Roll ended with Adams’ drugs failing him. They fail him here too, and he’s left alone and cold. Adams must have needed to get that out and recorded – the feeling that we’ll all be left in the cold trying to sing a peaceful song. Just as much, we need to hear it.

The new world

To commemorate X's 13-31 tour this past Sunday, I decided to get into character. X, the formative Los Angeles punk band, whose four records released from 1980-1984, helped establish the Los Angeles punk scene, was coming to town to commemorate their 31st anniversary... I think. Or maybe they're doing 31 dates. In any case, I don't know what the 13 refers to, or the 31, but I was happy to see one of my favorite bands returning to their touring glory.

But I specifically needed to be in character. My friends created a mohawk - first with mouse, then with hairspray, then with hairspray sprayed on my head as I held it against a bathroom counter - and I found an old shirt (a 1998 gift from an especially cranky friend that read "The Boat Sank - Get Over It) stained with my blood, no less, that I ripped up with the aid of a butcher knife. I was not exactly a participant in the "punk scene," certainly not in the early 80's, nor in whatever weird manifestation the punks of my childhood were - wallet chains, Vans shoes, New Found Glory poster. None of that.

For once, though, I wanted to experience a punk show from the inside. A wonderful photographer, Nikki S. Lee, used to develop project after project where she "became" one of her subjects - a lesbian, a stripper, a housewife, a tourist - and give others her camera to capture her image. In the most interesting of all of those, she too became a punk, complete with chains and dyed hair, and leather jackes and fishnet stockings. I, on the other hand, got some hairspray and ripped up a t-shirt, but it's still a rather therapeutic transformation.

Anyway, apparently only I felt this way, because at the X show the audience - probably representative of X fans at large - was mostly middle-aged, certainly not buttoned down, but not exactly dirty or angry either. I could not have found a bottle to throw or glass to break, and in any case that sort of thing would only get me kicked out. There were some leather jackets, I think, but besides me, on this Sunday night at the Showbox, I saw one mohawk bouncing up and down in front of the stage.

Anyway, I was not the point, although I enjoyed myself. X took the stage right at 10 as planned, Exene Cervenka wearing a black dress with a french collar and an apron, John Doe looking about how he has for 30 years - which is to say, like your cool uncle in a leather coat who never seemed to ever get a job. Billy Zoom, the guitarist, looks the part of a man in his 50's, even though his guitar was bright silver and covered in sequins. At times you'd catch Zoom lip synching their 30-year-old lyrics along with Doe while grinning in a way that reminded me of "The Colonel" in Boogie Nights' grin as he asks Dirk Diggler to "see that great big cock" he heard so much about. They began by singing "The Once Over Twice," the first song from 1981's Wild Gift, and it sounded, lo and behold, about as it did in 1981.

But perhaps some background on X is required. I found myself at a bar sometime later talking about the time I heard "Los Angeles" for the first time in 1999, and that, being 8 years ago now, "Los Angeles" recalled a different era for me - a dinge and dirt that I must have thought at the time was an undercurrent of all of suburban society. It was, however, first released in 1980, and who knows how long before that it was written. To me, X has great nostalgia, but it's certainly a different nostalgia then is intended.

But that is my background, not X's. X released Los Angeles in 1980, Wild Gift in 1981, Under The Big Black Sun in 1983, and More Fun In The New World in 1984. They also released two more records in the 1980's - Ain't Love Grand and See How We Are, but the band had "a new creative direction," which was to say they tried to be famous and made a couple of half-baked pop records. Although one song from Ain't Love Grand showed up on their set list Sunday night, they almost never perform songs from those records, even though a couple ("Burning House of Love" "4th of July" "You") are somewhat interesting. Even less heard than those terrible records was 1993's Hey Zeus! which sounds, in its way, like grunge - so though it may have been considered a "return to form" at the time, the record was still an example of X trying to fit in with contemporary pop.

And contemporary was never what X did well. I've had to explain to many people over the years who they were, some turned off by all music termed "punk," some excited by it, but virtually all are surprised to hear "punk" and then hear X. If I could describe X as anything, I would say they are indeed punk, but also rockabilly, and a little spoken word rolled into one. Billy Zoom clearly grew up on Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, and his guitar is pure rockabilly. Mix him with John Doe, who, as his name might imply, has a fasciation with gutter culture, the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles, and brings all of the band's most direct vitriolic, dirty lyrics, writing songs like "Johnny Hit and Run Pauline," "Sex and Dying In High Society," and "Adult Books." Then add in Exene Cervenka, the lead singer, once dubiously called by VH1 "Rock's first antiheroine," who has a background as a beat poet, and a terrible singing voice, but the right type of terrible singing voice. She and Doe create something beyond harmony when they sing together - a sort of fusion of criticism and anger, their voices are simply how their most poetic and interesting thoughts take hold. And they truly take hold.

Or, at least did between 1980 and 1984. It interests me that in X's terrific set Sunday night of, say, 15-20 songs, all but one were from those four great albums (the other, "My Goodness" from Ain't Love Grand, was, without a doubt, the show's only lagging point). And for the most part, they sound just like they did then. It's interesting - Cervenka, whose voice gains so much credibility on being off-key, irreverent, the voice of the gutter, but it hasn't changed at all. On "We're Having Much More Fun," the set's second song, has a climax every chorus of "We'll crawl through your back yard/ and whack your yappin' dog," and the emphasis on that lyric - hitting the long a's of "whack" and "yappin" with Doe and Cervenka in unison, did not change at all. Me and my mohawk sang along unabashed. And why wouldn't it? X knew, despite being not quite punk and not quite not-punk, how to write a perfect rock song. I'd imagined for years a sea of fans bobbing their heads and chanting in great unison the chorus of "The New World," in my mind the most perfect of all of their songs - "It was better before before they voted for what's-his-name! This is s'posed to be the new world!"

X was once considered, in those early 80's heydays, one of the great live acts of all times, and I wondered if that could be true as the songs sounded so close to the recordings still, after 24 years. What struck me was that their song order was just right - the slash-and-burn gutter punk of "We're Desperate" eminating out of the slightly calmer "In This House That I Call Home," and turning into the more churning and pointed "The Hungry Wolf." I wished I had a pad and paper to write down the smart lineup of all of these great songs.

