Experiments: Letters to my Father - Sidewalks of the City

Letters to my Father.

Part 1. Sidewalks of the City

Someday if you go, I wont’ be able to hear this song. Not in the same way. I came to love her all on my own, Lucinda Williams, at a different time and place from you. In 1997, we had that thin black radio with half an antenna broken off and the battery tray long missing. You’d come home at lunch and make a hotdog in beans or drowned in Spaghetti-O’s and go for a run. You’d only eat your oatmeal with hot milk, which you’d boil in a small saucepan, and leave it out on the counter the rest of the day, a soft white glaze on the surface of the metal. You’d listen to KBCO on the radio, and that was where I first heard her, at the time that Car Wheels On A Gravel Road became famous. I didn’t like it. I thought “Can’t Let Go,” the single that played on the progressive, KBCO-like hippie rock stations sounded like Bonnie Raitt, it was too “country” for me, at the time, who loved the trends of the day, ska and electronica (remember that one? Of course you don’t). And you agreed that you didn’t like the song – you liked her when she was more country. When you and mom would play “Passionate Kisses” by her and by Mary Chapin Carpenter, but it was her song. Even after I fell in love with Lucinda Williams, I didn’t start loving that song until now. What I’ve fallen in love with on Lucinda’s first two records, over time, is how happy she sounds, how in love with the world, how excited by life. Her records of aging have been extraordinary, but I’m so happy she had that excitement recorded.

Like this, I’m not talking about you, or maybe I am tangentially. Did we share an understanding over that time? We’ve had arguments since then, about Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, which I’d eventually believe was one of the greatest records of the 90’s, after I liked country a little more, and admired Williams for her conceptual wonder. I loved World Without Tears just as much, and that was actually my first record of hers. Still, Sweet Old World won’t leave me. I love it too much. Maybe from an artistic perspective, I can still argue that Car Wheels and World Without Tears are better albums, but what’s the point? Sweet Old World is like a great friend that I’ve had now for 7 or 8 years. Longer for you. You knew her when it came out, in 1992. You’d already made “Passionate Kisses” overplayed in the house. You could tell me that “Side of the Road” is the stuff of great songwriting, that it made her career.

It did, you’re right. You’re wrong, like you have been so many times, that it stopped when she moved away from country. The truth is you’re a purist, and not just in music, or in movies, or in art, or in writing, and I don’t even mean it as a compliment, although, perhaps I’ll tell you someday, that gave me taste. I have taste, Dad, I have the ability to parse through details, to have opinions, and it’s because of that, you’re purism, you’re ridiculous ridiculous purism. No, Essence and World Without Tears aren’t country, but they’re wonderful. They’re not as happy, but they are about something else we experience, loneliness and desire. The feeling that other people lift us into life and then push us away, because of a coldness in our souls. I love this theme, I love it expressed because people don’t say these things to each other. World Without Tears has a great song called “Atonement” that I’m sure you’d hate if you knew what it was. It’s all loud guitars and atonal singing, a yell, a fight. I love music that’s loud and atonal as much as I love the country that’s sweet and melodious that she used to sing. The truth is, I learned to appreciate, to find the good.

And you stayed pure. You wore it like your religion, the pure. Dylan you were willing to grow with, Van Morrison too, to let them get away with whatever they were working on at the time. You even defended Planet Waves and Infidels. Not anyone else. Not anything else. I wanted to explain to you after the surgery, after the last bout of radiation that left you so miserable, to love what you had, because that could leave you too. You wanted to run faster and longer. You wanted to feel like you felt before the cancer, before the last year put you so constantly at sanity’s back door. I cannot say that I would not be faced with the same grimness, I did not lose the things you lost, felt the way you felt. I would be miserable too, I know, and I also know that when you were at your worst, I couldn’t help thinking that I would not react the same way. I have forced myself, my whole life, to find the positive, to fixate on it. Some – Josh, you – would say I was being deluded. I do not think so.

Another thing I got from you: Taoism. Sorta. At least, I know that through you I got supported to look into it. Taoism, I’m sad to find, has so much of its thoughts locked up in detachment and dismissal of all that is great in the world. I took it as the opposite – to find love and warmth in the worst of moments. To see what great sadness can offer us, to find the hope when all is bleak. I do not think this is a bad thing. I want kids so I can teach them to see the world like this. But perhaps they’d need a consciousness that’s as haunted as yours to get to the place I got. Because yours in the consciousness that formed in me.

Sidewalks of the city. You’d look back on that record, on Sweet Old World, and it would be the song you’d remember, though you remembered that she’d written a song, “Little Angel, Little Brother,” about her brother’s suicide. You remembered he was a poet. So was her father. You remembered she did a beautiful cover of Nick Drake’s “Which Will” that she recorded in one take at 2 in the morning. You thought “He Never Got Enough Love” was a pretty great song for a defense attorney, maybe you’d break it out in trial.

“Sidewalks of the City” is a song that should evoke my viewpoint on life. It’s a song of sad, uncertain observations – a man with hunger in his face, crumbling buildings and graffiti. Women sleeping in doorways. “Somehow you just don’t feel right,” she says compendiously. Yet is this a song of fear, of uncertainty? Not really. What a grand chorus – “Hold me, baby, give me some faith. Let me know you’re there, let me touch your face. Give me love, give me grace. Tell me good things, tell me that my world is safe.” The fiddles swell, the guitar cascades in scales, the drums come in. Dr. John plays bass. I’m amazed you never told me that – he was, after all, a friend of The Band’s, and you love to point out any friends of the Band, anyone who’s ever mentioned The Band, anyone who ever held a Band album in their hand, even for a second. Some day, actually, Lucinda Williams would write for Rolling Stone’s issue on the greatest rock artists a tribute to The Band. Still, you don’t give her a ton of credit past 1992. Purist.

This song is so pure. That fiddle is so beautiful. This is not lyrically a warm song, it’s the grandeur of the chorus, the sweet rise of her voice, that high, wise fiddle that makes the song warm. I may have never been willing to acknowledge it, but it’s one of Williams’ most perfect songs. Like “Side of the Road” and “Jackson” and “I Lost It.” I played one for you from World Without Tears you actually liked – “Fruits of My Labor,” another one of great, wounding simplicity that breaks hearts. Actually we saw her perform it, at the Boulder Theater. You leaned over to me and said, “She’s got a great voice, doesn’t she?” It makes sense you’d love this song, it’s a pure soul number. I love it when Lucinda gets experimental, but you only like the experiments that wind up in determined genres. At least you’re consistent.

Your taste is what made me. In the same way it limits you to not see the greatness in the world, it allowed me to pick it out when I saw it, to be a man of taste, to discern. You talked to me in college when I was reading The Sun Also Rises about Jake’s rituals – the way he shaved, the order and exactitude with which he admired bullfighters. This was what it meant to be lost, you said, to take comfort in the patterns and rituals that help you organize the world, to admire the things that made exact sense. I suppose I sought the opposite, disorder, and acknowledged disorder was best when it went down with a spoonful of order. Like Sonic Youth or “Atonement” or Joni Mitchell’s Mingus, there are elements of pop, of structure, of wisdom there, and I learned to love what took me a while to get to know. You, I think, sought beauty and expression, but needed to see it right away. You found hope in Before Night Falls, which you made me see a second time – this poor, persecuted, gay Cuban writer, whose life was one big kick in the pants, as life is for many, but he found his soul through writing, through expression. It’s the same reason you loved Look Homeward, Angel and Go Tell It On The Mountain. This was your pet theme, people who learned to express through the indignities of life. Beauty that rose from ugliness.

The purist, always. “Sidewalks of the City” is the rose that grows out of the concrete where it lies. Tell me good things, tell me that my world is safe.

A letter to Ryan Adams, who announced his retirement on his blog this week

Ryan Adams announced his retirement on his Cardinals blog earlier this week. He's since taken it down, but not before I could write the following letter. It was, however, before I could figure out how to send it to him.

Dear Ryan,

A friend who works for Jambase forwarded me the link to your blog saying that you’d like to retire from music. In it, you spoke of the pressures of being on the road, of health that needed attention, of fans and journalists speculating on your behavior and calling you an asshole for things you said. You spoke of someone you loved that you’ve lost, and of appreciating the day to day things that a life on the road never allowed to appreciate.

I’ve looked at your website exactly one time in my life, to find the set list for the one show of yours I was able to go to, at the Paramount Theater in Seattle in late January 2008. Because of this, I’ve never seen any of your comments you’ve made on your blog, not about your loss, for which I don’t know what you’re referring to, but I’m also very sorry; loss is difficult. I don’t know what you’ve written that’s been taken out of context, and I don’t know why you’re labeled an asshole, although I admit that stories of you freaking out on stage are sometimes kinda funny, and only illustrate the things I love about you, and maybe musicians in general. I mean, if those of us that are fans of musicians are allowing our pain and uncertainties be sublimated into music, it only makes sense that the people that create that sublimation would sometimes act out of pain and uncertainty. They speak to the irrationality that we’re not all that good at expressing.

