Thomas Doyle

Art by Thomas Doyle. Fantastic.

Rave: Tell No One

Tell No One. French. Suspenseful. Economical storytelling. Lyric. Worth it, highly recommended.

2008: Music

Without much preamble:

Albums Released in 2007:
Alegranza, El Guincho
Sleep Forever, The Big Sleep
At Mount Zoomer, Wolf Parade
Venus on Earth, Dengue Fever
Vampire Weekend, Vampire Weekend
Stay Positive, The Hold Steady

Albums Discovered/Re-Discovered in 2007:
Brightblack Morning Light, Brightblack Morning Light
Comicopera, Robert Wyatt
Strange Geometry, The Clientele
The Body, The Blood, The Machine, The Thermals

Still Processing:
Vivian Girls, Vivian Girls
Alight of Night, Crystal Stilts
HLLLYH, The Mae-Shi
Analog Africa No. 4, Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou
Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, David Byrne & Brian Eno

2008: Movies

Movies enjoyed (and recommended!) in 2008, both old and new. I have not seen Frost/Nixon or The Wrestler yet, but the best movie I saw this year is Milk. List below, caveats at the end:

Highly Recommended:
Milk
Man on Wire
Slumdog Millionaire
The Dark Knight
Iron Man
Encounters at the End of the World
Mongol
Planet B-Boy
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
There Will Be Blood
(the last two technically from 2007)

Also Recommended:
Gran Torino
Reprise
War, Inc
Wall-E
The Wackness
Tropic Thunder
The Flight of the Red Balloon
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Role Models

Enjoyed on DVD/Internet/Airplane/etc.
Syriana
Inside Man
Zodiac
Southland Tales
Into the Wild
Gone Baby Gone
Juno
Dogday Afternoon
The Visitor
Baby Mama
Flight of the Conchords (TV)
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (TV)
Casino Royale

Missed (i.e., to catch or rent)
The Band's Visit
Paranoid Park
Frozen River
Pineapple Express
Hamlet 2
Appaloosa
Rachel Getting Married
City of Ember
Happy-Go-Lucky
W.
Tell No One
Synecdoche, New York
Cadillac Records
Frost/Nixon
The Wrestler
The Class
Waltz With Bashir

No really incredible movies this year, but a fair amount of quality overall.

2008: Books

Sadly, I've had nowhere near the opportunity to read as much quality literature as I would like this year, less time and focus to write about the things I've read, and I have only a handful of real stand-out recommendations. The two best books I've read this year are Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson and The World Without Us by Alan Weisman.

I certainly hope (heck, resolve!) to pick up the pace of reading and writing this year. Until then, here's the list. And always, very few actual 2008 releases, since I like to read in paperback:

Fiction:
Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
The Easter Parade, Richard Yates
Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson
Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris
Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell

Non-Fiction:
The World Without Us, Alan Weisman
The Trouble With Diversity, Walter Benn Michaels
Brand Simple, Allen P. Adamson
The Long Tail, Chris Anderson
The Substance of Style, Virginia Postrel

Jim Shepard's collection of short stories Like You'd Understand, Anyway deserves mention for a few excellent stories in the collection ("The Zero Meter Diving Team," "Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay"), but uneven quality throughout. Shepard's collection suffered from plots, characters, and scenarios that were over-imagined, forcibly too unique and consequently, made it hard for me to achieve any real empathetic connection. I'll completely damn Miranda July's No One Belongs Here More Than You with the same criticism, as well. A collection I fully expected and hoped to like, but one that was altogether too indulgent in its quirkiness for its own good.

Well, so much for 2008. The pile of books for 2009 is already a two feet high, so it's time to get going...

