The Hottest Spaniard in America

I happened to see only two movies in the month of August, and both starred Penelope Cruz. The first is Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona features Cruz as Maria Elena, the hothead, unstable ex-wife of Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), the “enlightened” Spanish painter at the center of everyone’s sexual fantasies and realities as he gets between the titular two American friends, played by Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johannson, on their summer trip to Barcelona. The second is Elegy, which features Cruz as Consuela, a grad student who falls for her much older professor, played by Ben Kingsley, and explores age and perceptions in sex and love.

The week I saw Vicky Cristina, I also caught Cruz on The Late Show With David Letterman. Cruz mentioned she’d just wrapped a Pedro Almodovar movie in Madrid and was exhausted touring the states doing promotions for her two movies. In fact at the time, I hadn’t even heard about Elegy, and now, a month into its release, I doubt I would’ve heard of it at all except for a rave review by Owen Gleiberman that sent me scrambling to the Seven Gables on 50th. I figured Vicky Cristina and whatever the Almodovar movie she’s completed were the movies she was promoting.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona has sort of gotten good reviews – you can tell because of the Woody Allen movies the reviews compare it to. It’s like Match Point says Variety, like Small Time Crooks (meaning, a screwball mixed bag) says The Village Voice, like Bullets Over Broadway and Sweet and Lowdown (meaning “funny!”) says The Baltimore Sun, and totally unlike Annie Hall and Crimes and Misdemeanors says Salon. Some dismiss it, some find things to enjoy – probably none love it all that much, which makes some sense.

It’s Allen’s biggest diss to American sensibilities of all of his recent European movies – in the movie, Cristina (Johannsson) finds herself wandering into a happy, Spanish hippie polyamorous relationship with Cruz and Bardem while Hall finds herself stuck with a successful Upper East Side real-estate yuppie who plays bridge and lunches with boring colleagues.

But something does work about Vicky Cristina – and that something is Cruz. Bardem has gotten some deserving good reviews for the movie, and so has Hall, but every time the movie zips, it’s because of what Cruz brings to it – the movie is ostensibly about Hall’s sensible Hall and her friendship with wild Cristina, but the wild one you truly believe in is Maria Elena – played by Cruz with total abandon, from her hair that looks like it’s never seen a brush to her Amazonian stalking of a painting canvas. Vicky Cristina should be Allen’s most thinly veiled free-love manifesto, but with Cruz at the helm of its “European” retro-sixties sensibilities, it feels alive and unpredictable.

That’s because Vicky Cristina Barcelona, like Elegy, is a better movie because Penelope Cruz is in it. The truth is, most movies with Penelope Cruz are better movies because Penelope Cruz is in them. How did this happen? Cruz became popular in America, if you can recall, not because of a film role necessarily, but because of a very pretty blue, Oscar De La Renta dress at the 2000 Academy Awards. She had starred (beautifully) as a pregnant, HIV-positive nun in Almodovar’s All About My Mother, and presented Almodovar with the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film that year. She wore a tight, periwinkle dress and suddenly seemed to be dating Tom Cruise. Cameron Crowe immediately tapped her to play an American version of a Spanish role she’d created in his Open Your Eyes remake Vanilla Sky, which would eventually be seen as mostly unsuccessful.

Looking at her film credits since ostensibly becoming well-known 8 years ago, before her Oscar-nominated turn in 2006 with Almodovar’s Volver, her movies fall into two categories – forgettable flops like Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Waking Up In Reno, Head in the Clouds, or Gothika; and flops that are memorable only because of the notoriety of how massive their failures were like Sahara, All The Pretty Horses, or Masked and Anonymous. One credit I’m skipping is perhaps her most famous American role – as Johnny Depp’s shrill cokehead wife in Blow, a widely derided movie at the time that earned her a Razzie Nomination for Worst Actress.

Blow has been resurrected by college-aged male movie lovers that enjoy seeing coke consumption and hot women on screen, but it still is, in all honesty, not a particularly memorable movie either. However, it too is a better movie because of Cruz. I remember at the time people discussing how obnoxious she was in her role, but I think that is Cruz’s success in the movie – with total abandon, she inhabits a shrill and obnoxious character. Her hair too flies around wildly until it’s chopped off in a masculine ‘do at the end of the movie (much like it is in Elegy, when she’s tamed a bit, too).

I’d like to say I called it then, and apparently it worked – amongst all those flops, Cruz became a major star. Maybe, movie dorks like myself that caught her, briefly, as a trash-talking woman giving birth on a bus to Javier Bardem's rival in Almodovar’s Live Flesh in 1996 knew she’d be this famous, but I doubt it – I truly think as good as she was in Flesh and All About My Mother, it was that fearless turn in Blow that did it, and since then, she’s made one bad casting choice after another, only to have them not matter that much.

