 |
 | Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Fever To Tell |
 | "The ultimate Yeah Yeah Yeahs album" | 2009-10-22 |
I was only a minor fan of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs until recently, nodding my head politely whenever "Maps" would be played somewhere. That changed when I saw them live this year and got to truly experience the outsized persona of Karen O in what must be her natural habitat, screaming and bending and spitting on stage in all her rock star glory. I found myself working backwards through their music, so, Fever To Tell was actually the third Yeah Yeah Yeahs album I bought, and it brought a fresh perspective on the record I don't think I could have picked up on when it was initially released - then it just seemed like a PJ-Harvey-fed chick rock also-ran of the then-hip garage rock revival, whose guitar skills were greatly overstated. With that trend come and gone, it's become clear Fever To Tell is even snappier, brasher, cruder, and beefier than all of its contemporaries, and that it's never stopped being a blast of wild, breathy, fearless insolence. Karen O shrieks and caws that she's "Rich rich rich" in the opening number, and the result is somewhere between elation and total unnerved fear. Moving into "Date With The Night," a song that seems half orgasm, half exorcism, the record becomes a dual catalogue of sexual catharsis and rather ferocious party music, making O's wails into the stuff of near dance music. The album could have been dismissed for being too same-y with one of these tracks after another, but the fabric of them together is an undeniable blast, and the songs, one by one, take on a rage specific to each one. "No No No" begins to wander off into sonic nothingness, but allowing that to move into "Maps" gives that song's intimacy new relevance. Which, in turn, gives "Y Control" the right extra punch it needs - the song is gut shatteringly loud and full of feedback, but it's also the straightest vocal Karen O does on the record, making it full of the wisdom around it. Fever To Tell gets better with age, it turns out, and it's because it's the full evocation of exactly who this band is, exactly as they are.
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 | The Fugitive (Special Edition) |
| "Why even waste energy pretending you don't love it?" | 2009-08-12 |
Let me be honest with you. I'm 27 years old, I like to drink and smoke and hang out with my friends, and I could not wait to buy The Fugitive last week. It was 1 cent used on Amazon and that made me so happy. You can go through a million movies and TV shows in which someone false gets accused of a crime, but what you'll ultimately think of as your barometer for that sort of thing is The Fugitive. It remains so exciting, tense, such a hair's breath away from total discovery. It gets you so extraordinarily invested in the justice-demands-it plot of Harrison Ford's wrongly accused Dr. Kimball as it does Tommy Lee Jones's Agent Gerard. I've liked a lot of strange foreign, indie, "old" movies over the years, but if I had a couple hours to spend on a cold day, I'd probably spend them with The Fugitive, caring about everyone, being pushed along bold storytelling momentum, stuck desperately wishing for justice and luck to work out just a minute longer for Sam Kimball - at least I'd know I'd be in good company.
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![The Fugitive [HD DVD]](product_images/4923000/4923182_thumb.jpg) | The Fugitive [HD DVD] |
| "Why even waste energy pretending you don't love it?" | 2009-08-12 |
Let me be honest with you. I'm 27 years old, I like to drink and smoke and hang out with my friends, and I could not wait to buy The Fugitive last week. It was 1 cent used on Amazon and that made me so happy. You can go through a million movies and TV shows in which someone false gets accused of a crime, but what you'll ultimately think of as your barometer for that sort of thing is The Fugitive. It remains so exciting, tense, such a hair's breath away from total discovery. It gets you so extraordinarily invested in the justice-demands-it plot of Harrison Ford's wrongly accused Dr. Kimball as it does Tommy Lee Jones's Agent Gerard. I've liked a lot of strange foreign, indie, "old" movies over the years, but if I had a couple hours to spend on a cold day, I'd probably spend them with The Fugitive, caring about everyone, being pushed along bold storytelling momentum, stuck desperately wishing for justice and luck to work out just a minute longer for Sam Kimball - at least I'd know I'd be in good company.
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 | The Fugitive |
| "Why even waste energy pretending you don't love it?" | 2009-08-12 |
Let me be honest with you. I'm 27 years old, I like to drink and smoke and hang out with my friends, and I could not wait to buy The Fugitive last week. It was 1 cent used on Amazon and that made me so happy. You can go through a million movies and TV shows in which someone false gets accused of a crime, but what you'll ultimately think of as your barometer for that sort of thing is The Fugitive. It remains so exciting, tense, such a hair's breath away from total discovery. It gets you so extraordinarily invested in the justice-demands-it plot of Harrison Ford's wrongly accused Dr. Kimball as it does Tommy Lee Jones's Agent Gerard. I've liked a lot of strange foreign, indie, "old" movies over the years, but if I had a couple hours to spend on a cold day, I'd probably spend them with The Fugitive, caring about everyone, being pushed along bold storytelling momentum, stuck desperately wishing for justice and luck to work out just a minute longer for Sam Kimball - at least I'd know I'd be in good company.
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 | The Fugitive (Blu-ray) |
| "Why even waste energy pretending you don't love it?" | 2009-08-12 |
Let me be honest with you. I'm 27 years old, I like to drink and smoke and hang out with my friends, and I could not wait to buy The Fugitive last week. It was 1 cent used on Amazon and that made me so happy. You can go through a million movies and TV shows in which someone false gets accused of a crime, but what you'll ultimately think of as your barometer for that sort of thing is The Fugitive. It remains so exciting, tense, such a hair's breath away from total discovery. It gets you so extraordinarily invested in the justice-demands-it plot of Harrison Ford's wrongly accused Dr. Kimball as it does Tommy Lee Jones's Agent Gerard. I've liked a lot of strange foreign, indie, "old" movies over the years, but if I had a couple hours to spend on a cold day, I'd probably spend them with The Fugitive, caring about everyone, being pushed along bold storytelling momentum, stuck desperately wishing for justice and luck to work out just a minute longer for Sam Kimball - at least I'd know I'd be in good company.