Agency Life

All life we work but work is a bore / If life's for livin' then what's livin' for?
- Ray Davies, The Kinks, "Oklahoma U.S.A"

EM rightfully called it out over dinner last night - maybe I'm not cut out for office work, because my tolerance for bullshit is too low. Maybe that's why, despite the neat literary narrative trick that Joshua Ferris' employs in his quite enjoyable Then We Came To The End, in which our perspective is implied and subsumed in the narrator's royal 'we,' I still most closely identified with Tom Mota. Yes, vulgar and slightly unhinged Emerson-quoting, clown-suit wearing, paintball-shooting Tom Mota. Imprison, then enlisted, then dead Tom Mota. Also, the star of the show.

Let me take two steps back. First, yeah, I'm not sure I enjoy spending all of my time and creative energy working for other people, but that said, I'm pretty good at it, and I've thus far managed a string of pretty reasonable gigs - enterprising, creative, and cubicle-free. So, in a world of complaining, I can't complain. And the work, while often too consuming of my time and mental energy, has also been reasonably intellectually challenging and has, if not added to the sum total of good in the world, probably not detracted from it. And I've made some friends and won some respect along the way. And probably learned a few things.. So, as Carl Spackler might say, I've got that going for me. Which is nice.

Second, in our lives, we spend maybe eight hours a day working and eight hours sleeping? Something like that? So it is amazing how few really useful or interesting novels there are about work (or sleeping, for that matter). Particularly good old fashioned, 20th century American office work. TV shows? Yes. Movies? Maybe. I guess those are the appropriate media. But novels? Nicholson Baker's Mezzanine, maybe? Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road, perhaps, although that had a good bit of sex, insanity, marital strife, and abortion in it, none of which really constitute much of my work day. Some Updike that I've missed, perhaps?

Which is what makes Joshua Ferris' Then We Came To The End such a pleasurable read. It is slightly cartoonish, but does a great job of elevating the everyday drama of office life to the appropriate levels of meaning, humor, and warmth. The work, a team of creatives in a large advertising agency in Chicago on the downswing of the dot-com boom, is surely recognizable to anyone who has worked in a creative field, or heck, in any professional services industry. The odd contours of office camaraderie, the strange insistence of minor professional triumphs and failures into your psyche, the tchotchke's that stand-in for personality and a personal touch, the elevator banks, and the office lighting.

It is all wincingly recognizable, and all laid comically bare. The read is quick and well-paced, and wrapped with enough grazing passes at the soul of the organization man and the small flourishes of craft (those that put the meta in fiction), to balance being an enjoyable subway read (as you head to your office) with taking heavy-handed swipes at the raison d'etre of your workaday life. Certainly recommended if you've ever had the pleasure of nine to five work.

Rave: Sze Tsung Leong

One of the best shows I have seen this year. A couple of weeks ago, ED and I took a break from being perpetually stressed out by our jobs to wander around Chelsea on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon. We saw a few good things, a few less good things, and one incredible show. Sze Tsung Leong's Horizons at the Yossi Milo gallery.

Admittedly, the collection was right in my sweet spot, but the photographs worked at so many levels for me. First off, they are gorgeous - expansive landscapes, evoking the basic geometry of the horizon, all sharing a common framing and visual syntax. The subject matter, impressive in its global scope, ranged from cities to people to landscapes to seascapes, all bleeding into washed out skylines of gray and white. Each of the photos evoked a common density, bleakness and dullness, which certainly characterizes one aspect of a world overrun with industry, people, buildings, and things. Within the scope of this commentary was enough room for the constant, irrepressible beauty of people and of nature and, at some basic level, of the capacity of human industry. From the good comes the bad. All of this wrapped up in a wonderfully curated show, where the prints were all hung level, to create a common horizon across all of the photographs. Well worth a look, and while much of the photos can be seen online at the artist's website, they are even more powerful when viewed together.

Rave: The Big Sleep

Alright, so I haven't been writing much about music lately. That's not because I haven't found that many good albums (it has been a little slow), but more so that I haven't had as much time to listen in depth, and haven't had that much time to write. I can recommend, in the last few months, the new Times New Viking (if you like GBV), the El Guincho record, and parts of the new Dengue Fever record. Also, I've caught up on and really like Brigthblack Morning Light and Robert Wyatt's Comicopera, as well as most of The Thermals record.