I also wished I had a pad and paper to write down what I remembered of all of the great l yrics that never quite registered until they were played too loud and in my ear. Since Cervenka is a beat poet at heart, and since Doe is, perhaps, a social critic at heart, their lyrics are always straining on social poetry, and I used to think that though certain song lyrics were unimpeachably perfect (say, "The World's A Mess, It's In My Kiss," the closest X came to a gutter-punk-poet anthem), for the most part great fragments searched for a greater whole. I don't think I agree with that anymore - the lyrics take ideas and let their beat notions fly with the same skill and abandon as the great guitar work, truly. Under The Big Black Sun, an album focused on mortality surrounding the shock death of Cervenka's sister Mary in a car accident shortly after her (already unhappy) marriage, to me maintains the best words and ideas the band came up with - the combination of "Come Back To Me," a sweet, saxophone laiden song of loss, into the beat anger of "Under The Big Black Sun" (the telltale lyric: "Everybody asks me how I'm doing/ I'm doing everything alone") was always central to that record, but they didn't perform those two songs on Sunday. They did perform the songs on either end of them, and it was the haunted fragments that stuck out to me - in "Riding With Mary" : "The next time you see a statue of Mary, remember my sister was in her car;" in "Because I Do" : "My nights are numbered/ they don't count for nothing." In fact, "Because I Do," about a bride, a fool, and a ghost in one, seems to me, even more than before, the most haunted, interesting song on that record - to say nothing of it being the loudest. As X still has no fans that I've ever met (scratch that, I have one friend in Atlanta who's a fan), maybe it takes 30 years of identical tours to get the songs truly heard in the way they deserve - for me, 9 years after my first exposure to the band, seeing them live is like hearing them the first time.

Remembering the dead... actually

"Veteran British" director Anthony Minghella died this week - it's been in the news. He has an Oscar, for 1996's The English Patient, perhaps the most poorly remembered winner of 9 Oscars ever, and he directed a few more successful movies on top of that, as well as a couple of duds, and a couple of movies that were supposed to recapture his prestige and didn't.

Scratch that, according to Entertainment Weekly, he leaves a "brief but vibrant" legacy to movies. He "restored prestige adaptations" to Hollywood making megaplexes "safe for adults" once again. He "made Jude Law a star" and "displayed and epic scope and humanity."

Perhaps these things are true, but I think it's actually tough to tell what's true anymore of celebrities after their death, especially in the movie industry. Before Minghella's death due to a brain hemmorhage after cancer operations, there was Heath Ledger's infamous "old story" of exhaustion and pills, and Brad Renfro's older story of heroin addiction in the previous two months alone. A lot of deaths lately, and a lot of selective memories too.

Let me say simply that I think it helps no one to remember these screen personalities as they weren't, or to overemphasize their accomplishments. At Brad Renfro's chilling, too-cautionary death, "I remember seeing him in The Client..." craziness abounded. Renfro had perhaps given foreshadowing to his work in a creepy performance as a stilted, angry adolescent in Sleepers, where he plays a young man acting out vengeance for sexual abuse. Or perhaps he had given foreshadow with his, frankly, terrific performance in Apt Pupil in 1998, where he played... a stilted, angry adolescent, obsessed with a Nazi.

But really, that was it. I cannot recall any performances Renfro gave other than those three, and in speculating on the life of a young celebrity, I have to assume that the anxiety of figuring out the direction of your life ten years after your last well known movie must be incredibly difficult and awful. I can't understand how anyone manages to retain a shred of honest self expression in a land as nitpicky, ruthless, and heavily under scrutiny as Hollywood is. So when people talked about Renfro - and many didn't - it didn't help to discuss his loss as a personal one, as if to exempt us from that culture and create us in a culture that is nurturing of "art and artistic expression." It would be nice if we were, of course, but we are not.

So let us talk about these men as they were. Heath Ledger's death stung more because his successes were so recent, and, I suspect, will be greater after The Dark Knight's release in May, in which his intense method identification with The Joker is rumored to have sent him into therapy. Heath Ledger was a former teen idol with an edge, who, desperate to fully shake off his junky pop movie past, took a daring role as a gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain, gave a performance of such precise identification that he made that movie truly work as a recognizable, human entity. Beyond that?

Beyond that, let's not say that Ledger was a great hope of indy acting - he wasn't. He was excellent in a small part in my favorite movie of last year, I'm Not There, but his work did not, as many have said since his death, "steal the movie." Daniel Day Lewis, upon accepting his Golden Globe for There Will Be Blood, spoke of remembering the "power" of Ledger's work in Monster's Ball - I am convinced that there is no way any human being could believe this. Not everyone who remembers the movie (which is, honestly, not many) agrees, but it's a terrible movie, and ask the fans of it what they'd remember, the answer would be Halle Berry, possibly Billy Bob Thornton, not Heath Ledger, although it was certainly a daring choice for him to take a part in the movie. Was he good in the part? I have to believe so, he was talented, but I don't honestly remember.

Beyond that? Ludicrously, in tributes, critics begin to fawn over the junk of his past - Four Feathers! The Brothers Grimm! A Knight's Tale! Huh? When people begin remembering the "sensitivity" he brought as Mel Gibson's son in The Patriot, I think we need to make sure we're talking about the right person here. Ledger was a gifted actor for whom existing in Hollywood probably hastened the causes of his death. He was extraordinary in Brokeback Mountain. Let's not make things up on top of that.

Now the tributes for Anthony Minghella have begun posting left and right, and I'm glad for that, as I hope that any artist is remembered fondly in his death - but I don't wish people to be remembered incorrectly. In discussing Minghella, there is an assumption based on the "epic sweep" and 9 Oscars garnered by The English Patient that everyone remembers the thing fondly, when I would defy you to find five people who remember the movie fondly. That goes double for Cold Mountain, a movie done in by marketing and hype - remember the foofaraw about its (deserved) exclusion from the 2002 Best Picture category at the Oscars? That happened, despite its "epic sweep" and 7 Golden Globe nominations received, presumably, by Harvey Weinstein going door to door with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

I'm happy that fans of Minghella's 1990 romantic comedy Truly, Madly, Deeply now feel apt to come forward with their fondness for that movie, although I've never seen it - at least that, to me, seems a genuine bit of appreciation. But looking over the list of his 6 movies, something strikes me to come forward as the sole fan of The English Patient back in 1997, and the only person I know who continues to defend the movie to this day.

I saw The English Patient in January of 1997, and remember it so fondly as the first movie that made me cry in a theater. I fell in love with its tragedy and hope, and applauded loudly alone when it won Best Picture that year, presumably by Harvey Weinstein promising roles to everyone in the MPAA, despite remarkably low ratings (no one tuned in to "watch The English Patient win everything" even though they did tune in in record numbers a year later to see Titanic do the same thing), and the hipster fondness for Fargo, a fellow nominee. I've seen The English Patient twice since then, and haven't liked it as much, though it is still powerful. The sensuousness of its images is still stunning, as are the extraordinary performances by Kristin Scott Thomas and Juliette Binoche (who won a deserved suprise Oscar that year for Best Supporting Actress). The power of its tragic scope, though, is not recreated on subsequent views.