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 | The Fugitive |
| "Why even waste energy pretending you don't love it?" | 2009-08-12 |
Let me be honest with you. I'm 27 years old, I like to drink and smoke and hang out with my friends, and I could not wait to buy The Fugitive last week. It was 1 cent used on Amazon and that made me so happy. You can go through a million movies and TV shows in which someone false gets accused of a crime, but what you'll ultimately think of as your barometer for that sort of thing is The Fugitive. It remains so exciting, tense, such a hair's breath away from total discovery. It gets you so extraordinarily invested in the justice-demands-it plot of Harrison Ford's wrongly accused Dr. Kimball as it does Tommy Lee Jones's Agent Gerard. I've liked a lot of strange foreign, indie, "old" movies over the years, but if I had a couple hours to spend on a cold day, I'd probably spend them with The Fugitive, caring about everyone, being pushed along bold storytelling momentum, stuck desperately wishing for justice and luck to work out just a minute longer for Sam Kimball - at least I'd know I'd be in good company.
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 | The Fugitive |
| "Why even waste energy pretending you don't love it?" | 2009-08-12 |
Let me be honest with you. I'm 27 years old, I like to drink and smoke and hang out with my friends, and I could not wait to buy The Fugitive last week. It was 1 cent used on Amazon and that made me so happy. You can go through a million movies and TV shows in which someone false gets accused of a crime, but what you'll ultimately think of as your barometer for that sort of thing is The Fugitive. It remains so exciting, tense, such a hair's breath away from total discovery. It gets you so extraordinarily invested in the justice-demands-it plot of Harrison Ford's wrongly accused Dr. Kimball as it does Tommy Lee Jones's Agent Gerard. I've liked a lot of strange foreign, indie, "old" movies over the years, but if I had a couple hours to spend on a cold day, I'd probably spend them with The Fugitive, caring about everyone, being pushed along bold storytelling momentum, stuck desperately wishing for justice and luck to work out just a minute longer for Sam Kimball - at least I'd know I'd be in good company.
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 | Show Me Love |
| "An empathetic wonder" | 2008-09-14 |
You may have heard that Show Me Love's original Swedish title was F***ing Amal, and to explain the movie, let's put that title in context. In a wonderful scene, Agnes (Rebecka Liljeberg) and Elin (Alexandra Dahlstrom), the two main characters, sit in the back of a stranger's car before suddenly, excitingly kissing each other. Elin, says to Agnes, who we've seen in pits of loneliness and isolation, that she is only lonely as a lesbian, "Because you live in f***ing Amal; if you lived in Stockholm, you'd have a million girlfriends." Maybe that would be true, maybe it wouldn't, but that title and that line tap into that true sense of teens - and maybe all of us - that just want to be alive and free and living as they see fit. Show Me Love goes is a marvel in that it shows teens as they truly are - competitive, self-centered, confused, immature, but capable of great love and friendship and sympathy and wisdom. We get to see Elin's aggressive, loving relationship with her sister Jessica (Erica Carlson), and their relationships with their equally confused young boyfriends Johan and Marcus (Mathias Rust and Stefan Horberg), and as each additional person shows up, another person and relationship we recognize as true seems to materialize. Johan spends time in the mirror adjusting his hat so it looks cool enough, Jessica and Elin get in shouting matches about chocolate milk, and Agnes, in a fit of anger, humiliates her only friend only to cry to her father minutes later that "No one will ever like me!" In other words, they act like we did, and Show Me Love observes them with utter acceptance and humanity. Lukas Moodyson's next two movies, Together and Lilya 4-Ever, are full of the same wide-eyed understanding, but in a way Show Me Love is his purest movie, and his easiest to empathize with. The ending is pat for the honesty we've seen throughout, but it's also so pleasing and silly and great, it barely matters - by the time we get there, nothing could disrupt the love we've built for these characters.
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 | Show Me Love |
| "An empathetic wonder" | 2008-09-14 |
You may have heard that Show Me Love's original Swedish title was F***ing Amal, and to explain the movie, let's put that title in context. In a wonderful scene, Agnes (Rebecka Liljeberg) and Elin (Alexandra Dahlstrom), the two main characters, sit in the back of a stranger's car before suddenly, excitingly kissing each other. Elin, says to Agnes, who we've seen in pits of loneliness and isolation, that she is only lonely as a lesbian, "Because you live in f***ing Amal; if you lived in Stockholm, you'd have a million girlfriends." Maybe that would be true, maybe it wouldn't, but that title and that line tap into that true sense of teens - and maybe all of us - that just want to be alive and free and living as they see fit. Show Me Love goes is a marvel in that it shows teens as they truly are - competitive, self-centered, confused, immature, but capable of great love and friendship and sympathy and wisdom. We get to see Elin's aggressive, loving relationship with her sister Jessica (Erica Carlson), and their relationships with their equally confused young boyfriends Johan and Marcus (Mathias Rust and Stefan Horberg), and as each additional person shows up, another person and relationship we recognize as true seems to materialize. Johan spends time in the mirror adjusting his hat so it looks cool enough, Jessica and Elin get in shouting matches about chocolate milk, and Agnes, in a fit of anger, humiliates her only friend only to cry to her father minutes later that "No one will ever like me!" In other words, they act like we did, and Show Me Love observes them with utter acceptance and humanity. Lukas Moodyson's next two movies, Together and Lilya 4-Ever, are full of the same wide-eyed understanding, but in a way Show Me Love is his purest movie, and his easiest to empathize with. The ending is pat for the honesty we've seen throughout, but it's also so pleasing and silly and great, it barely matters - by the time we get there, nothing could disrupt the love we've built for these characters.
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 | A Book of Common Prayer |
 | ""She died, hopeful. In Summary."" | 2008-01-21 |
I may be too much of a lover of Didion's non-fiction works to take her fiction seriously. This being the third novel following detached and deluded female protagonists (after Run River and Play It As It Lays) into the extremes of their antipathy, it seems clear that, simply, her stories are too much work. A great Didion essay states its facts with such brutal lucidity, you barely notice the incisive, enraged, impassioned consciousness at their center. Her fiction makes you all too aware of the artifice behind the words, and though I believe A Book Of Common Prayer to be the best of the Didion novels I've read, I don't know that I fully bought the whole thing.