But back to the one time I went to your website, to find that set list. That concert is still the only concert I’ve been to in my life, by anyone, that started on time. My friends and I arrived at 8:05 p.m. and already found you midway through your first song – which apparently was “Bartering Lines,” although I didn’t see it. We were quickly ushered to our seats as you segued seamlessly into “Peaceful Valley.” I see that you perform “Peaceful Valley” quite often, but I didn’t know how you’d morphed the violins into guitars when performing it live. Nothing had ever sounded like this in all of your songs – with the guitars so expressive, loud, and mournful. Your voice was always plenty expressive in that song’s silent bout of “Trying to find a peaceful song/ to sing when everything goes wrong,” but in harmony with the Cardinals, it was also sweet, soothing, and entirely complementary of the new guitar part. “Peaceful Valley” was already my favorite song on Jacksonville City Nights– a tall order, but more on that later – but this was incredible. Segueing into “Mockingbirdsing,” also, it was a great comfort – you sang “Mockingbirdsing” in your highest register, and the “Don’t give up on love” climax was more sweet and emphatic than usual. In a way, the thought hadn’t occurred to me – not giving up on love. I guess I’m not in love now, I have no relationship to speak of, and when I was in love before, it didn’t really last. It’s nice to know I should hold out for a little bit more.

I’m a big fan of yours, but not enough to follow the blogs, the media interpretation of the blogs (yawn), the every tribulation of rumor that following someone online entails. I haven’t seen you enough (I haven’t seen you twice, for that matter) to say, as one fan did of the show you did, that the version of “Cold Roses” you performed lacked passion. I don’t know how it would be possible to reach that conclusion, but more importantly, what a dumb, snobby thing to say – and what a revocation of the gift that is that song. “Cold Roses” is brilliant, brilliant. What a song, what a guitar part, what a harmony. I don’t think you’re capable of singing it without passion, and I don’t know what that would sound like. I think it’s nuts to imply that any and every appearance of that song everywhere is not a gift to people who love music. I’m thankful for that song, as I am of so many of your great songs, and I will likely put it on in my car when I decide to stop writing this and leave my office to go get lunch.

Let me explain how I became a fan of you, and what your music means to me. I’m not going to say some things that get said that I find untrue – your music did not help me through the darkest parts of my life. I’m not your #1 fan. I haven’t followed every word you’ve written. I don’t even own Demolition.

I was in a coffee shop, sometime in early 2005, when someone played “Let It Ride.” I went home and downloaded it illegally (sorry. But you’ve gotten plenty of my money since then). I couldn’t get enough of it – what a song! It’s still, I think, your most perfect song, full of energy and excitement. When I downloaded it, I couldn’t seem to find a version that started from the beginning, with the full guitar flourish with which it begins. So, I paid to download the song. I loved it so much, I figured there had to be more songs from Cold Roses I would like, so I downloaded “Friends” and “If I Am A Stranger.” I got laid to “Friends” once, and it seemed to put in context to me all the sweetness and warmth of that song. The truth was, though I’d always avoided listening to you (I mean, so many albums, so much effort to get to know them), you could create a brilliant song, you had a gift – a song that, like all great songs, could make concise and clear a simple emotion, and make you return, melodically, to it over and over in your head. Songs that affected your thoughts and ideas and your heart and your mind.

Still, I resisted buying an album. Then, my father saw you on Letterman, which he always watches, playing “Come Pick Me Up.” He told me I’d love the song. I downloaded that one, too. It immediately became one of my most played songs on my iPod. I picked up and moved to Seattle (unrelated to you, sorry), and decided the first album I needed to buy was Cold Roses. Though I didn’t love it immediately, I fell in love with it one song at a time, realizing each one’s perfection. I realized, actually, there wasn’t a bad song on it. Then I bought Rock And Roll after downloading “So Alive.” I realized there actually wasn’t a bad song on there either. Then, by then, to Easy Tiger, which I bought the day it came out. Then to Jacksonville City Nights.

I’d like to send you, someday, the 6 page essay I decided to write on Jacksonville City Nights, which I would actually include in a list of the most influential albums of my life. What a brave, weird, confused, varied, unique record. There is much I want to say about it, except that I identified with its frayed nerves and broken-glass pianos. I wanted to cry at the harmonies in “Dear John.” I’d listen to “Don’t Fail Me Now” when it was cold and feel understood. I’d loved “A Kiss Before I Go” nearly as much as “Let It Ride” and sang like an asshole to the harmonies in “Withering Heights” as loud as I could in my car. And then there was “Peaceful Valley,” the most frayed, and yet the most hopeful of all of the songs on the record – is it a song that seeks death as solace, or is it something that creates what it’s looking for, a peaceful song to sing when everything goes wrong? I didn’t quite feel, as crazy as I felt at the time, that everything had gone wrong for me, but I did feel like the song protected me some, blanketed me from forces driving me on to seek a peaceful valley somewhere.

My dad, who loved you on Letterman, went out and bought 29, an album he didn’t care for, so I stole his copy, and I made him copies of Cold Roses and Jacksonville City Nights, which he loved. Luckily, I loved 29 enough for the both of us. I’ve written extensively about that record too, which I see as a primer on survival. “Most of my friends are married and making them babies. To most of them I’ve already died.” Sometimes I look back on life and I marvel at my ability to stay alive, to look back at my dead dog’s pile of bones and be shocked that they represent the passage of time, that time has passed at all. “Strawberry Wine,” though “imperfect,” I guess, in a way that “Let It Ride” or “A Kiss Before I Go” are not, might be my favorite of all of your songs – I love how your voice trembles in the “Don’t spend too much time on the other side/ let the daylight in” chorus, and I think the line is, in its way, how you’ve survived. I guess I can’t say the imperfections in “Strawberry Wine” are my favorites – because I love “Carolina Rain” so much. And because I love “Voices” so much. And because I think “Elizabeth, You Were Born To Play That Part” was born to play in my car while it’s gray and raining (I live in Seattle, after all, so that’s often).

Since then, I’ve gotten caught up on the pre-Cardinals albums. Let me tell you that I don’t see them on playlists of your shows much (I don’t really know your playlists that well anyway), but “My Winding Wheel” and “The Avalanche” and “Hotel Chelsea Nights” are also songs I feel are perfect, even if they’re more direct than some of your braver works. I think “My Love For You Is Real” is a great song to get high to – you can’t stop smiling at it. I love working out to “The Drug’s Not Working” and to “Shakedown on 9th Street.” The truth is, it’s destiny for me to be a fan of your music, and I don’t much care about the other stuff.

So, I wanted to write you to take objection with your feeling that nothing you did mattered, or any of the “art will set you free” bullshit self-pitying artists can’t seem to take as truth. You are forced to feel how you do about the work that you’ve done, but I don’t have to accept it. Your music has been a part of my life, it has been my friend, it has known more of my thoughts than most people ever will. I’ve defended you against detractors. I’ve said, to many people, that the show at the Paramount in January of 2008 was possibly the best concert of my life. I wrote about “Elizabeth…” in my Great Songs series that I write for, 29 for my blog, and tried to get my essay on Jacksonville published. I hope you take some pride in the work you’ve done, and I hope you matter to yourself, but ultimately it’s irrelevant because your music matters so much to me.

With love and respect,

Ethan Kutinsky
Seattle, WA 98103
ekutinsky@gmail.com
ohsweetnuthin.blogspot.com

Best Movies of 2008

I had to wait a bit to make my list, which is perhaps realistic for movie goers who aren't paid to see movies. Since the Oscar-consideration calendar has now crept back into, like, October, keeping up with the "prestige" releases is a little exhausting. Luckily, I disliked both The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (It's Old Man Does Forrest Gump for far too long... before it's a totally unconvincing love story. Although, the aging trick is pretty spectactular) and Revolutionary Road (just mean spirited), so, my list didn't even undergo many adjustments recently. I still, however, haven't had a chance to see some movies I'd like to - The Wrestler, Nothing But The Truth, Frozen River, The Class, Frost/Nixon, and, I think more importantly, a number of smaller, independent releases that have a chance to truly impress me. That's why I think the truest Best of the Year lists are ongoing. And that the only real #1 of any year is the movie that moved you the most, which is perhaps why my #1 pick this year has 0 Oscar buzz. It is, however, closest to my heart.