In retrospect, the movie of his I like the most - né, the only other movie of his I like - would be The Talented Mr. Ripley, which, again, was a disappointment at the time - a "prestige adaptation" that was too "dark" and "ambiguous." People expecting a star-studded thriller with Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow instead got a hermetic character study of homoerotic sexual panic and of the ways that social expectations can be all powering. To my shock, I loved the character-based "prestige" of the movie - and the extraordinary performances of which, it's true, helped establish Jude Law as a credible star. The movie is great, and with expectations gone of what's inside, it gets better on repeated viewings.

Minghella was a talent of "epic sweep" who kept his biggest pretentions in check - he was, I think, rather thorough in his large visions, but not showy, despite the beautiful cinematography in all of his movies. Cold Mountain was a crock, as was Breaking and Entering, his fizzled 2003 original thriller with Law and Binoche. That's ok - directors twice his strife have made far more than two crocks, and, whatever can be said about Weinstein's marketing techniques, Minghella's skill sure convinced a lot of people to vote for him for that Oscar in 1996. I'm afraid his namelessness though makes writers think it's ok to exaggerate his accomplishments in the hope that it creates a better story - although, it is in vain mostly, a week from now, people still won't know who he is. The interesting story is this - Minghella directed a few successful movies, a couple were great and allowed us to appreciate something in human behavior and grand storytelling. He made Kristin Scott Thomas an actress who I'll always admire due to one heartbreaking performance, and made me aware of the beauty and sincerity of Juliette Binoche's face, as well as maximized the charisma of Jude Law. That, to me, is a plenty fitting tribute.

Nitpicking The Wire Nitpickers

I’m writing this at an interesting time, for which a week and a half form now might make my writing different. Perhaps at that time I’ll feel compelled to write again, perhaps not.

At this time, I have caught the second to last episode of The Wire before it airs by viewing it on HBO On Demand, a strange option HBO has given Wire fans all season – allowing them to access episodes a week in advance. The show airs its final episode on Sunday, March 9th, and it comes at the end of a shortened, 10 episode season focusing its usual hermetic scrutiny on the media – this season has taken us inside the walls of The Baltimore Sun and found us a morally wise, rather idyllic editor named Gus, played dutifully by Clark Johnson, to be our entrance into another season of an institution in cynical decline in the wake of modern capitalism.

It’s interesting to think of writing that last line – “another season of an institution in cynical decline in the wake of modern capitalism” – considering what really is prompting me to write this. The Wire has to be the most popular series I’ve ever witnessed amongst critical press. Salon.com, Slate, The New York Times, and Entertainment Weekly each have weekly online recaps and opinions on every episode, some of them including debate amongst its entire editorial staff. And though each vary in the amount they fawn over the greatness of every moment, and nitpick over every line they dislike.

They’ve written a great deal about the Sun plotline, certainly the least compelling of the show’s seasonal focuses. Each season chronicles a different institution in decline – the police force, the port, politics, the schools, and now the media – all while continuing to tell the stories they started even 5 years ago, and while continuing to comment on its main storyline, about the drug trade in Baltimore, and chronicling both sides of how police track down the thugs, and how the thugs “change up” in response.

But again, it’s not necessarily The Wire I want to discuss as much as what critics do to maintain relevance, or feign relevance, as the case may be. I say this as a critic myself, or one who has always seen myself as one, when I’m working as a critic or not. A recent list of Salon’s complaints about this season of The Wire: Omar seems “too superhero-like,” McNulty has re-descended into alcoholism too quickly, the Sun plot is "2 dimensional" and is too quick to label the editors as scumbags, the Sun plotline is 2 dimensional and too quick to label editors as saints. Scott Templeton, the scheming reporter played by Tom McCarthy once "set out on a reporting trip to the underpasses of Baltimore wearing a Kansas City Star t-shirt." Every time a second feels “unrealistic,” the writers of Salon mail three emails to each other, debating the second that is too “unrealistic.” Every time they see a plot coming, they complain. Every time they don’t see a plot coming, they complain.

When even your shirt choices are incorrect, it must be hard to win in that environment, eh? A similar phenomenon took over The Sopranos amongst critics in its final seasons. The first half of season 6, while unpopular by many, remains some of my favorite work of The Sopranos, anxious and confounded about life and meaning in every brave second. Still, critics balked, and balked loudly, every single goddamn episode – Vito plotline moving too slowly? The blogs are set afire! Carmela’s concern for Adriana seems too little too late? Ooh, there’s another topic to “argue.”

The arguments made about The Wire and The Sopranos on episode recaps, however, aren’t just nitpicky – they’re not very much fun. And it’s because these shows drew us in by their astonishing seasonal arcs, marveled at the way they developed characters and set off bombs when we least expected. There is no doubt in my mind these are the two greatest drama series ever to air, and now, writers who agree with that sentiment have found themselves in the position of having to predict their unpredictability, to comment on their perfection by saying things other than “they’re perfect!” And most importantly, the writers of the columns have had to make themselves above the plotlines and above the show in order to make themselves have something to say.

Now, I can’t begrudge people for wanting to move the conversations that fans of the shows are having online, but in all the whining and nitpicking, writers are losing their ability to truly submit to them. Later, one writer, in discussing The Sopranos, made the baffling suggestion that “We expect more of The Wire because the other seasons were so great, whereas when The Sopranos limped into its final season after two terrible seasons, we were truly surprised at everything good that happened.”

That’s a strange case of selective memory even if you agree that Season 6’s first part was not great (and I do not agree with that). Season 5 was a hit by everyone’s standard, won the Emmy for Best Drama series, and won back all of its fans lost amidst the first Sopranos backlash that developed in season 4.

Much the same, I never quite got the fawning the world did over The Wire’s 4th season, the one taking place in the schools. Now, my work is with kids with emotional disruptions and inner city backgrounds, so maybe I just didn’t find the work that surprising – it was very accurate, and very good, but it did not show me something I didn’t really know, while season 2’s great diversion into the port did. Season 4 is great, don’t get me wrong, but it is the season of The Wire I’d least likely watch again – too much procedural ho-hum about budgeting in the mayor’s office and having to take math tests slowed it down immensely.

But here I am again, being above the plotlines, and that, I think, is the problem. These columns that dissect episodes of shows like The Wire and The Sopranos - well, truly only those two shows - cannot continue to treat shows of that magnitude as normal television. Even Buffy The Vampire Slayer, that extraordinary example of network ingenuity, could be treated as normal television. The Sopranos and The Wire exist on their own canvas of time, establishing plotlines over seasons and years, so commentary and judgment on individual episodes as they come out is a bit like yelling at a painter midway through the painting. The thing only works if you surrender yourself to the whole product.