It begins strangely framed, like Didion's take on Cat's Cradle, an expatriate telling stories of other expatriates in Central America. Charlotte Douglass, the detached and deluded protagonist at its center, has details of great speculation - in the syntax of her storytelling and the odd personal attributes that get her, initially, under the investigation of a revolutionary government. But it's not until we visit her past in San Francisco, about her elusive daughter and two failed marriages, that the character really begins to come alive. Attached as Douglas's narrative is to the backdrop of a small revolutionary country, the story finds itself headed in an entirely different direction, quite successfully - it turns into Didion's That Obscure Object Of Desire rather than Didion's Cat's Cradle. There's a number of Didion's tendencies that still, I think, don't quite work in her fiction - her surprising leap into synopsis, her repetitive intrusion of key phrases, even her attempt to bookend the story in the same line seems a little (to be perfectly honest) stupid. But A Book of Common Prayer has undeniably more narrative verve than any of her previous fictional works - you may, in a sense, not enjoy watching a clueless protagonist amidst a quietly revolutionary backdrop, but you begin to need to see it play out.
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 | Rolling Stones - Some Girls |
| "When the whip came down" | 2007-12-25 |
As an album that starts with "Miss You," a pop song that represented 1978 pretty well, I see Some Girls as a Stones cross-section - the album that unites the true blooded rockers of old with the culture-savvy grandpa's that made mediocre albums and occasionally a great song from then on out. Some Girls isn't a perfect record, but it is a standout in the Stones catalog because it does have elements of the Stones of old and the pop of new - even an old-soul remake of "Just My Imagination" sounds punchy and wild, and closing with "Shattered," it allowed the Stones to get more unhinged than usual. But I really see the album as one long groan between its two masterpieces: "When The Whip Comes Down," a great rocker with its punch and simplicity, and "Beast of Burden," the set's most famous song that seems such a triumph listening to the whole album because nothing since "Whip" has its charisma and effortlessness. Now, that doesn't mean everything else on the record is not great - I loved "Imagination" and the bad-attitude r/b of "Some Girls." But as good of an album as Some Girls is, it doesn't ring as true or as easily as a great Stones record, and the truth is their transition into Grandpa-dom had already begun. Still, a band that makes a song as sexy as "Beast of Burden" is clearly not yet at risk of burning out, and that is more than a little of a relief.
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 | Ryan Adams - Rock N Roll |
| "You've lost total control" | 2007-11-20 |
Ryan Adams was famously drunk for about a decade of his life (he named his band Whiskeytown, after all), so it's easy to imagine the worst of his wild ways occurring right in the middle of recording Rock N' Roll, which, I think, is why it works. Adams is a major artist whose best albums seem without much unification or structure - you hear an album like Cold Roses and marvel at the songs individually more than the album as a whole. Well, Rock N Roll is a unified collection, moreso than any other of his records, and it's because his self destruction is so tantalizing and vivid here - his voice is scratchy, the guitars are rushed and angry, and the song titles alone are enough to justify an intervention ("Note To Self: Don't Die" anyone?). Still, that combo is as tonic as its subject matter - "This Is It" and "Shallow" open the record with bombast and pissiness, and the tracks fulfill it one after another - for the most part, at least. I could have lived without "Boys" or "Do Miss America," but for an album of self-destructive tendencies, a bad song or two should be expected. When it works best, in songs like "Note to Self," "So Alive," and "Burning Photographs," the songs perfectly capture the rush and thrill of the sins they describe, as does the overly calculated "soft" title track. Its best song, though, is the final one, "The Drug's Not Working" - a song that stands on the brink of thrill and annihilation for a time then finally falls over, which is, in its voyeurist excitement, even more of a thrill.
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 | Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina |
| "Ballad of some thin men" | 2007-10-24 |
It takes a great biography to both read like fiction and create enough historical specifics to truly adjust your mindset to the setting at hand. That's how I felt in Positively 4th Street - that I was amongst the atmosphere that treated folk music in the 1960's as if it were current pop music, the stuff of teen obsession and high celebrity. Following the folk scene that turned Joan Baez and later Bob Dylan into major celebrities, David Hajdu's endlessly thorough reporting unearths enough letters, charts, documents, and real conversations to truly present the 60's air of revolution and experimentation, and for a music fan like myself for whom the 60's are pure myth, this is an incredible accomplishment. It's fascinating to discover the true extent to which Joan Baez made Bob Dylan into a phenomenon, and though the post-stardom narcissism of Dylan is well documented, Hajdu presents that personality with such scrapbook authenticity that it's like the unveiling of an ego at its purest. The stories alone astonish (Dylan sitting on a wood floor surrounded by a pile of ripped up newspaper clippings to write Bringing It All Back Home, the protective chokehold Richard Fariña held on Mimi Baez even as he obsessed over Joan's every move), but collectively they're vivid, page-turning examples of the way forces that can change the world can tear individuals apart. As a music lover who, I thought, was well informed, I didn't know the fate of Richard Fariña, or his influence over the time - for people like me, his story is identical to great fiction. His story is ripe for fictionalization, but the credit for that is with Hajdu, whose straightforward, detail-heavy telling is a masterwork of characterization so perfect it can only be nonfiction.
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 | Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina |
| "Ballad of some thin men" | 2007-10-24 |
It takes a great biography to both read like fiction and create enough historical specifics to truly adjust your mindset to the setting at hand. That's how I felt in Positively 4th Street - that I was amongst the atmosphere that treated folk music in the 1960's as if it were current pop music, the stuff of teen obsession and high celebrity. Following the folk scene that turned Joan Baez and later Bob Dylan into major celebrities, David Hajdu's endlessly thorough reporting unearths enough letters, charts, documents, and real conversations to truly present the 60's air of revolution and experimentation, and for a music fan like myself for whom the 60's are pure myth, this is an incredible accomplishment. It's fascinating to discover the true extent to which Joan Baez made Bob Dylan into a phenomenon, and though the post-stardom narcissism of Dylan is well documented, Hajdu presents that personality with such scrapbook authenticity that it's like the unveiling of an ego at its purest. The stories alone astonish (Dylan sitting on a wood floor surrounded by a pile of ripped up newspaper clippings to write Bringing It All Back Home, the protective chokehold Richard Fariña held on Mimi Baez even as he obsessed over Joan's every move), but collectively they're vivid, page-turning examples of the way forces that can change the world can tear individuals apart. As a music lover who, I thought, was well informed, I didn't know the fate of Richard Fariña, or his influence over the time - for people like me, his story is identical to great fiction. His story is ripe for fictionalization, but the credit for that is with Hajdu, whose straightforward, detail-heavy telling is a masterwork of characterization so perfect it can only be nonfiction.