But, the new album from The Big Sleep - an immediate cause for praise and recommendation. A great, atmospheric, moody, dynamic collection of songs that also really fucking rocks. I saw the band open up for The Hold Steady last summer in Prospect Park, and hadn't been that immediately taken by a band that I'd never heard before since seeing the Arcade Fire open for the Wrens so many years ago at the Knitting Factory. They came out sounding assured and complete, with a sufficiently distinct sound to make me hungry for their album - whose release I apparently missed in my winter haze, but which I stumbled upon the other night. Worth it, as it consistently brings an alternating palette of sonic and lovely, just what I love so much in a good rock and roll band.

I am hoping for a show in New York soon, and if anyone wants to join, well, you can join.

Rave: 30 Rock/Tina Fey

Two weekends ago, it was a beautiful Saturday evening. What did I decide to do? My taxes. What did I actually do? Watch the entirety of Season 2 of 30 Rock on Hulu. [Quick aside: I was skeptical on Hulu as a service, but so far, I'm sold. If advertising is a necessary evil, I don't mind the pre-roll and interspersed 30 second clip model, while watching programs on my computer. Don't let it dissuade you, advertisers, but I check my email and the internet while you tell me about Ragu spaghetti sauce. But don't worry. I already knew about Ragu spaghetti sauce.]

Back to 30 Rock. Best comedy on television since Arrested Development? I think so. Is it Alec Baldwin who really makes the show. Yes, probably (see clip below). Is Tracey Morgan on his game pure joy to watch? Does the show take an enormous amount of pleasure and energy on throw-away bits, often upstaging the character and situation driven humor in the show itself? Delightfully, yes (see clip above).

But, bottom line, if Tina Fey is the spirit animating this show, from its sense of humor to its quirky girl soul, and is continuing in the fine form of her SNL head writer years, then color me even more impressed. The body work she is creating as a writer and, increasingly, as a very charming performer has my full appreciation. Let me go a step further. Will you marry me, Liz Lemon?

The January Raves List

Movies
There Will Be Blood

Wow. What a month.

Top 10 Favorite Moments in The Jerk

"Escena Romantica En La Playa"

I watched The Jerk again the other night. As I've said before, people don't get it, not nearly enough, the sort of genius that Steve Martin was, starting with The Jerk in 1979, through til LA Story in 1991. Funny, weird, innocent, honest, and beautiful. He projected a world, entirely, but a world that you'd only be overjoyed to be in.

My top (hey, it worked out!) 10 favorite moments in The Jerk:

1. The kiss on the beach, above.

2. Navin finds his special purpose

Patty: "(she lies down on the bed) You know what I'd like to do?"
Navin: "What?"
Patty: "Guess your weight."
Navin: "Hey, that would be interesting for me, no one has tried to guess my weight! You see, I guess their weights..."
Patty: "Put your arms up."
Navin: "This will give me a whole different perspective on this. (Patty squeezes Navin's backside) Hey! You're really trying to be accurate! Is it getting hot in here? Wait a minute - what's happening to my special purpose?"

3. Navin avoids the homicidal sociopath:

Navin: "Get away from those cans! (Navin runs inside the station)"
Navin: "There's cans in there too! (the gas station window breaks)"
Navin: "More cans!"

4. Navin defends himself against racist stereotypes:

Navin: "Select class. Very, very good."
Boss: "We'll keep the eggplants out!"
Navin: "Ah good! We don't want any vegetables."
Con Man: "Na, na. The jungle bunnies!"
Navin: "Oh of course! They'll eat the vegetables!"
Con Man: "Boss, could I talk to him? We're going to keep out the niggers!"
Navin: "The what?"
Boss: "The niggers! We'll keep 'em out."
Navin: "Sir, you are talking to a nigger!"