Elegy is even less successful right now than Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but it proves how incredible Cruz can be. Ostensibly, her Consuela is the opposite of Maria Elena – proper, reserved, hair in a geometrically precise shoulder-length cut with uniform bangs, wandering around in a school-girl outfit. Her character is supposed to be somewhat “invisible” to Kingsley’s David Kepesh, as he is so consumed by the idea that a beautiful woman could love anyone his age. Indeed she is a mystery to him, and to us, but as played with the sincere, piercing dark eyes of Cruz, she is a full bodied idea of gorgeous curiosity and life, a woman mostly unaware of how beautiful she is internally and externally, but rather competent and wonderful anyway.

Kingsley is excellent too, but without Cruz in this role, I don’t believe Elegy would have the outstanding power that it has. I won’t ruin where it takes Cruz’s Consuela, but I will say that she is given, towards the end of the movie, a deeply wounding scene involving an unguarded, naked photo session (Cruz has the rare distinction of being an object of obsession in dark rooms in both movies – she certainly does photograph well). The scene shows the extremes of Cruz’s talent – an unabashedly carnal performer with the ability to catch a viewer off guard through vulnerability and honesty, her sexuality emerging simultaneously with emotions and needs that crave and overwhelm.

Cruz made so many bad casting choices over the years it makes sense that she was due to make a few great choices to show off just what she can do, but it may have also been that movies were looking for any “Hot, wild, mysterious Spanish woman” roles that could possibly reign in the vivacity she was displaying anyway. What makes Cruz continue to be so exciting as a celebrity is wondering just when we’ll get to see that side of her personality reigned into a movie worth watching – I was lucky to find out that that’s happening twice, right now.

An essay on The Confessions of Max Tivoli

I found this essay I wrote a few years ago on a great book about love and death, The Confessions of Max Tivoli. Why not post it here?

In The Confessions of Max Tivoli, what seems like a gimmick takes on the air of great sympathy and understanding. Its protagonist, born with a foreknowledge of his death by simple addition, is born an old man aging backwards. We view him meeting his best friend with the face of a 54-year-old, falling in love with a girl his age while secretly sleeping with her mother (he does, after all, appear to be even older than she), getting the girl when they both coincide at the right age, and then, finally, pretending to be the same age as her son some decade and a half after she leaves him. Beyond requiring the most suspended of suspended disbelief, this concept seems hokey and awkward at fist glance – ages backwards? What are we supposed to learn, that age is a state of mind? Is this a Robin Williams starring vehicle in disguise?

There is simply nothing to prepare you for the actual text in the novel, which, both directly and indirectly, seems a modern incarnation of Lolita, another novel whose startlingly beautiful language takes a sticky concept and turns it into the ultimate meditation on love and life. I do not mean to say Andrew Sean Greer has the talent of Vladimir Nabokov (although, who’s to say, this is only his second novel). There is not a hint of preciousness in the design, not a second of cozying into the subject, not a single person who rises above his/her circumstances to learn an important lesson on the universality of humanity. No, that responsibility is ours, and the lyricism of the backwards man-boy does teach us invaluable truths about love, about self, about time, and about the inevitability of aging – as it is here, careening like a car crash you are powerless to control, the process that takes Max back in time propels us and confronts us with the inevitability, the uncontrollably finite process of time and age.

Max, being (mostly) the only person aware of his predicament is certainly a character locked into a sense of insular logic – being the only person having to live in his body, with his choices, it becomes a certain inevitability he’ll jettison the “life” of Max Tivoli on each reappearance of Alice, the girl he remarks towards the end of the novel he’s not sure if he ever really knew. Mid novel, he “becomes” his father, Asger Van Dalen (rechristened Tivoli after his love for the Danish amusement park) and marries his Alice under the pseudonym. Later, he becomes Hughie Dempsey, Jr., the child of his lifelong best friend, the only person who’s known and accepted Max for all of his often questionable choices.

Tivoli is about love, in the, at this point, unsurprising notion that anyone will do anything for love. This plot device, the lifelong obsession with Alice, is effective in its way – as a dramatic device to both mark the life and the motivation of Max, it doesn’t disappoint. But in the sense that she never knows the true identity of Max, even when she does (she thinks he’s a kindly old uncle living upstairs that was her mother’s true love), there’s an inescapability that the two cannot really be together. As a married couple, he lavishes her and loves her and is, we suspect, a reasonably good husband, but we know, as they marry when Max is 35 and looking like a 35 year old, they have only a set amount of time before he just wanders too far backwards from the man she married and their relationship becomes untenable.