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 | The Wire - Complete Second Season |
| ""Business, always business"" | 2007-08-15 |
Each year, so many people whine that The Wire doesn't get Emmy nominations, it threatens to become the Lexus of topics to whine about. I finished watching the extraordinary second season of The Wire, and in particular about the performance of Chris Bauer, but I realized what I was really feeling is the sadness and fear that such brilliant work will go unvalidated, that feeling that it is simply the truth that this is one of the finest series every created, and it just takes a few "experts" to agree with me to make that true. We'll leave aside the obvious argument about the accuracy of The Emmys, and I'll just mention why I know I'm right. Season 2 takes a couple episodes to warm up to - truly a product of season 1's perfection, a change in scope is not initially welcomed - as, in presenting the inner workings and corruption of the Baltimore port takes a few episodes to even understand. Once you do, though, you realize the extraordinary human story at its center - this season, there are the cops and drug dealers of season 1, but the true spark is in Dock Foreman, Frank Sabotka (Bauer), his obnoxious, lanky, wannabe son Ziggy (James Ransone), and his cooler, wiser meathead nephew Nick (Pablo Schreiber). Frank is being investigated by Major Valchek (Al Brown), "because he's an a--hole," which is to say, for nothing, but when 13 sex-trafficked Eastern European hookers show up dead in dock canister, his whole world of smuggling comes under scrutiny. It's that scrutiny that makes The Wire so intoxicating - Frank is far more human and varied than Valchek anyway, and the interplay of that younger generation (leading to one stunning, frustratingly human turn after another) gives it as much humanity as relevance, so much so that the structure of society seems to be equally as indicted as the personalities at its center. Did I mention that those cops and dealers are just as fascinating as they've ever been also? One halfway-point shock killing of a beloved first season character shows just how risky this show will be to make its stories true. To pull off as much as The Wire does in 12 episodes takes as much vision as it does skill and bravery. I know I'm so right about this show because to find each in such abundance is to understand just why we have creative expression in the first place.
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 | The Wire - The Complete First Season |
| "Completely extraordinay" | 2007-07-21 |
If you're like me, you never caught The Wire on HBO in any of its original, low-rated airings, and you heard - through critics, friends, in passing - that it was something akin to the Great Dramatic Series no one had seen, but you never quite wanted to get yourself hooked. Well, I held out for years, and when I finally got to watching The Wire's critically acclaimed first series, I still had no idea what to expect - a bonus, perhaps, of the low ratings: even its best secrets remain hidden. Like The Sopranos before it, The Wire creates such a rich web of characters and subcharacters, respects so thoroughly its creation of place and environment, that it takes no time to become absorbed in each brilliant, bristling detail - the show comes roaring in with "The Target," and by episode 2, "The Detail," we're already so entrenched in the reality of events, when a full-scale police-incited riot breaks out, it feels like the most natural, long-time-coming event that could have happened. The Wire bristles with personality, by every character involved - Dominic West's drunk, egotistical, brilliant McNulty that leads his crew of detectives - the magnificent, moral Greggs (Sonja Rohn), the stalwart Lester (Clarke Peters) - is interesting enough, but he's the least interesting character considering the astonishing crop of personalities and performances that play out amidst the beaurocratic and street-led turmoil of the Baltimore streets - The Wire stands as such an accomplishment because its drug world is as vivid and corrupt as its police world. In that, the personalities on the street - chilly, calm Stringer Bell (Idris Elba), confused D'Angelo (Larry Gilliard Jr.), smart, innocent Wallace (Michael B. Jordan) - become as absorbing as the world they inhabit. Each unexpected, nuanced plotline flies in the face of ordinary - or even recognizable - TV convention and lets the conflicting humanity of these personalities jut up against their world, and simply lets us be mesmerized by their results. I'm thinking of the plot thread that follows Bubbles, the heroin-addicted snitch played fearlessly by Andre Royo, who, in one astonishing scene at an NA meeting in "One Arrest" shows, with a mere flicker of his eye, his buried desire to live. Where the season follows him from there is an indicator of everything this series does right - creates and fulfills the humanity buried in every corner of a dying city.
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 | Ryan Adams & the Cardinals - Cold Roses |
| "Let it ride, let it roll, let it go" | 2007-07-10 |
I wasn't always the biggest Ryan Adams fan, but I remember years before I bought Cold Roses a couple of friends catching a concert of his - one friend thanked the other for bringing her saying "it's good I got to see him now since he'll probably drink himself to death in a couple years." Well, despite his rock and roll lifestyle, he hasn't drank himself dead just yet, and part of the reason might be that Ryan Adams seems to be writing two songs for every drink he consumes. Cold Roses, a double disc (!) of alt-country tunes, is the best of the three (!!) albums Adams put out in 2005, and that's because, on the one hand, Adams clearly has talent to burn, but also because he's willing to turn whatever idea pops into his head into a conventional song structure, and luck was with him for most of Cold Roses' 18 songs. You can hear that sense of drunken and whimsical invention on songs like, for example, "Mockingbirdsing," an infectious song that makes the most of musta-been-brilliant-at-the-time lyrics like "Sing me what the lord was singing/ on the day he made the sky the color of the blues," or a rambling coming-to-at-7-in-the-morning number like "Meadowlake Street." Then, there are songs that are plain brilliant - "Let It Ride" or "Dance All Night" or "How Do You Keep Love Alive," any of which could be classics of its genre. They sit side by side with the songs that are a little more drunken and a little more inane ("Beautiful Sorta," "Sweet Illusions," "Cherry Lane"), but if there's one failing of Cold Roses, it's not Adams' wild ways, but his predictable ones. For all of its great creativity, Cold Roses suffers from aimlessness - for an album with the running time of this double disc, it's surprising that you could not use words to describe the album such as "sprawling" or "epic" or even "exhausting." The record ends in "Friends," a great sunset song as bittersweet as any of its kind, but you may feel at the end of it as though you've gone nowhere. As a collection of good to great songs, Cold Roses is amongst Adams' best work. As an album, it seems like just another night at the bar.