5. When Navin confounds the hoodlums by tying their bumper to the nave of a church.

6. When Navin writes home about the job that Patty is going to give him next week.

7. Pizza In A Cup

8. Navin on love:

Navin: "Marie, are you awake? Good. You look so beautiful and peaceful, you almost look dead. I'm glad because there is something that has always been very difficult for me to say. I slit the sheet, the sheet I slit, and on the slitted sheet I sit. I've never been relaxed enough around anyone to be able to say that. You give me confidence in myself. I know we've only known each other four weeks and three days, but to me it seems like nine weeks and five days. The first day seemed like a week and the second day seemed like five days and the third day seemed like a week again and the fourth day seemed like eight days and the fifth day you went to see your mother and that seemed just like a day and then you came back and later on the sixth day, in the evening, when we saw each other, that started seeming like two days, so in the evening it seemed like two days spilling over into the next day and that started seeming like four days, so at the end of the sixth day on into the seventh day, it seemed like a total of five days. And the sixth day seemed like a week and a half. I have it written down, but I can show it to you tomorrow if you want to see it. Anyway, I've decided that tomorrow, when the time is right, I'm going to ask you to marry me, if that's o.k. with you. Just don't say anything. You've made me very happy."

9. When Navin sets Shithead free.

10. The denouement:

Navin: "And I don't need any of this! I don't need this stuff, (he pushes all of the letters off the desk), and I don't need you. I don't need anything except this (he picks up the ashtray) and that's it and that's the only thing I need, is this. I don't need this or this. Just this ashtray. And this paddle game, the ashtray and the paddle game and that's all I need. And this remote control. The ashtray, the paddle game and the remote control, and that's all I need. And these matches. The ashtray, and these matches, and the remote control and the paddle ball. And this lamp. The ashtray, this paddle game and the remote control and the lamp and that's all I need. And that's all I need too. I don't need one other thing, not one - I need this! The paddle game, and the chair, and the remote control, and the matches, for sure. Well what are you looking at? What do you think I am, some kind of a jerk or something? And this! And that's all I need. The ashtray, the remote control, the paddle game, this magazine and the chair."

The December Raves List

Music
The Basement Tapes, Bob Dylan & the Band
In Rainbows, Radiohead
"All My Friends," LCD Soundsystem

Movies
I'm Not There
Before The Devil Knows You're Dead
Why We Fight (DVD)

Books
Kakfa Was The Rage, Anatole Broyard
Planet of Slums, Mike Davis
Faceless Killers, Henning Mankell

Misc.
Clark and Michael

Kafka Was The Rage

As we move further into the future, the moment in which American culture indelibly changes seems less like San Francisco in 1968 or 1969, characterized by protest kids, free love, and the psychedelic movement spilling onto the shores of the American mainstream, but the era that immediately preceded it, in Greenwich Village from the close of World War II until, perhaps, the moment Bob Dylan plugged in at Newport. Perhaps my romanticizing of New York City underwrites this, but having read Prime Green, On the Road, and now Anatole Broyard's slim, personal, and wonderfully-observed memoir Kafka Was the Rage, it seems that from the GI's returning to New York to be taught by the exiles of WWII, to the beats and jazz, to folk and then the initial revved up dischord of rock and roll, downtown New York in the 50s and early 60s is where America really began to change.

The revolution seems simple: sex, drugs, a popular embrace of intellectualism, as a means to sex, an embrace of drugs, as a means to seeming intellectual, and the re-birth of American individualism, now manifest not on the frontier, but in the city, as a rejection of the corporate ethic of the 1950s. Here is the fundamental rift in popular culture, where both the darkness and the light slipped in. Here is the rift that opened, in which political protest (civil rights, anti-war) found voice, cultural change (embrace of sexual liberation and drugs, elevation of rock and roll to art and art to rock and roll, multiculturalism, rejection of wife, kids, house, job as an approach to living) began to be pervasive, and the spiritual center shifted (individualistic, psychedelic). Or so goes my half-baked thesis.

