Lists for '07

I have an itch I haven’t yet scratched. We didn’t send out our usual, well documented Christmas letter this year and, even though I get up at 5 AM every weekday to trudge to a meaningless, 10-hour job and am lost in a backwater of the cultural stream, I will not rest at ease without telling the world my favorite songs, words, and images of the year (many of which were actually created a little further back)

Music

1. The National: “Boxer”. This is poetry for the modern urban leisure class, toiling through crappy jobs and living in tiny, overpriced apartments, but it all seems worth it when you run across a thing of beauty like this LP. It ridicules all the obvious targets, the moneyed and the vacant wandering their way through the urban landscape, and finds transcendent little moments in life. It is all done with a quirky energy: pure, simple, true to itself. Of my three favorite bands that were at the top of their game at the start of the year, namely Silversun Pickups, Arcade Fire, and the National, I thought that this band had the least prospect for being able to top their recent heights, but with “Boxer”, they have created something different yet just as beautiful as their previous album, “Alligator”. Meanwhile, Silversun Pickups seemed to spend most of their energy touring the big summer fests, while Arcade Fire released an LP that, albeit brave and bold was, at least to me, too caught up with its own perceived importance, like, to paraphrase “Amadeus”, when the band walks off stage after a show they are surprised that they haven’t yet started shitting marble.

2. Sunny Day Real Estate: “Diary”. A buddy gave this for me to download at work, and it’s gotten me through many a dull afternoon. The first three cuts, “Seven”, “In Circles”, and “Song About an Angel”, may be the tightest 1-2-3 punch to start off an album in the history of rock ‘n roll. Argument A that emo can rock.

3. Thin Lizzy: “Bad Reputation”. I pulled this oldie out of my dusty stack of LPs last summer, and I kept playing it for weeks. The rockers are good, but I especially love the weepy love songs and tragic ballads, cuts like “Dancing in the Moonlight” and “Downtown Sundown”. Lynott takes that maudlin Irish sentimentality and blends it with a touch of soul.

4. The Kinks: “Something Else”. I bought this CD so I could hear the original version of “David Watts”, which I knew mostly from the excellent Jam cover. The guy behind the counter at Laurie’s Planet of Sound noted “this is a great record” when I went up to buy it, and while it took a bit of getting used to, boy was he right. The Kinks take classic English riffs, from the pop song to the sea shanty, and give them a twisted, 60’s sensibility. Several of the songs reward repeated listenings with fresh nuance. For instance, the first time I heard “Hairy Rag”, I thought it was simply another 60’s song about the joys of marijuana. Then I noticed the underlying critique on the depressing lives of the English working class. And then I thought about how everyone in the song was made complacent by their marijuana use, as they’d “curse themselves for the lives they led, get a hairy rag and then they’d put themselves to bed”, and I came to the conclusion that Ray Davies was actually saying, “C’mon guys, quit getting stoned and do something about your lives.” Like he’s the Pied Piper of Seneca.

5. Morton Lauridsen’s “O Magnum Mysterium”, as performed by the Chamber Choir of Europe. Melissa and I first heard this piece being performed by a Scottish youth choir in the Portage Park gymnasium a couple of years ago. The song was haunting then and is almost as beautiful on this CD, performed this time by a crew of young Scandinavians. It is coupled with some of Lauridsen’s other works, including the very pretty “La Rose Complete”, which I believe I heard Sean and Gary sing with the NEIU (my alma mater) choir (which performs some very nice stuff, BTW). However, “O Magnum Mysterium” remains the masterwork on this CD.

6. “Uncle Bob” Gailbraith’s 50’s compilation. My 80-year old neighbor back in California made this CD for Melissa and I to play on our drive back to Chicago in my dad’s Buick. I had relatively low expectations, looking for it to be full of Musak, which Uncle Bob collects obsessively. Instead, it had some really rockin’ stuff, great tunes by the likes of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, along with a bunch of guys I didn’t recognize. An honorable mention goes to Wes’ collection of old country, blues, reggae, and rock ‘n roll, which he titles “Psychodelicatessen” and is now 30-some CD’s long, but it was Uncle Bob’s CD I remember when I think back fondly on that long drive across the desert.

