12.27.2007

Recently Viewed

Training Day ***
The Blues: Godfathers and Sons ****
Sherrybaby ***

Training Day gets an extra star because of the outstanding perfomances by Denzel Washington (in what may be his most intense role since Malcolm X) and Ethan Hawke, who plays the innocent bystander role with a perfect combination of naivete and ethical strength. Kudos also to the creative cinematography by Mauro Fiore, who finds endlessly inventive ways of filming two people in a car. Aside from these elements, however, I found the film appalling, particularly in its racial politics (and I'm not referring to the fact that Denzel plays the heavy). A white man's fantasy (written, as it turns out, by a white man), this film is yet another tired spin on the formula of white boy saving the Other from his innate failings, while, at the same time, earning the respect of those he keeps in poverty, who continue to conveniently kill themselves off. Disgusting.

I'm finding The Blues to be a somewhat hit-or-miss series. This entry by director Marc Levin, however, offers a much more useful and honest portrayal of race relations than the film above. Levin's premise is to reunite the infamous Electric Mud band, and to have them jam with modern hip-hop artists like Common and Chuck D. Overseeing the sessions is Marshall Chess, son of the founder of Chess Records in Chicago, a Polish Jew whose enthusiasm for and sheer joy in blues music helps him blend in with the musicians here. The film offers powerful testimony to the ability of music to overcome racial and economic disparities in American culture without seeming forced or message-oriented. In addition to chronicling the reformation of Electric Mud, the film also provides a mini-history of Marshall Chess' participation in his father's company and some powerful performance clips, including a moving piano duet between the late Ike Turner and his mentor, Pinetop Perkins. The music, of course, is extraordinary.

Sherrybaby, like Training Day, is an actor's film, and the power of Maggie Gyllenhaal's performance overwhelms the somewhat simplistic storyline. Still, worth watching for the, at times, uncomfortable honesty of Gyllenhaal's acting. She had me squirming through the movie, partly because I could see what was coming, but more because the depth of her immersion in the role made the character's fuck-ups all the more heartbreaking when they arrived.

Books Read in 2007

Now it can be told! I'm a little less embarassed about publishing my list this year, since I managed to read slightly more than a book per month (though this is my lowest recorded page tally). Still, my primary reading remains short-form works like articles and short stories. I read a ton of that shit.

As usual, favorites are in bold.

Total number of pages read: 4256
Pages read in 1985: 21,061
Pages read in 1986: 17,757
Pages read in 1987: 11,496
Pages read in 1988: 9058
Pages read in 1989: 5892
Pages read in 1990: 7743
Pages read in 1991: 4870
Pages read in 1992: 5395
Pages read in 1993: 7568
Pages read in 1994: 4441
Pages read in 1995: 5417
Pages read in 1996: 4268
Pages read in 1997: 6890
Pages read in 1998: 6546
Pages read in 1999: 4324
Pages read in 2000: 8639
Pages read in 2001: 12,542

A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
Blankets by Craig Thompson (graphic novel)
An Edge in My Voice by Harlan Ellison
The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder by Mark Crispin Miller
Summer Blonde: Stories by Adrian Tomine
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
The Poor Bastard by Joe Matt (graphic novel)
Pobby and Dingan by Ben Rice
The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
The Little Man: Short Strips, 1980-1995 by Chester Brown
Light in August by William Faulkner
The Body Artist by Don DeLillo
Crisis on Infinite Earths by Marv Wolfman and George Perez (graphic novel)
The Last Castle by Jack Vance
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

12.26.2007

Favorite Music of 2007

Entering my fifth decade of life this year didn't seem particularly unnerving, though I perhaps now give more thought to regular checkups and rudimentary exercise than I did a year earlier. However, looking over the list of predominantly mainstream albums I most enjoyed this year gave me some pause for thought: Am I at last a fuddy-duddy? Have I lost my ear for the new, the seldom heard, the forgotten? Am I now destined to potter over my CD collection like an urban gardener over his limp beanstalks, remembering the glories of harvests past?