Best Movies of 2008:
1. Elegy
Perhaps 2008 is the year of getting old. As Benjamin Button's shallow ruminations on getting old soar to Awards victory, Roger Ebert pointed out that the movie about aging people will really remember is Charlie Kaufmann's Synecdoche, NY. Well, I didn't love that one either. What I did love was Elegy, a disquieting, magnificently powerful movie not simply of aging, but of the concept of aging. Following David Kapesh (Ben Kingsley), a mid-60's professor who begins in affair with Consuela, a much younger student played by Penelope Cruz, Elegy is the story of the way not just age affects their romance, but of Kapesh's own understanding of age, his own hangups about how old he looks and appears to others. It's a movie about the way constant anxiety over that appearance clouds what actually exists.

Isabel Coixet is a first time director, but she makes the sweet, soft images of Elegy combine with two magnificent performances to discuss what love, friendship, desire, and even our interactions with each other mean, past our own understanding of them. In fact, it makes a fairly convincing argument that our understanding gets in the way of actual interactions. I was left with more to think about after Elegy than any other movie I saw all year, and it's because it simply told a story of its characters that respected their humanity, their mystery, their desires, and their misconceptions. I dare you to find any moment in any of the eventual Best Picture nominees that disarms more than the truly astonishing scene in which Consuela, now desperate, with short hair, returns to David and strips for him. If you've seen the movie, you know why this scene is so wrenching and unforgettable. If you've seen Penelope Cruz's face in it, you know why she gave the performance of the year. Little did I know while seeing that scene, the movie would be impossible to top too.

2. Milk
The prestige movie that actually delivers. Gus Van Sant's Milk makes two very smart decisions in chronicling the life of slain San Francisco politician Harvey Milk - first, to focus on the nuts and bolts of the political process, on the greased hands, illogical causes, and the piecemeal way in which Milk rises to more and more prominent posts. Second, in the astonishing work of Sean Penn, whose nebbishy tics and passion make his joy and nervousness ours. Milk gets very personal towards the end, and it works and wounds because the process of believing in something is given such specific, grand weight - and because we believe right along with him.

3. Pineapple Express
Secretly the best of the "Apatow gang" comedies, Pineapple Express did something no other comedy this year made me do: make me laugh. Not just laugh, but double over laughing, with stoners, at stoners, with action movie fans, at action movie fans. Pineapple Express loves the bonds stoners and friends create and never lets you believe that bond is less than real. James Franco, Seth Rogen, and Danny McBride are great, but only because their weird love of each other and occasional hatred of themselves makes their bond in the movie surprisingly effective and totally believable. It might have taken the breezy, drama-helmed direction of David Gordon Green to make a story of friendship outshine a dopey action-buddy narrative - and still be hilarious.

4. Rachel Getting Married
Jonathan Demme's story of a recovering, self-obsessed, frazzled woman returning from rehab to attend her sister's wedding is a gritty, shaky-cam excuse for great performances. But it's also a simple, breezy, occasionally gripping-with-awkwardness story of accepting people, of how we're our own worst enemies, of blame and love and caring for the people around us. Plenty argued that they found the family of Rachel obnoxious, or couldn't deal with the jutting, rough camera work, but it all seemed to me a grand exercise of getting in the lives of the people it chronicled with great respect and sincerity. Maybe its crew is self-obsessed and crazy, but then maybe all of us are too - at least they know how to throw a loving, honest wedding, and we just got to watch.

5. Happy-Go-Lucky
Mike Leigh's most loving, human movie, Happy-Go-Lucky has the good sense to give us a woman who is happy, positive, and improves the lives of everyone around her, and not punish her for it. Sally Hawkins as Poppy, with her great boots and clangy arm of bracelets, flitters like a lawn ornament, but she also helps and cares and stands up for herself and people around her. Shot with Leigh's most gorgeous cinematic eye yet, Happy-Go-Lucky is magnificently warm, well crafted, and deserving to be told; it's the first movie of his I've seen that didn't ever have me looking at my watch, and it's one I'd watch again. I wish it didn't get a little too easy in its final minute, but Happy is a true triumph of people acting warmly towards one another.

6. Wall-E
Maybe as usual with Pixar movies, I'm gaga for it without feeling the grip I felt in better movies, like Elegy and Happy-Go-Lucky. I too gazed lovingly at the bleak but warm view of the future - fat people flying around with constant giant sodas, a world abandoned into garbage and soullessness. It's the hater in me that points out that Wall-E is better social satire than romance, but with images of the future this indelible, there's no doubt Wall-E is bound to be one of the most significant Pixar movies yet, a grand leap in ambition and scope, and, robot or no, made animation even more able to tell important human stories

7. Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist
Even if you're sick of Michael Cera playing the most adorable teenage nerd in the world, Nick & Norah's story of streetwise privileged New York teens is a wild and wonderful story of a great night out. I wish that all of the supposed 17 and 18 year olds didn't look and act like they were in their mid-20's, but maybe New York's teenagers age faster than the rest of us. Regardless, Nick & Norah is the movie I went in grouchiest and came out most excited this year - a bit of young romance and wonder at the world illuminating the possibilities of night life in any city.

8. The Dark Knight
Ignoring the ass-busting running time and the rather unnecessary Two Face plotline, The Dark Knight is the most credible "dark" superhero story, perhaps ever, because of Heath Ledger's combination of blissful anomie and Christian Bale's stolid righteousness. Ledger takes his Joker to such horrific, lived-in dispeptic superiority, far more than any performer would ever be expected of. But it's easy to overlook that it's truly the combination of Ledger and Bale that makes the movie so gripping - its humanist message only works if you root for the Bat, too.

9. Doubt
The prestige movie I'd dismissed as stagebred fodder turned out to be far more than expected, not about doubt, certainty, religion, or Catholic church sex scandals, but about the world of suspicion and responsibility. Meryl Streep - who is, after all, Meryl Streep - gives such a harrowingly cruelty-laced performance that it overshadows the doubt and certainty of everyone else in the movie (with the possible exception of the wonderfully sensitive Viola Davis), and it allows her remaining humanity to underscore the film's brilliant sense of parochial duty.

10. The Edge of Heaven
Touching on religion, politics, nationalism, the illusion of geographical line, language, and the frail bonds of child and parent, it would be easy to paint The Edge of Heaven, from Turkish director Fatih Akin, as the grand European answer to Babel. And it is - grand in that it's quiet, intimate, unflashy, a criss-cross of love, concern, and a desire to reconnect that respects the grand, small connections of us all.

Best Music of the Year

Top Albums of 2008

1. TV On The Radio Dear Science

What a year. Music in 2008 was more passionate and exciting than in any year this decade, and it seemed to crib from whatever was necessary - the 80's and early 90's came back in style with synthesizers everywhere, punk giutars roared back, and techno was safe for the radio. This year, I think we moved backwards to move forwards and wound up creating music that was wildly inventive - new in terms of scope and topic and even pushing sounds past what we thought we'd seen and heard.

I was already a TV On The Radio fan, but nothing the New York art-hard rock-punk-world-techno band had done before sounded anything like the furious guitars and calm vocals that open "Halfway Home," a song of dizzying ambivalence of death, comfort, confusion, and acceptance. The song is electrifying, but also magnificently warm and singable, in a way that even the band's best work hadn't been. That's true of the record as a whole - letting the rap giddiness of "Dancing Choose" eagerly beckon into love songs like "Family Tree," and letting each song be a profound bed of emotion and poetry. Music like this is astonishing in and of itself anyway, but the lyrics open Dear Science into a world you don't expect - a blazing, brave confrontation with meaning, passion, existence. By closing in the 1-2-3 punch of "Shout Me Out," "DLZ," and "Lover's Day," TV On The Radio shows excitement, fury, and love be one and the same, exist in the same breath. "Yes of course there are miracles," they conclude in "Day," "A lover that loves, that's one," before unleashing a filthy, beautiful song of sex and longing that makes explicit and raging all the passion that fuels questioning, love, and living. Dear Science longs for answers and then gives us some.

2. Q Tip The Renaissance

I can think of only one possible reason for The Renaissance not being near the top of every critic's top ten list this year - it's so fun and ebulliant from beginning to end that it just reminds of you of every other great Q Tip and Tribe Called Quest song ever made. That has to be it, because The Renaissance makes you feel high from the opening beat of "Johnny Is Dead" and makes you perfectly content to remain there until "Shaka" signs off with dramatic hope. Or maybe it just didn't sell that well.