Worse than that, however, is too many assumptions about what it is to be a TV show, or to be these TV shows. This is what I mean by surrending yourself to the whole product - on a network show like Lost, fans can complain about plotlines beginning in October loudly enough that the writers, worried about the loss of fans, can adjust and jettison those plotlines by March (as evident when exactly this happened, famously, in Lost's third season). The Wire and The Sopranos know exactly what they want to accomplish in their seasons. And, they do this by intentionally producing the emotions that the plotlines get criticized for - Slate complained rather loudly that McNulty (Dominic West) seemed to re-emerge too suddenly as an alcoholic this year, and that his fabricated serial killer plotline was frustrating. Yes and yes - McNulty is so self-destructive his tendencies can re-emerge quickly, like many self destructive people; how frustrating! He invented a serial killer, which the audience felt resistance to accepting - much like Bunk (Wendell Pierce) did on screen. Worse - it worked! Imagine our frustration about how easily one can abuse the system. As for Scott Templeton's irrational clothing choices for wandering the streets of Baltimore - yes! True! What an irrational character!

Much in the way The Sopranos "too philosophical" season 6 was too philosophical. Yes, by posing the question "Who am I, where am I going?" famously in "Join The Club" (the love-it-or-hate-it center of that season, for its 40 minute hallucination), the show challenged you to ask that question of its characters - many refused. That's fine enough, but let's not criticize the show for meeting its own intentions.

The problem is that when writers take to whining about shows like The Sopranos and The Wire, they have to attack the details because the whole is too good and established to truly criticize. But in the nitpicking, columns about these subjects only reveal how irrelevant they are. Writing about movies and music that astonishes you can be relevant (Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" column comes to mind, as does Lisa Schwarzbaum's enraptured own Sopranos season 6 episode reviews), but only when a writer makes him/herself deferential to the subject, and approaches his/her experience honestly. Nitpicking the shows is dishonest in the extreme - a lie to maintain relevance, which is exactly what the Sun plotline in this season of The Wire chronicles. No wonder the Slate writers don't like it.

Oscar Picks and Movie Loves

Hey, the Oscars are coming! We don't know who really won in the Writer's Strike, but we know that any attempt to derail the Oscars has come out unsuccessful. Which is good, because the people that are clear to win every category and have been since the nominations were announced are probably pretty excited to show up.

That said, there are some great nominees in the bunch, and great movies not nominated that are also around. I haven't seen them all, and maybe I'll update this later this week before the show - Eastern Promises this week, but maybe I won't, and I did catch Michael Clayton in the midst of writing this, which, honestly, changes my entire perspective of this years awards for the better. In any case, it won't keep me from talking about all the great work Hollywood did this year to prove - successfully - that it was relevant this year.

Best Actor:

• Will Win: Daniel Day Lewis There Will Be Blood



• My Preference: Johnny Depp Sweeney Todd

Daniel Day Lewis was bound to win an Oscar even before his rather insane bowling-pin climax in There Will Be Blood, which this year proved to be the arthouse equivalent of Jack Nicholson in The Shining or Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs. Say what you will about it being over the top: it is. But it's also unforgettable.

That said, I just liked Johnny Depp better. Johnny sang, Johnny stared with purpose, and damn it, I will gladly sit through the gleefully bleak Sweeney Todd again before the puzzling, ass-busting artfest of There Will Be Blood any day. I know I'm not supposed to say that in this year when There Will Be Blood earns comparisons to Kubrick (some of them justified), but it's how I feel.

I confess I'm also less enamored with George Clooney and Viggo Mortensen than I'm supposed to be. Clooney gives undoubtedly his best performance in Michael Clayton because so much fear and rage sneak into his slick, salesman eyes, but the same-ol smooth George Clooney junk is the movies only weak point (and it's barely weak). Tommy Lee Jones was also extraordinary in In The Valley of Elah, a surprise nomination in a so-so film (not Jones's fault. Possibly Charlize Theron's fault. More likely Paul Haggis's fault.). But he's nothing next to Johnny. There are no fewer than four performances I like more than all the nominated performances here this year - Steve Carrell in Dan In Real Life, Christian Bale in Rescue Dawn, and Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke in Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, but that speaks more to our current generation of extraordinary actors than it does to the category they represent. It was a good year.

Best Actress

• Will Win and My Preference: Julie Christie Away From Her

I loved Away From Her as a fan of so many extraordinary women - well, three of them anyway. Sarah Polley, the writer/director, did wonderful understatement to the great short work of Alice Munro, whose details are so precise and evocative of the full capability of human behavior. And Christie is the perfect embodiment - gorgeous and stately bordering on pure lunacy. One extraordinary scene of Christie's Alzheimer's patient, Fiona, wandering lost through her own home, only to mutter a vague koan to her past, is a scene of haunting ambiguity, and I'll be happy for her to win an Oscar for it.

The other nominees are certainly are all deserving, except that besides Ellen Page in Juno, I haven't seen any of them. My personal favorite performance of the year, Molly Shannon in Year Of The Dog, is not one to receive a nomination - perhaps because Year Of The Dog makes Away From Her seem famous (to say nothing of my second favorite, Ashley Judd in Bug). Still, it was the most varied, understated, human work I saw all year. Also, twice as funny and spastic as Ellen Page in Juno, but Page was spritely enough to make that sort of thing work where it shouldn't in Juno, so I'll avoid the Juno bashing.

Best Supporting Actor:

• Will Win and My Preference: Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men

I've written my complaints about No Country For Old Men on here before, but none of those ever had much to do with Bardem, who is capitol-T terrifying, and whose mere presence elevates the brilliant cat-and-mouse scenes of that movie to unbearable and traumatizing - I mean that as a compliment. The other nominees are probably terrific, but - ack - two of the rest of them. There's Charlie Wilson's War, of which Hoffman's performance - brilliant as it is - seemed to me far less interesting thatn Tom Hanks', and Tom Wilkinson in Michael Clayton, who is also brilliant, but overshadowed by the other great performers around him. I have a feeling that I'd love Casey Affleck's work in The Assassination of Jesse James, but I'll have to return to that at a later date.

I might have liked to see, say, Steve Zahn from Rescue Dawn, or Christian Bale (of course) in I'm Not There listed amongst these performers, but those are performances only recognized in the land of my brain, where Bale already has a supporting actor Oscar for his work in The New World two years ago. George Clooney didn't need the Oscar he won in that category anyway.

Best Supporting Actress:

• Will Win and My Preference: Cate Blanchett I'm Not There

In the only category for which there seems to be an actual race going on, I think early lead contender Blanchett's deeply uncanny performance as Bob Dylan in I'm Not There has to be rewarded, both in its wounding accuracy, and as a referendum on the most original work and voice to be uttered at the movies this year. I also loved Amy Ryan in Gone Baby Gone, who was the early favorite, but more due to my sentiment after her work on The Wire. Ruby Dee for American Gangster could win, as could Tilda Swinton for Michael Clayton, but those votes will probably all have the caveat of blaming Blanchett for being in a movie as strange as I'm Not There - but perhaps I'm trying to justify an impending Blanchett lost as some sort of compliment. But I would like to say that if anyone else wins, I sure hope it's Tilda Swinton, who, I think, is actually the reason Michael Clayton is so good - playing a corporate shark who's just as twitchy and anxious as she is capable and adept at corporate treachery, it's her anxiety - obvious and genuine, in that it nearly undoes her but is kept quiet - that reminds us of the real people playing out a corporate-thriller script. Stuck almost beyond herself to be a woman in the amoral world of corporate law, you can see her soul eating her as she's driven to be evil in spite of herself - the astonishing scene where she, in pure corporate jargon, orders a hit, you wind up thrilled not out of that scene's malevolence, but it's unintended pity.