To an extent, this can be read as a metaphor for love in general – the couple is given less than a decade of happiness before the moment she says to him, “I don’t know who you are.” It’s true she doesn’t, his identity is a lie, but the love is as strong as ever. Much like Lolita, the protagonist gets his woman for a time, but in truth never really has her, her affections somewhere else, and her need for Asger never coming close to resemble the intensity of feeling Max has for her.

It’s hard to tell when the book first sideswipes you and has you in its clutches. Perhaps it’s at the end of its first section, upon the realization that Sammy, the 12-year-old a now-58-year-old Max shares a room with, is actually his son. What it does is make the story, for perhaps the first time, full of possibility. You were willing to write off a character who either seems like he’ll be Simon Birch (that is, chirpy and sentimental) or else the Elephant Man (and invoke “you poor thing!” syndrome). The son gives you the sense that this man may have had a full life, entering and backing away from real interaction with the world, conquering his affliction occasionally, falling victim to its implications in others.

In that sense, what becomes the most sympathetic aspect of Max is, in its eloquent precision, his isolation. This isolation may be justified – he can’t exactly proclaim his condition to the world. Still, as a 17-year-old awkward in his skin, it barely matters that that skin is a 53-year-old’s – we all understand the sense of feeling a foreigner in your own body, skeptical of the way people view you and the way you view yourself.

Which is to say Andrew Sean Greer, a lyricist if ever there was one, follows precisely the axiom of great writing: take the specific, make it universal. Certainly the story of a Max, in love with an Alice, the type of woman who’d never pay attention to a Max (in this case because she thinks he’s in his mid fifties), is as old as time in its way. Yet you’ve never felt on the inside of it like this – the threads of time are pulled back and forth, his life in the sandbox, puttering around Alice’s house as a 12-year-old, and its backward-life forward chronology have a certain braided style that makes the puzzle of the novel interesting on simple logistics – his son, eh? How’d he find out where he lives without tipping off the mother? And the mother’s Alice, eh? How did she get convinced to take in such a stray 12-year-old?

The answers to these questions are great answers, of course, as any good novel must be fully aware of the appeal of their smallest tidbits. The final fourth of the novel, a section of careening intensity is so full of themes and elements you barely knew had overwhelmed your every sense – Max’s lifelong friendship with Hughie, the absence of his mother, the castrating effect of time on his body (as a 12-year-old, he notices, resigned, he just can’t get the thing to work like it used to), the accidental discovery of Alice’s whereabouts, Max’s hypnotic conversation with her newest ex-husband, the end of Hughie, and a final, sweet resolution of the whole crew – a late night cry and kiss goodnight from a torn up Alice.

What makes reading and absorbing these details such an overwhelming and moving experience, I think, is that concept that seemed cumbersome and untenable in the extreme to begin with, the obstinately backwards movement of time in a culture confined to a linear existence. Rarely in a novel – in absence of a terminal disease (and I’m happy for every time one is absent in a novel) – are we so swiftly reminded of the mortality of our protagonist. Even at 12, we know his years are even more finite than that because this trajectory of time, even more than an age-related dementia, will literally turn Max into a baby. In their magnificent final moments together, Hughie begs for a solitary existence with Max, saying he alone understands Max’s fear of dying as a helpless baby, and he alone is his answer to it. We know he’s right – Max, we’re certain, has no possible way of telling Alice or Sammy of his condition, and it’s a moment that clues us into the mental singularity of a man forced to live his life in total isolation from the world.

Was Hughie simply acting out a lifelong crush on Max? That reading is possible, I’m afraid, and in those final sections of the last quarter of the book, you’re thrust into an unenviable position as a writer – that is, the position to dismiss Hughie’s mostly human behaviors as long overdue puppy love. I choose not to read it this way, although I admit that such a non-reading is an arbitrary choice. Hughie, a homosexual in the beginning of the 20^th century, and Max are equal foreigners in their bodies and their worlds, and Max draws this parallel frequently. I read Hughie’s love for Max comes from a bond of understanding, of being the only two people alive that, without judgment, accept each other as they are. Indeed, Hughie’s secret is as antisocial as Max’s – unmoved by the death of his son and in a marriage that’s more annoyance than matrimony, Hughie is simply a man trying to find any way to make it through his days. With Max to look out for, he has someone to feel superior to (he does, after all, have it easier), and thus, accepted by.