The truth is rap and rock have a double standard in the way music critics talk about them. Rock can be totally irrelevant, the albums can be listened to by 15 people in Seattle or Williamsburg and still wind up on top of most critics best of the year lists, whereas rap albums have to have Lil Wayne's numbers to be considered relevant - ignoring mainstream rap in favor of less successful albums is tantamount to cultural illiteracy. Well, I dare you to listen to Lil Wayne's dully mediocre Tha Carter III then follow it up with The Rennaisance and tell me you like Wayne better. The Renaissance is so varied, wild, packed with guest stars (like "Life Is Better," featuring a Norah Jones vocal that plasters a smile permanently to your face), and exciting, it becomes a giddy, energizing force that doesn't even break between songs. The theatrics of "Shaka" are more than well deserved - by the end of The Renaissance, they're a curtain call earning a standing ovation.

3. Madonna Hard Candy

In a year in which the 80's infected absolutely everything from fashion and music in rock, pop, and R/B, it should make sense that the best neo-80's sound came from Madonna. It may be her 11th record, but Hard Candy tops a decade of Madonna at her Euro-techno finest. "Give It 2 Me" turns the worst synthesizer of 1988 into a propulsive club anthem and gives Kanye West his best moment of the year (seriously) in "Beat Goes On." It offers the promise of a "one stop candy shop" in the opening moments but allows ruminations on failed relationships that run from wrenching intimacy to furious resolve, often in the same song ("Miles Away," "Incredible"), and considering her year of divorce and custody tabloid mishegos, songs like "Voices" and "Devil Wouldn't Recognize You" allow a rather shocking bit of bruised intimacy into the Madonna fray. The truth is, since most indie music is obsessed with 80's synth and techno anyway, most indie bands would do themselves a favor analyzing what goes so right with Hard Candy - sure, it may have plenty of input from the biggest pop producers and stars in the business, but it's all Madonna, confessing and cracking a whip all over the dance floor, as only she can.

4. Eagles of Death Metal Heart On

What was once a joke band to keep Josh Hommes occupied between Queens of the Stone Age records wound up making an album of more humor and bravado than even Queens have been capable of in their last two records. Sure, the dufus-in-tight-pants schtick is in full effect in "Wannabe In LA" and "High Voltage" ("We're gettin' freaky in the shadows of the night," Hommes and Jesse Hughes sing), but there's also a rock sensibility that was only part of the show before on this record, and in "Heart On" or "Cheap Thrills," the record is so loud and exciting, you forget you're supposed to be laughing. That's because Heart On is the dufus-with-a-broken-heart EoDM album, and "Now I'm A Fool" makes a fairly convincing case for this. With all emotion, excitement, and humor intact, the finale, "I'm Your Torpedo," manages to be the loudest and most satisfying rock song of the year - and one that could have been made by no other band.

5. My Morning Jacket Evil Urges

MMJ deserve credit for expanding their sound from any recognizable alt-country genre exercise and indulging their instinct to free themselves from expectation, to engage in a few evil urges themselves. The results, like "Highly Suspicious" and "Evil Urges," sung in falsetto, are ridiculous and astonishing. The rock numbers like "I'm Amazed" and "Aluminum Park" are more infused with belief and passion than repeating another MMJ album would have allowed, and if it weren't for a few ponderous, supposed-to-be-deep clunkers in the middle, the excitement of "Touch Me I'm Going to Scream, Pt. 2" and "Smokin' From Shootin'" would have made this album legendary. As it is, we're lucky that this album reaches such astonishing highs, even if it isn't sustained.

6. Beck Modern Guilt

Beck caps his 2000's winning streak with an album that pushes his anxiety and techno instincts into a deadly standoff - "Orphans" sees Beck wrestling with his maker, "Volcano" sees him jumping into a volcano, and "Soul of a Man" has him waxing existential. Using Danger Mouse as his dance muse, Beck loses his way and, in 34 wise, concise minutes, helps us grapple with our own dual instincts to party and drink ourselves to death.

7. Kings of Leon Only By The Night

Following their instinct to get psychadelic and long, opened up on Because of the Times, Kings show what their best at - wild rockers like "Crawl" and "Manhattan" that allow for Caleb Followill's southern-mumbles voice to bury a hard-partying consciousness in great rock, and then set it free on glorious, sad jams like "Cold Desert."

8. MGMT Oracular Spectacular

Where Madonna got the 80's techno pop right, but for the indie version, MGMT is as great it comes. Subversive or no, "Time to Pretend" and "Kids" are party-friendly and just as fun in skinny jeans.

9. Jaymay Autumn Fallin'

The year's best singer-songwriter debut, this forgotten March release is a warm, well written, beautifully simple record of heartbreak, easing moments of excitement like "Grey or Blue" into daring, lovely Dylanesque rambles like "Sea Green, See Blue" and "You'd Rather Run."

10. Raphael Saadiq The Way I See It

There's plenty of R/B on the radio to steal its thunder, but by sounding older and more retro than everyone, Saadiq's way of seeing also sounds more seductive and wild.

Top Singles of 2008

1. "Disturbia" Rihanna

I didn't believe Rihanna was a real pop star until "Disturbia," a techno'd-out horror story that really is a song of feeling cut off and overwhelmed. Addicting and pulsating, "Disturbia" works because Rihanna's voice sounds more vulnerable and in control than any song she's done prior.

2. "Forever" Walter Meego

An indie-techno wonder that earns the power to say (through a voice-box, natch) "I can make you excited."

3. "Electric Feel" MGMT

The best of the MGMT techno-rock numbers, "Electric Feel" gets you sailing on its synth-flute beat and dorky charm.

4. "Paper Planes" M.I.A.

It takes a Tamil rebel and a chorus of gun shots to make the hustler anthem of the year. Santogold took much of MIA's wild-ethnic-superstar thunder this year, but "Paper Planes" proves why MIA's the real deal.

5. "So What" Pink

A kiss off like no other, if it weren't for its simple melody, and great techno chorus, this would just be another Stewart Smalley affirmation.

6. "Forever" Chris Brown

The techno R/B seduction anthem that everyone tried to make this year, Brown's "Forever" is the one you want to go home with.

7. "Keeps Gettin' Better" Christina Aguilera

Getting the 70's into the 80's dance party, Aguilera is dirrty and beautiful at once.

8. "A-Punk" Vampire Weekend

An indie rock guitar dance song that's like a festival-rock bounce anthem gone giddy.

9. "What U Got" Colby O'Donis featuring Akon

I'll take "What U Got" and its sexy curiosity over the balcony-humping "Love In This Club" at any dance party.

10. "Ready For The Floor" Hot Chip

Like "Electric Feel" performed by more sincere robots.

Top 10 Songs from Non-great albums

1. "Real Love" Lucinda Williams (from Little Honey)

2. "The Cheapest Key" Kathleen Edwards (from Asking For Flowers)

3. "Blue Ridge Mountains" Fleet Foxes (from Fleet Foxes)

4. "Strange Times" The Black Keys (from Attack and Release)

5. "Love Lockdown" Kanye West (from 808s and Heartbreaks)

6. "Living Well Is The Best Revenge" R.E.M. (from Accelerate)

7. "I'm A Lady" Santogold (from Santogold)

8. "2080" Yeasayer (from All Hour Symbols)

9. "Drunk With The Thought of You" Sheryl Crow (from Detours)

10. "Magick" Ryan Adams & The Cardinals (from Cardinology)

Best of the Year 2008: The Real List

Every year, I spend some time during the flurry of annual Best Of The Year lists is movies, music, and TV to reflect on what I think is the best of the year, at least, the most meaningful books, songs, albums, movies, TV shows, etc., that I had not known about or experienced a year ago. For most people, any year can include any number of works of arts from any number of years – this year, I saw for the first time the classic The Lion In Winter, which was entertaining and theatrical enough, and released 40 years ago. This year I saw The Rules of the Game for the first time, a seminal film released in 1939. I did not include either of those movies on my list because, as great as they were, they were works I appreciated without being moved, changed. These ten works, new or not, meant more to me.

1. Paul Bowles The Sheltering Sky (1949)
So often, I read a modern novel, and find a consciousness and character at work that I identify with immediately. I’ve fallen in love with works by Rick Moody, George Saunders, Paul Auster, Alice Munro, and read their books so precisely that I feel I have no tolerance for older works, works of the American and world lit canon that I feel like I missed out on because I wasn’t forced to read them in college.

That changed this year. The modern works I read that I was supposed to love this year – Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories, James McManus’s Positively Fifth Street, Neil Gordon’s The Company You Keep – I saw through, detested, or gave up on midway through. Instead, far and away the greatest book I read this year was the Paul Bowles classic The Sheltering Sky, published in 1949, a classic I didn’t even know I’d missed. The book explores Port and Kit Moresby, two Americans wandering Africa sometime after the war – for what reason? We’re not sure really, and neither are they, desperate to shed off the skin of the civility of their New York world.