One word, quickly, on what has to be the most obvious snub in this category, Jennifer Garner in Juno, a performance universally louded for its tender portrayal of Vanessa, the type-A mom-to-be who crumbles at the possibility of finally fulfilling her destiny as a mother. Mary Elizabeth Williams, eloquently writing for Slate, says Garner "is cheerful and perfect, fanning magazines on her coffee table and eagerly throwing herself into nursery color schemes. Only a woman who'd been so cruelly disappointed in the quest to have a child, one whose marriage is so painfully strained, could possess such steely desperation to make it all right." I disagree entirely - the fanning of magazines and obsessing over color schemes is who Vanessa is - the desperation is Williams' judgment. Garner is so astonishing in Juno because she finds the love seething underneath her compuslive Stepford actions, her desire to make up for her fear of parental inadequacy and emptiness through gestures meant to make an eventual baby feel welcome and loved. I think if Garner were nominated in this category, she would win, and it's because we all love Vanessa because of how much we recognize her, and how we need Juno's happy ending for Vanessa more than we need it for Juno.

Best Director

• Will and Should Win Joel and Ethan Coen No Country For Old Men

I think of this category not as the best direction of a movie this year, but as a career retrospective referendum. What I mean is I find something a little offputting in every nominee, so we should award the Coens for following their instincts to make their steps minimal, about cinematography and room tone, and for maximizing No Country For Old Men's terror in effect. Tony Gilroy was sleak for a first-time director in Michael Clayton, but I think that movie's strength derives from outstanding scripting and casting.

Now, I really believe that Todd Haynes should be winning in this category for the originality of his vision - for making I'm Not There a true director's picture of voice and ambition. I also think that of Paul Greengrass for The Bourne Supremacy, and, believe me or not, Quentin Tarrentino and Robert Rodriguez for the double picture moxie of Grindhouse (even if this movie had been on anyone's Oscar radar this year, though, it would have been complicated to iron out who could be nominated for what).

Best Original Screenplay:

• Will Win: Diablo Cody Juno



• My Preference: Tony Gilroy Michael Clayton

Mostly my vote here is against Diablo Cody, who I find annoying, but who is clearly unstoppable. That said, Michael Clayton is nothing short of ingenious both in structure and character, and Gilroy, who also wrote The Bourne Ultimatum, deserves a medal as well as an Oscar for writing two of the most profound genre exercises of the year. However, in my world, Todd Haynes and Oren Moverman's screenplay for I'm Not There is using its originality to gain a slim lead over Kelly Masterson's crafty and intricate time layering screenplay for Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, making everyone feel bad for the cleverness of Adrianne Shelley's Waitress screenplay that simply cannot compete. It's unfortunate that these nominees represent the "best" in such an original year, but certainly someone had to write those great lines for Jennifer Garner in Juno. And, perhaps secretly, even if others were nominated, I might still root for Gilroy.

Best Adapted Screenplay:

• Will Win: Joel and Ethan Coen No Country For Old Men



• My Preference: Sarah Polley Away From Her

Now, this is a point of technical concern. I did not like what the Coen's adaptation of No Country did for Cormac McCarthy's Sherriff Bell, turning him into a doddering old man who didn't mean very much. I did, however, love how Polley managed to turn a wonderful short story (Alice Munro's "The Bear Came Over The Mountain") into a wonderful movie that does not turn Munro's telling, wise narration into anything but cinematography. It's the technical best adaptation of the bunch.

Best Picture:

• Will Win: No Country For Old Men



• My Preference: Michael Clayton

Initially, I had no passionate reaction to any of the nominated movies. I didn't even want to see one of them, and have some fundamental reservation or another over the remaining four. Given what they are, I'll say the cat-and-mouse scenes between Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin in No Country For Old Men are about as good as movie scenes got this year (I just don't like the full product... or any scene with Tommy Lee Jones). But I was making the wrong assumption about Michael Clayton, and I think that assumption - which is to say, it's "just a corporate thriller" - undercuts its excellence. The movie uses our knowledge of its type of movie to shock us with character heartbreak, disillusionment, anxiety, and hard-fought habit, until our biggest disappointments with the movie are its unbelievably brief exercises in genre familiarity (when Clooney lapses into his long, smooth speeches, say - but even that gets subverted in his great performance). This year has been praised for its originality, by me also, and in that, the acceptable "edgy" choice is No Country For Old Men, but Clayton takes the familiar and makes it strange and exotic again, forcing us to re-discover its possibilities.

Now I could go off again about I'm Not There, which should win as a write-in candidate, but I'll spare you for now. Three Coen Oscars in one night is never a bad thing, and No Country, which will surely win, had moments of astonishing spare beauty, flaws or no.

Movies of the Year!

Much this year has been made that 2007 is a great year for movie - Ebert described a phenomenon of watching one great movie open after another, and awards season is packed with surprising movies, perhaps not surprising because they are great, but because they managed to live up to their pre-release hype. That in and of itself is a bit of an accomplishment.

A bit of one. I think 2007 is a great year for movies, but mostly because it comes after some fairly lousy ones, and it's not the movies that many mentioned that are so great. I had issue with No Country For Old Men, as I wrote on here last month. I cannot really discern why it is I saw There Will Be Blood, although it's hard to deny how brilliantly it is made. Juno is more charming than it should be, I guess, and I'll be honest - very little will convince me to get to the theaters to watch the triumph-of-the-parapalegic-will art snooze The Diving Bell & The Butterfly, although clearly Julian Schnabel is a great visionary.

To me, the reason I can say that 2007 is a great year for movies begins and ends with looking at what I think is clearly the picture of the year, Todd Haynes's I'm Not There. Pure and simple, I've never seen anything like it, a movie of monumental passion and vision, that fuses myth and music and ideas and creates story and emotion that expands their great sense even further. From Cate Blanchett's searingly dead-on portrait of a strung-out 60's Dylan, to a confused, blank Christian Bale positing Dylan's revised propheteering in the 80's, to the daze that is Richard Gere wandering through a Basement Tapes boom town. It's a head trip and an emotional wallop, an expansion of film as much as music and celebrity, and it's Todd Haynes's first movie about identity and society that is as astonishing and affecting as it is bold and visionary. To me, you can call it a great year for movies if something stood apart from the rest of the great movies of the year by being more than a movie, by connecting on all levels and creating a few you didn't know you were missing.