Anatole Broyard's memoir is an account of these changes, told at close-quarter. Beginning with Broyard's return from the war, his education, both personal and academic, in a new America, at the hands of a lover named Sheri and a host of emigre professors at the New School, continuing through a Greenwich Village obsessed with art, culture, and change, and never quite finding a conclusion, due to Broyard's death, the memoir still provides a shimmering view into a post-War New York City which launched many of the social trends that defined 20th century America, and are still reverberating across the world today.

A few selected passages, as encouragement for you to pick up this slim volume as accompaniment on your next train or plane ride of modest length:

"Auden lived around the corner on Cornelia Street and I often saw him scurrying along with his arms full of books and papers. He looked like a man running out of a burning building with whatever of his possessions he'd been able to grab. He had a curious scuttling gait, perhaps because he always wore espadrilles.

He came hurrying into the stationery store just as we were going out. Sheri was in front of me and he ran right into her. As he wrote somewhere, fantasy makes us clumsy. He also said that the art of living in New York City lies in crossing against the lights.

Sheri, who floated instead of walking, was easy to knock over, and Auden had all the velocity of his poetry and his nervousness. She fell backward, and as she did, she grabbed Auden around the neck and they went down together, with him on top. I was so concerned about her skirt flying up that I didn't even stop to think about whether she might have been hurt. She was lying on the floor beneath one of the most famous poets of our time, but I couldn't see the poetry or the humor of it.

She clung to Auden, who was sprawled in her arms. He tried desperately to rise, scrabbling with his hands and his espadrilles on the floor. He was babbling incoherently, apologizing and expostulating at the same time, while she smiled at me over his shoulder, like a woman dancing."

To fully appreciate that quote, I guess you need to know that Sheri doesn't wear underpants.

"For most of the people in Meyer Schapiro's class at the New School, art was the truth about life -- and life itself, as they saw it, was more or less a lie. Art, modern art, was a great, intense, but at the same time vague promise or threat, depending on how you looked at it. If civilization could be thought of as having a sexuality, art was its sexuality.

With the dim stained-glass light of the slides and the hushed atmosphere, Schapiro's classes were like church services. Culture in those days was still holy. If he had chosen his own church, it would have been Romanesque -- yet there was something fundamentalist in him, too. He made you want to get up and testify, or beat a tambourine."

While writing jazz criticism:

"I had always liked old jazz -- from Louis Armstrong to Lester Young -- but I hadn't made up my mind about Charlie Parker, who was everybody's hero at the time. While he could be brilliant, I found in Parker's style a hint of the garrulousness that would soon come over black culture.

Also, it seemed to me that jazz relied too much on improvisation to be a full-fledged art form. Nobody could be that good on the spur of the moment. And there was too much cuteness in jazz. It stammered and strained. It took its sentimentality for wisdom."

About emerging writers in Greenwich Village:

"They were writer-intellectuals in a sense that Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald -- and the generation before them -- were not. Not even Joyce was an intellectual to the degree that they were.

It worried me, this bookishness of theirs. I was afraid I would never be able to keep up with it. I didn't have the patience to spend whole days reading. I was too restless. And I was too much attracted to the world. I read only for what I needed to know, or what gave me pleasure; I never read out of any abstract hunger for knowledge. Also, I was suspicious of bookishness."

About 1947:

"To someone who hasn't lived through it, it's almost impossible to describe the sexual atmosphere of 1947. To look back at it from today is like visiting a medieval town in France or Italy and trying to visualize the life of its inhabitants in the thirteenth century. You can see the houses and the cathedral, the twisting streets, you can read about the kind of work they did, the food they ate, or about their religion, but you can't imagine how they felt; you can't grasp the actual terms of their consciousness."

Even if I have just quoted you the best passages, don't you want to read it?!