The Sheltering Sky gives them what they’re looking for, in a way, and it’s an act of both great indictment and vindication to have a second act of your book titled “The Earth’s Sharp Edge” – that is, the edge with which Kit and Port fall off. In it, Port contracts a disease and Kit collapses under the pressure only to release herself in a way she certainly wasn’t expecting. Is society a lid that keeps down the madness of Port and Kit’s soul, or is it what makes them desperate, lonely, and vicious to one another? Bowles has some answers, but it’s the fact that the questions are asked, that madness is granted and warned against, and that it’s written in a style like Hemingway, minimal, cutting, giving you nothing but what you need to know, and letting the bleakness of the surroundings and the prose tell you everything you need to know and then some. Right now, just writing it, I want to reread every word and pick out the factors that made these characters delusional, angry, pitiful, and representative of all of us, protected by a sky above us that creates order.

2. Playtime (1967)
This year, a friend’s fantastic birthday purchase of a Netflix subscription has yielded me an opportunity to see a number of amazing movies I’ve always meant to see. I saw Tokyo Story and La Dolce Vita and Beauty and the Beast, and what a gift each of those movies are. The one that surprised me the most, though, is Playtime, a movie that pushes you right in the center of its wonderful concoction of modern metropolitan France and leaves you in awe and smiling for 2 hours. A world of an order, and of specific modes of movement and behavior, Jacques Tati’s Paris is bewildering, ridiculous, and full of people grasping for connection and understanding.

The movie is a love poem to modern society even as it spotlights the contrivances that keep people from connecting. In one of its many nimble, extraordinary sequences, a man and a woman in separate apartments engage in a bit of a seduction, as we watch from their outside windows. Yet they don’t actually interact, they’re separated by the wall and the televisions each are watching. The two complement each other without even being aware of each other’s existence. Tati created Playtime as absolutely a movie with no equal – a song of movement and interaction that moves, unconcerned with plot or character, simply wrapping us up in the world that we’re so lucky to live in.

3. “Forever” Walter Meego
The 80’s are everywhere, and for proof, line up the pop music of the year next to the indie music – you’d find the two not so distinct. Songs like MGMT’s “Electric Feel” and Hot Chip’s “Ready For The Floor” – songs, basically, about love and dancing – fit right in with Chris Brown’s “Forever” or Madonna’s “Give It 2 Me.” Of all of these, though, music made me dance, laugh, and appreciate all things indie, no single song moved better or excited more than Walter Meego’s “Forever.”

I heard it first at a concert I saw for no particular reason, and found Walter Meego’s guitar/voicebox/synth combo charming and fun. Yet “Forever” is more than that – it’s that sense of fun turned into something that elevates and restores. Its choruses are bracketed by the line “I can make you excited,” and it proves itself right – full of bass, pulse, and drive, the song is excitement, about music, about love, about being alive. Songs did better than “Forever” in both pop sales and indie recognition (although, I did see the “Forever” video playing in an American Eagle in LA, and later on an ad for Heineken), but none elicited more easy smiles than this one – and certainly, none meant more to me.

4. Penelope Cruz in Elegy
In this time of Oscar prognostication, people write about Best Actress contenders in terms of “slots.” Is there room for Meryl Streep in Doubt to be nominated without taking up Angelina Jolie’s “slot” for Changeling? We used to watch movies throughout the year and then decide who was deserving of nominations. I for one would ask that people remember a woman who seems to already have a “slot” for Best Supporting Actress – Penelope Cruz, who will be deserving, too, when she is nominated this year for her magnificently fiery work in Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

But her better performance was in a lead role, in Elegy, and she almost certainly won’t be nominated. As the young object of desire by a mid-60’s professor, played by Ben Kingsley, Cruz manages to be mysterious under his gaze, as well as gorgeously open and naïve. She is full of love, excitement, and desire, and it is perhaps her genuineness that, along with his own self-centered concerns about his age, keeps Kingsley’s David Kapesh from really understanding her. Cruz manages to convey everything through gorgeous glances and perfect smiles, but it’s one unforgettable, devastating scene towards the end of the movie in which Cruz gets very very naked, that we truly understand every emotion she feels. The scene is wordless, but loud – Cruz proved herself as capable and powerful as any working today.

5. Tina Fey as Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live
Without a doubt the single most important bit of fictional television all year. For around six weeks of completely inspired impersonations, Fey deeply wounded a political figure perhaps more than any actor, comedian, commentator, or talk-show host since Chevy Chase skewered Gerald Ford in 1975 – and she did it simply by mimicking her, by looking like her in stately dresses, and by sounding like her when she spoke. Her impersonation of Palin’s wild inconsistencies and quirky-moronic defense mechanisms during the Palin-Katie Couric interview were only hair’s breath from realty anyway, but it allowed for lines like “and now I’m going to impress you with some fancy pageant walking” or “For those of you Joe Six-Packs playing a drinking game at home? Maverick” to be even funnier because they didn’t seem all that off from the real thing. This was a moment that we can remember as the way true comedy, done well can really matter – and can matter more by being of high quality.

6. The Straight Story (1999)
Another great Netflix viewing that I didn’t expect to love and miss as much as I did. David Lynch’s The Straight Story seems like a joke on paper – a straightforward narrative of a nearly blind old man (Richard Farnsworth) driving his lawn mower across Iowa to see his dying brother – and perhaps that’s why it took me nearly ten years to see it. But the amazing thing about the movie is that Farnsworth, with his small, searing eyes, seems to be the only person capable of allowing Lynch to express his sincerity. Unlike his movies that, with varying success, plunge the duality of human desire and cruelty, The Straight Story is about the kindness and compassion that binds us all together. You see Lynch’s vision in his shots anyway, and maybe that’s the greatest aspect of The Straight Story – that kindness can exist in people you’re suspicious of, and that it can sustain you.

7. TV On The Radio Dear Science
Every year, it gets more and more exhausting to try and keep up with critical music tastes – even this year, when I feel I’ve been relatively up-to-date on music coming out in the world, I don’t recognize half the albums of most critic’s top ten lists. Usually, I pick whatever album meant the most to me as the album of the year – Neko Case or PJ Harvey or Blackalicious, or whomever I just happened to find give me the most sustained, exciting record of the year.

Well, I’m good and shocked to find that most critics seem to agree that Dear Science seems practically on another plane to every other mainstream release this year. “Halfway Home” opens the record with its furious guitars and drums, and shocks you with its lyrics of consternation at so many eternal questions. Science is TV’s eclectic, loud confrontation at the things that create meaning in our life – the threat of death, the existence of love. They do it with Tunde Adebimpe’s astonishing lyrical abilities, and with music that can be poppy, rap, punk, virulent, sexy, or lovely at any given moment. For a band that was already unique in their spot in modern music, Dear Science is their most listenable, and most ambitious record. When Return to Cookie Mountain was released in 2006 and everyone called it amazing, you sometimes had to work to enjoy some of its weaker cuts; it was excellent but cerebral. Dear Science is the first record of theirs I loved as much as I admired.

8. Battles, Performance at Bumbershoot
This is a work of art that only those lucky enough to see Battles perform live can appreciate, as seeing music live is so different from listening to it on your own. Particularly at a setting like Bumbershoot – Seattle’s annual 3-day, outdoor music festival over Labor Day weekend – where the excitement of music and art is infectious for everyone wandering from one unheard act to another. I’d never heard of Battles before the show, and nothing could have prepared me anyway – a drummer, guitarist, and keyboard player who are maybe electronic, or maybe art-rock, or maybe industrial, or maybe hard rock, or maybe pop, and who each seem to play whatever they feel like, whenever they feel like it. It’s an art-rock version of a discordant jazz jam-band, but it requires the setting of a concert to really understand – to feel the volume that pulsates, the bass that moves your body, the noise that takes over. This is musical performance that’s beyond magnetism – it’s a release, a cleansing.

9. “The Children Stay” By Alice Munro (1998)
As I’ve written about “Cortes Island” from The Love Of A Good Woman collection by Munro on one of these lists, I wanted to avoid writing about a second story from the same collection – particularly when I could have written about “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” or “Post and Beam” or “Family Furnishings” or “Trespasses,” all by Munro, just as easily. But “The Children Stay” is the Munro story I think of most (including the other greats from Good Woman I read this year, “Save The Reaper” and “My Mother’s Dream” – each of which was astonishing).