And then looking at the rest of the movies in my top ten list, I have to say I love all of them too. The genre explosion of The Bourne Supremacy seems to me as perfect a movie as any of its kind, and it was written by Tony Gilroy, the writer/director of Michael Clayton, a legal thriller that only looks like a legal thriller, with astonishing human characters barely containing their desperate anxieties in the face of corporate America. Its human dynamics and the chilling human dynamics of Before The Devil Knows You're Dead make their crimes the least of their concerns. Grindhouse was throwback fun, and The Lives of Others has to be the bravest political movie to have been released in an age when they seem to be everywhere. Further, I say that Knocked Up comes out over Superbad in the comedy war because of the genuineness and detail Judd Apatow uses to characterize his secretly loving and sweet group of characters. There were a lot of great romantic comedies with a lot of great dramatic and comedic performances by its stars - Waitress, Year of the Dog, and Dan In Real Life each charmed me far more than Juno, but why nitpick? With this many great movies to choose from, there's no need.

When it comes to performances of the year, there will be some that will win Oscars (Amy Ryan in Gone Baby Gone, Daniel Day Lewis in Blood), but I propose a couple of other deserving great performances. Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman in Before The Devil Know You're Dead are so scary and trenchant and desperate and brilliant, that they should be duking it out for the best actor trophy. Ashley Judd in Bug is the type of acting every former starlett should do once in their life, if anyone could muster the greatness she achieved. Molly Shannon in Year Of The Dog gave such specific humanity to a woman devastated by the loss of her dog, that even her most lunatic moments feel frantically lived in. And Christian Bale deserves an Oscar for being Christian Bale anyway, but in Rescue Dawn and 3:10 To Yuma, he showed two drastically different studies of desperation, and each one is worthy. I'll be happy if Julie Christie later wins an Oscar for her sensitive work in Away From Her, and if Blanchett wins for I'm Not There, to give a little credit where it will clealry be given, but my winners are the ones in this paragraph.

Best Movies of 2007

1. I’m Not There
2. The Bourne Ultimatum
3. Michael Clayton
4. Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead
5. Grindhouse
6. The Lives of Others
7. Bug
8. Waitress
9. Year Of The Dog
10. Rescue Dawn

Best Music of 2007

As I look over the various top ten lists for the music of 2007 released in magazines, as well as my own below, there's a sensation that I cannot ignore - are we all kidding ourselves? 2007 has to be one of the weakest years in recent memory for music, and it's not because there weren't some great songs, but I can't think of a single great album, an album that I even really fell in love with. Last year, there were three, and I complained about not having ten.

This year, I sort of have two that I loved, or at least spent a lot of time getting to know and not minding that I was spending a lot of time getting to know them. There are a few more that I like a little less, but am still pretty fond of. And then there are albums with some great songs and lots of filler, which is unfortunate, but it's how it goes some years.

The truth is I find myself very removed from most of the well regarded records of the year. Artists I've loved made albums I thought were terrible this year - Bruce Springsteen's Magic, Kanye West's Graduation, Queens of the Stone Age's Era Vulgaris, Wilco's Sky Blue Sky; not just sub par records, terrible records. That's to say nothing of the artists I'm a fan of whose records were mostly positive mixed bags (Lucinda Williams, Ryan Adams, Radiohead, New Pornographers), and the artists I'm supposed to love but actively dislike - M.I.A., The White Stripes, or Arcade Fire, all of whom's popularity continues to elude me.

This year, I can at least be very very happy about White Chalk, P.J. Harvey's 7th full length album, even though I think it may be her weakest. When you're an artist as extraordinary as Harvey, "weakest" is a pretty relative term. At the time of its release, I thought White Chalk was like an extended character piece, of a repressed victorian persona released from an old Dorset attic on a rusting piano, like The Others: The Musical. It is, for a good half the album, but then it's something else also - a muted walk into adulthood. Midway through the record, at the title track, Harvey walks barefoot along the Dorset beach and sees blood on her feet. It's like that walk transforms her into an adult, and the remainder of the record is subdued and lovely, stately and mature. "Silence," I think, is another Harvey great, a sort of be-careful-what-you-wish-for ballad of wishing to be released from your memories. Its followed by the atonal "To Talk To You," which is like a dip back into Harvey's child persona from early in the record. And it ends with a lovely combo of "Before Departure," a sweet song that seems written in slo-mo at a train track, and "The Mountain," a song that's both hystrionic and wise, screamingly off-kilter and melodically just right, which just about sums up Harvey and White Chalk.

I also am happy to report that Me'shell Ndegeocello's The World Has Made Me The Man of My Dreams gets better with every play, just like all of her records. She's a major musician too, and I have yet to see her on any Best of the Year list, which is typical. I'll still campaign for her if she needs it. Same goes with Talib Kweli, who seems like he should be more well-regarded than he is, considering the pure ambition and skill of his verse.

When it came to singles, I for one love "The Way I Are" by Timbaland over all others rock, pop, or otherwise. "Rehab" had personality and tabloid joyousness, "Hot Thing" is like alterna-rap's hot dance track in waiting, and Hilary Duff surprised the crap out of me by releasing a song I can't help but love.

Top Ten Albums of 2007:

1. White Chalk P.J. Harvey

2. The World Has Made Me The Man of My Dreams Me'shell Ndegeocello

3. Eardrum Talib Kweli

4. Easy Tiger Ryan Adams

5. In Rainbows Radiohead

6. Back to Black Amy Winehouse

7. Challengers The New Pornographers

8. Sound of Silver LCD Soundsystem

9. Because of the Times Kings of Leon

10. West Lucinda Williams

Top Ten Singles of 2007:

1. "The Way I Are" Timbaland

2. "Rehab" Amy Winehouse

3. "Hot Thing" Talib Kweli

4. "Umbrella" Rihanna

5. "When Under Ether" P.J. Harvey

6. "Gimme More" Britney Spears

7. "Dignity" Hilary Duff

8. "Until The End of Time" Justin Timberlake & Beyonce

9. "Jigsaw Falling Into Place" Radiohead

10. "Bartender" T. Pain

Ten Perfect Songs You Might Not Have Heard On The Radio:

• "Are You Alright" Lucinda Williams (West)
• "Silence" P.J. Harvey (White Chalk)
• "True Love Way" Kings of Leon (Because of the Times)
• "My Love For You Is Real" Ryan Adams (Follow The Lights)
• "Go Ahead" Alicia Keys (As I Am)
• "Lovely Lovely" Me'shell Ndegeocello (The World Has Made Me The Man of My Dreams)
• "Radio Nowhere" Bruce Springsteen (Magic)
• "Misfit Love" Queens of the Stone Age (Era Vulgaris)
• "Someone Great" LCD Soundsystem (Sound of Silver)
• "Go Places" The New Pornographers (Challengers)

2007's Real Top Ten

Last year, I wrote a blog of what I thought were the ten most significant books/movies/tv shows/ music that I had encountered that year. Maybe this year was less significant than last, maybe not, that sort of thing is hard to judge. There were 10 more great works I encountered this year though, without a doubt, starting with the one that's earned more ink than anything else I own since I bought it in February. Then there are some others. It all makes me think that the greatest work isn't just timeless, it reopens what you thought you knew and updates your thoughts.