I'm Not There

Let's start with what makes a popular biopic (that word I can't pronounce) of a popular musician, with Ray and Walk the Line our recent, obvious examples. First, the narrative should be straightforward, illustrating how the performer's enormous talent allowed him/her to rise from obscurity to fame, wealth, and acclaim, overcoming in the process whatever obstacles stand in his/her way. The narrative should not document a linear ascension from nothing, but rather, should document the many rises and falls (alcohol, drugs, women, prevailing bad attitude of the times , general bad attitude of our star) that the musician must endure through his career (although presented in a chronologically linear fashion).

A good biopic should make the music of the artist immediately approachable, even if you have never heard it before. The biopic should connect the music as directly possible with the person's life. You shouldn't need a lot of previous understanding of the music, or the person's life, or the cultural or social context in which the artist was making their art to appreciate the movie. You should be able to walk in to the movie, knowing fuck-all about the artist, and walk out two hours later humming the songs, with a greater appreciation for the artists struggles, and a clear idea how the artist's talent enabled him/her to overcome both personal and cultural turmoil to forever change the landscape of American music.

Todd Haynes' I'm Not There probably fails against that standard of a biopic. It's convoluted, full of inside jokes, abstract and non-linear in its narrative, and, of course, doesn't include a single character called Bob Dylan. So what.

First, let me suggest why I think I'm Not There succeeds as a movie, in its own right. It's funny. It sends up or celebrates with humor so many of Dylan's contemporary cultural touchpoints (Baez, the Beatles, Ginsberg, Pete Seeger at Newport, the fans, the fans, the fans) and is also wonderfully witty in reference to Dylan's life and music ("C'mon, play your early stuff!" Blanchett's Dylan taunts a crucified Jesus). It's visually appealing and stylized, and feels like it contains at least three different movies in it. It has at least one transcendent performance (Blanchett) and a handful of good ones (Bale, Marcus Carl Franklin, Bruce Greenwood, Charlotte Gainsbourg, even David Cross' Allen Ginsberg cameo is equal parts jubilantly weird and amusing). And while it may not explain Bob Dylan, his work or life, to the lay audience, I think it does a damn good job channeling it.

Now, if you have more than a passing familiarity with Dylan, life and music, I think I'm Not There is extremely rewarding. At a superficial level, the characterizations of the mythic events in Dylan's career (the self-mythologizing tramp from Minneapolis, Robert Zimmerman, the Greenwich Village folk scene, the visit to Woody Guthrie's deathbed, Newport in '65, the Don't Look Back UK tour where he was cheered through the acoustic half of his set and booed through the electric half, turning his back on the protest kids, the Woodstock years, the Christian years) are smart and funny, and when un-jumbled chronologically, surprisingly direct. The stylistic sending up of the Dylan eras and their attendant documentarians (isn't Julianne Moore's Baez great?) are dead-on, if a little too knowing. And the music, while wandering beyond just the recognizable "hits," provides great context to the narrative and stylistic elements of the movie.

Where I'm Not There really takes off, I think, is that it does, actually, get at some of the very important things about Bob Dylan, albeit well below the skin, and in that discomforting way where yesterday, today, and tomorrow are all rolled into one. Through the movie, you come to understand that Dylan, for being anointed the voice of his generation, was always an artist badly out of place in his time - from his personal founding myth as a rail-riding Socialist all the way through to his distancing himself from the turmoil of the Vietnam era in search of a family life and eventually a passing comfort in Christ.

The figurative Richard Gere scenes, which everyone can apparently do without, investigate perhaps the most interesting part of Dylan's career, when he turned away from his music, and for all pop culture knew, lived in as an outlaw, in the wilderness as America profoundly lost its innocence. The confrontational Dylan, wise too young, shines through in Ben Whishaw's performance, as well as Blanchett's, clearly anticipating the damaged relationship between artist and fame.

Even the most deeply anachronistic narrative threads, in my opinion, those showing the collapse of the personal and spiritual life of the extremely wealthy and famous Dylan (the Heath Ledger and Christian Christian Bale sequences) are insightful in appreciating that Dylan not only bore the expectations of a (younger) generation and the scrutiny of an older generation which could sense but not understand its own demise (scored to Blanchett mouthing Stephen Malkmus' version of "Ballad of a Thin Man"), but Dylan also bore that unholy burden of being rich and famous.