Reading a great Munro story is a tapping into the desires and fears we all experience and consider too small to discuss, and “The Children Stay” is about an affair, of sorts, but it’s also about the non-reasons that could create its existence, about the way longing has a million reasons, or none at all. It’s three parts of this story that have stayed with me months after reading it. One, a quick reference to “talks like this” throughout the marriage of its two main characters – meaning late night talks about love, life, philosophy – as a force that sustained the marriage and masked its discontent. Second, a lengthy dining room conversation about the meaning of Orpheus. Third, a dizzyingly simple, haunting final line that shows the longing as lifelong, unanswerable. All I can say is that any reading that sticks with you months is a gift, but a story in which the individual moments that surprise you continue to register that surprise on their recollection is more than great writing – it’s great art.

10. Lawrence Lessig Free Culture (2004)
My strangest bit of popcorn reading for the year, Lessig’s Free Culture dissects the current (well, 2004 current, so current enough) conflicts of copyright violation, people’s fears of litigation, and what that means for how we express ourselves creatively. Free Culture is also a history of the way creativity has always been an act of piracy – or, at the very least, collaboration, and that as much validity that exists in cracking down on illegal, immoral piracy, the harms and the reality of that cracking down are far much worse for how we live, and how we express ourselves. Its legally precise prose that entertains because it makes us question at what point the hassle of the protection for expressing ourselves is enough to contain our best creative instincts.

Honorable Mentions: Great moments without much context? How about the Roger Ebert essay on why he won’t review Ben Stein’s Expelled (http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/12/win_ben_steins_mind.html), a gripping piece both on the importance of shaping arguments correctly, and defending moral beliefs? Ebert wrote up a storm this year, but of all of his memorable writings, this recent work moved me most.

The final montage of The Wire’s finale “-30-” in which we see, basically, a synopsis on everything and everybody. You could complain that this sort of thing was excessively summative, but it also created a compelling, singular moment of explanation to recognize the factors that create who we are, from our crackheads to our governors. As a philosophical text, this four minute piece of the 90 minute finale gave me more to think about than everything on television combined… except Tina Fey of course.

Finally, the cinematography of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky. It was not showy and will likely not win any awards, but the filming was a frame by frame evocation of that movie’s wonderful advocacy for being positive and caring. One beautiful shot of its lovely protagonist Poppy (Sally Hawkins) walking onto her new boyfriend’s balcony after a wonderful date is like a vision of tranquility – her hair flowing as the sun sets on her beautiful city. Leigh gets much credit for the subtle and true improvisation he brings to the actors of his movies, but I hope people begin to see Happy-Go-Lucky as proof of his subtle and true visual capabilities, too.

A few new albums

Some notable artists I’m fans of released albums recently, and each surprised me a bit, but perhaps not as I expected.

Eagles of Death Metal Heart On

Originally, Eagles of Death Metal were Josh Hommes’ joke side band during bong-rips between Queens of the Stone Age albums. Their initial release Peace Love Death Metal in 2003 had some fun songs on it, like the jangly hoe-down “Wastin’ My Time” and the bombastic “English Girl,” but didn’t really last on my play list very long. At the end of the day, the record was only slightly better than a joke my buddies would’ve come up with between bong rips, and once, did, creating the sadly defunct Hidden Valley Man Ranch.

I wasn’t planning on buying Heart On for mostly that reason – the kitschy swagger title, the artwork of Hommes and co-band mate Jesse Hughes in full 80’s butt rock attire made me think it was more – and more extreme versions – of the same stoner joke. Then I heard it in a cd store and found myself shaking my ass and clapping along – just a little – to the opening song “Anything ‘Cept The Truth.” Heart On seemed to be onto something that Peace Love only hinted at – this music could be as fun for us as it was for Hommes and Hughes. “Anything ‘Cept The Truth” is a song of bravado like any of their previous works, but about a man proudly displaying how full of shit he is – something that makes it remarkably more honest than the rest of their catalogue. Even more than that, songs like “Now I’m a Fool” and “How Can A Man With So Many Friends Feel So Alone” are plenty full of LA doofisness, but are also actually sorta sad. Could this be the high school fantasy where the high schooler finds himself inexplicably heartbroken?

Sometimes, and that only aides the feeling of rock discovery with Heart On, which could have added the words “your sleeve” to that title if it would’ve still been funny. Instead, the title track and record have a great deal in common – they’re jangly, economical beasts of heart, humor, and excitement. In fact, the albums missteps are its “typical” Eagles of Death Metal songs – “Prissy Prancin’” and the masturbation anthem “Solo Flights” that are humor without the bite. It doesn’t matter though – surrounded by tracks like “High Voltage,” “Cheap Thrills,” and climaxing with “I’m Your Torpedo,” this is the rock record that earns actual bravado instead of just dresses up in it for laughs.

Lucinda Williams Little Honey

Since Lucinda released West in February of 2007, apparently things have gotten better. Then, Williams muttered that she “can’t find her joy anywhere,” begged for a man to “unsuffer” her, but then muttered that said man “won’t rescue” her, and ended, with a glittery recognition that “who knows what the future holds or where the cards may lay.” It was one of the best reviewed records of her career, but I found it rather stiff and unconvincing, even if it had moments that soared and were wonderful.

But things are better now. “I found the love I’ve been looking for – it’s a real love,” are the opening words on the record, and the song, “Real Love,” is one of the most fiery and happy she’s ever written. Little Honey is being very well reviewed also, but many are seizing on that “It’s a real love” as proof that happiness is not really as useful for Williams’ best writing instincts as misery was – that her loneliness was always so eloquent, and her happiness turns more easily on cliché. I’ve also read that even though the “happy” songs are wonderful (or not, depending on the review), the “real bread and butter” of Williams is still her morose numbers like “If Wishes Were Horses” and “Rarity.” I disagree in 100 ways.

First, Little Honey is the weakest album Williams has ever made. Second, it’s not because she’s happy; the happiest songs are the strongest here (ignoring the half-assed numbers like "Jailhouse Tears," a rather worthless duet with Elvis Costello). More importantly, happy songs are not new to Williams, she’s always made great ones, and always made them with simple ideas rammed home under a good structure. “Real Love” might not break any new ground, but it’s fun, lithe, sexy, and propulsive. People writing that it’s new territory for Williams didn’t hear “I Just Wanted To See You So Bad,” the opening song from Lucinda Williams, or “Passionate Kisses,” full of ebullient hope and excitement, or “Six Blocks Away,” full of country sass. None of those songs was particularly more complex than “Real Love,” and like all the great songs of Williams’ great career, the simpler they are, the more they work anyway.

That’s especially true of the two other great happy songs of the record, “Honey Bee,” which isn’t even about anything but rocks ridiculously, and “Little Rock Star,” a song of rock self-destruction that morphs into an incendiary guitar-god triumph. But truly, only those three songs to me fulfill what a great Williams song should be – as brilliant as it is effortless. So many of those sad songs of West were competent, full of gorgeous production, and… far too much work. Songs like “What If” and “Words” and “Fancy Funeral” had interesting ideas wandering away from Williams, grafted too heavily on productions that were sweet and wonderful, and didn’t quite fit. That album produced one perfect song, “Are You Alright,” which touched on the magnificent simplicity and profundity of any of the best Williams songs – something I’m quite thankful for. The difference is that on a great Williams record – on a record like Car Wheels On A Gravel Road or World Without Tears – nearly all the songs would have felt like that.

Little Honey is already being discussed as a “renaissance” of kinds for Williams, but I actually think it’s proof of something more upsetting – that Williams most creative years are behind her, and this Williams of West and Little Honey is a competent, charming touring musician who loves her guitar and the world of music (on Little Honey, this climaxes in an unobjectionable, not very good remake of AC/DC’s “It’s A Long Way To The Top”). That’s nothing to object to, but it’s perhaps better to ignore the false praise these albums haven’t deserved and enjoy her for the comforting presence she still is.

Q Tip The Renaissance

I’ll keep my love of this album simple: if you’re not stoned when you start listening to The Renaissance, you might be pretty sure you are by its end. Maybe you should be.

I'd read a couple of positive reviews of The Rennaisance, so I went to listen to it at a local cd store. Flipping on "Johnny Is Dead," the brilliant opening track, I didn't just like the song - I started dancing to it. I didn't just start dancing to it, I started flailing my arms in excitement. Even that wasn't enough, so, talking to the guy behind the counter who started looking at me like I was crazy, I yelled, "This album is THE S***!" At this point, I'd probably heard 1 minute of it. Still, I was right - The Renaissance sucks you in with a mood of excitement and never lets it slip. And that's Tip's intention anyway, "So it's up to me to bring back the hope/ put the feeling in the music that you could quote." The songs are each, probably, less than 4 minutes long, and just as one slags for a second, the next starts. "Johnny Is Dead" moves quickly into "Won't Trade," and then into the giddy, lovely "Gettin' Up" without even leaving you a chance to breathe. Music this fun and moving is great, but it's the feeling that creativity has been unleashed and that Tip doesn't even need time to catch his breath. Most hip hop records start with the singles and then slog off into repetitive numbers, but Tip leaves the weakest material at the beginning and never slows. In the middle, "Manwomanboogie" with its devious baseline and awesome Amanda Diva chorus wins over any remaining skeptics on the record, and combines it with another wildly inventive cameo appearance from Raphael Saadiq on "We Fight/We Love." The album is 12 tracks without a forgettable one on it, and could quite easily lead you to similar fits of embarassment as mine listening to the record in the CD store. By the time you reach the Norah Jones collaboration "Life Is Better" and hopeful finale "Shaka," you're in a hip-hop high you can't even remember experiencing in the last ten years.