I searched for reviews of The Confessions of Max Tivoli after I completed the book, and, dazed from the emotional wallop of its final quarter, and overwhelmed by its parallels to Lolita (more in a moment), I was surprised to hear the analysis, “beautifully written, but without anything meaningful to say on love and life.” I couldn’t disagree more. It may be not so noteworthy to say that love is all there is to live for, and that it is eternal – so, maybe there isn’t that much left to say on love – but as for life, I think Tivoli is actually a fairly important document. In its fictional post script – one saying the book has been brought to you, after being found in an attic in 1947, by the “Samuel Harper Foundation,” tells you, quietly, the fate of its reading. Sammy, then in his early 20’s, found this book and later started a foundation that trafficked manuscripts of some kind.

What it means is that the experience of good writing on your existence is a profound communicator – Max, who could not approach the things that mattered to him during life did find them after his death, either by a theoretical understanding of whatever Alice makes of these journal entries or, if Max is correct in his final pages, by having his 1941 necklace returned to her. He also lives on by the work of his son, perhaps even inspiring and causing the work of his song. It means that Sammy was so profoundly moved by what he read, he worked his life to publish it. This simple sentence after the completion of the events of the novel says that marking your existence on this planet, you make your mark by being true and creating proof of your existence. In another echo of Lolita, we’re told of what the power of writing will allow you to forgive. Max is a far less treacherous human being than Humbert Humbert, but he felt no less isolated, and, in truth, he’s not very much less eloquent.

Why Lolita, you ask? Like Lolita, Max gets the girl for a while, only to have her taken away by something he should’ve seen just under his nose. Like Lolita, he meets her briefly before one or both of the main characters’ deaths. Like Lolita, the “transcripts” we’re given are posthumous of the main character, and the fates of the other remaining characters told by an ominous outside source. Like Lolita, the character’s first sexual encounter is told in poetic non-specifics. Like Lolita, you forgive unforgiveable acts because you love the voice of the person speaking them.

It’s amazing that a novel with a ludicrous concept could leave such an indelible impression about the nature of people, the truths of existence, and the importance of expressing them. It’s amazing that it could still do this in the best way a novel can, by sideswiping you with utterly absorbing characters in a fully spellbinding narrative flow. The Confessions of Max Tivoli as a title is a sort of everyman journal entry type of banality, and that, in truth, could be the case – this is simply a man we’re presented with, with elements of his mortality and purpose apotheosized to the order of highest importance. In essence, they remind us why those elements are of the highest importance to us.

Some great almost-great albums

The release this past month of Beck's Modern Guilt has gotten me to thinking about the albums that I love that I can't claim as great. Last year, I wrote on here about Joni Mitchell's The Hissing Of Summer Lawns, which I think has to be the epitome of this type of thing - an album that I could find dozens of reasons to dislike, except that so much is done right on the album and drawn to it over and over again. Artists all the time make albums that are mediocre with a few good songs sticking out, but this is something different - albums that are made to be expansive and brilliant wind up tripping on their own ambitions. Still, I love those grand amibitions so much, I keep trying and trying to love the album as much as the artist clearly did. Mostly it doesn't work, but what comes out of it is something that makes you happy you tried.


Once, Roger Ebert wrote about The Darjeeling Limited (a movie I didn't like at all), "Why do we have to be the cops and enforce a narrow range of movie requirements?" I identify with that statement quite a bit. It gets to be an exercise for critics, wanting to keep up an aura of crumudgeonness - of being difficult to please and having discerning tastes - to not discuss what good is in a movie or album or book but to instead make sure s/he is on top of pointing out a work's flaws. That's fine - flaws need to be discussed too - but perhaps tougher is to engage with a work whose flaws are obvious and acknowledge what draws you in about it. Since Beck's Modern Guilt is exactly this type of record, here are two others that fit that definition, and my ever expanding thoughts on that damn Joni Mitchell album I can't stop thinking about.



Swordfishtrombones Tom Waits

Ask ten Tom Waits fans to pick the album that typifies Tom Waits to then, and they'll likely give you ten different answers - or, at the very least, 6 or 7 answers, with many of them repeating the title Rain Dogs. In the mid-70's, Tom Waits stopped making the sort of back alley jazz records and got into work that was darker and more tortured. By the mid-80's, he decided much of that was still too melodic, and made Swordfishtrombones, which begins in "Under Ground" like a small child banging on a xylophone, accompanied by a barking old man.