Let me also go ahead and say that, while the I'm Not There (Hendrix' "All Along the Watchtower," The original soundtrack isn't great end-t0-end, it has some pretty great tracks. It would be hard to argue that anything is an improvement over the Dylan originals, although Dylan has always been eminently coverable Byrds' "You Ain't Going Nowhere," The Band's "Tears of Rage," and "I Shall Be Released," George Harrison's "If Not For You," to name just a few where the cover competes with the original). Perhaps the Calexico-backed "Goin' to Acapulco" by Jim James and "Yankee" by Willie Nelson join those ranks. And, of course, I'm partial to the Sonic Youth, Malkmus, and YLT stuff... so, thanks, Todd Haynes. Great job on the movie and the music.

2007: Music

Sixteen years of musical fanaticism and (shamefully, I suppose), since making the modest shift from angst to melancholy, from Nirvana and Pearl Jam to Dinosaur Jr. and Luna in 1994 or so, I can't really say that my tastes have evolved all that much. When I flip through my year's purchases and play lists, it's still very much indie rock. And I get deeper in to Dylan. Ah, well. Here's 2007 for you, recommended, in all its glory:

Albums Released in 2007:
Fort Nightly, White Rabbits
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Spoon
Night Falls Over Kortedala, Jens Lekman
Person Pitch, Panda Bear
Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?, Of Montreal
Challengers, New Pornographers
Friend Opportunity, Deerhoof
Boxer, The National
23, Blonde Redhead
Asa Breed, Matthew Dear
The Shaky Hands, The Shaky Hands
Live At Massey Hall, 1971, Neil Young
Let's Stay Friends, Les Savy Fav
Mirrored, Battles
Weirdo Rippers, No Age
Woke on a Whaleheart, Bill Callahan

Albums Discovered/Re-Discovered in 2007:
The Greatest, Cat Power
New Morning, Bob Dylan
Bringing It All Back Home, Bob Dylan
Dongs of Sevotion, Smog
Ce, Caetano Veloso
Writer's Block, Peter, Bjorn & John
Absolutely the Best, Ike & Tina Turner
The Remains, The Remains
The dBs, Stands for deciBels
Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, Arctic Monkeys

Notable Songs:
If I were with it, a music critic, this list would be littered with hip-hop and country songs, M.I.A. and Gypsy-influenced emo. Sadly, I'm not. I still buy CDs, don't listen to the radio, and don't hear many singles. So you'll get mostly more indie rock. Sorry:

"Senor," Willie Nelson & Calexico
"Goin' to Acapulco," Jim James & Calexico
"I've Been Out Walking," Nina Nastasia & Jim White
"Myriad Harbor" and "Failsafe," The New Pornographers
"The Underdog" and "Rhythm & Soul," Spoon
"Pots & Pans" and "Brace Yourself," Les Savy Fav
"A Postcard to Nina," Jens Lekman
"No Cars Go," Arcade Fire
"Weird Fishes / Arpeggi," Radiohead
"Sycamore," Bill Callahan
"Bunny Ain't No Kind of Rider," Of Montreal
"Up Against The Wall," Peter Bjorn & John
"Bros," Panda Bear
"Tourist Trap," White Rabbits

Lessons learned? I'm a sucker for kick drums and horns...

If you want to know what the cool kids like (some of which I like, some of which I'm not as smitten by), here are the year end comps from Pitchfork, Stylus, Slate, and AllMusic.com.