If so, I suppose there could be worse companions than these fine musicians, listed here roughly in order of preference and/or repeated plays:

9. Radiohead, In Rainbows
8. Wilco, Sky Blue Sky

If I have indeed become a fuddy-duddy, let me first blame these two bands for showing me the gilded path. I love both of these bands fiercely, to the extent that I will buy their new releases before hearing a note. In their past few releases, both of these bands have experimented more with sound than with song, but this year both bands seemed to rediscover the simple pleasures of songcraft, measuring their odd beeps and twitters with genuinely literate and expressive lyrics. Luckily enough, both bands also feature lead singers who can (when called upon to do so) emote with the best of them. Both of these albums feature some absolutely gorgeous songs, something I've not come to expect from these bands in the last few years. Although I will happily seek out any of their future noodlings, it was nice to see them both return to what, for them, passes for roots rock.

7. Arctic Monkeys, Favourite Worst Nightmare
These lads, by contrast with the comparatively old hands above, are still in the blossom of their working-class anger, though this should not be mistaken for punk disdain. Rather, the Arctic Monkeys channel their aggression into surprisingly empathetic songs about the people in their neighborhood. Unlike Bob of Sesame Street, however, the Monkeys are willing to peek around the curtain of their neighbors' windows, sometimes to devastatingly honest effect, as in their heartbreaking anthem to a housewife's lost youth, "Fluorescent Adolescent," one of my favorite songs of the year.

6. Paul McCartney, Memory Almost Full
Back to the fuddy-duddies, then. Macca's latest shows him more willing to experiment with instrumentation and songcraft, though experimentation to the former Beatle means something very different than it does to Radiohead or Wilco. The opening number, "Dance Tonight," for example, is a charming little mandolin number that McCartney wrote for his youngest child and is only experimental in the sense that it is not overwrought with McCartney's sense of self-importance (an affliction that more often struck his former partner, John Lennon) or the need to make any kind of grandiose statement about the vapid subjects that sometimes dominate McCartney's songs. Later in the album, McCartney acknowledges his past, but again manages to be more charming than cloying. The kicker is "The End of the End," in which the Beatle projects to the day of his death, evoking the sad realization that, aside from Ringo's perpetual nostalgia tours, Paul is really all we have left of the world's most influential pop band. This song, and this album, make you feel that perhaps we should enjoy whatever good years this man has left. But, like Dylan's recent renaissance, McCartney doesn't elicit any sympathy votes with his music. It speaks for itself.

5. Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, Raising Sand
Initially, I thought this would be more of a novelty record. It certainly is that, but not in the sense of it being an of-its-era throwaway. The novelty (or one of them) is in hearing Plant's grizzled voice wrap itself in harmony around Krauss' gorgeous lilt, and in the way they manage to resurrect some real chestnuts from the R&B and C&W canons. If, like me, when you listen to Led Zeppelin's fourth album and find yourself looking forward more to "The Battle of Evermore" than "Black Dog", you will fucking love this album. Ride on.

4. Steve Earle, Washington Square Serenade
The story of this album is almost as much fun as the album itself. Steve Earle, long the outcast leftist songwriter in a town full of conservative hacks, finally gets fed up with Nashville, marries one of the best singers on the planet, loads up the truck and moves to Manhattan, where he procedes to emulate the young Dylan by writing songs about what is, to him, a newly discovered mecca of characters, sounds, and inspiration. In doing so, like Dylan, Earle churns out one of the best albums of his career, a folky fuck-you to Trashville and all the small-minded hicks who inhabit it and a hummy hallelujah to NYC and all its freaky immigrants. Unlike anything coming out of country music these days, this album tells us what it really means to be an American.

3. Bat for Lashes, Fur and Gold
Before I fell in love with Bjork, her albums used to scare me shitless. Hypnotized both by her voice and the amazing range of fucking weird-ass noises she would throw together in her songs, I could only sit transfixed, like the RCA dog listening to his master's voice. This album is the first time since hearing Bjork's chirpy growl on a Sugarcubes record that I've felt so entranced by a voice whose words make me shiver in repressed terror. It must be love.

2. Amy Winehouse, Back to Black
Until I heard this record, I thought that any 20-something's evocation of the Golden Age of Motown would fall into the tired histrionics of Boyz 2 Men or Mariah Carey-style yelping, where a potentially interesting song becomes an excuse for the singer to ululate like some sped-up version of a Cold War siren. Amy Winehouse, despite (or because of) all her drug-induced tragedy, knows that Motown was not intially a City on the Hill and that its songs were made to sound best coming out of a transistor radio, something Mariah Carey wouldn't touch with a ten-inch heel. Better yet, Winehouse looks like she has just stepped out of the era, and carries the pipes to prove it. This record is a sonic love-letter not only to some of the greatest music made in America, but to the poor shlubs who stayed up all hours learning etiquette, fashion, and dance steps to bring it to the masses. This is, and always will be, a music of the people.