This was the album that would enable Rain Dogs, and, really, establish the weirdness that has remained Waits's backbone. For me, my own answer as a Waits fan to what his best album is would be Bone Machine, the astonishing 1990 album that sounds like one miraculous round trip to hell and back. Getting into Tom Waits now, as people cranky enough who are my age sometimes do, I wouldn't expect that Swordfishtrombones would be the record they'd gravitate towards - full of bangs on a kettle drum, off-key blows in a bassoon, screaming. In the track "Shore Leave," the title is sung cryptically towards the end of the song in a way that sounds like a baby spitting out its food. By the time you start hearing circus music during "Dave The Butcher," you're not even sure Waits knew he was supposed to be a musician.

Of course this is Waits's charm and it seems most charming to the cognizenti when he's at his most baffling - or at least, so they say. People's favorite Tom Waits' songs also tend to be the more melodic ones, and understandably so (how do you even remember the other ones?). The album is tough - but it's not without comprehension, revelation, and often beauty. No other artist makes records that can be ugly and silly and critical and light. When, in "Frank's Wild Years," Waits delivers a disaffected monologue to an organ about a man, his wife, who was "a used piece of jet trash, made good bloody mary's, and kept her mouth shut most of the time," it's something so wild and unhappy it winds up levitating on its very unlikelihood of causing a smile. If you make it that far, the album, without a doubt, wins you over - enough so that in the straight, beautiful numbers like "In The Neighborhood" or the jazz composition "Rainbirds," you truly believe in what Waits is doing, even if it took a lot of ignoring disbelief to get there.


29 Ryan Adams

The backstory behind 29 is that Ryan Adams had to shelve it for a while - it did, after all, come out when he was 31, his final of three albums released in 2005. Strategically it makes sense - 29, unique in Adams' catalog anyway, definitely didn't fit with his more direct, pop-oriented songs of Gold and Love Is Hell, and had at least a comrade of sorts in the countrified drunkenness of Cold Roses and Jacksonville City Nights, Adams' other 2005 releases. It was deemed too weird and obscure, but as the bass drum beats and guitar blazes a sound right out of the Grateful Dead's "Truckin" on the title track, it's something else - a declaration of survival. In the track, Adams muses "I should've died 100,000 times" and "Most of my friends are married and making them babies/ To most of them I've already died." He recounts bar fights, arrests, close calls, drug use, and even his dead dog's pile of bones and then roars on his way - it's obscure enough, I suppose, but it's also a thrill. Coupled with its following song, "Strawberry Wine," which has a softer Adams musing "Don't spend too much time on the other side/ let the daylight in," Adams imagines the side of his 29 years if he hadn't survived, and that makes this, really, a concept from start to finish about the luck of the surviving - even a manual of sorts.

Adams has long been criticized as being a machine that cranks out songs rather than an album artist, but 29 is the antithesis - a full record not that concerned with the song to song individuality. That's the strongest thing about 29, but it also isn't fulfilled. Though its middle, sad songs "Night Birds" and "Blue Sky Blues" are terrific, they're followed by the terrific, what-drives-me ramble "Carolina Rain" and then left unfulfilled by what should be the conceptual meat of the record - a bla love song "Starlite Diner," and "The Sadness," a fight with depression re-imagined as a bullfight. The truth is neither of the songs work, and they disrupt Adams' conceptual daring.

The record picks back up with "Elizabeth, You Were Born To Play That Part," as emotional a song as Adams has ever written with its collision of two absolutely gorgeous melodies. However, the heartbreak seems isolated. "Voices" concludes the record, and it's like a postmodern folk song - all deadly pleas and emotional coos so trenchant you barely notice there's only an acoustic guitar playing. This song should connect 29's ends of survival - with its "Don't you listen to the voices" center, it's the hope that makes his good luck story of "29" possible - but it doesn't, it merely ends the album respectably. That all leaves 29 mostly unfulfilled, but still - there are times I can't sleep at night and "Voices" is the song I want to hear. There are times I drive in the rain and "Elizabeth..." is the song I want to hear. There are times I find myself amazed to be who I am and "29" will pop up - it's amazing that an album can call forth that sense of identification and still, not fully, work.

The Hissing of Summer Lawns Joni Mitchell

What's left for me to say about this record? To call songs like "In France They Kiss On Mainstreet," "The Jungle Line" and "Don't Interrupt The Sorrow" tuneless would absolutely be right. But they also come at a speed of ideas and criticism that is its own bit of intoxication. Last year's Grammy-winning River, the Mitchell tribute albumy by Herbie Hancock, featured "The Jungle Line" turned into a spoken-word jazz piece, and maybe that's the right forum for it - not the moog-sampling wander from painted jungle flowers to crossing the Brooklyn Bridge that it has. As it is, it, like the majority of the songs on the record, are hard to know and hard to like. Sean Nelson, the eloquent writer for the 33 1/3 series, in writing about Mitchell's Court and Spark called out Mitchell on Hissing for losing all sense of compassion and empathy - this is Mitchell at her most disdainful. Her opening image in "Mainstreet" is of "under neon a signs/ a girl was in bloom/ and a woman was fading/ in a suburban room." That might be the nicest comparison she makes on the record - she sees women as chained to Ethiopian walls, imagines Scarlett O'Hara wandering Times Square for porn, sees nagging wives ruining their husbands' lives, finds them unable to speak up to save their lives.