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 | Joni Mitchell - Hejira |
| ""Like me, she had a dream to fly"" | 2007-04-13 |
It's hard to say if many accurate reviews of Joni Mitchell's reverent 1976 album of the road Hejira have ever been written. People tend to laud it with bizarre superlatives - "her third 'poetic' album after Clouds and For The Roses!" "Her third masterpiece after Blue and Court and Spark!" "Her second album in her 'difficult' period after The Hissing Of Summer Lawns!" or "The album where it all began to fall apart." I don't think I agree with any of those, and listening to the meditative bass of her guitar in songs like "Amelia," it seems all that can really be said of Hejira and where it fits in Mitchell's canon is that it most certainly is the album in which her voice started to go, and also - and this has to be said - that it rides the borderline of being a little embarassing. Considering "Amelia," (in which Mitchell compares herself to Amelia Earhart), "Coyote (in which Mitchell contrasts herself to a coyote), and "Black Crow" (in which Mitchell compares herself to a crow), it begins to run the risk that Mitchell will pull up next to a gas station somewhere in Nebraska and write a plaintive melody about how she is similar to a squeegee. There's no escaping that, after Hissing of Summer Lawns, what Hejira most proved was that the beloved Mitchell of old was gone for good and that the new Mitchell was more beholden to her odder impulses in a manner that made her suffer melodically. Yet after owning Hejira for a couple of months, I can't get its rapt reverence of the highways out of my mind - her lyrics are at their astonishing best, whether describing walking past a wedding dress in Staten Island ("Song For Sharon") or being hit on by locals in a dive bar ("Coyote" - a favorite, defining lyric of the album from that song: "There's no telling how close to the bone and the skin and the eyes and the lips you can get/ and still feel so alone"). And the songs that truly grasp you right away only suck you in more on further listens - the whimsical "Blue Motel Room" proves Mitchell need not have mentioned, in 1974's "People's Parties," that she wished she had more sense of humor, the songs final verse revolves around a "peace talk, in a neutral cafe," and it charms with plaintive jazz classicism. "Amelia," that song comparing her to Amelia Earhart, is the one that grabs you instantly, and that's due to the awe in the lyrics, and that trademark Mitchell/ Jaco Pastorious guitar and bass interplay that sounds clunkier and slower than on all other records of Mitchell's, and seemingly marks the passing of lines on the highway. The song that brings the record into unforgettable focus, though, is "Refuge of the Roads," the final number in which the elation and freedom of the road turn into a vivid warmth. Mitchell's is often off on the record (How many can remember "A Strange Boy" or "Furry Sings The Blues"? I cannot), but at the point Mitchell arrives at that final "refuge" in "Roads" - the 'u' stretched to ecstatic oblivion - it becomes impossible not to admire and smile at Mitchell's "difficult" idiosyncrasies that made experiments like Hejira possible.
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 | Joni Mitchell - The Hissing of Summer Lawns |
| "Joni Mitchell does Luis Bunuel" | 2007-03-05 |
What is there to make of the Joni Mitchell that emerges on The Hissing Of Summer Lawns? This Joni Mitchell seems to have no connection with the Joni Mitchell who, up through Court and Spark, released the previous year, was in her creative peak, a winning streak that spurned out one perfect album after another (what artist working today could make albums the astonishing quality of Blue, For The Roses, and Court & Spark in succession?). Mitchell, it seems, was interested in taking her music in a very very different direction - the lyrics now are not the coherent, eloquent epistles of angst and regret, they are works of beat-poet stream of consciousness (this line starts "Don't Interrupt The Sorrow": Don't interrupt the sorrow/ Darn right/ In flames our prophet witches/ Be polite/ A room full of glasses/ He says "your notches liberation doll"/ And he chains me with that serpent/ To that ethiopian wall"), and the music itself wreaks of the Steely Dan 70's. The attempt? To say something in the vein of a Luis Bunuel about the stagnating complacency of the bourgeoisie. I didn't much care for that Joni Mitchell when I started listening to the record, as many people still don't - her less-transporting verse is a meaningless ramble and truthfully, even some of the great writing is lost in its song form. A song like, for example, "Edith and The Kingpin" might read like great morality tales, but is as far from memorable as the weakest of her material, and its opener, the single "In France They Kiss on Mainstream" is energetic enough, but is dying in search of a tune. Yet something struck me after a while - that middle section of the record! "Don't Interrupt the Sorrow," "Shades of Scarlet Conquering," "The Hissing of Summer Lawns," "The Boho Dance," "Harry's House/ Centerpiece" and "Sweet Bird" work with at least a fraction of the full conceptual and lyrical fire that Mitchell intend, and, in the case of "Hissing" and "Sweet Bird" allow Mitchell to fulfill a grander ideal with songs attempting more daring commentary and soaring past their already large intentions. It's a flawed record to be certain, but what works about The Hissing Of Summer Lawns is its ambition to be a work of great concept that, even when failing, makes you admire the drive.