A Different 2007 Top 10 List.

• Hejira Joni Mitchell (1976)

Considering I already wrote a 6 page essay on the subject and posted it on here, I don't have much left to say. It's hard for me to imagine a 2007 without Hejira - without my initial indifference towards it, my falling in love with it, my needing to hear the sounds released by its unique guitar, and eventually my satisfaction with it as it fell into the realm of all the music so familiar and beloved to me. Two days ago, I was driving in the cold mountains of the Boulder Canyon when "Blue Motel Room" came on, and after I finished singing along to every punchy word of it (It contains this gem: "You and me are like America and Russia/ always keeping score/ we're always balancing the power/ and that can get to be a cold cold war/ we're gonna have to have ourselves a peace talk/ in some neutral cafe"), it struck me how perfect it was - breezy and calm, but so full of emotion and wonder. Hejira remains an imperfect record, but a perfect one at that.

• "Kennedy and Heidi" The Sopranos (2007)

I could write and write and write about each of the final 9 episodes of The Sopranos that aired this year. Let's just say that at the end of season 5, Johnny Sack gets indicted and Tony's lawyer tells him he dodged a bullet. This season was about the anxiety of not being able to dodge bullets forever, of "waiting for the other shoe to drop." "Kennedy and Heidi" goes beyond shock when, 3 minutes in, Christopher, Tony's "nephew" and a driving force of the show played by Michael Imperioli, is killed as his car flips over, seconds after perhaps the most loving look Tony's ever given anyone. Followed, of course, by Tony suffocating Christopher as Christopher tells Tony he'd never pass a drug test and needs to be put in a cab. That their tumultuous, essential relationship could be boiled down to that act of... well, what is it? Love? Anger? Hate? Tony confesses to his therapist that he feels relief, after all the stress Christopher causes him.

The Sopranos had done death many a time through many characters, but never with the discomfort of "Kennedy and Heidi," an episode that has Tony admitting the relief of not having Christopher in his life, fessing up to the anxiety of wondering each day if "today's the day one of my rat fuck friends is going to turn on me," and, ultimately, feeling below the real grief of everyone else, that causes him to, suddenly, jet to Las Vegas to take peyote, fuck Chris's ex, and declare before God and a desert mountain "I get it!" The episode is uncomfortable, but so slightly uncomfortable, it speaks to the anxiety just below the surface in everyone. It sees Tony sitting in an ornate plane as the loneliest image on the planet, and strums the opening guitar of "Are You Alright" as he drives through the city (a lonelier guitar part is hard to imagine). All of Tony's anxiety, perhaps for the show's 7 years, is summed up and puzzled at in this episode, and it is, for all its frustration and shock, impossible not to agree with him that there must be relief in letting go of it. For someone that just killed someone he loves, that's quite an agreement.

• I'm Not There (2007)

One reason people my age become so passionate about movies, I think, is that modern filmmakers have a potential for creativity that can open up movies in completely new directions. That's what happens in movies like Mulholland Drive or Boogie Nights or Pulp Fiction or Palindromes - movies that start as an experiment and end as truer than any "normal" movie you recall watching. I'm Not There is unlike anything I recall seeing, and it's because it's an idea guided by a biography, and fragmented intellectually. But what keeps the movie so unique and not simply esoteric (which, it must be said, it is - if you don't know the Bob Dylan biography, you truly won't enjoy it much) is that the passion, loss, and anger of the man and of its vignettes is the story already told by the music, and the music is some of the greatest ever created. Todd Haynes expands the idea of ideolizing Dylan, but then does something else - he uses Dylan to forge his greatest film yet about identity freefall, and he does it through profound senses of loss and confusion that we don't even realize we're watching. For me, the most heartbreaking moment is not any of the sad shots between Heath Ledger and Charlotte Gainsbrough as the fracturing Bob and his wife Sara, not Cate Blanchett's eerily accurate 60's train wreck, but a sad moment in which the Christian Bale character begins to sing "Pressing On," the best of Dylan's gospel songs, after disavowing all he's ever assumed to be true. Never has the song sounded so sad or so triumphant. What an experience.

• "Los Angeles Days" Joan Didion (1988)

It was my favorite of the After Henry essays even before this year's writer's strike, but Didion's take on 1988's writer's strike now reads with spooky precision, and that's because Didion, one of the greats, always sees a human struggle underneath a bureaucratic one. It's not 1988, but the following two paragrahs, that conclude "Los Angeles Days," are an unbearably true statement about our current strike:

>>I had gone to Atlanta in an extra-industry role, that of “reporter” (or, as we say in Hollywood, “journalist”), with credentials that gave me a seat in the Omni but access to only a rotating pass to go on the floor. I was waiting for this rotating pass one evening when I ran into a directior I knew, Paul Mazursky. We talked for a moment, and I noticed that he, like all the other industry people I saw in Atlanta, had a top pass, one of the several all-access passes. In this case it was a floor pass, and, since I was working and he seemed not about to go on the floor, I asked if I might borrow it for half an hour.

He considered this.

He would, he said, “really like” to do this for me, but thought not. He seemed surprised that I had asked, and uncomfortable that I had breached the natural order of the community as we both knew it: directors and actors and producers, I should have understood, have floor passes. Writers do not, which is why they strike.

• Jacksonville City Nights and Rock N Roll Ryan Adams (2005, 2003)

I became more obsessed with Ryan Adams this year than any other artist, and began tracking down all his records. To me, Jacksonville City Nights and Rock N Roll are both Adams' great extremes, and are two takes on the same album. Jacksonville is his purist country record, full of twang and pool-hall pianos, and Rock N Roll is all loud bravado and punk guitar, but each are records about self destruction, the voice of a record at once fiercly alive and ready to collapse at any given moment (one of Rock N Roll's highlights is a song called "Note To Self: Don't Die"). In that way, Rock's "This Is It" and Jacksonville's "Peaceful Valley" are like widening explorations of the same theme - excitement and anxiety rolled into on combustive expression. And they're so vibrantly different and vivid, they're the work of an artist whose breadth and abilities alone would astonish if his songs weren't as astonishing as they are.