The truth is, as hard of an edge as these songs leave you with, I've never disliked them, not any of them, even "Edith and the Kingpin," which is, I think, a waste of a song. "Don't Interrupt The Sorrow" calls forth the history of women suffering and surviving only to be given the platitude "Bring that bottle over here and I'll pad your purse" - why not be angry? Its second half, too, has a perfect run - a man reminisces angrily on "Harry's House/ Centerpiece" and the result is experimental and beautiful. She dissects a bad local band in "The Boho Dance" rather dispicably as "just another hard time band/ with Negro affectations," but winds up really making a case for musicians needing to be true to who they are.

What keeps me coming back to Hissing is what has to be its strangest song - and Mitchell's strangest, for that matter. "Shadows And Light" was the first song I objected to on the record, and with its long, slow, drawn out keyboard as its only instrumentation, why wouldn't I? In her first mainstream negative review, Steven Holden of Rolling Stone wrote that the song sounded like "a long, solemn fart." But where the songs of Hissing are angry, "Shadows and Light" is lead by a synthesizer that accepts vicious dichotomies for what they are - stands in acceptance of them. "Hostage smiles on presidents, freedom scribbled on the subway," she sings to silence, and I have to think, to all things there are good and bad. We've given women - given ourselves - freedom and wound up bound to it. How do we reconcile the two? It's an effort to get there, but Hissing to me retains its fascination because it's, ultimately, just worth it.

Modern Guilt Beck

Beck has to be upset something fierce these days - the songs in Modern Guilt are pulled out of their straight malaise by dancy production of Danger Mouse, but there's not doubt of what he's feeling. "If I wake up and see my maker coming," he sings in the opening number, "Orphans," "We'll drag the streets with the baggage of longing." He drags the album with the baggage of longing - each song seems to be about how he no longer recognizes the world around him, and climaxes with Beck contemplating leaping into a volcano.

I should, in all honesty, truly identify with this record - I find myself baffled by modern culture constantly, and I think in 2006's magnificent The Information, Beck did just that - imagined a world with dead cellphones, drowned out by elevator music, and adrift with the strangeness of the world around him. The truth is, Beck's previous albums are the best reason to move forward with Modern Guilt anyway - knowing the winning streak he's been on. My theory with Beck has long been that 2002's classic Sea Change, full of such overwhelming sadness, freed Beck to make the music he wanted to - the far jauntier Guero and The Information along with Change are truly Beck's fullest, most inspiring work.

Modern Guilt is along that vein but is simply not as good because there is no movement - Beck's malaise traps you in the record and suffocates it with dance rhythms that feel mostly stapled on. A song like "Replica" makes great use with intensely overdone beats of creating a sonic landscape that seems impossible to penetrate, but most of the record does so without as much sense of consciousness.

But that consciousness still lingers and infects. The truth is I didn't care much about Beck when I was supposed to - Odelay and Midnite Vultures seemed like a lot of danc-y hoohah about nothing, and even when I liked a song I didn't care to go much further. Modern Guilt has so much to it, by contrast. "Orphans" is a great song, and so is "Volcano" (of that titular volcano Beck can't decide to jump into), and even at one note, a record about modern contempt and malaise is a stronger note than virtually all other albums in release. The truth is, the best thing of a record about malaise and contempt is that you feel it some yourself - you yearn for the release in songs like the crunchy rocker "Soul of A Man." That may be as effective as it is frustrating.

Would you hang out with Richard Kelly?

If I had to make a bet, it would be that you, whoever is reading this, have not seen Southland Tales. Perhaps you do not know the name Richard Kelly. Let's clear those up right away - Richard Kelly is talented writer/director who gained cult notoriety through 2001's Donnie Darko, wrote a mess of a movie no one blames on him called Domino in 2005, and last year released Southland Tales, a movie that could be called "dark" because it's apocalyptic, or "light" because it takes place in sunny California on the eve of the apocalypse, or "kitschy" because it includes music videos, cars fucking, overdubs about the apocalypse, hands being chopped off, etc. Or it could be called a "negative utopia sci-fi thriller" because it's about world war, global gas crisis, a draft that has everyone panicked, and, you know, the apocalypse.