1. Bruce Springsteen, Magic
I wrote about this on the site earlier, and I have lost none of my enthusiasm for this wonderful, much-needed, album. There are at least three songs on this masterpiece that never fail to bring tears to my eyes, and at least that many that make me want to blast down the freeway, hooting at underage girls. Like his earlier classic, Born in the U.S.A., this album has been sadly underestimated and misunderstood, but it will, I have no doubt, be regarded as one of Springsteen's most vital statements. This is an album we should feel lucky to have, and one that may well serve as a reminder, years hence, of what made this country great and how we pissed it all away.

12.12.2007

Recently Viewed

Across the Universe ***
The Darjeeling Limited ****
No Country for Old Men *****

Across the Universe is not a film I expect to see more than once; the soundtrack, on the other hand, is something I might turn to again. The real purpose of the film anyway is to re-present the Beatles songs for a new generation, and it succeeds at that, I suppose, though with a threadbare plot and only hints of the turmoil of the 1960s that made people like John Lennon so vital. The characters all have names taken from the Beatles canon (Jude, Rita, Sadie, Prudence, etc.) and the songs fall into place pretty much as you might expect, though there are some creative sequences and the cameos are enjoyable (though I didn't recognize Joe Cocker until the credits rolled). I suppose the chances that you will enjoy this movie are proportional to how much you enjoy seeing and hearing reinterpretations of Beatles songs. This film does that better than most. To me, the Beatles songs are so ingrained into my musical vocabulary that they are roughly equivalent to oxygen atoms--it sometimes takes bad air to make me aware of how much I take breathing for granted. Still, this is not at all a bad film, but, for me, it served more as an alternative visual template for the songs.

By this point, I'm sure most people have made up their mind about whether they enjoy Wes Anderson's style of film-making or not. I, like many, fell in love with Rushmore first, but it was The Royal Tenenbaums that sealed the deal. Like any great director, Anderson's failures (The Life Aquatic comes to mind) are inherently more interesting than whatever else is showing in the multiplex. Darjeeling is his most mature film to date, though; at times hilarious, but most often sadly poignant or, more precisely, less funny after reflection. There is a hint of this in Rushmore in the way both Max Fischer and Herman Blume mask their loneliness and sorrow with hyperactivity (Max) or ironic detachment (Herman). But they are both wounded and pained, almost past the point of being able to communicate it. What Rushmore does with romance, Darjeeling does with family relations, and the results are as often heartbreaking as they are funny. What they never fail to be, however, is endearing. A trite word, perhaps, in these days where the audience is more ironically detached than any character could be and still seem human, but there is nothing trite--characters, music, shots--about this wonderful film.

I saw a matinee of No Country for Old Men with an audience composed largely of retired guys, at least one of whom confused the first preview for the main feature: "Are we in the right film?" he asked his buddy. He seemed similarly confused after the film ended, asking "What the hell was that?" Indeed, the literary stylings of Cormac McCarthy's exploration of human violence--which the Coen Brothers follow almost precisely--are not for everyone. The depiction of violence itself is not the point, at least not in the way the retired guy might have been expecting. But violence--the legacy of violence in the West, the legacy of violence on its victims and its practitioners--is exactly the point of the story, and Tommy Lee Jones, who plays the moral center of the film in somewhat the same fashion as Samuel L. Jackson ends up as the moral center of Pulp Fiction, is our tour guide through this savage land, almost by default. The first half of the film sets us up for a typical underdog-outsmarting-the-gangsters plot, but anyone expecting another replay of this curiously American narrative is probably not going to walk away fulfilled. Anyone who is ready to question why these kinds of narratives are so appealing to so many people, however, will discover a dark meditation on our collective soul and one of the best films of the year, certainly the best film the Coens have ever made (and, to my mind, that is saying quite a bit). And between this and In the Valley of Elah, Tommy Lee Jones has nailed an acting Oscar this year.

SITE NOTE: I'm near the end of my schoolwork for the semester, so you may look forward (?)to more frequent postings here for the next few weeks.