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 | As She Climbed Across the Table : A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) |
| "Scholarly wisdom" | 2007-02-21 |
I'm not sure what to think of Jonathan Lethem these days - each work I read by him is, for a time, effortless, close to perfect, and then finds itself veering into a land of bad bad choices. Reading his The Fortress of Solitude, I was left to wonder what the book would have been like if it were simply kept as its electrifying first half, instead of allowed to wander, halfheartedly, into its characters' imagined futures. A similar sensation takes hold in As She Climbed Across The Table - it's not that what becomes of its characters is bad, per se, as much as it is simply ignorant of the novel's wondeful strengths. The book doesn't conclude, per se, doesn't quite complete its central love story - a bizarre love triangle in which Alice, the main character's girlfriend, is drawn away by a hyperactive physics blackhole called Lack - nor does it quite fulfill it, as a first glance at its ambiguous, artsy ending might assume. That's an interesting choice, to be certain, but it also ignores what the book does right. That's because As She Climbed... is effortless not as a love story, but as a breezy satire on academic life. It trots in a revolving door of bizarre academic types, each using Lack - which is, clearly and repeatedly stated, a giant nothing - as a springboard to represent their own attempts at fulfillment, their own need to "get" a situation. Its characters - named in bizarro Pynchon-esque monikers like Georges DeTooth, Dr. Soft, Carmo Braxia, Gavin Flapcloth (!) - are then a wild evocation of pretention in action, a goofy take on collegiate pretentions. There's not much of a sense about Philip Engstrand, a pleasant enough lovestruck protagonist, but its love story itself is a bit of a pleasantry meant to present the lack in its characters' own self-images that make its lunacy possible. All of that leaves this novel breezy, easy to read, fun, and not much of anything. Still, its goofiness is a treasure, especially climaxing in the actions and reactions around DeTooth, the wigged, deluded deconstructionist who explains to a physicist that his response to Lack is to, "compose a document. Perhaps it will not mention Lack. Perhaps it will consist of only the word 'lack.'" The physicist's response is to start vomiting.
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 | Where I Was From |
| "Some dreamers of the golden dream" | 2006-10-01 |
"A good deal about California does not, on its own preferred terms, add up." This sentence, which opens Didion's third chapter in Where I Was From, is characteristic of the sort of pummeling understatement and reserve that characterizes all of Didion's work - humble, free of ostentation, profound in implication. No, the California Didion presents does not add up - a place defined by a jettisoning pioneer spirit "destroyed" by its own sense of development, a place defined equally by class as it is by people who say sentences like "we don't discuss class here," a place , Didion's Sacramento specifically, both defined by and existing in spite of its geography. Her contradictions of place and identity take Didion from one heavily scrutinized example to another - the Spur Posse, Boeing, Douglas, pioneers on the Sierra Nevadas, prisons, insane asylums - and if Didion's argument of conflicted identity doesn't always connect in thinking later about her specifics, the reading is as fluid, as full-bodied in argument and fact, as merciless an investigation as anything she's ever written. Didion has long been defined by her identity to California, something that comes up in all of her writings, whether in New York or El Salvador, so to see her tackle it so specifically - at one point even deconstructing (with fascinating effect) her own first novel, Run River - is a thrill. What will be of most fascination, undoubtedly, will be the 4th section of the book, the short, devastating section detailing the death of Didion's mother, yet what makes this piece so compelling is the grand scale of Didion's research and work - her California becomes a grand exercise in characterization. Her description in this section is some of the most agonizingly evoked, rich, and understated work of her career, and if the sections preceding it - highly descriptive, full of research often much fuller and drier than expected - can seem aimless when thinking about them, the finest compliment I can give Where I Was From is that, in the effortless and moving reading of the book, it evokes exactly what Didion wants of California, of her, and of her mother, and no more.
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 | Where I Was From (Vintage International) |
| "Some dreamers of the golden dream" | 2006-10-01 |
"A good deal about California does not, on its own preferred terms, add up." This sentence, which opens Didion's third chapter in Where I Was From, is characteristic of the sort of pummeling understatement and reserve that characterizes all of Didion's work - humble, free of ostentation, profound in implication. No, the California Didion presents does not add up - a place defined by a jettisoning pioneer spirit "destroyed" by its own sense of development, a place defined equally by class as it is by people who say sentences like "we don't discuss class here," a place , Didion's Sacramento specifically, both defined by and existing in spite of its geography. Her contradictions of place and identity take Didion from one heavily scrutinized example to another - the Spur Posse, Boeing, Douglas, pioneers on the Sierra Nevadas, prisons, insane asylums - and if Didion's argument of conflicted identity doesn't always connect in thinking later about her specifics, the reading is as fluid, as full-bodied in argument and fact, as merciless an investigation as anything she's ever written. Didion has long been defined by her identity to California, something that comes up in all of her writings, whether in New York or El Salvador, so to see her tackle it so specifically - at one point even deconstructing (with fascinating effect) her own first novel, Run River - is a thrill. What will be of most fascination, undoubtedly, will be the 4th section of the book, the short, devastating section detailing the death of Didion's mother, yet what makes this piece so compelling is the grand scale of Didion's research and work - her California becomes a grand exercise in characterization. Her description in this section is some of the most agonizingly evoked, rich, and understated work of her career, and if the sections preceding it - highly descriptive, full of research often much fuller and drier than expected - can seem aimless when thinking about them, the finest compliment I can give Where I Was From is that, in the effortless and moving reading of the book, it evokes exactly what Didion wants of California, of her, and of her mother, and no more.
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 | Where I Was From (Vintage International) |
| "Some dreamers of the golden dream" | 2006-10-01 |
"A good deal about California does not, on its own preferred terms, add up." This sentence, which opens Didion's third chapter in Where I Was From, is characteristic of the sort of pummeling understatement and reserve that characterizes all of Didion's work - humble, free of ostentation, profound in implication. No, the California Didion presents does not add up - a place defined by a jettisoning pioneer spirit "destroyed" by its own sense of development, a place defined equally by class as it is by people who say sentences like "we don't discuss class here," a place , Didion's Sacramento specifically, both defined by and existing in spite of its geography. Her contradictions of place and identity take Didion from one heavily scrutinized example to another - the Spur Posse, Boeing, Douglas, pioneers on the Sierra Nevadas, prisons, insane asylums - and if Didion's argument of conflicted identity doesn't always connect in thinking later about her specifics, the reading is as fluid, as full-bodied in argument and fact, as merciless an investigation as anything she's ever written. Didion has long been defined by her identity to California, something that comes up in all of her writings, whether in New York or El Salvador, so to see her tackle it so specifically - at one point even deconstructing (with fascinating effect) her own first novel, Run River - is a thrill. What will be of most fascination, undoubtedly, will be the 4th section of the book, the short, devastating section detailing the death of Didion's mother, yet what makes this piece so compelling is the grand scale of Didion's research and work - her California becomes a grand exercise in characterization. Her description in this section is some of the most agonizingly evoked, rich, and understated work of her career, and if the sections preceding it - highly descriptive, full of research often much fuller and drier than expected - can seem aimless when thinking about them, the finest compliment I can give Where I Was From is that, in the effortless and moving reading of the book, it evokes exactly what Didion wants of California, of her, and of her mother, and no more.