If that sounds confusing, well, let me say I haven't even started talking about the plot, which is about California in the midst of world war with Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and North Korea - oh right, a nuclear bomb has gone off in Abilene, Texas in 2005 (forgot that part), and now we're out of gas. So, a gas substitute that uses the power of the ocean controlled by a goofy megalomaniac played by Wallace Shawn. This is slowing the earth's rotation by .0000006, just enough to cause people to act irrationally - or so says a comparable screenplay by Boxer Santaros, played by The Rock (ne, Dwayne Johnson), who has recently woken up in the desert with amnesia and is now shacking up with Krista Now, a porn star/ media sensation played by Sarah Michelle Gellar. Boxer is also the son-in-law of the vice-presidential candidate in the 2008 election and married to Mandy Moore. Plus, there's a group of Neo-Marxist revolutionaries played by what seems like an entire season's worth of Saturday Night Live veterans - Amy Poehler, Jon Lovitz, Nora Dunn, and Cheri Oteri are the rebels. Also, Justin Timberlake is a scarred Iraq veteran that sometimes narrates with passages from the Book of Revelations. And there's Seann William Scott, who joins the neo-Marxist rebels to impersonate his identical twin brother, who's a cop, I think, but he is at least also played by Scott.

Alright, glad I got that out of the way. Sometimes it's necessary to write that description down just to make sure I had a grasp of the plot. When Southland Tales premiered at Cannes in 2006, it was seen as the biggest mess the festival had ever seen, or at least since the last overly self-indulgent movie no one could follow, Vincent Gallo's notorious The Brown Bunny, which many compared it to. Recently I watched Southland Tales, and I prepared for it - a friend and I discovered on Netflix it is listed in groups such as "100 Favorite Films of All Time" and simultaneously "The Worst Movies Ever Made." On that page, you can see a link to Roger Ebert's 1-star review, who complimented that the 2006 Cannes version of the movie had 26 minutes chopped off of it, but suggested to "keep whittling the movie down until it's the size of a toothpick." Also, Nathan Lee of The Village Voice named it the best movie of 2007.

Again, think of this as background. I've become convinced recently that Donnie Darko is one of the great movies of modern times. Many a college stoner certainly agrees with me, but think of it - Donnie Darko was released with no flair, critics ignored it, it barely played in even indie markets, and it managed to spawn midnight screenings, a theatrical rerelease, massive success on DVD, and launched Jake Gyllenhaal into becoming an A-list star. Watching it now, it does not surprise me that it became so successful, what surprises me is that critics didn't even notice it its first time around - are critics so skeptical of first time filmmakers? Its poppy 80's quasi-musical numbers and coming of age story alone, along with its rather uproarious sense of humor and playful satire makes me think the movie is unmistakably great, even before its time-travel head trip of a plot takes hold. Scenes in Donnie Darko are not particularly complicated, but they're hard to shake, and that's where it succeeded - it was a populist mind-bender.

There's nothing populist about Southland Tales, which seems like one grand exercise in getting people to not like it. For people who've contrasted the original version of Donnie Darko and its director's cut, there may be some reference - the director's cut is, honestly, not as good. It explains the movie's cryptic time-travel plot somewhat, but also adds too much, including stoner-heavy nonsequitor intercuts of fire and water and eyeballs, and grafts on more than its share of extraneous additional scenes, including a ludicrous dissection of Watership Down that supposedly decodes messages of urban sexuality. If I finished the director's cut surprised that it worked anyway, because the elemental Donnie Darko is such a strong movie, it made me most appreciate that movie's initial scene to scene rhythm, the perfection of what was left in it.

As I'm saying, Southland Tales is of this mindset - more stoner intercuts of fire and water, not to mention constant interruption of a news-media interflux, based on CNN, of scrolls and apocalyptic devastation elsewhere in the world. To be honest, the apocalypse and future mishegos of Southland Tales is more work than it's worth, although apparently it caused a release of three graphic novels to explain its labyrinthine backstory that opens the movie in a barrage of information (the movie, naturally, starts at "chapter 4"). But then again, there are so many elements that are more work than they are worth in Southland Tales that it strains to start there.