2007: Movies

Movies enjoyed (and recommended!) in 2007, both old and new. Caveats at the end:

In the Theater:
I'm Not There
Rescue Dawn
Ratatouille
Hot Fuzz
Michael Clayton
The Lives of Others
Notes on a Scandal
No Country for Old Men
Zidane

On DVD:
The Siege
Batman Begins
Extras
Ong Bak
Once in a Lifetime
A History of Violence
The Science of Sleep
An Inconvenient Truth
Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic
The TV Set
Match Point
Grizzly Man
Out of Sight
Me And You And Everyone You Know
Idiocracy
Planet Earth
Why We Fight
Pan's Labyrinth

And, having done the once-over of Dana Stevens' list over on Slate.com, a few films that I have every intention of seeing, and simply haven't at year's end, but I'm guessing will make the list: The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, Persepolis, and There Will Be Blood.

2007: Books

A good year for reading, on subways and airplanes, in India and Rhode Island and New York and California. My recommended reads, if you haven't already got to them (very few 2007 releases, since I read in paperback):

Fiction:
A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipul
Appointment in Samarra, John O'Hara
Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney
Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion
The Insanity Defense, Woody Allen
In Persuasion Nation, George Saunders
Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John Le Carre
Giraffe, J.M. Ledgard

Non-Fiction:
Fiasco, Thomas Ricks
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
Prime Green, Robert Stone
Class Matters, Correspondents of the New York Times
Planet of Slums, Mike Davis
Kafka Was the Rage, Anatole Broyard

Little write-ups of each book can usually be found in the month in which I read the book. Search the site if you are interested in more detail on anything listed.

The November Raves List

Hooray for Henry!

Music
I'm Not There Soundtrack
Stands for Decibels, the dBs

Movies
No Country for Old Men
Grizzly Man (DVD)
Out of Sight (DVD)

Books
Giraffe, J.M. Ledgard
Planet of Slums, Mike Davis
Faceless Killers, Henning Mankell

Food & Drink
Little Dishes, Brooklyn, NY

Misc.
Grails at Knitting Factory / the return of WS
Black Watch
Fat Suits
HH Modern Art Lecture
Weekend in SF
Thanksgiving in RI / Thanksgiving eve's train ride
The arrival of Henry Emmet! (technically, December!)

No Country For Old Men

Went down to BAM with ED last weekend to see No Country For Old Men. Having not read the novel and been underwhelmed by the last few Coen brothers' movies, in comparison to my always high standards for them, I didn't have much by way of expectation. I must say that I always admire the dark humor that the Coen brothers use to line their violence, and their return to Texas was welcomed. While they might not be as vital as they were in their earlier films, the Coens have certainly mastered the period piece, at least when the period is the 80s or early 90s. Combined with the strange temporal context in which their films get absorbed, the desolate landscapes of West Texas form an evocative backdrop for the brutality and general weirdness of Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem's cat-and-mouse game. Tommy Lee Jones' weathered face and odd, funny ramblings, adds a third distinctive performance to the film, and the off-tempo philosophical coda ("some things happen for no reason / but obey the same calculus"), while somewhat disappointing in its lack of avenging bloodbath, provided an excellent close to the movie. That's my rambling take: Worth your while.

Giraffe

From the back cover:

In 1975 secret police dressed in chemical warfare suits sealed off a zoo in a small Czechoslovakian town and orchestrated the slaying of forty-nine giraffe, the largest captive herd in the world.

Such is the premise for J.M. Ledgard's outstanding first novel, Giraffe. I am completely enamored of the novel, and may have only one quibble -- which is that while exposing the inhumanity and illogic of totalitarian (or, specifically, Communist) regimes has not slipped fully into irrelevance, it also lacks the immediacy that it once had. Beyond that, the novel is a gem: dreamlike in its prose, alternating passages charged with lyrical, political, and personal reflection, quiet desire, and electricity. The elements that I love best about prose writing and novels find a confluence in Giraffe: an elegant and understated style, a narrative that bends and blurs the edges of reality, without ever forcing us into the territory of the incredulous, an intense, indirect engagement with deep questions, and grounding it all, tethers to science, politics, and those utterly human things that drive the world, and provide the framework for those things that drive our hearts forward. Baroque praise, I'm sure, but well-earned. Giraffe is easily one of my favorite novels of the past few years.