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 | Run River (Vintage International) |
 | "Where she was from" | 2006-09-25 |
There's a wealth of evidence in Run River (Didion's first book, published in 1963) that the world was to get one of its great writers, but it gets lost a bit in the story. Using a sort of end-of-the-golden era view of Sacramento land booms as its backdrop, it follows Lily and Everett, holdouts of the wealthy Knight and McClellan pioneer families that struck it rich in Northern California, an era described by Didion as "the cutting clean which was to have redeemed them all." Didion's sense of location and the specifics of the era is remarkable, so it takes little effort to be interested in the events, but set up as it is a framed story revolving around a murder, 20 years of backstory, and then the conclusion of the murder, she seems far too willing to make Run River an act of condemnation. I picked up Run River as a fervent reader of Didion's astonishing nonfiction works, and felt a little dismayed at first at my willingness to avoid reading the book. It's a feeling that goes away - the middle section of the book is filled with flawed, impish characters rendered in empathetic specifics, and is full of the humanely observed understatments that make Didion's best work so accessible (I am convinced no writer can devastate more with a seemingly average sentence - perfectly interrupted, of course). Still, returning to the murder at the end of the book, my reluctance returned, and I realized Didion's failure is to make the book a declaration of decay, to turn her events "tragic" (or, really, the stuff of nighttime soaps) in an attempt to critique the California pioneer identity. All this winds up doing is rendering the fates of her characters not all that important. Still, the book should be read for that glimmering center of the book, a time when its characters flaws are rendered rich with empathy - its chapters detailing Martha, Everett's sister, as she (miserably) attempts to conquer heartbreak with pioneering audacity shows Didion's characters as fascinating idealists, endearing in their quixotic fucntionlessness.
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 | Bob Dylan - John Wesley Harding |
| "There was a wicked messenger" | 2006-09-25 |
Why is the way Bob Dylan's structured his career so damn important to the history and existence of rock music? For the answer to that question, I give you 1967's John Wesley Harding, not because of its quality (which is impeccable, I'll get there), but because its sound was such an about face to the climactic fullness of Blonde on Blonde that it appeared career suicide, because the world was on a sex-drugs-and-rock kick that summer and Dylan denied all three by releasing a record of spiritual asceticism, and because to this day it remains amongst the most inscrutably mercurial and fascinating records ever made. I'll give you my take - Dylan was recovering from his motorcycle accident at the time, and broke with his long-term manager Albert Grossman. The record reflects a deep turning inward for Dylan by reflecting on the state of society, being disgusted by everything he saw, and turning that hatred inward upon realizing he's guilty of all that he accuses. Listen to "I Dream I Saw St. Augustine" - "No martyr is among you now/ whom you can call your own/ but go on your way accordingly," he sings. All of the characters he fastens himself in and out of during the record make the same assessment, and Dylan himself feels on trial - he's the drifter of "Drifter's Escape," the hobo of "I Am a Lonesome Hobo," and the Judas of "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" doing time for everything except being true to who he is. The record, then, becomes stripped musically of everything in Dylan's quest to reemerge - he cocoons, if you will, and comes out singing "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight," a bit of a love song to himself, predicting safe, pastoral times ahead (see New Morning). Plus, it features a little song called "All Along the Watchtower," a song that redefined the word "ominous," and one that brilliantly wagered the idea that we may not deserve what waits for us, good or bad, but at all costs, we have to approach it. That may be the defining statement of Dylan's career.
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 | Jungle Fever |
| ""When's the future?"" | 2006-09-05 |
Spike Lee has said, in hindsight, that he'd lost his abilities as a filmmaker between Do The Right Thing and Malcolm X. If that's true, you won't be able to tell during Jungle Fever - at least not in a way you'd expect. Jungle Fever is a lot of things - daring, empassioned, extreme, overarching, undeniably and intentionally "heavy" - but amateurish it is not. Watching Jungle Fever now made me realize all the power Lee movies entail - which is, especially at this point in his career, a real voice. Two scenes of extremes are rendered in equal precision - a group of African American women discussing the problems of keeping their men, contrasting with an equally long and empassioned scene of pugnacious racism between a group of Bensonhurst Italians. In each scene the experience of its characters is given vividness by the authenticity of the dialogue, by the conviction of its cast. And of the cast, let me add what a treasure of an ensemble it is: 15 years later, virtually every supporting role (some on screen for just minutes) has become a recognizable performer (it's a game in itself to count how many Oscar, Emmy, Tony, and Grammy wins/ nominations, not to mention plush Sopranos roles, these actors share). In its leading roles, Wesley Snipes has a seething immediacy, John Turturro burns with conscience, and Samuel L. Jackson, in the most fearless performances of his career, unfolds so many gripping layers at once, the Cannes jury created a special acting prize to honor him. All that helps make Jungle Fever provocative in the right ways - sparking conversations, as well as personal speculations, about the modern state of racism, of the way that we're never free of our own cultural expectations, and how they effect who and how we love. The movie's first giant, nagging flaw is its attempt to handle too much - the plot that follows the path of crack addiction belongs to a (terrific) different movie. Its second, and this is tougher, is that the notion of this "fever," of Flipper (Snipes) and Angie (Annabella Sciorra) being blinded by each others' race, is an unfulfilled idea in the movie - the characters, I'm afraid, work better as catalysts for thier environments than they do as lovers, as their affair is remote, and Sciorra, a gifted actress elsewhere, seems far too cold for fevers of any kind. Yet even these flaws are the product of a force already at work on the film industry - the movie suffers only from an ambition to reach all aspects of the urban race experience, and succeeds as well as can be expected; you'll rarely recall a film who fails its goals this intriguingly.