What keeps me thinking about Southland Tales is, I guess, my perspective on movies. Southland Tales gives you so many reasons to hate the movie, so many moments that are deeply frustrating and ridiculous, miles beyond kitsch or interest. But then again, other movies have frustrated me and been ridiculous, and I've wound up appreciating them. A few weeks ago at a friend's house, I brought some movies to hang out to and enjoy, and suggested a favorite of mine, Bob Fosse's All That Jazz, a great movie that I can enjoy simply for its visuals and thrilling editing. I thought this movie was relatively easy to enjoy, but as we were ten minutes into it, with its plot aggressively criss-crossed from one scene to another without much explanation in these early scenes, my friends were checked out and laughing at its 70's decor. I forget sometimes that I can't expect others to have the perspective I have with movies - since I was 13, I've been challenging myself with movies that were beyond my intelligence level, with movies whose meanings and ideas are unclear, with movies I watch just because I hear things that interest me about them. Others don't want that and don't have to, I suppose. What it means is that I've come to accept being uncomfortable with a movie, and distinguishing elements that work from elements that don't.

The ability to do these two things is what keeps me thinking about Southland Tales. There are so many moments that frustrate, and the plot is so gonzo ridiculous that I can't blame anyone for checking out. But I also think to simply label it as amongst "The Worst Movies Ever Made" is dishonest. As is, honestly, declaring it one of the best. I love movies that fill me with new ideas and surprise me with great moments, but overall, this movie, I think, barely comes in over the 50% mark - I'm happy that I saw it, I love the thoughts it makes me have, but I wouldn't say it's worth the work you put in.

That said, those great moments are GREAT. Every now and again, a scene will just happen, and it will be astonishing - a scene of amazing humor and heart and ideas that simply explodes on screen. The funniest moments on screen involve Gellar's porn empressario Krysta Now, a woman who named herself with the "Now" "in order to differentiate myself from the other 76 Krystas in the business" and has a modest radio hit with a song called "Teen Horniness Is Not A Crime," which can be heard briefly, in one of the movies most uproarious asides. I'm shocked that Kelly gathered the cast he did, as one idea is just weirder than the next - Cheri Oteri, in particular, is too bizarre to swallow. The woman who once obsessed on SNL about "The Perfect Cheer" as a Neo-Marxist rebel badass in dreadlocks? It's hard not to laugh, and, in that case, you're not supposed to.

Still, Gellar and Mandy Moore share one hysterical scene of cross-accusations around The Rock, that's like a soap opera on acid (and porn), and Nora Dunn, as another rebel calling herself "Deepthroat 2" is full of great lines as well (talking about losing people in Abilene - this movie's 9/11 - she states, "This may come as a shock to you, Mr Smallhouse, but I have lost two people in Abilene. Two of my four ex-husbands on a fishing trip, which they took every year to bitch about me."). I loved another scene in which Amy Poehler and Wood Harris (The Wire's great Avon Barksdale... like I said, weird casting) fake a domestic squabble to get a cop to show up, and I love the awful beat poem Poehler screams when the cop arrives. I love Gellar in general in this movie, her look is perfect, and a couple of scenes of her talk show ("Join us for an in-depth discussion of the penetrating issues facing society today. Issues like abortion, terrorism, crime, poverty, social reform, quantum teleportation, teen horniness and war") had me toppling over.

I laugh so rarely at the movies these days, thinking every comedy I see is, in fact, not all that funny, that these scenes are worth the 2 hours that surround them. Beyond that, though, is one particular scene that is funny, touching, weird, brilliant, and truly, a revelation. I don't know how to describe it except to say it's unlike the rest of the movie, which is already not really like anything.

In the scene, Justin Timberlake, who up to this point has been irritating us with voiceover passages from The Book of Revelations, breaks out into an arcade-hall music video lipsynching the Killers' "All The Things That I've Done." He's wearing a shirt straight out of Donnie Darko, except its design - a bird-looking inkblot on a tight white t-shirt - seems to be made out of blood. We've already seen a rather unsightly scar around his eye, and know that he is a veteran of "World War 3" in Iraq, and now he's a sharpshooter. As the scene begins, in the middle of the song, cutting straight to its "I got soul but I'm not a soldier" tagline, it seems stupid, and as the backup dancers start with him, it seems stupider. But as it continues, full of grinding hot girls in skimpy outfits and Timberlake dumping beer on himself, something else takes hold - the unmistakable look of terror and pain in his eyes. Is it wrong of me to think of this scene as a statement of the mind-altering effects of war? Timberlake is so astonishingly communicative in this number, there's no way not to think that - he, rather fearlessly, shows us a life. And by roping us in with a music number, we don't even notice it happening.

I did not expect that scene, but it strikes me, individualy, as four of the best minutes in movies last year, and last year had many many great moments in movies. This is what I mean when I say that it's worth seeing Southland Tales - you need the rather bogus context surrounding the scenes that work, because Kelly, gifted and offputting crank that he is, can truly make a scene work.

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.