Give It 2 Me

A recent letter from a reader named Brett Faber in Aurora, NB to Entertainment Weekly wondered why Madonna wasn't included in the annual "Entertainers of the Year" countdown: "Madonna had the year's highest-grossing tour -- $163 million and counting, with several shows to go. This is one of her best reviewed tours, and she is probably the biggest entertainer of our time, yet she didn't make your list? If the two hours she is on stage each night giving out the energe of a 20-year-old isn't entertainment at its best, I don't know what is."

There are two more pieces of evidence to make the case for Madonna this year that this reader didn't include. First, that not only was that highest-grossing tour a mesmerizing critical hit, but sold out its run nearly instantaneously at a price of well over $100 per ticket. Second, that Hard Candy, though selling a modest-for-Madonna 700,000 copies in America, has sold 3.5 million copies worldwide. That's pretty good, right?

I didn't even mention the less substantive bit of evidence: it's one of her best albums. I have to use the qualifier "one of" because there's a lot of competition. Thinking about it in light of all of Madonna's career, there's also a lot of competition in the past ten years.

Madonna is the type of artist that's always been referred to in constant retrospect. When Ray of Light was released ten years ago, it was greeted as a mature, sedate album by a sage and wise Madonna ready to enter her 40's as a sweet mother and wife ready to knit fashionable sweaters or something. Nevermind that "Ray of Light" the song was as pulsating and furious a dance number as Madonna had ever released, this was wise-calm-spiritual Madonna. By that token, Music in 2000 was a bit of an afterthought - we'd already said goodbye to Madonna the popstar, even if this album was #3 on the Album of the Year list at Rolling Stone and produced 3 Top 20 singles, as well as the last Madonna #1 with "Music." Then there was American Life, a commercial and critical flop raised to relevance only when Madonna kissed Britney Spears at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2004, apparently "passing the torch" from one generation of pop queen to the next.

Well, Britney went nuts and Madonna's still around.

Madonna is famous in a different way, I suppose, than she was 20 years ago, when papparazzi were accused of screwing up her marriage to Sean Penn, and she was embroiled in a contraversy regarding the imagery of her "Like A Prayer" video, as she danced in front of a field of burning crosses, causing her to be dropped from a costly Pepsi ad campaign. For one, papparazzi are accused of screwing up marriage to Guy Ritchie. For another, her face probably has less wrinkles now than it did 1989.

That was a time when Madonna's superstar status was indisputable. Like A Prayer, arguably the greatest pop record of the 1980's, had 3 #1 hits, a feat none of her records since has ever matched, and sold 10 million copies. That was perhaps a peak in her career, and since then, everything has been in retrospect - her Sex book/ Erotica period in 1993 was derided by many, even as the Erotica record sold 5 million copies and produced two #1 hits. Her 1995 release of Bedtime Stories was seen as a desperate pop attempt to remain relevant... even though it sold 3 million records, produced her longest-running #1 hit, "Take A Bow," and introduced in a major way Madonna's fondness for leather whips during her memorable "Human Nature" video, in which she reminds us that she's not sorry for anything.

Then it was really the period of Madonna's retrospective career - Ray of Light in 1998. But the funny thing is, Madonna has been just as relevant during the past ten years. More than that, however, Madonna has made, I think, her best work in the last 10 years. If she's been less of a cultural icon, it's hardly a "less of" worth considering - she went from being the single most recognizable, media-monopolizing superstar in the world to being... still one of the most recognizable, media-monopolizing superstars in the world. Judge it on coverage alone - her divorce with Richie earned the same New York front page attention as did Jennifer Aniston's from Brad Pitt.

If Madonna was praised as ushering in fashion and musical trends from boustiers to Gospel choruses, Madonna has remained just as influential the last ten years. I remember her "Ray of Light" long curly blonde 'do being described in 1999 by Kathy Griffin as "that hairstyle that everyone hated and now everyone has." I remember her Music cover derided for its bright-pink Urban cowboy look, only to see the cowboy look everywhere after her fantastic "Don't Tell Me" video in early 2001. For a woman in her 40's, even commanding two major fashion trends is a sign that things are still going well.

But how about that music? Take a look at this list of major Madonna singles since 1998: "Frozen," "Ray of Light," "Music," "Don't Tell Me," "What It Feels Like For a Girl," "American Life," "Hung Up," "4 Minutes," "Give it 2 Me." I can't think of an artist whose work in their 40's have produced as much consistently great pop music. By bombarding her pop with European techno back during Ray of Light and then dropping the introspective raison d'etre on her successive albums, Madonna again predicted the tide of musical trends. This year, I find no real difference amongst many of the biggest songs of the year - Madonna's "4 Minutes" as pop, Chris Brown's "Forever" or Rihanna's "Disturbia" as r/b, MGMT's "Time To Pretend" or Hot Chip's "Ready For The Floor" as indie rock. Madonna always believed in the power of music to bring the people together, frankly the rest of music figured out she was right.

I don't mean to suggest that Madonna is solely responsible for trends in pop music that have embraced techno, but I do think Madonna's career in the last ten years have benefited from the trends that she's been connected to, and that now, to hear a song like "Ray of Light" and "Hung Up," there is a dance-ready excitement that indie music also shares. That's the thing, really - excitement. Blasted with bass and drums to deafen and thrill anyone in a mile radius, her singles may have been seen as desperate or, at least, calculated attempts to keep songs in the top ten, but they've all worked - and, as the momentary spectre of "calculatedness" falls away, they've all deserved to be there. It's because far from an artist we view in our review mirror, Madonna is as relevant now as ever, and maybe even a better artist than she's ever been before.

The Alternate Hip-Hop Universe

The alternate hip hop universe

Something in this universe aligned to make hip hop what it is today, and keep a separate strata and type of hip-hop as “beneath” and secondary. Actually, nothing aligned but those entities artists giving awards-acceptance speeches call, succinctly, “radio and retail.” People eat what they are fed, after all, but loving the hip hop that I do, I like to imagine my alternate hip hop universe, where the strata are reversed, where one type of hip hop is the most commercially successful music in the country, creating an industry, and the other type of hip hop lives forever in its market-inept shadow.

Here in my alternate hip hop universe, Q Tip is being welcomed from a not-very-long hiatus with a #1 spot on the album chart for The Renaissance, now in its third week of release and not likely to leave the top ten for another six months at least. “Gettin’ Up” shot straight up the singles chart to #1, something that “Life Is Better” and “Manwomanboogie” will do right afterwards, probably at some point overlapping their time in the top ten. Pity Kanye West, who releases 808s and Heartbreaks this week, where it’ll debut at #11 and sell modestly before dropping out of the top 100 altogether. “Love Lockdown,” an unusually good song for him anyway, will find its devotees in stoners and hipsters, but won’t really be played much outside of college dorm rooms.

Beyonce’s double album I Am…Sasha Fierce is mostly laughed at by the music-buying masses, still too high of Raphael Saadiq’s The Way It Feels and, probably, finding a fourth single to treasure off of Alicia Keys’ year-old As I Am (that last part probably not too far off from this universe). But Beyonce’s used to this, being consistently outsold over the past ten years by the big names in the soul and R/B game, Jill Scott and Angie Stone. Artists like Scott and Stone – and, sure, Keys – made the trends lean toward soul-based singers with huge, irrepressible voices singing tunes they wrote themselves about love and independence and family that take on the sounds of truth just in how they sing, while thin-voiced come-ons about dancing and being arm-candy come out quickly and are forgotten about.

We’ve all stopped telling ourselves that Lil Wayne and T.I. don’t suck and you can’t hear them on any radio stations because they know better. Critics desperate to sound relevant and in touch, in fact, stopped describing Lil Wayne’s style upon vomiting a line such as “I’m a venereal disease like your menstrual bleed” in “A Milli” as “casual” and instead adopt the more accurate “repulsive,” and “obnoxious,” and perhaps even throw in “anatomically inaccurate.” The Black Eyed Peas that sang “A lot of MC’s should be unemployed” came after the Black Eyed Peas who gave us “Don’t Phunk With My Heart” and “My Humps.” The album containing those songs was just a forgettable demo tape the band made long before Bridging The Gaps showed us who they really were.