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 | Jungle Fever |
| ""When's the future?"" | 2006-09-05 |
Spike Lee has said, in hindsight, that he'd lost his abilities as a filmmaker between Do The Right Thing and Malcolm X. If that's true, you won't be able to tell during Jungle Fever - at least not in a way you'd expect. Jungle Fever is a lot of things - daring, empassioned, extreme, overarching, undeniably and intentionally "heavy" - but amateurish it is not. Watching Jungle Fever now made me realize all the power Lee movies entail - which is, especially at this point in his career, a real voice. Two scenes of extremes are rendered in equal precision - a group of African American women discussing the problems of keeping their men, contrasting with an equally long and empassioned scene of pugnacious racism between a group of Bensonhurst Italians. In each scene the experience of its characters is given vividness by the authenticity of the dialogue, by the conviction of its cast. And of the cast, let me add what a treasure of an ensemble it is: 15 years later, virtually every supporting role (some on screen for just minutes) has become a recognizable performer (it's a game in itself to count how many Oscar, Emmy, Tony, and Grammy wins/ nominations, not to mention plush Sopranos roles, these actors share). In its leading roles, Wesley Snipes has a seething immediacy, John Turturro burns with conscience, and Samuel L. Jackson, in the most fearless performances of his career, unfolds so many gripping layers at once, the Cannes jury created a special acting prize to honor him. All that helps make Jungle Fever provocative in the right ways - sparking conversations, as well as personal speculations, about the modern state of racism, of the way that we're never free of our own cultural expectations, and how they effect who and how we love. The movie's first giant, nagging flaw is its attempt to handle too much - the plot that follows the path of crack addiction belongs to a (terrific) different movie. Its second, and this is tougher, is that the notion of this "fever," of Flipper (Snipes) and Angie (Annabella Sciorra) being blinded by each others' race, is an unfulfilled idea in the movie - the characters, I'm afraid, work better as catalysts for thier environments than they do as lovers, as their affair is remote, and Sciorra, a gifted actress elsewhere, seems far too cold for fevers of any kind. Yet even these flaws are the product of a force already at work on the film industry - the movie suffers only from an ambition to reach all aspects of the urban race experience, and succeeds as well as can be expected; you'll rarely recall a film who fails its goals this intriguingly.
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 | Neko Case & Her Boyfriends - Furnace Room Lullaby |
| "Guided by your electric wire's hum" | 2006-08-18 |
Think of this as a relative endorsement - I've become such a fan of Neko Case in the past year that Furnace Room Lullaby, my first purchase of hers, now seems a fairly subpar Case record, something which is less a criticism than simply a high bar to live up to. There's a wealth of extraordinary songs on Furnace Room Lullaby - the cold echoes of the title track, the invigorating vocal heights of "Set Out Running," the haunted eloquence of "South Tacoma Way." What makes Case's songs so distinct is the way her melodies - as conventional as they'd ever be on this record - seem to invade with spare syllables, making each second of their short running time rattle around your head for days. What make's Furnace Room disappointing in light of the entire Case catalog is its lack of conceptual daring, its sidestepping of the passionate cohesion that elecrifies Blacklisted and Fox Confessor Brings The Flood. Certainly, she was just starting out with this record, but it falls short of her biggest accomplishments. Still, few artists can do what Case does - her powerful vocals and invasive lyrics are already in full swing, and on "Porchlight," she makes what may still be her finest and most singable song - a song whose longing is more memorable than its perfect melody.
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| SALVADOR |
| ""The Exact Mechanism of Terror"" | 2006-08-13 |
It would be false to say that I was ever truly familiar with the situation in El Salvador at any time, not truly, and what makes Didion's Salvador such an extraordinary essay is that it so thoroughly and eloquently elucidates a time and place, but does so with specifics that feel as endemic to any political crisis now, or any 100 years ago. In her first chapter, she describes her experience in El Salvador by saying "I came to understand, in a way I had not understood before, the exact mechanism of terror." Salvador is an extraordinarily precise evocation of El Salvador in 1982, of the failure of Reagan's policies there, but what makes it still relevant is exactly that evocation of mechanics, of the bodies at the morgue that add up but don't amount to a story, of the shudder of fear at the sight of headlights in a dark dining room, of the shifting game of verbiage that describes progress or failure or civil wars or assassinations. What I mean is that Salvador will move and feel familiar to anyone, and that, at the point she describes the particular failing of America that allows us to approach this conflict as "something of the familiar ineffable, as if it were taking place not in El Salvador but in a mirage of El Salvador," it will seem the most reasoned, obvious, and unsettling conclusion about national and international conflicts.
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 | Salvador |
| ""The Exact Mechanism of Terror"" | 2006-08-13 |
It would be false to say that I was ever truly familiar with the situation in El Salvador at any time, not truly, and what makes Didion's Salvador such an extraordinary essay is that it so thoroughly and eloquently elucidates a time and place, but does so with specifics that feel as endemic to any political crisis now, or any 100 years ago. In her first chapter, she describes her experience in El Salvador by saying "I came to understand, in a way I had not understood before, the exact mechanism of terror." Salvador is an extraordinarily precise evocation of El Salvador in 1982, of the failure of Reagan's policies there, but what makes it still relevant is exactly that evocation of mechanics, of the bodies at the morgue that add up but don't amount to a story, of the shudder of fear at the sight of headlights in a dark dining room, of the shifting game of verbiage that describes progress or failure or civil wars or assassinations. What I mean is that Salvador will move and feel familiar to anyone, and that, at the point she describes the particular failing of America that allows us to approach this conflict as "something of the familiar ineffable, as if it were taking place not in El Salvador but in a mirage of El Salvador," it will seem the most reasoned, obvious, and unsettling conclusion about national and international conflicts.
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