• "Bring It On Home To Me" Sam Cooke (1961)

I must have had "Bring It On Home To Me" in my collection before, but this year, after buying a collection of Cooke's greatest hits, I truly understood the song for the first time. Amidst Cooke's hits - some bouyant examples of 50's and 60's doo wop, some great soul and gospel, some sorta generic - "Bring It On Home" comes alive with harmony. Cooke had the best voice of all of the male 60's soul singers, but it took harmony to make it so evident and heartbreaking. Hearing "Bring It On Home to Me" now is to hear one of the greatest songs ever made, without a doubt.

• The Brief and Hideous Reign of Phil George Saunders

Saunders is a punchy writer of tragicomedies as bleak and upsetting as they are hysterical. My favorite short story of his, "The 400 Lb. CEO" makes you ache and laugh at once, wincing with pain as the pure human cruelty flies by with one brittle jab after another. Phil is one of his longer works, but it's barely 100 small pages long with crazy illustrations, and it's hard to say when its creativity turns into lunacy, but it does, brilliantly. In this political fable about a country so small, only one person can fit inside it at a time, he invents crazy robots (the "media" are represented by creatures who communicate through giant headlines coming out of megaphones in their ass), and has them led by Phil, a robot whose brain keeps falling off, making him more dangerous and incoherent as time passes. If it sounds like a punctillious allegory of Bush, it both is and isn't, it's more - it's about our fears that go along with lunacy, that make us subject to it. Yet in its apparent bleakness, Phil has a savvier, more moving twist in it than in any work of his previously - a twist that makes us think there's hope for all of us.

• The Wire Season 2 (2003)

You've been told you're supposed to watch The Wire, right? One renegade friend of yours has seen it, or you read the reviews that often proclaim it a "highwater mark for dramatic television" (as Entertainment Weekly stated this last year when it failed to earn any Emmy nominations). Well, it happened, I got into The Wire in a major way this year, and it's every bit as great as you've heard, and for none of the reasons - it's plots are not "too complex" or "too labyrinthine," rather they have a lot of characters and a lot to keep track of, with details so nuanced and true to life you don't really notice you're paying attention to them.

The biggest surprise for me watching The Wire is the renewed love you find for police investigation shows. By opening the show up to, basically, the entire real world, there's incredible mystery behind the "well how will they figure this out" premise; it renews it entirely. Each of the three seasons I've watched so far has been brilliant, but in season 2, the season that focuses on Baltimore's dock workers (or, as one of my friends put it, "the season with all the white people"), that mystery was matched fully by its human story at the center. Following Frank Sabotka (Chris Bauer - see below), his nimwit son Ziggy (James Ransone), and his meathead nephew Nick (Pablo Schreiber), the show made its corruption a drama of family and collapsed expectations, all while never losing focus on its drug runners of season 1.

• "Are You Alright" Lucinda Williams

The greatest, loneliest, sweetest composition of the year. There's a thing about a great Lucinda Williams song that you might not grasp until having absorbed it a few times - her simplest words are her best. I remember years ago riding with a friend in my car who made me listen to "Side Of The Road" over and over again, wallowing in amazement at the way a simple description of staring at a farmhouse can evoke a longing for freedom. That's true of songs like "Memphis Pearl" or "Sidewalks of the City" or "I Lost It" or "Jackson" or "World Without Tears" or any of the other dozen masterpieces Williams has written. "Are You Arlight" stands with the best of her work, and it starts with that mournful but sweet guitar that segues into a natural enough question - "Are you alright, all of the sudden you went away." Yet in asking in its chorus, beautifully, "Are you sleeping through the night? Do you have someone to hold you tight? Do you have someone to hang out with? Do you have someone to hug and kiss you?" she not only creates sweet sing-songy lyrics, but asserts the real needs everyone has, and creates a universal longing for understanding. West doesn't quite match the promise of "Are You Alright," but it does show that no artist can cut to the core of human needs so simply.

• "The Deposition" The Office (2007)

People began whining about the fourth season of The Office, especially in those padded hour-long premiere episodes, but I didn't see much wear on the show - what I saw was growth. Just before the strike ended new episodes of The Office in November, the show aired what might be its funniest, most stunning episode yet in "The Deposition," which sees Michael (Steve Carrell, having a very good year) having to testify before his bosses, girlfriend, and least favorite person in the office, Toby. The things that come out of Michael's journal scald ("Who's this other girlfriend of Michael's, this Ryan?"), a court-transcript mediated "That's what she said joke" turns the shows geeky running gag on its ear, and its climax is the epitome of this season's attempt to humanize Michael - which is to say, the sympathy you feel for Michael might, for the first time, be real.

Great Performances I Saw This Year:
- Tony Sirico The Sopranos - Each actor on The Sopranos is brilliant, but Sirico is the most overlooked because he makes what should be The Sopranos most peculiar character, Paulie Walnuts, into a pile of old-age agita and crankiness that's completely recognizable. Funny, irascible, completely illogical, cold but loyal - Paulie and Sirico helped create a life on screen, so well you barely notice. One shot in "Walk Like A Man," in which a furious Paulie drives all over Christopher's lawn, is told entirely with the flare of his nostrils. But its his fear and childish idiosyncrasies becoming one in "Remember When" that was his real triumph as an actor this year - a one-hour duet with Sirico and James Gandolfini as Paulie and Tony evade feds by driving to Miami. It was a gift to Sirico, and a gift to us.

- Andre Royo (2002), Chris Bauer (2003), Idris Elba (2004) The Wire - Each season, The Wire's universally perfect cast has one performance that seems to step out and present itself as one of the best you can recall. In season 1, it was Royo's heroin-addicted snitch Bubbles, who, at an NA meeting, revealed his buried desire to live, and the need in his eyes has informed his character ever since. In season 2, it was Bauer, playing dock leader Frank Sabotka with fury and fatherly disappointment rolled into a seething triumph. And then there's Elba's Stringer Bell, the smooth dealer of seasons 1 and 2 who gets unravelled and feisty in season 3. In one extraordinary scene with lonely widow Donette, Stringer unleashes the real terror he's capable of, and you get a glimpse, finally, of what an extraordinary presence he's been all along.

- Molly Shannon Year Of The Dog, Steve Carrell Dan In Real Life - It's said the key to great comedy is playing crazy characters straight, which makes me think the best comedians have a fairly good grasp of internalizing outlandish characteristics. So, when two wonderful comedians turned in serious performances in two dramedies, I guess I couldn't be too surprised. Shannon in Year of the Dog seems like an apple of the regular Shannon-lunatic tree, except that we wind up so deeply identifying with her Peggy's search for meaning and companionship that it turns Mike White's comedy into a vital story of self-discovery. And Carrell in Dan In Real Life reminds me of a calmer Woody Allen in the 70's, a man torn by desire and obligation, revitalized by a taste of love then forced to swallow it back down again. His torment turned Dan In Real Life into a wounding comedy of family and romantic dynamics.