No middle schoolers find themselves singing along to “Love In This Club” because even they find the song ridiculous, and anyway, radio stations are too busy with their old copies of Talib Kweli’s Ear Drum and The Roots Rising Down to worry about the ethics of teaching kids to say to the girls of their choice, “Fuck it, let’s just fuck right here!” Rihanna and T.I.’s “Live Your Life” wouldn’t be taken seriously, as it is just a thin melody on top of an old YouTube clip, right? People would laugh at Mariah Carey for telling her guy to take her to the floor and not post it on You Tube in “Touch My Body” instead of laughing with her… and agreeing.

Next year when we look back on the artists that made up this decade, hip hop will still be king, but when we look back at the extraordinary black artists that made up this time, names like Wayne’s and West’s and T.I.’s and Sean Paul’s won’t really mean much, because there’ll be so much to say about Blackalicious and Me’shell Ndegeocello and Kweli and Erykah Badu and Tip (and, ok, Outkast and Timbaland) to get a word in edgewise. In that world? Quality and creativity are key, and the industry and sales respond accordingly – they respect the music that proves their genre is the essence and spirit of creativity today, and ignore the junk.

Best Of the Decade: ?

At this time in ten years ago, in 1998, in the world of movies, music, and even television, we knew we were living in a different era than we were at the beginning of the decade. We knew and could recite collectively that Nirvana's Nevermind was the great album of our era and had irrevocably changed music. We knew and could recite collectively that Pulp Fiction was the movie of the decade, that it had irrevocably changed movies, and that we could never go back again. We even knew that every sitcom to come out heretofore would have echoes of Seinfeld and The Simpsons, and to argue about diminishing their influence would be an exercise in futility.

We have that same feeling about television now, in a sense - this is the decade in which The Sopranos changed basic tenants of television, including the length of seasons, the quality of material on the small screen, the limits of what a show could cover, the amount of intelligence and detail that could go into the craft, etc. We don't have that in music and movies. Looking ahead to 16 months from now, in which magazines will be synopsizing this decade of the 00's, what will they say? What will our era be known as and known for?

I think the results will be wide, the choices for Album and Movie of the decade will be highly disparate, and probably disappointing. I was thinking this today driving around listening, straight through, to Sleater-Kinney's The Woods, an album I think, with two others, stands at the highest pinnacle of quality of all records released in my adult lifetime, which, coincidentally, happened legally on January 17, 2000. In fact, this is the first decade I can consider myself an "adult," however cognizant I might have thought myself before the time.

Does everyone feel like this, starting on that downhill curve of their 20's? Well, me start with the "this" that I mean, and let me start with music. What is this decade musically? A time of a great movement in music, like Alternative was? Not really - what was there, indie music? Hip hop? Bland pop-punk? Those seemed to be doing pretty well before too. In fact, of the three albums that I think of as the highest quality this decade is by a pop-punk artist whose peak was thought to have been 1995 - Green Day, whose American Idiot will no doubt find itself near the top of many Album of the Decade lists next year, including mine if I write one. It is and remains an extraordinary work, but more than that, it stands out as such a singular success for three reasons - 1) It's a work of frustration and rage, which is related to the frustration and rage that we've arguably felt all decade, 2)In an era in which albums as a collective work declined, in order to give way to a music industry that has progressed online, it is a reminder of the mastery of a full ALBUM and of what such a thing is capable. And most importantly, 3) We've heard it before, but we've never heard anything like it. That's what I want to explore more.

If this decade is full of work in which there's no clear agreement on what it all "means" and what can define us, I'd like to make a case for that indefinition as who we are. People, I think, are generally interested in the world of pop culture in the last 20 years, perhaps moreso than at any other time in America's history - those of us in our 20's and 30's have a bit of an inflated sense of how great our pop culture is - this year, Entertainment Weekly devoted an issue to the 100 "New Classics," 100 Top albums, movies, TVshows, books, etc., released since 1983 - which means, basically, the lifespan of the vast majority of its readers. Recently, the London Times released a Top 100 list of the greatest movies ever made in which #2 was Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, which is a little ridiculous, but certainly indicates that we're ready to dismiss the conventional thinking about what are the "Great Movies" and embrace our own culture. #3 on the list was E.T.

"Best of" all time lists, as I've talked about too often, is more of an indication of current modes of thought than they are definitive discussions of what are the "Best" ever. Such a thing is impossible to quantify. Recently, Roger Ebert devoted some speculation over the fact that in every decade, Citizen Kane is universally declared as the greatest of all movies - strange convention, eh? As each year, Best Of TV lists come out, any top 10 nowadays will likely include The Sopranos, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, possibly even Sex and the City - we are, truly, going to think of our time as the golden age of television.

But it's sort of a useless battle, because if there's one thing that we can agree on for our time, it's that everything there is to say about life has been said, including the fact that we've said everything there is to be said. The reason "Best Of" lists seem so useless now is because we've said to the point of boredom that The Beatles are as great as music gets and that Citizen Kane is the world's greatest movies - it's even become convention to counter with Bob Dylan and The Godfather as "rebellious" answers.

But here's a question I have for people who are like myself - when people ask you what your favorite movies are, when were they made? When did you see them? And which of them, when you think about the movies that moved or excited you most, are truly your favorites? When I make my list (and I like to think I'm well versed in movies), I have some movies that have been named forever - The 400 Blows, Raging Bull - but also movies in my time, Boogie Nights and What Time Is It There? and Waiting for Guffman and Blood Simple. Now, obviously these are movies in which our older, more "influential" movies have made possible, but if I'm to answer that question truthfully, I'm going to answer with the movies that made me most love the capabilities of movies. And, as a man born in 1982, it's not as if Boogie Nights "feels" particularly newer than, say, Tokyo Story - it is, of course (it looks back on an era that happened after Tokyo was released, after all), but I saw Tokyo Story for the first time this year, I saw Boogie Nights when I was 16.

My point is this - why do I have to have my thoughts of Tokyo Story, which is a beautiful movie that has passed the test of time and made me cry, automatically more valid than my thoughts of Boogie Nights? How about those of you that would answer Happy Gilmore or Dumb and Dumber as your favorite movies? Are you wrong? I don't think so - I asked you what movies you enjoyed most. I don't enjoy those movies, but it's not up to me. There is no best movie ever made, there's just many opinions about it. Many, but not enough.

We define the culture, and there's nothing "true" about what's best and what isn't. Those of us that grew up being told, as I was, that The Beatles were the best band in rock history and that Citizen Kane is the pinnacle of moviemaking have absorbed that information but we don't have to necessarily conform to that notion even if we like The Beatles and Citizen Kane. When we were kids, we didn't really think a black man would be seriously contending for the presidency, even though we were told such a thing was possible. There was supposed to be outrage when the Obama candidacy began skyrocketing, and certainly to an extent there was (and we haven't even seen the end of it or the worst of it yet), but there sure seem to be plenty able-minded adults who decided they didn't actually care, and, in fact, really liked the guy. As adults in our 20's and 30's, we, now, decide the messages about taste that we want the next generation to develop.

I want my art now, if it's great, to tell me what I've heard and seen and then take it a step further. I want to hear about confusion and not tell me everything, but I want it to also be full of craft and life and ideas. I found myself, a night ago, talking about the third album I think stands as a pinnacle of quality for this decade - Blackalicious's Blazing Arrow. I said to a friend of mine that if it had just been more popular, I would absolutely call it the greatest hip hop record ever made. It's perfect from beginning to end, and at 17 songs, that's a long time to be perfect. It comes with fury and excitement out of its first track and only gets better in each track. It's rap that raps faster and louder and more precise than any I've heard, its moments of soul that move and cause you to swoon, it's samples and poetry and rhythm and love and sex and everything that hip hop has promised us it is. Why isn't it the best hip hop record ever made? Certianly if it had sold half of the records that Kanye West's The College Dropout had, it would find itself on as many Best of the 2000's lists as Dropout will.

Same goes for movies - I think the best this decade are probably not that popular. I think I'm Not There was unlike anything I've ever seen, and it included many things I've seen. Same with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Those are truly the two that jump out at me as truly special and extraordinary, but also as movies that comment on our own over-analyzed sense of identity, movies that tell us about how hard it is to know who we are when we've talked so much about who we are. Which is something we need to talk about - doesn't it make since everything there is to say has been said, we need to throw out everything and start at the basics? This is a time that, I think, we can say truly that our culture is the one that is most important - or it is, at least, as important as anything that's come before, and it's because we have to think on topics that compound the things we already know of that are supposedly great. Now, great means something else.

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.