7. The Smiths: “The Singles”. We picked this up on sale with our BMG membership. I forgot how good these songs were, Johnny Mars’ tripped out 80’s guitar a perfect complement to some of the best lyrics in the history or rock ‘n roll, alternately poignant, defiant, ridiculous. “I wanted a job and then I found a job, and heaven knows I’m miserable now….” Or how about, “If a ten ton truck should kill the both of us, to die by your side, well the pleasure and the privilege is mine.” I can’t listen to this record without laughing. It might have ended up higher on my list, except that it disappeared into that black hole of CD’s, otherwise known as Melissa’s car, and I didn’t get to hear it that much.


Movies

1. “Once”: Probably the greatest movie ever made about writing and performing music. I never understood why the music in musicals has to be so universally awful, why they had to be clever, soulless pieces written by some gay man tinkling the keys on his baby grand up in his Manhattan apartment, and this movie is living proof that it doesn’t have to be that way. Glenn Hansard and Marketa Irglova do for the musical what Elvis Presley did for the pop record, turning it from an empty commodity into something that matters.

2. “Control”: OK, I was a little biased going in to this one, as I think Joy Division/New Order is probably the greatest band of my lifetime. Let’s just say that this film by Anton Corbijn, who cut his teeth making music videos and is a big fan of the band, satisfied all my expectations as a fan. The Joy Division tunes are great, appropriately front and center, and the renditions played by the actors in the film are also first rate, strong enough in fact that I see no need anymore to live out a small dream of mine, namely to play bass in a Joy Division cover band, because that tribute has now been done quite well by someone else. The acting in the film is impassioned. The script, as it comes primarily from source material, notably “Touching from a Distance”, Debbie Curtis’ biography of her late husband, sometimes dips into a inky Romanticism, like the quill of the English schoolgirl at the heart of Ms. Curtis’ bio, but even here I was suckered in. All in all, a first rate entertainment.

3. “A Scanner Darkly”: I have long been fascinated by Philip K. Dick’s paranoid visions and off-kilter spiritualism, and I quite enjoyed Richard Linklater’s earlier animated-live action feature “Waking Life”, so this film was right up my alley, and it delivered. There’s nothing like two hours of animated delusions occurring in a world that is half-1970’s Orange County and half-Brave New World to warm the cockles of my California heart.

4. “Little Miss Sunshine”: It’s just as funny, and as sweet, and as spot-on in its targets for parody as everyone says it is. The feel good movie of the year for feel bad people.

5. “The Lake House”: Yes, I know, this one’s my guilty pleasure, but I have a soft spot for Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reaves whenever they pretend to be Chicagoans. I kind of liked the time travel element, and while this has chick flick written all over it from start to finish, it is the first movie that made me think nice things about Ms. Bullock since “Love Potion Number Nine”, or maybe “While You Were Sleeping”.


Books

1. “The Fish Can Sing” by Halldor Laxness: This is actually the 2nd time that I’ve read this book, and I enjoyed it almost as much this time around. This is a great comic novel that tells a series of short vignettes about the young life of Alfgrimur and the odd collection of folks gathered around the cottage where he grew up. It is a seemingly simple book that has a lot to say about music, your muse, and how to live a good life.

2. “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy: Gripping from start to finish. It’s about post-Apocalypse America, but rather than taking place just after the bombs have dropped or in the distant future where motorcycle gangs or some other odd macho fantasy has taken over, the events in “The Road” occur maybe 7 or 8 years after civilization has collapsed, when the planet is still gripped by nuclear winter, and there is essentially nothing left alive and nothing left to eat, with much of the remaining human race forced into cannibalism. There is no food, no sun, and seemingly no hope, as a father and his young son traverse the blighted land. Nothing I’ve ever read has made me as happy to sit in the yard and drink a Coke. In that sense, it is a very religious book, as it helped me appreciate what a beautiful world we live in.

3. “Fool the World (An Oral History of the Pixies)” by Josh Frank and Carolyn Ganz: A breezy read about my favorite band, done in interview format with all the relevant witnesses.